Dusk

The lilacs beside the house had come out on Tuesday, and by Friday the whole yard smelled of them whenever the wind dropped. Faye had hung a flag on every pole from the church to the store for Monday’s parade. The first summer people had arrived at the cottages on the point, and one of them had already asked at the store whether the boatyard was always so loud.

It was loud. Nell had the big doors rolled back and the port side of hull 212 half plated, and she was not going back to Portland on Monday.

She had two weeks. The Petrel belonged to the electricians and the engine builder’s men now, and to a joiner who was fitting twenty-four seats for turbine technicians. None of that was her trade. Vera Nadeau had closed her book on the structure after the trials. Toby Keegan had stood on the fitting-out pier the Friday before and told her to go home.

“If she cracks, I’ll call you,” he had said. “She won’t. Go build your own boat, Thibodeau. You’re back here on the tenth, because you’re riding her to New Bedford with me.”

She had asked Win on Tuesday whether two weeks away would trouble the clause. He had said the ninety days were proved on the twentieth of March, and that half his tug captains were gone from their households longer than that. He had said she should be at the yard. He had agreed almost before she finished asking, and she had been too pleased to wonder at it.

“Up an inch,” she called. “Hold her there.”

Rémy took up on the chain fall. The plate rose an inch along the frames, a sheet of three-sixteenths aluminium eleven feet long, and Jesse leaned on it with both hands while she drove a wedge. It was the third sheet of five on this side. She tacked it at the middle frame first and worked toward both ends, a tack forward and a tack aft in turn, so that the plate lay down onto the ribs without a ripple.

Rémy had barely spoken all week. He had been like that since he turned up on the pier in South Portland, unshaven, the day of the trials. He worked beside her as well as he ever had. He simply did not argue, and from Rémy that was like a grinder running with no disc in it.

“Is it the girl in Lincolnville?” she asked him, when Jesse had gone for more wedges.

“What girl?”

“The one nobody knows about. You’ve had a face on you for nine days.”

“There’s no girl. Tack your plate.”

“Did she throw you over?”

“Nell.” He looked at her across the chain fall, and for a second she thought he was going to say something else altogether. Then he looked away at the harbor. “She didn’t throw me over. Her name’s Carrie. Leave it.”

She left it. She was in too good a mood to pick at him.

The second wheelhouse module had gone south on the flatbed on Tuesday, and the wire had come the same afternoon. On Wednesday she had driven to the bank in Rockland and opened a second account, and she had moved two hundred and eight thousand dollars into it. The teller had asked what to call it. She had said, “The note,” and the teller had typed that. It was eight months of payments, sitting where she could not spend it by accident. She had come home and shown her father the slip, and he had put it in his wallet.

Win was due at five.

At five she had the third sheet tacked from end to end. At six she sent the crew home for the long weekend and swept the cradle. At half past six she went across to the house, where Rémy had a pot of beans on and her father was reading the tide table. She set a fourth place. At seven they ate without him.

“He’d have rung,” she said, to nobody.

Leon turned a page.

The Volvo came down the hill at twenty to eight. She went out onto the step. The light had gone long and gold, and the lobster boats had all swung to face the incoming tide.

He got out slowly. He was in his grey suit, and he had not brought the canvas coat. She saw his feet and almost laughed. For the first time since a January morning in the shed door, Win Lathrop had come to Skerry Harbor in his office shoes.

“You forgot your boots.”

He looked down at them as if they belonged to someone else. “I came straight from Middle Street. I didn’t go home.”

“What’s on Middle Street?”

“A lawyer. Before that I was at the bank, at two. It took longer than I’d allowed. I’m sorry, Nell. I should have rung you from the road.”

“You should have. There’s beans.”

He kissed her. It was a careful kiss, and his mouth was cold, though the evening was mild. He held on to her arm afterwards for a moment, above the elbow, with all his fingers.

She had seen him grey at the foot of a platform. She had seen him ill over an envelope and sleepless at her drafting board. This was different. All the quickness had gone out of him. He stood in the yard like a man who had put something heavy down and did not yet know what to do with his hands.

“Is it the vote?” she asked.

“It’s June,” Win said. “All of it.”

Rémy had come to the kitchen door behind her. He leaned in the frame with a dish towel over his shoulder and looked at the grey suit.

“Two weeks today, Portland,” he said.

“I know the date.”

“I thought you might.”

“He’s got it on his office wall,” Nell said. “So has Toby. New Bedford, the eleventh. Let the man in, he hasn’t eaten.”

Rémy moved out of the doorway. He took his time about it.

Win ate about a third of what she put in front of him. He asked about the plating and listened to the answer. He asked Leon how the garden was, which he had learned to do in April, and Leon said, “Peas,” and held his hand eight inches above the table. It was an ordinary supper. She kept telling herself so.

Her father did not get the board down afterwards. He sat with his tea and watched Win across the table, steadily, and Win knew he was being watched and kept his eyes on his plate.

“Late,” Leon said at last.

“Yes, sir. I had some business to finish. It’s finished now.”

Leon considered that. He looked at his daughter, and then at his son, who was scrubbing a pot that was already clean. He picked up his cane and went through to the front room without saying good night.

“What’s the matter with everybody in this house?” Nell said.

Nobody told her.

“Fine. Win, come down to the water with me. There’s twenty minutes of light and I want to show you the port side.”

They went out through the shed. Bilge got up from the cold stove and followed them as far as the big doors and lay down there. The shed was dim, and 212 stood in it with her new plate holding what was left of the daylight. Win stopped at her bow. He put his palm flat on the third sheet, where it turned in toward the stem.

“This went on today.”

“This afternoon. You can’t see the tacks from here. That’s on purpose.”

“Two more, and she’s closed in.”

“Tuesday, if Jesse keeps his end up.” She watched him. He was looking at the boat the way he had looked at her father on the launch-way the day of the four words. “You’ve gone quiet on me, Win. You’ve been quiet for a month, but this is something else.”

“I know. I’m sorry for it.”

“I didn’t ask you to be sorry.”

She took his hand and walked him out onto the launch-way.

The concrete ran down to the tide in a long slope, still warm underfoot from the day. The sun had gone behind the hill, and the harbor was pale and perfectly flat. Out at the ledges a bell buoy clanked once and was still. She stopped where her father always stood, a few yards down, and turned Win around so that they both faced back up the ways. The bow of 212 stood over them in the open doors, high and blunt.

“That’s where you look at a boat from,” she said. “Dad taught me. You stand where the water is and you look at what’s coming.”

“She’s very fine from here.”

“She is. I’ve got something to say to you, and I’m going to say it standing here, because it’s the same kind of thing.”

His hand tightened on hers.

She had planned it while she was tacking plate. She had decided that he had been given three weeks since the eggs, and before that a month since the kettle, and that a man who asked leave for everything might wait out the whole year for leave she had never given. She was the one who had written the page. She could at least say what she wanted done with it.

“I told you I’d stopped counting the months. I said I wasn’t asking you for anything. I’m asking now.” Her voice was steady. She was glad of that. “I don’t want to file in January. I don’t want a quiet divorce, or any other kind. I want term one struck, the same as I struck two, if you want it too. It takes both our initials. I’ll still owe you the money, and I’ll still pay it on the first of every month, and I’ll hand it to you across a kitchen table. I’ve thought about that part. I can do it. So that’s my question, Win, in plain words. Do you want it struck?”

For a moment he did not move at all.

Then he pulled her against him. It was nothing like the careful kiss in the yard. He had one arm across her back and the other hand at the back of her head, and he held her so hard that she felt the buttons of his suit coat through her shirt. His heart was going like a pump. He put his face down into her hair, and she heard him breathe in.

She held on to him. She waited for the word. It was a short word, and he liked saying it.

“Whatever happens in June,” Win said, into her hair, “the yard is safe. I’ve made sure of it.”

She did not let go of him. She stood inside his arms and turned the sentence over.

It was the wrong answer. She had asked him about a line on a sheet of vellum and about the two of them, and he had told her about the shed. It was as if she had asked him the time and been handed a tide table.

There was something wrong inside it, too. She had worked with metal long enough to know a seam that looked right and rang false when it was tapped. I’ve made sure of it. A man could not make sure of a note in a loan book he might lose in three weeks. If the sale went through, the book went to a stranger. He had told her so himself in the mould loft in January, as fairly as a man could, before she signed anything.

“How?” she said.

“I’ve seen to it. The note can’t be sold out from under you. I can promise you that much.” His arms did not loosen. “Please don’t ask me for the rest tonight.”

She thought of Gordon Pike, and two telephone calls on a Saturday in April, and all the calls since. She thought of a bank at two o’clock and a lawyer on Middle Street. He had got the audit committee to do something. He had ring-fenced it somehow, with a covenant or a carve-out, something with nine pages and a seal. He was exactly the man to spend a month on that, and to be late for supper finishing it.

It was a kind thing to have done. She did not want to stand on her father’s launch-way and hear about a covenant.

“That isn’t what I asked you,” she said.

“No. I know it isn’t.”

“I asked whether you want it struck.”

He lifted his head. There was just enough light left to see his face, and it frightened her a little. He looked at her as if he were learning her off, feature by feature, for a time when she would not be in front of him.

“I heard you,” he said. “I heard every word, and I’ll have it as long as I live. It’s the only answer I’ve got tonight, Nell. I can’t give you a better one. I’m sorry.”

“After the eighteenth, then.”

He did not say yes to that either. He put his mouth against her forehead and kept it there.

She could have pushed. She knew how. She could have stepped back and folded her arms and looked at him as she looked at a bracket, and she would have had it out of him by dark, whatever it was. She very nearly did.

But she had asked for something that could not be got by pushing. If he said he wanted to stay married to her because she had backed him down a launch-way, she would never know what it was worth. And he was so tired. He had three weeks to turn six hundred people against two hundred thousand dollars apiece, and he was holding on to her as if she were the rail of a boat doing twenty-seven knots.

She had waited eleven hours for a panel to cool, and she could wait three weeks for him.

“All right,” she said. “You’ve had your one. The next time I ask you a plain question, I want the answer to that question.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the word I was after. You’ve said it about the wrong thing.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh, and it broke in the middle. She pretended she had not heard that.

There was a light behind them. She turned her head against his chest.

Somebody had switched on the lamp over the shed door. Rémy was standing in the opening, beside the bow of 212, with Bilge at his feet and his hands in his jacket pockets. He must have come through from the house to lock up. He was fifty feet away and she could not see his face, only the shape of him against the lit shed and the set of his shoulders.

He was not looking at her. She could tell that much from the angle of his head. He was looking at Win.

Nell lifted a hand to him. It was a small wave, half an apology for being caught on the ways in a man’s arms, and half a dare to say something about it.

Her brother did not wave back. He did not call down that the tide would be over their shoes in an hour, or that Portland ought to mind the weed on the concrete in those soles. He would have said either one in March. He stood there without a word for as long as it took the bell buoy to sound twice. Then he bent, took the dog by the collar and went inside. The lamp stayed on.

“He’s been like a bear all week,” she said. “There’s a girl. He told me her name today, and I think it nearly killed him.”

Win said nothing. He was looking up at the lit door where Rémy had been.

“You’re cold. You’re in a suit, on a slipway, in office shoes.” She took his hand again. It was the left one. She felt the bronze band under her fingers, scratched and warm, with its flat place from the grinder. “Come up. I’ll find you a sweater of Dad’s, and you can sleep till noon. It’s a holiday.”

“Nell.”

“What?”

He stood looking down at her. The water had come another foot up the concrete behind him, without a sound.

“Thank you for asking me,” he said. “I wanted you to know that I know what it cost you.”

“It didn’t cost me anything. I’m for hire, not for sale. Asking’s free.”

She had meant it to make him smile. He shut his eyes instead.

She led him up the launch-way. He came beside her past the bow and the three new plates, and past the wheelhouse jig standing empty on the floor. He did not let go of her hand until they reached the foot of her stairs. She took that for a good sign.
***