Chapter 3 #3
Roan sat down on the edge of the tilted berth with the chart in his hands and did not cry, because he'd done that, years of it, and it was gone the way water was gone, run off and left the salt.
What was left was the plain arithmetic of it, the arithmetic he'd been outrunning at four knots down the whole eastern seaboard: they had made her sound so they could leave, and then they had stopped, they had stopped moving so Emmett could get the treatments, and the boat they'd built to carry them somewhere had sat at a dock going green while the life they'd built her for turned into a house full of pill bottles and a hallway full of specialists and a number, always a number, the bank's number, growing while the man shrank.
Two years of it. And at the end of it Emmett was gone and the house was the bank's and all Roan had left of any of it was the one thing that could still move, so he'd moved.
He'd cast off and he'd kept casting off, harbor after harbor, and he had told himself for seven years that the moving was freedom when the moving was just the only way he'd found to keep the arithmetic from catching him.
You stayed once, the arithmetic said, in the dusk, in the tilted berth. You stayed, and it took everything. So don't.
"You want a hand with that?"
Hollis was at the top of the companionway.
He hadn't gone up the hill after all, or he'd come back, and he stood there filling the hatch with the last of the light behind him, not coming down, not asking what the chart was or who the tools belonged to, just standing at the edge of it the way he'd stood at the edge of every hatch Roan had cracked open all week — there, and not reaching.
Roan looked up at him. He had a dozen easy things. He could feel the locker of them, right where it always was.
"His name was Emmett," he heard himself say instead. "He built her. We built her. To go south on." He turned the chart over in his hands. "We didn't go."
Hollis didn't say he was sorry. He didn't say any of the things people said, the things that were really just a way of setting the weight back on you so they didn't have to hold it.
He came down the ladder, slow, and he sat down on the tool locker across the little cabin from Roan, close in the dusk, his big ruined hands loose between his knees, and he looked at the chart Roan was holding of a coast they'd never reached.
"Tell me about her," Hollis said. "The boat. What'd he do first."
And Roan, who had not talked about any of it to a living soul in seven years, found that he could talk about the boat.
He could talk about the frames Emmett had steamed in a box rigged out of an old downspout, and the plank he'd sprung and cried over and refastened, and the gold leaf on the trailboard he'd laid on with a brush and a held breath and a swear word.
He could talk about the boat because the boat was where the man still was, in every fair curve of her, in the shape she remembered, and Hollis had known that — had known it before Roan did, had asked about the wood on purpose, because the wood was the one language that let a man say the thing without having to survive saying it straight.
He told him about the steam box — a length of old galvanized downspout and a borrowed wallpaper stripper, because a proper box cost money they were pouring into bronze instead — and how the whole contraption had hissed and bucked on its sawhorses like it wanted to take off, and how Emmett had stood in a cloud of it in his good glasses, fogged blind, bending white oak around the form with his bare hands and swearing at it in a way that was mostly love.
He told him how they'd blown the first three frames, cracked them clean, the oak letting go with a sound like a shot, and how Emmett wouldn't quit and wouldn't buy the box and wouldn't do the sensible thing, just kept feeding downspout into the fire and steam into the dark until the wood finally gave him the curve he wanted, at two in the morning, on the fourth try.
Held the bent frame up against the boat with steam coming off him like a man on fire and looked back over his shoulder and said, There. Told you she remembered.
Roan heard his own voice do something on the last of it. He stopped. Hollis let the stopping be, and didn't fill it.
"He was right," Hollis said, after a while.
"She did." He nodded at the new plank, pale in the work light, faired clean into the old dark wood.
"Still does. You put your hands on her today and she came fair for you the same as she came for him.
Wood doesn't forget who was good to it." He said it like the plainest fact in the world, and it went into Roan and lodged somewhere the arithmetic couldn't reach, at least for tonight.
They sat in the dark cabin until the light was fully gone from the hatch, and it was, Roan understood somewhere underneath the talking, the closest he'd let anybody come in years, this quiet, this big silent man on a tool locker asking him about steam-bent oak so he wouldn't have to bleed.
And it was good. That was the trouble with it.
It was so good that when the boat creaked and settled in her cradle, some small ordinary night sound, Roan felt his whole body do the old thing without his permission — felt himself start pricing the harbor, reading the weather, plotting the course out — because a thing this good was exactly the kind of thing the arithmetic came to collect on, and Roan Mercer had been leaving good things before they could leave him for so long that his hands knew the way to the halyards in the dark.
Hollis saw it. Of course he saw it, he read hulls for where they'd fail.
"She's not going anywhere tonight," Hollis said quietly, into the dark. "Neither's the tide. You can just sit a minute."
Roan sat. It was the hardest thing he'd done in a year.