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  32 Little Stories

  · Water ·

  EAST BY THE SEA AND WEST BY THE SEA

  I, Abraham LeDrew of Brigus in the District of Port de Grave, in consideration of the sum of Sixty Dollars ($60.00) in hand paid to me, have bargained, sold and delivered unto Arthur Crummey of Western Bay, District of Bay de Verde: a Fishing Room with Dwelling House, Stage, and Store House at Breen’s Island, Indian Tickle, Labrador, on land bounded as follows: North by Tobias LeDrew, South by Henry LeDrew, East by the Sea and West by the Sea.

  To have and to hold the aforesaid premises unto the said Arthur Crummey, his heirs, executers, administrators and assigns forever.

  In witness whereof I have herewith set my name and seal this 16th day of January, 1934, at Brigus, Newfoundland.

  THE WAY THINGS WERE

  The boy is travelling to the Labrador as part of his father’s crew for the first time. They have carted their gear down past Harbour Grace to Spaniard’s Bay to be sure of a berth, loading nets, trunks, curing salt and barrels into the hold of the Kyle, settling clothes and twine over the mound of their belongings to make a place for sleeping. By the time the ship leaves Carbonear, more than two hundred men and boys have descended into the hold for the voyage, a constant undertow of disembodied conversation in the dim light, fragments of a song rising from one corner or another.

  Half a dozen Americans from Boston and New York sleep under cotton sheets in the first-class berths. They drink twelve-year-old scotch in the saloon, brass polished around the bar, the dark stain of mahogany wood on the walls. They stand at the ship’s railings in woolen coats to watch cathedrals of ice drift slowly south, a cloud of Eskimos coming down to meet the boat in Rigolet and Makkovic. They peer into the hold at the tangle of fishermen and gear, handkerchiefs pressed over their noses against the rising stench. They can barely understand a single word these people speak. A man from New England asks the boy to pose for a photograph, a school of Labrador islands in the background. His hands like snared birds at the ends of his sleeves, stiff, unnatural, he has never had his picture taken before. The photographer’s tie is made of silk.

  The boy comes above deck around mealtimes, stands near the dining room windows to watch white-coated waiters carry trays to the tables, spotless hands and sterling silver forks, mouthfuls of roast beef and mashed potatoes, ladles of gravy, cakes and pies for dessert. In three days he has eaten only hard tack and tea, his stomach aches like a tooth that should be pulled. His eyes water as he watches the food disappear, plates sent back half full. The waiters carry in silver pots of coffee, after-dinner drinks; the guests push back their chairs, light up cigarettes, lift a casual finger for more sherry or whiskey.

  The boy doesn’t know enough to be angry with the way things are, wishes they could be otherwise in a vague unexpectant fashion; turns toward the motion of the water, cutting his palms with his fingernails to feel the hunger less. He is three years younger than the scotch on the tables.

  MAKING THE FISH

  Once you’d got the catch pitched up on the stage head, you got down to making the fish. Assembly line. Cutting table, blades of the knives pared almost to nothing by the sharpening stone. Woolen gloves soaked in fish guts, the water running red out of them when you made a fist. The cod passing through your hands like knots in an unbroken string as long as the sea is wide.

  Cut Throat

  Get your fingers into the gills of a cod and lift it to the table, fifteen, twenty pounds some of them and the ache in your arm after three hours like the chill in a church hall on a February morning. Two motions with the knife, across the throat below the gills and along the bare length of the belly, like a Catholic crossing himself before a meal. Push the fish along the table, the left hand of the man beside you reaching for it, he doesn’t even turn his head in your direction.

  Get your fingers in the gills of a cod and lift it to the table.

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  The open body, the knife in your right hand. The head taken off clean, as if you were castrating a young bull. The liver scalloped from the chest and pushed into the oil barrel, left there to ferment like fruit going bad. The tangle of guts lifted clear, the cod flesh pulled from beneath, a body freed from a messy accident. Organs and offal dropped through a hole in the cutting table to the salt water beneath the stage.

  The gulls screaming outside, fighting over blood.

  Splitter

  A good splitter could clear his way through five or six quintals an hour if the fish were a decent size, a full boatload done in three and out to the traps for more. Two cuts down each side of the sound bone, curved keel of the spine pulled clear and the cod splayed like a man about to be crucified. Dropped off the cutting table into the water of the puncheon tub, the next fish in your hands. Two cuts down each side, sound bone pulled clear, splayed cod dropped into the puncheon tub. Two cuts, sound bone pulled clear, cod into the tub. Two cuts, pull, into the tub.

  By nine o’clock it is too dark to see properly, eyes as tender as skin soaked too long in salt water. The wicks are lit in bowls of kerosene: oily flame, spiralling spine of black smoke.

  Salter

  Empty wooden wheelbarrow set beside the puncheon tub, the flat, triangular sheets of fish meat hefted from the elbow-deep water.

  Dead weight of the loaded barrow a strain on the shoulders, the bones shifting down in their sockets, the tendons stretching to hold them as the feet shuffle into the storehouse. A hogshead of salt beside the bins, a handful strown across the white insides of each fish before they’re stacked. Weight of the pile squeezing water from the flesh.

  Turn with the emptied barrow. Squeak of the wheel, squish of feet soaked inside the rubber boots. Arm fishing into the puncheon tub, elbow numb with the cold.

  The Bawn

  Wait for a fine day in August. Sweep a stretch of beach clear, put stones down over any patch of grass that might spoil the fish.

  The salt cod taken from the bins and washed by hand in puncheon tubs, front and back, like a child about to be presented to royalty, the white scum scrubbed off the dark layer of skin. Carried to the bawn on fish bars and laid out neatly in sunlight, 150 quintals at a time, the length of the shoreline like a well-shingled roof.

  Two fine days would finish the job, a week and a half to cure the season’s catch. The merchant’s ship arriving in September, anchoring off in the Tickle; the cured cod loaded into the boat and ferried out.

  What It Made

  You could expect $2 a quintal for your trouble, a good season for a crew was 400 quintals. Anything more was an act of God. The Skipper took half a voyage, out of which he paid the girl her summer’s wage, and squared up with the merchant for supplies taken on credit in the spring. The rest was split three ways. $130 for four months of work, it could cut the heart out of a man to think too much about what he was working for.

  ACTS OF GOD

  What the water does to your hands when you’re fishing, well there’s no telling it really. Blisters, open sores, cracks webbed around the knuckles, the salt water burning like iodine on a paper cut. Sometimes the skin roughs up, thickens into leather around the joints, you can barely close your hand to make a fist. The only thing for that is to soak them in a barrel of ‘old soldiers’: cured squid as salt as the brine and purple as a bruise, it’s like losing your hands in a sunset. I don’t know why that helps, but it does.

  Water pups is another thing, welts on your hands and up your arm, the skin gone chalky white and a bubble of water underneath, you got those by the dozen. Some people say copper bracelets or brass around your wrists will drive them off, but I couldn’t do a thing to help them until an old man told me to wrap my wrists with a strand of wool.

  “And mind,” he says, “Nine turns on each wrist. Three is no good to you, and five is no good either. Nine turns of wool is the trick.” I never had a problem with water pups after that. Used to strain my wrists hauling two or three hundred pounds of cod at a go, sometimes it got bad enough I couldn’t turn
a doorknob. That ended too.

  Now you can wonder about it until your hair curls, but what’s the point? If someone tells you to put your nets down where all day they’ve been brought up empty and you come away with a full trap, I say keep your mouth shut and be thankful.

  THE LAW OF THE OCEAN

  Domino Run, Labrador, 1943

  The Americans had dozens of boats on the coast during the war years, surveying the islands, mapping every nook. They had poles erected on all the headlands with little silk rags at the top, forty, fifty feet high some of them. We had no idea what they were there for, but we stole every piece of silk we came across, carrying them down the pole in our teeth, they were perfect to boil up a bit of peas pudding, or to use as a handkerchief.

  We were out jigging one afternoon, mid-August, the weather fine enough until the breeze turned and a wind as warm as furnace exhaust came up. Took in our lines and headed straight back into the Tickle, knowing what to expect behind it. Passed one of those survey ships on our way, holed up in a shallow cove and they hadn’t even dropped anchor, just put out a grapple. We stopped in to warn them but the skipper more or less laughed at us, and the squall came on just like we said it would, the wind wicked enough to strip the flesh off a cow.

  Next morning that little survey boat was sitting on dry land, blown twenty feet up off the water. When word got out, every boat in the Tickle headed straight for the cove and we made pretty short work of it. Took anything that wasn’t bolted down, food, silverware, bedding, books and maps, compasses, liquor, clothes. Got my hands on one of those eight-day clocks they had aboard, but I was too greedy to take it all the way to Father’s boat; hid it behind a bush and turned back to the ship for something else. And I’ll be goddamned if someone didn’t go and steal it on me.

  The Americans were standing alongside but they didn’t say a word. Law of the ocean, you see, salvage. We were like a pack of savages besides, seventy or eighty men and boys climbing in over the side, what could they say? Cleared the boat in fifteen minutes, as if we were trying to save family heirlooms from a burning building.

  The Americans sent up a tug later that day to take the ship off the land and we all helped out where we could, throwing a few lines around the masthead, rocking her back and forth until she shimmied free and slipped into the water like a seal off an ice pan.

  We kept waiting for another chance like that to come along, but the Americans got smarter afterwards or maybe they just got luckier. It’s a job to say the difference between those two at the best of times.

  GRACE

  Indian Tickle, Labrador, 1945

  There’s no saying why things turn out one way and not another. It could have been me easy enough.

  We were out after a meal of birds, took the boat around the head and a little ways into the Bay where they had their nests. Four of us, myself and Ken Powell, Bill Delaney, and Sandy who was just home from overseas. He’d brought a rifle back with him, a sharp double-barrelled thing with a German name, he could hit a turr at two hundred yards with that gun.

  Sandy and Bill went ashore, and me and Ken pulled around in the boat to put the puffins to wing; they’d head straight for their nests and the other two would be waiting for them there. After half an hour or so we came into the shore to trade off, and Sandy passed me his gun as he stepped into the boat. Well, I can’t say what changed my mind. I’d been after Sandy to let me use that rifle from the start of the season. idn’t like the way it sat in my hands and I stopped them just before they pushed off. “Here my son,” I said, “I’m not used to this thing. Give me back the single.” And Sandy passed it to me with this queer grin on his face, like he’d just won a bet with somebody.

  We turned our backs and headed up the hill a ways, and then we heard it, a rifle shot but louder and not as clean, there was a grating sound like metal giving way. Sandy had seen a bird on his way off the shore, lifted the gun and fired. He threw it over the side and we never could find it to see what had happened exactly, but three of his fingers were gone, the bone of the first knuckle on his ring finger jutting from slivers of flesh as raw as a flayed cod.

  The nearest hospital was in Cartwright, we took the boat and got started about six in the evening, going all night to Grady, where we stopped in for a cup of tea. We pushed on right away though because Sandy’s hand had come alive by then and he was throwing up with the pain, “my Jesus Christ,” he kept saying, “the fucking thing is on fire.” We had a bucket of salt water and that’s where he kept it, dipping up a fresh lot every half hour or so, tossing the bloody stuff over the side.

  It was ten days before he came back on one of the hospital boats, they’d sawed off the bit of knuckle from his ring finger then sewed him up, and he went right to work. I did what I could to pick up the slack for him, it could have been me after all. You’d see that queer grin on his face when his mangled hand couldn’t do what he wanted, as if he was thinking about those three lost fingers, pale as plucked birds, rotting at the bottom of the Bay.

  WHEN THE TIME CAME

  Well you didn’t talk to children about that sort of thing. We found out when the time came, and I guess they figured that was soon enough.

  This was in July and it was hot enough to split the rocks, I remember that. Father was away in Labrador. Mother was lying in her room all day, I can imagine she was overcome. And Dixon Crummey came to the house, she was not a regular visitor let’s say. Late that afternoon Mother’s water broke and I remember she said, “Dixon I think you’re going to have to stay with me tonight.” Dixon made us our supper and got us into bed, and Mother lay in her room all evening.

  What woke us the next morning was our sister, squalling. You can’t imagine this, it was like she was conjured out of nothing, from the air. I walked down the hall to Mother’s room and she was sitting back against a wall of pillows, holding a child. It was as sudden as an unexpected death and just as disconcerting. A sister is something you need some time to prepare for.

  Everything was different after that, you could feel the order of the family shift, the way animals sense the weather changing. Mother kept to her bed for two weeks and Dixon stayed with us during the confinement, as they called it. When she got back on her feet she never strayed far from our sister; even when she was talking to you a part of her was somewhere else, attuned to something I was only peripherally a part of, listening for a cry.

  And when Father got home from the Labrador that year his daughter was almost three months old. “A girl,” he said, holding her in his hands, shaking his head and taking a good look. “A girl.” The baby staring back as calm as you please, as if she could see the resemblance in this stranger’s eyes and trusted him on that alone.

  FIFTIES

  After Father died I got a crew together and went down the Labrador myself; I was just sixteen then and the arse gone out of the fishery besides, it only took me two seasons to wind up a couple of hundred dollars in the hole.

  I landed the job at the mine intending to work off the debt and go back to the fishing right away. One of the other stationers on Breen’s Island wrote to me once I’d been gone five or six years, asking after the boat and the stage, said they were rotting away as it was. I told him to use what he wanted and never heard any more about it. I knew by then it was all over for me anyway.

  My first Christmas home from the mine I’d gone up to see old man Sellars; he had me in for a glass of whiskey and a slice of cake and talked about forgiving some of what I owed him, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Pulled out a slender stack of fifties and counted off two hundred dollars into his hand. New bills, the paper crisp as the first layer of ice over a pond in the fall. Then I had another glass of whiskey and then I went home out of it, half drunk and feeling like I’d lost something for good.

  · Earth ·

  BREAD

  I was twenty years younger than my husband, his first wife dead in childbirth. I agreed to marry him because he was a good fisherman, because he had his own house and he was willi
ng to take in my mother and father when the time came. It was a practical decision and he wasn’t expecting more than that. Two people should never say the word love before they’ve eaten a sack of flour together, he told me.

  The night we married I hiked my nightdress around my thighs and shut my eyes so tight I saw stars. Afterwards I went outside and I was sick, throwing up over the fence. He came out the door behind me and put his hand to the small of my back. It happens your first time, he said. It’ll get better.

  I got pregnant right away and then he left for the Labrador. I dug the garden, watched my belly swell like a seed in water. Baked bread, bottled bakeapples for the winter store, cut the meadow grass for hay. After a month alone I even started to miss him a little. The baby came early, a few weeks after my husband arrived home in September. We had the minister up to the house for the baptism the next day, Angus Maclean we named him, and we buried him in the graveyard in the Burnt Woods a week later. I remember he started crying at the table the morning of the funeral and I held his face against my belly until he stopped, his head in my hands about the size of the child before it was born. I don’t know why sharing a grief will make you love someone.

  I was pregnant again by November. I baked a loaf of bread and brought it to the table, still steaming from the oven. Set it on his plate whole and stood there looking at him. That’s the last of that bag of flour, I told him. And he smiled at me and didn’t say anything for a minute. I’ll pick up another today, he said finally.