The moment I saw what the captain had hidden on that boat before he disappeared, I set the grinder down and stepped back, because the box was full of paper, and the paper was money.
Not a fortune. Nine thousand four hundred dollars in banded twenties, damp at the edges but countable, and under it a bread bag holding thirty-one folded notes in a shaky hand, each one signed by somebody else.
They were IOUs.
Captain Aurelien Broussard ran that boat out of Dulac for thirty years, and after the storms in 2005 and again in 2008 he did what a lot of the old captains did quietly, which is that he lent money to deckhands and their wives and the fellow who welded his rigging, four hundred dollars here, twelve hundred there, and he wrote it down because he was a bookkeeper by nature, and then he never collected a dollar of it.
The notes go back nineteen years. Some of the names on them are dead. Two of them are men I’ve since met, standing on that same dock, who did not know the paper still existed.
Under the money, wrapped in a Ziploc inside another Ziploc, was a cardiologist’s letter out of Houma dated seven weeks before he went missing, and a prescription bottle, and one page in his own hand.
He knew. Three vessels’ worth of men had been telling that story around the docks for eleven years — that a healthy man tied up on a calm night and vanished — and the truth was in his bunk the whole time, which is that his heart was failing, that he’d been told what was coming, and that he had gotten his affairs in order the way a careful man does.
What happened on the water that night nobody will ever know. The Coast Guard searched four days. He went off that dock alone at sixty-eight years old with a bad heart in the dark, and the marsh does what the marsh does.
His page said this, and I have it framed in the shop now.
Whoever cuts this open — burn the notes, do not chase anybody. The money is for the ones on top of the stack, they have the least. I am not a rich man but I did not want to leave owing anybody the trouble of paying me back. — A. Broussard
Burn the notes.
I found his daughter in Thibodaux. She is fifty-one and she teaches at a middle school and she sat at my kitchen table and read that page four times without saying anything.
We did it in October, at the dock in Dulac, and there were about forty people. She read her father’s line out loud and then we burned all thirty-one notes in a shrimp pot, and the money went where he said it should go, split by his daughter and an old deckhand named Trin Nguyen who had two of the oldest notes in that stack and cried like a child at a picnic table.
I did not scrap the boat. I could not make myself do it and my wife has stopped asking.
She’s up on blocks behind my shop with a tarp on her, and I’ve got about nine hundred dollars of frame work into a hull worth nothing, and his daughter comes out twice a year to look at her.