talking to the trees. It was no surprise
he killed himself that winter,
a shotgun pushed up under his chin.
He had taken off one shoe to fire the round,
his big toe shoved into the snare
of the trigger guard, the bone
broken clean by the rifle’s kick.
COUSIN
Saddle Island, Red Bay, c.1550
The world’s largest whaling station, scores of Basque sailors hunting rights and bowheads up and down the coast in sixteen-foot skiffs, six men at the oars and one straddled across the bow as they crest the back of a steaming whale, oak shaft of the harpoon hefted above his shoulder like a torch meant to light their way through night and fog. The weight of a falling man pierces the water’s skin, the edgeless shape moving beneath it like a dark flame.
A speared bowhead could drag a boat for hours, trailing blood and bellowing before it died of exhaustion or its wounds, the oarsmen rowing furiously to keep steady beside it, avoiding the piston slap of the animal’s tail that could hammer the open skiff to pieces when it surfaced. Thousands hauled up in the lee of Saddle Island to be rendered every season, the enormous bodies like stolen vehicles being stripped for parts: the thick, pliant hide stretched across umbrella frames in France and Spain, the finest women in Europe corseted with stays of whale baleen; tons of fat boiled down in copper cauldrons, a single schooner carrying seven hundred barrels of oil home in the fall.
The useless bones dumped in Red Bay Harbour – the curved tusk of the mandibles, hollow vertebrae, the long fine bones of the flipper: carpals, meta-carpals, phalanges, cousin to the human hand.
The remains of a hundred whalers interred on Saddle Island, their heads facing west, a row of stones weighed on their chests as if to submerge them in the shallow pool of earth, to keep them from coming up for air.
The corpses of several men often exhumed from a single grave, victims of a common misfortune. A seven-man crew sometimes buried side by side, their livelihood their undoing; shoulders touching underground, long fine bones of the fingers pale as candlelight folded neatly in the hollow of their laps.
CAPELIN SCULL
What you’d imagine the sound of
an orchestra tuning up might look like,
cacophony of silver and black at your feet.
Spawning capelin washed onto
grey sand beaches in the hundreds
of thousands like survivors of a shipwreck,
their furious panic exhausted into
helpless writhing while boys scoop them
into buckets with dipnets.
They migrate all the way
from the Caribbean for this,
each wave rolling onto the shore
like another bus stuffed with
passengers bound for oblivion,
limbs and heads hanging recklessly
through the open windows.
Most of them rotted on the beach
or found their way onto gardens
planted with potatoes in those days,
except for the few we dried on
window screens beside the shed,
neat rows of the tiny fish
endlessly buzzed over by houseflies
like crazy eighth notes on a staff.
Roasted them over open flame
until they were black and they tasted
much as you’d imagine burnt fish would
but we ate them anyway,
head and tail together.
They had come such a long way
and given themselves up so completely
and in such an awful silence
that we felt obliged to
acquire the taste.
WATER GLASS
Near Domino Run, August 7th
Early evening, approaching a gate of islands;
the boat sailing effortlessly through calm
like a soul about to leave the world,
low sun navigating a placid scatter
of cloud white as pearl.
Passengers congregated above deck
praising the strangely beautiful weather.
A wind as warm as furnace exhaust lifts
an imperceptible lens of moisture that warps
our vision, the landscape of humped rock
skewed to pillars of straight, striated stone.
A shoal riding high in the Run shimmers
as the boat rolls on the tide swell,
then disappears completely
like a penny at the bottom of a water glass.
My father stares down the long flue of islands
and makes a sour face, skeptical of the wind,
predicts we’re in for weather and soon.
The Americans beside us oblivious to
his dark forecast, their faces haloed by sunset.
As we steam closer the nearest rock cliffs
resolve into stumps of treeless stone,
red-faced in the failing light
like faith-healers exposed as fakes.
Out of view on the far side of the Run
the squall is picking up momentum,
the water stirred into a wicked lop,
clouds carrying darkness, a plague of sleet;
stands of low spruce on the bigger islands
bent over in the gale,
genuflecting towards the day’s peace
as it abandons the blind ship.
NEWFOUNDLAND SEALING DISASTER
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
slit them free of their spotless pelts.
The storm came on unexpected.
Stripped clean of bearings, the watch struck
for the waiting ship and missed it.
Hovelled in darkness two nights then,
bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.
Minds turned by the cold, lured by small
comforts their stubborn hearts rehearsed,
men walked off ice floes to the arms
of phantom children, wives; of fires
laid in imaginary hearths.
Some surrendered movement and fell,
moulting warmth flensed from their faces
as the night and bitter wind doled out
their final, pitiful wages.
HUNTERS & GATHERERS
between Makkovic and Postville, August 11th
This is repression.... We forget something. And forget that we have forgotten it. As far as we are subsequently concerned, there is nothing that we have forgotten. – R.D. LAING
Hunters gathered that shale, layered it
into its roughly human shape
two centuries ago, ridged spine of stone
on the highest point for miles,
raised as a guide for descendant hunters
like a gene passed down through generations,
Inukshuk overlooking the ocean
and the broad swell of inland tundra
teeming with ptarmigan and grouse.
In the ship’s lounge a scatter of kids from
Davis Inlet takes in a Disney film on the VCR,
an infant milks Pepsi from a baby bottle;
twenty dozen beer picked from the forward hold overnight,
a wrecked assembly of Innu and Inuit strewn
in lounge seats now, smelling of booze and
smoke and mindless bewilderment,
robbed even of a sense of loss.
The blind silhouette on the horizon ignored,
like constellations stranded above a city;
one shale arm extended to point
the next hunter inland to the caribou routes,
that part of a people whose waiting
lives beyond patience.
It will stand that way for
a long time to come.
THE WOMEN
There was one in every fishing crew of four or five, brought along to cook and keep the shack in decent shape, and do their part with making the fish when the traps were coming up full, cutting throats or keeping the puncheon tub filled with water. They helped set the salt cod out on the bawns for drying in August, called out of the kitchen if a squall of rain came on to gather it up before it was ruined.
Most were girls whose families needed the wage, some as young as thirteen, up before sunrise to light the fire for tea and last to bed at night, the hot coals doused with a kettle of water.
Usually the girl had her own room beside the skipper’s downstairs, the rest of the crew shoved into bunks under the attic eaves on mattresses stuffed with wood shavings. Sometimes it was only a blanket hung from the rafters that stood between her and the men.
When the work slowed after the capelin scull, a fiddle might be coaxed from a corner on Saturday nights, lips set to a crock of moonshine, followed by a bit of dancing, heels hammering the planks down in the bunkhouse. The single boys courted hard, they’d fall in love just to make it easier getting through the season. There was a carousel of compliments, of flirting, there were comments about the light in a girl’s eyes or the darkness of her hair. There was romance of a sort to be considered: coals to be fanned alive or soused with the wet of a cold shoulder. The fire of loneliness and fatigue smouldering in the belly.
Most of it came to nothing but idle talk and foolishness, though every year there were marriages seeded on the Labrador islands, along with a few unhappier things. A child sailing home pregnant in the fall and four men swearing they never laid a hand upon her
CAIN
Breen’s Island, 1941
My father stabbed his brother with
a white-handled pocket knife
when they were boys and working on the Labrador
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