The Salt House on the Sound

The ferry from Rockland takes forty minutes if the water is calm, and it took forty minutes that day, so I had no excuse to keep my stomach from dropping. Ten years away, four of them in the Marines, and the last thing I saw before the mainland slid behind us was the same gray sky I'd left under.

My name is Arnie. I'm twenty-eight years old, and until three weeks ago I was a carpenter in Portsmouth doing punch lists on condo conversions and pretending I didn't count the days. The Marines gave me a pattern of habits. The condos gave me a mortgage. I gave both up in the same month, which my mother called impulsive and I called arithmetic.

The island hasn't changed. That's the trouble with islands. Everything mainland moves fast, and then you come back and the church steeple still leans the same three degrees it leaned when you were nine, and the lobster boats are newer versions of the same boats, and the salt smell hits you in the chest like a hand laid flat.

I got off at the dock with two duffel bags and a tool belt I'd already started wearing out of habit, and I walked the mile up to the house.

The house is fine. The house is the least of it.

It's the cannery. My family's run a crab cannery on the north side of the island for three generations, and my grandfather used to say the smell of the cooking floor was the smell of money. He'd have had a heart attack at what I found. The roof over the packing line has a hole you could drive a skiff through. The seawall is down to rubble in two places. The dock heaves when a seagull lands on it. There's a chain on the front gate with a padlock somebody defeated sometime around 2019, if I had to guess by the rust.

My mother, Roz, is in her sixties and has run the place alone since Dad died. She'd been sending me emails for two years that started cheerful and ended around Christmas with things like we may have to let it go. I'd been answering none of them. That's a thing the Marines taught me too, the bad part, the answering-none-of-it part.

I stood at the gate for a while and did the math on the roof. Then I did the math on the seawall. Then I sat down on a crate that used to hold crab and felt like someone who'd left a fire unattended for a decade.

There was a light on in the workshop.

The workshop sits behind the cannery, a long low building my grandfather built from the salvage of two wrecked boats, and there was yellow light coming through the one window that isn't boarded. I hadn't turned any light on. Nobody on the island had a key anymore except my mother, and she was on the mainland dealing with a loan officer, which is how I got here first.

I went in through the side door, quiet, because four years of training doesn't care that the war is over.

He was sitting at the long bench with a lantern and a half-planked hull the size of a bathtub in front of him, and he looked up at me the way you look at a cat that's been coming to your porch for years and you finally catch it at it.

"Arnie," Trent said.

Trent is twenty-nine now. When I left he was nineteen and already the best boatwright on the coast, which he told everyone, and we'd grown up racing skiffs and then, for about eight months that I've never managed to explain to anyone, doing more than racing skiffs. He ended it by leaving for a yard in Belfast with no warning and letting me find out from his cousin. Then I enlisted, and the two events got folded together in my head into one big door closing.

"Trent," I said. "You're squatting in my grandfather's shop."

"I'm not squatting. I'm working."

"You're living in a building my family owns."

"I fixed the roof on it three years ago," he said, and pointed the little plane in his hand at the ceiling, which was indeed new. "Nobody paid me. Nobody was coming. Your mother knows I'm here, by the way."

"She does not."

"Ask her." He set the plane down and stood, and I noticed the cane before I noticed anything else, leaning against the bench. He used it to take a step, not for show. "IED outside Kandahar, four years ago. You can ask me about it or not ask me about it, either one is fine, but don't stare at the cane."

I hadn't been staring. I'd been staring. I dragged my eyes up to his face.

"What are you building," I said, which was not any of the things I'd walked in here to say.

"Rebuild for a lobsterman off Vinalhaven. Took his stern in." He looked at me, and he didn't do it for a long dramatic time, he just looked the way Trent always looked, like he was doing arithmetic on you and had already gotten the answer. "You're here for good, or you're here to sell."

"I'm here to figure out if there's anything worth saving."

"There's everything worth saving," he said. "The building's the easy part."

* * *

We went at each other for two hours. I want to be fair about how it went, because it didn't go well for a while. He told me the seawall numbers off the top of his head. He told me which pilings were rotten and which were just ugly. He told me my mother had been paying him in crab meat for three years of free advice, which, fine, is a thing my mother would do.

"The dock is a write-off," he said. "The seawall needs about six grand in stone and a week of good tides. The roof over the packing line is the big one."

"I know how to frame a roof."

"I know you know how to frame a roof. You framed the Hendersons' porch the summer you were sixteen and I heard about it for a year."

"You heard about it?"

"Small island," he said, and went back to his hull, which ended the conversation in the way he's always been able to end a conversation.

Here's where I admit the strangeness out loud. A man I haven't spoken to in ten years is living in my family's shop. I found him there with a lantern and my grandfather's chisels. Every reasonable version of the next hour ends with the county sheriff. But it was going dark, and the ferry was done for the day, and the house has four empty bedrooms and no heat I'd turned on yet.

"I'm going to be here a while," I said. "Months, probably. The whole thing."

"Okay."

"I don't have a plan that involves you."

"I have a plan that involves me," he said. "I keep the shop. You take the house. If you want hands for the cannery work, I'm the best carpenter on this island, and the second best is eighty-one."

"That's not a joke, is it. About Walt."

"Walt is eighty-one."

I stood there with my hands in my pockets doing the thing where you price labor in your head. And the honest math was that I needed him. The other math, the one about why my stomach was doing something other than arithmetic, I put off until later, the way I do.

"Room and board," I said. "You help with the cannery. We settle it fair, rates on paper, and we write down what you're owed for the shop roof while we're at it. I'm not running this on vibes."

"Good," he said. "Vibes is how this island got into trouble."

"I mean it, everything settled first. Money's money."

"I know," he said. "That's the first sane thing you've said."

* * *

That night we ate in the workshop, because the house has no food in it and the shop has a two-burner camp stove and a pot, and Trent makes a chowder that he claims is his grandmother's and which I suspect is just salt pork, potatoes, and patience. We ate off the bench, pushed the hull aside.

He talked. That was the surprising part. I'd remembered him like someone who made you pull every word out with pliers, but ten years and a bad leg had loosened something. He told me about the yard in Belfast, about learning to laminate stems, about the day the medic told him he'd walk but not work, and how he'd gone back to work that same winter out of spite.

"Spite's a good fuel," I said.

"It's the only one that doesn't run out."

I told him about the condos. He laughed at the right parts. Somewhere in the middle of it he said, "You never answered a single email, you know. She showed me every one of them."

"I didn't know what to say."

"You could have said anything. Silence reads worse than anything."

I looked at the lantern instead of him. "Yeah. I've learned that the expensive way."

He put his spoon down and studied his hands, and then he said, quiet, "I should have told you I was leaving. That's mine to carry. I've known it for ten years and I've never once said it out loud, so there."

The lantern hissed. Somewhere out past the seawall the water did what water does at night, which is remind you how big things are.

"Well," I said. "Okay. Thank you for saying it."

"That's all you've got?"

"I'm working on more," I said. "Give me a few days."

He nodded, like that was a fair contract, and got up to light the shop stove for the night, moving with the cane and without hurry. I washed the pot at the yard tap and thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that the building might be the easy part after all.

The roof over the packing line was exactly as bad as Trent had promised, which was satisfying in a grim way, because I like being right and miserable about it. We started on a Tuesday. By Thursday we had the old purlins down and the scrap burning in a barrel, and by Friday we were hauling new rafters up a ladder two at a time, and the cannery, which has no air conditioning and no shame, settled into one of those June heats that makes the whole island smell like low tide.

I took off my shirt around ten. This was a practical decision, heat being heat, and not a decision with an audience in mind. But Trent was three rungs below me on the ladder holding the board steady, and when I reached up for the next rafter my whole torso was about eight inches from his face, and he did not look away, and neither did I, and then he said, "You're crowding the line," and I said, "You're crowding my ladder," and we both climbed down and got water and did not talk about it.

He was nineteen the last summer I saw him shirtless, and he's broader through the shoulders and slower getting up off his knees, and I know the exact mechanics of why, and none of that made it easier to watch him wipe his forehead with his forearm. His leg is bad. He works around it, plans every lift so he never has to kneel twice, and there's a competence to it that I found, over the course of that Friday, frankly distracting.

"Stop staring at my knee," he said.

"I'm staring at your rigging. Your rope tension is wrong."

"My rope tension is fine and you've been staring at me since the purlins."

"I've been supervising," I said. "It's my cannery."

"It's a bank's cannery with your last name on it," he said, and handed me the next board, and our hands touched for about a second longer than a handoff requires, and I put the board down before I did something with it.

By four the sky over the sound had gone the color of a bruise. I've been around enough weather to know that particular green-gray, and Trent took one look off the roof and said, "Down. Now. This one's got balls!"

We got the tarps weighted and the tools in the shop and we were maybe forty seconds too slow about it. The storm came off the water like it had a grudge. Rain so hard it bounced, wind that took the yard gate and put it in Walt Jr.'s field two properties over, and us in the old boat barn with the big sliding door rattling in its track because the latch is stripped and has been for a very long time.

The barn is old growth spruce, dark, dry, and it has a smell that a decade hasn't changed. Pine tar, oil, old salt. We stood there dripping, and the storm slammed the roof like it was owed money, and Trent started laughing.

"What?"

"You," he said. "You used to be scared of thunder."