I drove to Bangor on Tuesday morning, two hours down Route 1A with my rosary on the dashboard, and I did not tell a soul. Lucien Gagnon met me at the door of his shop on Exchange Street, a tiny man of eighty six in a cardigan, and he locked it behind me. He did not say hello. He said, “Marion, I have a magnifying glass on the counter, and I have a letter in the safe, and I will give you both. But I want you sitting down, because I carried this for twelve years and I am afraid for your heart.”
He handed me the glass and a small board of walrus tusk, yellowed with age, that Armand had bought in Nome in 1978. I turned it over. Down the whole length of the underside, in letters no bigger than a grain of rice, someone had carved a message. It took me five minutes to read it. It said, DENISE: THESE ARE COPIES. THE REAL ONES ARE SAFE. IF YOU ARE READING THIS, YOU TOOK THE WRONG ONES. COME HOME, GIRL. DADDY. I laid my head on the counter and wept without sound.
Lucien told me the rest. In 2010, Armand had known that Denise gambled. He had seen the envelopes from the casino in Bangor, and he had seen his daughter look at the glass case in the den the way a hungry dog looks at a butcher window. So he had a plan. Every year for twelve years, the grandson of Lucien, Etienne, a gifted carver, had made exact copies of the boards, and Armand had switched them one by one. All two hundred eleven genuine boards were sitting in the climate controlled vault of Lucien, wrapped in cloth, with a fire safe full of tags.
A walrus tusk board with a tiny carving gave one mother the Tuesday to bring her daughter back home to Bar Harbor.
I gave my terms standing in the shop of Lucien, wiping my eyes. “Lucien, I want every board brought home to Bar Harbor tonight, in your van, with Etienne. I want the eBay listing taken down, because I will not let a buyer be cheated. And I want to be alone in my kitchen when I call my daughter.” Lucien nodded. He took a key from his cardigan and opened the vault. Row upon row of tagged boards lay in their cloth, each with the handwriting of Armand. I touched them one by one. They felt warm, as if he had just set them down.
Denise called me at nine that night, because the eBay seller had told her a woman from Maine was asking questions. I let it ring twice and picked up. She cried before I said a word. She owed fifty two thousand dollars to an online poker site and two men in Portland who did not send letters. She had meant to sell the boards, pay the debt, and buy them all back someday. “Mama, I know it is a terrible thing,” she sobbed. “Please do not hate me. I do not even know who I am anymore.”
She drove up that night, three hours in the rain, and arrived near midnight. She walked into the den and stopped. The glass case stood in its place by the window, filled again with two hundred eleven boards. Under the lamp, I had put the walrus tusk board on a cloth. Denise took one look, understood, and snatched it up and ran for the door with it, her face wild. Etienne Gagnon, a big young man who had stayed to help me, stepped into the hall and gently took her wrists. “Miss Denise,” he said, “please read the bottom first. Then do what you want.”
She read it standing in the hallway in her wet coat. Her whole body sagged. She slid to the floor and held the board against her chest, and I knelt beside her. We stayed on that floor an hour, the way we did when she was three and had a fever. She said her father had known her better than she knew herself. She said he loved her enough to lie to her, so she could not do the thing that would ruin her. I told her he carved it with a magnifying glass for her. That was all.
The money consequences were gentle. The real collection was appraised at four hundred ten thousand dollars. I kept the boards of my husband, and I gave the sixty most valuable to the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, which paid a fair price. With that, I paid the debt of Denise to the two men in Portland through my lawyer, in full, with a signed release. The eBay seller account was closed. Denise agreed to enter a program in Portland for compulsive gambling, and she started the next Monday, with my hand on her shoulder.
In the name of Armand, who passed in 2022, I started the Armand Thibodeau Fund. It pays for safety suits, traps and gear for young lobstermen starting out in Hancock, Washington and Penobscot counties. In the first year we outfitted twenty three boats. A seventeen year old from Stonington put his first dozen traps in the water in June, and called me at the dock to say his first buoy was on the line. I told him my husband would have wanted to hear that in person.
This past August, Denise came up with her husband for a week and sat beside me in the den, playing cribbage on the walrus tusk board. She won the first game. I let her. She counted fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair is six, and grinned like her father. When she finished, she turned the board over and read the message again, quietly, and put her finger on the tiny letters. Then she said, “I came home, Daddy.” I pretended not to hear. Lucien came to supper that night with a blueberry pie and a bottle of cider, and he sat in the chair that Armand loved best. He laughed more in two hours than he had in twelve years. Etienne still carves, but now he signs his name.