Hebburn

A tug brought them up the Tyne on a Thursday forenoon, with the city showing itself by slow degrees through the coal-smoke.

The Sigrid had sailed from Stavanger to Copenhagen, lain three weeks discharging timber, crossed the Skaw with a northeast wind, and now had come for a return cargo of Newcastle coal. Olav was four months at sea. His trousers had loosened at the waist, and his hands had learned the work. He had learned to sleep in the top bunk through the full range of the ship's motion, and to wake a minute before the watch-bell, and to make coffee in a swell without spilling more than a cup on the stove. The Kattegat had been short and choppy and tired him in an hour. The open North had rolled him to sleep. He had come to prefer the long swell above the others, because in it a man had time to think between blows.

He had learned other things that were not of the sea. He lived now in a room with seven other men, all of whom were older than he was, and none of whom he had known a month before. Most of them had settled into his presence without much remarking on it, the way a yard-dog is settled into when a new man comes into the yard. He had learned to wash at the common basin in the mornings with his shirt off and to forget that he had ever thought it strange. He had learned to change his trousers inside his bunk with the curtain half-drawn. A man asleep near him made a small sound on the in-breath that was not the same as the sound Peder's breath had made across the passage at home. After a week of it he could sleep through it as easily as he had slept through his brother's.

Some things he had noticed he could not have explained if he had been asked. One of the older sailors was a man from Kristiansand named Rørvik, who had a voice like dry wood and who knew every port between Kiel and Cardiff. He had a scar that ran from his shoulder-blade down into the small of his back, and the scar moved when he hauled on a line. Olav had found himself watching it once without knowing he was watching. He had turned away when he became aware, and it had become one of the ordinary facts of the ship, like Rørvik's breath at night or the way Thorvald held his coffee-cup with the handle pointing starboard whichever way the ship was rolling.

The tug brought them up through the narrows of the river between banks of shipyards and coal-staithes and chimneys. There were more chimneys than Olav had known were in the world. They stood in rows a hundred deep on both banks, and each of them gave off a smoke — brown and grey and blue and in one place yellow. Above the whole city the sky was the color of an old copper pot. Thorvald came and stood at the rail beside Olav and looked up at the sky. "It is a very English sky," he said. "You will get used to it."

"My father was here once," Olav said.

"Most Norwegian sailors have been here once."

"He hurt his knee here."

"Some Norwegian sailors have done that, too." Thorvald did not look at him. "He was a sailor then."

"Yes."

"He did not become one after."

"No."

"Well then. Do not hurt your knee, Finnøybu."

The Sigrid was warped in at a wharf below a great black tip, where the coal would be loaded from above through a chute. For the rest of that Thursday and all of Friday the crew worked at the trimming, which was the stowing of the coal into the hold in the manner that the ship would ride best with. The trimmers were local men in leather aprons, black from face to boot. They came and went as the chute ran and stopped. They did not speak to the crew except in orders, and the orders were in a Tyneside English so thick that Olav could not understand them; Thorvald had to translate the first day. By Saturday noon the cargo was in and the hatches were battened, and the captain came forward to the forecastle with a handful of silver and gave each of the crew a full afternoon and evening ashore, to be back aboard by midnight.

"The Finnøybu is not to drink," Captain Dahl said.

"I do not drink, sir."

"He is not to drink and he is not to fight. He is to come back sober, on his own two legs."

"I will be careful."

"You will also not be alone. Thorvald goes with you as far as the yard gate. After that you may go where you please for three hours, and you will meet him at the yard gate at six by the great clock, and you will come back to the ship with him. Is this understood?"

"It is understood."

Thorvald walked him up the length of the wharf and through the yard and out by a small side-gate into a street of low brick houses, and stopped at the corner under a lamp that was not yet lit. The lamp-post had been painted a green that was almost black with soot. Thorvald took his pipe out of his pocket and did not light it.

"You have your father's business to do, I think."

"I did not tell you."

"You did. You told me yesterday at the rail. You did not know you were telling me." Thorvald tapped the stem of the pipe against his palm. "The yard you want is two streets down that way, and then one street over. It is called Hebburn. Walk carefully. There are carts."

"How do you know which yard?"

"Because there is only one your father would have been sent to from a Stavanger ship in eighteen fifty-six. I sailed out of this river for eleven years, Finnøybu. There are things one learns."

"Thank you."

"Meet me at the gate at six."

Olav walked in the direction Thorvald had pointed. The streets were wider than he had expected and the people in them were more numerous. Men in dark coats, men in caps, women in aprons standing at doors, children running in packs between the legs of horses. The carts were what Thorvald had warned him of. They came at speed and without warning from the cross-streets, and the drivers did not shout when they turned a corner. By the end of the first street he had understood that to stand still in this city was to be struck down, and he walked with his shoulders set and his eyes ahead. He turned where he had been told to turn. The second street gave onto the river again at a lower bend, and there across a stretch of open dock-ground he saw a yard with its gates wide open and a sign above the gate that said, in iron letters, RUTHERFORD & CO.

He stood at the gate a long time before he went in.

The yard was not as large as he had thought it would be. It was a place of scaffolding and dry-docks and heaps of oakum, and a smell of hot tar and iron filings rose off the ground. A gang of men were hauling a line of something heavy across the yard and singing a song with the pulling. The song was not a Norwegian song, but it had a shape Olav recognized — the shape of work done to a rhythm. A foreman in a bowler hat saw Olav at the gate and came over.

"You're lost, lad."

"I am not lost."

"Then you're looking for a man."

"I am looking for a place."

The foreman put his hands on his hips and looked Olav up and down. He saw, Olav supposed, the cap and the jacket and the hands and the new-sailor's face. Something in the look softened, against the man's will.

"What place."

"The place where they put the planking on the beams for the big boats. I was told a Norwegian sailor was hurt there once. Nearly twenty years ago."

"He was killed?"

"No. He was sent home. He is my father."

The foreman looked past Olav at the dock-ground for a moment. Olav kept his mouth shut.

"Nineteen years ago a man named Abel Rutherford dropped a plank off the second staging of slip three. The plank took a Norwegian in the knee. I was sixteen years old that year and I fetched the water for the ones as carried him off. Come in. I will show you slip three."

They walked across the yard between the heaps of oakum. The slip was empty, with only a keel laid on the blocks and a scaffolding halfway up one side. The foreman pointed with his chin.

"He was about there. He walked after, I'm told."

"He walks. He uses a cane."

"Aye. Well."

Olav said nothing. He looked at the place. It was an unremarkable patch of ground with a ladder leaning on it and a heap of shavings to one side. His father had been a man here, in this place, for some hours on one day, and he had walked the rest of his life because of those hours. Olav looked up at the scaffolding. The scaffolding was empty on that side.

"Where are you from, lad?"

"An island called Finnøy. Off the west coast of Norway."

"How long at sea?"

"Four months."

"First voyage?"

"First voyage."

"Well." The foreman put his hand on Olav's shoulder, just once, and took it off again. "Tell him when you go home that the yard remembers. There's not many of us old enough for it now. But it remembers."

"I will tell him."

They walked back to the gate. The foreman pointed up the street toward a coffee-stand where Olav might sit for an hour without spending more than a penny. Olav thanked him and went to the stand and sat on a box and drank a cup of the hot bitter coffee that Englishmen made. He looked at the light over the river. The light was not like the light over Stavangerfjord. The river was narrower, the banks were higher, the sky was closer to the chimneys, and the light had to find its way through all of it before it reached the surface. And yet it was water, as at home — black where the current ran under a pier, brown where it turned on a mud-bar, silver in the one place where the sun had found a gap. He watched it for an hour. He thought of his father. He thought of Peder. He thought of nothing for a long stretch of minutes. That was something he had not yet learned to do on the ship, where there was always a bell coming. He learned it that afternoon.

He met Thorvald at the gate at six by the great clock on the yard wall.

"You found it."

"I found it."

"Good."

They walked back to the ship in the lamplight, which was yellow and steady and low enough that Olav could see each stone of the street as he put his foot on it. Thorvald did not ask him what he had seen. He said, after a while, "My father was a cooper at Ålborg. I saw the shop the last time I was in Denmark. The shop was a laundry now. There was a woman hanging sheets where he had used to hoop his barrels. She was a good-looking woman. I did not go in."

"You did not go in."

"I thought about it. I thought it would be the same shop whether I went in or not."

"It would be."

"Yes."

They came to the ship. The ship was showing only a riding-light and a single lamp in the stern, and the crew were mostly already aboard. Olav climbed the plank after Thorvald and went below. In the small ledger his father had given him, in the back of the small Bible, he wrote the line I was today at slip three of Rutherford & Co., Hebburn, and the date, and nothing else. Then he shut the Bible. He went forward to the galley. The pot of water he had set to simmer before going ashore was still going; the stove had held its coal. He put more coffee in the grinder and ground it. He had the pot ready when the first of them came down through the scuttle, his breath smelling of stout and his eyes shining. The man thanked him and took his cup. He gave the coffee out to each of them as they came in. The last one was Henrik, who had drunk enough to be quiet rather than loud, and who took his cup without looking at Olav and went to his bunk.

Olav cleaned the galley. He turned down the stove. He went up on deck once before bed to see if the tide had turned, because he had learned to feel it through the hull and he wanted to check whether he was right.

The tide had turned.