Chapter 8 #3
He had to stop a second. His jaw worked, the hard old face fighting itself, because this was costing Gil something too, Gus understood — this wasn't easy grace, this was twenty years of a proud man's own grievance being set down on purpose, in the open, because he'd decided it had to be.
"You want to know when I let it go? Denise's funeral.
Four years ago now. I stood at the back of that church and I looked at who'd come, and it was the whole fleet, Gus — the whole fleet, in their one good jacket apiece, men who'd lost boats in that mess same as me — and every last one of them had food in their truck for my kids and a hand for my shoulder, and I thought: we're all still here.
He near sank us and we're all still here, because after he near sank us he spent twenty years making sure not one of us ever went under again.
Whatever he took that winter, he's paid back into this harbor a hundred times over, out of his own hide, and I'm standing at my wife's funeral hating a man who's kept half these families afloat since.
And I was ashamed of myself. That's when I let it go.
" He looked at Gus, steady. "Four years I've been forgiven you.
I just never said it out loud, because you're impossible to say it to — you'd have found a way to turn even that into one more thing you owed.
So I'm saying it now, at the desk, where you can't wriggle.
I forgive you. The fleet forgave you a long time back — they just never told you, because you never once stood still long enough to hear it.
You were always off doing them one more favor to make up for a thing they'd already let go of.
You've been paying twenty years on a debt that got marked paid the first winter, and you never once picked up the receipt.
" He put the pen down on the desk, well out of Gus's reach.
"So. Debt's clear. Which means you don't get to hang this morning.
Which means you've got to think of something else to do with yourself, and I'd suggest, as your president, that you think of it fast, because the meeting's at ten and right now the only man in this harbor who knows how to fight that deal is either about to sign it or about to sail out of my life on a little boat with no name on it, and I've had about enough of watching the two smartest men on my waterfront run from the same damn thing. "
The door opened. June came in out of the morning with her chin up, having plainly been listening at it, unashamed, the way she'd earned the right to over eighty years.
"He's right, and I'll say the short version, because Gil takes forever.
" She crossed to the desk and put her small hand flat on Gus's cheek and turned his face up to her, wet eyes and all, and didn't let him look away.
"You've been paying a bill nobody ever sent you, Gus Ouellette.
Every soul in this town has been trying to hand you the receipt for twenty years and you keep giving it back and doing us another favor instead.
Set it down. Set the whole thing down." Her thumb moved once, gentle, at the corner of his eye.
"And then go around that point and get your man, and let yourself be kept for once in your stubborn life, before the tide takes him where you can't follow. "
And Gus — who had spent twenty years unable to receive so much as a plate of chowder without turning it into a debt — sat in the chair between the two people who'd decided, this morning, to save him whether he'd allow it or not, and let himself be forgiven.
Just let it in. It came into him strange and enormous, the way the cold came into him every time he went into the harbor, a thing his whole body braced against and then, for once, didn't. Twenty years of penance came off him all at once and he understood he'd been carrying it the way he carried everything, two-handed, alone, so long he'd forgotten it had a weight — and then it was gone off him, set down, and he felt so light and so unmoored he had to grip the desk.
Gil's hand came down on his good shoulder, heavy and sure.
June's stayed on his cheek. And Gus Ouellette, forgiven, wept for about ten seconds in front of the two of them, hard and silent, and neither of them made a thing of it, and then it was done, and he was still there, and the harbor was still there, and he was — for the first time since he was twenty-seven years old — a free man with a debt paid and a voice back in his chest and something left in his own two hands to spend on himself.
He wiped his face on his sleeve. He stood up out of the chair and left the pen lying on the desk behind him.
"I have to go get him," Gus said.
"Then go get him," said June. "We'll hold the meeting."
***
Out at the mouth of the harbor the slack held one more moment, and then, the way it always did, on schedule, forever, the tide turned.
Amos felt it take the boat. Felt the water make its choice under him — the flood going slack and the first pull of the ebb coming on, the sea reaching for the peapod to draw her out the way it had drawn him out of a dozen harbors, the easy way, the safe way, the way that asked nothing of him but that he keep on being a man that nothing could hurt because nothing could hold him.
He put the tiller over and came about and took the flood back into the harbor before it was gone.
He didn't decide it, any more than Gus had decided all right in a dark office, any more than he'd decided to stand up in a room full of strangers.
His hand just did it — put the helm down and brought her nameless bow around toward the sleeping town, toward the dead ice and the live pound and the man about to hang himself in a co-op at ten o'clock — because Roan was right, God help him, Roan was right about the whole of it: the open water couldn't love him back, and he was done, he was so done, doing his grieving early and alone and for no reason and calling it freedom.
And up the shore, Gus Ouellette came out of the co-op onto the ramp with his debt set down for the first time in twenty years and his voice — the voice the debt had muzzled since he was twenty-seven — coming back into him like feeling into a sleeping arm, and he looked out past the moorings for a small boat that might, against all his deserving, be coming back around the point.
They saw each other across the water at the same moment. The peapod, standing in on the flood. The big man on the co-op ramp, gone still.
The tide had turned. It was carrying them both, now, the same way — in.