Chapter 2 #3
He didn't decide to look at it. His eyes just went, the way they had last night — down the shore, to the ring of drowned cribwork coming up dark and dripping out of the falling water, the whole dead acre of it laid bare again.
And once his eyes were on it his hands wanted to be on it too, that was the trouble, that was always the trouble, because he could see exactly what she'd been and exactly what it would take: pull the rotted netting, sister the cribs that had gone, refloat the two on the north side that had sunk on their moorings, re-lay the flush gates so the tide worked her the way whoever built her had meant it to work her — twice a day, clean, so nothing in her ever went stale.
A month of work for two men who knew it.
Less. And then you could hold a whole season alive in her and sell it when the price came to you instead of chasing the price out the door at whatever Portland felt like paying on a Tuesday —
"You keep looking at that wreck like it owes you money," Gus said, come up beside him quiet for once, a coffee for each of them because of course it was.
"None of my business." Amos took the coffee. Didn't drink it. "You had a good pound once."
"Best on this stretch. My grandfather's crew built her.
" Gus looked at it too, and the lightness went out of him for a second, the way it had gone out of him over the shoulder, there and gone.
"Whole fleet used her. You could go broke slow in the summer and get made whole at Christmas.
Then there weren't the men to keep her, or the money, or —" He stopped.
"Or the men to keep her," he said again, like the second reason was the true one and the first was just polite.
"She's been under fifteen years. Everybody's forgotten she was ever anything but a hazard to navigation. "
"I haven't," Amos said, and heard himself, and shut his mouth around it, because that was the kind of thing a man said who was thinking about staying, and he was not thinking about staying, he was a bad bet for staying, and he had a fitting to finish and a weather window to catch.
Gus looked at him a beat too long. Didn't say anything. For once in his life the man didn't say anything at all, which was somehow louder than everything else he'd said all day.
Dee came out onto the dock before it could get worse, a plate in her hand, aimed at Amos like a heat-seeking thing. "Well, you're still here," she said, pleased about it and not hiding it. "Thought you'd be gone with the tide."
"So did I," Amos said, and took the plate, because he'd learned by now there was no surviving her, and she patted his cheek with a hand that smelled of coffee and fryer and went off to tell the whole harbor he'd said thank you, which he hadn't, but which by the end of the day he would apparently have said, in her telling, warmly and at length.
***
He woke Wednesday before light — he always woke before light; seven years of a body that wouldn't rest anywhere it hadn't decided was safe — and knew before his eyes opened that something was wrong, because the boat felt different under him. Sat different. Settled.
He came up through the hatch in the cold with his heart going, and stopped.
The stemhead fitting was gone. In its place, bedded and bolted and gleaming dull in the last of the moon, sat a new bronze fitting on a proper backing plate, the bolts peened over neat, the whole job done the way Amos would have done it if he'd had the part and the money and the daylight — better, maybe.
The port shroud was new too, turned and served at the deadeye by a hand that knew what serving was.
And on the bridge deck, where he couldn't miss it, sat a red fuel jug, full, and a cardboard box, and in the box, when he made his legs walk over and look, was food — bread and butter and a wax-paper hank of the Foghorn's chowder cold in a tub, coffee, and a can of the good tobacco he'd been out of for a month, which meant somebody had seen the empty tin in his cockpit and said nothing and just fixed it.
Fixed all of it. In the dark. While Amos slept the first four hours he'd slept through in longer than he could name.
No note. No bill. Nothing to sign.
Amos stood on the deck of his father's boat in the cold with the new fitting cold and perfect under his hand and felt something come apart in him that he'd spent seven very careful years keeping in one piece, and he did not have a word for it, and did not want one.
He could leave now. The rig was sound. The tank was full. Thursday's blow would pass by Friday and Friday he could be gone around the point and out past the ledge and away, ahead of the tide, ahead of the owing, ahead of the moment the people who relied on him found out what relying on him cost.
That was the trouble. That was the whole trouble, standing there in the moonlight with a stranger's kindness bolted to his boat.
He didn't want to go.
And a man who could do that to you in the dark — no note, no bill, nothing to sign — a man like that was either the safest harbor Amos had come across in seven years of running, or the most dangerous thing on the whole coast of Maine, and Amos stood on his deck until the sun came up and could not, for the life of him, tell which.