Where I Belong

by Alan Doyle

  “You boys keep one eye on the fish and the other on Frank, you got that?” he’d say to me and Perry while we helped Frank gut his fish and clean his boat.

  One day, Frank’s boat came through the breakwater on a particularly busy afternoon on the wharf, and he pulled up his boat all the way down at the last station. Me and Perry had dibs on cutting out Frank’s cod tongues and we went directly to catch the lines as he tossed them up. Within a few moments, we noticed two things odd about Frank. First, he was uncharacteristically quiet. No stories, no ramblings about how lazy and soft everyone was getting. No discussion of his day at sea. More telling was that Frank was gutting his daily catch using only one hand, jamming the not quite dead fish down with his elbow. The other hand had been inserted into an ice cream tub and covered with a plastic shopping bag, the whole thing tightly tied around his wrist. He held the whole contraption close to his chest, careful not to let anything touch it. Frank never mentioned it, which meant we were all supposed to ignore it, too, which we did as best we could—until it became apparent that we would be there forever if Frank had to gut all those fish by himself with one hand.

  “Uh, Frank,” Perry said sheepishly. I was glad he was the first to speak because I was afraid that my tongue might get cut out if I asked the wrong question. “What’s up with your hand?”

  Frank looked at us for a moment. “What?” he asked, as if he had no idea what Perry was asking about.

  “You know … the bag, the bucket?” I said.

  He looked down at the rather conspicuous white knight puppet he’d constructed on his hand. “Oh Jesus f—king Christ,” he began, as he continued to gut his fish. “I reached down to haul in the handline earlier this morning and friggin’ forgot I had two hooks on the line, and one of ’em caught me in the palm of the hand on the way up. Foolish thing. Hook’s still in there. After we finishes with these few fish, I must get Jack to see if he can get at the hook with a pair of pliers.”

  Now we had known Frank long enough to know that a small hook in the finger would not cause him any noticeable discomfort. We were also very familiar with the hooks that were used in the inshore handline fishery in Petty Harbour. The smallest one was about eight inches long and about as thick as the laces in a men’s dress shoe.

  I leaned in to Perry, who was looking every bit as nervous as me. “Go get Jack,” I whispered.

  Moments later, Jack came striding with purpose down the full length of the wharf.

  “Fine day, Frank,” said Jack casually. Then he said, “A’rn?,” the Newfoundland fisherman abbreviation for “either one,” meaning “Any fish today?”

  Frank replied with the customary “N’arn,” meaning “Not a one,” which was said no matter how good or bad the day’s catch might have been.

  With the small talk out of the way, Jack figured he could get to the real question.

  “What’s on the go with your hand and the ice cream tub, Frank? You got something jammed in it?”

  Frank repeated the “small hook” story and assured Jack that it was nothing of any concern. He would have a look at his hand later when the work was done. But Jack knew better and insisted that Frank take off the ice cream tub and plastic bag and show him the minor injury.

  Frank slowly untied the plastic bag and winced a little as Jack slid off the ice cream tub. All of us boys were standing around Frank, waiting to catch a glimpse of his hand. And when that tub came off, I almost fainted. The only thing that kept me upright was the fact that I was not totally sure what I was seeing. I saw a reddish purple mass of flesh. It was somewhat like a human hand but more closely resembled a misshapen hockey glove. The appendage was curled into a fist, and I could just make out the closed fingers and knuckles. The hand seemed to be holding a long, galvanized nail with an eyehole at the top, some three or four inches above the thumb. Of course, it was not a straight nail but a fish hook, an eight-incher, and when Jack gently turned Frank’s hand over, we suddenly realized the galvanized steel hook and barb were not being held at all. The hook had pierced right through Frank’s hand and three inches of hook had cleared the other side. The entire area around the puncture wound was swollen to bursting.

  Jack shook his head like he’d seen this kind of thing before. “Jaysus Christ, Frank. When did you do this?”

  “Ah Christ, b’y, ’bout four thirty this morning, I s’pose. Just after I got out past Tinker’s Point. Didn’t want to waste all the gas to come and go for nothing, so I started fishing and got in a good spot, so I stayed. Sure, there’s nothing to it anyway,” he said, studying his hand. “As long as you don’t bang it off anything, you’d barely notice it.”

  Jack sighed. The rest of us stayed dead quiet. “Frank, you could lose your hand, you old fool. Hold on. I’ll phone someone to take you to the hospital.”

  “To the hospital? For this? Don’t be so foolish, Jack. Get the pliers and cut the eye or the barb off it and pull the bastard out.”

  “Frank, you’re going to get an infection and drop dead in your sleep. You at least need to go to the Goulds and see the doctor.”

  “The hell I do,” said Frank as he walked past Jack and strolled right into Jack’s office in the weight shed. We all watched as he grabbed a set of rusty vise grips with his good hand. He had them half set on the eye of the hook before he got back over to where we were standing.

  A few more strides and we heard a click and watched as the eye and about an inch of the hook hit the top of the wharf and bounced a couple of times.

  “Now,” Frank said to Jack, “yank that out and I’ll pour some iodine on it and we can all get back to work.”

  “Are you sure, Frank?”

  The answer was wordless and clear.

  Jack fixed the vise grips over the hook and barb and was about to pull.

  “One second,” Frank said, using his good hand to brace himself on the fish-splitting table. He looked around at us group of wincing boys. And then he saw me.

  “You, Young Doyle. Hold my arm steady for Jack.”

  I shook my head, but Frank curled me in next to him and whispered, “Come on now, don’t let the boys see you shakin’. It’ll only take a second. Don’t be so gutless.”

  With my two hands holding Frank’s wrist, I pressed his upper arm and bicep into my chest.

  “All right, here we go, Frank,” Jack said calmly, and then he counted backwards in preparation. “Three, two—”

  “Jesus Christ, b’y. We’re not launchin’ a f—king rocket. Yank it out!”

  With that, Jack made a short, quick pull and the hook slipped out rather easily. It was not that big a deal at all. But what followed was far worse.

  The moment the hook left Frank’s hand—which was right in front of my face, because I was still holding on for dear life—a stream of liquid squirted out of his palm. If it had been red and red alone, I think I could have handled it. But the liquid was more yellow than red, and the thick, jaundiced pus made the whole mixture resemble bloody snot. A lot of it.

  But even that was not the worst part. When the injured hand released its fluid, the smell of infection was forced out as well. This rank stench and the fact that the hand’s swelling went down instantly before my eyes—a fleshy hockey glove transforming back into a human hand—put me over the edge.

  I released Frank’s arm. I stepped over to the edge of the wharf and barfed my guts out into the harbour.

  Lucky for me, most of the boys had already turned away so they did not see me. They would have laughed at me for days. But Frank saw, and he was none too pleased by all the fuss about a “little hook” in his hand.

  “Jesus, thank Christ that’s out.” He turned to me and the boys. “And ye crowd are as soft as shit. Someone wipe the puke off that young Doyle fella so we can get back to work.”

  Even later in his life, Frank was determined to go on about his day however he saw fit. He developed angina and should have been on heart medication, but that required too many trips to the doctor and pharmacy. One d
ay, I noticed Frank was in pain and I asked him about it.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Me chest feels like it’s going to bust. I must go to Fred Stack’s and get some of them nitrogen pills, or whatever he calls ’em.” And up he’d stroll to a house on the harbour where he would ask for a top-me-up from another aging heart patient.

  As his condition worsened, he relented and eventually got a pacemaker. When he returned from the surgery, he was supposed to take a few months off to recover and rest. He was back on the water in four days.

  “You boys need to pay special attention to Frank now, you hear me?” Jack told us.

  That same day, Frank arrived back at the wharf uncharacteristically early. I could tell from hundreds of feet away that something was not right with him. He was hunched over and was sitting on the gang boards as he steered the boat. When he got up to the wharf, he had trouble climbing the ladder. I ran and got Jack right away.

  Jack met Frank at the top of the ladder. “How are you, Frank? You’re looking a bit pale.”

  “Ah frig sakes, b’y. I slipped in the boat this morning and fell right down on that foolish thing they put in me chest. I’m gonna have to go back to town now and have that looked at, ain’t I.”

  “Let’s have a look, Frank,” Jack said. A crowd of boys and even some of the other fishermen were gathering around, partly out of concern and partly out of morbid curiosity. Jack asked Frank to sit down on the bench, but of course he refused.

  “Sit down? Why, are you a dentist now or something?” Frank snapped, winking to all the younger boys.

  Jack opened Frank’s coveralls. There was a bloodstain just above the left pocket. Jack unbuttoned Frank’s plaid work shirt. I’ll never in my life forget what my young eyes saw when Jack pulled the shirt down a bit over Frank’s shoulder.

  Frank’s chest had been recently shaved for the surgery, and the stubble of re-growth was dense and white, with trails of dried blood running in every direction. There was a hockey-puck-sized bump over his heart, closed with a few dozen stitches. But more than half of those stitches had broken open, revealing the fleshy pink insides of Frank’s incision. But that was not the worst of it. Busting through the stitches, beyond the surrounding dried bloodstain of the gaping chest wound, hung a black electrical wire with a frayed silver metallic end.

  Frank looked down at the wire, completely unfazed. “I s’pose if we got a bit of black tape we could rewire it and save a trip to town,” he said. Then he casually started to push the wire back into the pink incision in his chest.

  “Frank!” Jack and a few other fishermen who’d gathered around shouted. “For Christ’s sake, Frank! Stop!!”

  Frank was startled. “What is wrong with ye crowd? Shut the shouting and bawling. Ye’re gonna give me a heart attack!”

  Jack called an ambulance, which came quickly. I remember Frank agreeing to get in it, but refusing to lie down. He sat there, shirtless, with his coveralls rolled down to the waist, as the driver closed the rear doors and drove up the road. Last thing I saw through the windows was Frank, with a grin on his face and a wire hanging out of his chest, offering the paramedic a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 3

  There was a time when every weekday at the Doyle household started with the Bathroom Ballet. We were a large family living in a small house: two adults, two boys and two girls and our aging little black mutt, Pal. For years, we went to the bathroom in a bucket in the back porch, but by the time I was around six or seven years old, we had indoor plumbing and a fully operational bathroom. The bad news was that by the time I was about eleven, my brother, Bernie, was a teen, as was my sister Kim, and that added extra chaos as we all vied for some private time in the can. Meanwhile, Pal ran up and down the stairs barking and spinning and scratching at the door in a canine fit that meant “I am going to pee on this floor exactly right now unless someone comes downstairs to let me out!”

  Our bathroom was small, with a tiny tub. There was a curtain around the tub, which was used for privacy, not for showers, because the tub didn’t have one. There was a small sink and vanity with a mirror on the wall just above it. Across from the sink was a toilet that sat directly under a little picture window. My father is not a particularly tall man, and when he sat at the toilet, his knees touched the vanity doors. And when we flushed the toilet, the contents were funnelled down the drain, through the house, under the ground and into the river a dozen metres or so behind our house. You could flush the toilet, close the lid, hop on top, look out the window and watch your own poop come out the other end of the pipe in the river a few seconds later. But there wasn’t much time on a weekday morning for this kind of entertainment.

  My folks very sensibly tried to organize the chaos of the daily Bathroom Ballet.

  “What we got to do,” Mom decided, “is wake each of you ten minutes apart, so that everyone has their chance in the bathroom.” It was a great idea, but like many great ideas, it worked very well in theory and not so well in practice. If we really wanted our own bathroom time in the morning, one of us would have had to get up half an hour before we even went to bed. I know this sounds like a bit of a poor man’s situation, right? But please remember that in very recent family history, we’d had no bathroom at all, so sharing one seemed like a great leap forward.

  It was not at all uncommon for the entire half-dozen of us to be jammed in the bathroom at the same time. The first one to almost make it to the bathroom every morning was my dad. I say “almost” because he was invariably intercepted by some of us kids who’d bolt around him and get in there before him. He’d be left standing in the hall in his underwear, with one hand on his hip and the other high on the wall, leaning so hard on it you’d swear he thought it would fall if he weren’t there to hold it up. Every now and again, he’d take his hand off his hip and rub his sleepy eyes and whimper over the din of all of us kids packed in the can.

  “Probably I’ll just sneak in there for a quick sec before ye crowd gets goin’?” he’d ask. But we’d ignore him, cramming into the bathroom till it was most certainly a fire hazard.

  My sister Kim was usually the first one in. She’d run a tub full of water, get in and close the curtain around her. Once she was settled, she’d shout, “The coast is clear!,” which meant it was safe for Bernie and me to go in and make use of the toilet. But there was a rule, and it was this: only number one was allowed while someone was in the bathtub. Kim could suffer her brothers peeing on the other side of the curtain, but she would not allow the dropping of a number two bomb. But Bernie and I being mischievous young fellas, we were known for taunting Kim by feigning disregard of this rule, often as loudly as possible.

  “Oh my Jesus, I think I’m having a baby,” Bern might shout.

  “Bern, you better be fooling, or that’ll be the last time your arse is able to sit on that toilet.”

  Other times, I’d be the rule breaker. “Aw frig, Kim. I musta got the stomach flu or something. Sorry. Can’t hold back!”

  “Ye are just friggin’ around, right? ’Cause if yer not, I’m putting my head underwater!”

  Meanwhile, poor Dad was still in the hall holding up the wall. “Just give me one quick sec in there and then I’ll be gone altogether,” he pleaded, head down like an old dog, while Pal, the real old dog, scratched at his bare legs and barked “Emergency!” in dog speak.

  A while later, Mom would stroll in with my baby sister, Michelle, who was just a tiny little thing at that time.

  “Alan, Bernie!” she’d say as she ushered us away from the toilet. “Stop torturing your sister.” Mom would pop Michelle on the toilet and then go to the mirror and begin fixing her hair.

  Bernie and I would move on to brush our teeth. “I’m using your toothbrush, Kim! And I’m not going to tell you what for.”

  “Aw, gross! Mom, are they serious?”

  “Ye lot can work it out amongst yourselves,” Mom would say, not even looking over at us.

  Then another distant whimper from out in the hall. “If I c
ould just nip in there right quick.” By now, Dad had given up holding the wall and was pacing up and down the hall.

  Michelle would finish her pre-school pee and we’d congratulate her as she got off the toilet and washed her hands.

  Bernie would rustle the bathroom curtain. “If you don’t get out soon, Kim, I’m lookin’ in. I’m gonna do it.”

  “No!” Kim would shriek.

  “I’m friggin’ doin’ it!” Bernie winking to me as he raised his voice.

  Then, right when Kim was most panicked, I’d lift up Michelle and poke her head through the curtain, her perfect little smiling face greeting Kim’s and saying, “Kim’s in the tub!” The discovery of Kim behind the curtain never ceased to amuse Michelle, even though it happened almost every morning.

  When Kim could not stand the harassment any longer, she would call for a towel and we’d pass it to her through the slit in the curtain. She’d dry and wrap herself before coming out and heading to the girls’ bedroom to dress, but not before smacking both her brothers. Once she was gone, Bernie and I high-fived each other for another job well done.

  “I’m next,” Mom would say, much to our disappointment, and she’d kick us all out so she could use the toilet. But Michelle would protest—“I want to brush my hair like a big girl”—so Mom would give in and let her stay. When Mom finished and opened the door, Dad would finally see his chance to get in there, but by that time Kim would be dressed and would bolt back in to curl her hair for school.

  “But I just wants to dart in there for a tiny second. I’m friggin’ bursting here,” Dad would plead, as Pal wailed and wrapped herself around Dad’s leg in a last-ditch effort to get his attention.

  “Sorry,” Kim would say. “You can’t pee next to me, Dad. I’ll be scarred for life.”

  Mom would defend her teenage daughter. “Jesus, Mary and St. Joseph, Tom. Put some clothes on, will you?”

  And I’d watch Dad huff and puff back into the bedroom and slip on a pair of pants, cursing the whole time about how he’d “built the G-D bathroom” that he was never allowed near. Then he would give up and trudge downstairs with Pal in hot pursuit. From the window at the top of the stairs, I’d see him down below, standing shirtless in the freezing wind, peeing off the back step, with a most contented little black mutt squatting next to him doing the same.