Chapter 1 #3
"Then aboard, twelve feet in the air." Roan bent and picked the coffee back up off the side deck, and it had gone cold, and he drank it anyway, because a man took what a place put in his hand or he was just performing, and he was suddenly too tired to perform.
"I've slept worse places than my own boat. I'll want a ladder."
Something moved across Hollis's face that Roan couldn't read yet, would spend a good part of a summer learning to read. He looked, for just a second, like a man who'd expected an argument and been handed a plain fact instead and didn't quite know where to set it down.
"I've got a ladder," Hollis said.
***
The marine railway at Cyr's was older than the boat, which Roan would not have believed possible.
It ran down into the harbor on a long slope of iron rail gone the deep flaked orange of a century of salt, a heavy timber cradle riding it on iron wheels, and it was worked by a winch and a length of chain that Hollis fed and checked by hand at a control the size and vintage of something you'd find rusting in a shut-down mill.
The whole apparatus had the look of a thing kept alive on principle and spite in roughly equal measure.
Up the slope stood the shed itself, big and gray and leaning companionably against the years, its doors open on a dim interior that breathed out at Roan as he passed — pine tar, cut cedar, bottom paint, linseed, the low green smell of a place where wooden things were made sound.
Somewhere in the dark of it a radio was playing a ballgame to nobody.
Boats stood up on stands in the yard, canvas-shrouded, waiting.
It was, Roan thought, a going concern held together by one pair of ruined hands, and it had the particular held-breath quality of a thing that was one bad season from not going at all — though he didn't have the pieces yet to know why he thought so, only the shape of it, the way you read weather off a sky before you can name the cloud.
He floated the Petrel over the submerged cradle on the slack, Hollis at the water's edge sighting her keel down against the poppets with one hand up — left, come left, hold — and then Hollis threw a lever and the chain came up taut and the old winch took up its ancient argument with gravity, and the Petrel began to come out of the sea.
Roan had hauled a hundred boats. He'd stood in a hundred yards and watched hulls rise streaming into the light, and it had never once done a thing to him, because not one of them had ever been his.
This was his.
She came up bow-first, water sheeting off her in curtains, and it was like watching something be undressed against its will.
The part of a boat you never see — the whole hidden two-thirds of her, the part that does the work and keeps the counsel — rose up into the hard flat afternoon: the long dark run of the hull below the boot-top, gone green and bearded with a summer's growth, weed streaming, the through-hulls crusted white.
The wounded garboard came clear of the surface last on the port side, dark and swollen and shining with all the water it had been quietly drinking.
And below all of it the keel, the deep true bottom of her, fouled and streaked and absolutely, unarguably sound — the bones of her showing through everything that had grown up to hide them.
She rose, and rose, and the pouring slowed to a running, and the running slowed to a drip, and then she hung there in the cradle above her own shivered reflection in the harbor, out of the one element she'd been built for, keel in the air, every hidden thing about her hauled up naked into the light of the town's best day.
Roan stood at the foot of the ways with his neck cricked up at her and did not say a single dry thing.
Could not, as it turned out. The locker was empty.
He stood and looked at the underside of the only thing he owned, the only thing he'd let himself keep, hanging in the air with all of it showing, and behind him three hundred people finished eating fried fish in the sun of a Saturday that had blessed every boat in the harbor except this one.
The winch ticked as it cooled. Hollis came up the slope to stand beside him, wiping his wrecked hands on a rag that made them no cleaner, and he looked up at the same hull with a wholly different face than the one Roan could feel his own doing — not gut-punched but almost gentle, a man looking at a great deal of hard work and not minding the sight of it one bit.
"There she is," Hollis said quietly, up at the boat, like the boat had been the one holding out. "Let's see what you've been hiding."
Roan found his voice down at the bottom of himself. It came out rougher than he'd have chosen. "How long till she's back in the water?"
"That's the wrong question," Hollis said, not looking away from the hull.
"What's the right one?"
"Whether you'll still be here when she is.
" He said it with no weight on it at all, the way you'd note the turn of a tide, and then he walked up under the Petrel and laid one hand flat against her fouled and streaming keel, standing there in the shadow of the boat like a man greeting an old acquaintance, and left Roan at the foot of the railway with a whole harbor at his back that had just finished blessing everything in it but him.