He clearly wasn’t going to let me pay him back, so I could only say, “Well, thank you. We really appreciate it.”
“Anytime.” He briefly eyed his handiwork from this new angle, by the porch light. “My grandmother,” he told me, “had a theory about doors. Whenever things were going wrong, she’d have my stepdad come hang a new door for her. He’d tell her she was nuts, that doors were doors, but she’d say no door ever opened exactly the same as the last one, the new one was always that little bit different, and anyway it never did any harm to walk through a new door now and then, and see where you end up.”
I thought about that for a minute. I thought about what he’d been actually trying to do for us, hanging that door on this house where right now it seemed everything was going wrong; and I thought how incredibly thoughtful and nice he was, and how inadequate any reply I could make was, to thank him. And by the time I’d thought all that, there was nothing I could say, because he had already walked to his truck and he wouldn’t have heard me.
I did step out onto the porch, though, and Sam was right. It was a little bit different.
I was a little bit different.
Malaika had said, when we’d talked about how she had fallen for Darryl, that there had been something about him, just something, and every time he’d come around she had noticed it more. She had liked it more.
Sam put his things in the back of his truck, lifted Bandit up onto the seat of the cab, and got in himself, as I had seen him do countless times. And as he always did, he raised his hand in a brief wave goodbye as he backed out.
I waved back.
The night was a clear one, the wind blowing sharp from the bay. It was cold on the porch, and I hugged myself tighter, but I stayed and watched the red taillights of Sam’s truck roll up the long driveway, and in that one moment I knew, beyond all doubt, why I hadn’t cared much when Tyler had gone.
? ? ?
Malaika had noticed that I was distracted at work the next morning, but she put it down to the after-effects of our board meeting. “It was a beautiful thing, seeing Sharon shut down,” she said. Sinking into the chair on the opposite side of my desk in my office, she swivelled to look out the window. “What on earth is Sam doing now?”
I’d been acutely aware of exactly what Sam had been doing since I had arrived. I’d tried not to be. I’d reminded myself I was probably just on the rebound, and that it was never a good or professional thing to get mixed up with men in the workplace, and that Sam had never done anything anyway to make me think he was interested back, but it still hadn’t kept me from noticing what he was doing and where he was, so I could answer Malaika with no hesitation, “He’s building a platform for Willie to use when he starts on the chimney.”
The stonemason and his mate were on their last day of foundation work, two days ahead of schedule, and given that this was the last month they could work outside before it got too cold for their mortar to set, they were wasting no time moving on to the great central chimney. “A wee bit of scaffolding,” Willie had told Sam, “would be just the thing.” What he was getting was more than a wee bit, but Sam never did things by halves.
Malaika, watching Sam’s surefooted steps along the roof’s ridge, shook her head. “I don’t know how they even do that. I hate heights. But then I guess with Sam it’s in his blood.” And seeing that I didn’t understand, she said, “His father was an ironworker. It’s a Mohawk thing, Sam tells me, walking up there in the open on those steel beams. It’s tradition.”
I had heard about the famous Mohawk ironworkers who’d earned the respectful nickname “skywalkers” by working on the skyscrapers and bridges of New York and other cities. In fact, one of the men who had served as a consultant at my previous museum had been a retired ironworker, and he’d told me that many of them came from a community near Montreal, where I’d been born. I wondered if Sam’s family came from there as well.
Malaika didn’t know. She said, “I think he comes from Brooklyn.”
He could not have heard us talking. It was cooler out that morning and I’d had my window closed, but when I’d seen his head begin to turn I’d looked away abruptly, feigning sudden fascination with the papers on my desk, and that had made Malaika notice them.
She’d asked me, “What’s all that?”
“I’m doing research on our painting.” I had started with the inventory made by Captain Wilde’s wife. A lot of inventories, since they were usually taken to value a person’s estate when they died, left out things like people’s portraits that would stay within the family and weren’t seen as having value to anyone else, but because our inventory had been taken for a special purpose while the homeowners were still alive, they had left nothing out.
My father’s portrait, Captain Wilde’s wife had noted first among the contents of the parlour, in a gilded frame. 1 writing desk with leather bottom chair, 4 mahogany chairs, 2 arm chairs, 1 square walnut table, 1 pair andirons with tongs, 1 carpet, 1 bookcase—the books listed separately on their own page—3 brass candlesticks, and last of all, a painting of the Bellewether at Halifax.
“And that,” I’d told Malaika, “isn’t Halifax.”
We’d looked towards the painting, leaning up against the far wall of my office out of everybody’s way, with quilted padding on the floor beneath its frame. Except the impact of my statement had been lessened by the fact the painting had been turned around, so we were looking at the back of it.
I’d thought I’d left it facing out when I’d carried it up after our meeting, but that morning my thoughts were admittedly muddled while I’d sorted through this new shift in my feelings for Sam, and I couldn’t rely on my memory. I’d risen and turned it around again, so I could prove my point.
It was a beautiful painting, not flat in its imagery like some Colonial paintings could be. It had life. It showed a half-constructed ship careened upon its side with three men hard at work upon it, framed by tall trees casting shadows on a curve of beach that was, without a doubt, the beach here at Snug Cove.
The broad gilt frame was beautiful as well, and bore a narrow brass plaque with the title of the piece: The Building of the Bellewether.
I wasn’t an expert on ships, but the ship in the painting did look like the Bellewether when I compared it to the other images I had collected—and there were a lot of them. Benjamin Wilde had been captain of several ships over his lifetime, but only one became part of his legend. Like Drake’s Golden Hind, Nelson’s Victory, and Charles Darwin’s Beagle, the Bellewether’s name was forever bound to Captain Wilde’s. Her portrait had been painted and engraved as many times as his had, and historians had written of the sloop’s exploits as though she’d been alive.
“The Fearless Bellewether” was actually the title of the article I reached for first when trying to explain my doubts about the painting’s subject. “Here’s the thing,” I told Malaika. “I don’t think this shows the building of the Bellewether at all. It says here she was built at Jackson’s shipyard, which was here on the North Shore somewhere, but from all the accounts that I can find it was a proper shipyard, and that’s not what’s in this painting.”
Thoughtfully Malaika had agreed, “No, that’s our cove.”
“With just one ship and a few men. Not a shipyard. But here in this article it says the Bellewether had to be overhauled. Listen to this: ‘In autumn of 1759, the brave sloop was attacked by enemy pirates in the West Indies, the crew and captain were killed, and she was brought home in a sad state, barely afloat. Instead of giving up on her, William Wilde had the little privateer brought to the cove, where she was restored to better than her former condition and lengthened by fifteen feet.’?” Turning again to the painting, I said, “I think that’s what this shows. See? She’s being repaired, not built.”
“You may be right.” She’d side-eyed me as though my theory was amusing.