I turned the canvasback over on my knee on the bench at the ferry landing and ran my thumb along the little cork plug under the keel. It had been sealed with beeswax, the same way Odell sealed the honey jars he kept in the shop, and when I pressed it with my nail it gave. I tipped the hollow body toward the gray light. In the dark of that wooden belly, beneath the place where the tide page had lain, there was a second thing wrapped in a scrap of chamois. A small brass key, with a number stamped in the bow.
“Mama,” Renee said, and her voice shook, “they are in our garage in Elizabeth City, in a plastic tub under a tarp. The four of them. Dwayne told me they were extras, that you wanted him to get them appraised. I believed him, because it was easier. Then this one fell out of his truck and split. I looked at the number on the bottom and called Purvis, and Purvis told me which ones Daddy used to keep in the back room.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “I did not know that you had not given them to him.”
We crossed to the island on the next boat, the two of us, in the rain. The shop was cold, and smelled of cedar and linseed oil and the faint sweetness of the woodstove. The knife with the cork handle lay on the bench exactly where he had set it down. I looked under the bench and saw what I had walked past for two years, a low oak chest with a brass lock the size of a hand. The key slid into it like a word into its sentence. The lid rose without a sound. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a thick ledger.
It was the provenance book. Every old decoy of Odell, and the great ones of his grandfather, Captain Zeb Midgett, who carved on Currituck Sound in the 1890s, each listed with a photograph, a date and a note from the museum in Salisbury that had appraised them. The four marked with a check were the oldest in the shop. Fourteen thousand dollars apiece, the appraiser had written. On the last page, in the square pencil of my husband, a letter to me. I read it standing, with the rain tapping the tin roof.
A man who carves for forty four years learns to read the faces of those who stand at his bench, and he writes down what he sees.
Sudie, if you are reading this, Dwayne has come for the old four. He asked me twice in 2019 what they would fetch. I said they were not for sale. He looked at them like a man looking at a boat. I do not say he is wicked. I say he is hungry, and a hungry man can be a fool. Do not blame Renee, for she does not know. Do not sell the old four. Hang them where the children can see them. And let the boy come back, if he comes back honest. A bad day is not a bad life. Your Odell.
We drove to Elizabeth City that evening, Renee at the wheel of her little car and the provenance book on my lap. The garage door was open. Dwayne stood in the light of a single bulb in his golf shirt with a beer in his hand, and the plastic tub sat open at his feet. He saw us. I watched him decide whether to be angry, and then watched his shoulders drop. He did not argue. He set down the beer and said, in the voice of a boy of nine, “I have a buyer in Richmond. Fifty six thousand for the four. He gave me twelve in advance.”
“And the twelve?” Renee asked. “The truck,” Dwayne said. “And the card.” She closed her eyes. I did not shout, because I have buried a husband, and shouting at the living is a waste of the little breath we are given. I told him to put the four in the back seat of the car with a blanket between each one. Then I told him that he would pay the man in Richmond his twelve thousand back, every cent, out of his own wages, and that he would call him tonight and say it plainly. He picked up the phone with a hand that trembled.
The man in Richmond turned out to be the same collector who had paid me for the little pintail, a retired surgeon named Ashworth with a soft voice and a long memory. He listened to Dwayne without interrupting. Then he said that he had never wished to buy a thing that was not freely given, and that he would accept the return of the deposit in installments, and that he wished to see the old four if the widow would ever permit it. I took the receiver. I said he could visit on any Saturday, and that I would make the coffee.
Renee stood in the driveway with her arms around herself. She said that she loved her husband, and that she did not know what she would do. She said that on Sundays she would take the ferry to the island, with him or without him, as long as I was alive. I took her face in my hands. I told her that the island had room for both, and that the door of the shop would stay open. Dwayne, standing behind her with his head down, said very quietly, “Can I come, Sudie? If I carry the wood?”
In March, we opened the back room of the shop to the school children of Knotts Island. A glass case holds the old four, and a hand lettered sign above them tells of Captain Zeb and of Odell. The children come in vans with their lunches and sit on the floor while I show them how to burn feathers into a block of juniper with a hot nail. Purvis brings a mess of birds every Saturday, as he promised, and Dr. Ashworth drives down from Richmond once a month to look at the old four through a glass and say nothing at all.
Dwayne comes every Saturday. He carries the wood and sweeps the floor and, last month, began to learn to hollow a decoy. His first was crooked as a dog leg. I set it on the shelf beside the others, next to the sister of the little pintail, and he blushed to the roots of his hair. On the wall of the shop, framed in plain pine, hangs the torn page of the tide book with its line of pencil. Dwayne has 4. Beneath it, in my own hand, I have added a line. Dwayne returned 4. It is the best thing in the shop.
