Chương 99: Tom Dolan's Boy

They brought the boats in on Sunday morning. Abe came down at eight, because it was Sunday and the board said Sunday, and worked like everyone else. Punts up on the blocks, gear out of them, forty hooks in a barrow with the bent ones picked out for Riddell's pile. His arm was strapped and no good for lifting, so he worked one-handed. Purnell ran the unloading with her voice worn down to a rasp, and used what was left of it anyway.

"Gaffs left, hooks right! If it's bent it goes on the pile. Deciding's not your job, carrying is!" At noon, Fenn closed the count. He didn't make a speech of it. He stood at the boards with the book open on his arm and went down the rail tag by tag, saying each name once, and a hand somewhere in the shed answered each one. The two small names from the cut still stood at the bottom in their own column, and Fenn read them too, and no hand answered, and he went on. At the end he came to the tag on the OUT side.

"Dobbs," said Fenn. Abe looked at his boots and got through it. The shed was quiet for the length of one wave against the pilings. Then Fenn wrote in the book, and shut it, and said, "The count's closed. Day crews stand down at four. Thank you."

"Take that rail down now," said Mullen.

"It's done its work."

"It stays up through the week," said Fenn.

"It's a row of names staring at people while they eat," said Mullen.

"Crew four's still got two hands out on loan to the Longmarket," said Fenn.

"Till they cross over, that rail's doing its job, and I'm not making a new one on Tuesday because you didn't like looking at this one." He went back to his boards, and the rail stayed up. Then the winch crew came up the steps with something heavy wrapped in wet canvas, slung on a pole between two of them, and set it on the middle table with a thud that moved the mugs. Abe knew what it was before anyone said a word. The core of the big one, out of the chest of the thing he'd killed.

Bigger than a basketball, and it sat on the table like an anvil.

"The shed talked it over this morning," said Fenn, to the room.

"It's yours, Dolan. Nobody voted the other way." Any other day of his life, this would have been the best thing that had ever happened to him. Today he felt nothing come. It was the same nothing as the dead man he'd carried to the shed on his shoulders last night, and he was starting to hate that nothing more than he'd ever hated anything.

"Take it home," said Fenn.

"Don't leave it lying about my shed." Purnell rasped down the start of a cheer, because half the shed was asleep on the nets. Abe said thanks to the room and left it by the door with his name chalked on the canvas in Fenn's writing. At two, Fenn sent him up the wall.

"Take the far end. Eastham's been up there since Friday and won't come down." He handed Abe a thermos.

"If he won't eat it, sit with him till he does." The far end of the wall was the old part, where the walkway narrowed and the stone went green below the tide line. One of the three guards was at the last post, leaning on the parapet with a bent pole propped beside him, watching the water like other men watch a fire.

"Tom Dolan's boy," he said, without turning around.

"You stand like him. Knew you off the ladder."

"I've brought soup."

"Fenn sent you." Eastham moved along the parapet enough to make room, which was the invitation. Abe stood next to him. Below them the harbor was finding its old shape again, a strip of sand showing at the near end that hadn't shown all week. Off to the right, a long way down, the carcass lay against the pier like a ship that had given up, with gulls walking on it. Eastham drank the soup straight from the thermos, slowly, and talked between swallows, no hurry in any of it.

"Your dad worked this post nine winters," he said.

"Eight, it would have been. Coldest stand on the wall, and he put in for it every year, and every year the rest of us let him have it and told him he was soft in the head." He pointed with the thermos, not looking where he pointed.

"You can see Salt Row from here. Just there, past the chapel roof. One of those windows was his kitchen." He drank some soup.

"He never told anybody that was why he wanted the post. We all knew anyway." Abe found the window. It took him a while, because he'd never seen his own kitchen from the outside and above, and then he had it, third along, with the drainpipe. The light wasn't on. It was two in the afternoon.

"He used to name the big swells after the people who ran the town," said Eastham.

"There's a wave out there somewhere called Mayor Brock, if it's still going. Ugly great thing that kept coming back after you thought it was done. He'd lean out and greet it."

"He read on watch," Abe said.

"The green book."

"Eleven years, one green book." Eastham nodded at the sea.

"I asked him once, did it end any different the twelfth time through. He said he wasn't reading it, he was arguing with it. Wrote his side in the margins so the book couldn't pretend later that it had won." Abe laughed before he knew he was going to, and it came out loud, up there with nobody to hear it but the gulls. He'd held that book a thousand nights. He knew every margin in it by heart, the small square capitals, the underlinings that went through the paper. It had never once been funny.

It had been a relic, a thing you were careful with. Now it was a man leaning on this parapet, arguing with a paperback and naming waves after councilmen, and Abe was standing in the spot where he'd stood to do it. The laugh ran out and left his eyes stinging. He looked at the water until that stopped. At home there was a photograph of his father on the shelf, in his good shirt, not smiling, because you didn't for photographs. Abe had looked at it so long it had stopped being anyone.

"What else," he said.

"Anything. Whatever you've got." Eastham had plenty, and no hurry about any of it. Tom Dolan whistled through his teeth and it carried in fog, and half the wall could find him by it. Tom Dolan brought two of everything up the ladder, though he'd never say who the second one was for, and it went to whoever had forgotten theirs. It hurt, the good kind, and Abe stood up there taking it in like a man who'd been hungry a long time without noticing. The afternoon wore down toward four.

Eastham never said one word about Saturday, or the harbor, or the boy who'd stood on the carcass, and Abe could have stayed up there all week. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. Near the end of it, the old man tipped the thermos back for the last of the soup and set it down.

"In the autumn," he said, to the water, "after that job down your steps, we hauled a grab bucket of something up out of that stairwell. Three loads of it. Nobody ever said what it was, and nobody wrote a word down about it either. I signed off on that at the time." He put the cap back on the thermos.

"I find I keep thinking about that bucket lately." Abe kept his eyes on the water and held everything exactly where it was.

"Weather's coming Tuesday," said Eastham.

"Nothing big. Rain off the west." He picked his bent pole up and set it against his shoulder, which meant the watch was going on and the visit was over.

"Thank Fenn for the soup." He went down through the low city with the core on his good shoulder, heavy even for him, and he was glad of that. The hall doors stood open for the airing. Inside, Mrs. Amery sat in her folding chair with her paperback out, and while Abe passed she put a docker's wrenched arm back together in about the time it took the man to look away from it, and was reading again before he'd finished saying thank you. It did not do one thing for his sister, and he walked on.

Salt Row was shovels and open doors and the pump going at the low end. Colin was at it in the road with his sleeves up, the crowbar leaned against his own front step where he could see it, and Old Turner supervised from a kitchen chair.

"Left a foot of mud in my hall and bent my gutter," Turner told the street in general.

"The mud I'll grant it. The gutter was spite." Colin leaned on his shovel and looked down the bottom steps, where the waterline was going down the stairwell one wet stripe at a time.

"October," he said.

"Right down there. Something came up those steps in the night, and somebody went down and killed it, and four months I've been asking who."

"You've been boring the whole street with it," said Turner.

"Well, I'm done asking." Colin straightened up and got back to it.

"I've watched the crews work all week. I know what that job was now. Whoever he was, I'd stand him a pint and carry him home after."

"You'll not find him," said Turner.

"He'd have been round for the pint by now if he wanted one."

"No," said Colin, cheerful about it.

"I don't suppose he does." Four months Colin had been asking, and he stopped on the one day Abe was carrying the whole answer up the road past him. Mrs. Bewley was at her gate with a broom. She'd been sweeping the yard where the dog used to bark, and she stopped when Abe came level with her, and looked at him like she looked at a child she was counting. Abe stopped too. He couldn't have said why, except that walking past her wasn't a thing his legs would do.

"June told me you saw my daughter," said Mrs. Bewley.

"At the school gate, on the Thursday. She asked you if you'd got me out. Her mother. And you answered her, and she ran." Abe stood there with the core on his shoulder. His mouth was open. Nothing was in it.

"You told her the truth," said Mrs. Bewley.

"I know you did. She was always going to run." She didn't wait for anything back. She nodded once and went back to her sweeping, and the broom went on down the yard, even and slow, all the way to the wall. Abe went in through the gate she'd swept and up his own stairs, with his throat closed to a knot, and the knot stayed. The building smelled of low tide all the way up, salt and wet plaster, and the stairwell boards gave under his feet in a way stairs shouldn't.

Past Colin's door on the ground floor, standing open on the hole in his living room floor. Past the Bewleys' dark one on the second-floor landing. The flat wasn't locked. The seaward windows had gone on Thursday, all three of them, and the weather had been coming in ever since. The kitchen floor had swollen up in ridges. There was sand in the sink, actual sand, and everything soft in the room had drunk four days of salt rain. Home was over.

It had been over since Thursday, and everyone but him had already worked that out. He filled a bag with the things Peg had asked for. Then he took the photograph of his father off the shelf under the broken window, wiped it dry on his shirt, and laid it in on top, face up. June's list was still on the wall by that window, and four days of weather had gone through it. The ink had run down the paper in long gray threads.

You could still read both columns if you already knew what they said, and he knew what they said: two million on the left, in his sister's handwriting, and on the right the number that never moved fast enough. The wrapped core sat by his foot. The sum should have been running before he got the paper flat. He had run it on a wet road at two in the morning with his hands still shaking, and over a workbench, and in front of a buyer who was counting bills out onto a cloth.

He stood in the wrecked kitchen with the list in his hand and waited for it to start. It didn't start. He folded the list into his shirt pocket, put the calendar in the bag last, fat with damp and still showing February, and picked the core back up. He came down and out the gate, and carried the bag and the core up the hill to the school. The school kitchens at seven o'clock were empty but for them.

Peg had the small stove at the end lit, the one the kitchen women used for their own tea, and three cots stood down the far wall by the dry-goods shelves, made up neat. June's notebook was open on the work table, in the middle of it, next to an enormous jar of salt, like a thing that had always lived there. Abe hung the calendar on a nail by the door, February showing, and stood the photograph of his father on the shelf over the little stove. Peg watched him do both, and pointed at a chair.

"Sit down. I'm going to say what happened Thursday, once, and then we're eating." Abe sat. June came in and sat too, quietly, with her hands in her lap.

"I signed out of the school at half past seven and walked down for the pair of you. I got as far as the stones." Peg turned around with the spoon in her hand.

"You know that part."

"You don't have to-" said June.

"I know every step between this school and that door," Peg said, over the top of her.

"Thirty years of them. I have never in my life been lost, anywhere, and there isn't a street in this city I could take by accident. And I took the ones that went the long way." She stopped, and wiped the table where it didn't need wiping.

"Because if I'd come down and asked-" She stopped again. Then she said it plainer.

"Somebody would have known. Somebody down there would have looked at me and said, I'm sorry, Peg. And then that's what it is, and I don't get to have it any other way ever again. So I didn't ask. Everybody at that hall thinks I stayed because there were six hundred people in it who needed streets found for them, and I let them think it, but I sat at that table all night because it was the one place in Calder where nobody was going to tell me." The pan ticked on the stove.

"And you knew," said Peg, to June, not kindly.

"Four months you knew how he does it. This city got told a story about my boy, and I believed the story like a stranger would, and you watched me believe it, every night, at this table. Don't tell me it wasn't yours to tell. I've heard it. I don't care tonight." June looked at her notebook and let it stand. It wasn't fair, and everyone in that kitchen knew it wasn't fair, and it stood.

"And you." Peg pointed the spoon at Abe.

"Punching the sea. My sister's boy, stood on a monster, punching the sea." She put his plate down in front of him, and her hand came down flat and warm on the top of his head, once, like settling a lid on a pot.

"You're both here. That's all I wanted out of this week. Eat." Abe picked up his fork. He put it down again. Then it came, all of it, at his aunt's table with his head down on his arms. Ada, who he'd started to answer with the word no, who heard the no and ran. The man behind his own front door, with his slippers set together, toes to the wall. Dobbs at the bench with his two-inch pencil, saying you've got it, writing Abe's Sunday into the week, and the tag on the rail that was never crossing over.

Every breath he'd put away since Thursday came back out of wherever he'd kept them, one after another, loud, in a kitchen that smelled of dinner, and he couldn't have stopped it partway if he'd tried. June got out of her chair and hung onto his arm with both of hers and cried with him, quieter. Peg stood behind him with her hand on the back of his neck and kept it there, the whole time, without one word. After a while the crying wore itself out on its own. The kitchen came back, one ordinary sound at a time.

The pan. The tap. A gull on the roof. Peg took his plate away without a word and put it back hot, and this time he ate it, all of it, with his eyes swollen and his breath still catching, and it was the best food he'd ever had in his life. Then June sat back down and told them about the hall.

"Mrs. Garside and the man off the fish stall had a war over blankets. Three days. She kept a list of who had two, an actual list, she showed me. And last night he comes over with one folded up like a present, and she looks at it and says, that's my blanket, that's the one I came in with. And he says, well, it's had adventures. And now they're friends for life and she's invited him for his tea." The three of them laughed themselves stupid about it, wet-eyed, the kind of laughing that's half the other thing.

After, June pulled her notebook over and wrote in it, tongue between her teeth. Abe dug his own out of his school bag, where it had sat for two weeks, and found his place in it, and the two of them worked at the one table under the one light while Peg did nothing at all with her eyes shut, which for Peg was a kind of holiday. Out past the roofs below them, the water was going down street by street in the dark, giving the low city back.

"Same again tomorrow," said Peg, with her eyes still shut.

"All of it. The whole boring lot."

"Good," said June, and wrote.