The long loft above the old ferry repair shed was eighty paces from end to end, cold, drafty, and smelling of ancient tarred hemp, dry pine dust, and the pungent ammonia of roosting river gulls. Floorboards of two-inch hemlock groaned beneath Pella’s boots as she walked the length of the central bay. He held a smoking animal fat lamp in her left hand. The wind off the harbor whistled through the uncaulked weatherboarding, rattling dry cobwebs that hung from the collar beams like frayed lace. Outside, the rain had turned into a steady, gray needle-spray that drummed against the cedar shingles overhead with a monotonous, dull hiss that filled the drafty attic.
On two heavy timber sawhorses in the center of the loft sat a wooden reel three feet in width. Its cheeks were cut from rough elm boards, banded with iron strap. It carried fourteen deep-water lengths of three-eighths-inch braided iron wire rope. The metal was dark, crusted with a dry brown patina of dried machine oil and surface rusting from fourteen years of storage in the river damp. Beside the reel sat an iron skillet filled with a warm, thick, sticky paste of clarified sheep fat and Austrian flake graphite, emitting the heavy, greasy smell of a blacksmith’s cool bucket mixed with cold animal fat.
