“She’s changing, Syllie, my son, everything’s changing.”
Sylvanus nodded. “Heard it all before. When you scrapped your jiggers for the traps, I heard it, and when you scrapped your flakes for the plants, I heard it. What’re you going to do when you got nothing left to scrap, that’s what I’d like to hear.”
“Beg at your table, I suppose,” said Manny dryly. “From the size of them fish you’re catching, I don’t allows you’ll have any problem feeding us. Syllie!” He laid his hand on his brother’s arm, stilling it. “It’s staring us in the face. Them small fish you got there is the first sign—nay, not the first, the second; the first was the season getting shorter. And now we got smaller fish— that’s the second big sign she’s being overfished. The big ones is all gone, and the young’s not getting a chance to grow old.”
“Yes, that I knows,” said Sylvanus quietly. “And I appreciates your offer. But I’ll stick with her. She’s been running good the past few weeks. Maybe it’ll right itself, she always do.”
“Think about it, buddy. That’s all I’m asking from you—think about it.”
“Already did. And like I said, I’m sticking with it. If I changes my mind and wants in, ye’d be the ones I’d go with.” He nodded up to Jake appreciatively, then started back pronging.
Jake grunted. “Oh, you’ll be wanting, make no mistake, you’ll be wanting—but it’ll be too late then, when all hands is gone.”
“Comes to that, I’ll go with somebody else.”
“I’m not talking about the boat. Brother, listen here, there’s things happening that’s not going to be too good if you don’t start thinking ahead.”
“Always going to be things happening,” said Sylvanus.
“You’re not listening,” said Jake. He paused, getting a warning look from Manny. Muttering something unintelligible, he started scooping the fish his brothers had tossed up near his feet into the fish baskets stacked alongside.
Sylvanus cast a suspicious look at Manny. “What’s he on about?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Manny. “Trying to figure things out, is all. We’re going to use gill nets when we gets the skiff. I don’t like trawl lines. Perhaps that’s what you ought to get, a gill net. Make it easier on yourself.”
“Gill nets! You mean ghost nets.” Sylvanus stuck his fork in his gunnels, shaking his head at his brother. “Old man, I wouldn’t put something that dirty out in the water.”
“They’re only dirty if they breaks from their moorings. We’ll make sure ours won’t break.”
“Won’t break! How the jeezes can you help that when the trawlers are forever ripping up the nets? That’s uglier than trawlers, them gill nets are.”
“Yup, like Father,” grunted Jake. “Thinks he’s better than everybody else, and too bloody stuck in his ways to listen.”
“Oh, to hell’s flames with Father,” cried Sylvanus. “You’re no better than the stinking foreigners if you joins in with them, buying bigger boats and bigger nets. And if you thinks that’s going to solve anything—all hands going midshore—you got your head up your arse.”
“Which is where yours is, buddy, if you thinks standing on shore, blathering, is going to get you somewhere,” said Jake, his voice rising. “And I gives a fat shit now about what you or anybody else thinks when I got a family to feed, and
dick
is all your mouthing is going to do, when all hands is too busy fishing to listen.”
“Simmer down, simmer down. Syllie didn’t mean it like that,” cut in Manny, but Jake was riled, his bony cheeks a scratchy red. Kicking aside the basket of fish, he wagged a finger at Sylvanus.
“And I’ll tell you something else, too, brother. I’ll take the last goddamned fish out there if I got to; rather me than them. And if you ever gets a youngster, you’ll be out there no different than the rest of us, trying to scrounge up a meal. So stick your preaching up me arse because if that’s where me head is, I’ve a better chance of hearing you.”
“Listen to them, listen to them, like the dogs,” cried Manny as Jake shoved back inside the stage, Sylvanus near snarling after him. “Imagine hauling nets with the two of ye in the mornings. Cripes, you’d have the Virgin Mary gnashing her teeth.” He sighed, the stage door slamming as Jake let himself out on the other side. “Listen, brother,” he said more calmly, as Sylvanus, his mouth a grim line, pitched the last fish up on the stage. “It’s fine if you don’t come with us, but you can’t keep going like you are, either—jigging. Not by the looks of them boils on your wrists. And what time did you get off the flakes last night— two o’clock? I knows because Mother was watching.”
“Give it up, Manny,” said Sylvanus wearily. “I’m doing what I’m doing till there’s no more doing, and then I’ll think of some other way. But I’m just not packing it in first sign, is all.”
“First sign?” Manny sat back on the thwart, looking up at his brother in resignation. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Just let me say this—I’ll just say it once!” he yelled as Sylvanus grunted in exasperation. “It’s not all that bad, all right. Getting rid of the flakes is not all that bad. Just hear me, all right, just hear me. Since we started selling straight to the plant, I sees a big difference in a day. Don’t have to be out in the stage all hours of the night, gutting and scrubbing, and the least bit of rain sending me running to the flakes, or else a whole bloody load of fish is spoiled. You don’t have to hang on to all of it, Syllie. There’s a comfort, brother, in hauling your nets and passing your catch straight to the plants—especially now, with other things that might be coming. Anyway.” He rose to leave as Sylvanus’s eyes brooded onto his.
“What other things?” asked Sylvanus. “What’s this other thing you keeps hinting about? Well, you might as well tell me,” he hollered as Manny brushed him aside, leaping upon the stage. “What? Is bloody Noah floating by on his ark? Oh, I knows—he can’t find a pair of codfish, so he’s after mine, is that it, brother? Noah wants me fish—oh, and me stage, too?” he asked as Manny turned, jabbing a finger back at him. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Noah wants me stage.”
“Bang-o, buddy. I didn’t know how to tell you,” said Manny. “Better tell him to hold off, though, because the first load of fish me and Jake catches in our new skiff, we’re dumping right here on your stagehead. That’s right, bawl all you likes, now,” he said over Sylvanus’s scoff, “but that’s just what we’re doing—giving you our first catch. So, start hauling up your bleeding boat before it’s too late in the evening and you’re out on the water in the dark. Got Mother drove off her head, worrying, you have.”
Sylvanus threw down his prong. “Now, you listen here!” he said angrily.
“Nothing left to listen to,” said Manny. “Come over after you’ve done, and have one of Jake’s new brews. He’ll be fine, then. Don’t give me that,” he said threateningly as Sylvanus snorted. “Mother don’t like goings-on like this. And look, there’s a fish beneath your boot, not even bled. Getting slack, my son, getting slack.”
Sitting back on the thwart as Manny vanished inside the stage, Sylvanus picked up the missed fish, his hands shaking. Making Mother worried, he mocked. She’d be more bloody worried seeing me off to sea with Jake in the mornings. She’d be worried then!
Pulling his skinning knife out of his boot, he slit the fish’s throat, imagining it his own should fortune send him aboard a thirty-foot skiff, hauling in gill nets for hours on end, listening to Jake’s ongoing sputtering, and the arguing and spitting and farting of two or three others crowding around him, spoiling the quiet of a morning.
“Not a bleeding chance,” he muttered out loud, “not a bleeding chance.” Climbing out of his boat, he angrily cleared off his splitting table, trying to figure the one thing making him the angriest—the overfishing or arguing with Jake. Attacking his small pile of fish, he started gutting and splitting, gutting and splitting, his hands creating a rhythm that eventually hammered all else outside, no matter he was missing that sense of comfort that always came when he centred himself amongst his labours; no matter his half-emptied puncheons were stealing his sense of worth; no matter the dying babies and how desperately he lay beside his Addie, wanting her; no matter it took him sixteen hours to do what normally took twelve. His mainstay was making fish. And making them proper. And when the last one was gutted and split and carefully laid out in the puncheons, he rose with a grim satisfaction and stepped outside, taking a stretch and a breath of clear air.
It was growing dark. His mother’s lamp was already lit, her face peering through the window—and was that Addie? Yes, it was Addie, letting herself out through his mother’s gate, picking up some rocks and whipping them at a couple of crows having a late-evening feast on some garbage rotting near the side of the yard. She was most times at his mother’s since she started helping in the garden. She glanced his way, her features lost in the hour just past twilight.
“Are you finished for the day?” she called out.
He nodded, feeling a warmth as she stepped into his mother’s lamplight and smiled, the shadows playing over her face. She started toward him, and he sucked in his breath, cursing that he stood in his oilskins, streaked with blood, and with the stench of gut upon his hands.
Backing into his stage, he called out, “I’ll be home in a minute.” Closing the door, he glimpsed through the window, watching as she stood there for a minute before turning homeward. He glanced about his stage, dimly lit by an old kerosene lantern, its mantle partially blown. After pumping more air into the lantern for more light, he skimmed out of his oilskins, and whereas in the past he had scrubbed his hands and face before going home, this evening he stripped proper—sweater, shirt, pants, and underwear—and stood naked in the shadows. Unclamping the cold-water hose, he hosed the length of himself, then started lathering the broad expanse of his chest, the length of his arms, digging deeply into the black, hairy crux of his pits. He bent over with a grunt, soaping his navel, his loins, his heavily muscled thighs, his bowed knees, his calves, all hairy, black. “Like the beast,” he grunted, “like the mute beast.”
His teeth chattering with cold, he hosed himself off, then scrubbed himself dry with a ratty, threadbare towel and hastily climbed back into his dirty clothes. Holding down his head, he hosed his hair, the cold water numbing his scalp. Flicking it dry, he finger-combed it back in place, and getting a tidied view of himself in a cracked piece of pane, he stepped back outside, feeling somewhat heartened, and hurried home.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OLD SAW TOOTH
O
NE LATE AFTERNOON
, and the tide already partway in, Sylvanus shoved off his boat with a heavy heart. He ought to be out on the water by now, already jigging, not just pushing off from shore. But with the small fish he was hooking these days, it took forever to catch his morning quota. And by the time he’d cleaned and salted them, and laid out those in the faggots and turned those on the flakes, well, it felt like he was always racing the tide to get back out for the evening catch, and then racing against the falling light, now that fall was taking on, to get back to shore.
It was not just the lateness of the hour that was deflating him this afternoon. He was getting used to that, fishing all hours of the day and evening. No, something a whole lot worse he’d just heard on the fishermen’s broadcast was causing the sickness in his stomach. The haddock fishery was at the point of collapse. Collapse! A fish that was as abundant upon the sea as the cod near gone. Fished out. Fear swept up and down the shores like fire.
Didn’t we say, Sylvanus silently cried out, standing in his boat, steering his way through the neck, didn’t we bloody say? And the cod won’t last, either. This shows she can’t last—not when the spawning grounds are being fished out. What kind of fool can’t figure that? What kind of fool can’t figure we’re farmers, not hunters; that we don’t search out and destroy the spawning grounds, that we waits for the fish to be done with their seeding, and then they comes to us for harvesting? What kind of fools can’t figure that what’s happening to the haddock will happen to the cod? That’s it’s already starting with the smaller fish and shorter seasons? That what’s happening on top of the water is a sure measure of what’s happening beneath? That with the mother’s immeasurable depths and complexities, a fish once lost can never be found? What kind of fools—what kind of
fools
can’t figure that?
And that’s when a great silence fell upon him. Any man could figure that logic. What truth, then, was this?
They knew. The weight with which this thought struck him forced him to sit. They knew. Of course they knew. Everybody knew. Governments. Corporations. Merchants. Even the fishermen working the big boats knew. But they would keep doing it anyway, like a youngster gobbling down the profits from his jelly bean business— knowing the difference, but unable to stop.
Sickened, he anchored two stone’s throws past Pollock’s Brook and tossed his jiggers into the sea; left arm up, right arm down; right arm up, left arm down. Left, right, left, right. Two hours went by with a quarter of the bites he was used to getting. His stomach knotting with hunger, he rowed up to Gregan’s Hole and went ashore. There, he kicked together a pit and skinned the smallest cod in his boat, throwing it into his pan with hardtack and onions.
“Government,” he grunted, stoking the fire so’s to stew the fish faster and get back to jigging, “a bloody government is what we needs, one who’s not afraid to stand up and stave off this glut off our shores, who’s not scared to go out and do what Jake says, blow the bastards off the water. And never mind talk; talk don’t do nothing because nobody’s listening to talk. And for the name of jeezes, don’t give us another ten years of research because your last ten years proved to be wrong, and now you needs another ten to figure why. A limit is what we needs, a goddamn two-hundred-mile limit like the Chileans got so’s to protect the spawning grounds—our spawning grounds!—and drive all them foreigners the hell home to fish out what’s left of their own shores.”
Fingering back the last of the fish, he shucked the bones to the gulls and started back out to sea. Anchoring over Gregan’s Hole, he stood wearily, left arm up, right arm down, right arm up, left arm down, right down, left up, left down, right up, his mind tiredly playing over and over the rest of the broadcast he had heard that morning, the governing fathers responding to the accusatory voices of the fishermen after the announcement of the collapsing haddock fishery.