Outlined heart with arrow on foot

Tom Eades came down off watch with his oilskins steaming and stood over the table, reading the drawing upside down the way deckhands read everything. 'Heart,' he said. 'With a bolt through it. Very Sunday school.' I told him it was a fletching, that a proper arrow would be heavier than the thing I'd drawn, and he laughed at me the way he laughed at the wind. He was the only one who ever stayed long enough to see what I did next, which was press the back of the bread knife along the line so the flour set into a crease that would survive a roll or two.

The winter after the Hebrides the galley fire went out and we lived on cold tins for four days while the sea took the rail off the starboard side. When we came back in, the drawing was still on the table under a grey dusting. Nobody had touched it. Tom brought the first hot tea in a week, looked at the line, and drew the arrowhead himself, a little crooked, pushing in from the edge.

The company sold the Brandon to a yard in Hull that spring. On the last morning I scraped the table clean, every curve and feather, then stood there with the knife in my hand. The steel had worn and no amount of scrubbing would take out the groove where that arrow had gone in. Thirty years of onions had not managed it. I left it alone.