Chapter 3
The Debt
The arm quit on him on the forty-first trap, which was thirty later than it had any right to, and Gus was almost proud of it.
It quit the way it had been threatening to quit for a year — not a twinge but a giving-way, the whole joint going soft and useless in the middle of the haul, so the trap he had halfway to the rail stopped coming and started going, dragging his arm down over the block with two hundred feet of ledge and a granite-ballasted pot on the far end of it.
A younger man's arm would have fought it. Gus's arm just opened its hand.
And then it didn't have to, because Amos was there.
He came across the deck without a word — he did everything without a word; the man could unload a whole day's grief in the space it took anybody else to say good morning — and took the warp out of Gus's failing hand and put his own body into the haul, and the trap came up over the rail smooth as if nothing had happened, as if the Second Wind had always carried two men on her arm instead of one man on an arm and a half.
He set the trap on the washboard. He didn't look at Gus.
He picked the crabs and rebaited and sent it back over, and reached for the next warp, and only then, with his back mostly turned, said, "Take the wheel a while. "
"I'm fine."
"You're not, and I don't want to lose a trap because you're proud.
" Amos hauled. His voice stayed flat and easy, the voice you'd use on a spooked dog or a green kid, and it took Gus a second to understand the man was giving him a way to sit down that let him keep his dignity — handing him the wheel the way you'd hand a fella his hat.
Here. This is yours. No fuss. "Boat won't run herself. Somebody's got to."
So Gus took the wheel, and hated it, and was more grateful than he could have said, and the two things sat in him side by side the way they'd been sitting side by side for a week and a half now, ever since a stranger in a nameless boat had come around the point and started, quietly, taking one end of every weight Gus picked up.
He watched Amos haul the rest of the string alone.
The man was good — Gus had known that the first morning — but there was a thing past good in the way he worked, an economy that came from thirty years of the same motion, a body that knew the weight before it lifted it.
Digby, Gus thought. The Cora Lee. Thirty years, him and me.
Then a company came up smiling. His hands went still on the wheel spokes.
Because that was the part he kept snagging on, in the days since Amos had told him.
Not the loss of the boat — Gus had watched men lose boats his whole life; it was the ordinary weather of this coast. The part that snagged him was I was the one told him to sign.
I did the arithmetic. I told my father it was the only way.
Amos had said it looking straight ahead at the harbor, flat, like he was reading off a chart, and Gus had stood there at his own wheel with the whole of his own life rising in his throat and not said one true word back — because the true word was me too, and Gus had not said me too out loud to a living soul in twenty years, and he was not about to start with a man who could still leave on the next fair tide.
Amos set the last trap and stood, and rolled his shoulders the way a whole man does, easy, and looked back at Gus at the wheel with those dark eyes giving up nothing.
"How long's the arm been like that."
"It's old. It's fine."
"How long."
Gus turned the boat for home. "Since about the time you were losing yours," he said, which came out truer than he'd meant it, and Amos heard the double in it — Gus watched him hear it — and let it go.
That was the other thing about the man: he let things lie.
He did not pick at a scab, because he had too many of his own to go poking at anybody else's.
It should not have been restful. It was the most restful thing Gus had felt in a year.
***
He found Amos down at the pound that evening, and understood the moment he saw him that the man was never going to be able to help it any more than Gus could.
The tide was near dead low, the drowned cribs standing up dark and streaming, and Amos was out in the middle of them to his thighs in the cold water, working — nobody had asked him to; nobody had so much as mentioned it — hauling the rotted netting off the north cribs by the armload and heaving it up onto the ledge.
Methodical. Wordless. A man doing the thing his hands couldn't not do.
He'd already freed one of the sunk cribs; it stood half-refloated on the ebb, weed hanging off it like hair. He must have been at it an hour.
Gus stood on the ledge in the going light and watched, and didn't call out, and thought: There's two of us, then. Two men who'll mend anything on this coast but the one they're standing in.
"You'll take a chill," Gus said, finally.
"Had worse." Amos didn't stop. He worked another armload loose, the muscle standing up in his back, and threw it clear.
"Whoever built this knew what they were about.
I keep telling you. Laid the gates to the tide like they had her pulse under their thumb — see how she'd set the north crib to the ebb so it'd flush and never—" He caught himself.
Straightened, water to his thighs, the wreck of the pound around him and the harbor gone pewter behind.
"None of my business. I know. You keep telling me none of it is, and I keep having my hands in it anyhow. Bad habit."
"I've got the same one." Gus toed off his boots and set them on the ledge. "Move over."
He went in. The cold took his breath the way it had taken his breath sixty summers running, and his shoulder screamed and he told it to hush, and he waded out into the drowned pound his grandfather's crew had built — into the bones of the best thing this co-op had ever owned — and put his hands on it for the first time in fifteen years.
They worked it together in the last of the light, mostly silent.
Now and then Amos would say a thing about the cribs, the gates, what she'd take — the netting all pulled, the two north cribs sistered, the flush gates re-hung and re-hinged, a month's work for two men who knew the trade, maybe less — and Gus would listen, and hand up what Amos freed, and not say the thing that kept rising in him.
Which was that a month of work meant a month of Amos.
That the man was standing thigh-deep in Gus's own harbor describing, and not seeming to know he was describing it, a reason to stay.
"Who let her go?" Amos asked once, low, not looking up from the crib he was working free. Not who built her. Who let her go.
Gus handed up a black rope of rotted netting.
"Same year the co-op near died," he said, before he'd decided how much of it to say.
"Wasn't the men to keep her, after. Wasn't the heart in anybody.
" He heard how near the edge he'd come, and stepped back off it the way he always stepped back.
"Big job, keeping a pound. Bigger than it looks from the ledge.
Somebody's got to be here every single tide, day and night, or she goes stale and you lose the whole lot at once. "
"Somebody usually is," Amos said. No barb in it — just the flat truth of it, laid down easy.
He looked up the ledge to the lit windows of the co-op office, where Gus was every tide, where Gus had been every tide for twenty years, and he didn't say the rest of it.
He set the freed crib upright and moved to the next.
And Gus stood thigh-deep in the cold with a rope of dead netting in his fist and was grateful, again, for a man who would set a thing down right where you could see it and then leave it there, and not make you pick it up until you were ready.
The peapod rode at the float behind them.
She'd been there past Friday now — past the fair tide, past the window, past every reason Amos had given for leaving — and neither of them had said one word about it.
Gus wasn't going to be the one to say it.
Some things you didn't point at. Some things you'd learned to just leave riding quiet at the float, grateful for them morning after morning, asking them no questions, in case the asking was the thing that sent them back out around the point.
They quit when they couldn't see. Climbed out streaming and freezing onto the ledge and stood there heaving for breath, two grown men soaked to the waist over a wreck neither of them had any earthly business fixing, and Amos looked back at what they'd done — the netting gone off the whole north side, one crib standing proud of the water again — and something crossed that hard face Gus hadn't seen on it before.
Not quite satisfaction. The ghost of where satisfaction used to live.
"She could come back," Amos said, quiet, to the pound and not to Gus. "She's not gone. She's just been let go."
He didn't seem to hear the double in it. Gus heard it for both of them, and kept it, and said nothing, and handed the man his boots.
***
He should have known Dee would get to Amos. Dee got to everyone; it was practically her ministry.
She'd been circling him since the Blessing — feeding him against his will, needling him, delighting in every inch of ground he refused to give — and Gus had watched it with the fond dread of a man watching a wave come at a sandcastle he was too tired to move.
It wasn't that Dee was cruel. Dee was the least cruel soul on the waterfront.
It was that Dee believed, bone-deep, that a person could not properly be helped until the whole harbor understood exactly what was wrong with them, and she took it as her office to make sure the whole harbor understood.