Boats lined the harbor as I walked slowly toward the pier, and I was not going out on the water. I had come to stand on the seawall with everybody else’s family.
My brother had the boat at the head of the line with fresh paint on the transom and his kids on the bow.
At the Blessing of the Fleet here, the boats go by the pier one at a time and the priest calls each by name and reads the dedication. Most boats are blessed for somebody. A father, a wife, a man the Gulf kept.
The dedications are kept in a book at the parish hall. You file them, and once you file one it stands every year until somebody changes it, and hardly anybody ever does.
My father filed one in 2011, three months after the diagnosis, and never told a living soul.
So Father Ancelet reads out the boat’s name, and then he reads what my daddy wrote, in front of about six hundred people and a public address system.
Blessed for my son Emile, who keeps her running and pays her slip and takes me out on the flat mornings, and who thinks I do not know what it costs him. If I am gone when you read this, read it anyway, every year, until the boat is gone too.
My brother was standing at the wheel of that boat when it was read. He had the throttle in his hand.
I was on the seawall in a folding chair next to my aunt with a paper cup of coffee.
Nobody clapped, because you do not clap at a blessing, and that made it worse and better at the same time.
Here is what I want to say about my brother, because people have wanted me to say something else.
He is not a thief. He was gone fifteen years working offshore, came home to a father he barely got to see and a boat that smelled like him, and grabbed the one thing he could still get his hands on. I understand it better than I let on that day.
He came to my house that night around ten and sat on the steps and could not talk for a while.
We have her together now. Not a handshake. Both names on the paperwork, both names on the slip, and we split it, and he does more of the work than I do because he is younger and he insists on it.
He has taken his own boys out eleven times since. He did not know how to run the pass. I taught him, and he took it about as well as a man takes anything from a younger brother.
The dedication still stands. We did not change it, and Father Ancelet reads it every spring, and last year my brother stood on the seawall for it and let his oldest take the wheel.
Fifteen years of quiet upkeep does not leave a mark on anything you can point at. My father knew that, so he went to a parish hall in 2011 and put it in a book where the whole town would have to hear it out loud once a year, forever, whether I was there or not.