Chapter 73 Amos's Page

They gave him the blue chair, because that was where everyone went first, and the chair received the big weathered man the way it received everyone: completely, sinking him to the eyes, and for a while he sat turning the oilskin packet over and over, reading the address as though the words might change their minds. "Take your time," Lily said. "The kettle's just gone on." "It's not the reading," the ferryman said. "I know what's in it. Have known eleven years, the way you know a hull's cracked before the surveyor confirms it. It's the giving it up. Once it's read aloud in this room, it stops being mine to carry alone, and God help me, keeper, I have liked carrying it alone. It was the last job he ever gave me." "Jobs keep better shared," said Avis, from the shadows past the lamp, where she had settled herself like a piece of furniture that had always lived there. "Eleven years in a garage with a half-built boat. Ask your hands whether sharing would be worse." He broke the sailmaker's thread with his thumbnail, because scissors were too kind for it, and unfolded the page inside — brown now, soft as cloth, written in pencil that the damp had gentled but not defeated — and he read it aloud, slowly, in the voice you use at gravesides and nursery doors, because by now everyone in that room knew exactly which voice that was and what it cost. It was not a dying message. That undid the room first. It was dated the Tuesday before he drowned — six days, a man writing on an ordinary evening about an ordinary week — and it said: Garage, Tuesday. She'll take another season yet, so don't rush her, and don't you dare sell the molds. I keep meaning to say the thing and keep not saying it, so here goes, in ink, where a man can't take it back. You think I stay in the trade for the money, and you're right, there is no money, but the true reason is the boats get built twice. Once out of timber. Once out of the promise. Every plank you and I lay together is us telling each other we'll be here next week to lay the next one, and I have never in my life had a surer way of saying I'll see you Thursday than handing you the plane. So: I'll see you Thursday. Steam the oak in my yard; your garage runs cold. If anything ever happens to me — and nothing will, I'm bulletproof, our mam had it said over my cot — finish her anyway. Not for the water. For the telling. A finished boat tells everyone who looks at her: these two saw it through. Your mate, Amos. Silence, of the kind that follows an anchor going down. "He knew," the ferryman said at last. His hands were flat on the page, steadying it or being steadied by it, impossible to say. "Six days out, and he's writing instructions like a man leaving a recipe. Bulletproof. Our mam had it said over my cot." Something moved through his face, grief and laughter arriving at the same door and refusing to queue. "Eleven years I've been afraid to open this in case it blamed me for the weather. And it's a joke about steaming oak. He sent me a joke across eleven years, the great gudgeon." He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, briskly, dispatching tears like flies, a gesture the men of this town seemed to learn from the same lost textbook. Then he straightened in the blue chair, and his voice changed — the voice of a man reading out terms. "Right. You've all heard it. Finish her anyway. For the telling." He looked around the golden room, at the teacher and the keeper and the girl and the boy and the oldest woman on the coast, and asked, awkwardly, formally, as though the words had to be imported from abroad: "It says boats get built twice. The second build needs more hands than the first. Would the town — I mean. Could I put it in the flower-shop window? Properly announced?" Mrs. Okafor, present in her official capacity as the town's true newspaper, was already writing. The notice went in the window before the shop closed: BOAT FINISHING — HANDS WANTED — NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, ONLY PROMISES KEPT OR PENDING. By Friday there were nine names on the list and a cask of oakings-up oil donated by the ironmonger, who would not say why, and did not need to; everyone had someone they would plank a boat for if the chance were offered. The work itself became, in the way of such things, a kind of open church with wood shavings. Men who had not spoken since a funeral found themselves clamping the same strake and discovered the quarrel had died of neglect somewhere in the interval. The ferryman worked differently too, they noticed. Eleven years he had built her alone at the pace of grief, one plank a fortnight; now he worked at the pace of company, which is faster and slower at once, because more gets done and everything said along the way gets done as well. They set the date for the spring tides, when the ebb runs farthest, and the town took the project the way dry ground takes rain. Mr. Pryce appeared at the garage with seasoned oak from the allotment sheds and opinions about joints. Owen climbed onto the loft ladder with his tape machine and asked what kind of rhythm a steam-box liked, and the ferryman, to his own visible astonishment, found himself explaining caulk and seam and swing, aloud, to a boy, in the evenings, in a garage that suddenly had light in it again. Avis came down once, inspected the frames the way she once inspected wicks, and pronounced her judgment to the assembled volunteers: "She'll float. Boats always know when they're being finished for the right reason; it's in how the seams close." And when the ferryman asked her, humbly, whether boats could be told who they were for, she said, "They're told every day, by every hand that touches them. You'll want to keep saying his name while you work. Timber keeps what it hears. That's not superstition; that's joinery." Even the ledger took notice: Iris wrote the evening's entry — Read aloud in the golden room: a mate's six-day-old instruction, kept eleven years against fear, and found to be a promise with a pulse — and as the ink dried, down the margin, in the oldest quick hand, one word surfaced and dried: Launch. And it was Iris, locking up near midnight, who found the leaf that had come in with the last of the drying rack — sealed, unlike the others, folded thrice and pressed flat, addressed in no hand she knew, in letters printed rather than written, as if to be readable by anyone and attributable to no one: FOR THE LIBRARY. DO NOT OPEN UNTIL THE TWO LIGHTS MEET. She stood a long time with it in her hands, feeling the weight of waiting in it, heavier than paper, lighter than duty. Then she did the keeperly thing, the Margaret thing: she wrote it into the ledger, word for word, sealed it into an envelope of her own, and put it in the locked drawer behind the third shelf, where this town keeps the things it is not ready for and refuses to lose.