The plan had been for him to return to the quarries this summer, after the cruise, and again next summer. Then, after he finished at Andover, he would go on to Yale or Harvard and work in the offices during vacations to learn the arts of managing men and accounts. An apprenticeship alongside his father would follow college graduation, and at some time in the distant future, he would become president of the Cape Ann and Bay Island Granite Company. Presumably, he would be agreeably married to a suitable woman by that time and have a son of his own to groom for future responsibilities. Every mark was there, as clear as the marks plotted on a chart; so clear that sometimes Nathaniel felt as if he had already made the voyage and was looking back on it, full of years and respectability. In those moments, the sense of inevitability and predictability pressed against his ribs like a steel corset.

But now this … This strange and unlooked-for rupture in the way things were supposed to unfold. Stranger still, he didn’t know how he felt about it, or how he should feel. He yearned for life to be as it had been only yesterday, because right now he couldn’t even guess, much less predict, where they were going to spend tonight. Yet, he could not deny that the not knowing stirred a peculiar and foreign excitement that drew its poignancy from fear. He heard Eliot murmur:

“Maybe we should go on strike ourselves.”

“How can a man’s kids go on strike?” asked Drew.

“They can’t. That’s the point. So we’re worse off than those quarry hands.”

“Go to work in a quarry for a day and you’ll change that ditty,” said Nathaniel, remembering the pits whose sheer sides, fissured and sharp-edged, resembled ancient walls under excavation, or maybe the foundation for the Tower of Babel, considering the garbled tongues spoken there amid the clamor of air hammers and steam drills: the Yankees’ down-easter drawls mingling dissonantly with Gaelic, Italian, and the cryptic singsong of Finnish. Whatever their native language, all spoke the common vernacular of the quarryman—the wheeze that came from breathing silicate dust ten hours a day, six days a week, year upon year.