Chapter 4
The Floor Price
Amos knew the man was Halyard before he knew his name, before the truck door even shut, the way you know a squall by the color of the water under it and not by anything you could name to a jury.
He was up on the co-op wharf splicing a new eye into the pound's north crib pennant — the pound was his now, unofficially, the way a thing gets to be yours when nobody tells you to stop and you can't make yourself quit — and he watched the pickup come down the co-op road, clean, a rental by the plates, and park where the fleet parked, and a man get out of it in boots that had cost more than the truck and had never once been near a fish.
Fifties. Easy in himself. He stood a moment in the co-op yard and looked at the dock and the hoist and the tired old buying station and the fleet rafted at the float, and he did it with a small pleased proprietary care, the way you'd look at a house you were thinking of buying, and Amos's stomach went to water and then to stone, in that order, the whole of it happening in the two seconds before the man had said a single word.
I know you, Amos thought. I've never seen your face in my life and I know you right down to the ground.
"Morning," the man called up, friendly, lifting a hand. "Looking for Gus Ouellette or Gil Levesque. That either of you?"
"Neither," Amos said, and went back to his splice, and did not offer to fetch them, and felt the man's easy attention rest on him a beat too long, filing him the way Gus filed things, before it moved on.
Gil came out of the office. Gus came down off the Second Wind.
And Amos, splicing, watched the shape of the next hour arrive on his dock, and knew every beat of it before it played, because he had lived inside this exact hour once before, in a kitchen in Digby, with his father pouring the man coffee.
Three weeks he'd been here now. Long enough that his hands knew the co-op's gear and the fleet had quit watching him like weather and started nodding to him on the ramp.
Long enough that the pound's whole north side stood mended and proud of the tide — his and Gus's evenings poured into it without either of them once calling it a project, or a reason, or anything at all.
Long enough that a thing had happened in a dark office that neither of them had spoken of since and that now sat in every silence between them, warm and unfinished: a hand that had rested on his throat, a head that hadn't turned.
He'd meant to be gone two weeks back. Instead he was splicing pennants for a pound that wasn't his, in a harbor he'd sworn not to love, and he'd stopped pretending, somewhere in there, that he didn't.
***
The man's name was Boyce, and the thing that made him dangerous, Amos understood inside five minutes, was that he was telling the truth. Or enough of it.
"I fished," Boyce said. He'd asked to say his piece to the members, and Gil — because Gil was fair, because Gil was fair to a fault and it was going to cost them — had put the word out, and by four o'clock the buying station floor had forty men and a few women in it, the fleet come in off the water still in their oilskins, leaning on the scale and the totes and the doorframes, and Gus at the back with his arms folded and his face doing something Amos had never seen it do, which was nothing.
"Twenty-two years, out of Stonington. Ran a boat, lost a boat, ran another.
So don't anybody in here think I flew in from an office to tell you your business.
I know what your business is. I know what it costs you and I know what it pays you, which lately is next to nothing, and I know that when the price is where it is right now there's men in this room doing sums at two in the morning about whether they make the boat payment or the light bill.
" A few heads went down at that. He'd aimed it well.
"I'm not here to buy your co-op. I couldn't buy your co-op; it's not for sale and it shouldn't be.
I'm here to make it worth something again. "
He laid it out plain, and it was, Amos had to give him, a beautiful thing to look at.
Halyard would put a real buying station on the co-op wharf — refrigeration, their own trucks, their own reach into markets the co-op couldn't touch from out here at the end of the road.
They'd pay a boat price this season that Boyce wrote on the whiteboard by the price board, and a sound went through the room when he wrote it, a low sound, because it was better than a dollar over what Portland was paying and every man there did the arithmetic on his own season in his own head and heard his own kitchen table go quiet.
Company bait at cost. Company fuel at cost. Company credit to carry a boat through a soft patch, so no man ever again had to choose between the payment and the light bill.
And in exchange, only this: the fleet sold its catch to Halyard.
Just to Halyard. On a contract that ran eight years, so they could build the thing knowing it would still be standing when the concrete cured.
"That's it," Boyce said, and spread his hands, empty, a man with nothing up his sleeve.
"That's the whole of it. A price you can live on, costs you can plan around, and a buyer who's still going to be here in eight years when the man in Portland has moved on to whatever's cheaper that week.
I'm not asking you to decide today. I wouldn't trust a man who decided today.
Your annual meeting's the fourteenth. Take it to your meeting.
Take it to your wives, your accountants, your priest. Ask them what a guaranteed price would mean.
" He capped the marker. "I already know what it'd mean.
I fished. I just want you to be able to say it out loud in your own kitchen and hear how it sounds. "
And the terrible thing, the thing that turned Amos's splice to rope in his hands, was that the room wanted it.
He could feel it wanting it. Petras Gauthier was nodding slow.
The Blue Inn couple down front were holding hands too tight.
The Cormier girl had her arms crossed but her eyes were doing the math.
These were not fools. These were tired people who had been drowning in slow motion for years, and a man had walked in and offered them a floor to stand on, and Amos knew — knew in his teeth, knew in the scar tissue of it — that the floor was painted on water.
Somebody had to say the first thing, and it was a hard-luck highliner named Wade — two boats and a payment on each, a face like a closed fist — who said it. "What's the price after the first year?"
"Market. Reviewed annual, fair to both sides. It's all in the—"
"Market's what's killing us right now," Wade said. "You're offering to save me from the market with the market."
"I'm offering you a year at a number you can breathe on," Boyce said, easy, no heat, "and a buyer with a stake in you still being here next year to sell to.
The fella in Portland's got no stake in you at all.
He'll buy from whoever's cheaper next Tuesday and never once think of your name.
" And that landed. Amos watched it land, watched it go round the room and settle.
"It's a year, though." Petras Gauthier said it like a man arguing himself down a ramp he'd already decided to walk. "A year's a year. For some of us a year's the whole difference between keeping the boat and not. I'm seventy-one years old. I haven't got ten more of them to spend being principled."
The Blue Inn fellow spoke from the front — young, in over his head on a mortgage and somebody else's dream. "We can't make another season at this price. We can't. If a man's offering us a floor, I've no right not to look at it. I'd be a fool not to look."
"Nobody's saying don't look." The Cormier girl, sharp, arms crossed hard over her oilskins.
"I'm saying my father signed a thing once that a man swore up and down was a floor, and that's the reason I'm running his boat now instead of him running it.
So look all you like. Just read the part he doesn't read out loud to you. Read that part."
And there it was — the harbor splitting clean down its middle in front of Amos, the drowning half reaching for the plank and the remembering half slapping their hands off it, and both of them right, that was the horror of the thing, both halves entirely right.
The young ones truly couldn't survive another season.
The old ones had truly watched exactly this drown the town once already.
Gil stood in the middle of it with his big flat hands on the scale housing and let it run a while — a president who'd been a member first, who'd near lost his own boat to the last one of these, who wanted to trust it and knew better than any man alive what it cost to trust it wrong.
"We'll take it to the fourteenth," he said at last, heavy as a stone going over the rail.
"We'll read every line of it, out loud, twice.
Nobody puts his name to a word of it before the meeting.
" It was the fairest thing a man could say, and it was, Amos knew, precisely what Boyce had driven up the road to get: three more weeks for that number on the wall to sit and work in forty tired kitchens.
He looked for Gus.