Part 3 — The Appraisal
I shook the second note out of the bell, and it unrolled in my hand as thin as a cigarette paper.
“Gunnar, the appraisal says one hundred ninety thousand dollars. It is a fair number, because permits are scarce, and I worked thirty-one seasons for it.”
“The paper is in the tackle drawer in the shed, under the spare line, in a coffee tin.”
Kjell had gone the color of old rope. He had a transfer form in his jacket, still unsigned by the state, with his mothers name written across the line.
Marlys, at the front table, was not the sort of woman to stay quiet. She said she had worked at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission for twenty years before she retired, and she would be glad to tell him what happens to a transfer form with a signature that was not made in front of a notary.
It gets stopped at the desk. It gets flagged. And someone writes a letter.
I read the last line of Siris note slowly, because it was for him.
“Kjell, I held you before I held a permit. I will always love you. But I will not put your name on something you did not earn, and I would rather you were angry at me than ruined by me.”
Siri rang that bell for forty years to call a fisherman home, and now she had rung it one more time to call back her son.
Kjell stood still a long time. Then he took the cash box out of his coat and set it on the table with the hundred and forty plates of money inside. He told the room he was ashamed and sat down on a folding chair.
Pastor Lund counted it out in front of everyone and gave the whole amount to the church building fund, as the sign had promised.
On Monday I drove with Marlys to the commission office in Juneau by ferry and by phone, and we filled out the right form. In Alaska a permit holder who dies leaves it to the heirs, and an heir may fish it through the proper transfer. Mine went through in three weeks.
The forged form was pulled and held, as Marlys said it would be. Because I did not press the matter, and because Kjell wrote a full letter of apology to the commission, it was closed with a warning on his file.
In April, I called him on the phone and said the Helga May needed a deckhand.
He showed up at the dock at four in the morning in borrowed boots, silent as a post. I handed him a thermos and a rag and pointed at the brass bell on the wheelhouse door.
“Ring it once, son,” I told him. “Your mother is waiting at the stove.”