Joe held the photograph in both hands, standing in the gravel of the boatyard in Annapolis, and he said the thing that I had waited thirty years to hear him say. “Terry,” he said, “she told me on the porch in 2010 that I have a brother. His name is Daniel. Dad made me swear on my sobriety coin that I would never tell you, or anyone, because he said it would kill him to be known for it.” He turned the photo over, and read the words, Nassau, 1998, brother of Joey, again, softly. I stood beside the old sailboat on its cradle, with the pipe of cash in my hand.
He told me what Carla had said that day on the porch. She had been the second wife of Vic in the Bahamas, married in 1997 on a beach in Nassau, when Vic was running charters and drinking even then. Daniel was born the following spring. Vic had come home to Maryland for the winter of 1999 to wrap up his affairs, and then the rum had taken the rest of him. He never went back. Carla had asked for nothing but two hundred dollars a month, and Vic had sent it, secretly, for twelve years, until he could no longer afford the postage.
“The money in the mast,” said Joe, slowly, “was for the boy. It was supposed to be for his schooling. He was saving it for the day he was brave enough to hand it over. He never was.” Behind us I heard a heavy step on the gravel, and an old man in a navy windbreaker came around the cradle, squinting. It was Barney Cole, once the charter partner of Vic. He took one look at the pipe in my hand and said, in a flat voice, “That money is half mine.”
A mast pipe slid from an old sailboat gave one daughter in law the afternoon to bring her husband back to his brother in Annapolis.
I gave my terms by the hull of the old boat, with the pipe of cash against my chest. “Barney, I do not know what you and Vic agreed in 1996, and if you have a paper, you are welcome to show it to my lawyer. But this money was put away for a boy, and I intend to see that he gets it. Joe, we are flying to Nassau on Thursday, you and I, and we are going to knock on a door. I do not care whether he wants us. He has the right to know that his father kept him in the mast of a boat for twenty seven years.”
Joe wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I met Carla on the porch,” he said, “and she was small and tired, and she said, tell your father I forgive him. I said I would. I never did. I hid it in my chest for fifteen years because Dad asked me to, and because I was afraid that if I told you, you would see how much of his blood I carry.” He took my hand. “I have been sober thirty years, Terry. But I have been hiding for longer. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”
Barney then lost whatever patience he had. He lunged at the plastic pipe, wrenched it out of my hands with a grunt, and sprinted down the dock toward the water with it held over his head. “Half mine,” he bellowed. He made it fifteen yards. The two men on the travel lift, Rollo and Dee, who had been waiting to haul the old boat, swung the big yellow lift in front of the dock gate, and its steel legs closed off the end of the pier like a portcullis. Barney slid on the planks and sat down hard, with the pipe in his lap.
Rollo climbed down from the cab of the lift with a wrench in his hand, took the pipe from the lap of Barney without any ceremony, and handed it back to Joe. “Sir,” he said, “I think this belongs to your family.” Barney sat on the dock, breathing heavily, with his cap crooked, looking at the water. After a time he said, in a small voice, that Vic had owed him money and that he had never had the heart to ask. Joe nodded, and I said that we would settle every fair debt. He nodded again.
The money consequences were fair. Barney was shown the papers, which were an old loan of eight thousand dollars, and was paid in full that afternoon with interest, and went home. The remaining sixty six thousand dollars in the mast pipe, with the pipe itself, was carried to Nassau in the bag of Joe. Daniel, twenty six, a marine mechanic in a gray work shirt, met us at the door of his mother, and he looked at Joe for a long time before he said, “You have his chin.” Carla made tea for everyone.
In the name of Vic, who passed in April, I started the Captain Victor Lane Fund. It pays for treatment, and for sailing lessons and boat repair for kids and families touched by alcoholism, in Anne Arundel, Calvert and Talbot counties. In the first year we taught ninety one children to sail and placed thirty one adults in recovery programs. One was a boy of twelve from Edgewater who had never been on the water. On his first day he took the tiller of a little dinghy and refused to give it back.
Daniel came to Annapolis in September and stood in the boatyard beside the old boat, which Joe and I had decided not to scrap. He ran a hand along the hull, along the faded gold letters on the transom. Then he looked up at the bare mast and smiled. Joe put an arm around his shoulders, the two of them the same height, with the same chin. The late summer wind came off the Chesapeake, and the halyards of the whole yard rang against the masts like bells.
