Across the aisle sat Branko with his lawyer, Kostelac, a little round man in a gray suit, and Vesna, in black, very straight, her hands folded on her purse. Behind them sat Zoran and Jure and their wives, and half of Fish Harbor, men in windbreakers with their caps in their hands, come to see what Thurman Whitfield's son was going to say.
Vesna had come to the Anchor Light on Tuesday afternoon. She had sat in a booth by herself and asked him, quietly, to tell her what happened to her son. Not for the hearing. For her. He had sat down across from her and told her, all of it, from the plates to the light, and she had listened with her eyes on his face the whole time, and then said, "Thank you. Nobody would tell me. Not one of them. Not even my husband." And then she had said, "Tomorrow you tell them too. I'll be there. I want to hear it said out loud in a room."
They called him at a quarter to eleven.
He walked to the witness chair and put his hand on the Bible and swore, and sat down and looked out at the room, at his mother and Sig and Branko and Vesna and all of Fish Harbor, and for one moment he thought of his father in a chair like this one, twenty-three years ago, knowing exactly what it would cost.
He told them what happened.
It took an hour and forty minutes. He told it in order, the way Sig had told his. The plates and his own hands on the wrench. The crack and the cement. The radio and the bank letter and one more set. And Davor at the bottom of the engine-room ladder in the noise and the dark, saying stay there, hand me the light.
"And you handed it to him," said the senior member of the Board, a white-haired captain, gently.
"Yes sir. I handed it to him. I could have gone down. I've thought about it every day since. I don't know if it would've made any difference. But I didn't, and he did, and I'm alive, and he isn't. I wanted you to have that too."
Kostelac was courteous and careful. He asked whether most boats in the San Pedro wetfish fleet didn't routinely plate their freeing ports when deck-loading, and Duncan said yes, and that they shouldn't, and he hoped the Board would say so where the whole fleet could hear. Kostelac asked whether a sea that size might have capsized her even with her ports open, and Duncan said nobody could know that, and it was a big sea. Kostelac thanked him and sat down. Branko had not looked up once.
Then they called Jure Bakota.
Duncan watched him walk up the aisle. He was pale. He put his hand on the Bible and swore, and sat down, and looked at the microphone for a long time, and then at his brother, in the third row, and then at Vesna Perovich, who was looking straight at him.