“They are the people who bought my company, Mr. Batiste,” I said, and I pointed to the bold letters at the top of the page. The father of Yolanda is a large, florid man named Earl Batiste, with a money clip and a bank board seat and a voice that carries over a parking lot, and he lowered the paper slowly to the newspaper on the picnic table. “Hughes Marine was sold in April to a national marine services company. Every boat, every barge, every contract. Twelve million nine hundred thousand dollars.” The propane burner roared under the empty pot. “Line twelve of the vessel schedule is the SeaArk in the driveway of my son. The buyer already owns it.”
Earl Batiste did not move. Around us the party had gone still, forty relatives with crawfish heads in their paper plates and their mouths hanging open. “Boat boy,” Earl said, in a voice like a rusty hinge. “Boat boy owns half the Gulf.” I said, “I own none of it now, Earl. I sold it. I wanted a little peace, and a chance to see who my family was when they thought I had nothing.” I looked at my son. “I hauled the ice. I took your forty dollars. I would do it again.”
Marcus had gone the color of the newspaper. He is thirty six, a broad shouldered man with my own square jaw and the soft eyes of his mother, and for twelve years he ran my best towboat in the worst weather on the Sound without ever once complaining. “Daddy,” he said, “I can explain.” I said, “Please do.” He said, “I thought the company was sinking. You told me the Coast Guard contract was ending.” I said, “I did. I lied to you.” His mouth opened. “I wanted to tell you in June, on your birthday, with a check. So when you took the boat, you were stealing from yourself, son. Though you did not know it.”
A cardboard sign leaning against a workboat hull brought a car lot owner to a picnic table and gave one towing captain the evening to bring his son back aboard.
Yolanda came across the yard from the porch. She is a graceful woman with silver at her temples, and I have been married to her for thirty four years, and I had never seen her walk like that, fast and straight, like a woman headed into a storm. She stopped in front of her father. “Daddy,” she said, “you called my husband boat boy at my own wedding. You called him boat boy at the funeral of my mother. And tonight you handed him forty dollars for hauling ice.” Her voice was shaking, but it did not break. “Say you are sorry.” Earl Batiste looked at his daughter for a long time. Then he took his hat off, which I had not seen him do since the funeral.
“Darnell,” he said, “I am sorry.” It cost him. I watched the cost cross his face like a cloud crossing a field. “I have been a proud, foolish old man. I did not know what to do with a son in law who was better than I am at everything that matters.” He cleared his throat. “I raised that boy to think the Batiste name was worth more than a boat. I was wrong. It was worth less.” He turned to Marcus. “Son, I taught you that. And I am ashamed.” Marcus lowered his head.
I walked down the length of the table and sat next to my son on the bench. The paper plates crackled. For a minute we did not speak. His big hands were clasped between his knees, and I saw they were trembling, and I felt an old, familiar tenderness stir in me, from the time he was six and fell out of the skiff at the marina. I had fished him out by the collar. He had laughed, spluttering, and said, Daddy, I was swimming. “Marcus,” I said. “Where is the compressor? Where are the pumps?” He said, hoarsely, “In the shed. I have not sold them. I could not make myself.” I said, “Good.”
I told him my terms. The SeaArk, the compressor, and the salvage pumps would go back to the yard on the Industrial Seaway by Monday noon, and Pete would sign the receipt. The sign on the boat would come off. Marcus would call the buyer, face to face, and apologize. And I would pay for his own license as a salvage master, which he had always wanted, and for a used boat of his own, a small one, an honest one, to be repaid out of his wages. “You will have a Hughes boat,” I said. “But you will earn it.” He nodded, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “Yes, sir. Daddy.”
He earned it. I will not pretend otherwise. By midsummer, Marcus had pulled a shrimp boat off a sandbar near Ship Island in a squall, and a charter captain called me personally to say it was the finest piece of seamanship he had seen in thirty years. I did not tell my son that. I told Yolanda, and she told him, and he came by the house that night with a case of beer and said nothing at all. We sat on the back steps and drank in the dark. The tree frogs sang.
The boat he bought was a twenty two foot hull, old and scarred, with a tow rope and a VHF radio. I laughed when I saw it, because it was so much like the first one. Marcus painted the name himself on the stern, in white letters, a little crooked. Hughes and Son. He stood back and squinted at it, and then he looked at me, to see if I would approve. I walked all around the boat once, running my hand along the hull, and I said, “It is a little crooked.” His face fell. “But it will float,” I said. “Which is the whole business.”
At the next family boil, Earl Batiste arrived early and stood at the gate. He held out two twenty dollar bills, and he did not smile. “Darnell,” he said, “I understand there is a need for ice.” I looked at the money. I looked at him. A slow grin broke over my face, and I took the bills and put them in my shirt pocket. “Earl, I believe that is right.” I walked to the truck and drove to the Dollar General and bought six bags. When I got back, he was waiting at the tailgate, in a clean apron, and he lifted the first bag himself. “Boat boy,” he said gently, “let me help.”