Chapter 9 #2
"None taken," Amos said. "It's a fair question and here's the answer.
Because we're the only two men in this room who've already paid the price of your deal, mister, and lived to tell it.
You want somebody who knows exactly what your contract does by year three?
You're looking at the only two on this coast who've read the last page.
He read it in this hall twenty years ago.
I read it in my father's kitchen. And we are telling you, both of us, with everything it cost us to learn it — you don't sell in the low water.
" He said it quiet and it went through the room like a keel through calm.
"You don't sell in the low water. You keep, and you wait for the tide.
That's the whole trade. That's the only thing my father should've known and didn't, and it's the thing this harbor forgot, and it's back down that shore right now with a thousand pounds of your own catch alive in it, waiting on a better price than the one that man's selling.
Keep your catch. Keep your co-op. Keep each other through the lean water.
That's how you beat him. It's the only way anybody ever has. "
For a moment nobody said anything, and Gus thought he'd lost it after all — thought the fear in the room was too big and the truck outside too warm and a tired man's arithmetic too plain to argue with.
Then the Cormier girl stood up. "I'll say it, since my father can't, on account of he signed the last one.
" Her arms were crossed the way they always were, but her chin was up.
"I've run his boat six years wishing to God somebody'd talked him out of that pen.
Somebody just did. I'm voting the co-op's road, and I'll take a lean winter over a Halyard sign on our wharf.
And any of you young ones drowning as bad as me — the pound's real.
I bailed it out with my own hands. It'll hold. "
"It's a lot of work," somebody said from the back. Not hostile. Just tired down to the bone.
"It's our work," Gil said from the front, "on our wharf, for our own selves, and I'll take a lot of that over a little of the other kind.
" He looked around the hall, slow, taking his time the way Gil took his time.
"I lost a boat to the last one of these.
Some of you know what that did to my family; the rest of you were kind enough never to ask.
So I've got more standing than any man in this room to be scared of the hard road, and I'm telling you — the hard road, with your neighbors, is a thing you live through.
I lived through it. The other road you don't live through.
You just stop noticing you've drowned." He let it settle.
"Petras. You said a year at that floor is your granddaughter at Orono.
The co-op'll carry your boat this season out of the pound money — put it to a vote if you doubt me, but I already know how this room votes on carrying Petras Gauthier, because this room left food on my step a whole winter and never once let me thank it. "
Petras took his cap off and turned it in his hands and didn't say anything for a moment, and when he did his voice had gone rough as a bar at low water. "Well," he said. "Hell. When you put it thataway."
Gil let the silence ride one more beat. Then he said, "That's the floor, then. Halyard's offer, or the co-op's road. All in favor of the co-op's road, hands up."
Gus didn't count them. He couldn't have; his eyes had gone useless.
But he heard the sound a room makes when its hands go up together — the shift and the rustle and the low held breath of it — and he heard Gil, after a moment, say, thick, "Well.
That's about as clear as it gets. Motion carries. We keep."
The hall came apart into noise. And Boyce, in his good boots, closed his folder, and stood, and looked around the room without any hardness in him at all — a man watching a thing he'd honestly stopped believing he'd ever see.
"First co-op in six years to tell me no," he said, to Gus, on his way out.
He didn't say it sore. He said it almost soft, almost like a man handing over a thing he was relieved to be rid of.
"Send the truck back whenever you've got your own ice sorted.
No hurry. Consider it—" He almost smiled.
"Consider it a going-away present." And he went out to his rental and drove up the co-op road and was gone, and the reefer truck hummed on down at the wharf, keeping the fleet's catch cold, for now, on nobody's terms but the co-op's own.
***
They found the quiet afterward the way they kept finding it — down at the pound, in the long gold evening, the two of them on the ledge above the black water and the thousand pounds of everything the harbor had, that day, refused to sell.
Gus had been carrying the ask around all afternoon like a live coal.
He'd shaken every hand in the hall and hugged Dee and let Gil grip his neck and take-forever-say a thing that meant I'm proud of you, and the whole time the ask had been sitting in his chest, and now it was just the two of them and the tide going out and there was nothing left to do the thing behind.
He was so bad at this. Twenty years a man doesn't ask for anything, he loses the knack of it entire.
"I had a whole speech," Gus said. "Worked it out hauling this afternoon.
It was real good. Had a bit about the tide in it.
" He turned his hat in his hands. "And now you're standing there and it's all gone out of my head and I've got nothing left but the plain thing, which I'm no good at, so you'll have to take it plain.
" He made himself stop turning the hat. He made himself look at Amos and not the water. "Stay."
Amos went still.
"Not for the co-op," Gus said. "The co-op needs a pound man and that's true and it's not why, so forget the co-op.
Not because I need a sternman, though God knows my shoulder does.
That's not why either." His voice was shaking now and he let it shake; he was done holding doors shut.
"I'm asking for me. Just me. First thing I've wanted for my own self in twenty years and I'm standing here asking for it out loud, which Gil'll tell you I don't do, which I've never once done in my life.
I want to keep you, Amos. Not because you're useful and not because anybody needs you and not for one single reason but that I want you, that I've wanted you since you threw me that line clean in the dark the first night, that I'd rather be no good at being a free man with you in my house than be the best martyr on this coast without you.
Stay. Let me keep you. Be a thing I got to keep for myself, the one thing, after all of it.
" He ran out. "That's the ask. That's the whole ask.
I don't have a bit about the tide anymore. I'm sorry."