Mr. Whitcomb stood in the middle of the tent with champagne dripping off his hand onto his good shoes, and every fisherman in that room watched him. The brass tag lay in my palm, the size of a quarter, green with twenty two years of salt. I had read it a thousand times on my kitchen table. It said, in little stamped letters, CORMORANT II, CAMDEN. I had always supposed it was the name of the boat of Elden. It was not. Elden had never owned a boat by that name. And now I watched the man who sat at the head table go the color of a boiled lobster.
“That is a nameplate from a yacht,” said Captain Dale Billings from the crew table, in a voice that carried. Dale was seventy eight and had fished the same waters as Elden for fifty years. “That is a Cormorant II. It belonged to old Harold Whitcomb. The yacht that was out of Camden in February of 2003. The yacht that came into the harbor with a smashed bow, the very next morning.” He stood up. “Mr. Whitcomb, I believe that is the boat of your father.”
The tent had gone as quiet as a church. Abby had stopped in the middle of the aisle in her white dress, and Carter had let go of her hand. Whitcomb opened his mouth. Nothing came out for a long time. Then, in a rasp that nobody in that room will ever forget, he said, “I was twenty two. My father went to Florida for the winter and let me take the boat out. It was dark. There was fog. I was not drinking, I swear to God, but I was showing off. I heard a thud. I thought it was a log.”
A brass tag knotted into a fishing net gave one widow the wedding day to bring a banker back to the truth on Deer Isle.
I gave my terms standing on the grass at the wedding of my own granddaughter, the net of my husband across my arm. “Mr. Whitcomb, I am not going to scream at you. I am eighty years old, and I have waited twenty two years to know what happened to Elden. You will tell it all, here, to Abby and Carter and these people. And in the morning, you will call the Coast Guard and tell it again, from the beginning, to someone with a pen.” My voice was as calm as the water on a windless dawn. I think it frightened him more than shouting.
He told it. He said that his father had paid a harbor man to say the yacht had struck a ledge. The bow was repaired in a yard in Rockland, in the middle of the night, with the name plate quietly removed. He said he spent years afterward trying to forget, and could not. And then, when his son Carter began to date a Peabody from Deer Isle, he felt a sick, strange fate closing in. He had toasted the property on the point because he wanted to buy it, to make it right in some sad twisted way, to bury it under money.
He lunged then, quick as a man half his age. He snatched the net and the brass tag from my arms, and bolted for the tent flap, with the net trailing across the grass like a tired fish. He made twenty feet. Captain Dale Billings, and four more lobstermen from the crew table, men in their good flannel shirts with forearms like mooring lines, rose up from their seats and walked after him, unhurried. They surrounded him at the edge of the lawn. “Whitcomb,” said Dale, “you can drop that net, or you can drop in the harbor. Your choice.”
He dropped the net. Abby ran across the grass in her wedding dress, and put her arms around me. She was crying so hard she could not speak. Carter stood two steps behind her, white as paper. “Mrs. Peabody,” he said, in a broken voice. “I did not know. I swear on my life. I never knew.” I told him I knew he did not. A boy is not his father, I said, any more than a net is a storm. He put his face in his hands and wept like a boy. Abby took his arm.
The money consequences came in the months that followed. Whitcomb called the Coast Guard at dawn and gave a full statement. The old investigation was reopened, and a federal prosecutor accepted a plea. He resigned from the bank and paid a settlement of one million, two hundred thousand dollars to me, which I accepted only so I could give it away. The wedding went on, in a smaller way, the next afternoon, with the fishing crew in attendance. I sat at the head table. I paid for nothing.
In the name of Elden, who was lost in February of 2003, I started the Elden Peabody Fund. It pays for survival suits, emergency beacons and radio gear for lobstermen in Hancock, Knox and Washington counties. In the first year we outfitted eighty one boats. A young man in Jonesport went overboard in November, in sixty degree water, wearing a suit that we had given him. His beacon brought the Coast Guard in eleven minutes. He called me from the hospital. I could not stop shaking.
I read the note by the light of the morning and thought of the hands of Elden. The net now hangs in the Stonington lobster co op, on the wall by the door. Beneath it is a small plaque. It reads, For Elden Peabody, who tied the last knot. Every morning, before the boats go out, the men stop in front of it and take off their hats. Abby and Carter live in Stonington now. Carter hauls traps on the Ruth Ann, and Abby keeps the books. On the water at dawn, the fog lifts like a curtain, and I know he is out there, guiding them home.
