The old man laid his hand flat on the waterlogged logbook, and I saw that the knuckles were scarred white, like old rope burns. His name was Lucius Toomer, and he was eighty six years old. He had worked the deck of the first boat of my father, the Ruthie Ann, for six seasons out of Bayou La Batre. “Glenda, read the last page before I say a word,” he said. I opened the cover with two fingers. The ink had run, but the handwriting was my father, big and square. September 12, 1979. Hurricane Frederic. Wind out of the southeast, ninety knots. Lucius is in the water.
He told it in a low, steady voice, with the Coke sweating in front of us and the oyster bar clattering all around. Frederic had come up the bay faster than anyone forecast. Lucius and two other deckhands were taking in a net when a rogue wave swept the three of them off the stern. My father, at the wheel, swung the boat around in a sea that stood the pilot house on end. He found Lucius first, and then the other two, and he hauled each aboard with a gaff and a line tied around his own waist, until his hands bled through his gloves.
“Then the engine quit,” Lucius said. “Your father could have cut us loose and saved himself. Instead he ran her up on the sandbar off Dauphin Island on purpose, in the dark, so the three of us could walk off at low water. She broke her back by morning. He lost the Ruthie Ann and every dollar he had in her.” His eyes shone. “The insurance company said he grounded her on purpose. They were right. They paid him nothing. He never said one word to me about it, and I never could look him in the face.”
A second Coke left across an oyster bar table gave one daughter the Tuesday to bring an old shipmate home to the family of her father in Daphne.
I gave my terms at the table, with my hand resting on the second Coke. “Mr. Toomer, you are going to drink this,” I said. “It has been waiting twenty three years.” He picked up the bottle with a trembling hand and tipped it back, and the old man began to cry. “I could not sit down with him, Glenda,” he said. “He lost everything saving me, and I had nothing to give him back. Every Tuesday he looked at that empty chair, and every Tuesday I sat at the bar with my coffee and my shame.” I told him that was finished. I told him the money in the will was the one thing my father had never found words for.
He told me the rest in pieces. After the Ruthie Ann, my father had worked as a deckhand for two years, then borrowed enough to buy a half share in an old boat. He built the three boats slowly, with his hands, and he never complained. He never told my mother the truth either. “It is for an old shipmate, Ruthie,” he had said in 2005, and that had been all. I put my hand over my mouth. I thought of the hands like the mitts of a catcher, and the voice that cut through fog, and of how he had simply sat down every Tuesday across from an empty bottle and waited, patient as the tide.
Donna and her husband, Rick, came through the door of the oyster bar at half past one, in their church clothes, carrying a folder. Someone had told them where I was. Donna marched straight to the table and snatched the logbook off it. “So this is the bum,” she said, loudly, so the whole room turned. “Glenda, he has been working you. A drifter with a sob story.” She held the book over her head, as if she meant to tear it in half. But Bernice the waitress, sixty eight years old and strong as a deckhand, plucked it right out of her hand and held it to her chest. “Not in my restaurant, Madam,” she said.
Donna read the last page standing at the end of the table, with the folder of the lawyer clutched against her stomach. I watched the color rise in her neck, and then drain away. Rick said, “Donna, what does it say?” She did not answer. She sat down heavily in the chair beside Lucius, and she looked at the second Coke, and at the scarred hand of the old man. “Daddy did this,” she said, in a very small voice. “Daddy lost the boat, and never said.” She turned to him. “Mr. Toomer, I laughed in that office. I am so ashamed.” He put his hand on hers. “Child, he would not want you ashamed,” he said.
The money consequences were simple. Donna withdrew the contest that same week, and the lawyer in Fairhope transferred the five hundred twenty thousand dollars to Lucius, in a trust, since he had no one left but a church and some great grandchildren. He gave a third to the church in Bayou La Batre, a third to the children, and the rest to a fund for deckhands. Donna and I kept the house and the two remaining boats, and we sold the smaller one for a good price and split it evenly. They say the Ruthie Ann is still on the sandbar, when the tide is low and the water very clear.
In the name of my father, Hollis Rhodes, who passed in September and who gave away the first boat he ever owned, I started the Second Coke Fund. It pays for medical care, legal help and counseling for retired deckhands and fishermen in Mobile and Baldwin counties, and for their families. In the first year, we helped fifty three men. A deckhand of seventy nine, in a Navy cap, sat in the office and said, “I never could pay him back.” I slid a Coke across the desk. I told him some debts are not for paying. They are for sitting down.
Every Tuesday since that October, Lucius and I have met at the table by the window, under the sign with the funny sayings. Bernice brings the usual. A dozen raw, saltines, and two Cokes in glass bottles. This time, both bottles are finished. Lucius tells me a story from the Ruthie Ann, and I tell him one about my father, and the old man laughs until he coughs. When the bottles are empty, he reaches over and taps his against mine. “To Hollis,” he says. “The best man I ever knew.” I say amen, and the afternoon light comes in across the bay.