Homeless at 19 She Bought a Rusted Houseboat for 10 Dollars and Found Something No One Expected
June Prescott had been moving toward water her whole life without fully understanding why. She was born in a small town in central Mississippi where the nearest body of water was a muddy farm pond that dried to cracked clay by August, and the nearest river was forty miles of two-lane highway away. None of that explained the boats. She had been drawing them since she was old enough to hold a crayon, filling sheet after sheet with lopsided hulls and crooked masts and stick-figure sailors who all appeared to be going somewhere purposeful. Her mother saved the drawings in a folder in the kitchen drawer. By the time June was nine, the folder was an inch thick.
Her mother died when June was eleven. Brain aneurysm. One Tuesday she was making spaghetti, and by Thursday she was gone, and the kitchen still smelled faintly of tomato sauce for weeks afterward in a way that June could not decide whether to find comforting or cruel.
Her father, Cal, was a quiet man who did maintenance at the high school and had built his entire emotional life around her mother without anyone, including him, quite realizing it until she was gone. People in town said he did his best, and they meant it kindly, but there was a resigned quality to the phrase, as if they were already measuring the distance between what he managed and what was needed. He showed up to school events. He packed her lunches. He never raised his voice. But after her mother died, something inside him went very still, and the stillness spread, the way frost spreads across glass, covering first the edges and then the center until nothing was left uncovered. By the time June was seventeen, her father answered her questions in single syllables and looked past her at something only he could see. She stopped trying to reach him not because she stopped caring but because failing repeatedly at the same thing has a cost, and she was running out of what she could afford to spend.
At sixteen she got a job at a marine supply store outside of Jackson, an hour from her town by bus. The store sold boat parts and fishing gear and life jackets and rope, all of it smelling faintly of salt water despite being two hundred miles from the nearest coast, and June had walked through the door for the first time and felt something click into place the way a hatch dog seats into its keeper. The owner was a man named Thad, who had spent his twenties as a Coast Guard rescue swimmer and his middle years selling the things that kept other people from needing to be rescued. He took an interest in June not out of pity but because she actually wanted to learn, and in thirty years of running that store he had seen enough people who did not want to learn that the ones who did stood out sharply.
She memorized the parts catalogs. She learned the difference between marine epoxy and hardware store epoxy and why confusing them could sink a boat. She learned what a stuffing box was, what a bilge pump did, why fiberglass needed gelcoat to stay sound. She learned that ropes were called lines on a boat, that everything had a specific name, and that the names mattered because in an emergency you did not have time to point and say the thing over there. Thad taught her to splice a line and read a tide chart and identify a hull design from across a marina. He taught her that a boat was a system, and a system could be understood, and a system that was understood could be fixed. He said that everything in life was a system if you looked at it right: houses, cars, weather, money, people. If you could see the system you could work with it. If you could not see it, you were entirely at its mercy.
June saved money from every paycheck in an old Folgers can she kept on the shelf in her closet. By eighteen she had eight hundred and eighty dollars. By nineteen she had eleven hundred and forty.
Her father died on her nineteenth birthday. Heart attack. She came home from work and found him in his recliner with the evening news still running on the television, and he looked peaceful in the particular way of a person whose long, slow departure has finally, quietly, reached its destination. She sat with him for a while before she called anyone. She had been watching him leave for eight years. The final leaving felt less like a shock than like a sentence reaching its period.
The house belonged to a man named Berkeley, who owned rental properties in town and was not unkind but was also not in a position to extend generosity past the boundaries of practicality. He gave June two weeks, which was what remained of the paid month, and said his own daughter needed the house, which was probably true. June spent those two weeks packing her father’s belongings into boxes for Goodwill, keeping his old wool fishing sweater and a photograph of her parents from 1998 that showed them standing in front of a lake she could not identify, both of them squinting slightly into the sun and looking like people who still had their whole lives arranged neatly in front of them. She packed her own things into a backpack and a duffel bag. On the morning the lease ended she stood on the porch for a moment with her hand on the doorknob, looking at the door from outside as if memorizing its color, and then she pulled it shut and walked to the bus station.
She had been thinking about Louisiana for months. Thad had mentioned more than once that his brother Walker ran a marine repair shop on the bayou outside of Houma, and that if June ever wanted to learn boats from the inside rather than from behind a parts counter, Walker would teach her. Standing in the Jackson bus station with everything she owned in two bags and eleven hundred and twenty-eight dollars in a coffee can, she understood that the alternative was staying put and inventing something from nothing in a town that held only absence for her. She bought the ticket south.
The ride took most of the day. Mississippi rolled into Louisiana as the land flattened out and the air thickened with moisture and the trees changed their character entirely, oaks giving way to cypress and tupelo whose roots stood in the dark water like the legs of patient animals. Spanish moss hung from the branches in long gray curtains, moving gently in the wake of the bus. June watched it all through the window with the fixed attention she gave to anything she was trying to learn and hold. This was a place she had never been but had always somehow felt the outline of, the way you sometimes recognize the shape of a word in a language you have never studied.
Walker was waiting for her at the Houma bus station in a dented Ford pickup. He looked exactly like Thad but with a beard and less inclination toward conversation. He drove with one hand on the wheel and one elbow out the window and let the warm, wet evening air carry them the ten miles to his shop without much narration. The shop was an open-sided wooden building with a corrugated metal roof set on a backwater inlet, and there was a dock extending out over the dark water with a handful of boats tied along it. A fishing skiff. A cabin cruiser with waterline stains running in green streaks down its sides. An aluminum johnboat pulled halfway up the bank.
And at the end of the dock, listing a few degrees to port, was the houseboat.
