by Ann Swinfen
As she had promised, Tirza arrived on her bike soon after five, just as it was getting light.
‘Dad’s coming along behind,’ she said. ‘Shall I help with the milking?’
Soon after Nathan arrived, the cows were driven out into the pasture and they were ready to start.
‘I can give you a hand too, Tobias,’ said Harriet.
‘Don’t you worry. You’ve got plenty of chores. And you never did like ladders.’
‘Well, that’s true. Dinner will be ready at noon.’ Harriet smiled at Tirza. ‘We haven’t seen you for a long time. We can have a good visit over dinner.’
Tirza shuffled her feet. She had been avoiding the farm, avoiding Martha, but she was aware she had not been helping Harriet as much as she usually did.
‘I’ll come for strawberry picking. And if you need help when you’re canning...’
‘You don’t need to come just to work,’ said Harriet kindly. ‘I appreciate your company.’ She touched Tirza’s arm as she headed back to the house.
‘Now,’ said Tobias. ‘We have to paint the milk room last, after the milk is collected.’
Tirza peered round the doorway. The milk had stopped dripping through the strainers into the last two milk cans. Tobias removed the strainers, put the lids on the big cans and hitched them to the hoist. Then he hoisted them up and lowered them to stand in the huge clay trough with the others. The blocks of ice floating in the water chinked against the sides of the cans. Later, when the milk was cool, the truck from Portland would collect most of the cans, except those kept for family use and Harriet’s cheese making.
Tobias poured whitewash into old sauerkraut cans, on to which Simon had fixed wire handles, and handed out brushes.
‘Simon and Tirza can get started on the tie-up. Sam, you get up into the hayloft and do as much as you can reach from there. Nathan and I will start at the other end of the barn with the ladders and work along the ceiling till we meet up with you.’
Soon there was no sound except the wet slap of their brushes against the plaster and the beams of the old barn. Tirza loved whitewashing. Last year’s coat was stained and greyish. Her wide brush laid a dazzling layer of white over the top. It went on so easily you could work fast, and within an hour the tie-up had already begun to look brighter and bigger. What a sense of power! An action so simple, and the building grew larger, billowing outwards like a balloon inflating, the roof taking flight above their heads and soaring upwards.
‘Snowball will probably be so startled this evening, when she sees this, that she won’t give any milk!’ said Tirza.
‘Don’t suppose cows notice things like that,’ said Simon.
Tirza looked at him in astonishment. ‘Of course they do. That’s why Snowball is some difficult. She’s a noticing cow. Smarter than the rest.’
Simon laughed. ‘Are you a cow psychologist now?’
She shrugged. ‘Just common sense. You watch her, that’s all.’
By noon they were more than halfway finished, so after their dinner of cod, boiled new potatoes and young cabbages thinned out from the field, they sat out on the porch for a time while Tobias and Nathan drank a cup of coffee and Harriet and Patience shared a pot of tea. Martha had not appeared for dinner, but Tirza had noticed Patience going upstairs with a tray. Billy, who had been watched closely by Patience all morning to keep him out of mischief amongst the whitewash, ran around the flower beds below the porch with his arms stretched out, making aeroplane noises.
The ground sloped away from the house on this side, down to the orchard which lay on the near side of the farm track, with the strawberry field on the far side of it. In winter you could just make out the county road beyond, but now it was hidden by the trees, which were covered with blossom. As the breeze stirred them, the first petals drifted down, sprinkling the orchard grass and the backs of the half-dozen geese who lived there.
Whitewashing time and apple blossom – it was almost summer, thought Tirza, shutting her eyes against the sun and leaning back on her hands. The old silvered boards of the porch were warm under her palms, and her legs dangled over the edge. Far away she could hear the sound of a big aeroplane.
‘Time we were getting back to work,’ said Nathan, but no one rushed to move. The sun and the sense of the morning’s achievement made them lazy.
‘There’s an aeroplane coming this way,’ said Simon.
‘I read something in the paper,’ said Tobias. ‘They’re starting regular patrols up and down the coast, looking out for enemy planes and ships.’
‘I guess they’ve got more chance of seeing them than a couple of GIs up on the church headland with a gun,’ said Nathan.
The plane came nearer. It was flying up from the south. A big plane, four engines. Tirza and Simon jumped up and shaded their eyes, searching for a sight of it. They had hardly ever seen a four-engine plane.
‘There it is!’ cried Simon, pointing. Then Tirza saw it too. They were squinting into the sun, and even the grown-ups were looking too. Billy had climbed up on to the porch.
‘Where, where? Show me!’ He tugged at the hem of Tirza’s shorts. She lifted him up and pointed.
The roar grew louder. The plane was going to fly right overhead. Suddenly the screen door from the living room flew open and hit the wall. Martha stumbled through, almost falling. Her hair was awry and she wore no make-up. She looked strange, wild-eyed.
She ran forward and seized Billy from Tirza, swinging him in the air and clutching him to her so that he gave a startled explosion of breath, too surprised to say anything. She stared frantically around and up at the plane, which they could all see now. Then with a terrible cry she threw one arm over her head, crooked at an awkward angle, and ran back into the house. Harriet started to her feet and ran after her. The others were slower, but in a scramble that was almost comic in its haste they followed behind.
They found Harriet in the kitchen. Martha was under the table, hunched over Billy who was yelling with indignation. She was shaking. Outside, the sound of the patrol plane died away to the north.
‘I reckon it was the plane,’ said Nathan to Tobias after they had resumed the whitewashing. The milk had been collected. The family milk cans were standing temporarily outside in the horse trough with a block of ice, and they were working in the milk room. Tirza, painting the door frame of the tie-up next door, could hear them talking quietly together.
‘I guess so.’
‘Stands to reason. Will dying like that, his plane crashing. She’s thinking every plane is like to crash.’
‘I guess she isn’t thinking at all. She’s so scared she just wants to grab Billy and hide.’
‘Ayuh.’
They fell silent.
It was the first time Tirza had seen Martha since Will’s death and she had been, for a moment, very frightened. Then she had felt angry, though she could not have said why. Once the sound of the plane died away, Martha crawled out from under the kitchen table and released Billy, who ran to Patience. Martha looked dazed, her eyes vacant, like someone who has just woken up. Harriet had made her drink a cup of scalding sweet tea, and after a while Martha had acted quite normal. No one made any reference to her strange behaviour. For the first time in her life, Tirza was sorry for Billy, and she even felt some pity for Martha too, though it was mixed with irritation. Her father and uncle might be right about the reason for Martha’s behaviour, but it was stupid. Why should the aeroplane, which was flying along quite steadily, suddenly fall out of the sky? And if it did, why should it fall on Libby’s Farm? And a kitchen table wouldn’t be much protection. Tirza was scornful.
They finished the whitewashing with a couple of hours to spare before evening milking. The stalls in the tie-up were dry enough by then to use, and with care the milk room too. The whole cow barn looked twice the size, with the low-lying evening sun lighting it up and the clean smell of the whitewash filling the air.
Tirza and Nathan stayed to supper and then walked slowly back to Flam
boro, Tirza wheeling her bicycle. They had lost a day’s fishing, but families need to help each other out at busy times. With Nathan still part-owner of the family farm, they would both lend a hand with haymaking and harvest.
‘Dad?’ said Tirza. ‘Do you reckon Martha is... well... kind of crazy, since Will got killed?’
Nathan sighed.
‘She’s not really crazy, child. Just crazy with grief. She’ll get over it, some day. But we have to be patient meantime. That hiding with Billy under the table – that was just a kind of instinct, like a cat hiding her kittens or a ruffled grouse fluttering around, trying to draw you away from its nest. It’s nothing to do with reason.’
‘You reckon she’ll get better, then?’
‘I reckon so. Ayuh.’
The herring had come. In one of their mysterious and unpredictable migrations, they were swarming about ten miles out to sea off Flamboro, where they were spotted late one evening. The fishermen needed to move fast, for the fish would disappear as suddenly as they had come – north, perhaps, to the Grand Banks or south towards Rhode Island and Cape Cod.
Mostly, these days, Nathan confined himself to lobster fishing. As a young man he had worked as a trawlerman, first as crew on a boat belonging to another fisherman – George Pelham, the father of Walter. His own father was still alive then and the farm was not large enough to provide a living for two grown sons, once the elder one married. Like many younger sons in the family before him, Nathan had chosen the sea and left Tobias to work the farm. He was a single man then, with no dependants to be left abandoned if he should be lost overboard.
His father had died when Nathan was courting Louisa O’Neill and the two brothers inherited the farm jointly. Tobias suggested they should sell off a parcel of land halfway across the county which had come into the family with some nineteenth-century marriage. The fields were too far away to use for anything but hay. It was impossible to keep taking horses and machinery over there for other crops. Even for hay it was not worth the time involved. With his half of the money from the sale of the land Nathan was able to pay most of the cost of the Louisa Mary, the rest to be paid off to the bank over five years. Together with their lawyer, the brothers devised a fair scheme of dividing any profits from the farm, the majority going to Tobias.
For a year after buying the Louisa Mary, Nathan went out inshore fishing with the rest of the trawler fleet from Flamboro, but the boat was not large enough to go further afield. When he married, he applied for his lobster licence. He had known too many trawlermen’s widows left to struggle on their own, though in the rough Maine seas a lobsterman’s life was hardly safer. The lobsters provided an adequate living most years, augmented by some fishing. In the lean lobster years he fished more often. Tirza’s birth and Louisa’s death persuaded him that this pattern of work had been the right choice. Some of the men who ran greater risks netted far greater catches and could afford bigger boats. Walter Pelham, who had taken over George’s old boat on which Nathan had once crewed, had bought himself a fancy new boat out of Kennebunkport two years ago. Most of the lobsterboats were under thirty feet, the trawlers a little longer, but Walter’s Reliant was forty-three feet at the water-line. By rights it needed at least three men to handle her and her gear – skipper and two sternmen – but whenever Walter could keep Wayne away from school he dispensed with one of his crew and used Wayne instead. His irregular education had held Wayne back to the same class at school as Simon and Tirza. He was already fourteen and big for his age, but he had not grown into his full strength yet.
When word went round that the herring had been spotted, Nathan decided that he would go after them with the other fishermen. Louisa Mary’s net was not very large, but it was as much as he could handle with Tirza’s assistance. If the run was as good as reported, it would be worth missing a day or two at the pots in exchange for a sizeable herring catch.
The evening was grey and overcast when they loaded the fish kegs into the Louisa Mary. Tirza paused in rolling them down to Nathan, squinting at the sky and sniffing.
‘Rain before morning, I reckon. And an easterly.’
‘Ayuh. It’ll be good for the fishing.’
Bright sun would give away the position of the boat to the fish and could send them darting away like a vast grey underwater cloud before the net could even be laid out. And every fisherman in the southern half of Maine, where the coast faced due east towards the ocean, feared a strong westerly wind, an offshore rote, which could sweep you helplessly out to sea. But it was the north-easterlies that were the worst of all, bringing the severe storms down from Canada and the Arctic.
The weather turned out as they expected. At three thirty the next morning as they climbed aboard the Louisa Mary, a fine drizzle was falling from a starless sky. It was not yet dawn and there were lights on in some of the sheds along the wharf, where other fishermen were collecting gear. Tirza stored the basket of food and two thermoses – one of hot coffee and one of cold milk – in the cramped wheelhouse and came out again on deck. She bundled her yellow oilskins into a locker on the port side and turned up the collar of her windcheater. It was not wet enough yet for oilskins, which were heavy and awkward to wear, but the fine cold rain made the day feel like fall after the long stretch of late spring sunshine.
Wayne hailed her from his father’s Reliant, which was moored alongside.
‘Goin’ to be a swell day’s fishin’, my dad says. Shame you ain’t got more capacity on that little boat o’ yourn!’
Tirza stuck out her tongue at him. This had been a running joke ever since Walter had bought Reliant.
‘Oh, we’re just taking a day off real work,’ she said. ‘Thought we’d have us a lazy day pulling in fish with a net like you folks, ‘stead of our usual high class work.’
‘Give over, the both of you,’ said Walter. ‘Cast off forrard, boy.’
Once Reliant was under way, Nathan started the Louisa Mary’s diesel engine and they puttered slowly out of the harbour between the winking red lights on the two walls that embraced it like arms. Despite the heavy sky there was only a low swell running before the light onshore breeze. Nathan opened up the throttle and the Louisa Mary surged sweetly forward. Reliant, bigger and faster, was already disappearing into the darkness ahead, but the Louisa Mary was a sturdy little boat, what Nathan called a ‘true’ boat. This was partly due to the way she sat in the water, and partly to the way she handled, but above all it came from the way she seemed at home in large seas or small, so that those who went to sea in her always felt safe.
Nathan hummed quietly to himself as they headed out to the bearing where the herring had been sighted last night. He would never whistle on a boat, but without thinking he always began this soft contented humming when he had the wheel between his hands and the boat fairly under way. Tirza smiled to herself and poured them each a mug of the heavily sweetened coffee and stirred milk into it.
The grey sky was beginning to lighten ahead of them with the rising sun as they neared the fishing ground and choose a position clear of the other boats. As Nathan throttled back Tirza pulled out her oilskins and struggled into them. The rain was falling more heavily now. The oilskins would protect her from it and, more crucially, from the wet and muck of lowering and raising the net and handling the fish. She had never possessed oilskins of her own. These were an old cut-down set of Nathan’s which Abigail had adapted for her. Although they had been shortened to the right length, Abigail had made no attempt to narrow them. The broad back which had fitted Nathan comfortably stood out around Tirza like a yellow tent. They were too stiff to mould themselves to her narrower shoulders and back, and sometimes when she turned she revolved inside them, leaving the oilskins facing east when she was facing north. She looked forward to the day when she would stop growing and could have a set of her own in the right size.
They laid the net out astern and Nathan began to trawl slowly while Tirza kept a look-out for any dangers to the net, unforeseen snags or wreckage. The sea w
as so murky today there was little chance of spotting anything in time. Below her in the choppy waters she could see the turn and flash of the herring, and if she laid her hand on the ropes holding the head of the net, they thrummed with more than the movement of the boat and the waves.
A hundred yards further out to sea, a wave more solid than the rest rolled over, and a great curved body, gleaming blue-silver like pewter, showed against the deep blue-grey of the ocean.
‘Look, Dad!’ she cried. ‘A whale! First one I’ve seen this year.’
As they watched, the whale humped into sight, then breached, sending a fountain of spray into the air where it caught a chancy beam of light and glittered briefly. With a slap of his tail and a final heave of his great back, the whale was gone. Nothing was left but a drift of strong fishy breath floating past in the wind. The sight of a whale always filled Tirza with passion. Leviathan, emperor of the seven seas, near enough almost to touch, breathing the air she breathed, anointed with the same ocean spray, then sounding, diving, booming his complex songs down the long channels of the deep.
When Nathan judged they had run long enough, he nodded, cut the throttle, and Tirza engaged the winch that would lift the net inboard. Nathan came astern to help her and as the net swung in over the deck a low shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and lit up the liquid silver of the herrings, wriggling and flapping in a great mass which bulged the net outwards. Tirza released the foot of the net and the fish showered down around them, leaving them more than calf-deep in the glittering, sea-smelling haul. Nathan laid out the net again as Tirza began to sort and gut. Young fish went overboard, downwind to stop them falling back into the net again. The remaining fish were judged by eye according to size. Out of an empty sky the gulls were suddenly upon them, shrieking and fighting over the guts as Tirza flipped them overboard. Fish scales were everywhere – in her hair, down her neck, flecking her forearms below the rolled-up oilskin sleeves, even clinging to her eyelashes. Nathan joined her until the job was half done, then he went back to the wheel-house and eased the Louisa Mary forward again for the next drag, while Tirza finished gutting the fish and tossing them into the kegs.