Stavanger

They crossed to Stavanger on a Tuesday in the first week of March.

The wind was light out of the southwest. Lars had the sail up and the sheet slack, and his hand beside Olav's on the tiller, and did not speak. Olav did not speak either. The last time he had been in Lars's boat he had been a boy of eighteen with a chest under a tarpaulin and his father beside him pointing with a cane at a brig at the outer pier, and he had looked at the brig the way a boy looks at a house he has not yet lived in. That had been June. It was March now and he had no chest and the boat sat higher in the water without it.

Jens stood amidships with his cane and did not point at anything. Jens had been to Stavanger only once since Olav had come home at Christmas, and that had been on the first Saturday in January, to take a letter to the post in person, and he had not explained that trip, and Olav had not asked. On the walk down to the landing, his father had looked at him on the stone path beside the barn and had said, without looking at his face, that they would be at John's before the dinner hour, and that John had taken the trouble of a dinner.

"John has taken the trouble of a dinner."

"Yes."

"Then we will eat a dinner at John's."

"Yes."

They did not say more than that on the walk down. Peder had come with them as far as the top of the path and had stopped where the path began to slope and had lifted a hand to his brother. Olav had returned the motion. Peder was a man now for the gesture. He had been a boy for it in June.

Stavanger came up out of the water in its proper order—the low spine of Hetland, the roofs behind the masts, the masts themselves. The forest was smaller than it had been in June; he knew now what had gone out and come in at the turning of winter to spring, which was most of the fleet. He counted the brigs because he could count them. He had not been able to count them in June. The counting was something a boy who had made one voyage did with his eye.

Lars set them down at the inner pier. Olav handed the painter up to a boy who was standing there because a boy was always standing there at that hour. Lars said he would wait at the third bell of the afternoon watch, and the hour of return was understood without being specified. Jens and Olav went up the plank and along the pier and into the narrow street that ran up from the water toward the Hetland road. Olav walked a half-step behind his father, because a son going into the house of his father's older cousin walked a half-step behind his father in the custom he had been raised to and had not forgotten in six months at sea.

John Stensøy's house stood on a short street above the inner harbor where the painted frame houses gave way to stone at the corners. The door was a dark door with a brass knob darkened at the edge by many hands. A woman in a white apron opened it. She called over her shoulder, and John Stensøy came forward from the back of the hall with a man's step that was quicker than his face suggested. He was a larger man than Jens and a year or two younger, with pale eyes and a short beard that had gone grey at the chin only. He took Jens's right hand between both his own.

"Jens."

"John."

"And the boy. Come into the parlor. My wife is at her sister's until the evening. We will eat in the kitchen as the countrymen do."

He led them past a parlor that had its chairs dressed in linen covers and into a kitchen warmer than the parlor and smelling of bread and of something with cabbage. Above the stove hung a framed print of a brig of forty years ago, blue hull, white stripes, red waterline. A table was set for three. They sat. John poured the coffee himself.

He did not ask Olav any questions for the first half of the meal. He spoke with Jens about the winter, and about a man at Judaberg whose boy had drowned in the autumn, and about the seam in the small boat at Vestbø that Jens had written about in his January letter. As the soup was cleared, he spoke of his own father, who had taken Jens out in a sailing smack on the Stavangerfjord in the summer of 1844 and given him the tiller for the whole of an afternoon, and had come back saying that Jens of Vestbø had taken the tiller like a boy who would want a ship of his own by seventeen. Jens said that had been a forecast partly borne out and partly not. He did not elaborate. Olav listened the way a boy listens to the half-known history of the people in whose blood his own blood goes.

The cabbage came in a pot and the pork with it and they ate. John passed the salt without being asked, and Jens took it without thanking and passed it on. They had eaten at the same tables for forty years, Olav thought, in each other's fathers' houses before they had eaten in each other's, and the passing of salt was a long sentence they had written between them without words for it.

After the pork John pushed his plate aside and put his elbows on the table.

"The captain is home today," he said. "He has asked us for the evening."

Jens nodded. "The ship is at the quay?"

"At the herring quay. She has been there since the thaw. He will want to show her after the dinner."

"That is well."

"He is a man who shows a ship."

"I have heard so."

John looked at Olav then for the first time in any full way, and Olav set his cup down because John had set his down.

"Your father has written me a careful letter about you. I would rather hear you than the letter."

"I will answer, sir."

"Where did you sail."

"The Sigrid. Captain Rasmus Dahl. Stavanger to Copenhagen to Hebburn to Stavanger, June to December."

"Cook."

"Cook. And on the homeward leg the wheel when the captain wanted it under a new hand."

"The ship suited you."

"I would sail her again, sir."

"I wrote to Rasmus Dahl in February. He said you would be welcome back in April if you wished. You did not wish."

"I had not known that he had written."

"Your father had known." John did not look at Jens and Jens did not look at John. "A boy is not told every letter in his father's drawer. You did not wish to sail the Sigrid again, and I am not asking why. I will ask you a different question. Do you wish to sail the Asta."

"I wish to sail the Asta, sir."

"The captain is not Rasmus Dahl."

"I understand that."

"Do you."

"I have been on one ship, sir. I do not know yet what I do not know."

John looked at him a moment longer. Then he said, without the edge coming off his face but with something coming off the voice, that a boy who said he did not know yet what he did not know was a boy whose father had raised him, and that the four owners of the Asta had read his name on a paper yesterday morning and had put their four signatures under it without any one of them asking the others to wait, and that the dinner was eaten, and that they should take their walk now to the captain's before the light went.

They walked the ten minutes to the captain's through streets Olav had never seen in June, because the business of the Sigrid had been at the pier and at the office of registry only. The captain's street was behind the cathedral. The houses were higher and the windows were larger and the doorsteps were of cut stone. The captain's door had a small brass plate engraved with no words that Olav could read in the fading light. John Stensøy rang and they waited.

The woman who opened the door was not a servant. She was perhaps forty, with brown hair drawn back smoothly and a grey silk at her throat that had been a dress of another purpose earlier in its life. She took Jens's coat and Olav's coat over her own arm and laid them across a chest in the hall without calling a girl to take them. She said a quiet thing to John in a voice that had a softer Stavanger in it than Olav had ever heard. Then she turned to Olav.

"You have come a long way for a dinner, and the captain will talk more than a boy who has come a long way for a dinner will want to hear. Please sit at my right. I will rescue you when I can."

He did not know how to answer her. He said, "Thank you," because he did not yet know what word he was supposed to use in her house. She smiled at him without her face changing much, and she went into the parlor ahead of them.

Captain Gjermund was at the fire. He was a heavier man than Olav had expected, broad in the shoulders and thick about the waist, with a weathered face and grey hair that had not been combed with the care his coat had been brushed with. The coat had been brushed with very great care. He came forward with his hand out, first to Jens and then to Olav, and his hand was larger than Olav's own hand and dry, and the clasp of it was held a second longer than a stranger's clasp. His voice had a hitch at the front of certain words, a small catch before a vowel, and he covered it pleasantly so that one heard the hitch only after one had stopped listening for the meaning.

"The son of Jens Hestby. Welcome in my house. Welcome twice because you come as a Vestbø man and as my youngman. Three times because John Stensøy brings you. Four times because my wife is fond of country boys, and tonight I keep the peace by pretending I am also."

Olav did not know how to be welcomed four times in one breath. He said, "Thank you, sir," and did not look at the captain's wife, because she had said to him at the door that she would rescue him when she could, and he did not yet know where the danger was.

They went into the parlor. On the far wall hung an oil painting of a two-masted vessel at anchor in a harbor Olav did not recognize. The captain stood under the painting for a moment before he sat and did not name the ship or the harbor. His wife took a chair by the side window. A small piece of embroidery lay on a table beside her and she did not take it up. The captain talked, from the chair under the painting, about a barometer reading he had taken that forenoon and about the weather he expected for the last week of March—dark, he said, and stormy in patches, yet not very bad for March, yet one watched the glass.

After a quarter of an hour a girl came and said in a low voice that the dinner was ready. The table was long for four; the lamps were lit along it. The captain sat at the head and the captain's wife at the foot, and Jens on one side, and Olav and John on the other. The captain seemed not to notice. He talked. He talked through the soup, which was fish, and through the roast, which was lamb with a dill, and through the pudding, which was a bread pudding with preserved plums from Hardanger, and Olav did not have to say anything for the whole dinner except yes and no and sir.

The captain spoke of the Asta as a man speaks of a woman he has married well. He spoke of Lisbon and of the rock off Point St. Vincent and of the way a Portuguese pilot took a ship up the Tagus, and of the cargo he would carry outward, which would be coal from Shields, and of the cargo he would carry homeward, which would be salt from the salt-pans of Setúbal. He spoke about the first voyage he had ever made as a captain, out of Tvedestrand in a brig named Elida, and he told a piece of the story with a kindliness Olav had not expected and did not know what to make of. He named his crew—the first mate and the second mate, the carpenter who had sailed with the ship four voyages, the boatswain who was from Hogganvik and had sailed with him before, and the six forward hands, who were six names that passed over Olav's hearing without lodging, because a man hears names as names only after he has stood in a forecastle with them; and the two youngmen, one of whom was Olav, and one of whom was a boy called Nils whom Olav would meet at the quay in the morning.

All the time the captain talked, his wife ate quietly and watched the bread and turned the bread with a knife once when the slice was not cut through, and said small things only—where a spoon lay, whether a glass was full. Twice she looked at Olav in a way that carried no expression and did not last. Once, when the captain had gone on at some length about a cargo of port wine he had brought home from Oporto in a winter long before his present marriage, she cut into the silence after a sentence that had half-finished, and she said that the pudding had gone round, and that they would take coffee in the parlor rather than at the table. The captain looked across at her for a moment without the hitch being covered, and then he laughed and said that the captain's wife had the last word on the timing of the coffee, as she had the last word on several other things of which he would not speak in front of company. He laughed, and John laughed, and Jens did not laugh.

Olav took nothing from the dinner table but the course in front of him and the wine in his cup and the sound of the captain's voice covering the room. He took the wine and he took the sound.

After the bread pudding the captain stood up and put his napkin on the table and said they would walk to the quay now, the four of them, while the light held. His wife rose also but did not come. She kissed John Stensøy on the cheek as if he were a cousin, and she pressed Jens's hand, and she looked once at Olav and gave him a small nod, and she went back into the kitchen without saying good-night. Olav did not think, at that moment, about what the small nod had been for. He thought about it later.

They walked through the back of the cathedral square and down to the herring quay, where the Asta lay at the stones with her yards squared and her hull painted a black that had been painted recently and would carry the winter still. She was a three-masted schoonership and she was larger than the Sigrid. The name-board on her counter had been gilded the autumn before, and the carving of the letters was deep enough that Olav could have put the nail of his thumb into the belly of the A. The figure on her bow was not a woman; it was a plain scrolled head, painted white, with no face.

The captain led them up the gangway ahead of John and Jens, talking as he went—the pump that had been replaced at Easter, the new weatherboards along the starboard bow, the stove in the galley that he himself had caused to be taken out and a better one put in; he named each thing with a man's satisfaction in his own house. He took them forward and aft and below. He showed Olav the forecastle himself, a long low room with eight bunks in two tiers and a small iron stove at the forward end, the deckhead so low that Olav's cap brushed it if he straightened. He showed the mate's cabin aft, and his own cabin beyond it. On the bulkhead of the captain's cabin was a small oil painting of a boy of perhaps ten years who stood very straight beside a chair. The captain did not name the boy and Olav did not ask.

He clapped Olav on the shoulder as they came up out of the forecastle, and the clap was hard enough that Olav felt it at his collar-bone, and soft enough that the captain could have said it was only friendliness if anyone had asked.

"You will stand where I put you and eat what I set before you and pull when I tell you to pull, and you will be happy on my ship. Yes?"

"Yes, sir."

"That is a Vestbø answer." He laughed and turned to John Stensøy and said, "A Vestbø answer is a clean answer. I will have five more like him if you can find them by Saturday."

John said mildly that five more of him were not likely to be found by Saturday anywhere in Ryfylke, and the captain laughed again and clapped John on the shoulder also, and the hour at the ship was ended, and the four of them came down off the gangway onto the quay in the last of the light.

Jens did not say anything on the walk back to John's. John said one thing: he said, to nobody in particular but with his face turned slightly toward Jens, that a man in the best of his humor before articles were signed was a man one kept an eye on afterward. Jens did not answer. Olav walked a half-step behind the two men again.

They stayed the night at John's. John's wife had come in from her sister's. She welcomed Olav as a boy she already knew by letter, said she had been at his baptism in Hesby when he was eight days old and remembered that his mother had worn a grey dress in which she had looked tired, and did not say more about his mother. She showed him to a cot in a small room that had been a sewing room in a past year and was a storeroom now. He slept badly. He had not yet learned what he was not sleeping about. He knew only that the captain's hand at his collar-bone had left something, and that the captain's wife's small nod at the dinner-table had left something, and that the two somethings were not the same thing, and he did not know how to hold them in one pocket. At some hour after the bells had gone three he slept.

In the morning John's wife gave them coffee and bread and a small piece of cheese, and John walked with them down to the office of registry through a thin sleet that had begun at the first light. The building was the one Olav had been inside in June. The grey of the Stavanger weather on the cut stone had not changed, and the door with the wrought-iron handle had not changed, and inside, the light fell on the dark wooden counter in the same way. Behind the counter the clerk was a different man in the same spectacles. He had the ship's book open at a fresh page for the Asta crew. Captain Gjermund was not there. John stood aside for Olav, as Captain Dahl had stood aside for him in June, and Olav stepped up and gave his full name and his day and year and place of baptism, and watched the clerk write them in the same neat hand the June clerk had written them in. The line was:

Olav Hestby of the farm Vestbø, Finnøy, in the parish of Hesby, the first day of April in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven. Youngman, term of the voyage not to exceed one calendar year. Wage of twelve kroner per month, with an advance of six kroner paid on the day of signing.

He signed. The pen was the pen he had signed with in June. His hand was steadier than it had been in June. His name on the paper looked like his own name now. The clerk read the line out in the clerkly voice, and the Asta's first mate, who had come into the office in the minute Olav had been bent over the book and had stood at the far end of the counter without being introduced, nodded without speaking. The clerk slid the silver across the counter, and Olav held it a moment in his palm, and he looked at his father, and his father was looking at the counter and not at him, and Olav put the silver in his own pocket.

John Stensøy walked them to the quay. Lars had come in with the morning tide. He had made tea on the stones with a small brazier he kept for that purpose, and he gave them each a cup while they waited for the wind to steady. The sleet had stopped; the sky over the outer roadstead was the grey of a bucket that had held salt for a long time. The wind steadied from the northwest, and they got into the boat and pushed off. The crossing home took longer than the crossing out.

Jens did not speak for most of the crossing. When they were past the outer buoy and Finnøy was visible over the larboard bow, he said, "He is a man who shows a ship."

"Yes," Olav said.

"It is the hour after he has shown it that you will be watching."

"Yes."

"And the wife at the door."

"Yes."

"Remember her when you hear him at sea. She has been hearing him a long time."

"I will."

Jens did not say more. Olav did not ask him to. He sat in the stern with his hand beside Lars's on the tiller, and the boat came home. At the Vestbø landing he took the silver of the advance out of his own pocket and held it out to his father. Jens did not take it.

"A man keeps his advance," he said.

Olav put it back. They went up the path together, and Peder was at the yard.