Chapter 4: The Creek

Boone would not step onto the boat.

It was Sunday noon on Shem Creek, with the tide high and gulls on every piling.

I stood on Toomer's dock between the two of them with a paper cup of coffee.

Miss Lorraine was tied up at the far end of the line.

She was a sixty-eight-foot steel trawler with her outriggers folded and her white paint gone gray at the rail.

She had been sitting at that dock since October.

Rhett walked to the gangway with his hand on my back.

It was a big hand, low on my spine.

He did not take it away when a crew of men in white boots looked up from a net pile and saw it.

"Morning, Doc," one of them called.

"Morning," I said.

"Doc fixed my back," an old captain in a Vietnam cap told the man next to him.

He said it loudly, and he did not look away from Rhett's hand.

"She fixed mine too," said somebody else.

Half the creek had been on my table at one time or another.

They came with a bad shoulder, a slipped disc, or a wrist that would not close after thirty years of mending nets.

I had never once had to explain myself to any of them.

Today I could feel them counting.

Rhett stopped at the gap between the dock and the deck.

It was a three-foot step down over black water, with a rope rail on one side.

"Careful, Doc," Rhett said.

"I can step down, Rhett."

"I know you can."

Boone put his hands on my waist from behind and lifted me over the gap.

He did it without any effort, and he set me down on the steel deck.

His hands stayed on me a second too long.

Then he let go, and he stayed where he was, on the dock, with his boots planted on the planks.

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