Chapter 10
The dock below the eating-house had been sagging for two years, and everybody who used it had learned its ways.
Boat crews coming up to supper stepped wide of the third plank without thinking.
The stringers underneath had gone soft where they met the water.
The whole outer end leaned a little south, like a tired horse resting a leg.
Henry Baldwin had built it sound, but docks are like everything else on a river.
They want keeping, and a widow with two children keeps what she can reach.
Louie stood looking at it in the early light, the morning after the longest night of his life. Then he went and borrowed tools off the wharf boat.
He worked all that day, and the most of two more.
The outer end he jacked true, sistering the soft stringers with sound oak.
He pulled the third plank, with four more like it, and laid new ones, spiking them home with a boatman’s economy.
The sound of his hammer came up the hill through the open kitchen windows, steady as a heartbeat.
Ada Baldwin kept finding reasons to be at the window that looked down on the water.
On the third afternoon, she came down the path with her hands in her apron and stood at the land end of the dock.
“Mr. Morritt. Might I ask what you think you’re doing to my dock?”
“Fixing it, ma’am.”
“I can see that. I don’t recall hiring it done.”
“No, ma’am.” He set the last spike and drove it home. Then he stood up out of his crouch. “You didn’t. The Belle’s mate turned an ankle on that plank two weeks back, and I got tired of watching men walk crooked. Call it a favor to the boats.”
“The boats,” she said.
“They’re particular where they step.”
Ada walked the length of it, slow, testing. The new planks lay pale against the gray of the old ones. All the lean was gone. Under her feet, the dock stood the way it had stood when Henry was alive. Something about that pushed at her chest from the inside, in a way she had not braced for.
“What do I owe you?” she asked, brisker than she meant. “And don’t say nothing. Lumber’s not free, and neither is three days of a man’s back.”
“Lumber was culls from the mill yard, bought for dimes. The back was mine to spend.” He gathered the borrowed tools, not looking at her. “I take my supper here every night of the world, ma’am. A man likes his supper to come off a dock that’ll hold.”
“That’s no kind of accounting.”
“It’s river accounting. It’ll balance if you let it.”
She stood there with the wind off the water pulling at her apron.
Exasperated, she decided, or something else that had no name yet.
In the end, she fed him fried chicken that night, with two pieces of pie, and charged him for neither.
He paid for both anyway, leaving the coins under the plate’s edge where she would not find them till he was gone.
It became a contest between them, quiet and unspoken. It was the politest war Camden Bluff never knew it was watching.
Mrs. Hale reported the town’s verdict over her fence, which was that the widow had found a treasure, and the treasure had found free suppers. Ada let the town think so. It saved explaining what she could not explain anyway.
The roof went the same way. July came in hot, with thunderheads building across the river of an afternoon.
One supper-time, a stain spread on the kitchen ceiling while the rain hammered.
The next dry morning, Louie was up the ladder with a bundle of shingles before Ada had finished the breakfast dishes.
She came out to the ladder’s foot and scolded him in a whisper, on account of the neighbors.
He shingled on, mild as May, and had the whole slope tight by dinner.
Wood turned up split. That was the eeriest of it, she declared to Mrs. Hale.
A woman would go to bed with the woodpile low, and wake to find it split, stacked, ranked neat as soldiers.
All of it done sometime in the gray before sunup, without one sound to wake the house.
Twice, she tried to catch him at it. Twice, she overslept, worn out from the day before, and found only the stacked wood. Of the stacker, no sign.
“You might at least wake me so I could say thank you,” she told him at supper. “A person can’t thank the dark.”
“The dark doesn’t want thanking,” Louie said, and passed his cup for more coffee.
“You will let me pay you,” she told him, cornering him at his table with the account book in her hand. “I keep books, Mr. Morritt. I pay what I owe. I won’t be beholden.”
“You feed me.”
“And you pay for what you eat. I’ve watched you do it.”
“Then we’re square.”
“We are nowhere near square, and you know it.” She sat down across from him, which she did with no other customer, and did not notice she had done it.
“Why?” she asked, plain out. “You’re not a rich man. You’re not a fool either. Boats leave every day, and they pay wages. Yet you stay here mending a widow’s shingles for chicken dinners. Any other man in the county, I’d know what he was about, and he’d be finding his hat. So why?”
For a moment something moved behind the boatman’s quiet, and she thought she was about to hear the truth spoken.
“A man gets tired of passing through,” Louie said. “I like the town. I like the work. I’ve eaten at a hundred tables on this river, ma’am. Yours is the first that ever seemed to mind whether I came back. Maybe I’m paying for that. It doesn’t come cheap where I’ve been.”
It was a true thing, and it was not the truth, but it was as far as he could go.
Ada looked at him a moment longer. Then she rose, smoothed her apron, and let it be.
She was too shorthanded to argue away good help, and too honest to pretend the house was not the better for him.
That night she wrote in her copybook, in her small square hand: J.
Morritt, sundry work, owed. She did not put a figure to it. There was no figure to put.
Cissy required no accounting at all. Cissy had decided the matter the first week.
She adopted him the way a cat adopts a warm windowsill, completely, and without consulting anybody.
When he came up the hill of an evening, she abandoned whatever she was ruining and ran to meet him.
She sat by him at supper when her mother lost track of her.
She showed him her rag doll Louisa, her collection of river glass, the gap where her tooth had been. His opinion was required on all of it.
Mostly she required stories.
“You’re a boatman,” she informed him, climbing his knee as if it were a stump put there for the purpose. “Boatmen know stories. Tell one.”
So he told her stories, small and careful ones.
He told about a catfish under the Glasgow bridge, big as a skiff, that stole a fisherman’s anchor.
Years later it was seen wearing the anchor like a watch chain.
He told about a ferry mule that wouldn’t cross until the ferryman sang to it.
The ferryman had the worst voice on the river, and the mule had the worst ears.
They suited each other for twenty years.
Small tales, funny ones, tales that ended and were done.
“Sing it,” Cissy commanded. “The mule song.”
“There’s no singing in this eating-house,” Louie said. “Your mother keeps a respectable table. The mule would tell you so himself.”
Never his own. Never the one.
That one stood behind his teeth every evening, whole, its ending polished from twenty years of carrying.
Ten feet away, its owner dried dishes with no idea it was in the room.
Some nights, with Cissy heavy against his arm, the wanting to tell it rose in him strong.
Then he had to set the child down and go out to look at the river until it passed.
“You’re my friend,” Cissy told him one evening, matter-of-fact, the way she would have said the stove was hot. “My best one that’s grown.”
Louie was a while answering.
“Then I’m a lucky man,” he said. His voice came out level. Keeping it so cost him more than the dock, the roof, and the woodpile together.
Lucky was not the half of it. Lucky did not begin to cover what it was to be somebody’s best grown friend in this house.
Will was another matter.
The boy had not softened one inch in a month.
If anything, he had dug deeper. The enemy had stopped being a stranger at a table and become a man mending his father’s dock with his father’s ways.
Will watched from the kitchen doorway, from the top of the path, from behind the woodpile.
That the woodpile was easier to fill now, he was too proud to admit.
He never spoke first. His thanks, when his mother forced the issue, came out like teeth being pulled.
At the family table, the chair at the head still stood empty every meal.
Nobody sat in it. Cissy had once tried to wave Louie into it, supper being crowded, and the whole room had gone still as a held breath.
Louie had looked at the chair, then at the boy already half out of his seat with his eyes burning.
He had said only that he was a bench man himself, being used to boats.
Then he had sat himself down along the side.
Will had settled back, slow. He said nothing that night either.
But he watched the boatman differently after it. It was the way a sentry watches a man who came to the wall, looked at the gate, and turned back of his own accord.
Louie pushed nowhere. He knew this country.
He had stood post in a rocking train car once, twelve years old, between a small girl and the world.
Nobody had been able to buy him off either.
A boy guarding a dead man’s place could not be argued out of it, or bribed out of it, or charmed out of it.
Nothing would win such a sentry but time, laid down slow, in plain sight.
So he worked, and let the boy watch him work.
When Will hauled water, Louie happened to be carrying wood the same direction, silent, matching his pace to a ten-year-old’s dignity.
When the skiff Will was proud of dragged loose in a rise, it was back on its blocks by morning, bailed dry.
Its painter lay coiled in a neat flemish that the boy studied for an hour.
Then, alone behind the smokehouse, he taught himself to make it.
Trust in a wary child is only ever earned, never taken. Louie had learned that from the inside, a long time ago.
He could wait. Waiting, as it happened, was the one thing in this world he was truly good at. And for the first time in twenty years, he was waiting in sight of the shore.