Lonesome George, a half-tame great blue heron, soared in on broad wings and claimed his I’m-king-of-the-world! post on Miss Dotsy’s bow. The wily majestic creature knew Ben and Knocker Ellis as soft touches. He cadged daily for a handout in the shape of a freshly shucked oyster. Ellis took one from the meager catch. He knifed it open in an instant, flicked the quivering flesh forward. Lonesome George snatched it out of mid-air, jerked his head twice to position the bite in his beak, and swallowed. Despite a scraping honk, a twitch of his crest plumes, and a pleading yellow eye, Ellis gave the flying sponger no more.
Ben steeled himself. Broached it. “Some problems down there.”
Knocker Ellis nodded to himself. Seemed to have expected this. The big man shrank with an odd melancholy, but waited for Ben to say more.
“The storm. It wrecked a boat. Down there by that oyster rock. A Nantucket Lance. Nice one.”
Knocker Ellis considered this. “’Tuckets don’t sink.” Those three words coming from Ellis made the longwinded Fidel Castro seem mute.
Ben struggled to get over the surprise of hearing Ellis say so much. And Ellis was right. How had Ben missed it? All the print and TV ads for the Nantucket Lance boasted its closed cell flotation chambers. The manufacturer would mercilessly Skil-saw the hull into small sections on a lake, but every chunk remained afloat. The ads were astounding, and certainly persuasive. Yet here was an unsinkable boat sitting squarely on the Chesapeake’s bottom. For that matter, what was a man in a perfectly good life vest doing in the mud with that boat? Maybe the vest was not perfectly good after all. Ben would check it on the next dive.
Ben set that last question aside. “I know what I saw.” Rather than reveal his loss, he addressed the gain. He said it sideways, in the Smith Island way. “There was none-too-much cargo.”
Knocker Ellis eyed him. “That so? How big a boat?”
“Twenty-five feet. Center console. Triple 250 Mercs. She’d fetch a price.”
Knocker Ellis communed with his inner calculator for a moment. “Must be close on fifty-five hundred pounds of cargo.” He shook his head and smiled small, as if in admiration of something Ben could not understand.
Ben asked, “You want to unpack that a little? Maybe cut the inscrutable all-knowing Powerboat Show guru stuff?”
Ellis simply said, “Swamp capacity.”
Ben was annoyed. “I’m talking about a sunken boat that shouldn’t sink, and you’re talking about a bayou census, as near as I can figure out.” Ellis’s look said it all. Ben felt like a rookie sailor.
Ellis spoke as if reciting common knowledge, “The swamp capacity of a twenty-five-foot, center console Nantucket Lance is five thousand five hundred pounds. She won’t sink unless cargo, gear, passengers, fuel, and water in her cockpit sum up more than that. As a for-instance, I figure Miss Dotsy’s capacity is a couple-two-three hundred pounds more than the Lance, just because of her size.”
That explained the boat, but not Knocker Ellis’s ready erudition on it.
Anticipating Ben’s question, Ellis said, “I wanted to get myself a Lance if I could ever afford to retire. So I read up.” Ellis nodded toward the stack of bushel baskets that Ben had yet to fill. “I have to say retirement seems pretty far off, with you quitting work to cramp and carve and yammer and whatnot.”
Silent for weeks at a time, now Knocker Ellis was voluble, sharp, and a wise-ass. Ben realized he did not know this man at all. Had his father? The thought brought Ben around.
He said, “Maybe the gold watch isn’t so far away.”
Ellis looked interested. “How so?”
Ben said, “I’ll get to that, but you need to know something else, first.” Ben looked off toward the western horizon behind the clouds, not wanting to meet Ellis’s eyes. “Captain went down with the ship.”
Knocker Ellis relapsed into a this-is-bad-business silence. One slow, deep breath. A second. “Anybody you know?”
Ben’s hands tensed. The knife jerked deep. The wooden duck’s little bill snapped off. Ben and Ellis stared at the maimed carving. Ben flipped it over the side, and watched it bob away on the swells. He admitted, “You knew him longer than I did.”
Ellis shook his head slowly. Was that the confirmation of a suspicion, or a fear that something had gone wrong? Ben was not sure.
Ellis looked Ben in the eye. “You Blackshaws got a hellafied manner of doing things. You think it’s your father? After all this time off island?”
“Like I said, it’s a recent wreck. Storm got him.”
Knocker Ellis pressed. “You sure you recognized him? After fifteen years gone, a few days on the bottom?”
“The body, the face, yes it’s all a mess. But there’s an Army jacket. He liked those. The name on it is wrong. The driver’s license had a completely different name, too. No surprise there. He’d have changed his go-by long ago. Maybe more than once. The license picture? That’s plain as day. It’s Pap. Older, but no mistake. Here, see for yourself.”
Ben pulled the wallet out of his progging bag, and passed the license to Ellis.
Ellis squinted at it at arm’s length. His shoulders bowed like a great weight had been lowered on them. “Sorry, Ben. Was a good man.”
“Suppose so. While he was around.” Anger flashed in Knocker Ellis’s eyes as Ben took the license back.
Knocker Ellis reached for the radio just inside Miss Dotsy’s small cuddy cabin. He tuned to channel 16, the frequency monitored by the Marine Police.
Ben removed the gold slab from the progging bag, and placed it on the engine box with a thump.
With his back to Ben, Ellis picked up the microphone. “We best get on with this. Call it in. Damn storm’s coming round again.”
“Knocker Ellis. We have to talk.”
Ben failed to hide the strain in his voice. Ellis turned, saw the hunk of bullion, narrowed his eyes. “Gee, Ben. What about?”
First things first. Ben said, “Turn the radio off.”
Ellis complied. He even unplugged the power cord from the back of the transceiver. He understood that a stuck mic could provide hours of amusement for other watermen listening in on the common frequency. Loose chat on the air had even revealed the location of long-secret oyster rocks. This was a time for much greater care with every word.
Ellis tilted his head toward the gold bar. “That would be the cargo you mentioned?”
Ben nodded. Knocker Ellis approached the engine box. Stroked the gold slowly with a gnarled finger. When he smiled, it looked like his golden eyetooth was communing with the bar, signaling to and fro with lustrous rays about wealth and misery.
Ellis cleared his throat. “More of these below?”
Ben nodded again. “I count twenty boxes. Six bars across, and two deep in each box.”
“Mercy. Indeed we are picking high cotton.” Knocker Ellis went to his Deep Blue place again and crunched the numbers. He said, “Two hundred forty bars. A lot of gold, if every box has gold in it. And here’s a stamp. Four-zero-zero o-z-t.”
Ben mused aloud. “Okay, that’s probably Troy ounces.”
Ellis continued the math. And the lecture. “A Troy pound is twelve ounces. A Scottish Troy pound is sixteen Troy ounces. That’s if you go by the Incorporation of Goldsmiths, City of Edinburgh, late seventeenth century. Four hundred divided by sixteen is an even twenty-five pounds Imperial. This is an old measure. Old gold. What about that stamp? Like a grinning face, but a little sideways.”