All Hands

The letter had gone to every house on Wednesday. It was on cream paper, and it began Dear fellow owner.

Win had read his own copy at the kitchen table on the Western Promenade and found nothing in it to correct. Prescott had set out the Meridian Brandt offer in four short paragraphs that a tired man could follow after a shift. The employee stock plan held twenty per cent of Lathrop & Sons. At one point two billion dollars, that share was worth two hundred and forty million. Divided among eleven hundred and fifty members, it came on average to about two hundred and eight thousand dollars each, more for long service and less for short. Every member would vote by secret ballot before the eighteenth of June. I have worked beside many of you for thirty years, the last paragraph said, and I would not ask you to weigh this if I did not think you had earned the right.

It was signed Prescott, in ink. He must have signed eleven hundred and fifty of them.

At twenty-five past two on Friday afternoon, Win stood on a staging platform under the port bow of the Petrel and watched three hundred and ten people come into the assembly shed. It was the overlap between the day shift and the night shift, and Toby had stopped the floor for it. The engineers came across from the office building in their shirtsleeves and stood together near the door. The welders and fitters stood where they worked. He could see the cream paper in a good many back pockets.

The big screen from the boardroom stood behind him. Aggie sat at a folding table beside it with his laptop.

“You haven’t eaten,” she said, without looking up.

“I had a sandwich.”

“You had half a sandwich at eleven. I threw the other half away myself.”

“I’m fine, Aggie.”

“You’re clipped already and you haven’t started.”

He had twenty-two slides. He had built them himself, between ten and two for three nights running, at the kitchen table after Nell’s lamp went out upstairs. Every figure on them had been checked twice. He had not carried a column wrong.

He had not shown them to her. She had asked on Tuesday what he meant to say. He had told her it would be the backlog and the margins, and she had said, “That’s your half,” and gone up to her wheelhouse drawings. He had taken it for agreement.

She was standing at the foot of the starboard staging now with Walt Brackett and Danny Arsenault. Normally she would have been in Skerry Harbor by this time on a Friday. She had stayed for Vera Nadeau, who had put her dye on the twenty-second frame the afternoon before and handed down the last pink slip. All of them were in. All of them were clean. He meant to say so on slide four.

He also meant to remember that tomorrow was the twentieth of March. He had been lawfully married for forty-nine days and would be for fifty by morning. The condition in his grandmother’s trust would be met on its date, and nobody in this building but the two of them knew what that had taken.

At half past two Toby walked to the front and raised one hand, and the shed went quiet.

“Mr. Lathrop wants a word about the letter,” he said, and stepped back.

Win took the microphone.

“Thank you for stopping work. I’ll take about twenty-five minutes.” His voice went out over their heads and came back off the far wall. “You’ve all had the chairman’s letter. Everything in it is accurate. I want to show you the other side of the ledger, so that you have both in front of you when you vote. Aggie, the first slide, please.”

The screen lit. Lathrop Shipbuilding: Firm Backlog, March 2027.

“The yard has three vessels under contract for Nantucket Shoals Marine Services, at eighteen million dollars each. That’s fifty-four million dollars of firm work. Hull 1 is in front of you. Hull 2 starts on the first of May, and hull 3 in September.”

He went to the second slide, and the third. The third was margins. He had thought hard about the third, and had decided that they were owners and were entitled to the true figure. Hull 1 would lose money, because of the rework. Hulls 2 and 3 were forecast to earn seven per cent, because of what had been learned on hull 1. He said so. He showed them the hours per frame in December and the hours per frame in March, side by side, in two columns.

Nobody looked at the columns. He could see that from the platform. They were looking at him, or at their boots, or at the man next to them. A fitter near the plasma table had taken the cream letter out and was reading it again.

“Slide four. As of yesterday afternoon, all twenty-two replacement frames in the wet deck have been accepted by the class surveyor. There were thirty-one cracks in December. There are none today. The worst panel on the hull measured fourteen millimetres out of flat, and it now measures four.”

That ought to have landed. It was their work. He waited for some sign that it had. A few of the night shift glanced at Gus Theriault, and Gus looked at the floor.

He understood, a slide later, what he had done. He had told them their own news as if he were the one bringing it. They had known the four for three weeks, and Gus had read it off the gauge himself.

“Slide five. Schedule to delivery.”

He was partway into slide six, which was the cost of the yard to the Lines over nine years and how that curve bent after hull 3, when Toby Keegan took a step forward.

He did not raise his hand. He did not raise his voice either. He had been standing at the front with his arms folded and his white hard hat pushed back, and now he unfolded them.

“Mr. Lathrop.”

Win stopped. “Toby.”

“I don’t mean to cut across you. I’ve got a question, and I think I’m asking it for a few people.” The superintendent’s red face was tired. It was not angry. Win would have found anger easier. “That’s a lot of numbers. I expect they’re right. Yours generally are. But the last time you had something to tell this yard, you sent an email. I stood in the canteen with sixty fellas for fifteen minutes waiting on you. I’ve still got most of their numbers in my phone. Tierney’s driving a fuel truck in Scarborough. Paul Ouellette went to Bath and he’s two hours a day in his car.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So you’ll understand, there’s some of us looking at your screen there and thinking it’s a longer email. That’s all. Go ahead.”

He stepped back into his place.

The shed was entirely silent. Three hundred and ten people waited to see what Win would do with it.

He knew what was true. He had told it to one person, thirteen days ago, standing at a sink. I couldn’t get out of the car. It was in his mouth. He looked down at Toby, and past Toby at the faces, row behind row. Each of them had a hire date and a rate that he could have recited. His hand had begun to sweat on the microphone, and his chest had gone tight, as it had in the lot.

“That’s a fair thing to say,” he heard himself answer. “The decision in June of 2025 was correct on the figures. The way I communicated it was not. I’ve acknowledged that.”

He had not acknowledged it. He had never said one word about it to any of them. The sentence came out of him in the voice of a quarterly report, and he watched it fall on the concrete between himself and the front row.

Somebody at the back said, clearly, into the quiet, “Did your wife write the slides?”

The laugh went through the shed like wind through a field. It was not a cruel laugh. It was the laugh of people who had been waiting for one, and it lasted a long time.

He did not look toward the starboard staging. He was not going to make her the place his eyes went.

“No,” he said, when it had died down. “I wrote them. She’d have made them shorter.” It was true, and it got nothing at all, because they had finished laughing. “Slide seven.”

He went on. He did not know another thing to do. He had twenty-two slides, and stopping at six would have been leaving the room again, with the difference that this time they could watch him go.

Slide nine was the comparison with the Louisiana yard. Slide eleven was page forty-one of the offer, the paragraph about consolidating shipbuilding, with the three lines highlighted. He told them what it meant. He told them there was nowhere on the continent for the work to be consolidated into, and that within twelve months of a sale this shed would be shut. They knew that too. He saw it in the engineers by the door. They had read page forty-one for themselves and done a different sum from his: a yard that might close anyway, against a cheque that would certainly clear.

Slide fourteen was the one he had built the whole deck to reach.

“The owner holds an option for four further vessels at nineteen million dollars each. That is seventy-six million dollars. With the three firm boats, it’s a hundred and thirty million dollars of work and about five years of full employment in this shed. The option is conditional on one thing, which is that hull 1 delivers on time, on the thirtieth of June. That’s a hundred and three days from today. I believe it can be done. A month ago I didn’t.”

At half past three the shift horn went.

It went in the middle of slide nineteen. The day shift had been standing for an hour on a Friday afternoon, and the horn was the horn. Some of them looked at Toby, and Toby looked straight ahead, which was neither a yes nor a no. A few men at the back picked up their lunch pails. More followed. Nobody hurried and nobody made a show of it. They simply went, in twos and threes, out through the small door into the grey daylight. The engineers went with them.

Win read slide nineteen to their backs. He read twenty and twenty-one to the night shift, who had nowhere to go, and to Toby, who stayed. Slide twenty-two said Questions.

“I’ll take any questions,” he said.

For a long moment nobody spoke.

“Is the two hundred and eight before tax?” someone asked.

It was a young pipefitter on the night crew. He was not being insolent. He wanted to know.

“Before,” Win said. “For most of you it would be taxed as a long-term gain. The plan administrator can give you your own figure.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

There were no others. Toby nodded to him once, civilly, and went to start the night shift. The grinders came on, one after another, along the port side.

Aggie closed the laptop. She unplugged the cable and wound it around her hand, and she did not say anything about sandwiches.

“I’ll take the screen back with the van,” she said. “You should go home, Win.”

“In a while.”

She patted his sleeve, twice, which she had not done since he was about twelve, and went to find the driver.

He stayed on the platform. He took off his glasses and found that there was nothing to clean them on but his tie.

“Come down from there,” Nell said.

She was at the foot of the steps in her coveralls, with her hard hat under her arm and her truck keys in her hand. He came down. She walked him away from the noise, around the stern of the Petrel to the far side, where the staging made a kind of alcove against the wall and there was nobody working.

“You’ll be late on the road,” he said.

“I’ll be late on the road.” She set her hard hat on a plank. “Do you want it now or do you want it Sunday night?”

“Is it term seven?”

“It’s term seven.”

“Then now.”

She looked up at him. There was no pity in her face, and he was grateful for that. It was the look she gave a bracket.

“Every number you put up was right. I checked the ones I could. The schedule’s right, the option’s right, and you were straight with them about losing money on this boat. I’d guess nobody’s ever shown them a margin before. And none of it mattered, Win. You could have stopped at slide one.”

“A hundred and thirty million dollars of work mattered to no one.”

“They know about the work. They’re the work.” She jerked her head at the hull beside them. “Walt cut out frame fifteen and put it back, and Vera passed it first time. He knows there’s a boat after this one if they get her out the door. He doesn’t need a slide for that. He needs something else, and so does Toby, and so did that boy who asked you about tax.”

“What?”

“You stood up there for an hour and told them the yard was worth keeping. You never once said they were.” She said it quietly. “They don’t need your numbers. They need to know you’d miss them. If this shed went dark, would you care that it was Walt who wasn’t in it, and Danny, and Gus? Or would you just have three hundred and ten fewer lines on a page? Prescott signed every one of those letters by hand. He knows about people’s knees. He’s offering them two hundred thousand dollars, and he’s offering it like a man who’d be sorry to see them go. You offered them five years’ work like a man reading out a timetable.”

It was accurate. He ran it for an error and could not find one.

“And when Toby stood up,” she said.

“I know.”

“You had it. I watched you have it. You had the true thing right there and you gave him ‘the way I communicated it.’”

“I couldn’t—” He stopped. The grinders screamed on the other side of the hull. “It was the car again. I looked at them and it was the car.”

“I thought it might be.”

He put his glasses back on. His hands were not quite steady, and he let her see that, since she was going to see it anyway.

“I would miss them,” he said. “I’ve only found that out since January. I know Toby drives five hours for a hockey game. I know Gus took his crew for coffee and let me pay. I stood at a bench with Pauline Gott for eight hours and I’d know her hands anywhere now. I’d have told you a year ago that it made no difference who did the work as long as it was done. I was wrong about that. I don’t know how to stand on a platform and say it, Nell. I don’t know how to say that at all. I open my mouth and a figure comes out.”

She did not answer at once. Then her face changed. It was not a smile, but it had some warmth in it.

“That’s the first thing you’ve said all day that they’d have believed.”

“That I don’t know how to say it?”

“Yes. That. In exactly that voice.” She folded her arms. “If you’d turned off the screen and said that to Toby, you’d have had half the room. You wouldn’t have had all of it. Two hundred thousand dollars is a house. But you’d have had half.”

“Then teach me.”

“I can’t.”

“You did it at the Cumberland Club. A fact a second before every handshake.”

“That was a card Aggie wrote out. It got you through one dinner. This isn’t a card.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how I do it, Win. I grew up in a shed with nine people and a father who talked to everybody. Nobody taught me. I couldn’t write you a sequence diagram for it if I tried all night. I can only tell you when you get it wrong.”

“Every time?”

“If you want it every time.”

“I do. I want it the same day, and I’d rather you didn’t soften it.”

“When have I softened anything?”

“You haven’t. It’s one of the things I—” He caught the rest of the sentence and set it down carefully. They were on the vellum still. She had been clear, and he had said he understood. “It’s something I rely on.”

Her eyes stayed on his a moment longer than the words needed. Then she picked up her hard hat.

“I’ve got to go. Rémy’s welding out the forward face of the first module tomorrow, and I want to be standing there when he starts.” She hesitated. “Are you coming up?”

“Not this weekend. I think I should be here.” He had not known it until he said it. “The night shift works Saturdays now.”

She studied him.

“Don’t take slides.”

“I won’t take anything.”

“Take coffee. Thirteen cups. You know how Gus has his?”

“No.”

“Then that’s your first question.” She put the hat on and tucked the end of her braid down her collar. She said the next thing more gently than she had said any of the rest. “It was bad today. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t. But you finished it. You didn’t walk off.”

“That was only stubbornness.”

“I know what it was. I’ve got some.”

She went. He watched her cross the shed toward the small door, a short, quick figure in coveralls. Walt Brackett lifted two fingers to her as she passed, and Danny called something that made her laugh over her shoulder. The door let in its slab of daylight and shut again.

Win stood where he was. Tomorrow the date would pass, and Dorothea Quimby would be able to stand up in June and certify him truthfully. He would have the forty per cent, which was the smaller part of what he needed. The rest belonged to the people who had just walked out on slide nineteen.

He went back around the stern. The notice he had signed on the first of February was still on the board by the door, with Congratulations?? under it in pencil. Somebody had added a third question mark since. He read it and left it there.

Gus Theriault was at the port staging with a clipboard, sending his men up. He saw Win coming and straightened, warily, as a man does when the office walks toward him.

Win had no card in his pocket and no figure that would help.

“Gus,” he said. “How do you take your coffee?”
***