He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Ice House

On Tuesday he drove us to Bayou La Batre himself.

"The lender requires a walk of the premises," he said. "I'm the lender."

"You're the lender and the landlord and the judge," I said.

"Yes."

The Guidry dock sat at the end of Shell Belt Road, with the shrimp boats tied three deep along the pilings.

The air smelled of diesel and brine and old ice.

Two of the three boats hadn't gone out in a month.

My father was nowhere to be seen, which was how I knew he was in the house, crying to my mother.

Cal got out of the SUV and stood on the shell lot with his hands in his pockets.

He did not look at the boats.

He looked at the long wooden bunkhouse behind the ice house, with its tin roof gone orange and its row of small square windows.

He looked at it the way you look at a tooth that has been pulled.

"Show me the hold," he said.

"The what?"

"The ice hold. On the Miss Beverly."

My mother's boat was the oldest we owned.

It had a deckhouse and a cabin hatch, and under the cabin an insulated hold the size of a closet.

Shrimp had been packed in ice down there for forty years.

I led him down the pier.

It was eleven steps from the cabin hatch to the rail.

I did not count them, but I felt him counting.

At the hatch I stopped, and he stopped behind me.

The hatch was a square steel door with a heavy latch and a pin through it.

He put his hand on the pin.

His fingers were steady, but I could see the tendon standing out in his wrist.

"Open it," he said.

I pulled the pin and lifted the door.

The cold came up into my face, wet and sweet, smelling of fish and iron.

It was dark below, with a bare bulb on a wire and the walls sweating.

"I slept on the floor of this hold in the winters," Cal said, in the voice of a man reading a lease. "They put me in it to keep the catch from spoiling. I was fourteen. The first night I counted ice blocks until I stopped being afraid. After that I counted them to keep from being angry."

I said nothing.

I was looking at the latch.

On the inside edge of the door, down low, there was a small bright notch worn into the steel.

It was as wide as a child's finger, and it sat where a short arm could reach through from a crouch.

A child's finger had worn it there, working a pin loose.

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