Chapter 9 #3
For a long moment Amos didn't say anything, and Gus stood on the ledge with his heart out in the open air where he'd never once let it go, and understood that this was the cost of it, this exact unbearable moment, and that a man who wanted a thing for himself had to stand here in the wanting with no way to make it safe, and that this was what everybody else had been doing their whole lives while Gus hid behind a debt.
Then Amos said, low and rough, not looking at Gus but out at the pound: "You know what I did last night?
Sailed out to that point sure as sunrise that I break what I hold.
Sailed out to prove it. And Roan Mercer rowed out and told me I never broke my father — that Halyard broke my father, and I was just a boy who couldn't stop it — and I sat there on slack water and I couldn't find the hole in what he said.
Six years I've been so sure I was a curse, and a man in a skiff pulled the bottom out of it in about four minutes, and left me sitting there being just a fella.
Just a fella who lost his dad and got scared.
Not a curse. Just scared." He turned, finally, and his dark eyes were wet, which Gus had never once seen.
"So I don't get to say no on account of I break things.
He took that away from me. I've got no reasons left, Gus.
That's the terrifying part. You've asked me to stay and I've run clean out of reasons to run. "
"Then don't run."
"I'm not going to." Amos said it like a man stepping off a ledge into water he can't see the bottom of.
"God help me. I'm going to stay, and let you keep me, and be kept, and someday it's going to hurt like hell because everything you keep can be lost, and I'm going to stay anyway, because a man in a skiff was right — grieving early and alone was never freedom, it was just being dead a while before you die.
" He came the step. He took Gus's face in his two rope-scarred hands the way he had that first night in the too-empty house.
"Keep me, then. I'm asking too. Turns out I can ask, when it's you.
Keep me, Gus. Don't sell me in the low water. "
Gus couldn't answer him. For the second time in his life the man who always had the next thing had no words at all — but this time he didn't reach for a task, and he didn't reach for the wound.
He reached for Amos. He got both arms around him, the bad shoulder and all, and pulled him in against his chest and held on — held on the way he had never once let himself hold on to a single thing in twenty years of giving everything away — and Amos came into it and fit there and held on back, the two of them gripping each other on the ledge above the black water like men who had each, separately, that morning, decided to quit drowning.
"I've got you," Gus said at last, into his hair, rough — the thing Amos had said to him the first night, handed back.
"You hear me? I've got you. And I'm not going to be careful about it, and I'm not going to be sorry about it, and I am never going to give you away and call it a present again as long as I live.
You're mine to keep. And I'm going to keep you badly, my whole life, and you'll just have to put up with a man who's out of practice. "
"Suits me," Amos said, wrecked. "I'm no good at being kept. We'll be no good at it together."
"That's still better than being no good at it alone.
" Gus felt the man go still against him, hearing his own words out of the dark bedroom handed back to him, and felt him breathe something that was almost a laugh and almost the other thing — and then Gus kissed him, and it wasn't the desperate thing from the first night on this same ledge, the thing they'd both flinched off of.
It was slow, and it was sure, and it had nowhere else in the whole world it needed to be.
It was a man kissing a thing he had decided to keep.
Up the shore, in the last of the gold, a few of them had drifted down to the head of the ramp the way a harbor does.
Dee, arms folded, her chin doing something wobbly she'd deny to her grave.
Gil with his hands jammed in his pockets.
Roan and Hollis, shoulder to shoulder. June small and upright in the middle of the lot of them like the keel they all hung off.
Nobody came down. Nobody called out or made a thing of it.
They only stood at the top of the ramp and let the two men have the ledge, and watched — the way this harbor had always watched over the ones it had decided were its own: from a little distance, saying nothing, present. Keeping them. The way it kept its own.
And Gus Ouellette, who had given everything he had away for twenty years and kept nothing, not one thing, for himself — reached out on that ledge above the held and living water and took hold of the one thing he was finally going to keep, and kept it, and did not let go.
Below them the tide went on out, and the pound held, and the fleet's whole catch waited safe in the cold clean dark for a better morning than the one the world had offered — kept, all of it, kept and not sold, waiting on the turn.