The Shipwright's Come About

Chapter 1

Around the Point

The Petrel started taking on water three miles off Merritt Point, which was about the least surprising news of Roan Mercer's year.

He'd known the garboard was going. He'd known it in Boothbay, when the bilge pump cycled twice in a night it had no business cycling at all, and he'd known it better in Tenants Harbor, where he'd pulled the sole boards, looked at the seam weeping along the keel like something with an opinion, and put the boards back down.

A man could get very good at putting the boards back down. It was practically his profession.

Now the pump ran and didn't stop, and the note it made had gone from working to pleading, and the water standing in the bilge had a look to it he didn't like — not a trickle finding its level but a rise, patient and certain, the sea doing the one thing the sea always did, which was get in.

"All right," he told the boat. "All right. I hear you."

He came up into the cockpit and took stock the way you took stock when you were forty-one and single-handing a thirty-four-foot wooden boat older than you were: fast, and without any illusions.

Wind out of the southwest, building, a chop coming up on it that slapped the topsides and found the seam and worked it.

The point to weather, a green nun marking the ledge off its foot.

Past that, the mouth of a harbor he'd never put into and had fully intended to sail on by.

That had been the plan since Tenants Harbor.

Round the point, wave at the pretty town, keep the tiller down and run for Rockland, reprovision tomorrow, take the delivery out of Camden the day after — some orthodontist's Hinckley that wanted moving to Newport, eleven hundred dollars and a bus ticket, easy as breathing, except that the bilge had other plans and the bilge, historically, won.

He knelt and ran a hand down into the water and felt along the plank where it met the keel and felt the give in it, the slow inexhaustible pulse of the Gulf of Maine coming in through a seam a man had been ignoring on purpose. He brought the hand up wet to the wrist.

Merritt Harbor, then. When the boat picks the harbor, you don't argue with the boat.

The handheld VHF lived in the companionway on a lanyard, and when he thumbed it to sixteen it had just enough life in it to embarrass them both.

Of course it did. Everything aboard the Petrel was like that — nothing dead, nothing well, the whole vessel running on the exact same principle as her skipper.

"Merritt Harbor Harbormaster, Merritt Harbor Harbormaster, this is the sailing vessel Petrel.

" Static. He keyed it again, watched the little battery icon consider its options.

"Any station, this is Petrel, I've got a wooden boat making water, coming around your point, I'll want a float and I'll want it soon. "

The radio spat, cleared. A voice came back that did not waste one word it didn't have to. "Petrel, Merritt Harbor. Switch nine."

He switched. "Nine."

"You sinking or leaking?"

Roan looked at the bilge, at the pump, at the seam. "Ask me in twenty minutes," he said. "Leaking, for now. Pump's keeping her mouth above water. Barely."

"Come in past the green, favor the co-op side.

You'll raise a landing full of people — we've got the Blessing on today, half the fleet's dressed and swinging on their moorings, so mind how you go.

Town float's port side of the co-op dock, I'll clear you a spot.

" A pause, the kind a man leaves when he's deciding whether to say the next thing.

"Cyr's yard is the shed with the railway, right there off the landing.

You've got a plank started, that's where you'll end up.

Don't try and sail out of here on a sponge and a good attitude. "

"Wouldn't dream of it," Roan said, which was a lie, and something in the two-second silence that came back suggested the harbormaster knew it was a lie and had talked enough leaking men in off the water in his life to let it lie there.

"Merritt Harbor, out."

Roan set the radio down, put the tiller over, and pointed what was left of his afternoon at the gap in the land.

He came around the point into the middle of somebody else's good day.

The harbor opened up the way the pretty ones did, all at once, a working bowl of water ringed in black spruce with a town stacked up the hill behind it in white clapboard and gray shingle and a church spire keeping an eye on the whole arrangement.

But it was the fleet that got him, and Roan would not have said, three inches of seawater into a bad afternoon, that a working harbor could get him at all.

Every lobster boat on every mooring had been dressed.

Bow to masthead to stern, they were strung in signal flags, a hundred snapping rectangles of color running the length of each boat, and they lay to the freshening wind in a long swinging rank down the middle of the harbor like they knew exactly how they looked and were being modest about it.

On the landing, a crowd — trestle tables, coolers, a smell of fried fish and cut grass and outboard exhaust coming off the water to meet him.

Up on the end of the co-op dock a man in white vestments stood with a hand raised over the harbor, and under that raised hand the whole town had gone still, heads bare, caps in fists, three hundred people holding quiet together in the middle of a Saturday.

Blessing of the Fleet. Roan had put into forty harbors that ran one and never once on the day. He had a real gift for missing the part where a place loved itself out loud.

Nothing says welcome, he thought, threading the first of the moorings dead slow, like a stranger's boat coming in to die during grace.

He brought her down the rank of dressed boats at a crawl, the pump laboring below decks like a second heart that had taken up smoking, and he was aware — the way you're aware of a windshift before you can name it — of faces starting to turn.

Not all of them. The pastor never faltered.

But along the edges of the crowd, then deeper into it, people found the incoming boat and stayed on it, because a harbor knows its own the way a diner knows its regulars, and the Petrel was nobody's regular.

Dark hull gone chalky where the varnish had quit.

A seabird carved into her trailboards that some patient hand had gilded, once, a long time ago, and no hand had touched since.

She was a boat that had been loved hard and then not at all, and Roan had learned that people looked at a boat like that and felt something they couldn't quite lay hold of, and looked a beat too long, and he had spent seven years being the beat too long in the corner of other people's harbors.

He found the town float — a big man in a ball cap already down on it, unhurried, waving him to the port side, flipping a cleat's worth of somebody else's line out of the way to make him room — and he brought her in the way he brought everything in, which was cleanly and without help, because help was a thing you had to stay somewhere long enough to pay back.

Fenders over. A turn of the wheel to lay her alongside. The bow kissed the float, the stern swung in soft, and he had the Petrel made fast fore and aft before the big man had finished bending for the midships line.

"I've got it," Roan said, not unkindly, already dropping the loop over the cleat.

The man straightened. Older, sixty-something, weathered to the color of a chart left too long in a sunny window, and he looked at the boat and then at Roan with the specific care of a person who kept the town's mental ledger and had just turned to a fresh page.

"Harbormaster said you were leaking. He didn't say you sailed like that. "

"Like what?"

"Like you learned it somewhere it counted." He nodded down at the Petrel's topside, where the bilge pump's discharge was pissing a thin hard stream over the side, steady as a cut. "That's a lot of water for a boat that's just leaking."

"She's dramatic," Roan said. He crouched, popped a cockpit sole board, looked, put it back. Force of habit, that. A man could reassure himself to death. "Gets it from her last owner."

That earned him a short bark of a laugh.

Up on the landing the pastor had lowered his hand; the held quiet came apart into the ordinary din of a town feeding itself, kids and gulls and a truck radio and three separate conversations about the wind.

A woman had appeared at the head of the float — mid-sixties, an apron still tied on over clothes that were plainly her good ones, a mug of coffee in each hand like she'd walked straight out of the supper and forgotten she was carrying them.

She came down the float toward Roan without any particular hurry, and her look, when it reached him, was a frank and unembarrassed thing that he felt land square between his shoulder blades.

"Dee," the older man said, not turning. "He doesn't need coffee. He needs a haul-out."

"Everybody needs coffee, Verne." She put one of the mugs into Roan's hand before he had decided whether to take it, and up close her look got worse, or better — it went over his face slowly, like she was holding it up against a picture only she could see.

"Huh," she said, mostly to herself. "Same as the last one who came around that point looking like that.

And the one before him." She shook her head, pleased and disapproving at once, and patted the Petrel's toerail the way you'd pat a dog that had wandered in off the road. "Harbor's not full up yet, apparently."

"Sorry?" Roan said.

"Nothing at all. Drink your coffee." She looked at him a moment more. "You've got the face of a man who's already worked out where the exits are. Sit down anyway. We feed people here." And then, because Verne had opened his mouth: "You'll want Hollis."

***

Hollis, it turned out, was already coming.