What if the foreigners and bigger boats did take it all? What if, come spring, nothing ran, not even the scrub cod? What then? Thus far, his house had wanted for nothing, despite his shortage of fish the past year. The bit of coin he’d saved had seen to that, and she hadn’t felt a thing, hadn’t known but that his puncheons were bursting to their brims. And for certain he’d keep them in meat again this coming winter. But his coin was gone, all used, and no amount of hunting would put flour in the larder, or butter on the table, or clothes on their backs. It was the fish that provided him with coin. Logging brought some relief, but not enough.
The grimness of the thought sobered him. He’d take the bloody fish, then. He’d take whatever the hell would help him through this winter, and he prayed to the sweet Jesus Lord that the coming spring would favour his jiggers as well as it was favouring the gill nets and the trawlers— and not just for money, either. Fish was his mainstay mentally and spiritually as well, for he had built himself upon that cursed sea, and he was only a part of himself without her.
Upon making the decision, a weariness crept over him, comforting almost, like the soothing that comes after a hard knock to one’s bones, and he felt like balling his oilskins into a pillow and crawling into the crux of his boat and going to sleep. But, no. The harshness of his loudmouthed threats and his clenched fists summoned him back to the garden, to putter around, fixing the back-bridge or something, pretending all was fine and rendering the harshness of his behaviour a common thing, else it’d be harder and harder to go back, making it a thing that would then have to be spoken of. And he didn’t want that. Hell, he didn’t need that, he thought, hanging his head ashamedly.
Hanging the dripping line up over the rafters in the stage, he kicked beach rocks onto the fire and trudged toward his mother’s yard like an old soldier. And that’s just how they were as they battened down their house, moving into winter, like two old soldiers wearied from battles fought on different soils and now picking through the foundations of what had been common ground, careful lest they trip a land mine and harm their respective solitudes, which kept the flag of truce between them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
OCEAN OF ANCIENTS
C
URSED. HE SWORE
he was cursed, as winter brought with it screeching winds and snow, and ice storms that befogged even the old-timers’ memories. Cripes, how he longed for the openness of the sea as he pushed through brush, suffering the snow creeping coldly down his neck, branches scratching at his face like a surly cat, and ice-blasted winds snatching at his breath. Even sunny days were wretched as the sun glittered off the white, searing his sockets, and warming the snow just enough to suck him thigh-deep into its banks. And the silence! There was always that silence when the woods were blanketed with snow, a heavy silence that bore down on the trees and the land with the stillness of death. Separate. All sounds became separate in that silence—the creaking of a boot, the rustling of his garments, a cough—all separate and spreading out in time so’s time itself became a thing that had to be ploughed through. No, sir, the woods couldn’t take him as did the sea, rocking him upon her breasts, fanning his face whilst he straddled her belly, plumbing her depths, his hips swaying to her heaving and ebbing beneath him, her bodice spreading so far out that it was impossible to see where water and sky separated.
Come midwinter the snow was banked twelve, fifteen feet deep in most places, making logging and hunting near impossible, and driving him mad as he prowled the limited space of his house, worrying about the meat, the larder, and the cursed knowing that all the while he sat, snowed in, the draggers, the trawlers, the factory freezers, and all else built around a diesel were sitting out there on his banks, sucking in his fish, day in, day out, day in, day out.
She wasn’t doing much better, he noted, grimly, chancing the occasional sideways glance at his wife. Any lightening of mood her absorption with the garden might’ve brought had certainly vanished with the summer sun. Yet, unlike him whose foot tapped impatiently as he stood pressing his face and hands against the frosted windows like something held captive, she was strangely calm this winter, her broodiness well contained within her.
Cripes, he envied her that as he paced and prowled, shovelling the path between his house and his mother’s every day, sometimes twice a day, bringing water when the buckets weren’t even emptied, and overflowing both their wood-boxes with splits. And when that was done and morning not yet over, and his peep-holes in the windows steamed white with his impatient sighs, he’d start back to prowling, working extra hard to clamp shut his eyes so’s they wouldn’t cling to hers like burrs whenever she drifted by—at least, that’s what it appeared like to him, that she
drifted,
her eyes seeing and resting on nothing except when ensnared by his.
She’d exclaim impatiently over his impatience then and seat herself in her rocker facing the window, her back to the room so’s to escape him. She could sit for hours like that, facing her window, her feet propped on the sill, levering her rocker to and fro, to and fro—no different than when she was immersed in her little red book when they’d first married. Not that he ever bothered trying to bring up the subject of those little red books, for they were directly connected somehow to her brooding, their babies, their dying. Cripes, no. The mere mentioning of anything to do with the babies, and she skittered from him like a cat in cold water. Didn’t matter to her how he ached, building those little boxes. Didn’t matter to her how he had wept upon every nail hammered, that he walked around as emptied as her belly after each burial, that each unfulfilled expectation tore a deeper hole in his heart than the ground into which he had buried them. Hell, no. Too caught in her own grief, she was, to give notice of his.
He’d catch himself then and hang his head, recognizing in himself that wounded dog limping around for a pat, whereas his brooding had nothing to do with her; nothing to do with the burials, even. Truth was, as the long winter days pressed on, he started not giving a damn about any of it: her brooding, his brooding, whatever the hell it was they were all brooding about. Getting back to the sea was what was driving him, and filling his boat and his puncheons, and covering his flakes with fish, and gaining back some comfort in knowing that the mother was still there for him, that she hadn’t abandoned him, and that he could resume the life she had once so generously given.
Middle of March the winds died, and the sun started cutting through the snow. He was out the door like a singed cat, sawing the blade of his bucksaw through the spine of a black vir oozing with sap, and axing off its limbs, wood chips flying, and a ringing sounding through the woods like church bells. First of April he was setting snares, tracking moose, and chopping open ponds for a blessed meal of fresh, pink trout. Christ, what relief to be swinging his arms and legs over bogs and lakes, and envisioning that day when he could finally start caulking his boat and readying his jiggers and gearing up for another season.
His first day on the water, and he near trembled from the want of it. Yet it was the mother’s nervousness that took his mind. He felt it, swear to God, he felt it: her constant shifting, even on the dullest day; her quick leaps from a breeze to a near gale with no warning; her uncalled-for storms up to the end of April; and those long mornings of glassy stillness throughout the latter part of May. He knew the wind to be her accomplice, but it were as though the sun and moon held vigil, too, for it was a queer light on the water these days, and he kept searching skyward for a reading of something to come. More precisely, it was what
didn’t
come. Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks into the season before a small stream of cod, half the size of four years before, swam wearily to his jiggers.
He near wept. No wonder she was tossing and fretting beneath him. No wonder she was reluctant to yield to his jiggers. He caught sight of a dragger that had crept but a quarter mile sou’west of him, and two more sitting a few miles farther out.
“Bastards!” he spat, watching the one closest to him steaming even closer, two miles farther in than she ought to be by law, the bright orange bobbers of some fisherman’s net quickly sinking beneath its hull. When he thought the beast would swamp him, it cut its engines, engulfing the sea with quiet. The creaking of her winches sounded over the sea, and a mumble of voices as the men aboard milled starboard, leaning over the bulwark. She was raising her net. Lifting his paddles, Sylvanus rowed within a few hundred yards of the mammoth beast, shading his eyes as the iron-shod slabs of wood rose dripping out of the water, thudding heavily against the wooden side of the trawler as the clanging chains winched them upward. The ocean beneath started broiling, foaming white as the net breeched.
“Jeezus!” He knew from talk the size of a trawler’s nets, but he’d not seen one, and he stared in awe now, as the thousand-foot netting rose out of the sea, its bulbous shape gushing back water and vibrating with its thousands of fish all crushed together and bulging, strangling, wriggling out through the mesh. The cranking of the winches grew louder as the net rose abreast of the gunnels. A cry cut forth from the men, and Sylvanus stared disbelievingly as the net split dead centre and its cargo of fish—redfish, mostly—started falling, slowly at first, as though the hand of God held it mid-air, but then with a turbulent swoosh, back into the sea.
“Jeezes,” and he stared disbelievingly as the mass of redfish floated on the surface like a bloodied stain growing bigger and bigger as the waves took them, spreading them farther and farther outward and toward where he was now standing in his boat. Loud, angry cries grew from the men abandoning the trawler’s gunnels. Black smoke spurted out of her stacks, signalling the trawler’s return to the open sea, leaving in its wake the drowned redfish spreading like a ruptured sore upon the face of the sea.
Within minutes Sylvanus’s boat was encompassed by the fish now drifting on their backs, their eyes bulging out of their sockets like small hen eggs, their stomachs bloating out through their mouths in thin, pink, membrane sacs. Gulls flapped and squawked frenziedly, clutching onto the bellies of the fish, jabbing at the pink sacs till the membranes broke, spilling out the guts. The sea of red broke, and Sylvanus clutched his side sickeningly as he took in the spread of creamy white pods now floating before him. Mother-fish. Thousands of them. A great, speckled gull perched atop one of the pods nearest him, jabbing at her belly, weakening it, rupturing it, till the mother’s roe trickled out like spilt milk.
Who, who, Sylvanus silently cried, would accept such sacrifice in the name of hunger? And he sat back, bobbing in his little wooden boat upon the giant expanse of blue ocean, his pitiful few fish at his feet, and he felt his smallness, his minuscule measure against a sphere where thousands of fish can be flung to the gulls thousands of times and count for nothing. He thought of the mother-fish he’d saved from his jiggers over the years, and her sacs of roe, and he drew his eyes now back to the frenzy of the gulls jabbing at her belly, spilling her guts, her unlived life, into the sea, and he weakened, seeing in the mother’s fate his own. He rose, churning with anger at the stupidity, the
stupidity
of it, and shook both fists at the pillagers, roaring, “Bastards! You goddamned bastards! You stupid, goddamned bastards!”
In destitution, he closed his eyes to the hideous sight surrounding him, reopening them onto the hooded eyes of government, replying, “Yes, yes,” to the angry cries of the fishermen who were forced ashore in droves, “we hear you, and we’ll soon have our boundaries, and we’re working with foreign governments; but let’s not be hasty about blame. It’s as we told you before, there’s a cold front out there these days, and we’ve been telling you and telling you that cod don’t like cold water and that’s probably the reason she’s not swimming ashore. And, too, we got an overabundance of seals this year, feasting on your catch; and it’s the worse year yet for slub, despoiling nets up and down the bay; and it’s your spirit, men, it’s your spirit—you haven’t really given over the ways of the old; still too many of you clinging to your fathers’ day and not taking on the more modern means we’re equipping you with—what of the new fibre gill nets? We’re giving them to you, free—more competitive they’ll make you inshore crowd, more competitive. About twenty thousand we got out in the waters by now, and those fishermen are hauling in the cod, and they like them, they do, they like them.”
S
YLVANUS SNORTED
, nearly punching the radio one afternoon a few days after he’d witnessed the colossal waste of fish, and heard for the second time that day the government urging gill nets onto the fishermen.
“No, no, we don’t like the bloody things,” he exploded. “We hates them, we bloody hates them. For the love of jeezes, stop giving us what we don’t want and give us what we wants.”
He broke off as Adelaide darted in from the clothesline, a startled look on her face. “Bloody government,” he muttered, switching off the radio, shoving back his chair, “heads up their bloody arse. The more they learns about fishing, they better they gets at catching them, not sparing them.” He dug a tumbler of water out of the water bucket and stood drinking it back, thudding the emptied glass on the bin. “Nothing, Addie, nothing; just fishing stuff, is all,” he added, brushing aside her worried look. “Seen my cap? Where’s my cap? Cripes, the bloody thing is never where I lays it.”
“On the table.” She pointed out as he rooted noisily through a box of woollens behind the stove. “Syllie, what’s got you going?”
“Nothing you haven’t heard a hundred thousand times,” he grunted, pulling on his cap and heading for the door. She stood back, the size of her no bigger than a bean sprout, trying to bar the doorway, the blue of her eyes tinged with concern. “Look, it’s nothing to concern yourself with. Bloody governments, that’s all.”