“Tim wouldn’t have needed even the one if he’d lived,” Cyrus resumed.

“Yes, sir. We know. You—”

“Watched him die. Watched the light go out of his eyes, same as you would see it go out of a lamp.” With a jackknife, he pried the key on the tin’s cover, fit the slot into the tip of the metal band, and opened the container, releasing an oily smell. “Tim was on the table next to me, down in sick bay. Sick bay”—a low, bitter snort—“Slaughterhouse is what it was. Yes, an abattoir of human flesh.”

“The Brooklyn took sixty hits”—Nathaniel, to show he knew the facts about the battle, and also to forestall a repetition of the same old war story.

“Fifty-nine,” Drew corrected.

Cyrus fastidiously broke the pilot cracker into four equal parts, laid a piece of cod on each, and passed out three.

“If there was more of us on board, reckon you’d have to perform a miracle of loaves and fishes—should say, crackers and fishes,” said Eliot, his attempt to change the mood falling flat because it verged on the impious. He paused and put on a serious expression—never an easy thing for him.

“So did you find everything shipshape, Father? Squared away and all Gloucester fashion?”

Cyrus chewed, swallowed, cleaned his teeth with the tip of his tongue. Rising, he stood with one hand resting on the gallows frame in which the main boom was crutched, and then asked Eliot back:

“Shipshape, you say?” He removed his hat to wipe the sweatband, even though it wasn’t a hot morning, and the exposure of his partly bald skull, the gray hairs on his temples showing bright silver in the unsparing sunlight, seemed to age him a decade in a twinkling. “Things are not shipshape, but they will be,” he muttered, almost inaudibly, and spit over the taffrail.

There he remained for a time, showing his sons his back, while he looked at the dock and at the green plain of Mingulay’s lawn rising gently from the seawall toward the house, beneath whose roof half a dozen families could have lived comfortably, beneath whose roof that many families, and possibly more, were going to live, in summers yet to come: all the sons and daughters who would be begotten by those begotten by those begotten by him. So he had told Nathaniel, Eliot, and Drew; so he would tell anyone who asked why he had built so big a house for only himself, his wife, and three children. Not for them alone, he would say, but for those generations of Braithwaites whom he would never see, whose Christian names he never would know.