Chapter 5
“It’s a chowder,” Wendell Marr says. “You put fish in it. You put potato in it. You put cream in it. Then you stop.”
Hollis Baker crosses his arms. “There’s bacon in mine.”
“I know there’s bacon in yours. It’s wrong.”
“People like it. You don’t get to decide what people like.”
“People liked the Hindenburg,” Wendell says. “Right up until they didn’t.”
Four minutes past seven, and the Widow’s Lantern already has forty-one people in a room made for thirty.
The windows have gone opaque with steam.
Someone’s coat is drying on the radiator and making the place smell like a wet dog.
Theo’s strung old brass lanterns along the beams, and they throw a warm amber light over everything—the scarred wooden tables, the fishing nets on the walls that have hung there so long they’re basically load-bearing, and the long counter where nineteen crock pots and one deeply suspicious slow cooker sit in a row like defendants at a trial.
I’ve got my own crock in the lineup, of course.
Smoked haddock, brown butter, and a little tarragon.
I’m not entering. I’m just participating.
I’ll be telling myself that right up until the moment Bess reads out the winner, and I discover exactly how much I actually care.
Bess judges the contest because while Theo owns the bar, she owns the kitchen, an arrangement that came with the building and has never once been written down.
She runs both it and the Kettle with an ease that puts me to shame.
Theo works the room in a flannel shirt with the sleeves shoved past the elbow, arguing about whether to add salt and shouting things about spoons.
“He’ll come,” he says more quietly, pausing at my elbow, and I realize I’ve been watching the door again.
“I didn’t say he wouldn’t.”
“You’ve looked at that door about nine times.”
“I’m expecting the Patels. They’re bringing the—”
The door opens, and it isn’t the Patels.
Julian ducks under the low frame the way tall men learn to duck under low frames, and steps into the amber light.
There’s nothing as dramatic as a hush this time, just a hitch in the conversation and a dozen heads turning towards him and turning back.
He’s in a dark coat over a dark sweater, and he looks exactly as out of place in a fisherman’s pub as a black orchid in a bucket of daisies, and somehow entirely at ease.
His eyes go around the room once until they find me, and they warm just before Theo bellows across the whole pub.
“There he is!” Theo abandons his sacred pot—the one night a year Bess lets him near a stove—wipes an enormous hand on his flannel, and crosses the floor to grip Julian’s hand like they went to school together.
“Volkov! You made it. Glad you did. Come in, come in, sit yourself down. We’re about to descend into anarchy. ”
“Theo.” Julian shakes the offered hand. “Thank you for having me.”
“Course, course. Any friend of Pen’s.” Theo claps him on the shoulder, which would stagger most men, and Julian doesn’t move an inch.
“You a chowder man? No, don’t answer that.
Nobody’s a chowder man until they’ve been to one of these and lived.
Sit. You want a—” Theo catches himself. “Right. Nothing. Water?”
“Water would be perfect.”
“Did you decide on the boat?” Julian asks, sitting where Theo’s steered him, at the long table by the fire.
Theo blinks. “You remember what I said about the boat?”
“At Penny’s dinner you mentioned you’d been thinking of selling the Marguerite. You did not sound entirely certain.”
“Yeah.” Theo scratches his beard. “No. I didn’t sell her. Couldn’t do it. Sit with the idea long enough, you realize some things you keep even when they don’t make sense on paper.”
“Yes,” Julian says quietly, and for a second something passes over his face that I don’t understand and want to. “You do.”
He takes off his coat. His sleeves are already pushed up, and I’d like to state for the record that this is a deliberate act of aggression.
My whole body goes stupid. I’d love to dress it up, but I have nothing to dress it up with.
I am holding a ladle with my face on fire and my mouth slightly open when Lucy raises the camera and takes a photograph of me doing it.
“Delete that.”
“I’m not deleting it,” she says. “I’m having it framed.”
I’d braced myself for the whole night to be a rescue operation. At my dinner, Julian was a guest, and a guest is a project. Everyone at that table was quietly working on him and he was quietly working back. In here he’s just in the room.
Wendell and Hollis have been arguing about bacon since 1991 and they simply widen the argument to include him, the way you’d shift over on a bench.
They adopt him inside four minutes. He turns out to have views.
His view is that bacon in a chowder is a Portland habit, which is the most inflammatory thing anyone has said in this building this year, and Hollis nearly comes over the table.
“A Portland habit!”
“I stand by it,” Julian says calmly.
“My mother put bacon in a chowder and she wasn’t from Portland.”
“Then your mother,” Julian says, “was ahead of her time, and I am behind mine, and we would both have enjoyed the argument.”
Hollis laughs so hard he has to sit down. I go and get more bread, mostly so I have somewhere to put my hands.
The Cordelia comes up, because the Cordelia always comes up.
She’s why this pub is called what it’s called, and every child in Black Harbor learns it by age six.
The schooner Cordelia went down off Gull Ledge in a November gale in 1817, with all hands, and Abigail Rood put a lantern in that window every night for the rest of her life.
On a foggy night, if you’re a certain kind of person, you can still see it out past the point.
There’s a painting of her over the bar. It is not a good painting. No one minds.
Hollis tells it every year and he does the voices badly. Forty-one people go quiet the way they always do.
“It was not Gull Ledge,” Julian says into the silence, and everyone turns to him.
“Come again?”
“It was the Sisters. Three miles farther south.” He sets the water down on the table, untouched.
“Gull Ledge would have put her in plain sight of this window, and no one on shore saw anything that night, which is the part of the story that has never made sense. And it was not all hands. Four men came off her. Two died on the rocks. The third walked into Wiscasset ten days later. The fourth was picked up by a Halifax vessel.”
Not one person says a word.
“And,” Julian says, “Abigail Rood was not a widow.”
I’m watching his mouth while he says it, which is not the correct place to be looking during the town tragedy, and I know that, and I go on doing it.
Wendell Marr sits up so fast his chair barks on the floor.
“Her husband was the one picked up by the Halifax vessel. He was put ashore in Nova Scotia with no money and no papers. It took him thirteen months to get home.” Julian’s voice doesn’t change at all.
“She kept a lantern in that window for four hundred and eleven nights. And then she did not need to.”
The silence goes on a beat too long.
“How in hell would you know that?” Arthur Finch says, from the end of the bar, and Julian answers him without any hesitation whatsoever.
“Because it is in the insurance filings in Portland. The Cordelia was underwritten there and the loss was contested, which means someone wrote everything down. There is also a Halifax crew list from 1818 with Rood on it, spelled wrong. The story on this side of the water is better. It is simply not what happened.”
Arthur looks at him for a long moment.
“Huh,” Arthur says, and goes back to his chowder.
For four seconds no one in the Widow’s Lantern does anything at all. Then forty-one people start talking at once, and Wendell Marr is on his feet, and Hollis says four hundred and eleven nights in a choked voice.
I stand there with a ladle in my hand and something hot and enormous turns over under my ribs.
My eyes sting and I’m furious about it. I’ve spent my whole life in a town that keeps a lantern burning for people who are not coming back, and this cold, courteous, impossible man just told the whole room, gently, that the waiting ended. That someone came home.
And just like that, Julian’s in. Not tolerated.
In. Of course they love him. He gave them a better ending.
Old Dennett, who hasn’t said a word all night, leans across two people to ask whether the records say anything about the Prosper, which was his great-great-something’s boat.
It turns out they do, and Julian tells him.
Old Dennett’s eyes go bright in the lantern light and he grips Julian’s forearm and says thank you, son.
He learned it from records, I tell myself. He said records. Insurance filings. A crew list. He reads old books for fun. That’s all it is.
But there’s a way he says it. He doesn’t say it like a man reciting something he read. He describes the wreck and the rocks and the gale the way you’d describe a road you drove once, a long time ago, in bad weather.
I put the thought down. It’s too big and I’m not ready to pick it up, and anyway Harriet Coyne has just arrived with her chowder in a copper pot she polished specifically to intimidate everyone, and the room shifts its attention to the true drama of the evening.
It’s later, and the anarchy has descended as promised.
Bess is officiating the tasting with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice.
Rennie has been cleared of the corn incident by a two-thirds majority and is weeping into a napkin.
Somebody’s brought a fiddle, because somebody always brings a fiddle.
Theo’s pouring drinks, and the lanterns have burned down to that low gold that makes everyone look kinder than they are.
I’ve ended up next to Julian again. Or I’ve ended up next to Julian on purpose. The line between those two things has gotten thin over the course of the evening.