Of course he felt good today, of all days. (You feel well, Eliza would tell him. Not good. You are good, but you feel well.) He never really understood that. You got your point across, who cared how you did it. But Eliza sometimes came at him for his grammar. He had to accept that about her, it was just the way she was, got it from her mother, like she got everything else, her curly black hair, her freckles, her long legs, the way she squinted in bright sunlight and the way one of her feet was a half size bigger than the other. Sometimes if he looked at her too quickly now he could believe that Joanie was still alive.
If Eliza was there she would, after she fixed his grammar, laugh in that way she had, the way that made you want to laugh with her, and say something about how wasn’t that always how it went, your hair behaved itself on the day you were going to get it cut.
Not that Eliza’s hair ever behaved itself. Just like her mother’s—just like Joanie’s.
Last time pulling in at the wharf, turning off the truck, tucking the key under the passenger-side mat. Same damn spot every other lobsterman put the key to the truck—not so much a hiding place as it was an announcement. Look at me. I belong here. And this is how we do things.
“Thought you got yourself a sternman,” said Josh Young, who was preparing to steam out at the same time. They climbed into their skiffs right near each other. “That guy from Ellsworth, you had him hauling with you. He quit on you?”
“Fired him.”
“Yuh,” said Josh, looking Charlie up and down. “I bet you did.”
“That guy from Ellsworth was useless,” said Charlie. He nodded and untied his skiff from the wharf, pushed off. Last time talking to Josh Young; no loss there. Over his shoulder he couldn’t resist saying, “I do better on my own, you know how it is.”
Josh grunted like he did know, but he didn’t. That guy couldn’t do a thing on his own, wouldn’t dare go out for half a day without a sternman.
Last time rowing the skiff to the boat, mooring it, starting the boat’s engine, heading out. The Joanie B, skeg-built, forty feet long, serviceable but not fancy, suitable for offshore later in the season.
Not this season, though.
Charlie Sargent knew every inch of this boat, knew it better than he knew any other forty-foot stretch in the universe. He knew the way the ignition stuck in really cold weather, and the way you had to jiggle the key real gently to get it going again. He knew the grooves marked in the floor of the wheelhouse from all those hours—days and weeks and months and years—of standing in the same spot. He knew the way you had to turn real easy when the wind was coming from the southwest because if you didn’t the bow would fight back against you.
Last time steering around the buoys in the harbor, last sunrise, the sky filling up pink and orange with whites and blues right around the edges. Charlie Sargent was no poet and he wasn’t a religious man but sometimes when he was out there on his boat with the wind lashing him and the colors of the sunrise spread out around him he felt a thump deep in his heart that made him want to be a little bit of both.
He turned the VHF on, tested it, turned it off again. A little farther out now, then a little more. But not too far. He came to a few of his own buoys, killed the engine, considering. Haul them, reset them, and send them back down? Didn’t seem like there was much point in that. But to leave the work undone, that wasn’t in his nature. That wasn’t how Charlie Sargent operated.
Just a couple strings, maybe, just the ones right here. He wouldn’t go beyond this area, though he had traps set all over. That would take all day and by then he’d lose his nerve, when there was no sense in that now: already the thing was decided. Plus, he hadn’t brought himself any lunch. Charlie’s buoys were red and black and bright blue, he’d had those colors since he was a boy of sixteen, setting out in the old rattrap boat his father had let him use.
He reached over the starboard side with his gaff and his hook, grabbed the pot warp, pulled the line from the water to run it through the hauling block and into the hydraulic hauler. The line coiled itself on the deck below the hauler. The line strained, and the trap broke the surface. He broke that trap over the rail—okay, maybe that bastard Josh was right, maybe he could have used a sternman just then, because he was breathing heavy and his hands were shaking. He wasn’t as strong as he used to be. Then the trailer traps, one after another, just three in this string, thank God, because it was a real struggle now to get them over.
But even so he did what he was supposed to do, what he’d been doing right along, since he was a boy of five, learning at his father’s knee, and he unloaded the traps. Disappointing haul on this string. Not a keeper in the bunch. The first trap was empty, the second held a couple of crabs, and the third had three lobsters. One was too small, he could tell just by eyeballing—didn’t even need his gauge. Two had undersides berried with eggs. Those had to go. He grabbed his V-notch and marked them, then tossed them over. “Off you go,” he said. “Go out there and make your babies.”
What was that little song Joanie used to sing to Eliza? One baby two babies three babies four, you’re the only one for me, it’s you that I adore.
Never made much sense to Charlie, but that didn’t matter. Joanie could be reading a grocery list or a report from the traffic court in The Ellsworth American and Charlie would be all ears, drinking it up, like it was the sound of angels singing. Charlie had loved Joanie like that, with all of himself. To the ends of the earth and back. Not that he was given to talking that way. But he could think that way, sure. He could think it.
That was done, then. The sun was up, the sky a clear blue now with just traces of white around the edges. Not too foggy today, that was good. He looked around the Joanie B to see that everything was in order. He didn’t like to think he’d leave anything sloppy behind for anyone else to deal with.
Something around his ankles, to make sure the job was done properly. He should have thought of that.
He remembered in eighty-five when that poor kid went over. Lucas Spaulding. Charlie had been a little bit younger than Lucas’s dad, and Lucas was no more than eight or nine, just starting to learn the ways of it, out with his father and his uncle one morning. August, the height of a really good season, the traps practically hauling themselves. Right up to the guidelines they were that summer. That was the summer Charlie bought Joanie a new car, Eliza was six. It was a week before the Lobster Festival, the town about as lively as it ever got. And poor Lucas. Standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, the line looped around his ankles when the trap went over, so he went over with it. By the time they pulled him up his face was dead blue and his heart had clearly stopped beating. Better that way, almost, people said; if he’d come to, his brain would have been right ruined.
Jesus, he hadn’t thought about Lucas Spaulding in ages. They canceled the Lobster Festival that year, and a bunch of summer people from the Point got all up in arms about that. Not that they could say anything out loud, so they whispered behind closed doors. But word got out. It always did.