In Windsor, Ontario, a widowed tool-and-die maker builds a Great Lakes shipping game for his eleven-year-old grandson, and cuts it down rule by rule until it is worth playing, while an estate agent's letter waits under his keys.
by Meieresque Matters, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The board was a sheet of quarter-inch Masonite, two feet by four, and Marcel Pelletier had painted the Great Lakes on it with the blue enamel left over from the porch railings. He had done the coastlines freehand, from the road atlas, and then gone over them again with a finer brush, because Lake Superior had come out looking like a boot and it did not look like a boot. It looked like a wolf's head. Anyone who had ever sailed it would tell you that.
The ships he had cut in the basement from half-inch brass bar stock: six of them, each an inch and three-quarters long, the bows filed to a point and the pilothouses built up with a sliver of brass soldered on at the back. On a laker the pilothouse sits at the front, but at that scale nobody could tell, and a ship with the lump at the stern looked more like a ship. Tolerance was a thing you chose. Forty years at the engine plant had taught him that much: you held the tolerance where it mattered and let it go where it didn't, and a man who held it everywhere never finished anything.
The rules were typed on Lucille's Smith-Corona, eleven pages, stapled at the corner. He had typed them with two fingers across three evenings. There were forty-one rules.
Colette dropped Danny off at six on Friday, in the rain, with the engine running.
"He's had supper," she said. "He says he hasn't, but he has." She kissed her father on the cheek and put an envelope on the hall table under his keys. "That's from the agent. Just look at it, Dad."
"I'll look at it."
"Thursday she can come. Or the Thursday after."
"I'll look at it," Marcel said, and she went back out to the car.
Danny was eleven and had grown since September, mostly in the wrists. He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the board on the table under the lamp, and at the six brass ships in the harbour at Duluth, and at the dice, and Marcel saw the look he was waiting for, which was the look of a boy who has been shown something he did not know he wanted.
They played until half past nine. Danny read the rules aloud. By page four he was reading faster. By page seven, which was the fuel, he had stopped reading aloud and was only turning the pages.
Fuel was good. Marcel had worked out fuel properly: bunker oil per hundred miles, loaded and light, with a surcharge for headwinds on Superior. It took the length of a turn to calculate, and Danny calculated it with a pencil on the back of the envelope from the agent, and got it wrong twice, and the second time he did not care that he had got it wrong.
He fell asleep on the chesterfield before the end of the season. His ship was off Isle Royale with a full load of ore that was never going to reach Hamilton.
Marcel sat at the table after he had put the blanket over the boy. He turned over the envelope. On the back, in Danny's handwriting: fuel 214, crossed out, fuel 241, crossed out, and then a drawing of a ship with a great many smokestacks, all smoking.
Saturday he did not wait. When Danny went out with the Lachance boys to throw a football in the schoolyard, Marcel took the eleven pages down to the basement and laid them on the bench under the fluorescent tube, beside the vise.
You could spend a morning trimming a rule here and a rule there, and at the end of the morning you would have a game that was three per cent less boring. He had seen men do exactly that to a die that was never going to run true. You did not shave it. You pulled it out and you cut a new one.
He took a red pencil and struck out every rule that Danny had read without looking up. Fuel went. Crew wages went. The Coast Guard inspection went, and the harbour pilot fee at Duluth, and the whole of page nine, which was about insurance and which he had been proud of. When he had finished there were nineteen rules. He typed them fresh, two pages, and left the old eleven in the drawer with the spare hacksaw blades.
On Sunday afternoon they played the second version three times.
Danny won all three. He won the same way each time: he took his ship straight to Duluth, loaded iron ore, and ran it down the lakes to the mills at Hamilton, back and forth, back and forth, while Marcel's grain from Thunder Bay sat in port waiting for a price that did not come.
"It's the same," Danny said, at the end of the third game. He did not say it as a complaint. He said it the way you would tell a man his tail-light was out. "Ore's always best. You just do ore."
Marcel looked at his price table. The boy was right. Ore paid a steady nine dollars a ton on the board, and grain paid anything from six to eleven on the roll of a die, and on average it came out a little under nine. So there was no reason, ever, to carry grain. It was not a choice. It was arithmetic dressed up as a choice, and the boy had seen through it in three games and a bit.
"Next week," Marcel said.
Colette came at six. In the hall she looked at the envelope under the keys. It had been opened, turned over, drawn on.
"You looked at it," she said.
"Danny looked at it. He drew a ship."
She held it up to the hall light and studied the ship with all its smokestacks. For a moment she was going to say something else. Then she laughed, once, through her nose, the way her mother used to, and she put it in her handbag.
The trouble with grain was that it was not risky enough to be interesting and not safe enough to be sensible. A game was a string of decisions, and a decision where one answer was always right was not a decision. It was a chore with dice in it.
On Tuesday night, at the bench, he doubled it. Not a little: doubled. Grain now paid from three dollars to eighteen, three dice added, so that most seasons it paid middling and some seasons it paid a fortune and some seasons you would have done better to leave the hold empty. He left ore alone at nine. That was the whole change. He typed it on a single line and pasted it over the old line with rubber cement.
On Wednesday he went through the house looking for something to do and did not find it. The furnace man came and went. He ate a tin of soup standing up. Lucille's winter coat was on the hook by the back door where it had been since March, and he took his own down from the hook beside it and went out and walked to the end of Ouellette Avenue, where you could see across the river to Detroit, the Renaissance towers with their lights on, and watched a laker come downbound past Belle Isle, riding low. From the way she sat in the water he judged her loaded to her marks. Ore, probably, for the mills at Zug Island. It was the ninth of December. She had perhaps five weeks left in the season, and her captain would be counting them.
Colette phoned on Thursday.
"She called me at work," she said. "The agent. She said you didn't call her back."
"I've been busy."
"Dad. You've been busy with a board game."
"It's a good game," Marcel said. "It isn't finished."
There was a silence on the line, and then she said, "Okay," in a voice that meant it was not okay but that she was not going to fight about it on the telephone, and she said Danny would be over at six on Friday, and she hung up.
On Friday Danny played grain.
He did not play it every time. That was the good thing, and Marcel watched it happen from across the table with his hands flat on the oilcloth: on the first run the boy went for ore, safe, and on the second he stood his ship off the Lakehead with the dice in his fist, and looked at the price chart, and looked at Marcel's ship already loaded and running, and you could see him doing sums that were not really sums. Then he loaded grain. He rolled three ones. Three dollars a ton. He groaned and fell sideways off his chair onto the linoleum, and lay there, and said, "Again."
Marcel had never been able to put a name to it at the plant, but he knew it when he saw it: the moment a machine stopped being a thing you ran and became a thing you wanted to run. Again. He would not have got there by adding rules. He had got there by taking most of them away and making one of the few that were left twice as sharp.
They played until eleven. Past his bedtime, and Marcel let him.
In the last game of the night the season ran out. On the board it ran out as it did in the rule book: at the end of the thirtieth turn the locks at the Soo closed, and every ship that was above them stayed above them till spring, and the game was over. Danny had a ship in Whitefish Bay, loaded, one turn from the locks.
"What happens now?"
"Nothing. Season's over."
"But what happens to the ship?"
"She lays up," Marcel said. "She ties up at the wall in Duluth or the Soo or wherever she is, and the crew go home, and in March the ice goes out and she sails."
"So what happens in the game?"
"Nothing. I took it out. Three months of nothing, turn after turn. You'd be asleep on the chesterfield again."
Danny sat on the floor with his back to the stove and thought about it.
"But real ones," he said. "Real ones try to get through. Before it closes. Right? It's on the news. They get stuck in the ice and the icebreaker has to come."
"Some do. Some make it."
"So put that in," Danny said. "Not the nothing. The trying."
He wrote it at the bench on Saturday morning with the red pencil, and it came out simpler than anything else in the game, which made him suspect it was right.
From the twenty-fifth turn, any ship above the Soo may attempt the last run. Roll one die. The number needed to pass rises by one each turn: on the twenty-fifth, 2 or better; on the twenty-sixth, 3 or better; and so on. A ship that passes is paid double for her cargo. A ship that fails is frozen in till spring and her season is lost. A ship may instead lay up safely at any time and keep what she has earned.
Six sentences, and a whole winter in them.
He did not like to admit how long he stood there with the typed card in his hand before he took it up the stairs.
They played it on Saturday afternoon. Danny's ship reached Whitefish Bay on the twenty-seventh turn with a hold of grain he had rolled fourteen dollars a ton for. On twenty-seven he needed a four. Double fourteen was twenty-eight. Laid up, he kept what he had already earned, and the grain earned him nothing.
He did not roll at once. He sat with the die and looked at the board and at Marcel's ship, which was safe in Sarnia, tied up, finished for the year, and Marcel could see the whole of the game happening in the boy's face: not the sums, which were easy, but the weight of the thing. Everything he had made that season was in that hold.
He rolled a five.
He went through. He did not fall off the chair. He sat very still with both hands on top of his head, and then he said, quietly, "Oh, man," and Marcel had to get up and fill the kettle, for no reason, with his back to the table.
They put the board away on the Sunday afternoon, because Colette was coming at five and they both knew it without saying so. Danny slid the brass ships into the cigar box one by one. Then he stopped with the last ship in his fingers.
"You never go," he said.
"Hm?"
"You never do the last run. You just lay up. Every game. You're in Sarnia on like turn twenty-two, and you just stop."
"Somebody's got to keep score."
"That's not a rule," Danny said, "that's you." And he went to put the box on the shelf over the stove.
Colette came at five, in the dark, with the snow starting. Marcel went down the front steps with the boy's bag and put it on the back seat of the car. Then he stood at the driver's window with his hand on the roof, the snow landing on his sleeve and not melting at once, while his daughter waited, and he said, "Thursday's all right. For the agent. Thursday."
She looked at him through the half-open window for a long moment. Then she nodded.
When the car had gone round the corner he went back in and did not turn on the television. He went down to the basement and switched on the fluorescent tube over the bench, and put a length of half-inch brass bar stock in the vise, and marked off an inch and three-quarters with the scribe, and began to cut a seventh ship.
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THE END
Meieresque Matters, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Simulācrō Rērum Meierēscārum per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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