"He said the Buena Fe had her lights. He said he saw them himself. He said a man named Villaseñor was dead, and the next ship coming up on Point Fermin in a fog was going to have a mate on it with a bottle in the chart room, and an AB at the wheel afraid to touch the telegraph, unless somebody stood up in that room and said what happened." He opened his eyes. "And then he said he was going to tell them about his minute too. That he'd waited. That if he'd put the wheel over when he first saw the light, Villaseñor would be alive. He said he wasn't going to say one true thing about me and leave out the true thing about himself."
"And he did."
"Every word. I was in the room. He said I was drunk and passed out and he'd called me twice. And then he said, I waited too long. I was afraid to take the ship. That's on me." Sig shook his head. "They took my license. They gave your father a letter of admonition. That's all. But by the time it got from the hearing room to the hall it had turned around. Whitfield admitted he was at fault. Whitfield hung Aasen to save himself. Bill Erstad, who was patrolman for the union and had been drinking with me for ten years, put it out that your father had made a deal with the company, and I let him. Because it was easier being the man who'd been wronged than the man who killed Cayetano Villaseñor with a bottle of aquavit."
He wiped his face with his hand, roughly, as if it were still wet from the rain.
"That's the first part," he said. "That's the part you could have read in the transcript. Here's the part you couldn't."
Duncan waited.
"I went on the beach. I had a room at the Hotel Seaman on Beacon Street, eight dollars a week, and I drank up everything I had, my sextant and the watch my mother gave me in 1933. By Christmas I wasn't eating. And one Sunday somebody knocked, and it was your father in the hall with a plate in his hands wrapped in foil." Sig's voice caught, and steadied. "Pot roast. From Joaquim Amaral's place down the block. He put it on the table and sat on the other bed and watched me eat it. He didn't say anything. And the next Sunday he came back."
In the kitchen doorway, Duncan heard Ilda let out a breath.
"For a year," Sig said. "Every Sunday. Fifty-one Sundays. He missed one, the winter you were small and had the croup and he was up with you all night. He came Monday instead and apologized." He laughed, a small cracked sound. "He apologized to me. Do you understand? He'd sat in that room and done the bravest thing I ever saw a man do, and the whole waterfront was calling him a rat for it, and he apologized to the man who let them for missing a week."
"Why?" Duncan said. It came out of him like something torn. "Why would he do that? After you—"
"I asked him that. About the fifth month, sober for once. And he sat there on the other bed with his hat in his hands, and he said—" Sig stopped. He was looking past Duncan, at nothing, at the rain. "He said, Sig, I told them what you did. That's not the same thing as what you are. I'm not going to let the one turn into the other. And then he said, eat your supper, it's getting cold."