Chapter One
The Master's Brushes
The master painter of Dioro died in the first week of the season, at eighty six, in his sleep, with the tide going out, and the town knew it before the sun was properly up, the way such towns know, because the bench outside the blue workshop was empty, and the bench had not been empty at first light in sixty years.
He had painted every working boat in Dioro at least four times over, and the fleet came home early that day, all of it, and the boats were drawn up in their ranks with their painted eyes facing the workshop, which nobody arranged and everybody understood, and the town mourned him the way coasts mourn their keepers, with food and noise and stories until deep into the night, and the stories were all the same story in a hundred colours: the day he painted this, the season he repainted that, the argument he won with one raised eyebrow about the exact blue a grandmother's boat required, because blue is not blue, girl, there are forty blues and thirty nine of them are wrong.
Aissa Ndiaye, his granddaughter, third of the line, sat through it all in the place the family's women had always sat, and held, on her lap, wrapped in the cloth from the bench, what he had left her, and did not open it that night, because some things are not opened in crowds.
