Chapter 2
On the Ways
By the time the stranger came down the ladder, Hollis had the sole boards up and the worst of it looking back at him, and the worst of it was about what he'd figured, which was no comfort at all.
He'd been at her since before six. That was the yard's own clock, not a decision — light came up over the point and put itself down through the shed doors and across the ways, and a man was either working in it or wasting it.
He had the garboard off on the port side now, the swollen plank leaned against a stand where it could dry out and be honest with him, and he'd gotten his light down into the cavity behind it to look at the frames, which were the whole question.
Planks you could replace. A plank was a morning and a length of good cedar and knowing where the bevel wanted to go.
Frames were the boat's ribs, her held shape, the thing everything else was fastened to, and if the frames had gone soft where they'd sat in a season of standing water, then the Petrel was a bigger conversation than her skipper had budgeted for, assuming her skipper had budgeted for anything at all, which Hollis would have bet good money he had not.
He got a fingernail into the nearest frame and pressed. Waited. The wood pressed back.
Sound. Or sound enough. Two of them had darkened where the water had stood against them, but the awl didn't sink, and the fastenings behind the broken plank were green with age and holding, and Hollis let a breath go out of him slow, because a man could love a boat he'd only met yesterday if she showed him bones like these.
"That your good news face or your bad news face?"
Hollis backed out from under the turn of the bilge and stood, and there in the daylight, finally, was the man.
He hadn't gotten a proper look yesterday.
Yesterday there'd been a leaking boat and a crowd and a haul on a slack tide, and a man in trouble is mostly the trouble.
Now the trouble had climbed down a ladder in the morning light and was just a man, and Hollis, who read people the way he read hulls — for where they were sound and where they'd fail — took the reading without deciding to.
Lean. Wiry, in the way of a man who used every muscle he had and fed them all just barely enough.
Not tall, a few inches under Hollis's own reach.
Dark hair gone bleached at the ends and stiff with old salt, overdue a cut by a month, more gray at the sides than a forty-year-old ought to have earned and had clearly earned anyway.
A thin white scar riding through one eyebrow.
And the eyes — Hollis noticed the eyes because they wouldn't hold still, pale gray-blue, hazed like the horizon on a day that couldn't commit to weather, and they went past Hollis to the shed doors and the yard and the water beyond twice in the time it took to ask one question.
A man taking the reading of the exits the same way Hollis was taking the reading of him.
His hands were rope-scarred and capable, and on the inside of the left wrist, gone soft and blurred with years, was a small tattoo Hollis couldn't make out and didn't ask about — a bird, maybe, which would have been a joke if the man had looked like he was in on it.
Sound bones. Neglected hard. Braced against a floor he didn't trust to stay level.
Fleeing, not drifting, Hollis thought, and was mildly annoyed at himself for having a thought about it at all.
"News is she's better than you deserve," he said, and turned back to the boat, because the boat was easier.
"Frames are holding. Two are punky where you let her sit wet, but they'll take a sister, I won't have to cut them out.
" He laid a hand flat on the exposed frame, that old habit, letting the wood know where he stood.
"Whoever built her knew what he was about.
Steam-bent white oak, close spacing, more frame than the plans would've called for.
He built her to outlive everybody who'd ever own her.
" He heard how that landed a half-second after he'd said it and did not take it back, because it was true.
"Somebody built this boat like he meant to be buried out of her. "
The stranger — Roan, the harbormaster's paperwork had said, Roan Mercer, a name Hollis had turned over once and set down — went very still.
Not the stillness of yesterday, the practiced ease of a man leaning on a locker full of easy lines.
A different stillness. He came the rest of the way down and put a hand on the boat's keel, up under her, and looked at the opened seam, and for a second the whole performance of him went somewhere else and left just the man behind it, looking at the inside of his own boat like it was a room he hadn't been able to make himself enter in a long time.
"Yeah," Roan said. Rough. "He did."
He, Hollis noted. Not I built her. Not I did. He. A previous owner, then, or a story the man wasn't telling, and Hollis had spent forty-six years in a town where everybody knew everybody's whole business and had learned, mostly, the mercy of not asking. He went back to his tools.
***
Gil found him under the boat an hour later, which was how Gil found everybody — by walking into a place like he'd built it and raising his voice until the person he wanted surfaced.
"Cyr. Tell me you saw my message."
"I saw the light on the phone." Hollis came out from under the Petrel wiping his hands.
Gil Levesque stood in the shed doors with the harbor bright behind him, a folded paper in one fist, sixty-odd and built like a bollard, president of the co-op going on a decade and constitutionally incapable of asking for a thing softly.
He'd thawed toward Hollis over the years the way granite thaws, which is to say not at all to look at, and completely if you knew where to feel for it.
"I've been busy. Somebody dropped a boat on me. "
Gil's eyes went up the Petrel's hauled flank and back down, took in the opened seam, the stranger sanding at the bow who he clocked and dismissed in the same half-second.
"The one that came in during grace. Bad form.
" He held the paper out. "Fall haul list. Fourteen boats want out before the water goes cold, and I moved the Cormier girl up because her wet exhaust's shot and she's fishing on a prayer as it is, so that's fifteen, and I need you to fit the Gauthier boat in somewhere because he blew a stuffing box and he's hauling water same as your friend there. "
Hollis took the list. Fifteen boats. Sixteen.
Every one of them a hull he'd pull up these same iron rails on these same slack tides through October, one at a time, at a rate that hadn't kept up with the cost of the zincs in a decade, because the day he charged the fleet what the work was worth was the day half of them fished the winter on boats they couldn't afford to fix, and Hollis had done that arithmetic so many times it wasn't arithmetic anymore, it was just the shape of his year.
"I'll fit Gauthier in," he said.
"'Course you will." Gil said it rough and it came out fond, and he thumped the Petrel's stand with the flat of his hand on his way to the door the way another man might've said thank you.
"You're the only railway between here and hell that'll still pull a working boat, Cyr.
Don't let that fall through the wharf." He was gone before Hollis could tell him it was closer to falling than Gil knew, which was just as well, because telling Gil would have made it real, and Hollis had a boat to open up.
He stood a second with the list in his hand.
Fifteen boats that couldn't fish without him and a message light he still hadn't answered and a letter under the coffee can he still hadn't read, and every last thing of it handed to him with his own name on it.
Ask Hollis. Hollis'll do it. The ledger in the desk drawer said what the ledger had said for three years now, which was that the yard made just enough to keep making just enough, and that a bad winter or a broken winch or one boat he couldn't bring himself to charge would be the difference between holding on and not.
He'd stopped opening the drawer most days.
There was only so long a man could look at a number that didn't change no matter how early he got up.
Down the boat, the stranger had stopped sanding and was watching him hold the list. Hollis put it on the bench and picked his chisel back up.
***
The bill was the part nobody ever wanted, so Hollis did it the way he did everything he didn't want, which was directly and without dressing it up.
He sat the man down on an upturned bucket in the shed, in the dim and the smell of it — cedar and tar and the linseed rag he kept forgetting to throw out — and he wrote it on the back of the envelope from under the coffee can, because that was what was on the bench, and because writing on the back of it meant he still hadn't turned it over to read the front.
Materials. The two frames to sister, the garboard, the broadstrake that had gone in sympathy.
Bronze to re-fasten. Cotton and seam compound.
His own time, which he undercharged, because he always undercharged, because the alternative was standing in the shed watching a good boat die on a technicality and Hollis had never once in his life managed to do that.
He slid the envelope across.
Roan looked at it the way you'd look at a diagnosis you'd already suspected.
His face did a good job. It was a face that did good jobs — pleasant, a little amused, entirely closed for business behind the eyes.
But Hollis built things for a living, he knew where load went, and he watched the number go into the man and travel down through him and come to rest somewhere it hurt, and the pleasant face never moved at all, and that told Hollis more than any flinch would have.
"That's fair," Roan said, which men only said when it wasn't a question of fair.
"It's low," Hollis said.