Take care of yourself, Joe.

All my love,

Lucy

There was a woman, of course, as Lucy guessed-not the one who made the bracelets, a widow who kept a little shop next door to one of the town’s three bad bars, but her oldest girl, Michelle: a divorced woman in her forties with hair the color of dry tobacco, a seven-year-old daughter, and a sad but warming smile. Jobs outside the plant were scarce but Michelle had a good one, working for LeMaitre’s little newspaper, laying type and editing the classifieds, which, in a town where everything was theoretically for sale if a catch was light, took up ninety percent of its pages. For some time, the better part of a year, we took care of one another, doing all the small things and exchanging all the customary comforts, and if I never told her I loved her, this seemed at the time a small thing, a minor lack. About her ex-husband, Naomi’s father, Michelle spoke not one single word in all the time I knew her.

The day I received the letter from Lucy began at 5:00 A.M., me and half a dozen other lumpers standing around the wharf in our oilskins and boots in the predawn cold, waiting for the plant crew to show and smoking first cigarettes; once the work started, it would be another three hours before any of us could smoke again. The High Chaparral was in, fifty feet of rust and stink, sitting low in the oily water, its belly fat with fish.

When the plant whistle blew, Marcel came down to where we were standing.

“The usual shares, gents,” he announced, and lit a smoke of his own. “Three dollars a thousand. Deckman gets a buck. Joe and Lewis in the hold, Larry works the jilson. Let’s be quick now, get this done by noon.”

We stepped aboard and lifted the hatch, careful not to leave it upside down-bad luck for certain-then descended the rattling aluminum ladder into the hold, a clammy alley running the length of the ship, with four pens on either side and a big one across the stern, all of it lighted only by the fretted glare of a couple of bare bulbs in metal cages. In the pens, behind pieces of plywood nailed in place, lay seventy thousand pounds of cod, blackbacks, and pollock, cocooned in ice.

Larry yelled down through the hatch when the jilson was set: “Flats first!” he said, meaning cod.

We moved to the forward pen, used an ice shaver to jimmy loose the pen boards, and ice and fish poured out. I filled my basket and hooked it to the jilson, gave it a yank.

“Yuuuuup!”

Away it went, snatched from the hold and out over the wharf, where Larry guided it into the hopper; from there it would be wheeled up to the long tables of the plant, gutted and filleted, the meat then packed again in ice and loaded on trucks to carry it to Boston or New York or Montreal. The trick was to keep the baskets coming, so that by the time Larry lowered the jilson again, another was ready to go.

For a year I’d worked the tables for wages, or else manned the loading docks. Lumping the hold was harder work, but it paid better: at three bucks for every thousand pounds of fish, split two ways plus a dollar for Larry, we’d walk away with a hundred and five dollars in our pockets, all before lunch.

“Yuuuuup!”

Lewis was Canadian, a lifer, his face red as a slab of steak. We’d worked together a year and had a rhythm down: one of us would step into a pen with a short-handled pitchfork to shovel it out, while the other loaded the jilson, the two of us trading places with every basket to keep the jilson moving.

“Yuuuuup!”

At nine we stopped to smoke. Five pens were empty, including the big one at the stern. Both of us had stripped down to our oilskins and gloves, the sweat steaming off us in the dark hold, the meaty vapors of our bodies mixing with the gunmetal smell of fish and ice. Lewis nudged me with his elbow.

“Drink?”

Lewis passed me his flask. I wiped off the spout, took a sip, and passed it back. Both of us knew not to stop long enough to light a second cigarette. We were better than half done but the last half was always the largest.

“You going out on the Bodie?” he asked me after a minute.

The Chase Bodine had come in a week before; the captain was assembling a crew for a run to the Grand Banks and had offered me a spot.

“Might. Can’t say.”

“Ford’s been hitting.” Lewis took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled, using his pinky to pluck a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. He examined it a moment, like it might be something he needed, before flicking it away. “Everyone says so. There’s at least three thousand in it this time of year. That’s good money.”

“So why don’t you go?”

He laughed out smoke. “Thirty days, a thousand miles out? Gives me the willies just thinking about it. And Ford didn’t offer, either.” He crushed out the last of his cigarette. “Back to work, Joey.”

We sent the last of the fish up to the plant a little after noon, scooped out the rest of the ice and dumped it overboard, and hosed down the hold. It was one o’clock when I walked up to the plant office. Marcel ran his enterprise with a machinelike efficiency, but his office looked like a hurricane had hit it: piles of paper everywhere, file cabinets full to bursting, invoices and shipping orders and punchcards for employees long gone stacked on every surface. One time I’d noticed, held in place between the mounds of paper, a half-full cup of coffee, tipped at a thirty-degree angle and somehow suspended at least six inches above the desktop. It hadn’t spilled a drop.

Marcel removed an envelope of cash from the top drawer and handed it to me: a hundred and five, plus ten more. I held up the extra bill.

“What’s this for?”

He smiled, pleased I’d noticed. “A little bonus. For finishing by noon.”

“We didn’t, Marcel. We only just got done five minutes ago.”

“I put ten in Lewis’s envelope too. I don’t hear him complaining.”

I deposited the envelope in the chest pocket of my slicker. “That’s because Lewis only has nine fingers to count on. You know, this is no way to run a business.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll do as I like.” He leaned back in his chair. “Listen, Joe, I heard Ford Conklin’s offered you a spot on the Bodie. You considering it?”

The truth was, I’d barely thought about it. “Might be. The money’s good. Everybody says Ford’s been doing well.”

Marcel gave a measured nod. “He has. Ford’s put more than a few dollars in my pocket, I’ll say that. But the banks are a haul, Joe. And it’s getting late in the season. I’ll tell you, if it were up to me, I’d say what the hell, go. But Abby, she’s not so hot on the idea.” He paused and looked out the window beyond his desk. It was a sunless day, the seaway and the sky above both gray as slabs of granite. Far off to the north, a pair of tankers plied the water at the crook of the horizon. Twenty thousand deadweight tons of oceangoing steel apiece, though at this distance, they looked no bigger than a couple of tin toys moving through the crosshairs in a carnival shooting gallery. “Anyway,” Marcel said, and rapped his desk, “I just thought I’d tell you. If it makes a difference, I might be having an opening for a foreman in the next couple of weeks. With you the paperwork’s a little funny, of course, but I think we could work something out. And we sure could use you.”

I’m sure my face showed my surprise. “Thanks.”

“Just keep it in mind. And the person you should thank is Abby, because this is really her idea.” He turned to one of the piles, fingering the contents, and produced an envelope. “Before I forget, this came to the house this morning.”

He handed me the letter over his desk, and at once I saw it was from Lucy. With anybody else I might have waited to read it, but not Marcel. He and Abby had taken good care of me, and if my time of exile had a bright spot, it was those two. I took a chair before his desk, its great towers of paper, and read.