“Christ sakes Benjoy, I don’t know how you stand it.” Mick’s socks steamed in the woodstove oven. He shook the Bacardi bottle, held it up to the kerosene lamp, just to be sure, then tossed it in with the kindling and old newspapers.

Bal took it out and put it in the cardboard box his Pops had marked sea glass.

“You oughta get a clock out here, Bal,” said Mick. “Must be almost midnight.”

“Nine o’clock,” I told him.

“It’s what I was talking about. Couple of days out here and a fellas turned right ass over tea-kettle. But Jeez, huh, what a fuckin’ day.”

We’d left the island in the bitter chill before dawn to arrive on Black Island for a sunrise start.

Bal anchored the outboard in the lee of the quarry wharf. The jumble of weed hung granite blocks looked ancient and monumental in the grey light, like we’d run across more than water coming across the channel. Bal paddled the punt into the beach standing up. I helped him haul it up out of the tide’s reach. Mick didn’t wait. I listened to him thrash off through the blow-downs, cursing and snapping branches.

“Which way you gonna hunt?” Bal asked.

We listened to Mick make his way north. “He’s headed up to the meadows there by the swamp,” I said. “You want go east by the old apple orchard?”

Bal nodded.

“Guess I’ll go south,” I said.

Bal grinned.

The southern end of Black rises steadily; past the heaps of quarry tailings, past the stacked block along the remnants of the little rail system, through a line of moss hung apple trees where someone kept a small orchard among the cellar holes and scatter of brick and glass that marked the little town. I saw a few does and a couple little bucks no bigger than dogs. After a while I got tired of weaving through the tangles and blowdowns and headed towards more open going along the shore. I sat on a rock and watched the northwest wind beat down the seas coming in from the storm offshore. The clouds broke from time to time and scatters of light picked out whitecaps and rollers like someone highlighting an ancient text. I never saw a deer there though they’d been busy; nibbling the young spruce to sculpted bonsai.

After a time I went back into the forest and hunkered down along the edge of a small clearing. The lower branches were hung with lichen and the clearing was thick with moss. I only knew time had passed by the chill settling and shadows deepening.

The plan was to meet up at the edge of dark back in the little cove by the tumble down granite blocks of the old quarry wharf. It was still a couple of hours till moonrise and the water was velvet black in the shadows under the huge square cut stone blocks of the wharf.

Bal was back already, sunk deep in his winter coat, half asleep.

We passed the bottle and listened for Mick.

He came back along the rough trail that followed the old railway line along the shore where they hauled the cut stone down to the waiting schooners. He wasn’t wasting the breath to curse now, just plowing through the tangles when he came to them, snapping branches and grunting with the effort of it.

“Sounds like a herd,” I said.

Bal giggled and flicked on his lantern.

Mick blinked in the sudden glare, scratched a crusty trail of blood off one cheek and picked brambles out of his hair.

“Who won?” I asked.

“Fuckin’ forest,” he muttered, “Full of trees and not one fuckin’ deer. If that bottle’s empty we better hoot and drive her for home.”

He heaved himself out of the rocker, paced to the dark window and pressed his nose against the glass.

“Dark ain’t it. I mean, not even one fuckin’ light out there,” he said. “I don’t know how you fuckin’ stand it.”

“Remember when we used to watch the moonlight at night down at the shore?” said Bal.

“Like a silver highway,” I said.

“Oh, don’t,” said Mick without turning. “But what the fuck, let’s go down to the Pool and check the boat. Something to do anyway. When the hell you going to get a four-wheeler anyway. This walking shit’ll kill you.”

We walked down to the shore and stood by the punt. Mick checked her anchor, settled the oars under the thwart, kicked a scatter of beach stone into the waves. The tide was just turning. The wind just a whisper. We could hear the tide slap against the hull of the few punts left out on the moorings as they swung in the current and the surge making further out on the ledges between the islands but we couldn’t see a hand in front of our face except where it blacked out a star or two.

“Jaysus,” said Mick. “It’s…”

We stood as in front of a doorway. Alone in an immensity framed in silence. Surveying a landscape without bearings or reference. Alone on a single point so that we might be connected to any place, any time. Alone with all of space towering above us and below only the constant shift of stone and water and branch.

We turned without speaking and followed the hill up to the cabin. We were halfway through the village before we could see the candle Bal left in the window.

“I am some fucking glad to see that candle,” said Mick. “We gotta get you a TV out here Benjoy. I don’t see how you can stand it.”

The tide streams out of the harbor Mick’s aboard the skiff Traps stacked higher’n his head I’m 15 feet above Leaning over the edge of the wharf Mick picks traps off the pile Smooth as a dancer he bends, rises, pirouettes, arms outstretched, lets 80 pounds of wet, weed slimed oak fly up to me. I catch each trap then set them in their rows to dry.

The old men watch silently, eye the hook, the hoist, the block and tackle. They know the slow and steady, measured way to work. I read the look: Have a care, young fellas. Mickey wrings out his gloves, taps a cigarette out of the pack, lights and draws. “What the fuck, we ain’t got all day Ben.”

“Benjoy, what are you fellas doing alongside the wharf? Beautiful day like today why I figured you’d be offshore railing ‘em.”

I blinked up into the snow that was changing to rain. The Harbor had a good lee in a nor’easter; tucked behind the ridge of rough granite and spruce that ran out to the lighthouse. The spatter of cold rain and the swell carried in by the flood tide were the only clues to the mess outside. Even so, George stayed safely back from the edge of the wharf, under cover of the bait shed.

We hadn’t been out in a month, no one had, what with a series of storms racing one after the other from the west and not a day between them. The six-pack in the dented twelve-quart bucket took our last folding money along with the fifty-three cents we dug out from under the seat in the truck.

“She ran a little rough this morning when we put bait aboard. Mick’s,” I shrugged and nodded toward the open hatch in the bulkhead.

A wrench flew out of the cabin and clattered off the stern.

“Tinkering?” suggested George. I heard his boots shuffle forward half a step on the worn planks then a gust above us drove down a slant of sleety rain and the boots shuffled back.

“Benjoy, hand me over that pair of vice grips outa my toolbox. Last time anyone had the carburetor offen this engine they was setting gear for dinosaurs.”

I dug through the rusty collection jumbled in a blue five-gallon bucket, found a pair of vice-grips that weren’t completely frozen with rust and passed them through the hatch. “You need a hand?”

“No, got two and can’t find room for them. Christ, it’s tightern’ the bark on a tree down here. Who’s that out there talking?”

“George.”

“Figures,” he muttered. “We’ll have the whole goddam board of selectmen down here.”

There was a rattle, clink, and scrape of buckets, empties, and tools shifting, the clatter that must have been the camp stove and set of cooking pots finding a new location and, a grunt as he settled in for another round.

“I dunno Benjoy.” The way George’s voice went up I knew he must be going up on the balls of his feet and back down again. Hands jammed in the pockets of his red and black check wool coat, eyes bright behind his glasses, flaps securely down on his blaze orange hunting cap. “Seems a pair of vice grips and repair go together about as well as onion gravy and apple pie. You remember back when you had that outboard that wouldn’t go Mickey?”

“Fuck sakes George which one was that? The old man says they go for no reason and stop for no reason. Ain’t that the truth.”

“You musta been ten, eleven that year. Let me see, it was the summer I was up to Bangor for my back, must been 19 and 73, no, that was the year my shoulder gave me all kinds of hell. Could have been ’74. No, that was the year I shot that 14-point buck way to hell and gone back in the old quarry on Black Island and liked to give myself a heart attack hauling him out.”

A gull perched on the stern and eyed the bait buckets. A gust of wind swung the fleet of lobster boats on their moorings. A flock of old squaws, pecking for mussels and snails, squabbled under the pilings.

“Sometimes,” Mick muttered. “Sometimes, those birds make more kinda sense than the gabbing that goes on up there.”

“You know, it must have been the summer of ’71. You had that old flat-bottomed MFG and a twenty-five horse Evinrude.”

“Took gear clear out to Duck Island,” said Mick. “ I was nine. They said where you taking those traps? Duck Island? Laughed. So that’s just what I did.”

“He was in the Pool down to the island just a cranking her over and over. Kept pulling until the handle broke off the starter rope. Took the cover off and wrapped what rope was left around the cylinder and cranked on that until he wore that to a frazzle too. He stood there in the stern, spinning around and around in the tide, holding that rope. Then he picks up the oar. Eight-footer. Solid oak.”

“If I could only brace my feet on something and get a grip on this little fucker.” Mick grunted. The Mister Chris listed.

There was a crack, a stumbling thud, and then silence.

Mick ducked out through the bulkhead, the vice grips in one hand, the other dripping blood. He walked to the stern and heaved the vice grips out into the mist and uneasy grey water. He stood there a moment, bareheaded, T-shirt streaked with rust and blood and rain, like he was waiting to hear the splash the way you might drop a pebble down a well and listen to know the bottom.

He walked back without saying a word. Pulled a beer from the bucket, popped the top and drank it, threw the empty up on the wharf, took out two more, tossed one to me and started his second.

I glanced at the mismatched pair of oars lashed to the side of the shelter back.

Mick laughed. “Didn’t help any then, besides there ain’t room enough down there to swing one enough to feel good about it. You know,” he called up to George. “The old man come by at that afternoon. Said he seen my skiff drifted in along the shore of the Inner Pool when the tide floated us high enough so he could see over the bar. I was just sitting there. He threw me a line and towed me home. ‘Bout half way over I noticed the friggin’ gas line had come off the tank. Hooked her back up, one crank, and she’s running like nothing happened. I ran up along side the old man. He didn’t say nothing, just untied the line and off I went. Hauled all my gear that day, didn’t get into the wharf to sell until after dark. The old man was right there, painting buoys. Only thing he said was, ‘Extra pair of oars in the shop if you want ‘em’.”

George peered into the mist like he could still see the trajectory of the vice-grips. “You know,” he started. “It seems like you mighta…”

“Seems like if you’re going to lighten your toolbox, vice-grips are a good place to start,” said Morris.

“Jeezum crow, how long you been there Morris, I swear you’re the only man I know can creep in hipboots.

“Long enough,” said Morris. “No boats out today. I’m going to the house for dinner, you boys want to ride with me we can stop by Lyford’s shop. If you can’t find the part you need there it’s only because you ain’t dug deep enough.”

“You oughta get that looked at,” said George.

Mick held up his hand like he’d just noticed it. The slush on the deck was red where he was standing. He found a bit of rag from the mess on the bulkhead and wrapped that around it. “It’ll heal, “ he said. “Wish we could get the engine to grow a new carburetor though.”

Winter dazzle on the snow, a half-gallon of rum on the seat between us, Just us in the pickup and an empty ice-bound lake, three miles of ice between the mountains, free from lines and limits, spinning from shore to shore, from end to end and back again.

“Cold enough for you?”

Mick pulled alongside me and rolled the driver’s side window down just a touch. His breath frosted the glass and, between my hat jammed down over my ears, the engine’s rough idle, and the crunch of ice under the truck’s tires through the icy ruts of the Lighthouse Road, I could barely hear him.

He rolled the window down the rest of the way and leaned an elbow out like it was summer again while he popped a fresh beer. The snowdrift in the bed of the truck was peppered with empties. He tipped this one back and finished it in one long swallow.

“Anti-freeze,” he shook the bottle to make sure it was empty, belched and tossed it to join the others. “I come by your place. Crissake, Benjoy, the hell you doing out here?”

“Walking.”

“Do what? Get in here ‘for we both freeze to death.”

The road ran through a thicker patch of spruce ahead and the shadows loomed out over the crusted drifts of old snow. Three- thirty and the day already edged impatiently toward evening. January afternoons make you feel like you’re too late before you even get started.

“I come by your place,” he said. “What a mess. Bit of a thaw and you got a lake on your doorstep. How’d you get out? Must be five hundred gallons puddled up in front of your door. I told the old man how you drilled holes in the floor to let it drain out the first time. Didn’t he laugh.”

“Came out the window on the south end. Fifty dollars a month.” I shrugged.

“They oughta pay you, climbing out windows and up that ladder to bed. Wonder you ain’t broke your neck.”

Mick belched again and opened two beers. He propped one between his legs and handed the other to where he figured I ought to be, in the passenger’s seat. I walked around, shoved aside balls of twine, mesh needles, and a hammer, took my seat and snagged my beer.

“Jaysus, old son, you can’t walk, I’m half-froze just looking at you.” Mick lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last one and idled along the back roads to Seawall where we could look out to the outer islands. Aside from the rafts of eider ducks and old squaws paddling just beyond the breakers, the sea was empty.

“My mother says the old man just about has a groove wore out in the cement down cellar in his workshop,” Mick said.

I thought about my walk to the lighthouse. Our loop of road from the wharf to Seawall, through Town to Echo Lake, out the lighthouse road and back down to the wharf again. “We all got our grooves,” I said.

Mick put her in gear and headed through Town in the fading light. Besides the bank, Sawyers’ Market, and the hardware store the rest were empty and dark.

We were the only truck in the parking lot by the pumping station. The ice was dotted with clusters of fish houses and trucks.

“Jimmy Crow ordered a fish house last year,” said Mick. “Had bunks and a stove, heater, the whole nine fuckin’ yards, even had carpet on the goddamn floor. Said it was bettern’ his trailer, for fuck’s sake. Had a generator and ran a TV. Said if he parked her just right he could step out of the house into the truck and hoof her over to the fish house and never get out of his slippers.”

“Must be a long winter, him and Emma in that trailer. It was me, I’d be looking for a quick getaway too.”

Mick cleared a space to look out where the windshield had fogged over. “Winter’s long no matter who you got to bunk with,” he said. “When I was a kid and fall fishing was over, the old man took me out to in his boat to bring my traps in. Sad as hell. Couldn’t stand being cooped up in school, couldn’t stand being home. Used to run away to my Gramp’s place every chance I got.”

I thought about him and his sisters in the little house above the Harbor. One road. Track through the snow to the store, post office, the wharf. The wind rising outside. Dickie listening to the weather down in his workshop. Pacing.

“My Grampa used to ice fish, never had a house or nothing, had a big hand auger to drill the holes and they made a fire out on the ice and set around watching for the flags to tip. When I was a kid he took me along. I wouldn’t go near the fire. ’Fraid it’d melt the ice and we’d all go through. Didn’t he laugh.”

“Do you think he’d have a fish house now, like Jimmy?” I asked.

“Nah, he said what the hell they want to go get shut up inside for. They had the fire, stashed their rum in Mason jars in the snow so the Warden wouldn’t see it.” Mick scratched the frost off the side window and opened another beer. “Didn’t they have a helluva time.”

“You know, one time they decided they was going to have a bean pot. Took the big cast iron cooker he used for deer camp and set it in the fire. Fucker held about five gallons of baked beans. It was too hot to handle so they set it off to one side to cool a dite. Come to look for it a while later and there was a hole melted clear through the ice and the whole lot, pot and all, was down to the bottom of the lake.”

The shadows of the fish houses stretched nearly to the shores of the lake. Lights flickered on in some of them.

“‘Bout time for another six-pack,” said Mick.

“It’s a cold one,” said the DJ on the radio. “Ten degrees below the donut.”

“Cold enough for you, Benjoy?” asked Mick.

Frost white March morning, a dark and bitter hour before sunrise, Mick finds me hauling down the East Side. The boats rock once in the foaming rush of his wake hulls touch, soft as a kiss, then settle. Hair tousled, t-shirt rumpled, one boot on, other leans out the cabin hatch, he rips the wrapper off a box of cigars “I’m a father,” he announces. A boy. A son. The next week he buys Old Ern a fifth of rum to steady his hand, another for when the job is done, has him paint Mr Chris across the stern.

The winter Mick rigged the Mr. Chris for dragging scallops lobster were down and gas was up.

“Dragging’s a dirty business.” Dickie was in the next berth in the baitshed filling buckets for the next time out. He let a pitchfork full of redfish drain juice back into the fifty-five gallon drum. “Hard on a boat. Hard on a man. Hard on the bottom. I’d rather pound all day offshore for half a bucket of lobsters than make a mess of my boat with chain drags and break my back shoveling mud and rocks.”

“Easy for him to say,” Mick muttered as we layered salt and herring in the rusty drums. “His house and boat’s paid for. I got rent and twenty percent on my boat loan.”

Father Power had a few lengths of six-inch black steel pipe in the shop. Too much metal for anyone else. Mick had him weld an A-frame to mount on the stern for hoisting the drag. We had a crowd on the wharf watching when they lowered it down to bolt it through the stern.

“Damned if that thing don’t weigh a thousand pounds,” said George.

Old Morris looked her over bow to and then walked down the wharf and checked her out from the stern. “I guess it does bring her bow up a dite,” he said after a while. He took a long drag on his cigarette and spit out a fleck of tobacco. “But I ‘magin you fellas got her figured.”

“That A-frame’ll be some slick for stacking traps days we take gear off shore and she’s sloppy,” said Mick.

“Looks like you fellas lost close on to a foot of freeboard with that weight set so far aft,” Millard said. He spit over the side of the wharf and nodded like he’d just brought up a key point. “Shit,” he said. “She’ll go right ass over tea-kettle you get out in a blow. I was you I’d mount that thing with a quick release so she don’t drag you right down to the bottom. You hear that George? I said, that mess’d drag them. Hah.”

“When’s the last time you went out in anything but up and down the driveway in that old Chevy of yours?” Mick put a length of pipe on the end of the wrench and cranked the bolts as tight as they’d go.

Days we dragged, Mick ran the boat on the tows and the winch when it was time to haul back and see what we’d scraped up. I was in the stern to catch the four-foot chain bag, hold it steady in the pitching seas above the sorting table, and tug on a rope to open the bottom and dump our catch.

We towed the lee sides of the island days it wasn’t fit to haul lobster traps offshore. I sorted, shoveled off the mess with a battered snow shovel, and shucked out the scallops. We towed the rocky spots where no one else wanted to run the risk of getting hung down on the hard bottom. Every now and then she’d fetch up hard, the cable would snap taut and we’d be dragged backwards, white water slopping up over the stern and onto the platform. When it got dark Mick put the spot light on the stern and we kept at it until the lights of the last boats out turned toward the harbor and the chatter on the radio faded to nothing but the crackle of static.

Old Morris waited on the float at the end of the wharf. Frayed warp in one hand for us to tie up with and his cigarette in the other. Old blue cap just 10 degrees off of straight ahead and his red and black checked woolen coat buttoned up tight under his chin.

“Helluva way to make a living ain’t it,” he said when the scallop meats didn’t come half-way up the bucket.

“I guess you fellas done alright today,” when it was closer to full.

“Jeez Mick, railing ’em ain’t you.” Buddy smoothed the sleeves of his leather jacket, put one boot up on the bollard and a hand on his hip. “I seen you towing the ledges. Must be hard on your stern all that going backwards?” He grinned. “What’d we have the other day Morris? Seventy-five pounds? More’n three buckets anyway and in before dark.” He leaned over the edge of the wharf and put one hand up to cut the glare from the bare bulb Morris had hanging above the scales. He straightened, hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets and shook his head. “I hired on Old Ern just so’s we could get ’em all shucked out without us being aboard half the night. Enough of a load so the stern’s down and we have to keep the scupper plugs in.”

Mick shrugged. “Fuckin scallops,” he said. “We’re only going out between lobstering. Just sumpthin’ to do, ain’t that right, Benjoy?”

“Something to do,” I echoed.

Buddy whistled as he walked down the wharf.

“Coast Guard sent a fella down here last week,” said Morris like he just remembered. “Wondered had I noticed any, ‘significantly large hauls of scallops this month’.” Said it just like that. He gave our bucket a shake and grinned. “Guess they ain’t after you fellas. Seems they figure someone’s towing in the cable zones. I told ’em catch goes up and the catch goes down. Good name for that boy’s boat, Risky Business.”

In the parking lot Buddy revved his new Chevy.

Morris passed back our bucket and squinted up to read the gas pump. “Been what, seven, eight years since the cable went in. Rest of the bottom’s been towed to hell. They sent a team to inspect the casing last summer, said you wouldn’t believe the scallops. That thick.”

It was an iron-grey day a week later. The waves that sloshed up over the cheeserind froze to a thick slush on the deck. The wind was icy and fierce out of the nor’west. Between the islands the seas swept steep and sharp. We were the only boat out.

We towed here. Hauled ass and towed there. Took off for another spot, dropped the drag and did a quick tow. All kinds of bone jarring pounding and all for about the same kind of nothing.

Mickey eyed the horizon took out a chart, scratched his head, settled his cap firmly, and took off on a new heading. We dropped the drag and towed in a long straight line. When we hauled back the drag was full. Right level full of scallops.

I dumped the drag, retied the bottom and held it out over the stern watching while Mick let the cable slip and cracked on the throttle so the cable hissed out through the block overhead as the drag settled and vanished in the dark water. I was busy with the sorting when the Mr. Chris fetched up hard. Mick idled back, stepped out of the wheelhouse, scanned the horizon and set the winch to take back.

We saw a long loop of thick braided cable before we saw the drag.

“Oh shit,” said Mick.

We hauled the cable off the drag, dumped the drag on the stern and took off. Spray burst out from under the bows and the exhaust pipe glowed cherry red where it ran through the cabin. Mick didn’t slack off the throttle until we were a good 20 miles away, safe in under the lee of Little Gotts

“You think?” asked Mick.

“It was old and frayed and rusted. If it was that cable it would have been insulated. Wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Mick. “It would have had some casing, you heard Morris the other day. Must have just been some old junk on the bottom. We was close but no way it was that cable.”

We’d towed for an hour and had the drag up and me in the stern ready to let it go again when the Warden’s boat hailed us.

There were two of them in the outboard. Dark green hull and green uniforms and faces bright red from the wind coming across the bay in an open boat. They wore their service revolvers with the flaps undone. I could see the rifles in scabbards clamped to the console.

They bumped alongside at the same time Mick let the drag down. My hands were on the rail when the drag dropped. A four foot steel bar about an inch thick with all the weight of a bag of chains behind it landed on one finger.

I strained to lift the drag and got my finger out. I couldn’t feel my finger and I was pretty sure I liked it that way. I let the glove freeze solid on my hand.

One of them came aboard while the other stayed behind flexing his fingers in his thin black gloves and walking in place. Neither of them said a word. The one aboard us kicked our half-bucket of scallop meats and tipped it side to side like he expected to find something major hidden under a few inches of scallop meats. He looked up forward and leaned into the cabin. He held up one of the damp, mildewed life jackets still in its plastic wrappers.

“US Coast Guard approved,” said Mick tapping the label.

The Warden tossed it back. It landed with a thud. He ducked his head to go through the bulkhead and into the cabin. I heard him curse when his feet tangled in the loose trap warp, and the clatter when he found the camp stove and cooking pots. With the engine off the oily slosh of bilge water under the engine and the creak of the bolts where the A-Frame was fastened to the hull were the only sounds. He came out looking pale and more than a bit unsteady.

He poked through my lunch pail and pulled out my peanut butter and marmalade and cheese sandwich. He looked at Mick. Mick pointed at me. He dropped it back in the pail brushed his gloves off like they might have caught something.

The Warden aboard their boat stamped his feet and dug his hands as deep as he could under his arms.

They didn’t say a thing, no thanks, or just doing our job, not even have a nice day. Just cranked their outboard, hunched as best they could behind their windscreen and headed home.

The open stretch across the bay to the harbor was streaked with whitecaps. Outside, the islands looked as if they floated above the uneasy sea.

“Five miles anyway,” said Mick. “They ain’t fit to be out on a day like today.”

I rested my bad hand on the side of the cabin. It clunked against the wood.

“What the hell ails your hand?” Mick asked.

“Drag landed on it,” I said. “Long as it’s frozen it’s fine.”

Mick went below and dug out the last of the Barcadi. “No Coke to go with it,” he said.

The Risky Business went down two weeks later. Dark night and a gale of wind came up suddenly the way it does when a front comes through. The Coast Guard sent divers to recover the bodies. Newspaper reported the scupper plugs were in and that she must have taken water in over side and swamped. No one asked what she was doing out that way. No one asked why they’d have had the scuppers plugged without a load on board. Whatever scallops they had had all swum away.

The price of lobsters picked up and we were just as glad to leave the dragging to the rest of them. We spent every spare day patching traps to set offshore. The A-frame worked like a set of bookends and let us take stacks of gear each time we went out. We went out when it was fit and even when it wasn’t.

In the lull between a February sou’easter and whatever was coming next we slipped out to haul. Thirty miles offshore, south of Mt. Desert Rock, we broke down. No power. No radio. Two boys in a thirty-foot boat alone on a great and empty ocean. The temperature dropped and the wind come on nor’west. By night it was blowing a full gale and we drifted with it out into the Gulf of Maine. The Coast Guard sent a helicopter out of Boston and found us the next day drifting with the sea smoke and waves as high as the top of our radio antennae. By the time they dispatched their eighty-footer to tow us in we were encased in a mass of glittering ice.

Mick sold what lobsters we had crated up to sell when the price was right and went on a month-long bender.

“Jesus, Benjoy,” Old Morris said. “Must have been some nasty out there.” He paused, took a long drag on his Marlboro, spit out a shred of tobacco. Squinted at me through the haze, his blue eyes sharp and bright under his faded blue cap. “Think you’ll ship aboard with Old Mick again?”

“That boy ain’t fit,” said Millard as we watched the wind shift the boats on their moorings.

“Fit like a glove,” chirped Lyle.

No one had a come back for that one.

“Dickie said I could go out with him if I had a mind,” I said after a while.

“Only boats out today. Dickie and son.” said George.

“Yeah,” I said and caught Old Morris watching me, watching the boats all restless on their moorings and wondering where Mick was and how the day was shaping.

“I know he’s wild, but he’ll change for me. I know he will,” she whispers. But her arms so tight around herself, her battered eyes safe behind dark glasses; they tell another story.

We were 15 miles offshore heading to the lee of the Little Island to wash down and clean up when Dickie idled back and let her come into the wind. He gave a quick smile and reached for the radio. I couldn’t hear a thing over the pulse of the diesel but he always picked up when it was Gwennie calling.

Dickie held the mike in his thick white mittens. He nodded when he spoke as if she was right there with us.

When he was done, he hung the mike carefully along side the VHF radio and tucked the coiled cord away.

“Gwennie says you’re to come to supper tonight when we get in,” he said and spun the wheel to put us back on course for Harbor and home. He leaned forward and rubbed at a spot on the stainless hauler control like maybe he had missed a speck of crusted slime then glanced over to see what I thought.

I nodded, grinned.

He edged the throttle forward.

We thumped up the back steps to the kitchen door, the only door anyone ever used, and Dickie closed the door gently behind us. We took our boots off in the little entryway and I made sure to line them up neat and square on the sections of newspaper she had laid down. We hung our layers on the pegs. Hat and poly vest, sweatshirt, sweater, flannel shirt, sweater vest. Our oil coats and bibs overalls were left hanging aboard the Deborah –Jayne but we still had plenty of layers to shed before coming in. I was 6 layers thinner and forty pounds lighter when I walked in, quiet and careful, to Gwennie’s kitchen.

I was suddenly conscious of the wet sleeves on my sweatshirt and the deep and abiding oily tang of bait on my cuffs and the way my hair stuck up every which way after 16 hours under hat and hood.

Gwennie sat me at the table after I washed my hands and wouldn’t let me do a thing while Dickie went in to wash up. I watched her in the pantry dishing up. Beside the sink and the old hand pump was her VHF radio. She had it mounted on the wall, the white mike hung carefully beside the receiver, the coiled cord tucked out of the way. Her window looked out on to the back yard. She couldn’t see the boats or the wharf or the open sea beyond. Her view was the apple tree out back and the little swing Dickie’d put up for Deborah or Jayne, the apple tree and the line of traps Dickie’d piled neat and square from out of his workshop in the cellar below.

The kitchen walls were lined with photographs and needlepoint and bright copper aspic molds.

We ate when Dickie got back to the table.

Gwennie asked how’d the day had gone.

Dickie talked of tide and wind and pounds sold.

Gwennie talked of roads and weather and who’d called.

“Look at you,” she said. “Not enough meat on that long frame to amount to a thing and filled my plate again.

Dickie grinned and passed his plate for seconds.

“You know what the doctor said,” Gwennie reminded him.

Dickie smiled but didn’t take his plate back till it was full.

There was coco-cola cake for dessert that night.

I asked and Gwennie shared the recipe.

Dickie got up and listened to the weather for tomorrow.

“Looks like we’ll get half a chance for the morning Benjoy,” he said.

“3:00?”

“No sense rushing,” he said. “3:30’ll give us plenty of time to be out to The Rock by sunrise.”

I helped clear the table even though Gwennie told me not to. I watched her look up from the dishes in the sink and saw her reflection in the window. I imagined her reaching for the white plastic mike. Calling out across the void.

“Base to Deborah-Jayne, come back.”

I imagined her calling that night, the night Mick and I were lost. The night she called my parents and said we hadn’t come in. That all the boats were out searching. Imagined her listening to the wild chatter of waves and engines and voices calling out of the dark and the gale. Waiting to hear some word, any word out of the realm of icy dark and the deep and unforgiving sea.

I imagined her calling during the days when we were out far enough that we lay under the curve of the earth and out of reach. Imagined her trying again in the dark as we ran in toward the lighthouse’s beacon and the glitter of lights that marked The Harbor. Heard her calling, “Base to Deborah-Jayne. You on here Dickie?”

And heard Dickie answer back. “Deborah-Jayne to base. Over.”

I saw her lean against the sink then and bring the mike a little closer.

He wrote a letter from prison. Two pages, plain ruled paper, letters labored words scored almost through the paper.

Bet your railing them with me in here. We’ll have a time when I get done. I’m working now, outside. The food’s OK.

“I dunno Benjoy. I guess we might as well take on ten pair to run offshore tomorrow.”

It was still early October. The lobsters were thick around the shores. The winds hadn’t stripped the last golden leaves on the birches and here and there, where the streams ran down to stain the ledges on the shore, maples blazed. The memory of the only frost so far had faded. The lowering slant of the sun turned the sea to gold and the glitter filled the air with light and promise. It was the fragile time of year when you could almost believe that maybe, this year, winter would pass on by.

Dickie nudged the Deborah-Jayne into gear and a click more. The sun slipped behind the tops of the wind-stunted spruce on the western shore. The wind picked up and gained an edge. Every other boat was safe on their mooring, facing the incoming tide just like they were watching us come in. Old Morris’d be at the window in the wharf. Just us left to come in. He’d a sent Young John home hours ago. Past the row of empty summer houses along the lighthouse shore, past the Marina’s empty moorings and the canvas shrouded bulk of sailboats, all so oddly graceless without their masts and out of their element. Past the ferry terminal and the old town float. Just a click above an idle and no more, just enough to glide up through The Harbor easy as a Sunday drive.

Morris stepped down the last rung on the ladder as Dickie gave her enough reverse to settle alongside the float. He sat on the stern and watched as I passed Morris our baskets and buckets of lobsters. Morris set them one by one on the rusted scale, tapped the weights, eyed the balance, took the pencil from behind his ear and bore down to write on the carbon pad. One by one he tipped the lobsters into the open pen beneath the float then stacked the scale baskets and garbage cans and weighed them. He passed me the empty containers and bent over the pad to figure the total.

Dickie pursed his lips as he read the yellow slip. He folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket. “I guess we better take twenty pair Benjoy,” he said.

I passed the gear down to Dickie. First the head trap then a tail trap. Bundles of the big offshore bouys. Forty traps. More than two miles of rope.

“Taking a load offshore, Dickie,” said Old Morris.

Dickie took his gloves off and wrung them out even though they weren’t wet. He straightened a trap that wasn’t out of line, shifted a bait bucket and then shifted it back, tied the string of buoys to the rail. “That time of year I guess,” he said.

“I always liked running offshore,” said Morris. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or Dickie or to himself. “Always seemed like I got out there and I remembered something I meant to try and bring back with me the last time I was there.”

We turned and looked out to where the sea and sky became one darker band and it was hard to say if it was the sea rising up or the sky settling down but it was all one.

“Something about being where you can’t see not even the mountains anymore, just the waves and tide and what the wind gets up to with the pair of them. You know what I mean?”

Dickie cleared his throat. “Guess I do,” he said then switched the key and waited ‘til I’d stepped out onto the float before putting her in gear and letting her find her way to her mooring.

“No need to wait Benjoy,” he said. “I guess I can haul the punt up the beach all right by myself.”

I stood at the head of the wharf with Old Morris. We watched Dickie lean out and hook the mooring buoy, watched him haul himself out of the shelter and walk out onto the bow as she ran up on the slack, heard the rattle of the chain against the hull after he’d already run it through the bow chock and around the bollard. Watched him check the traps stacked in the stern before bringing the punt alongside. Watched the tide stream out of The Harbor.

“Not many fellas fish offshore,” Morris said. “You can always tell the ones that do. Something out there calls to a man.”

After,

he came out to the island, pale and something I didn’t know how to gauge something I couldn’t get the measure of. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, some chill gone deep. Maybe only April’s fickle sun, maybe just winter shadows held in the forest fringe along the road.

We looked down the hill. The solid brooding houses of the village, the fields still matted and winter wild, the brooding forest, while beyond, the open restless sea. Seasons come and seasons gone and seasons yet to be.

Good thing you never come to see me there, He kicked at a stone and looked somewhere I couldn’t see. It ain’t like here.

I know now I could have held him, reached out, like a father like a son like a friend.