Chapter 4: The Hail

Slack tide on Monday morning was at twenty to seven, and by six the whole Bay was on the Beal wharf.

I had not known so many people could fit on it.

Forty captains stood in oilskins and rubber boots with their coffee in their fists.

Their wives stood behind them, and their sternmen behind the wives, and the kids sat on the stacked traps.

Nobody said a word to me.

They looked, and they looked at the Hall trucks lined up at the head of the wharf, and they looked at each other.

Verna sat at a card table at the end of the planks with the black ledger open in front of her.

She wore her flannel shirt and a yellow slicker, and she had a thermos at her elbow.

"Counter's here," she said, loud enough to carry. "Who calls?"

My legs shook, and I walked anyway.

I walked down the planks past forty faces and stopped at the table.

My father's buoy was in my left hand. I had carried it all night.

"Mercy Beal, daughter of Amos, captain of the Dora B.," I said. "I call the Hail."

"On whom?" Verna said.

"On the Keeper of the Bay."

"Name him."

"Dwight Thurston," I said.

Verna wrote it in the ledger, slowly, with a stub of pencil.

"The Counter hears it," she said. "Captains, you heard."

Nobody answered for a moment.

Then an old man near the front, with a white beard and a cap that said BEALS ISLAND CO-OP, shifted his boots.

"A woman?" he said.

He didn't say it unkindly. He said it flat, as a fact he was checking.

Verna turned her head and looked at him over her glasses.

"Do you want to be the man who tells Amos?" she said.

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