Chapter 17 of 18You and This House

The first sheet of roofing went at 4:40, peeling off the north slope of the ell in one piece and dropping into the north cove without a sound she could hear over the wind.

Nora Vance did the arithmetic while she dragged the ladder through the mud. An open gable meant a condemnation notice. A condemnation notice meant Marcus Thorne would own Tern Island by Labor Day for the price of a filing fee. Everything her divorce had left her was nailed up there under tar paper the color of steeped tea.

Four weeks on the island. Plywood at fifty-two dollars a sheet, and none of it on the island yet.

The weather radio on the kitchen shelf had said small craft advisory since six that morning and had moved up to gale by two. Nora had spent the afternoon hauling the porch chairs inside and wedging the boathouse door with a scrap of hemlock.

Rain came off the Gulf of Maine in long gray ropes. She took the ladder from the shed, the folded tarp from Renys still in its plastic sleeve, and the coffee can of roofing nails, and carried all of it around the north side with her face turned away from the water. The cove had gone white. Across the reach, Port Blossom was dark, and spray came over the seawall and ran up the grass in sheets — the same seawall Grace had told her was moving.

Her phone lit up inside her jacket.

"Where are you?" She had to shout into her collar.

"Past the point."

"Turn around."

"I'd swamp her coming about. I'm heading for the float."

Rain hammered the shed roof above her. She put her free hand flat on the doorframe and leaned into it.

"The float's under."

"Then I'll wade."

"Ben. Listen to me."

The line went thin and came back.

"I'll be alongside before you get that ladder off the ground. I can see your roof from here."

"There's a section of the ell gone. I've got a tarp and I've got nails."

"Don't go up on that roof."

"The plywood never came."

"Nora. Don't go up."

"You'll want both hands when you get here."

"I'll want you off that ladder."

She went up.

On the ell the wind came across the ridge in long shoves. She unrolled the tarp and nailed one corner, and then a gust took the rest of it out of her hands, spun it over the yard, and dropped it against the woodpile. She stood on the wet shingles with the hammer hanging off her wrist and watched it go.

The engine reached her before the boat did. Ben came in on the weather side with the throttle backed off, put the bow against the float's outer piling, and stepped off with a canvas tarp over one shoulder and a bundle of battens under his arm. He didn't wave.

"Get the second coil of line," he said.

She got it. They went up together, and he climbed without looking down once.

"Take that corner into the wind."

"This one?"

"Upwind corner. Hold it so the wind's pushing it down onto the roof instead of under it."

"It's pulling my arm out of the socket."

"Let it pull. Bend your knees."

The canvas cracked and filled. Rain ran off the eave in a rope. Nora leaned her weight into the corner while Ben laid a batten across the seam and drove nails in three strokes each, fast and flat, the way a man does it who has been out in worse.

"I've bent my knees."

"Then bend them more. And hold that corner tight."

"Watch the line."

"I'm watching it."

"Next batten."

"Where?"

"At my knee. Where my hand is."

"Here?"

"Higher. Good. Now nail it."

She fed him battens and kept her mouth shut about the cold. His hands were red and the nails went in straight.

Halfway along the ridge she stopped.

"Ben."

"What."

"There's paper under this batten."

"Paper."

"Old paper. Folded over."

He wiped his eyes with the flat of his wrist.

"We're losing the light."

"One second."

"You've got one."

She got her thumbnail under the crease and worked it free. The paper was the color of an old wasp nest and stiff as a leaf in October. She turned her back to the rain and read it.

"It's a docket. Blackwood and Finch, chandlers. Received of the sloop Gannet."

Ben stopped nailing.

"Read me the rest."

"Fourteen crates, north cove landing, the eleventh of October, 1921. Somebody initialed it. J.B."

"Jedediah Blackwood."

"That's what I'm thinking."

"Pocket it," he said. "Then get me two nails and don't drop them."

They finished the north slope in the last of the light and ran a line over the ridge to the chimney. By the time they came down the ladder, rain had found the seams of Nora's jacket, and her fingers had quit closing properly.

Inside, the cottage creaked and shifted around them like a boat at mooring. She lit the stove and hung a towel around Ben's shoulders, since he wouldn't take one himself.

"Your hands," he said.

"They're fine."

"They're blue. There's a difference."

She laid the docket flat on a dish towel and weighted the corners with the salt shaker and the sugar bowl. The wind put a shoulder against the door and held it there.

"You should eat something."

"I ate."

"You ate what."

"Coffee."

"Read it again," he said.

"Received of the sloop Gannet, fourteen crates, north cove landing, the eleventh of October, 1921."

"That's the same fall the draft marks on the manifests don't add up."

"How many crates in a trip, do you figure?"

"Fourteen in October. The manifests list nine trips that fall."

"Nine trips of medicine."

"Nine trips of something."

Ben wiped his face with the towel and sat down slowly, the way a man does when his back has decided for him.

"Crates of what?"

"Agnes Miller called it medicine."

"In her own words?"

"In hers."

He looked at the paper for a while.

"What's the glass say?"

"Falling. It'll keep falling till midnight."

"And the roof?"

"The roof holds or it doesn't. Nothing I can do about it from in here."

The stove ticked.

"Where's Grace tonight?"

"At the lab, watching gauges. She'll be up half the night."

"She'd tell me to move the survey stakes."

"She'd tell you to move yourself."

"That's the photograph, the diary, and now a docket," he said. "Three things, and every one of them came out of this house."

"And a town archivist who shipped the town's records to Portland the week I started asking."

"Grace told me that."

"She told me too. I want the docket somewhere drier than a roof batten."

"There's a safe at the Historical Society."

"Judith Finch read the diary and called it gossip."

"Then she'll call a docket a grocery list."

"She might. I'd rather she saw it than didn't."

Ben turned that over.

"If you show her, you can't unshow her."

"I know."

Above them the canvas lifted against the lath, snapped, and held. He pulled a can of Moxie out of his jacket pocket, warm, and set it on the table like a piece of evidence.

"You should have stayed on the mainland," Nora said.

"I know."

"So why didn't you."

He turned the can a quarter turn, lining it up with the edge of the table.

"You and this house," he said, shaking his head. "You're both stubborn."