Chapter 14: Milestone

Nobody said anything for a while.

The old sailor stood with his hands folded on top of his cane.

Gran folded the letter in half, then in half again, very small.

Seth was looking at the mast.

It lay along the far wall on six sawhorses, sixty-one feet of spruce, varnished so deep you could see your face in it.

His grandfather had glued it up in March, the last thing he made.

"Friday at five," Seth said.

"Friday at five," the old sailor said.

"That's two days."

"It's two days and an afternoon, son. Your grandfather stepped a mast in one."

"My grandfather had six men."

The old sailor turned and looked at us.

Gran with her bad hip.

Bess with varnish on her nose.

The two old shipwrights, side by side on the bench like a pair of bookends.

And me.

"Looks like six to me," he said.

I went to the bench and took the pencil from behind Seth's ear.

He let me.

On Thursday we fitted the step and the deck partners, the collar the mast would pass through.

Bess slung the rigging over the beams and sorted every shroud and stay by length, singing to them.

At nine that night I put the pencil down in the middle of a sentence.

"Rules," I said.

Seth looked at the half-cut partner on the bench.

Then he looked at me, and he turned off the work lights.

I slept nine hours.

On Friday morning Gran came down the hill at five with a pot of coffee in one hand and a dinner bell in the other.

She'd put on lipstick.

"Battle stations," she said, and rang the bell right next to Bess's ear.

We rolled Wind Rose out of the shed at six, on her cradle, onto the top of the railway.

It was the first time she'd been in the sun.

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