Everything in Its Place

Old Barnaby would not talk indoors. He said the Anchor had ears, which was Vera’s only known failing, and so on a bright cold morning with the tide a long way out you and Jonah walked with him along the old tideline path that ran from the cannery’s outfall to the slipway, between the black stakes and the weed, and Barnaby set the pace, which was slow and entirely his own.

“Tide was out at half past ten on Thursday,” he said. “Spring tide. You could walk it dry-shod if you didn’t mind the weed to the knee.” He pointed with his stick at a place where the path dipped under the wall. “Penhale walked it. I was on the slipway steps, having my pipe, where I’m not supposed to be. He came along here at ten to eleven, hat in his hand, and he stopped at the bottom of the steps. He never saw me.”

“What was he doing?”

“Looking up at the hut.” Barnaby took off his cap and put it on again. “The lamp was on. Three heads bent over a book. Two women, and Tom. He stood there so long I thought he’d be taken for a stake. His lips were going. I thought, he’s saying his accounts.” The old man shook his head. “Then he turned about and went off along the front to the Anchor. I’ve never seen him go anywhere he’d not been before.”

You looked up at the hut, its stovepipe thin against the sky. A man had stood at the foot of those steps with a thing in his hands and the means of laying it down in front of the very people who would be blamed for it, and he had not gone in.

“He could have told Rudd,” said Jonah.

“He could,” said Barnaby, “and Rudd’d have thanked him, and the town would have had to find a different story.” He leaned on his stick. “A man goes where he can be what he was the day before. That’s all the Anchor is. Nobody asks old men what they’ve seen, and nobody asks what the snug is for.”

At the end of the tideline the wind turned, and you could smell the cold hearth of the cannery. Order, you thought, can swallow a man whole. It had swallowed Josiah Penhale for forty minutes, and handed him a brandy.