"There was a man who made boats," the grandfather says.

And this time the record opens easily, the way a door opens that a man has oiled himself and walked through every day of his life. No reaching. No waiting on the fog. In this telling nothing was taken; he has only to want Tomas, and there Tomas is.

"You always begin with him," the Machine says, low, at his ear.

"She likes him."

"You like him. I hold forty-one years of that man. You never once let me file him any deeper than a morning away."

The grandfather does not argue. It is true, and the Machine only says the true things it knows he would rather have said aloud. He cups his hand to the side of Mara's face, warm, so that she looks through the lenses with him, and the record lays the day out along the inside of the glass — a river, a low sun, a roof of weathered board.

"Come and see him," he says. "He's old here — as old as the good world let its people get, which was old indeed."

And she goes to see him.

The shed stands open to the water on the mended waterfront, and the first thing is the light. It comes up off the river before it comes down out of the sky — the water clean enough now to throw the morning back whole. The underside of the shed roof ripples all day with a pale moving shine. Everything in the shed seems lit from below, like a thing remembered fondly. The second thing is the sound. A long, fine hiss, repeated, unhurried: a blade taking a shaving off a board, the way a person breathes who is asleep and dreaming well.

Tomas has a plane in his hand. She would not know the word, so the grandfather gives it to her, quietly, from far away: a blade set in a body of wood, tuned like an instrument, that lifts a curl off a board thinner than paper and lets it fall. The floor of the shed is deep in those curls. They lie where they drift, pale and loose about his ankles, and no one sweeps them until the day's work is done. Tomas holds that a floor of shavings is the only carpet a working man should trust. They smell of cedar, which is a smell Mara has. Under the cedar there is another smell she does not have. A river — a live one. Weed, cold water, the faint mineral breath of stones. A river that was once too sick to smell of anything at all, and now smells the way it must have smelled before anyone thought to put a price on either bank.

He is old. His hands are the oldest part of him and the surest — broad, seamed, mapped across the back with the small white commas of fifty years of slipped chisels. They move over the wood with a patience that is not slowness. He works the way water works on a stone, without hurry and without doubt. When he sets the plane down he sets it on its side, always, blade to the wall. When he takes a board up he takes it the way you take a sleeping child, one hand under the heart of it. There is no clock in the shed. There has never been a clock in the shed. The light says when the work starts. His back says when it is finished. Between the two of them the day comes out the right length every time.

He is building a boat that no one needs. The fourth one this year, or the fifth. The river is already stitched with them — little lapstrake hulls the color of honey, pulling at their moorings off every stair and landing on this reach of the water. Every one of them came out of this shed. He has never in his life taken payment for one. When a boat is done he gives it to whoever has been hanging about the shed most usefully that season, and starts the next. Someone asked him once — a grown someone, who should have known better — what he had against being paid. He thought about it for a while, the plane still going.

"What would I want with the price of a boat," he said at last, "when I had the making of it? The making's the wage. The boat's just what's left over."

There is a girl at his elbow. Twelve or so, brown from the water, a shaving caught in her hair that she does not know about and would not care about if she did. She has been coming since the spring. First to watch, the way children watch, from the doorway, sidelong, pretending to be about something else. Then closer. Now she has her own corner of the bench and her own small plane, which he set in her hands one morning without ceremony, the way you hand someone a thing that was always going to be theirs. She watches his hands the way you watch a thing you mean to be able to do yourself one day. That is the whole of her method, and it is the right one.

This morning she is fighting a board, and losing. The grain rises against her stroke and tears — little bites out of a surface that should be silk. She sets her teeth and bears down harder, which any twelve-year-old will do, and which does not work, which is the point of being twelve at a bench belonging to a man like Tomas.

He does not stop her. He lets the board teach the first half of the lesson. Then he comes round the bench, lays two fingers on the wood, and turns it end for end.

"Now," he says.

She strokes again, doubtful — and the plane rides. The same board, the same blade, the same arm: a long unbroken curl climbs out of the throat of the plane and hangs there, thin enough to read through. She looks at it the way you look at a magic trick.

"It tore before," she says, accusing the board.

"It'll tear every time, going that way." He runs his thumb along the wood, and the light off the river catches the grain for her: long bright rivers running through the cedar, all flowing one direction, the way water knows its own downhill. "The wood knows which way it wants to go. You were asking it to go the other way. It's a rudeness to fight it. Worse than a rudeness — it's a waste. The wood doesn't lose those fights. You do."

She strokes again. The curl falls. The board goes quiet under the blade, and there is a stretch where neither of them says anything, because nothing needs saying: the hiss of the plane, the shine off the water, the smell of a river given back.

"Everything worth doing is like that," Tomas says, after a while, to the boat as much as to her. "You find the way the true thing wants to lie, and you go with it. Took me half my life to learn that wasn't only true of wood."

She is quiet a moment, working. Then, because she is twelve: "What's it true of, else?"

"Days," he says. "People. Rivers." He tips his chin at the water. "They fought that river the whole of my working life. Walled it, straightened it, poured into it everything they were too cheap to look at twice. It went grey as dishwater and it stank, and every year it flooded them anyway, out of spite. Then one year they stopped fighting and asked it how it wanted to lie. Gave it back its bends. Let the marshes have their feet in it again." He takes the long curl from her plane, absently, and lets it spring shut around his finger like a ring. "Now look at it. First water I've trusted since I was younger than you. You can't cheat a true thing into being other than it is, girl. But if you go with it, it'll carry you."

Later she marks a plank for cutting from his measure, and he reads her the number, and she lays the rule against it herself before she cuts. Checking him, her lips moving. Another sort of master would take that hard. Tomas watches her do it with the expression of a man watching his best work take its first water.

"Good," is all he says. "Never take a measure on somebody's say-so. Mine included. The wood won't forgive you just because the number came from a nice old man."

Toward midday the shed fills and empties the way a shore does. A neighbour woman comes along the waterfront with bread still warm in a cloth and leaves half of it on the end of his bench without asking. In trade she takes nothing but the smell of the cedar and a look at the new hull. She and Tomas exchange perhaps nine words — the shorthand of people who have lived within shout of each other for forty years. Two boys come by water in one of his boats, a honey-colored hull he built the year they were born, still tight as a drum. He stands a moment in the open side of the shed, bread in hand, watching them handle her across the current, and does not call out any advice — which, for a boatbuilder, is a kind of blessing. An old man on the next landing raises a hand to him. He raises the bread back. And once a week Tomas's eldest comes down from upriver, grown and greying, to eat half the bread and tease him about the coffee tin he has never thrown away — the child who once left the last potato in the dish, allowed at last to joke about the winter, because the winter lost.

Across the water, on the far bank, stands the great house.

It is the size of a hill, and it has no windows, and once — the girl knows this only as a story, the way you know there were wolves — it was the coldest thing in the country. A fortress that blazed all night for people no one here would ever meet, drinking the river and the grid while the town shivered beside it and paid for the privilege. It is not cold now. Its heat goes out along the bank in mains laid by the town's own hands — into kitchens, bathhouses, the long glass sheds where the winter greens grow. On a cool morning you can see the whole street it warms exhaling gently, chimneyless, like a sleeping animal. There is a woman's name attached to how that happened. It gets said in that town the way saints' names get said in older ones. But that is another chapter of the record, further down, and the grandfather keeps his thumb on it and does not turn.

What matters here, on this bank, in the noise of the midday water, is only this: Tomas eats his bread looking at the great house the way you look at an old opponent grown into an old friend, and the girl eats hers beside him, and neither of them owes the far bank a single hour of their lives. The afternoon belongs to the boat. The boat belongs to whoever earns her. The days belong to the people living them, all the way down the waterfront — and no one in this town remembers to find that miraculous, which is the final and complete proof that it was won.

It is late in the day, in the long light with the river going to copper, when the girl asks about the box.

It sits on the high shelf at the back of the shed, where a workshop keeps the things it will not use and will not throw away — up among a cracked half-model of a hull he never built and a coil of rope too good to cut and too short to keep. Everything else on that shelf is wood or tar or fiber, warm-colored, of the shed's own kind. The box is not. The box is metal. Grey once, gone bare and bright along the edges where hands have carried it. A workman's toolbox with a strong steel handle and a lid you could sit on. And across the lid, deep enough to hold shadow at this hour, one long dent — as though the box had been set down, once, very hard, by a man who could not feel what his hands were doing.

It is the only thing in the shed she has never seen him touch.

She has asked about it before. Children always ask him, about everything, and he always answers — that is the standing wonder of Tomas, that he answers children like a man paying a debt he is glad of. About the box he has never answered more than weather. Today — and far away, on a balcony above another water, the grandfather feels the girl's question rising and lets Mara's rise with it, two questions going up together like two birds off the same branch —

today she asks again.

"What's in the box?"

Tomas does not answer for a while. He finishes the stroke he is on. He sets the plane on its side, blade to the wall. He looks up at the shelf, and his face does a thing she has not seen it do: it goes, for a breath, to some other waterfront entirely. He looks at the dent in the lid the way, this morning, she looked at the torn grain — a thing done against the way the wood wanted to lie, a long time ago, by someone who did not know better yet.

"Tools," he says at last. Which she knows. Which is no answer, and both of them know it.

"Whose?"

"Mine." He picks the plane back up. Turns the board. The evening light comes up off the river and moves on the underside of the roof, and the hiss begins again, unhurried — the sound of a man going with the grain of his one remaining lifetime. "From before."

"Before what?"

"Before I knew what my days were for." A curl lifts, and hangs, and falls. He does not look at the shelf again. "Not today, girl. That one's a winter story. The light's wrong for it."

And the record rests there. The shed with its floor of shavings. The boats pulling at their lines in the copper water. The girl sweeping up at day's end while the old man stands in the open side of his life, looking at the river he trusts. And high on the shelf behind them both, holding its shadow in the one long dent, the grey steel box — unopened, keeping its story the way the river keeps its stones.

On the balcony, the light has gone long too. Mara sits back, and the lenses cool against her grandfather's face, and for a moment nobody says anything.

"He never opens it," she says. "The box."

"He opened it for me once." The grandfather turns the record with two fingers, carefully, but not far; he keeps his thumb against the next page, holding the place. "There is nothing in it but tools, Mara — a plane iron, a square, a good hammer with a mended handle. And there was a morning, before the boats, before the river came back, when that box was the saddest object in the whole of the world. Not one thing in it changed between that morning and this evening. Only everything around it."

"The Machine could show me," Mara says. "The morning."

"It could," the Machine says at her grandfather's ear, unbothered, "and it has been asked not to. He tells this next part himself, every time. I have offered."

"You keep the figures," the grandfather says. "I'll keep the mornings."

He looks out at the water a while — their own water, on their own coast, its own small lights coming on. When he speaks again his voice has the sound it gets when the record is about to turn somewhere that costs him.

"You have seen how it came out. That was on purpose. I show you the far shore first, always, so that you will know, in the part that doesn't reason, that this next part ends well. Now hold on to the shed, Mara. Hold the smell of the cedar, the girl checking his measure, the bread on the bench. Because to understand what the box is, you have to watch a machine come to that man's yard when he was thirty years younger and afraid" — and his thumb begins, gently, to turn the page — "and you have to watch it do the whole of his job better than he could do it. And you have to stand next to him while he understands that it will never be tired, and never be hurt, and never be paid. That every morning of his life until that morning had just been handed a number, and rounded."

He stops himself. Smiles at her in the dark — an old man's smile, with the lamplight of a healed city in it.

"The arm can keep till morning," he says. "The boats were first because the boats were the truth. Everything else is only what it cost to get to them."