Chapter 12
The turn with Will came in August, and it came over a rope.
Louie was on the dock at first light, splicing an eye into a new mooring line for the wharf boat, when he felt himself watched. He did not look up. The watching had a familiar weight to it, ten years old and stubborn, planted somewhere up the path with a water pail for an excuse.
He worked the strands slow, in plain sight, the way you gentle anything wild. Over, under, over, each tuck laid neat as writing. When the eye was done he set it on the planks, admired it a moment, then pulled the whole splice apart and started again, slower.
Halfway through the third tuck, a shadow joined his on the boards.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Will said. “Pa went the other way round.”
“Did he now?” Louie kept his eyes on the strands. “Show me.”
It hung in the air a long moment, the way everything hung between the two of them.
Then the boy set down his pail and knelt on the planks.
He took the rope with a fierce carefulness that told Louie whose hands had first shown him.
The tuck he went at backward, making a botch of it. He knew it, and his ears went red.
“Your pa spliced left-handed, I’d guess,” Louie said, mild. “Some of the best rivermen did. It’s not wrong, it’s just the mirror of mine. Here. Do mine with your right, and you’ll have both. That’s a thing most grown deckhands can’t say.”
Will looked at him, hunting the trap in it, finding none.
They spliced until the breakfast bell, and neither of them said anything more. It was the best hour Louie had passed in Camden Bluff.
The next evening the boy was back, and the evening after. His mother sent biscuits down once, by way of a flag of truce, and got no answer from either of them but crumbs.
After that, the boy came to the dock. Never announced, never invited, never admitting to anything. He simply turned up with his pail or his schoolbook or his skiff for an excuse, and Louie put work in his hands.
He taught the way the river had taught him, expecting much and pitying nothing. Will learned the eye splice, the short splice, the flemish coil. He learned the bowline made blind behind the back, because a man wants his hands to know it when his eyes are needed elsewhere.
He learned to read the water off the end of the dock.
Where the brown ran smooth and dimpled, that was current over deep sand.
Where it creased and boiled, something drowned lay under, a tree or worse, waiting for a hull.
The still slick along the bank, that looked so kind, was the very place to drown a boy.
And the hurrying rough water in the channel that looked like danger, would carry him true.
“Everything on a river is backward,” Will said one evening, disgusted and delighted.
“Not backward. Just honest in its own language. You learn to read it, it never once lies to you. That’s more than you can say for most in life.”
“How do you know all of it?” Will asked once.
“Same way your pa knew it. Somebody showed me a long while back, and the river did the rest. Nobody’s born reading water. It’s all learning, it’s all free, and it never quits.”
Will thought that over the way he thought everything over, jaw set, eyes on the water. Then, without any warning at all, in the flat voice he kept for the things that mattered, “My pa was learning me the river. Before he took sick.”
Louie kept his own eyes on the water. Careful now, careful as a snag crossing. “Tell me about him,” he said. “If you care to. I’d be glad to know what kind of man built that dock.”
So the boy sat down on the planks next to the boatman and talked until the supper bell went. In three years he had not talked about his father to a living soul. His mother went quiet, his grandmother wept, the town changed the subject. Here, at last, was somebody who only listened.
The light went long and gold over the water while he talked. Louie let his own work lie still in his lap. Some talk a man does not whittle through.
Henry Baldwin came back to that dock piece by piece, in a boy’s telling.
A big man who laughed at his own jokes before the ending.
He could carry Will on one arm and a flour barrel on the other.
He sang off-key on purpose, to make his wife throw a dish towel at him.
That last summer he had promised Will a skiff of his own, then died in the August of it.
The skiff had been the last built by his own hands.
Louie listened the whole time like it was the only conversation in Missouri.
He never once said I’ll be him to you. Never once did he pat the boy, or go soft-voiced, or do any of that which would have shut Will up like a mussel.
He asked the questions one man asks another about a third man worth knowing.
What draft did he give the skiff? Did he favor oak or cypress?
Left-handed, was he, I thought so from the splice.
At the end of it, Will looked at him sidelong, wrung out, lighter. Then he issued the nearest to terms the sentry had ever offered.
“You don’t sit in his chair,” the boy said. “At the table.”
“No,” Louie agreed. “Nor will I ever. A man earns his own chair. I’ve no use for another fellow’s.”
Will nodded, one time, like a deal going down in a stockyard. Then he picked up his pail, remembered it was empty, filled it, and went up the hill whistling. On the dock the boatman stood alone a while, his eyes stinging in a way he put down entirely to the light off the water.
From the kitchen window, Ada watched her son come up the path whistling, and had to sit down a moment on the flour barrel.
She had seen it all summer, the slow campaign of it, though campaign was the wrong word for the man never advanced.
He only stood where he stood, day after day, until the boy wore out his own war and came over.
Now Will was down at that dock every evening God sent.
He came back with rope-burned hands, river words, and something loosened in his shoulders that had been cinched tight for three years.
Twice she had heard, through the window, the sound she had stopped even praying for.
Will laughing.
The first time, she had burned her hand on the skillet, not looking. The second time she went out on the porch to be sure, and stood listening in the dark like a thief at her own window.
Her house was full in the evenings now in a way it had not been since the fever year.
She would look up from the stove and find them arranged around the lamplight like a picture from somebody else’s life.
Louie with Cissy on his knee and a story going.
Will re-coiling the same rope for the pleasure of it.
Herself in the doorway with a dish towel, watching, half in and half out of her own kitchen.
Almost a family, the picture said. And Ada would turn back to the stove with her heart going two directions at once, gladness running one way, alarm the other.
The gladness needed no explaining. Any woman could see the children were the better for him.
The alarm was harder, and it kept her awake.
This warmth had a man at the middle of it who owned two changes of clothes and a canvas bag.
Boats left every day. Whatever held him in Camden Bluff, he had never once named it, and drifters drift.
That was the whole nature of the breed. Some morning her children were going to come down to an empty corner table.
The dock would be mended, and the man would be gone downriver, the way river men went. Cissy would cry for a month.
And Cissy, said a small, appalling voice in her, will not be the worst hurt in this house.
Ada put that voice away and fed her family supper.
Everett Shaw saw the picture too. He saw it every Sunday, from his chair by the kitchen door, over the top of a newspaper he had stopped reading.
He was not a jealous man. Jealousy he would have known how to be ashamed of, and put away. This was quieter, more reasonable, and it would not be put away.
That Sunday he found himself adding up his own offer the way a stranger might. A fine house. A schooled future. Security, standing, kindness. It was everything a sensible widow could want. And he had watched a boatman’s coil of rope outbid all of it in a boy’s eyes.
He was a fair-minded man, and he made himself be fair about it now.
The boatman did not push in. He did not court Ada in any way a watching man could name.
He sat his corner, spoke when spoken to, tipped his hat to Everett with a deckhand’s proper respect for a man of standing.
There was nothing to point at. Nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened, and everything was happening. A man who moved freight for a living knew the difference between what the papers said and what was in the hold.
Everett watched Will follow the boatman with his eyes like a first mate. In a year of correct Sunday calls, the boy had never shown him anything but a fence post’s politeness. He watched Cissy claim the man’s knee as her own deeded property.
He watched Ada, and that was where fairness cost him most. She did not look at the boatman like a woman courted. It was nothing so plain, or so answerable. She looked at him the way you look at a lamp in a window, to be sure it is still lit.
At home that evening, in the fine white house with the green shutters, Everett Shaw sat with his cold pipe a long while.
He had waited a year, patient as timber, sure as the seasons.
He had told her there was no hurry in him, only hope, and he had meant it.
Meaning it had been easy, for he had been the only road in sight.
Now something in him, quiet and unwelcome as a knock after midnight, had begun to say the road was no longer empty.
That patience, which had felt like strength all year, might in fact be the losing of her. One uncounted evening at a time, she might be going to a man who mended docks for chicken dinners.
He was a decent man. He said nothing yet, resolved nothing yet.
But all year he had rested in one understanding. Ada Baldwin would be sensible in the end, because being sensible was what Ada Baldwin was. Tonight that understanding had shifted under him, like trusted ground.
For the first time in a patient year, Everett Shaw felt the clock.