Chapter 4 #2
"And that's just the part that's in writing.
" Roan's voice dropped, and Hollis realized the man had the whole room now — that a stranger not one of them had ever laid eyes on had, inside two minutes, taken hold of a Merritt Harbor town meeting, because he was the only person in it willing to tell them the truth plain.
"Rezone this frontage and you don't get a marina and a working yard both.
There's no harbor anywhere that has both.
You get the marina. And every boat in this room that throws a rod after that hauls forty miles to fix it, if it can still afford to, and the ones that can't just stop, and in ten years you've got a real pretty harbor with three boats left in it and a gift shop where the co-op used to be.
" He was looking at the Blue Inn couple when he said it, not unkindly.
"I'm not telling you you're wrong to be scared of the winter.
I've been scared of a winter or two. I'm telling you this particular rope is tied to your own anchor, and the man selling it to you knows it. "
Three boats left and a gift shop. It was Marc's line, near enough.
Roan couldn't have known it was Marc's line, and across the room Hollis saw his brother's head come up, saw Marc recognize his own argument turned inside out and handed back to the fleet as a weapon, and something moved across Marc's face that Hollis couldn't read from the back wall and didn't get the time to.
Because June was on her feet.
She didn't wait for the chair to call her, because June had never waited for a man to call on her in ninety years and wasn't starting now.
"I'll say the part the young fella left out," she said, and her voice was thin and it carried, and the room settled for her the way it wouldn't have for anyone else.
"My Eddie hauled his boat up those rails for thirty years.
So did his father. That railway is how you fix the thing that keeps you alive, and there is exactly one of it between here and hell, and Hollis Cyr keeps it running at a loss that would shame every one of you if you looked at his books, which he'd never let you.
" She looked slowly along the right side of the room, the marina side, the frightened side, and she wasn't unkind either, which was worse.
"I know you're scared. I've buried more of this town than you have.
But you don't save a drowning man by selling his lungs for the summer people to park on.
You'll get one warm season out of it and a cold century after.
" She sat down. "That's all. Somebody get me my water. "
Then the room came apart into talk, and Hollis watched the thing he'd dreaded most walk right up the center aisle of it.
Marc stood.
He didn't shout. He'd done his shouting years ago and left it in another town.
He just stood up in the middle of the fleet's own hall, in the jacket too good for his truck, and said, "I'm Marc Cyr.
Some of you knew my dad." A silence opened for the name.
"I own half that yard. Legally, on paper — half of everything the young fella just stood up to save.
And I'm telling this board I want the sale.
" He didn't look at Hollis. That was the mercy and the cowardice of it both, that he would not look at Hollis while he said it.
"My brother's kept that railway alive on his own back for twenty years, and it's killing him, and not one of you has noticed because it's convenient not to.
I'm not going to stand here and watch him go under with it so the rest of you can keep hauling cheap. " He sat. "That's all I came to say."
The hall did not know what to do with a man selling his own family out of love, so it did the thing rooms do when they can't hold a feeling, which was get louder.
Gil was up over the top of it, using Roan's opening the way a captain uses a slant of wind, demanding Sutter read page nine aloud, which Sutter declined to do with a smile that had finally started to cost him something.
A selectman had his copy of the materials open and was asking, in the flat voice of a man who did not enjoy being handled, what exactly "subject to marina operations" was supposed to mean in plain English.
The gift-shop woman said, into a lull, that it was easy for June to talk about lungs when June's mortgage was paid and hers wasn't, and half the right side of the room murmured, because that was true too.
The Blue Inn husband said, quietly, not really to anyone, that he hadn't driven here to end the fleet, he'd driven here to not lose his house, and nobody in the room had an answer for the second thing, and he was right, nobody did.
A fleet captain in the third row said the marina people always talked jobs and the jobs were always some kid parking cars for eight weeks and drawing unemployment in October, and the whole left side thumped that like scripture.
Sutter tried to bring it back to the renderings, the tax revenue, the future — and for the first time all night the future sounded thin in his mouth, because June had set a century on the other pan of the scale and a stranger had set page nine on top of it, and a soft quarter-zip is a hard thing to argue a hundred years against. It was, Hollis understood, no longer a coronation.
It was a fight. That was the whole of what Roan had done in ninety seconds from the back wall: he'd made it a fight instead of a formality, and given the fleet six weeks to win it.
Old Nadeau, who'd chaired town meetings since before Hollis could vote, banged his gavel and said what chairs say — that this was a first hearing, that the board would take it under advisement, that there'd be a binding vote at a special meeting once the co-op's fall haul-out was finished, six weeks out, and would everybody please go home before somebody said the thing that ended a friendship.
Six weeks. A clock, where that morning there'd been open water and no clock at all.
The hall got up in a roar of scraping chairs, half of it furious and half of it relieved and all of it loud, and Hollis stood against the back wall with his heart doing something it had no earthly business doing, and looked at the stranger who'd just stood up in a town that owed him nothing and fought for a yard that would never haul one single thing he owned.
Roan caught him at it. Across the emptying room, over the heads. He gave Hollis a small crooked shrug, a man caught doing something faintly embarrassing.
Nobody had ever once fought Hollis's fight for him. Not in forty-six years. He'd have told you, that morning, that he preferred it that way.
He'd have been lying, and standing against that wall, he knew it.
***
They walked back to the yard the long way, down along the water, because neither of them said let's take the long way and both of them turned that direction anyway.
The harbor at that hour had gone still and dark and enormous, the fleet back to plain workboats swinging on their moorings, the tide right at the top of itself, slack and full, and holding.
"You didn't have to do that," Hollis said. It came out wrong, too rough, which was how everything true came out of him.
"I know." Roan had his hands in his pockets, watching the water the way he watched everything, though slower now, the reading gone out of it. "You keep saying that to me. 'You didn't have to.' Like a man tallies up a bill in his head every single time somebody does a thing for him."