by Ann Swinfen
The first of his floats came in sight – spindle-shaped and painted yellow and red. That British fellow, Sandy, had asked him how he ever managed to locate his two hundred pots. ‘In all that waste of water,’ he had called it.
Nathan thought about it as he put the engine into neutral and went forward to hook the pot out of the water. The sea wasn’t a wasteland to him, for one thing. Out here he could have described all the underwater geography that lay round about. In his mind’s eye it was as clear as Mount Manenticus, which he could see rising up on land, with Flamboro just a splash of white like seagull droppings at its foot and Gooseneck Lake over beyond the southern hogsback. These hills and valleys under water, sudden crags and deep rifts where a lobster pot might be lost – he could almost see them. The water lay like a tricky gauze over the top of them, but he had been learning their shapes and patterns since he had first come out in a boat with a lobsterman uncle when he was six or seven.
That was how the knowledge was passed on, he’d explained to Sandy. Oh sure, there were charts, but they only served as reminders. Every man fishing these waters carried his own map of the sea-bed inside his own head.
The lobster pot was empty. He pitched it overboard and headed for the next one. Trouble was, in fog or storm, you could lose your bearings, those unconscious sightings you took from coastline features and from the bell and whistle buoys marking the dangerous reefs. On an ordinary dark night it wasn’t so bad. There were harbour lights and lighthouses, and the clusters of windows from the houses in the ports. They all helped you to fix yourself on that mental map. And as for finding your lobster pots – well, you just remembered where you had laid them in relation to that map. Nathan couldn’t see the difficulty, any more than he could comprehend how some people had no sense of direction. Mary Flett was like that. Give her a lift somewhere, and she’d be saying, ‘Take a left here, Nathan,’ and you’d say, ‘But, Mary, they live east of here, not west.’ She’d look at you blankly, as if you were talking a foreign language. Which maybe you were.
The next three pots were empty too. And the bait was shredded and disintegrating, so he refilled the bait bags. Then he had a run of good luck. Five legal lobsters, one small one he threw back and one shedder. He held this last one up and examined it in disgust. After a lobster had shed its shell, it started growing fast, before the new shell hardened around it. And during this stage its flesh filled up with water like a sponge. No Maine fisherman would eat a shedder. They tasted like soggy pink felt. There were lobstermen and canners who would pass off a shedder as an edible lobster, but Nathan wasn’t one of them. This would be a fine fellow, too, once his shell firmed up. Nathan dropped him over the side with a sigh. Maybe if the lobster stayed in this area where Nathan had a fair number of pots, he’d wander into one again when he would be worth eating.
He put the engine in gear and headed north-east of the island. He had a group of twenty-five pots on an underwater ledge here where the fishing was good. The first one held two females with clusters of eggs under their tails. Two. Oh well, one day the eggs would be the catch of the future. He lowered them carefully into the water and watched them scuttling downwards into the murk. It was looking darker down there than it had just a few minutes ago.
Nathan straightened and sniffed the air. There was a damp smell different from the sea smell. It left a slight smoky after-taste on the back of your tongue. The horizon was blurred, as if someone had smudged a finger over half-dry paint. He weighed up the likelihood that the fog would come in rapidly. He was less than halfway through hauling his gang.
Under no circumstances was Nathan a rash man, but he needed all the lobsters he could catch at the moment. Abigail said Tirza must have several sets of new clothes to wear to high school in Portland. She had already dragged her off to buy a winter coat, and he had been taken aback when he saw the bill. Harriet had offered Abigail the pick of Martha’s castoffs. There were some sweaters that Abigail judged suitable, but everything else, it appeared, was too ‘flashy’. Tirza had looked embarrassed and uncomfortable when she tried Martha’s clothes on. Nathan had experienced an odd sensation watching her parade, reluctantly, in one outfit after another. At first the clothes seemed incongruous. He was used to seeing her in grubby shorts or dungarees patched at the knee, or in his old cut-down oilskins. In Martha’s clothes she looked, not just older, but alien. More feminine. Mysterious somehow. He was as uncomfortable about it all as she was. In the end he had agreed with his mother about the sweaters, and promised to find enough money to cover a couple of plaid skirts, some saddle Oxfords, and what Abigail called smalls – underwear, socks and handkerchiefs.
It seemed that as soon as he had agreed to this expenditure, the lobsters had taken to hiding away. He glanced at the horizon again. It looked no worse than it had done a few minutes ago. He would carry on, he decided, and finish hauling, but keep a reef watch. If things got worse, he would leave the cluster of thirty pots over to the north-west, in the direction of Casco Bay.
He had lifted four more pots and found three good lobsters when he noticed that the colours of the float on the fourth pot dimmed before his eyes as he dropped it back over the side. He looked up sharply. The horizon had crept up on him. It was no more than a mile away. And Mustinegus to the south had disappeared altogether. He swore under his breath and put the engine in gear. The glass of the compass was misted over with condensation. He rarely used a compass, but he wiped it now with the heel of his hand, then swung Louisa Mary round and headed back for Flamboro. The fog came stealing along on his heels.
At first he thought he might be able to outrun it, but the fog, like a great soft animal, rolled over his shoulders, over the cramped wheelhouse, over the bows. Everything ahead was blotted out and he was alone in a grey circle of dank air. He could not even see the bow of the boat. He slowed down. No point in rushing now, and more risk of collision. Most of the time Flamboro boats managed to avoid going to sea in a fog, but every fisherman kept a small foghorn stored in the stern locker. Steering with one hand, Nathan groped under the dragnet and spare gear in the locker until he felt the hard brass edge of the horn. He set it on the bottom boards by his foot and worked it at intervals with his left hand while he steered with his right.
He tried to remember where he had last seen the other boats. Ben had been further out than he was, but had turned back earlier. Probably he was ahead of Louisa Mary by now. The Towson brothers both laid their traps not far offshore. There were fewer lobsters there, what with the coming and going of the boats in the harbour, but the Towsons were young still – eighteen and twenty – and neither of them could afford a boat big enough to work further out. He numbered over the other lobsterboats in his mind. He was pretty sure no one was still further out than he was, which meant they would reach the harbour before the fog was too bad. But it also meant more risk of running into one of them. He sounded the foghorn again and strained his ears for any answering boom, but all he could hear was the regular noise of the buoys, shifting and distorted.
The fog had a curious effect on sounds. It seemed to muffle your ears as if they were wrapped up in a thick scarf. You strained to hear through its cloying thickness just as you strained to see through it. And yet some noises came louder and closer than they would on a clear day. The desolate groaning of a whistle buoy could sound near enough to fill you with panic while it was still a safe distance away, and voices sometimes echoed off the walls of fog and rebounded, so they seemed to come first from one direction and then from another. It was Nathan’s belief that it was these tricks that fog played with sound, more than the inability to see, which caused accidents. They confused the mind, and a fisherman who would bring his boat safely back to harbour on a pitch black night by the sound of the breakers alone could, in a fog, become as helpless as the most cack-handed novice.
These heavy fogs, rolling in from Newfoundland and Greenland, had a solidity that was almost tangible. Nathan glanced over his shoulder again. Beyond Louisa Mary’s stern
a shape hovered. Darker than the encompassing fog, it reared up and leaned over the small lobsterboat – fifty or sixty feet high. Somewhere in the distance off to starboard, a gull gave a single shriek. A stab of lonely terror smote Nathan like a physical blow, and he crouched over the wheel, shielding his eyes from that monstrous presence in the fog. Then the grey swirling mass around him shifted and backed, and he was alone again in a uniform greyness.
It was a cold fog, coming down from the north-east. Dank and cold where it clung to his skin. Yet he was sweating inside his oilskins and thigh boots. He could feel the sweat gathering on his shoulders and ribcage and trickling down his back to settle in a soaking mass at his waistband.
Ahead and on his port bow – he thought – came the bleat of another lobsterboat’s foghorn. Nathan held his breath. He must be near the harbour entrance now. The narrow channel between the two outflung arms of the harbour walls, and the reefs just below the surface on which they were constructed, allowed little room for two boats to manoeuvre during fog. He switched off his engine and allowed the boat to drift slowly under her own momentum.
‘Hey there! Ben, is it? Or George? It’s Nathan here, bringing in Louisa Mary.’
‘Ahoy, Nathan!’ Ben’s voice came out of the fog ahead of him. Thirty yards? Forty yards away?
‘Are you over the bar?’
‘Ayuh. Just going to tie up to the lobster car. I’ll keep sounding my horn and you can follow me in.’
The engine coughed with the damp as Nathan started it again, but then it steadied, and he forged ahead slowly until Ben’s boat and the long flat bulk of the lobster car took shape out of the greyness. He brought Louisa Mary alongside, just aft of Ben, and threw a couple of turns around one of the upright posts. Dimly through the fog he could see the silhouette of a slim young woman balancing on the pitching deck of the lobster car. Then he realised it was Tirza, with her arms wrapped around her. He climbed out on to the slippery slats and found his legs were shaking.
‘Oh Dad,’ said Tirza, clutching hold of him. ‘I thought you’d done it this time.’
‘Nothing to fret about. Easy as pie,’ Nathan said.
Labour Day dawned with a clear blue sky and a sparkle on the ocean that looked like midsummer. It was intolerable to think of school starting tomorrow. Tirza sprang out of bed half an hour earlier than usual, wanting to cram as much into the day as possible. She pulled on a pair of blue cotton shorts and an old shirt of Nathan’s. Abigail had cut off the tails and Tirza wore it with the sleeves rolled up, but it still billowed around her like a spinnaker sail in a light breeze. The looseness of it, and the cool air wafting inside it, always gave her a sense of freedom. She laid her crab line and rowed back to breakfast. Nathan was already seated in front of a plate of pancakes and bacon, and Abigail brought the coffee pot to the table as Tirza dried her hands carelessly on the seat of her shorts.
‘So how are you going to spend your last day of freedom?’ Nathan asked.
‘After I’ve delivered to the Mansion House I’m meeting Simon at Libby’s Marsh. He’s bringing the cranberry rakes.’
‘You don’t have to spend the last day of the vacation working.’
‘Oh, raking cranberries isn’t working. I like going to the marsh. There’s always something to see there. The geese will be flocking on the lake, and maybe we’ll go over and look at the fort.’
‘Why,’ Nathan said, ‘is there anything left of that still? Seems it was already pretty tumbled down when I was a boy.’
‘Sure. It’s not too bad. Last year Simon and me cleared all the creepers and weeds off it. Took three days, but it looked great afterwards.’
‘Simon and I,’ said Abigail automatically.
‘Simon and I.’ Tirza shook cornflakes into her bowl and poured milk over them, splashing some on the cloth.
‘I’ve always thought,’ said Abigail, ‘that somebody ought to look at that fort. One of these professors from a museum. I know when I was a girl there was an article in the newspaper about it. Seems it was built in 1690.’
Tirza paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth. She hadn’t realised it was that old. The fort stood on Libby property, so probably Libbys had built it when they first held the land, to defend themselves from the Indians. Or maybe from the French. She never could remember the dates of the French wars in these parts. Abigail, of course, had been a Libby herself before her marriage, second cousin to her husband. Born and brought up on the Libby farm the other side of Swansons’, near the end of the Todd’s Neck road.
Tirza started to eat again.
‘I bet Sandy would be interested in it. He’s always claiming America is so new. I reckon 1690 isn’t new.’
‘Don’t you go hanging round that young man, now, Tirza Libby,’ said her grandmother. ‘You don’t want him thinking you’re forward.’
‘I don’t hang around him!’ Tirza was furious. ‘I haven’t seen him for weeks. How can that be hanging around?’
‘Don’t shout.’
‘Dad?’ she appealed to him. ‘Dad, I don’t hang round him, do I?’
Nathan looked uncomfortable.
‘Of course not.’
‘If anyone hangs around him,’ said Tirza bitterly, ‘it’s Martha.’
Nathan and Abigail exchanged a glance.
At eleven o’clock Tirza met Simon near the foxholes. She had left Stormy Petrel pulled up on the beach with her new anchor firmly stamped into a patch of sandy soil just behind the ledges. The tide was coming in so she wasn’t planning to run any risks. Simon was carrying two cranberry rakes and a basket. Tirza had brought one of Abigail’s baskets. Although Abigail said she could no longer be bothered with crab-apple jelly, she liked to put up cranberries and cranberry jelly ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Together they picked their way past the foxholes into the edge of the marsh. After the long spell of almost unbroken dry weather, the smaller pools had shrunk to mere patches of darker green amongst the bog grasses. But even now there were treacherous places in the marsh, the pits of quicksand and mud which could engulf a stranger unfamiliar with the tricky paths. Old tradition held that these bog holes were bottomless, but Miss Bennett had told them in school that scientific surveys had established that the ‘bottomless’ pits in the Maine coastal marshes were never more than sixteen feet deep. Tirza, sitting in the schoolroom and studying the ceiling, had reckoned that sixteen feet was about as high at the ridge-pole of the school roof. If you fell into one of the bog holes, it would not make a lot of difference if it was bottomless or just as high as the rooftop.
The best cranberries grew in irregular thickets around Libby’s Pond which lay almost in the centre of the marsh. It was about a quarter of a mile long and pinched in the middle like a Victorian lady wearing a tight corset. Several islands of tufted reeds were scattered along its length, which provided nesting places for marsh birds and ducks during the summer. As they neared the lake, a cloud of red-legged geese rose with a beating of wings and swung overhead. Tirza and Simon flopped down on their stomachs amongst the cranberries at the end of the lake and waited. After a few minutes the geese circled around and came in to land again, throwing up a fine spray as they hit the water. They would feed here for a while, then head south again, for the Chesapeake, perhaps, or even further to the Gulf of Mexico.
‘It makes me tired just to think about it,’ said Tirza.
‘What?’
‘Flying all that distance. And how do they know? Know where to go, I mean.’
‘They fly in formation, following a leader.’
‘But how did they work it out in the first place?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘Maybe trillions of years ago they only came a little way north of their winter homes. Aha, says one bird, I do believe there’s better feeding a ways north of here. Let’s just buzz over where there’ll be plenty of food for the kids when they hatch out. He’s lazy, see. Then when it starts getting cold in the fall, his wife says, I declare, honey, it
was a lot warmer where we used to live. I think we should move back south for the cold weather. Come on kids, just follow your dad and we’ll be back at a nice snug place for winter.’
Tirza gave a snort of laughter. ‘Then the next year, their neighbours want to come too, and the young ones are breeding...’
‘And every year they try going a little further...’
‘Well, I guess it could have happened like that. Here, pass me a rake. We’d better get picking.’
Down beside the lake, bending over the cranberries, it felt almost tropical. The heat built up in this hollow part of the land, sheltered on three sides by dense pine woods. Even though it was open on the east to the sea, it lay several feet below the level of the ledges along the top of the beach. It was this cup-like formation and the abundance of small streams which created the marsh and also trapped the sun’s warmth – even on days like this which felt autumnal on the cliffs and harbour fronts exposed to the east wind.
The cranberries were thick this year. The bright red oval berries, hard as dried beans, popped off their stems and hit the wooden sides of the cranberry rake with a sharp ping, like beads dropped on a plate. Tirza enjoyed harvest time, apart from the back ache, and felt the rhythm of the year like the turning wheel of her life. But gathering the planted crops never had for her the same satisfaction as the harvesting of the wild fruits. There was a kind of thrill to it, as if you had outsmarted the coming winter. And the idea of abundant food, just growing here as it must have done for thousands of years, was oddly comforting. There were blackberries still to be gathered this year, and rose hips. Both Harriet and Christina made winter cordials from the hips. And there were a few hickory trees in Christina’s wood. Tirza would need to gather the nuts soon, or the squirrels would have them all. Not that she begrudged the squirrels their share. It always seemed pretty cunning the way squirrels stored up their winter food, just like people.