Epilogue #2
He sat back on his heels. He looked at it a long moment.
Then he stood, and turned, and found Gus in the crowd the way he always found him, first, before anybody, and he didn't smile — Amos still spent his smiles like a man short of coin — but the thing his face did instead was better than a smile, was the whole of him open for one unguarded second, and Gus felt it land in his chest like a line thrown clean in the dark.
And the fleet saw the name, and the fleet knew whose it was, because the fleet had heard the whole story by now the way the fleet heard everything, from Dee, embellished and essentially true.
A murmur went round — not loud, this was Maine, they didn't make a fuss of a man's grief in the open — but old Petras Gauthier took his cap off, and then the man beside him did, and then it went round the float like a wind laying down a field, forty men bareheaded in front of a twenty-foot peapod with a dead man's name on her bow, honoring a father none of them had ever met, because one of their own had finally been able to keep him and they knew, every one of them, exactly what that kind of keeping cost, having each of them failed and managed it a hundred times in their own lives.
Amos stood in the middle of it with his brush still wet in his hand and looked at the bared heads and could not, Gus saw, entirely hold his face together, and turned it out to the water for a second the way Gus was always turning his out to the water, and blamed it, no doubt, the way Gus always did, on the wind.
Pastor Gaudet blessed her. He blessed the whole fleet the way he did every year, the boats and the men on them and the ones the sea had kept, and then he came to the little peapod up on the grid with her new white name and he blessed her too, the Del Kean, newest and smallest and oldest boat in the harbor all at once, and asked that she carry her man safe, and keep him, and always bring him home.
And the fleet said amen, and Verne Doucette — ninety-three or ninety-four, nobody was sure, propped on his cane and his great-nephew's arm — raised his paper cup of the Foghorn's coffee and said what he said every year, what he'd said before Gus was born and would say after they were all gone.
"To them that stay."
And he thumped the cane on the boards, and the whole float thumped and stamped and hollered it back — to them that stay — and this year it did not go through Gus like an accusation.
This year it went through him like what it had always been meant to be, and he'd been too busy drowning to hear: a welcome.
A roll call. A harbor counting its own and finding them present.
Gus stood in the middle of it with a plate June had made him eat off of and a man who'd stayed standing at his shoulder, and he was one of the names in it now, one of them that stayed, kept and counted and home, and he had to look out at the water a minute and let on it was the wind.
Amos's hand found his in the crowd. Rope-scarred, sure, warm. It didn't hold on for show. It just held on.
***
They stood at the rail after, the two of them, while the Blessing wound down behind them into the long blue northern dusk, and looked out at the harbor holding all its boats, and down the shore at the pound holding all its catch, alive and cold and waiting on a better morning than any single day could offer.
"Kept, not sold," Amos said, of the pound, of the catch, of the whole hard-won year. It had become a thing they said. A private thing. He said it looking at the water, and then he said it again, lower, differently, and this time he wasn't talking about lobster at all. "Kept, not sold."
"Kept," Gus agreed, and put his arm around the man, and Amos leaned into it, a man who'd learned to be leaned on and, harder, to lean back.
They didn't say much. They'd gotten good at the not-saying, the two of them — better at it together than either had ever been alone, because it was a quiet with somebody in it now instead of a quiet you held the door shut against. The house up the shore road had two chairs in use these days and two pairs of boots doubled by the door and a second reading lamp Amos had bought one afternoon without asking anybody, which Gus counted a small miracle: a man buying a thing for a home he'd decided to stay in.
There'd be hard water ahead. There always was, on this coast. The price would crater again some winter and the secondhand ice plant would quit again some August and the shoulder would give out for good one of these years, and the two of them would take their share of the black moods a life hands around.
Gus knew all that now, and he'd stopped being afraid of it — that was the thing a year of being kept had worked in him, not that it made the losses impossible, nothing made the losses impossible, but that it made them survivable, in company, which was the only way anybody had ever survived anything at all.
"Not sorry?" Gus asked. It was an old question between them, worn smooth as a stair, half a joke by now. "Coming around that point. Letting yourself get caught."
"Ask me in forty years." Amos's mouth did the thing that wasn't a smile and was. "But no. Not sorry. Not one day of it."
Down at the rail's far end, Dee Pelletier stood with a coffee going cold in her hand, not watching the party.
She was watching the point — the way she always watched the point, on Blessing evening, the way she'd watched it the night a small tired boat came around it a year ago and the night before that and every Blessing back as far as anyone could remember.
Out past the moorings, off the dark shoulder of the point, a light stood in on the last of the flood.
Small. Low. A single-hander's light, maybe, or a lobsterman late off the water, or nothing at all, just a star sitting low where the sea met the coming dark.
"Huh," said Dee, to nobody, to the harbor, in the carrying voice she kept for when she wanted the whole dock to have it. She sipped her cold coffee and watched the light come on, unhurried, patient, the way they always came. "Well. Never does stay full up long, does it. This harbor."
Nobody answered her. Nobody had to. Down the shore the pound held its thousand pounds against a better price; up the float the fleet stamped one more time for Verne; and off the point a light came slowly in around the dark shoulder of the land, toward the one harbor on the whole cold coast that had never yet, in living memory, turned a tired boat away.
The tide was making. It was carrying whatever it was in.
The way it always did. On schedule. Forever.
THE END