Under the Eaves

It had rained on Skerry Harbor since noon, and under the metal roof of the shed it sounded like a truckload of gravel being tipped out slowly. Nobody had tried to talk across the floor all afternoon. Rémy had given his orders by pointing.

Nell was on the cradle of hull 212 with a clamp in each hand. The starboard side was plated now from the chine to the sheer, forty-six feet of bright skin, and a person could no longer look through her to the water. Behind her the second wheelhouse module stood tacked on her father’s jig, with her soapstone numbers on every seam.

At the end bench there were two grinders going.

Pauline Gott had driven to Rockland that morning to watch her granddaughter win something at a science fair. Rémy had taken her bench himself rather than fall behind on the tabs. He had stood beside Win since seven o’clock. For the first hour he had looked over every time the yellow grinder changed pitch. After that he had stopped looking.

At half past three he shut his own grinder off and held up one hand. The router wound down. The rain was louder without it.

“That’s it,” Rémy shouted. “Go home. Jesse, broom.”

Nell racked her clamps and came down. She was wiping her hands when her brother walked into the office and came out again with a mug in each fist.

He set one of them down on the bench at Win’s elbow. He did not say anything about it. He drank from the other and looked into Win’s bin.

Win had pushed up his face shield. He looked at the mug and then at Rémy. Nell saw him understand that it would be a mistake to make anything of it.

“Thank you,” he said, and picked it up.

“It’s black. I didn’t ask.”

“Black is right.”

“Three hundred and twenty-two,” Rémy said, nodding at the bin. “I counted. You’d have counted mine.”

“Four hundred and ten.”

“Four hundred and twelve. You missed two while you were on the phone.” He drank again. “You stand right now. It only took you two months.”

“Pauline would say three.”

“Pauline’s not here.” Rémy tipped the rest of his coffee down his throat. His eyes went to Nell, who had not been quick enough about looking busy, and he scowled at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t say a word.”

“Keep it that way.”

He took both empty bins to the rack. Her father had seen it too, through the office window. He lifted his cane an inch off the floor in her direction and set it down again. For Leon that was a round of applause.

She did her walk through the new module with the drop light. When she climbed out, the shed was empty except for Bilge and Win, who was sweeping aluminium dust off the bench into his palm. Nobody had told him to.

“Dad’s got Rémy’s chowder over at the house,” she said. “I’ve got eggs and half a loaf. You can choose.”

“Eggs.”

“You didn’t think about it very long.”

“I thought about it at about two o’clock,” Win said.
***
The rain was louder still in the apartment. The roof came down low on the harbor side, a foot above the windows, and each drop could be heard separately on the metal. She had slept under that sound for five years and liked it. She lit the lamp over the stove and the small one on her drafting board, and left the rest of the room dim.

He cracked the eggs. He did it one-handed now, which he had learned from her father on a Sunday morning in April and practised since without telling anyone. She cut the bread. They ate at the small table, and their knees touched under it, and neither of them moved away.

He was quiet. He had been quiet for three weeks. He had made a speech of four sentences on a platform and had the whole seawall shouting her name, and since then he had been gentle with her, and attentive, and somewhere else. Twice today he had walked out into the rain with his telephone.

She knew what it was. She had known since a kettle shrieked in her father’s kitchen. Tell her. He had something to say and he had signed a sheet of vellum that gave him no room to say it. She had told herself she could wait for him to get there alone.

She had waited three weeks. It occurred to her, over the eggs, that she could at least show him the ground was sound.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“The morning after the rain, in Portland. I got up before you and looked at the vellum.” She turned her fork over on the plate. “I looked at term one. I worked out there were ten months left. I counted them on my fingers, standing there in your shirt.”

He had put down his bread.

“I counted again the Sunday after, and it was still ten. And somewhere in April I stopped. I couldn’t tell you tonight how many it is without stopping to work it out, and I don’t want to work it out.” She made herself look up. “I’m not asking you to do anything about that. I’m not ruling anything through. I only thought you ought to know I’d stopped counting.”

The rain filled the room.

He was looking at her, and his face was not hard to read. There was so much gladness in it that her own chest hurt. There was something else under the gladness, and it looked like a man being handed a thing he had no right to take.

“Nell,” he said.

She waited.

He got up. He came around the little table and bent, and took her face in his hands, and kissed her. It was a long kiss and there was nothing careful about it. She thought he would say something when it ended.

He rested his forehead against hers and said nothing at all.

She noticed that he had not answered. She was Leon Thibodeau’s daughter, and she noticed. She also had his hands on her face, and his breath was unsteady, and she decided that a man could answer some things without a sentence. He would find the sentence. She had not been quick with hers either.

“All right,” she said softly. “That’ll do for tonight.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have—”

“I said it’ll do.” She put her hands over his. “I’ve got something to ask you now, and this one wants a word back.”

“Ask.”

“Will you come to bed? It’s my bed, through there. I warn you it’s narrow, and the roof’s low on one side.”

“Yes,” Win said. Then, as if once had not covered it, “Yes. Please.”

The half room held the bed, a shelf and a hook for her coveralls. The bed was a three-quarter she had built into the slope of the roof when she moved home, and she had built it for one small woman who slept on her side. He ducked through the door behind her and straightened up, and his head met the rafter with a sound like a mallet on a plank.

“Oh, no. Win.”

“It’s nothing.” He had one hand clapped to his scalp. “I measured it with my eyes and I was wrong by an inch.”

“Let me see.”

“There’s no blood. I’d know.”

She was laughing. She could not help it. She sat him down on the edge of the mattress, where the roof was highest, and parted his hair with her fingers to look. There was a red place already rising. She kissed it.

“You’ll stay sitting down,” she said. “Everything tall in this room is my job.”

“That seems fair.”

“And tonight I’m going first. You went first in Portland. You were very thorough about it. Tonight you keep your hands where I put them until I say.”

His eyes had gone dark behind the glasses. “Yes.”

“You like saying that.”

“I like being asked.”

She took his glasses and set them on the shelf. She pulled his shirt off over his head and put his hands flat on the quilt on either side of him, and he left them there. She took her time. There was aluminium dust in the hollow of his collarbone, where the face shield never reached, and she found it with her mouth. She ran her palms down his chest and over his stomach and felt the muscles jump. He breathed in hard through his nose. His hands closed on the quilt and stayed where they were.

She undressed standing in front of him, with the lamp from the other room behind her. She did not hurry that either. She had never in her life stood still to be looked at. He looked at her from the top down, and when he got back to her face his own was stripped quite bare.

“May I?” he said hoarsely.

“Not yet.”

“Nell.”

“Lie back.”

He lay back, and his feet went off the end of the mattress, and his left shoulder went off the side. He tried to shift toward the wall and the slope of the roof would not let him. He lay there with one arm hanging in space, six feet and more of him on a bed made for five foot three, and started to laugh.

“Who built this?”

“I did.”

“To what drawing?”

“Mine. Nobody’s complained before.”

“Has anybody had the opportunity?”

“No,” she said. “You’re the first one I’ve let up the stairs.”

He stopped laughing. She knelt over him on the narrow mattress, with her knees tight against his hips because there was nowhere else to put them, and took his wrists and set his hands on her thighs.

“Now,” she said.

His hands moved up over her hips and her waist, slowly, and closed over her breasts. She shut her eyes. She had spent three months being careful on other people’s floors, in his shed and his house and his grandmother’s sewing room. This was her own roof. The rain was beating on it a foot above his head, and she could be as loud as she liked.

She set the pace, and he let her. She took him into her when she was ready and not before, and sank down, and heard the breath go out of him. She moved as she wanted to. He watched her face and matched her, and when his hands tightened on her hips she said, “Wait,” and he waited, shaking, with his jaw clenched and his eyes on hers. She had not known that being obeyed like that could feel so much like being held.

“You can ask me for something,” she said. She could hardly speak. “You’re allowed.”

“Come down here. I want your mouth.”

She bent to him. He kissed her and wrapped both arms around her back, and she said, “Now, Win, go on,” and felt him let go of all that waiting at once. It took her with it. She cried out against his neck and did not care who heard on the whole empty waterfront.

Afterwards they nearly fell out. She slid to the wall side and he turned to make room, and the edge of the mattress simply ended under him. She caught him by the arm, and they lay clutching each other and laughing like a pair of children in a hammock.

“There’s a procedure,” she said, when she could. “You go on your side. I go against you. Nobody breathes out at the same time.”

“I’ll draw a diagram.”

“I’d sign it.”

They fitted, in the end. He lay on his side with his back to the open room and she lay tucked along the front of him under the slope, with her head on his arm. The rain had settled to a steady drumming. His heart was slowing against her shoulder blade.

His left hand lay on the quilt in front of her. She took it and turned it to the light from the door.

The bronze had changed since January. It had lost its lathe polish and gone a deeper colour, and there was a small flat on one side where it had met a grinder housing. She ran her fingertip around it. She had turned that ring out of her grandfather’s bar and charged him eleven dollars for it, so that it could not mean anything.

“It’s scratched,” she said.

“I’ve been working.”

“It suits you better scratched.”

He closed his fingers around hers. She felt him kiss the back of her head.

It was in her mouth then. It was three words long, and she had the first of them shaped. She had never said it to a man. She thought of saying it now, in the half dark, to his scarred ring and not his face, and she thought how he would go still behind her.

Then she thought of the sheet of vellum in its tube, a hundred miles south, with one line ruled through and six standing. She thought of a kettle, and her father’s two words. Win had something to tell her. She was nearly sure she knew what it was. She found that she wanted very much to hear it before she said her own. She did not want him to say it back because she had left him nowhere else to go.

She kept it. She pressed her mouth to his knuckles and let that stand for it.

“What?” he murmured.

“Nothing. Go to sleep. Mind the rafter in the morning.”
***
She woke because she was cold.

The rain had eased. There was only a tick and a drip from the eaves now, and the long breathing of the tide under the launch-way. The quilt was tucked in close behind her shoulders. The place where he had been was barely warm.

The clock on the shelf said six minutes past three.

There was a light in the other room. She got up, pulled the quilt around her and went to the door.

He was sitting at her drafting board, under the harbor window. He had turned the lamp down on its arm until it lit a circle the size of a dinner plate. He had his shirt on, unbuttoned, and his glasses, and one of her pencils in his hand. There was a sheet from his pad in the circle of light. She could see from where she stood that it had a column of figures on it. It was a short column, six or seven lines, with a rule under it.

He was not writing. He was looking at the rule.

“Win.”

His hand came down and turned the sheet over. He did it quickly and quietly, before he had even lifted his head. Then he looked round. The lamp was under his face and she could not see his eyes behind the glasses.

“I woke you. I’m sorry.”

“The bed woke me. It’s too wide without you, and I never thought I’d say that.” She came a step into the room. “What is it?”

He did not answer straight away.

“It’s the vote,” he said.

“At three in the morning.”

“It’s forty-one days off. Toby says the yard’s about half. There are eight hundred and forty on the Lines I’ve hardly spoken to, and my uncle knows their children’s names. I can’t make it come out, Nell. I lie there and run it, and it won’t.”

Every piece of that was reasonable. She had seen him at the foot of a platform in March, grey, with a cable being wound up behind him. Since then he had learned how thirteen men took their coffee, and he could not put any of that in a column.

She looked at the back of the sheet, white under the lamp, and at his hand lying flat on top of it.

“I wrote something down in January,” she said. “It’s the one I underlined. It doesn’t have hours on it. It covers three in the morning too.”

“I know.”

“If there’s a thing you don’t want to tell me yet, you say that. You don’t turn it face down.”

“I know,” he said again. His voice was very low.

She waited. She gave him as long as she would have given her father for a word. He sat with his hand on the paper and did not turn it back.

It was the vote, then. It was the vote, and under the vote it was the other thing, the one he had no leave to say, and he was sitting up with both of them. She could hardly be hard on a man for keeping his fears off her table when she had kept three words behind her teeth four hours ago.

“Are you frightened of June?”

“Yes.”

That had come at once, and it was true. She could hear that it was true.

“Then say that next time. You’re allowed to be frightened. I was frightened for eleven hours over a panel.” She crossed the cold floor and kissed the top of his head, on the sore place. He flinched and then leaned into her. “Come back when you’ve finished adding. Come in feet first.”

“I won’t be long.”

She went back and lay down against the wall. Through the door she saw the lamp go out.

He did not come. She lay and watched for him, drowsily. Her eyes got used to the dark, and she made out his shape at the board against the grey of the window. He had not moved from the stool. He was not facing the harbor. His head was turned toward the door of the half room, toward her, and he sat perfectly still. He looked like a man watching something that might go off.

June, she thought. Poor man. She pulled the quilt up and went to sleep.
***