I was still holding the orange parking cone when Junior pulled up to the oyster roast in the company truck. Junior is my foreman, a big, red faced man of fifty eight who has run my crews on the St. Simons Sound for twenty five years. He did not say hello. He walked across the grass past the long tables of steaming oysters, took the cone gently out of my hand, and set it on the ground. “Skeeter,” he said, “the Coast Guard just called me. They are asking who owns the spud barge that is moving down the channel at four miles an hour with Tanner on the crane.”
The talk at the tables died. Ray Spalding, my brother in law, put down his oyster knife. He is sixty seven, a rawboned man in a sweat stained cap, who has called me piling man at every holiday for thirty years, and he looked at me with the first doubt I had ever seen in his face. “Skeeter, what barge?” he said. “Tanner told us he was running a small job. Dock work. Said you had told him he could use the old equipment.” “I told him nothing,” I said. “Ray, I sold Lomax Marine Construction in August. Fourteen million, nine hundred thousand dollars. The barge was part of the sale.”
Ray stood up so slowly that the folding chair scraped the whole way back. “Fourteen million,” he said. “And how come nobody in this family knew about this?” Behind him, my wife Darlene, who had been fixing a plate of hush puppies, set it down. “Ray, I knew,” she said. “I have known since the day he signed.” She came to stand beside me and took my hand. “Skeeter wanted to see who would be kind to him if they thought he was only a man with a cone. And I watched all of you. Forty dollars to park cars at your own family party.” Her voice shook. “Ray, you owe him an apology.”
An orange parking cone sat in the grass at an oyster roast and gave one marine contractor the evening to bring his nephew back to the working dock.
My nephew came across the lawn then, because someone had phoned him and he had shut off the engine. Tanner is thirty five, a handsome, loud man in a fishing shirt, and he walked like a man going to the principal. “Uncle Skeeter, I can explain,” he said. “Line 4 was not doing anything. The crane unit was parked in the yard. I took it because I had a contract, a good contract, for a boat ramp in Darien, and I could not afford to rent.” He lifted his hands. “I was going to pay you back. After. Everybody takes a little on the way up.”
“Everybody does not,” I said. “Tanner, that barge was listed for four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. You did not borrow it. You took it out of the yard at night, and you told Junior that I had said yes. You put my name on a lie.” I looked at him a while. “I started that company with a skiff and a borrowed winch. The father of Darlene lent me eight hundred dollars. I paid it back in four months, with interest, and I took him a ham.” I let that sit. “That is the difference between taking and borrowing, son. The ham.”
Ray had not moved. He is not a quick man, but he is honest, and I watched the whole thing arrive on his face: the cone, the forty dollars, the joke he had made every year, and then the barge in the channel. He took off his cap and held it against his chest. “Skeeter,” he said, “I raised that boy to think the world owed him. I am the one to blame.” “You raised him,” I said. “You are not the one who drove the barge.” That seemed to help him, a little. He sat down and put his face in the cap.
I told them what I wanted. Tanner would turn the barge around at the next marker and bring it back to the yard under the eye of Junior. He would sign a statement. In place of charges, which the buyer had agreed to hold off, he would work for the new owners at the dock as a deckhand, at deckhand wages, for a year, learning the trade properly from the bottom. “You want a barge, son?” I said. “You earn a barge. Every one I have ever owned I earned by the inch.” Tanner looked at the ground. Then, after a very long time, he nodded.
The barge came home at nine that night, with a spotlight sweeping the marsh and Junior on the radio. Tanner tied her off himself. He did it badly, then did it again. Junior stood on the dock with his arms crossed and watched, and said only, “Rope goes over, son. Not under.” Ray had driven down with me. He stood at the end of the dock in the dark, and he said, in a low voice, “Piling man. I will never say it again.” I said I did not mind it. That was the truth. “It was never the name,” I said. “It was the way you said it.”
Tanner worked on the new crew for twelve months. He came in at five and left at dark, and by the end of the first summer his hands were as hard as the deck. The buyer, a quiet company out of Charleston, offered him a position as a crane operator in the second year. He took it. He still works there, and he is good. At the next oyster roast, in the fall, he brought a cooler of beer and a bushel of oysters that he had pulled himself from a bar off Jekyll, and he set the bushel down in front of me like a man laying a flag.
I did not park a single car that night. Ray did. He stood at the end of the lane in an orange vest with the cone in his hand, waving each truck into its place, a gray old man in the glow of the taillights, and nobody laughed. Darlene and I sat on the porch swing with a plate of oysters between us. The tide was coming in, the marsh smelled of salt and mud, and from somewhere in the dark a buoy bell rang and rang. I ate a hush puppy. I have never been so content in my life.
