The Man Who Forgot the Ocean

Chapter One

The last good season ended on a Tuesday in October with the boat coming in heavy, and June stood at the kitchen window with her hands in the dishwater and watched the Lady June round the point exactly on the tide, low in the stern with the day’s work in her, and thought, the way she’d thought ten thousand mornings, there he is.

She had married a man and a harbor both, and after thirty-seven years she could no longer entirely tell them apart, which was not a complaint. The window over her sink gave her the whole cove, the breakwater and the moorings and the run of gray water out to the islands, and she had washed a lifetime of dishes looking at it, and the best of those dishes had been washed watching a particular green hull come home. He came in with no flourish, dead slow past the moorings with his hand light on the wheel, and put her on the mooring first pass the way he’d done it since before Kate was born, and June dried her hands and put the kettle on, because a man in off the water wanted tea inside twenty minutes and she had never once in her married life been caught short of it.

It had been a fair season. Not a great one; there were no great ones anymore, the prices saw to that, and the fishing was work now in a way it hadn’t been when they were young, more gear for less catch and the young fellows going west in the winters. But fair. The boat had paid her way and a little over, and Warren had come home most evenings that fall with the particular tiredness she liked on him, the clean kind, the kind that meant a day spent doing the one thing on earth his hands had been made for, and he’d eaten his supper and fallen asleep in his chair by eight and been no trouble to anybody, least of all her.

She went down to the wharf to meet him, because it was a fair evening and the walk was good and because after thirty-seven years she still liked the sight of him stepping off his own boat, and she got there as he came in on the skiff from the mooring, standing up in it the way he’d stood up in small boats his whole life, reading her along the wharf before the skiff touched.

“You’re down,” he said, pleased, meaning she didn’t always come.

“It’s a fair night. Murray about?”

“Murray’s gone up already. He’s got that truck to go and sit in.” He made the skiff fast and handed her up a tote of the day’s few keepers for the house, and the plastic bag with Petey’s mother’s chow in it, and climbed the ladder after, and the two of them stood a minute at the wharf edge in the last of the light while he looked his boat over on her mooring the way a man looks a horse over in its stall, one long habitual pass, checking she rode right. Wes came along the wharf with a coil over his shoulder and stopped to tell them the Halifax traffic report he’d been rehearsing his dread of all week, and Warren told him to take the old road and be a Christian about it, and Wes said the old road added an hour, and Warren said an hour was cheap for your soul, and the two of them stood there in the cold settling nothing, easy as men who’d stood on that wharf together for forty years, and June leaned on the rail with the tote at her feet and let the evening be exactly what it was.

They walked up together in the near-dark, the three of them and the dog, Wes peeling off at his own gate, and Warren carried the tote because he carried things, and stamped his boots on the step, and came in bringing the cold and the smell of the water with him, weed and salt and diesel, the smell that was simply her husband by now.

“Petey’s mother sent that chow up for the books,” he said, setting the bag on the counter. “She means she wants her boy’s paperwork done before the government notices him.” He hung his cap on the hook and his oil jacket beside it and stood a moment warming the backs of his legs at the stove. “There’s a herring or two in there too. Don’t let the dog vote on it.”

The kettle went off behind him.

“Answer that,” Warren said, to nobody. “It’s for you.”

June took it off the heat.

“How was she running?”

“Sweet. That new impeller’s earned itself.” He took the tea she handed him and wrapped both hands around the mug, and nodded at the bag on the counter. “You’ll want to hide that chow from yourself, too, not just the dog. I watched you go through a jar of Carol’s in a week and blame me for the level.” He said it deadpan, into the mug, and June threw the dishcloth at him and he caught it without looking, forty years of catching things thrown on a pitching deck, and dropped it on the counter and grinned, and for a second the kitchen was every ordinary evening it had ever been. Then he looked out the window at his own boat riding the mooring in the last of the light, and June looked at him looking at it, a big man gone a little gray and a little slow, sixty-three years old and sound as a bell, warming himself at his own stove with his boat safe on her mooring and his supper on the stove, and there was not one thing wrong with the picture, not one, and she would think about that later, that there had been an evening in October when there was still not one thing wrong that she could name.

There had been small things. She would go looking for them later, the way you go back over a chart after you’ve been aground, hunting the mark you should have read. He’d tied the boat’s cover wrong in September, or not wrong, but twice, done it and undone it and done it again, and she’d thought nothing of it, a man being particular. He’d asked her twice in a week was it Thursday Kate was coming, and she’d thought nothing of that either, because she asked herself the same kind of thing daily and called it being busy. He’d stood in the marine supply in Bridgewater one afternoon and gone quiet in front of a wall of shackles he’d bought off for forty years, quiet a beat too long, and then picked the right one and paid for it and driven them home talking about the Zinck boys’ engine, and June had been looking at a display of foul-weather gear and had not seen the quiet at all, and only invented it afterward, or remembered it, there was no telling which, once she had a reason to go looking.

But that evening there was nothing. That was the truth she’d hold and worry like a stone in a pocket for the rest of it: the last good evening had been an ordinary Tuesday, and she’d spent it not knowing to hold on, doing the dishes, making the tea, half listening to a man tell her about an impeller, and had let it go by like any of the thousand before it, unmarked, unhoarded, gone.

They ate their supper. He told her the wharf news, the same news it always was, dressed differently: whose engine, whose crew, whose price, whose daughter had got into what program away and whose son had not. Murray Selig had bought a truck too big for any purpose the shore could imagine and was being punished for it by universal comment. Wes and Carol were driving to Halifax on the weekend for Carol’s sister’s something, and Wes was dreading the traffic the way he dreaded all things that couldn’t be fixed with a knife and twine. The savory in Danny’s last care package had been, Warren maintained, a message, though he couldn’t say from whom or of what.

“You could phone him,” June said. “It’s Sunday’s rate all week now, you know, on the long distance. There’s no Sunday anymore.”

“I’ll phone him Sunday,” Warren said, which was the treaty, the old one, that Danny was phoned on Sundays and not chased between times, because a boy four thousand kilometers off in the oil patch had built himself a life out there and a father’s job was to be home when the boy looked back, not to be reaching after him. June let it go. She’d been letting that one go for three years, and would go on letting it go, and did not yet know how few Sundays were in it.

After supper he fell asleep in the chair with the fishing report over his chest and Bosun against his slipper, and June sat across from him with her mending and the radio low and the good lamp on, and the house ticked and settled around the two of them the way it had ticked and settled around them for thirty-seven years, and out the black window the cove went about its night, the moorings knocking, the one green hull riding easy among the others, and June Croft sat in the exact middle of her life and did not know it was the middle, did not know the ground was already moving under the house, thought only, threading a needle by lamplight with her husband asleep and sound across the room, that she was a fortunate woman, which she was, which she had been, which, in what mattered most and cost most, she would go on being right to the end.

She woke him at ten to send him up to bed, because if she left him he’d sleep the night in the chair and be stiff for a week and blame the chair. He went up the stairs heavy and warm and half asleep, and paused on the landing, and said down to her, “You coming up?”

“In a minute. I’ll bank the stove.”

“Don’t be long. Frost tonight.” He knew the frost the way he knew everything about the weather, from somewhere below the level of knowing, and he was right; there was frost that night, the first hard one, and in the morning the grass was white and creaking and the cove smoked with it.

June banked the stove and stood a minute at the black window with her hand on the still-warm iron of it. The moorings knocked. The one green hull rode easy among the others out there in the dark, and the yard light hummed, and somewhere up the shore a dog answered another dog and gave it up. An ordinary night, the boat home, the man up, the dishes done. She turned off the kitchen light and went up the stairs of the house he’d built, on roads her feet knew blind, and lay down beside him, and took, without thinking about it, the wrist he offered her in his sleep, the whole warm size of his hand closing round it the way it had since she was twenty, and she went to sleep in the ordinary dark with no reason in the world to lie awake.

The appointment card was already written. Munro’s careful hand, a date, a time; it would be in the box by the road on Thursday, having come up the highway in the dark while they slept, the way the mail always came, carrying whatever it carried to whoever it was addressed to and asking nobody’s leave. June would bring it in with the flyers and the hydro bill and stand at the counter reading it, and that would be the first day of the rest of it. But that was Thursday. This was Tuesday night, and the frost was coming down clean and hard over a sleeping cove, and a woman lay in her own bed in her own life with her husband’s hand around her wrist and slept, which was, she would come to understand, its own kind of fortune, and not the smallest kind: to have had a life so ordinary that its last plain evening went by without a mark on it, unhoarded, unfeared, simply lived, the way the good ones are.

In the morning she filled the pill organizer, which held, that year, only the small pink one for his blood pressure, one pill, seven days, nothing to it, and put the kettle on while the frost smoked off the cove in the first light, and the day began the way they all began, with a woman at a window and a man on his way in from the water.

Chapter Two

The pills went into their little doors before the coffee finished, seven days of them, three to a door now where a year ago there had been the one pink one and nothing in it worth a thought, and June had learned to fill the box while Warren was still out on the porch so he never had to watch. Monday through Sunday, white and yellow and the small pink one that had nothing to do with any of it. The kettle ticked on the stove. Through the window the fog lay over the cove the way it did most autumn mornings, thick to the breakwater, thinning where the sun worked on it, and somewhere under it a gull was going on about something at length.

Warren sat on the porch step with a length of rope across his knees, splicing. He had Bosun beside him, the dog’s chin on his boot, and his hands moved the way they had moved for forty years, tuck and pull, tuck and pull, the strands opening for him like they wanted to. He didn’t look at the work. He never had. He looked out at the fog and let his hands do it, and if June hadn’t known what she knew, she’d have said there was nothing in the world wrong with that man on the step.

She brought him his coffee and set his pills beside it on the rail.

“Big day,” she said.

“Every day I wake up beside you.” He said it without turning around. It was an old line, worn smooth as a thwart, and he still meant it, and it still worked on her a little, which annoyed her.

“Munro at ten. We should leave by nine.”

“Munro.” He turned the splice in his hands and inspected it, though his eyes had already told him it was fine before his hands finished. “She still got that clock on the wall runs four minutes fast?”

“You could tell her. She’d be glad of the report.”

“Somebody ought to. Woman runs a whole clinic on the wrong time.” He took the pills all at once, a toss and a swallow, like they were an errand he could get out of the way early. Bosun lifted his head at the motion in case anything fell. Nothing ever fell. The dog lived on hope and toast crusts.

June went back in and washed the pan and packed her purse with the folder. The folder was a thing she hated and kept perfect. Appointment letters, the list of his medications printed in her own hand, the notes she made at the kitchen table on nights she couldn’t sleep, dated, small, factual. Sept 14, called the wrench a fish. Laughed it off. Sept 22, asked twice in an hour if Kate was coming Sat. She’d started the notes in the winter because the clinic told her to, and she kept them the way she kept the boats’ books, clean columns, no opinions. Opinions didn’t balance.

Getting him out of the house had become its own small seamanship, though not because he fought it. He’d have gone to Bridgewater in his splicing clothes, happy as Larry, and considered himself the best-dressed man in the building. She laid the good flannel shirt across the foot of the bed and said nothing about it, and he came in from the porch and found it and put it on and said nothing about it either, and that was the treaty, renewed without ceremony every clinic morning. There were a dozen such treaties now, and not one of them had ever been spoken aloud, and June sometimes thought that was the truest description of the year there was: a marriage running on agreements neither party would admit to having made. The shaving was hers to start and his to finish. The truck keys lived in her coat now, and he’d stopped reaching for the hook by the door where they’d hung for thirty years, and neither of them had ever said a word about the hook. You built the treaties one at a time, quietly, as the need for each arrived, and you took care never to let him catch you drafting one, because the drafting was the wound, not the treaty.

Bosun did his tragedy at the door, the full performance, ears flattened, the sigh, the collapse onto the mat like a dog who’d been promised the sea and given linoleum.

“Mind the house,” Warren told him. “Anybody comes about money, bite them.”

They took the truck. Warren rode with his window cracked, his elbow out, and read the shore the whole way up the highway the way other men read a paper. Frank Rhodenizer had his wood in already, split and stacked with the ends painted, and Warren looked at it going past and said October had teeth this year, watch, because Frank’s knees knew before Environment Canada did. The Publicovers hadn’t hauled their floats yet, and he had an opinion about that too, delivered to the windshield, a man letting his gear ride this late was a man telling the sea he didn’t respect it, and the sea kept accounts. Somebody had a new roof half on and Warren gave the workmanship a long look and kept his verdict to himself, which was itself a verdict. Forty years she’d ridden this road beside a man who couldn’t pass a wharf without an opinion, and the opinions still came, sound as ever, and she’d stopped being able to tell whether it comforted her or broke her heart that this, of everything, was what held. Both. It was always both now. She was learning to make room in one chest for both, the way you learned to carry two full buckets and not spill either, by not looking directly at what you were doing.

The fog came apart as the road climbed away from the water, and by the time they came down into Bridgewater it was a plain bright morning like nothing had ever been hidden anywhere.

The clinic smelled of the same lavender cleaner as always, over something older that the lavender never got. In the waiting room a young woman held a sleeping baby and an old man held a cap on his knee, turning it by the brim, around and around. Warren sat with his legs planted wide and read the fishing report in a newspaper three days old and said, not quietly, “Whoever wrote this has never been wet,” and the old man with the cap laughed, and the two of them were friends by the time the nurse called Croft.

The old man was a Publicover, it turned out, Lloyd, from Petite Rivière, some manner of cousin to the Publicovers with the floats still in, and inside two minutes he and Warren had located each other on the chart, whose father had fished with whose uncle, which boat, which years, and were away into herring. Whether there was any sense in seining herring the way they went at it now. Warren said the herring had more sense than the effort deserved and Lloyd said his grandson had an electronics package on his boat cost more than Lloyd’s first house, and could find a herring three miles off but couldn’t tell you what the sky meant, and the two of them sat there in the lavender smell shaking their heads together over the state of it, two men in their good shirts, each with a woman beside him holding a folder.

That was the other thing about the clinic. June had noticed it in the spring and couldn’t stop noticing it now. The folders. Every second chair, a folder, held the same way, flat to the chest or squared on the knee, and the women holding them, and now and then a husband holding one with the particular helplessness of a man given paperwork in a crisis. Nobody spoke of the folders. But the woman with the sleeping baby had caught June’s eye over Lloyd’s grandson’s electronics and given her the smallest tired smile in the world, and June had given it back, and that was the whole of it. A freemasonry. You were initiated without consent and you recognized your own.

June’s whole want for the morning fit into one sentence, and she said it to herself in the corridor like a woman saying grace. Let him tell her the truth.

Dr. Munro was small and quick with gray coming in at her temples, and she had a way of talking to Warren first and June second that June was grateful for and that made everything harder. She asked how the fall was going. She asked about sleep. She asked what he’d had for breakfast, easy as a neighbor, and Warren said, “Toast and an argument,” and Munro laughed, and June watched the chart on the desk not get anything true written on it.

“Any trouble with the days? Mixing up appointments, that kind of thing?”

“June keeps the days. I keep everything else.” He said it warm, patting the arm of his chair like it was the gunwale of something. “Forty years she’s kept the books and I haven’t been arrested once.”

“Warren.” June kept her voice level. “Tell her about the stove.”

“The stove,” he said.

“The twenty-eighth. The burner.”

“A man leaves a burner on one time in sixty years, they convene a tribunal.” He smiled when he said it. The smile was the thing. It arrived exactly where it used to arrive, at the same angle, with the same crease, and it did what it had always done to a room, and June sat there watching the smile do its work and thought, not for the first time, that she was the only person alive who could see it was working harder than it used to.

Munro made a small note. “I’m going to say three words, Warren, and ask you to remember them for me. Apple. Table. Penny.”

“Apple, table, penny,” he said. “You want them back now or is this a layaway?”

“Layaway.” She took him through the rest of it, the numbers backward from a hundred by sevens, and he got to seventy-nine and then said, “Sixty,” and then caught something in her face and said, “Well, you take off the tax,” and June laughed before she could stop herself, one syllable, and hated herself for it, because he heard the laugh and it fed him, and he coasted on it right past the question. Munro asked him to draw a clock showing ten past eleven. He drew the circle in one clean stroke. He put the numbers in and they crowded up the right-hand side like passengers on a listing boat, and he looked at what his hand had done and June watched him look at it. His face didn’t change. He set the pen down square on the paper, lining it up with the edge, taking his time about it.

“Clock’s fast anyway,” he said. “That one on your wall’s four minutes out.”

“It is,” said Munro. “I keep meaning to fix it. What were those three words?”

The pause was small. If you didn’t love him you’d have missed it.

“Apple,” he said. Then, easily, “and the rest of the groceries. You’d remember them too if they were worth keeping.”

“Table and penny,” said Munro, no weight on it at all, and wrote.

In the truck he put his seatbelt on and looked straight out the windshield and said nothing. June pulled out of the lot and drove. She knew this silence. It wasn’t at her, or it was, or it was at Munro, or the clock, or the pen he’d set down so square. It filled the cab like weather. Out past the Superstore, past the car lots, the road bent toward home, and she let the silence sit because she’d learned that picking it up only gave it something to push against.

They stopped at the light by the bridge, the long one, and a school bus crossed in front of them full of children going somewhere in the middle of a Tuesday morning, field trip faces at every window, and Warren watched them go by and something eased in him a degree, the way a child going by will ease a man who has raised his own, and June felt the temperature in the cab come up a notch and risked nothing, said nothing, kept her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the light.

“She writes everything down,” he said at last, at the Italy Cross turn.

“So do I.”

“I know you do.” He said it without anything in it she could answer, and then, after a mile, in a different voice, lower, to the window: “My mother went this way. Did I ever tell you.” He had. Three times this fall, and each time it cost him something to offer and her something to receive, and each time she took it new. “At the end she called me by my father’s name. Whole last winter. And I used to correct her, God forgive me, I’d say Ma, it’s Warren, it’s your Warren, like it mattered to the price of fish which of us she was glad to see.” He turned the words over the way he turned a splice. “It didn’t matter. I know that now. She was glad. That was the whole of the message and I kept quarrelling with the postmark.”

June drove. There was a thing trying to be said in the cab and she would not reach for it, because reaching was the wound, and she let it come at its own speed or not at all.

“Anyway,” Warren said, and the door of it closed as quiet as it had opened, “she was glad.”

Then the road came down the long hill and the water opened up on the right, pewter under the last of the fog, the islands sitting out there in it, and she watched it happen, as it always did. His shoulders came down. His hand came off his knee and settled on the door where the window was open, and the smell of the shore came into the truck, weed and salt and diesel from somewhere, and whatever had been sitting in the cab with them got out.

“Mackerel’ll be schooled up off the point,” he said. “Water like that.”

“You think.”

“I know.” And he did. Whatever else went, that stayed. He could read that water the way she read a bank statement, at a glance, to the penny.

They stopped at the wharf because they always stopped at the wharf. The Lady June sat up on her cradle in the yard, hauled out three weeks now, her hull the same green Warren had painted her every spring since before Danny was born, and Warren walked the length of her with his hand out, touching her the way you’d touch a horse you were walking past, so she’d know you.

Pearl had the canteen window open even though the season for tourists was done, because Pearl’s position was that coffee had no season. She leaned on the sill with her forearms, watching them come.

“Warren Croft,” she said. “What’d you steal off me this week?”

“Nothing you’d miss.”

“My good filleting knife walked off this wharf in June and I know where it lives now.”

“That knife followed me home,” Warren said. “I’ve fed it. It’s mine under the law.”

“The law.” Pearl set two coffees on the sill without being asked, and a heel of bread on the boards for Bosun, who took it away under the canteen steps to interrogate it. “How was town?”

“Clock’s still fast at the clinic,” Warren said, and took his coffee down the wharf to where Murray Selig was doing something to a trap that clearly required an audience.

Murray had a dozen traps up on the wharf for mending and had got himself into an argument with one of them. June could follow the whole proceeding from the canteen without hearing a word of it. Murray demonstrating the door that wouldn’t sit. Warren setting his coffee on the next trap, looking at the door for approximately one second, and then turning the trap entirely around and showing Murray the runner underneath, where the actual trouble lived, because the trouble was never where a man was looking or he’d have fixed it. Murray’s hands going to his hips. Warren already mending it, the twine needle appearing out of his coat pocket where a twine needle had lived for forty years, his hands going about the little surgery while his mouth, June had no doubt at all, delivered the sermon that came free with the repair.

“He’ll charge him for that,” Pearl said, watching too. “In beer. Come November.”

“He keeps accounts.”

“He’s married to the accountant.”

Pearl looked at June. Pearl had known her since school, and there were things they didn’t have to do out loud.

“Long morning,” Pearl said.

“Average,” said June.

“Mm.” Pearl topped up June’s cup before there was room for it. “Shirley Corkum’s after telling everyone her squares are what sold out first at Thanksgiving. I want you to know what I’m living with.”

“You could take it up with the church.”

“I could take it up with Shirley.” Pearl looked down the wharf to where Warren stood over Murray’s trap, pointing at something, and Murray was laughing, and the fog was gone off the water entirely now, and the whole cove sat there shining like October was a thing that would hold. “He looks good,” Pearl said, in a different voice, the one she kept underneath.

“He is good,” June said. “Most days he’s good.”

“And the other days?”

“The other days he’s still better company than most men on their best.”

Pearl considered that, and evidently found it within tolerance, and topped up June’s cup again without being asked: Pearl’s whole liturgy of love, performed hourly, denied under questioning.

She drank her coffee and watched her husband tell Murray Selig what was wrong with his trap, his hands moving, the water bright behind him, and she filed the morning where she filed all of them now. In the folder. Clean columns. No opinions. Sept 30. Lost table and penny. Kept everything that matters. Kept the smile.

The opinions didn’t balance. She wrote them anyway, some nights, on the backs of things, and burned them in the stove.