Chapter 21
Louie Morritt had run from every hard thing in his life, and he could have told you the hour each running started.
There was always such an hour. The place would begin to close around a man, quiet, like evening.
Somebody would start to count on him. Then one morning his feet would be on a deck before his head knew it was decided.
The trouble would fall away behind with the town smoke.
And he would tell himself, watching the water, that leaving first was the same as not being sent away.
That Monday morning, at Mrs. Hale’s window, he felt the old hour strike.
Everything in him knew the signs. The widow up the hill sat wearing thin between two roads.
One road was safe, rich, standing four streets over with its shutters newly painted.
Any day now the sensible answer would arrive, kindly, the way his sentences always arrived.
The wise course, the painless course, the one his whole life had trained his legs for, was to be gone before it came.
He stood at the window a long time, watching the boats take on wood in the gray below.
Then Louie Morritt did the one thing he had never once done. He picked up his hat, walked down to the levee, and planted himself.
The wharf master had been after him half the summer.
A man who mended docks unasked, who read the river like print, did not go begging for work on a growing landing.
By eight that morning, Louie had hired on steady.
Not by the trip, not by the season. Steady, year around, the word said out loud in front of witnesses.
His made name went into the wage book, at the top of a long empty column.
That column was the most frightening thing he had ever looked at.
From the wharf boat, he went straight back up Front Street to Mrs. Hale, and took the room by the month.
“The month,” said Mrs. Hale, who had rented to rivermen thirty years and knew what she was hearing. She looked at him over her spectacles a long moment. “Well then,” she said, and that was all, but she gave him the better lamp. In that house, the better lamp was as good as a blessing.
He was terrified the whole time. That was the truth he would have told nobody. Signing the wage book, his hand had been steady and his mouth dry as chalk. It was a small town with a small book, and no anchor was ever dropped harder.
Every running instinct he owned stood up and howled. He was building the very thing that would be torn from him. Roots only gave the world a grip to tear you up by. He heard all of it, the way you hear rain on a roof you have finally gotten tight.
Twice that first week, he woke at dawn with his boots already in his hand, halfway to gone before his eyes were open. Twice, he set them down, dressed, and went to work like a townsman. Nobody ever knew but him what those two mornings cost.
Then he went to find her, to say his piece before the day could say its own.
He met her halfway. She was coming down the path with her shawl pinned against the October wind.
Her face when she saw him was pale and set, the face of a woman braced to do a hard errand.
One of her hands was in her apron pocket, holding something.
He did not know it was a letter. He only knew he had to speak first, or drown.
“Ada.” He took off his hat. “I’d ask a minute. Not more. I’ve got something to say that wants saying while my nerve is up. Then you can say anything in this world back to me, and I’ll take it standing.”
She stopped. The wind worked at her shawl. After a moment, she nodded.
“I signed on with the wharf master this morning,” Louie said. “Steady work, the year around. I’ve taken my room by the month. I’m telling you first, before the town tells you, because you above anybody have earned the right to laugh at it.”
“Laugh at it,” she said faintly.
“A drifter, putting his name in a wage book.” His mouth bent, but his eyes never left her.
“I know what I am, Ada. I know it better than the town knows it. Never stayed a full season anywhere, twenty years. Every word the town has said against me is true. I’ll not stand here swearing it’s all different now, for swearing is wind, and you’ve been offered better wind by a better-fixed man. ”
“Louie...”
“Let me get it said.” He turned the hat once in his hands, and she watched him gather his nerve, like a man setting his feet on a heaving deck.
“I’m not asking you to tear up your life.
I’m not asking you to choose me over good sense, nor over him, nor to choose anything at all, today or this year.
You owe me nothing. The bread was paid for a hundred times over the first night you fed me supper.
What I’m telling you is only this. I am done leaving.
Not for you, or not only. For me. I’ve done enough leaving for one life, and it never once took me anywhere but further off. ”
The wind came up off the water. He let it pass, then said the rest quiet.
“I spent twenty years hunting the place at the river’s end.
I told a little girl it was a place where nobody gets sent away.
Then I went looking for it at every landing from here to the salt water, and it was never once there.
It was here. It’s this town. It’s that house up the hill with the bad third plank I fixed, the boy with his splices, the little one with her stories.
Above all it’s you. You’re the place, Ada.
You always were, since I was twelve years old.
“So I mean to do my staying here, in reach of it, working honest, wanting nothing that isn’t offered free.
If you marry your mill-owner, I’ll stand in the church and wish you joy.
And I will still be here, steady, till they put me up on that hill.
A man can’t earn twenty years back. But he can plant himself, and grow what grows. ”
He put his hat back on, then, because his hands had run out of ways to hold it.
“That’s the whole of it. I’ll not press you ever again past what I’ve said this morning. Good day, Ada. The wharf master gets my afternoons now, and I mean to give him full weight.”
Then he walked past her, down toward the landing, a man with a job to be at. Ada Baldwin stood on the path with the wind in her shawl, her letters in her pocket like stones.
She stood there a long while.
Then she walked back up the hill, past the eating-house, into her kitchen, and drew the two folded sheets out of her apron. The sensible thing, written in her own small square hand at Henry’s desk. One page named Everett Shaw a day in October. One page sent a boatman kindly down the river.
Ada opened the stove door and fed both pages to the fire. She stood watching until the sensible thing was smoke, all the way gone, up the chimney, out over the roofs toward the water.
It was not a decision. She told herself that, firmly, wiping her hands.
Nothing was decided. It was only that no answer written before this morning could be a true one now, and she had promised him true.
Everett would have his answer yet. But it would have to be made of whatever she learned next, watching a rootless man try to grow roots before the whole county.
The whole county did watch. There was no help for it, in a town that size.
They watched the boatman turn up at the levee at first bell, rain or shine, and work the way he mended, no stroke wasted.
They watched him bank his wages with the storekeeper like a settled man.
October wore on, and boats came down running from the ice upriver.
The wharf master, no soft judge, was heard to say he’d trade two ordinary men for the one of him.
Mrs. Hale reported the room paid a month ahead, swept by its own tenant, with a shelf put up. On the shelf, of all things, books.
A drifter with a shelf. The town chewed it over, fence by fence, and could not make it come out to anything but what it looked like.
He came for his supper every evening still, to the corner table, quiet, steady.
He pressed her by not pressing, in a way that made her want to throw the coffee pot at him.
Or do something else entirely, which she would not name.
Evening after evening. Week after week. Staying, in front of everybody, like a lamp left burning.
The coat was Will’s doing.
It happened on a Friday evening, late in October, with the first fires of the season lit and the supper crowd loud against the cold.
Louie came in with the wind behind him and shrugged off his old canvas coat.
He made for the row of guest pegs along the far wall, where it had hung all summer among the drummers’ coats.
Will got there first.
The boy took the coat out of his hands without one word.
He walked the length of the room with it, and hung it on the short row by the kitchen door.
The family pegs. Henry’s old peg had stood empty three years.
Will did not touch it, and never would. He hung the coat on the peg beside it, his own peg, moving his own jacket down one to make room.
Then he straightened the collar with two fingers, the way you square away a line you mean to leave rigged. He went back to his supper, red to the ears, glaring at his plate, daring the whole room to remark on it.
Nobody remarked. The room went on eating.
It was the loudest thing Will Baldwin had ever said, and every soul in the family heard it. Cissy’s mouth had fallen open. At the stove, Ada had gone very still, her spoon stopped in the pot.
And the boatman stood a moment by the kitchen-door pegs.
There hung his old canvas coat in the row of the family’s things, next to the empty peg kept for a good man gone.
Then he crossed to the corner table without a word, sat down, and looked out at the river until his supper came.
A man learning to stay must also learn what to do with his face, when the staying starts to answer back.