Chapter 3
What the Wood Remembers
Aweek into it, Roan could tell time by the tide of Hollis Cyr's silences.
There was the morning silence, which was just a man working before the coffee had finished its argument with him.
There was the reading silence, when Hollis crouched at a seam and went somewhere the rest of the world didn't get invited.
And there was this one, the one Roan had learned to like against his own better judgment — the working silence, the two of them on either side of the Petrel's opened flank, Hollis fairing the new garboard with a plane in long even strokes and Roan holding the batten where he'd been told to hold it, and neither of them saying anything, because the boat was saying it for them.
"There." Hollis ran a thumb down the plank's edge, checking the line by feel the way other men checked it by eye. "Feel that. Where it wants to sit."
Roan put his own hand where Hollis's had been. Felt the fair curve of it, the way the new wood had already agreed to be part of the old shape. "Feels like it grew there."
"That's the job." Hollis blew a curl of shaving off the plane. "You don't make the plank do what you want. You find out what the boat already is and you put back the piece that's missing. Boat remembers her own shape. You just have to not argue with her about it."
It was the most words Roan had gotten out of him in a stretch, and every one of them was about wood, which Roan was beginning to understand was how the man said everything he wasn't going to say about anything else.
He'd cataloged it the way he cataloged a coastline he'd be sailing back down: Hollis Cyr was fluent in exactly one language and went mute the second the subject got within a cable's length of himself.
Ask him about a scarf joint and he'd talk your ear off.
Ask him whether he'd eaten and he'd hand you a sandwich.
Roan had spent the week learning the shape of the work, and more than that, the shape of the man doing it.
Hollis fed the yard's whole day through his own two hands and never seemed to notice he was the only pair — hauled the stands, ran the winch, worked the seams, took Gil's calls, and somewhere in there did the plank teaching too, patient as weather, never once making Roan feel the size of what he didn't know.
Roan had crewed for a lot of men. Most of them taught you by finding the thing you got wrong.
Hollis taught you by handing you the tool and standing close enough to catch it if it went sideways, and saying, when you got it right, nothing at all, which somehow landed harder than praise.
"You're not bad at this," Hollis said once, watching Roan back a fastening out clean without splitting the wood.
"High praise."
"It's the highest I've got." He said it without looking up, and meant it, and Roan believed him, and hated a little how much he'd wanted to hear it.
"Whoever built her," Roan said, and stopped, because that was a hatch he kept his hand off of, and then went through it anyway, which surprised them both. "He used to say the same thing. Almost word for word. Find out what she already is."
Hollis didn't look up. That was the thing about him — he'd caught it, Roan could tell he'd caught it, the he, the past tense, the whole freight of it, and he did not do the thing every other person on earth did, which was reach for it.
He just kept planing, long and even, and left the door open without walking through it, and somehow that was worse, or better, than any question.
"Sounds like he knew boats," Hollis said.
"He knew this one." Roan looked at the new plank, pale against the old dark wood, the seam between them clean and tight. "Nobody knew her like he did."
Hollis set the plane down. He put his ruined hand flat against the hull, that gesture Roan had watched him make a dozen times now, the one where he let the boat know where he stood, and for a moment he just looked at her, the whole tired dark length of her up on the stands.
"She's not junk," Hollis said. He said it to the boat, plainly, a craftsman's verdict, no idea in the world where it was going to land.
"People look at a boat let go like this and they think junk.
She's not. She's tired." He took his hand back.
"Different thing. Junk you throw away. Tired you can bring back, if somebody's willing to do the work. "
Roan stood there with his hand on a plank that had grown into a shape it remembered, in a boat a dead man had loved, and did not trust himself to say anything at all, because the thing that had come up his throat had no dry version, no portable version, nothing he could sail off from.
So he did what he did. He picked up the plane Hollis had set down and coiled the cord of the work light with his other hand and found the next thing that needed doing, and let the silence go back to being about the wood.
***
Dee ambushed him at the Foghorn that evening, which he should have seen coming, because she'd been leaving the seat across from her open for three nights running like a trap with a slice of pie in it.
"Sit," she said, and he sat, because he'd learned that much.
The diner was in its after-supper lull, the counter down to two old-timers and a kid doing homework, the specials board by the pass half-erased.
A big quiet man worked the griddle in back with an economy of motion Roan recognized, and a leaner one in an apron moved through the tables refilling coffee with a spare, practiced smile that didn't quite reach the eyes until it landed on somebody he actually liked, at which point it changed entirely.
Roan clocked the two of them the way he clocked everyone — for the exits — and got, instead of exits, the distinct read of two people who'd stopped looking for them a while ago.
"Rory and Theo," Dee said, following his eye. "They run the place. Own the whole thing outright now, which is a story and a half I'm not telling tonight because I've got a better one." She pushed the pie at him. "Eat. You're too thin, it makes you look like you're planning something."
"Everybody in this town feeds a man before they interrogate him."
"It's the only leverage that works." She folded her hands. She had a way of looking at a person that was three parts warmth and one part autopsy. "Hollis Cyr."
"What about him."
"That's what I'm asking you. A week in his yard, sleeping twelve feet off his ground.
You'd have a read by now. A man who reads exits reads people.
" She said it easy, but her eyes had gone sharp, and Roan understood that this was not gossip, or not only gossip — this was Dee checking a stranger against the one person in this harbor she'd apparently decided needed checking-for. "So."
"He's the most competent man I've ever watched work," Roan said, which was true and safe. "And he won't take a compliment or a sandwich, he'll only give them."
"Mm." Dee looked at him a beat longer, and then, having gotten whatever she'd come for, she gave him the thing back.
"He was going to leave once. You know that?
Everybody in this harbor knows it and nobody says it, which is the worst way for a thing to be true.
" She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer, the way people do when the story's older than they'd like.
"Nineteen, twenty years back. He had a spot at a big yard down in Rockland, real money, a chance to build the fancy stuff instead of patching lobster boats for nothing.
And he had Warren." She let the name sit.
"Sweet, that one. Too handsome for his own good, always half out the door — you'd know the type.
They were going together. Down the coast. New life. "
"What happened?"
"What always happens here." She said it without drama, which was how you knew it had cost something.
"Hollis's father took sick. The yard was drowning in debt, and that railway's the only haul-out for the whole fleet, and if Hollis left there was nobody — you understand?
Not nobody who'd have it hard. Nobody. The boats don't fish, the co-op folds, the harbor dies.
So he stayed. Told Warren go on ahead, he'd come after, once he'd got the yard steady.
" She snorted, soft and sad. "Yard's never been steady a day in forty years.
Warren waited about six months and then he didn't. Went down the coast without him.
Married a dentist, I heard, which serves everybody right. "
Roan didn't say anything. The pie sat untouched between them.
"Then the old man died and left him the yard and the note on it both," Dee went on, quieter.
"And Hollis just — took it up. All of it.
Been holding this whole harbor on his back ever since, and the harbor lets him, because it's easy to let a man carry a thing when he never once puts it down and asks you to spell him.
" She looked at Roan, and the autopsy was gone out of it now, just the warmth, worn thin with worry.
"Everybody in this town needs Hollis. You'll not find one soul who'd say they don't love him for it.
But there's a difference between being needed and being wanted, and I have watched that man go twenty years without one single person crossing a room for him, and I am too old to keep watching it. You understand me?"
"I think you've got the wrong stray," Roan said. "I'm the kind that leaves before the leaves."
"I know exactly what you are." Dee stood, gathered his empty coffee cup though he'd have sworn it was still half full.
"I called it the second you came around that point.
Same as the last one, and the one before.
" She patted his shoulder on her way past, once, firm.
"Doesn't mean I'm wrong about the rest of it. Eat your pie."