Six knots
The last Christmas Alek spent in Heimaey, he caught the Herjólfur ferry in the morning. Thirty-five minutes across from Landeyjahöfn. His father was in the kitchen at ten with nothing to do. Newly retired. Alek's father's hands are bigger than Alek's, and Alek's are already large. A cod fisherman's hands that have tied mooring knots on the Heimaey dock for forty years without getting one wrong.
Alek recognized the posture. The same one he gets when the workshop closes for a storm and he's stuck in his Vesturbær basement with no idea what to do with the hours. A man sitting down who needs something to fix. He pulled the toolbox out from under the kitchen table and told his father the faucet was dripping. It wasn't. The faucet worked fine. Alek knew it and his father probably did too. But they spent the whole morning taking it apart and putting it back together. They separated the washers, cleaned the threads, changed a gasket that didn't need changing. They talked about water pressure, about the pipe material, about whether the shutoff valve was stiff. They didn't talk about what his mother had told him on the phone: that his father was forgetting things. That sometimes he repeated the same sentence at dinner. That the other day he couldn't find the way to the harbor.
When Alek left — three days later, ferry back, sports bag, toolbox — his father put a plastic bag in his backpack without saying anything. Alek opened it on the ferry. Six rope knots. Six different types: the same ones his father taught him to tie on the dock when he was ten. Bowline, clove hitch, figure-eight, sheet bend, reef knot, half hitch. Alek learned them all in one afternoon. His father says he never had to correct a single one.
