Frame Fourteen

The notice was pinned to the board by the shed door, between the overtime sheet and a flyer for a snowblower. Nell read it at twenty past six on Monday morning with her hard hat under her arm.

Lathrop Shipbuilding. February 1, 2027. To all hands, hull 1. Effective today, N. Thibodeau, naval architect, has authority to stop, direct and approve all structural welding on this hull, and to revise any structural drawing. Her instruction on the floor is the yard’s instruction. W. E. Lathrop.

It was three sentences long, and it had her name spelled right. She had half expected him to put Mrs. Lathrop on it, to make the point for the trust. He had put what was on the drawings.

Somebody had already written under it in pencil. Congratulations?? She left that where it was.

It was fourteen degrees outside and not much better inside. The Petrel stood under the gantry on her cradles, with two weeks of Nell’s soapstone still on her. There were a hundred and forty-nine days until the thirtieth of June. She had worked that out in the truck, and she did not intend to say it to anybody before coffee.

Toby Keegan called the shift together at half past six under the wet deck. Forty welders stood in a loose ring with their hoods under their arms and their breath showing. The foreman, a long-jawed man named Dunphy, had the clipboard. The boy who had lent her his soapstone on the first day was at the front. She had learned since that his name was Danny Arsenault and that he was twenty-one.

“All right,” Toby said. “You’ve all read the board. Mr. Lathrop got married Friday, and I’m sure we all wish him joy.” Nobody laughed, quite. “So it turns out the boss’s wife has some ideas about frame fourteen. She’s going to show us. Give her room.”

He looked at her when he had said it. His red face was perfectly bland.

Nell had thought about this moment on the drive down Sunday night. She had four or five good answers ready, and every one of them would have taken a minute of a day that did not have a minute in it. A man who had been insulted in front of his crew by a stranger from a thirty-eight-foot yard was allowed one back. She would rather he took it today and got it over with.

“Thank you, Toby,” she said. “Frame fourteen, port. I need a carbide saw, a die grinder and two strongbacks. Walt, will you hold for me?”

The grey-haired man who had welded frame 9 lifted his eyebrows. Walt Brackett had thirty-four years in the shed and a steel ticket older than she was. He had not said ten words to her since she chalked an arrow along his work.

“I guess I can hold,” he said.

“And Danny, I want you up there with a notebook. Write down everything I do in the order I do it. If I do something and don’t say why, ask me.”

“Out loud?”

“That’s the only way I’ll hear it.”

They rolled the staging in under the wet deck. From the platform the plate was a foot above her head, with the frames running across it like the ribs in an umbrella. Frame 14 port ran from the centreline girder out to the corner where the deck turned down into the hull. Its bracket sat in that corner with a chalk cross on it and a thread of red dye still in the crack.

She clamped the strongbacks to the plate on either side first, two lengths of heavy angle that would keep the deck from moving when the frame let go of it. Then she pulled her face shield down and cut.

It was ugly work and she did not hurry it. She ran the saw along the frame an inch below the plate, and Walt took the weight as it came free and lowered six feet of scrap to the men underneath. She ground the stub back to the skin in long passes until nothing was left of the old weld but a bright stripe. In the corner she slowed down. She took the bracket out with the die grinder, a little at a time, and kept going past the end of the crack until the metal was clean and whole.

“Why so far?” Danny called. He had gone pink asking it.

“Because a crack keeps going a little way past where you can see it. If I weld over the tip of it, I’ve just buried it for the surveyor to find.” She wiped the corner with a rag. “Dunphy, is Ms. Nadeau here yet?”

“Just signed in.”

“Ask her if she’ll dye that corner before I cover it. I want her to see the shell’s sound.”

Vera Nadeau came up the staging steps with her kit. She was forty-four, spare and brown-haired, in a grey parka with the class society’s badge on the sleeve, and she wore reading glasses on a cord. She was the woman who had written NOT ACCEPTED on the summary page. She sprayed the corner, waited, wiped it, sprayed it white and stood looking at it for a full ten minutes by her watch without making conversation.

“Parent metal’s clear,” she said, and wrote it in her book. “Carry on.”

The new frame was in the bed of Nell’s truck, wrapped in a moving blanket. Two men carried it in. She saw the shed take a look at it as it went by.

It was one piece. The old frame had been a straight bar with a square bracket welded to its end. This one had been cut whole out of a single plate, frame and bracket together, so that there was no joint in the corner at all. The bracket swept down out of the frame in a long curve and thinned as it went. Where the old one had ended in a square point, this one ended in a soft round nose about the size of a quarter.

“Where’d that come from?” Toby asked. He had come up onto the staging without her noticing.

“Skerry Harbor. I cut it Saturday on my router table.”

“We’ve got a plasma table forty feet from here.”

“I know. I’ll come to that.” She ran her thumb along the cut edge and held the thumb up, clean. “Feel it first.”

He felt it. He did not say anything, but he felt it twice.

She and Walt offered the frame up and she tacked it in the middle, one small tack, and checked it with a square. Then she scrubbed the joint with a stainless brush and wiped it down. Danny asked why, and she told him aluminium grew a skin of oxide in an hour, and that the skin melted at three times the heat of the metal under it. He wrote that down.

“Now come in close,” she said. “All of you who can see. This is the part that matters.”

They came in. There were men on the staging and men on the floor with their heads tipped back, and for once nobody was pretending to be busy at a bench.

“The last time, you started at the centreline and ran outboard in one pass. I’m starting here.” She put her glove on the middle of the frame, three feet from either end. “From here I go both ways. But watch which way the gun travels.”

She dropped her hood and struck the arc.

She laid four inches of weld toward the middle and stopped. She shifted her feet, moved a hand’s width to port of where she had begun and welded back to meet it. Then she crossed over and did the same thing a hand’s width to starboard. She went on like that, a step to port and a step to starboard in turn, and every step ran back into the one before it. The seam grew outward from the centre in both directions like frost on a window.

Welding overhead meant the sparks came down her collar. She talked through it anyway, in the gaps, with her hood up.

“Think of the heat as water. Before, you poured it all in at one end and it ran downhill ahead of the gun, right into the corner. Now I’m pouring a cupful here and a cupful there, and each one runs back into metal that’s already been hot and has already moved. None of it gets a run at the bracket.” She changed sides. “And I’m going port, starboard, port, so the plate gets pulled the same both ways. If I did the whole port half first, I’d drag the deck over with it.”

“That’s twice the starts,” Walt said. “Every start’s a cold lap waiting to happen.”

“It is, on steel. That’s a fair worry.” She showed him the last tie-in. “So I start each step on the end of the old one, where it’s still warm, and I hold over the crater when I stop. You were taught never to stop. I was taught how to stop. It’s the same care, pointed the other way.”

He grunted, which was not agreement. He leaned in closer to look at the tie-in, though.

The last step on the outboard side ended an inch and a half short of the round nose of the bracket. She let go of the trigger there and pushed her hood up.

“And that’s all of it. I don’t wrap the toe. The end of that bracket is free to give a little, and the weld stops in a place where it’s got nothing to tear against.”

She did the other side of the frame the same way. When she climbed down, her shoulders ached and there was a hot place on her neck where a spark had found skin. It was a quarter to two. Somewhere in the middle of it Dunphy had sent the shed to lunch in two halves so that nobody missed anything, and she had not noticed him do it.

She noticed something else now. High up, on the walkway that ran along the gantry rail, a tall man in a dark overcoat and a hard hat stood with both hands on the railing. She could not tell how long he had been there. He had not called down, and nobody else seemed to have looked up.

She pulled the strongbacks off when the metal had cooled enough to lay a bare hand on. Vera Nadeau went back up the staging with a steel straightedge and a set of feeler gauges, and laid the edge across the plate between frames 13 and 15.

“That panel was eleven on the sixteenth of December,” Vera said. “It’s four.”

“The old frame was holding it out of shape,” Nell said. “When it came out, most of that let go.”

“I didn’t ask why. I’m telling you what it is.” She put the gauges away and took out the cans.

Nobody in the shed had anything else to do for the next twenty minutes, and everybody stayed. Vera cleaned the weld from end to end. She sprayed it red, both sides, and the dye ran into every ripple of the bead. She stood and waited with her watch in her hand. She wiped it off with clean rags until the rags came away white, and then she shook the last can and laid a coat of developer over the whole seam like chalk dust.

A crack would bleed. Nell had seen thirty-one photographs of it. The dye hid down in the flaw where the rag could not reach, and then it drew up into the white as a thin red line.

Ten minutes was a long time to watch white powder. Danny Arsenault had stopped writing. Toby Keegan stood with his arms folded and his eyes on the bracket nose.

Vera went along the seam with a flashlight, an inch at a time, and then along the other side. At the corner she took her glasses off the cord, put them on and bent close.

“Clean,” she said.

It was the same flat voice she used for everything. She wrote in her book, tore out the pink copy and handed it down to Dunphy.

“That’s one frame accepted. I’ll want to see every one of the others the same way, and I’ll want the sequence on the drawing, not in somebody’s head.” She looked at Nell. “How many?”

“Eleven stations, nine through nineteen, port and starboard. That’s twenty-two frames. Nine of the brackets cracked on both faces, which is where the thirty-one comes from. I’m not patching any of them. They all come out and go back like this one.”

“Twenty-two,” Vera agreed. She packed her cans.

Nell turned to Toby, because it was his floor and it ought to go through him.

“Here’s the part about your plasma table. Plasma cuts with heat. It leaves a cooked edge a sixteenth deep, and that edge is exactly where I’m asking these men to put a weld. A router cuts cold. That’s what you felt.” She pulled off her gloves. “You paid for the machine, in a way. It’s been under a tarp for a year and a half. I want to cut the other twenty-one on it, one piece each, bracket and all. Four thousand dollars a frame, delivered here. With the one you’re looking at, that’s twenty-two frames and eighty-eight thousand dollars.”

“Four thousand,” Toby said, “for a piece of plate.”

“For the plate, the machine time, the programming and my brother’s Saturdays. I can show you the breakdown. I’ll quote it in writing to your purchasing office and invoice it at thirty days, like any vendor.”

“Like any vendor,” he repeated. He let his eyes travel, very slowly, to the board by the door.

She had known that was coming too. Her answer was the truth, so she gave it.

“I don’t sign my own purchase orders, Toby. He does.”

She looked up at the gantry. Forty heads followed hers.

Win had heard. He took his hands off the railing.

“What’s the delivery?” he called down. His voice carried well in the big shed, and it had no more warmth in it than Vera’s.

“Seven frames a week, starting next Monday. The last ones on the twenty-second.”

“Is four thousand your price or your opening?”

“It’s my price.”

“Then it’s approved. Twenty-two at four thousand, eighty-eight thousand dollars, net thirty. Send the quote to purchasing today and copy Mr. Keegan.” He paused. “If a frame fails Ms. Nadeau’s test for a defect in the cutting, I’ll expect it replaced at your cost.”

“You’ll have that in the quote.”

“Good.”

That was all. He did not tell her it was a bargain. He did not round it up, or offer to pay on delivery, or say anything about a rush. He had asked her the two questions he would have asked a yard in Rhode Island, and then he had put a warranty on her.

Nell bent to pick up her gloves so that nobody would see her face. For three weeks she had been waiting for him to try a fourth number. He had just been handed the chance in front of his whole shed and he had let it go by. She was surprised by how much she liked him for it.

The ring of men began to break up. Dunphy was already reading out who went on which station. Walt Brackett stopped beside her on his way past.

“Fifteen, starboard, is mine,” he said. “I’ll cut her out tomorrow. You’ll want to look at my corner before I cover it, I suppose.”

“I’d like to.”

“Thought so.” He went.

Toby had not moved. He stood looking up at frame 14, with its white dust and its round-nosed bracket. She let him look and coiled her lead.

“What were you running your wire at?” he asked.

It came out rough, like something he had been chewing for a while. She straightened up.

“About four hundred and twenty inches a minute, on three-sixty-fourths wire.”

“Overhead? My fellas were down around two-fifty. I told them to keep it cool, with all that cracking.”

“I know. That’s what steel teaches you, and it’s backwards here. If you run it cool and slow, you sit in one place soaking heat into the plate, and the bead goes on cold on top of it. Run it hot and move. You’re in and out before the metal knows you were there.” She held out the gun so he could see the drive on the handle. “It won’t feed that fast through a push gun, either. The wire’s too soft and it balls up in the liner. You need the pull motor at the torch. You’ve got six of these in the crib. I counted.”

“We bought those for the series that got cancelled.”

“Then they’re paid for.”

He took the gun from her and turned it over in his big hands. He looked at the drive rolls. He did not thank her, and she had not expected it. But it was a real question, the first he had asked her, and he had listened to the whole answer.

“I’ll have the other five out by morning,” he said.

He was handing the gun back when the small door at the end of the shed opened and let in a slab of white daylight.

A man came through it and stopped to let his eyes adjust. He was in his sixties, straight-backed and silver-haired, and he wore a camel overcoat that had never been within a mile of a grinder. He had a visitor’s hard hat in his hand and had not put it on. He looked up at the Petrel for a moment with what seemed to be honest admiration. Then he looked along the floor, found the one woman in coveralls and smiled.

The shed did not go quiet for him the way it did for Win. Two or three of the older men nodded to him, and he nodded back and called one of them by name.

Up on the gantry, Win had started for the stairs.

The man reached her first. He took in the red dye on her knuckles, the soot on her face and the bronze band on her left hand, and his smile did not change at all.

“You must be Eleanor,” he said, and put out his hand. “I’m Prescott Lathrop. I believe that makes me your uncle.”
***