by Alan Doyle
We all ran away screaming, abandoning Mikey, left tied to the wharf. And that’s when the guilt came over me.
“That’s a friggin’ sin, b’ys, leaving him there like that, tied up and full of bird vomit. We gotta do something.”
“Yeah, we should hose him down,” Benny said casually.
“For his own good, of course,” Perry added.
“C’mon, Mikey,” I said. “A fresh douse, for your own good.”
“No!” he begged.
“This is the best thing for you, b’y.” This was Wade, one of the older boys. “Fresh start to the day now, all that gull shite and guts behind us.” This made perfect sense to me. And that’s when Wade grabbed the hose and blasted Mikey with it on full crank, almost washing the poor kid over the head of the wharf.
“Lift up your arms, Mikey!” Perry added helpfully. “So we can get all the gull barf off you.”
We all tried to act like we honestly were not enjoying this in any way.
But after the scrub down, Mikey wasn’t looking so good. In fact, he was turning a wee bit pale. The weight of the epic adventure with the gull had taken its toll, and Mikey then made matters worse by barfing all over himself. Of course, all of us b’ys were deeply concerned and did the only comforting thing we could think to do: we put the hose on him again. After a brief drying period with a bag of Cheezies and a Coke, he was right as rain and back at it with us all.
There was always something fun on the go at the wharf—chats, games and mischief. But all that would end the moment we heard the putt-putt of a small boat coming around the point. Then it was all business. If Jack hadn’t already told us whose boat was coming in, we’d be out on the top of the breakwater with our eyes peeled. The moment the boat came into view, someone would yell out.
“Yes b’y, Hubert Chafe! My boat! My tongues! He’s loaded to the gunwales too! Ye can all blow me!”
Many of the boats and fishermen had long-standing arrangements with tongue cutters. In exchange for our help with the unloading and cleaning of their boats, and the loading and cleaning of the splitting table, the fishermen let us cut out their cod tongues. I had an arrangement with two of the twenty or so boats that came to the Catholic wharf, but there were always a few boats that were unclaimed for whatever reason—for instance, because their usual tongue cutter was away that day.
There were also times when many boats would arrive together, and then a boy would have too much work for just himself. When this happened to me, I’d ask Perry to cover my usual boats in exchange for the same from him the next time he got double-booked. Some of us teamed up, offering employment to a younger helper who was paid a commission of a little less than half the tongues.
There was always wheeling and dealing going on, some of it a little sketchy, if you could manage it out of Jack’s eye. It was like being in a union. A rumour would go around the wharf that Roger had agreed to cover Wade’s boats while he was away at a softball tournament, and Roger would get 25 percent of the cut—or a few beers, or whatever. There was more bartering on that wharf than there was at the Grand Bazaar.
When a boat reached the wharf side, no matter if it was arranged or not, all of us would shout out the same thing every single time:
“Can I have your tongues?”
I expect that’s a sentence that sounds strange to just about everyone, yet it was shouted hundreds of times on every summer day in Petty Harbour. How weird it must have seemed to any visitor from the Mainland who happened upon the wharf when a boat was coming in—this pack of young fellas in rags, waving buckets and sharp knives, shouting out to sea, “Can I have your tongues?”
Once a fisherman agreed to let you have his tongues, your first job was to get the fish out of the boat. If you were lucky, the fisherman had a webbed net in the hold of the boat. If so, all you had to do was hook the four corners of the net to a winch and hoist the entire mesh bag, containing as much as two thousand pounds of codfish so fresh that much of it would still be alive, and drop it on the wharf. But if the fisherman did not have such modern technologies—and about half of them did not—you had to heave the fish onto the wharf one at a time using a single-pronged pew. (For you Mainlanders, that’s a pitchfork with half the U gone.)
It was a super drag when the quality control inspectors from the provincial Department of Fisheries were patrolling the wharf because they restricted how you could poke a fish—no punctures in the sides or belly because that would leave holes in the fillets. So instead of blindly plunging your pew into a hold of fish and flicking onto the dock whatever came with it, we had to carefully stick each fish in the head or gills or, best of all, in the eye. It was time-consuming to aim for the eye, but according to the inspectors, this was done in the name of “quality control.”
I would never have admitted at the time how disturbing it was to poke a half-living thing in the eye. If I’d have admitted that, I would have been ribbed for the rest of my life. But I’ll confess to you now that poking fish like this freaked me out just a little bit. At the end of a long, dreamlike day, I’d go to bed and have odd nightmares where those broken eyes and blank faces would be staring at me menacingly. But the nightmares never stopped me from going back to the wharf and pewing thousands of fish each day. I needed the cash.
Once all the catch was on the wharf, your next job was to keep the splitting or gutting tables stocked with cod so that the fishermen could gut and bleed them, one by one. Somehow, you also had to harvest the precious cod tongues in whatever spare moment you could find from the time the fish hit the wharf till they made it to the table. You had to be fast. And I got fast—nowhere near the fastest on the wharf, but I think I got up to more than a dozen cod tongues in a minute.
Step 1) Turn the codfish belly up, tail away from you.
Step 2) Place your left thumb in one set of gills and your fingers in the other (for right-handed cutters). Pull and spread the fleshy triangle at the bottom of the cod’s head.
Step 3) Cut underneath the left and right jawline, leaving just a nip of flesh attached under the chin (if you can say that a fish has a chin).
Step 4) Slide your index and middle finger into the slit and pinch down with your thumb. Then cut along the bottom of the triangle.
Step 5) If you are a firsttime cod-tongue cutter, use your knife to snip away the attached nip. If you are an expert, push the round gill bone and tear off the little nip. (This increases your speed and looks super cool to tourists and visiting cousins from the Mainland.)
Step 6) Repeat a thousand times per day, or until your fisherman tells you you’re done.
Once a fisherman was done with his catch, he would accompany it to the weigh house with Jack Walsh. While he was gone, your job was to get the hose and clean the splitting table, the wharf and the holds of the boat. If you did a good and fast enough job, you’d be sure to get that fisherman’s tongues the next day. If you shagged this part up and the fisherman returned from the weigh house and found his table and boat still dirty, or saw you buggering off to count your tongues before you’d bothered to clean up, he would not be happy.
“Well, look at this, Jack. Young Stack here cuts the tongues and shags off before the tables are washed. What do you make of that?” Hubert Chafe would say loud enough for young Stack and everyone else to hear.
“Hubert, I guarantee ya I knows who will not be getting your tongues tomorrow,” Jack Walsh would say. He would always have the last word.
When I look back on this now, I’m grateful for the training ground that was the wharf. I learned a lot about effort and reward, about co-operation and about getting along in a group. About honesty and effort and commerce. About being a part of the community and sharing in its economic rise and fall. No fish, no tongues. No tongues, no money. Adult problems were understood by us boys from an early age. I also learned to have a blast with a bunch of idle dudes. (I had no idea these things would serve me so well in my adult life in a touring band.)
But the biggest lesson I l
earned on the wharf was that a job is not just an assignment or a task. It is something bigger than that. A job is an agreement, a deal you make with someone to do your part right, so everyone else can do theirs. If you don’t clean out the boat right, the tired fisherman who just gave you his tongues is going to have to do it. He doesn’t need that. He’s been up since four in the morning. Far earlier than most, I learned that work does not do itself. What a lesson.
The boys and I made some good dosh on the wharf, but it was not just the money that made me love cutting and selling tongues. Con O’Brien, from the Irish Descendants, grew up a couple of towns down from Petty Harbour, in Bay Bulls on the Southern Shore. A while back, we were talking about cutting tongues as kids. Con lamented the fall of the inshore fishery and the fact that our sons would not have those summers that we had. He had written some verses about it and we added to them to make a song—a song about cutting tongues. To my knowledge, it is the only song in existence on this particular topic.
It was the thrill of my life
When I first held a knife
And was told I could join in the gang
Making cash of my own with a bucket and stone
Makes a lad feel like more of a man.
—from “Not for the Money Alone,”
Con O’Brien/Alan Doyle, 2006
CHAPTER 6
I’ve outlined for you, dear reader, what it was like for us as kids to be working on the wharf and harvesting cod tongues. But the whole point of gathering them was to sell them and make a profit, and once the boats were in, usually by early afternoon, all of us young lads would do our best to sell our buckets of tongues as quickly as possible—and for as much money as we possibly could. Some days, we raked in quite a mountain of cash for wee fellas, and other days, not so much. And through it all, we learned about the markets available to us and how to squeeze the most out of them.
From worst to best, here were our vending options.
The very worst option, which we’d only consider if we’d considered everything else several times, was to bring the cod tongues home and give them to Mom to either cook for supper or put in the freezer. Mom would be delighted.
“Well, look at this. Alan, my son, bringing home the supper like the man of the house.”
I was still hoping to be paid in cash. “Do you think I could get something for the tongues, Mom?”
“Yes, honey. You can get your supper.”
The next-worst option to giving your tongues to your mom was selling the tongues to Bidgood’s Fish Plant. We hated selling our tongues there because we could not fool the Bidgoods or their man on the ground, Lewellen, into paying more for the tongues than they were worth. The Bidgoods weren’t cruel people, not at all. They just knew everything about the fishery and were way too smart to swindle.
Lewellen would pay around a dollar a pound for really fresh tongues. That meant that for your bucketful, which took you all day to collect, you’d earn about twelve dollars by selling to Bidgood’s. Perry and I would constantly debate the pros and cons of this. We resented Bidgood’s because the fresh cod tongues we had worked so hard to harvest and sell were then resold at the fish counter in Bidgood’s supermarket for $5.25 and higher per pound. That was more than four times what we got paid for the tongues. We always resented seeing any kind of markup on our tongues, believing we deserved the bulk of the money.
The fact that the Bidgood family took all the risk in this supermarket endeavour and bore all the costs for the fish plant and the store, including paying the dozens if not hundreds of local employees, was a fact that was lost on us boys. We focused on one hard fact and one hard fact only: Bidgood’s bought our tongues for too little and sold them for too much, ripping off the local fishermen and getting filthy rich in the process. It was all we ever heard from local fishermen a couple of generations older than us: merchants are all bad; fishermen and plant workers are all good. Our little cod-tongue exchange was all the proof we needed to confirm what we’d always heard.
We’d do anything we could to avoid selling to Bidgood’s, and naturally, we felt totally justified in trying to con them in any way possible. We’d try things like selling day-old or two-day-old tongues to Lewellen. But Lewellen could tell in a heartbeat if the tongues were more than a few hours old.
“Go on, Alan Doyle. The stink off them tongues would knock you down. When did you cut them? A week ago? Get out before I tells your father.”
We were even known to freeze some tongues we couldn’t sell, and then we’d defrost them and try to pass them off as fresh to Bidgood’s. This ploy never worked very well either.
“Couldn’t find a buyer for your fresh tongues, b’ys? Back now with frozen shite? How stunned do ye think I am? Go throw them out back for the cats.”
Me, my brother, Bern, and Perry heard from Burt, the best tongue cutter in the world, that soaking your fresh tongues in water for twenty minutes or so would increase their weight by as much as 10 percent, turning your twelve-dollar bucket into a thirteen- or fourteen-dollar bucket. But you had to be careful.
“If ye makes it too hot,” Burt said, “the tongues will cook a little bit and turn grey. But too cold and the water won’t absorb into them.” Burt shared his formula. “Hold one finger in the water and one in the air. Make sure the one in the air is a little bit colder than the one in the bucket. That’s the right temperature.”
“These lot smell all right, b’ys. Not trying to scam me this time?” Lewellen would ask when we brought the waterlogged tongues around.
“No, sir,” we’d say.
“I’ll give you thirteen-fifty for this lot.” And because we had no other options, we’d accept.
But here’s the worst part of all and yet another reason why we hated Bidgood’s. As a tongue seller, you did not receive cash on the spot for your goods. No way. You received a receipt, and a week to ten days later, a cheque would be made in your name, which you’d have to pick up at Bidgood’s. Then you’d have to deposit it in the bank or hope one of the local stores would cash it for you. Added complications. This is how I learned that cash in hand is an unbeatable way to do business.
But a far better way to sell tongues was to avoid Bidgood’s altogether and first try a buyer from one of the restaurants in St. John’s. Buyers from restaurants could occasionally be spotted trolling the wharves to stock up on fish. Those guys did not come that often, maybe once a week, but when they were in town, they wanted a lot of tongues quickly and would pay top dollar for them. There was one fella who owned a fish-and-chips place in St John’s. He came every Tuesday and would pay us a dollar fifty or more a pound. Not only that, he would buy every tongue he could get. And he would give us cash right away.
“Who got some, b’ys? Big and small, as long as they’re fresh. I’ll take whatever you got. Fifteen cash for a bucketful. We got a tourist dinner for a hundred people tomorrow night and they wants fresh tongues for appetizer. Who got ’em?”
Some of the kids on the wharf got their parents involved in our little business. Someone’s dad would pile us into the back of his truck and we’d go to the richer parts of St. John’s, knocking on doors and asking, “Would you like to buy some fresh tongues?”
The results were generally good, and Townies would pay whatever we asked. A dollar a dozen was the common asking price for doorstep delivery, and there were often a couple of dozen in a pound, so you were selling for double the price you got at Bidgood’s. If you got lucky, you could make a real killing. But I never enjoyed this kind of selling. I learned I was not a salesman or a negotiator at heart. I always felt like I was intruding on people’s afternoons, and I often felt that the Townies only bought tongues from us because we looked so damn pitiful. We were a bunch of ragamuffins from Petty Harbour, hanging out the back of a truck dressed in dirty tongue-cutting clothes and smelling like fish guts.
One time, a boy my own age answered his front door wearing a brand-new soccer jersey and holding a Pepsi. For no obvious reason, I wanted
to punch him right in the face. The kid did not say anything to me, but for a second I resented how clean and fun his summer morning was compared to mine. At the time, I didn’t know I was embarrassed. I felt poor and unsophisticated. In retrospect, I had no reason to feel embarrassed. Me and the boys were doing honest work, but sometimes on these trips, I felt like people laughed at us, or worse, pitied us. And I wanted no part of that.
Well, kind of. Funny to consider it now, but I have to admit that while being seen as a poor ragamuffin by the Townies infuriated me, it never kept me from using that as a sales tactic, provided the image was intentionally projected by us.
And playing out stereotypes was exactly what we learned to do when one of the best options for selling your tongues rolled down the hill—via a bus full of seniors on a scenic day trip to the cozy town of Petty Harbour, Newfoundland. They’d come only once or twice a summer, but when they showed up, it was a jackpot. Imagine: fifty or sixty well-off seniors starving for a slice of the old times, a meal of tongues the way they used to have so many years ago.
At first, when we saw that bus, we’d go running like rabid dogs to the bus door and assault the folks as they got off, shooting each other in the foot as we did so.
“Would you like to buy some tongues? Two dollars a dozen!”
“His tongues are maggoty! He cut them three weeks ago! Buy mine!”
“Hey, my Nan knows you! You should buy my tongues!”
But later, we got organized and figured out that teaming up could really pay off. Wade led us in the con.