The dock shook. He turned to see his father, face darkened by the shadow of a wide-brimmed straw hat, carrying a crate of dry stores. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows and his muscles, straining under freckled skin covered by fine, cinnamon hairs, still had the look of knotted whips. A young man’s muscles. But was a young man’s strength still in them? There was more gray than ginger in his beard, and half the hair under that hat was gone now, Closer to a grandfather than to a father in age—fifty-six this year, Nathaniel thought, and got to his feet and went to take the crate. Cyrus waved him off with a movement of his head and carried it the rest of the way, setting it down alongside the piling to which the dory’s painter was tied with a bowline.

“What were you doing?” he said. He was breathing hard, as if he had run down from the house, and Nathaniel saw that his face had not been darkened by the hat brim but by the color that rose in it from an excess of sun or exertion, or whenever he was angry: the color of an earthenware platter, a shade so close to his beard’s, before it had begun turning silver, that the distinction between flesh and hair had been hard to see from far away.

“Putting my personals aboard, sir.”

“Looked to me like you were standing on your head.”

There was a faint note of disapproval in his father’s voice, and Nathaniel felt himself blush.

“Oh, that. Just an exercise. A friend of mine at school told me that he’d read that the Hindoos of India stand on their heads all the time and that it’s very good for you.”

Cyrus stared critically with his good eye, frosty as winter seasmoke, while the left eye, its stilled pupil cocked off-center, seemed to stare over Nathaniel’s right shoulder. It was always disconcerting, this being looked at directly and indirectly at the same time.

“If the way those Hindoos live is an example, don’t reckon putting your head where your feet oughtta be is of any benefit.”

“No, sir.”