And then she told him.
In the spring of 1981, she said, when the first Vietnamese families started shrimping out of Bayou Clement, there had been trouble. Not just here. All along the coast. Men said they were taking the shrimp, crowding the grounds, working too hard and too cheap, not following the rules nobody had ever written down. There were meetings in the back of the bait shop. There were boats burned in Texas. Here, it never got that far, but it got far enough. One morning Hieu Tran, twenty-six years old and eighteen months off a refugee boat, came down to the harbor to find two words painted on the side of his little trawler in house paint, in letters three feet high. Every man on the docks knew who'd done it. Nobody said.
"Your granddaddy," his mother said. "Earl. And your daddy was with him, nineteen years old, holding the can."
Wade said nothing. The room was very quiet.
"Four years later," she went on, "Hurricane Elena came up the Gulf. You've heard about Elena. Everybody thought it'd go to Florida and then it turned around and came back at us, and Earl had the Delia P. out in the Sound trying to get her up the bayou in front of it, and the engine quit. Your daddy said the waves were taller than the wheelhouse. They took on water so fast. They were up to their waists in the cabin. Earl put him in a life jacket and they went over the side, and the Delia P. rolled over and went down right in front of them, and your daddy said he was sure, absolutely sure, they were going to drown in the dark holding on to an ice chest."
She stopped and drank some of the wine, finally.
"There was one boat out there that didn't have any business being out there. Little trawler, running with no lights because its generator had gone, coming down through the swells like it was looking for something. And it was. Somebody'd heard the Delia P. on the radio before the engine quit. Somebody'd been listening. He came alongside and threw them a line and pulled your granddaddy over the rail by his belt, and then he went back around for your daddy, who'd lost hold of the line, and he found him. In the dark, in that sea. Your daddy never could say how." She looked at the photograph on the wall. "It was the same boat, Wade. They could still see the words on the side. He'd painted over them, but house paint doesn't cover anything, not really. In the lightning they could still read them."
Wade sat with his hands between his knees.
"Daddy never told me any of that," he said. "He used to say 'some shrimper' pulled them out. Some shrimper. That's all he ever said."
"I know."
"Why?"
"Because he was ashamed," his mother said simply. "Because he could never figure out how to stand in front of that man and say the thing he needed to say, so he decided it was better not to say anything at all. Earl was the same, worse. You know what Earl did? About a month after the storm, he went to Hieu's house with three cans of paint. The green from the Delia P., the good marine enamel he'd bought for her that spring and never got to use. He put them on the man's steps and he said, 'It's good paint,' and he walked away. That was it. That was the whole apology, Earl Pruitt style." She shook her head. "Your daddy told me once Hieu nodded at him in the hardware store, years later. Just nodded. And your daddy nodded back and then went and sat in his truck for twenty minutes. He went to the man's dock maybe three times in his life to say something, and three times he turned around and came home."
"That's why you said 'of all the boats.'"