Denny Cove shipped out of Boston Harbor on the first of April, 1979, aboard a merchant freighter bound, the manifest said, for points south. He was twenty-three, Galway-born, with a duffel bag and a tin whistle and the address of a cousin he had never met. The crossing was meant to last four weeks.

Seventeen days later, in a fog so thick the bow disappeared from the wheelhouse, the ship put in at Hyannis to take on water. Denny was told they had reached the islands. He stepped onto the dock at three in the morning, smelled salt and pine pitch, heard a foghorn somewhere west, and concluded that he had arrived in the Caribbean. The crew said nothing to correct him. The ship sailed on at dawn.

By full daylight he had walked into town with his duffel and asked the woman at the counter of a coffee shop on Main Street whether the fishing boats were hiring. She said they were. He has never asked anyone, since, what country he is in.

On the eleventh day of the crossing, somewhere east of Halifax, the freighter ran into a fog bank that held for sixty hours. The engines ran slow. The deckhands sat on a coil of rope and passed a thermos. One of them was a man named Winston, from Kingston by way of Liverpool, who spoke in a long unhurried patois and laughed easily and taught Denny the names of every fish that came up in the trawl.

By the time the fog lifted, Denny was speaking the way Winston spoke, and not as imitation. The cadence had moved into him. He has carried it ever since — through every winter on the Cape, through every conversation with the harbormaster, through every song on the cassette. He does not turn it on or off. It is simply the shape of his voice now.

Hyannis, in Denny's understanding, is Montego Bay. The harbor turns the same way; the cruise boats come in on the same line. He knows the dockworkers by name and they know him, and when the ferry blows its horn at six in the morning he stands on the seawall and lifts a hand toward what he calls the bay.

The Hyannis–Nantucket ferry is a sacred crossing, undertaken on Sundays and holy days. He buys a one-way ticket and walks the deck the entire two hours, watching the water for things that everyone else has stopped watching for. Sandwich is a holy town. He goes there twice a year and sits on the breakwater and does not speak to anyone. The Cape Cod Canal he calls a river of Babylon, a passage of mourning, and he crosses it only on foot.

Provincetown, on the very tip, is a Saturday-night dance hall — neon and salt and laughter carrying down Commercial Street long after the harbor has gone dark. Denny goes once a summer. He does not dance. He stands at the edge of the crowd and listens to the music coming out of the open doors and considers it a kind of homecoming.