I opened the cracked wallet on the pickle bucket of Sean, with the whole lunch rush watching through the pass of the kitchen, and found what Fergus had hidden behind the photograph of the five of us at the beach. A folded sheet of lined paper, soft as cloth. It was a letter, in the blunt pencil hand of a man who had written mostly in fish tickets. Peg, it began. If you are reading this, the boy has finally come asking, and you have not given up on him. Good. I never did either.
I read it aloud, in a low voice, with Sean sitting very still. Fergus wrote that in the fall of 1971, his first full week on a boat at fifteen, his father had handed him an envelope with two hundred and twelve dollars, the whole of his share, and told him that a man should give it all away or give it to his children when they were grown, to see what they did with it. Fergus had kept the promise for his own. He had opened the account at Harbor Mutual the year Sean turned thirty. Two hundred and twelve dollars a month, every month, to be sent to Sean until the money ran out.
“That is what has been going into your account since the funeral,” I said. “It was never me, and it was never your wife. It came from your father.” Sean put his face in his hands. In the dining room, the men from the draggers had gone quiet. Maureen had turned off the radio. I kept reading. The money was not charity, Fergus wrote. It was a test, and he hoped the boy would pass it. If the boy noticed it and asked where it came from, he was a man. If he spent it and said nothing, he was still a boy, and I was to wait.
Sean lifted his head. His eyes were swollen. “Ma,” he said, “I spent every dollar. Every single month. I thought Kristen was moving something around.” His voice shook. “And then I sent you a request for the same amount, for a dinner of lobster that I ate. I took a bowl of chowder from my own mother and made her an invoice.” He laughed, hopelessly, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Dad would have thrown me off the dock.” I told him that Fergus had never thrown anything off a dock that he could not catch.
A father may give his son a river of money and still hope for only one thing in return, a single honest question.
The second page of the letter was shorter, and addressed to me. Fergus wrote that the rest of the account, fifty eight thousand dollars, was mine, that he had saved it out of the groundfish years when I thought we were broke. He was sorry he had let me worry. Then, at the bottom: The slip from New Bedford is for your birthday. It will be ready in the spring. I looked at the little paper from the boatyard I had half forgotten in the wallet. It was a receipt, stamped Paid in Full, for a sixteen foot lobster skiff, cedar planked, with a name to be lettered on the transom.
The name was Peggy D. I could not read it twice. I handed the slip to Maureen and went into the walk in cooler and stood among the crates of clams for a time with the door closed and the cold coming off the wall. I was seventy years old, and I had just learned that the man I buried had been building me a boat. When I came out, Sean was standing at the door with his hat in his hands. He asked me, humbly, if I would go with him to see it.
We drove to New Bedford on a Sunday in early April, in the old truck of Fergus, which Sean had never learned to start and which started for him on the first turn. The yard was a long tin shed on the water with a smell of cedar and paint. The old builder, a man named Tavares, led us to the back. There on a cradle, under a clean canvas, sat a small boat, white as a gull, with a green stripe and a brass cleat. Along the transom in gold leaf was lettered Peggy D, Gloucester.
“Your husband came every Friday for eight months,” Tavares said. “He steamed the planks himself. He would not let me touch the transom.” I ran my hand along the rail, which was smooth as a cheek. Sean walked all the way around the boat, twice, and then stopped at the bow and put his forehead down on it. He stayed that way until I thought he had fallen asleep. Then he said, into the planking, “I am going to fix this, Ma.” I said I knew he would.
He started on a Monday. He came to the Salt and Gull before dawn and lit the burners with me. He had never ladled a chowder in his life, and he scalded his thumb twice, and when a trawlerman asked what was good he said, with real fear, that he would have to ask his mother. Maureen laughed so hard she spilled the clams. He returned the first two hundred and twelve dollars to the account himself, and every month after, without a word, and he kept the receipts in a shoebox with the name of his father on it.
I launched the Peggy D on the first Saturday in May, in a light rain, with Maureen and the draggers and three generations of Doyles standing on the town landing. Sean held the line. My granddaughter broke a bottle of root beer over the bow because I would not allow anything stronger. When the boat touched the water, it sat so light and true that everyone cheered. I climbed in with a hand from Sean, and I took the oars for the first time in forty years.
We rowed out past the breakwater, the two of us, my son in the stern with the cap of Fergus on his head. The harbor was gray and silver, and the gulls were wheeling over the dragger fleet. I looked back at the town, the steeples and the old brick of the marine supply, and I felt the oars pull against the water as if somebody were holding the other end. “Ma,” Sean said, “what do I owe you for dinner?” I smiled. “A chowder,” I said. “At the Grille. You buy.”
