The dry dock is a chamber off the canal with a gate and paddles, and a boat goes in, the gate shuts, the water drains, and the boat sits on blocks to be worked on, and the dock logs every fill and drain because the water is metered. Every night it fills and drains with nothing in it. And in the morning the blocks on the floor have tar on them, fresh, black, in the pattern a hull leaves when it has been blacked overnight, and the dock smells of hot tar, and the tar pot on the shelf is cold and full.
I am the boatyard manager on a canal and the dry dock is where the real work is done, and every night it is done without me.
The dock.
A brick chamber off the cut with a gate at the canal end and paddles to let water in and out. A boat comes in on the water, the gate shuts, the paddles drain the chamber, and the boat settles onto the blocks and a man can stand under it and black the hull, which is tar, hot, brushed on. The dock logs every fill and drain to the company because it is a lockful each way.
At night it fills. And drains. With nothing in it.
The work.
The paddles work on their own. The gate, chained, opens. The chamber fills to the canal level, and the sound of the water is the sound of a boat coming in, the wash and the bump, and the gate shuts, and the paddles drain it, and the water goes down around a hull that is not there, and the dock is dry, and then the work starts.
Tar. I can smell it from the cottage. Hot tar, the kind you heat in a pot over a fire, and the brush, the long handled one, on steel, a stroke at a time, along a hull, the way it is done, from the stern forward, one side and then the other, and it goes on for four hours, which is what a seventy foot hull takes, and then the fire goes out and the paddles open and the dock fills and the gate opens and the boat goes out on the water, and the dock is empty and full.
In the morning the blocks have tar on them, fresh, in the shape of a hull's bottom, and the dock walls have the splashes at the height of a man's brush, and the tar pot on the shelf is cold and full and has not been moved, and the fire grate is clean.
What has been checked.
The paddles, chained. The gate, chained. They work.
The dock, at night, by me, on the steps down into it, in the dark, when it had drained. The blocks were empty. And above me, between me and the dark, there was a hull. I could not see it. I could feel it, the way you feel a thing over your head, the closeness of it, and the heat of the tar, and the brush went past me on the steel, a stroke, a foot from my face, and the tar went onto nothing and stayed there, black, glistening, in the air, the shape of the stroke, and the next stroke, and a man above me on the dock side said, mind your head, love, I'm coming along, and I went back up the steps.
Who.
The yard's records go back to when it was a company yard, and the dock's book has every boat through it, and the last working boat blacked in it was in 1961, the week before it went to the breakers, and the man who blacked it was the yard's dockman, who had blacked boats in that dock for fifty years, and the book has his note on the last one, which says, blacked her for the last time, she'll not need it where she's going, and the next entry in the book is a different hand.
He is blacking her. Every night. The last boat. For the breakers. Because a boat went out of his dock blacked whether it needed it or not, and because a dockman who has done a thing for fifty years does not know how to stop at the last one.
What is done about it.
The fill and drain are on the water return every night and the company has asked why my dry dock uses two lockfuls a night with no boat booked, and I have said, maintenance, and they have asked on what, and I have said, on a boat.
What I do.
I manage the yard.
A boat blacked in the dock is signed off. The dockman did the work and the yard manager looked at it and said it was good and wrote it in the book and the boat went out. Nobody looked at his last one. The book has his note and then a different hand, and nobody said it was good.
So I look. In the morning, when the dock is empty and the blocks have the tar on them in the shape of a hull, I go down the steps and I look at the work. The coverage. The edges. The way the tar has gone into the rivets, which is the thing a good dockman is judged on, and it has. And I write it in the book, under his last note, every morning, one line: blacked, inspected, good, and my initials.
The tar on the blocks in the morning has changed. It was the shape of a hull's bottom. It is, lately, less. The stern half only. Then the stern third. The work is getting shorter, as if the hull he is blacking is getting shorter, as if a boat that went to the breakers in 1961 is being broken up at last, from the bow, a little each night, and he is blacking what is left of her, and one night there will be no tar on the blocks and the dock will not fill, and the book will have his last note and my last line under it, and the line will say, she's done, and I think he will be glad.