Chapter 5
Low Water
By seven the first boats were coming in with catch there was no ice to hold, and by half past Gus had run clean out of the one thing he had never in his life run out of, which was something useful to say.
The ice plant sat dead in its shed. He'd been up half the night with a trouble light and Petey's socket set proving what he'd known the second it screamed — the compressor was gone, seized solid, twenty years past its time and finally past his talking-to.
A rebuild was two thousand dollars they didn't have and three weeks they didn't have either, and it was August, and it was warm, and lobster that couldn't be iced or held would be dead lobster by noon and dead lobster was worth nothing to anybody, which every man tying up at the float knew as well as Gus did, which was why they were all looking at him.
They always looked at him. That was the job he'd given himself twenty years ago and never once put down.
But this morning he stood on his own dock in the flat white light with the fleet's whole day going soft in the totes and had nothing in his hands to hand them, and it was the worst feeling he knew — worse than the shoulder, worse than the number on Boyce's whiteboard — the feeling of being looked to and being empty.
Petras Gauthier said what half of them were thinking, because Petras was seventy-one and past the age of not saying things.
"Boyce give me his number." He said it down at his own boots, ashamed and defiant at once.
"Said if the ice ever went, he could have a reefer truck up here inside a day.
Said Halyard takes care of its people." He looked up.
"I'm not saying. I'm just saying the man's got a truck and we've got a dead shed, and my catch is dying in the tote while we stand here talking about it. "
"His truck comes with a pen, Petras." Gus said it as gently as he had it in him to, because it was never the drowning man he was angry at. "And once you've signed the pen you don't get the truck back out of your life again. You were at the last meeting. Your whole life ago, you were at it."
"I know I was." The old man's jaw worked. "I also know a dead lobster's worth nothing by noon, and I've got a granddaughter starting at Orono in three weeks and no way under God to pay for it but what comes up on my warp. So you tell me. You always know. What do we do."
"We ice what we can off the Foghorn's machine and the gas station's," Gil said, low, beside him, not because he thought it would work but because a president had to say something. "Sell the rest today at whatever Portland gives. Take the loss."
"Portland'll know we're stuck by nine," Gus said.
"Word travels. They'll drop the price through the deck because they can, and we'll take it because we've got no choice, and then Boyce comes back Thursday and says let me fix your ice, fellas, just put your name here.
" He heard how tired his own voice was. "That's not a bad morning, Gil.
That's the whole play. He didn't even have to break the ice plant.
It broke itself right on schedule and did his work for him. "
"So what do we do."
And Gus, who always had the next thing, opened his mouth to give Gil the next thing and had nothing, nothing at all, and the silence went on a beat too long, and into it, from down the dock where he'd been standing so quiet nobody had marked him, Amos said:
"We don't ice them."
Every head on the float turned.
"You don't need ice to hold a lobster." Amos came up the dock slow, wiping his hands on a rag, and he didn't look at the fleet, he looked at the water — down the shore, at the pound, at the black acre of it he'd spent three weeks hauling back from the dead.
"You need cold clean water and room to move and a tide that flushes.
That's all a lobster's ever wanted. Ice is for fish.
For lobster, ice is just how you hold them once you've already taken them out of the one thing that was keeping them alive for free.
" He stopped at the rail. "You've got a pound right there.
Best-built one I've seen on this coast. She's three-quarters back already.
Put the catch in the water and she keeps herself, and you sell when you want to sell instead of when Portland says.
You don't take the loss today. You don't take it at all. "
Nobody said anything. The gulls went on about their business over the totes.
"She won't hold a whole fleet's landings," Amos said, into the quiet, plainer now, a man laying out a job.
"Not yet. But she'll hold enough to matter, today, if we get the north side gated by the tide.
And every day we work her she holds more.
Give me hands and I'll have her holding half your daily by the weekend and all of it before your meeting. "
Gil looked at the pound. Gus watched him look at it — watched the old man's face do the arithmetic, the real arithmetic, the kind Gus used to be the only one trusted to do — and then Gil turned and hollered up the dock in the voice that had run co-op meetings for nine years, "Petey!
Get your grandfather's boots! And find Hollis Cyr — tell him I need every clamp and every man he can spare and I'll pay him in lobster for a year! "
The dock came alive. And Gus stood in the middle of it with the strangest thing rising in him, the thing he'd had no room for in twenty years, so unfamiliar it took him a moment to name it.
Hope. The stranger had walked onto his dead dock and handed him hope, and not even handed it — handed it back, out of the water Gus's own grandfather had built to hold it.
***
They worked the pound all that day and the fleet worked it with them, and it was the first time in longer than Gus could remember that the co-op felt like a co-op instead of a slow-motion funeral.
Hollis came with his truck full of clamps and cedar and that big quiet competence of his, and he and Amos took one look at each other and fell into the wordless shorthand of two men who both knew wood, and between them they had the north gate re-hung by noon, hinged to swing with the tide the way the thing had been built to swing before anybody standing there was born.
Petey and three of the younger captains ran cribs and netting in the skiffs.
The Cormier girl and the Blue Inn couple bailed and hauled and passed line.
Dee brought chowder down at one and fed the whole crew off the tailgate of Gil's truck and told everyone within earshot that she'd known that pound would come back, she'd said so for years, which she hadn't, but nobody argued with Dee holding a ladle.
The pound came back the way a thing comes back when a whole town decides at once that it will.
By mid-morning the north side was gated and gating clean, the water inside it turning over dark and cold on the ebb the way Amos had promised it would.
By noon they'd sistered the two sunk cribs Hollis judged worth saving and condemned the two he didn't, and Petey and the young captains were setting the good ones back on their moorings in a line that followed the old dead line exactly, because the men who'd laid it a lifetime ago had known what they were about and there was no improving on it, only remembering it.
Gus stood on the ledge at one point and looked at the shape of the thing rising back up out of the water — the whole geometry of it, the cribs and the gates and the flush, his grandfather's crew's hands showing through Amos's — and had to look away again, because there was too much in it, twenty years of a thing he'd decided was dead coming back to life in an afternoon.
"She flushes on the ebb and the flood both," Amos was telling Petey, down in the water, patient, a man teaching the trade the way the trade had been taught to him.
"Twice a day, clean through. That's the whole secret.
You never let the water go still on them — still water goes warm and low on oxygen and you cook your whole holding overnight and don't know it till you pull dead product at dawn.
She's laid so she can't go still. Whoever built her built her so a fool couldn't kill the catch.
That's care, that is. That's a man who thought about the fella who'd come after him.
" He didn't look up the ledge at Gus when he said it. He didn't have to.
And in the middle of it, in the middle of all of it, was Amos.
Gus couldn't stop watching him. He tried; there was plenty to do and Gus did all of it, hauled and clamped and hosed and gave orders and took them; but his eye kept going back to the man in the middle of the pound to his thighs in the cold water, the man the whole fleet had started, without quite deciding to, to turn to.
Amos, does the crib go here or here. Amos, is this deep enough.
Amos, how many can she take. And Amos answered every one of them, sure and low and without a wasted word, and moved among them like a man who had done this exact work his whole life, because he had, because a company had taken it from him and he had carried the knowing of it up and down the coast for six years with nowhere to put it down, and here it was, pouring out of him, useful, wanted, and the fleet drinking it in.
He wasn't braced anymore. That was the thing Gus kept catching on.
The man who'd sailed around the point three weeks ago with one fender and his shoulders up around his ears, ready to be turned away, was standing thigh-deep in Merritt Harbor with forty people relying on him and he wasn't braced for the blow, because for the first time in six years the thing people needed from him was the thing he was made to give, and he was rising to it, rising to every bit of it, and Gus stood on the ledge with a load of cedar in his arms and understood that he was in a great deal of trouble.