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 harbour both, and after thirty-eight 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 grey 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 the way he always came in, 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-eight 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.”
“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 the way he did, 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 grey 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, which was 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 savoury 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 kilometres 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 four years, and would go on letting it go, and did not yet know how few Sundays were in it.
After supper he did the thing he did, which was fall 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-eight 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 the way that 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 only the small pink one for his blood pressure then, 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.