A strike doesn’t die of despair. It dies of an empty belly.
On the North Basin Spit, a low finger of gravel jutting into the tidal reaches, stood the lifeblood of the seven hundred shipyard families: the cooperative grain warehouse and the salt-fish smokehouses. Built thirty years before by the subscriptions of caulkers, sawyers, and dredgers, the timber buildings held two hundred sacks of winter rye, forty barrels of dried yellow peas, and eight hundred sides of split cod curing over smothered alder shavings.
If those sheds burned, the strike was broken before Sunday. Seven hundred households with over two thousand children would have no bread, no meal, and no choice but to crawl back to the slipways on the Port Admiral’s terms.
At midnight, a freezing drizzle blew in from the outer shoals. That turned the gravel paths between the warehouses into gray mud.
Inside the central grain depot, Tomas Reed sat on an overturned salt barrel, his left arm resting across his knee. Nessa Vale had removed the stiff calfskin brace to inspect the wrist. By the yellow light of an oil lamp, she was wrapping the forearm in clean linen soaked in a dark, bitter brew of boiled willow bark and vinegar. Her fingers were gentle but firm. She tested the tension of the bandage against the swollen ridge of the flexor tendon.
