Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Off Napeague, we swung northeast, heading up along the back side of the island; along the shoal, long narrow splashes were sign of a feeding squadron of bonita. Richard waved to his cousin Brentford Bennett, with whom he set nets for about five years after the bass declined, in the early seventies; young Brent had lifted and was on his way inshore.

  In Tobacco Lot Bay, the latest fish sign was shouted across the water by Tom Knobel, who was setting a run-around net on a school of bluefish; hearing him speak, it seemed surprising that Knobel had come from the city just a few years before. He had married a Parsons, Richard said, and settled at Lazy Point, picking up his new trade mostly from Brent Bennett. When I remarked that this young outsider spoke better Bonac than the Bonackers, Richard squinted at me, then laughed, leaning out of the skiff to grab the flag buoy on the first net.

  At sunrise, a breeze from the northeast caused the oily slick on the summer sea to glisten, and terns were dipping on a school of fish, and the day was fine. I took the cork line and Richard the leads, and Richard became his old exhilarated self as a day’s pay in big porgies and weakfish came flapping in over the side. Gill nets average about one thousand feet long, and are set in various depths and currents. For bass, they are set close to the beach, but bass are sedentary in summer, and these were well out in the open water. “We’re havin some fun this mornin, ain’t we? With the price of porgies the way it is, they pay better than weaks! I got fifty dollars here, I guess, with them four big weaks—that’s good enough to keep me happy!” And helping him haul, I felt exhilarated myself. Handling net, talking boats and gear, gave me the illusion that I still knew what I was doing.

  Asked how his brother Lewis was getting along, Richard raised his eyebrows and said, “Same as ever.” Lewis had hauled seine on the beach until the bass decline in the late fifties. By the time the bass came back strong a few years later, he was running a dragger for Norman Edwards, who was away in southern waters much of the year as captain on a bunker steamer. When I last heard of Lewis, he was “fillitin” and shucking shellfish for the new seafood shop in Wainscott, but since then, Richard said, he had gone back to the bay. Harry was also on the bay; Bobby was ocean lobstering out of Montauk; Francis was still setting fykes and gill nets and working with his son Jens on the family crew.

  Back in ’75–’76, Richard and Harry had made their last attempt to set their father’s sturgeon nets, but the draggers, working ever closer to the beach, had damaged the nets and driven both bass and sturgeon way offshore. These days the draggers were picking up striped bass four or five miles out, where in Richard’s opinion they did not belong. Like most local fishermen, he resents the foreign boats, particularly the huge Russian trawlers with their fine-mesh nets that permit nothing whatever to escape: they crush the young lobsters, the fishermen say, and they spoil the fishing grounds. “But the government don’t bother the draggers none, nor the Russians neither; the ones they come after are the last poor Poseys that ain’t got sense enough to quit the beach.” Richard himself had put a crew together in 1979 but gave it up after 1982. The fish were too few, and the new men so uncommitted that they walked off the beach if anyone got bossy. “It seems like the crews you get today don’t want to fish so hard. Quite a few don’t know their job, don’t know how to mend.”

  In the early sixties, Richard said, his father had injured his hip while digging steamers down at Shinnecock, and a few years later had been forced to give up fishing. Although a little senile now, he had lost none of the good spirits that had maintained him all his life. “I had a wonderful wife, just lost her three or four years ago,” Cap’n Frank had said in 1978. “We were married sixty-five and a half years. I own this house here. I got all my boys [Francis, Lewis, Bobby, Harry, Richard] and these kids who used to go fishin with me are grown up—the Havens boys—and they all give me anything I want, all the scallops I want to eat and all the fish; I don’t have to buy nothing …”6

  Until recently, Cap’n Frank had raised a lot of chickens and vegetables in the backyard, insisting on old-fashioned bunker dressing for the garden. “You put a bunker in each hill when you’re planting corn,” he used to say, “and the stalks’ll be a foot high before you’re out of the garden.”7 At ninety-three, he was still lively and liked nothing better than talking about fishing, and Richard said he would be glad to see me; Richard, who lives in a trailer behind Frank’s house in Poseyville, offered to take me to visit Cap’n Frank whenever I wanted.

  Like most Poseys, Richard quit school at sixteen, and he has always been a fisherman; he says he has never worked at a regular job. He peered across the silvered water of the bay, waving his arm to indicate the bay and islands, all the way north and west toward Orient Point. “Out on the water all day long and nobody to bother you—you can’t beat that.” Richard cocked his head, the better to squint at me. “You been travelin all over, and I bet you ain’t never seen a better place than this one here. I ain’t never seen better; I just don’t want to be no place else.”

  17.

  Indian Summer

  On August 8, 1983, after a fight of more than thirty years, the latest version of the bass bill became law. Because of all the editorials against the bass bill, and because of the prevailing rumor that Governor Cuomo was troubled by the bill, the baymen had convinced themselves that it would be vetoed. When he signed it, the men were shocked. “No matter what we do, we seem to be going backwards,” said Richard Lester, whose bad luck had continued into August.

  On the Backside, early in the month, the haul-seiners had been making a day’s pay, but the market price on everything but bass was dropping quickly. “Whatever we catch, that’s what’s cheap,” Benny Havens said one morning at Sagaponack, where the Havens and Calvin Lester crews were picking out a few blues and weaks from the red rolling mass of jellyfish in the seines. “Can’t set till sunrise in the summer cause you just load up with crabs the way them farmers done”—William pointed down the beach to where John White was kneeling on the sand, picking the pale spotted crabs out of his gill net—“and after sunrise we load up with jellyfish.”

  William told me that Cap’n Frank had died two nights before. “Long about one in the mornin, they found him half-sittin up in bed, knees up, you know, a kind of half-smile on his face.” William, Ben, and Billy Havens, Milt Miller, Donnie Eames, and Bill Lester’s brother-in-law, Dick Wood, had been pallbearers the previous afternoon, when Frank Lester was buried at the Oakwood Cemetery in Amagansett; a large crowd had turned out for the patriarch’s funeral, where the following poem, written by his granddaughter, was read:

  Our kind and gentle father and grandfather

  How we thought you would never wear out

  Your eyesight faded, your memories dim

  He insisted on the silliest whims

  Never a complaint had he

  Always with a tale of the sea

  There is a Special Someone

  Willing to give him a place in the sun

  Where he won’t have to worry, wonder, or doubt

  That is what God is all about.

  I remembered Frank Lester as a mild, warm, gaunt-faced man with a soft laugh who had seemed to embody the acceptance and serenity of another epoch, what one person has called a “way back way of living.”1 I was very sorry that I had not talked with him again before he died.

  “Even though he was older than you,” recalls Frank’s grandson Walter Bennett, “it didn’t seem like he thought he was any better. We went blue-crabbin one summer up at Georgica and got two bushel, got a check for eight dollars for one of ’em and he handed that over to the kids. If you did the work, he’d give you the money; this was one of the things about the family, everybody loved their children. When we were kids, we used to come down and just curl up on the rug. There was him and maybe Uncle Charlie and Uncle Ted or Uncle Bill. We didn’t have no TV and we’d sit there and just listen to them stories; it was well worth it, I’ll tell ya that. We used to hear the huntin stories and the fishin sto
ries, and we’d keep him goin, ask about another dog he had, or ‘What about the geese?’ ”

  Not long ago, Cap’n Frank told Walter Bennett that “no one should live this old; the hardest part of life is when you’re layin around.” But everyone agreed he had been fine until the last six weeks. After that, he had gone fast, and somehow his death seemed related to the passage of the bass bill a fortnight earlier.

  Two days after the funeral, the last of the Posey Boys, Captain Bill Lester, in black cap, black shirt, and black pants, came to Bridgehampton with the five haul-seine crews, their families, trucks, and dories. The baymen had come to picket the bass bill’s sponsor, state assemblyman Patrick Halpin, who was guest of honor at a fund-raising reception. Halpin’s hostess, a new summer resident in an elaborate house on Sagaponack Pond, came outside to ask these unfashionable folks not to spoil her party; what the fishermen and their families should do was go away. “I let you fish my pond,” she reminded them reproachfully, waving her fingers at the calm reach of Sagaponack Pond, stretching away a half mile or more to the ocean beach. Billy Havens, dark hair flying from beneath his Yankee baseball cap, stared at her, incredulous. “Sagg is your pond now? After hundreds of years, we got to have your permission to fish here? I don’t think so, lady!”

  Halpin, arriving, offered a dazzling smile, extending both hands to the small crowd like a celebrity, but Billy Havens, outraged, refused to shake either one of them. Arnold Leo, Secretary of the Baymen’s Association, informed Halpin that he was wasting his time—“You don’t know how these people feel about you!” The politician tried to justify his efforts on behalf of the striped bass, but he did not really know what he was talking about, and his crisp blazer and blow-dried hair elicited jeers from the wives of the angry fishermen. When someone addressed him as “Mr. Halpin,” there were cries of “Don’t you call him Mister!” Tom Lester’s wife, Cathy, and Stewart Lester’s daughter Gail did most of the talking for the women, and Carol Havens told Halpin, “If you ever done a day’s work fishing, you’d never survive it! How come you never come out here, went fishing with us, never learned the truth? This man here”—she pointed at Captain Bill—“he can tell you more about fishing than all them people you listen to put together! You’re just out for yourself, out for your own ambitions, you don’t care about the harm you done to families that’s been fishin for three hundred years!” Bill Lester tried to explain matters to Halpin, but the people were too angry to stop interrupting, and the politician, sticking it out in the face of much more hostility and distress than he had expected, could not concentrate on the mild-spoken old man, and soon beat a retreat into the house.

  Walking back to his car as the demonstration started to break up, Cap’n Bill remarked that his brother’s death had been a blessing. “Frank couldn’t do nothin no more, and that’s no good. I’m gettin the same way, with this arthur-itis; that stuff’s no good, you know, not for men like me and Frank that liked to work. There’s something beautiful about work; I don’t know why these younger fellers are so afraid of it. Fishin’s a hard life, but it’s a good ’un; it was an honest way of life, Frank used to say. All you need is a little ambition and some drive. Need some intelligence, too, I guess,” Cap’n Bill grunted, shifting himself into the car. “But not too much.”

  In Indian summer, with the bass so scarce, most of the haul-seiners went scalloping. The local bay scallop is far superior in quality to the big sea scallop and also to the calico pecten, a deepwater species from the continental shelf off the Carolinas and Florida that was competing for the New York market. But the bay scallops were so scattered and the eyes so small that many baymen, such as Stewart Lester, went north to Orient or all the way up Peconic Bay to Flanders in search of enough scallops to make up a day’s pay. Others gave up quickly and returned to the beach, where the bass remained scarce, and the abundant bluefish were worth nothing.

  On September 27 Jens Lester’s crew started a set in marginal conditions, and his steel dory, going off, took a big sea over the bow; the water and two thousand pounds of netting put her down by the stern, and she filled and sank. “Them tin boats don’t float too good,” one fisherman said.

  In 1974 Jens had acquired the first steel dory used on the beach; the dory was built by Tommy Field of Amagansett, who built a larger one two years later for Danny King. Steel dories do not open up like the wood boats, which take a pounding on the trailers; the bottom planks must be kept wet and swollen to avoid leaking, and therefore the weight is approximately the same. “Steel boats sink quick, though, I can testify to that,” Jens Lester says. “Thing of it was, the feller drivin the truck hit the brake too quick durin the launchin, dropped us off short in the slosh. Then a freak sea come, and we took that over the bow. We still got off all right, but with that big load of net, she was down by the stern already, and every time the bow went up high on a wave, we were takin more water in over the stern. Other times when we filled up, we was able to bail her, but this time I seen that we weren’t goin to make it; I tried to turn her back toward the beach, and I holler at my nephew there [Tim Kromer] to grab the life jackets. Well, just then she goes out from under us, she goes under, quick as that, and here we are maybe halfway to the bar.

  “I was the first back to the surface, and the cod-end buoy was close by, and when the boy come up, I told him to grab onto it. Just then one of the life jackets shows up, and we have that, too. That young fella was kind of panicked, but I told him just to take things easy, and pretty soon we was able to kick our waders off; in deep water, with any air in ’em, them waders is liable to turn you upside down. Then I seen my son [Mitchell Lester] tryin to swim out to us, didn’t have no life jacket or nothin, and I hollered at him to go back. We were thinkin of swimmin for it ourselves when Calvin shows up comin ninety miles an hour down the beach; the guys on our crew had got him on the CB.”

  Calvin Lester’s crew was “maybe a mile down the beach, gettin ready to set,” Calvin told me. “I seen Jens’s dory go off, looked like she was ridin all right to me, but when I happened to glance back a moment later, she was gone—just disappeared. So I yelled to Walter [Walter Bennett], ‘Where’s that dory, Walt?’ And he was damned if he could figure it out either. And just then word come in over the CB that the dory was sunk. So we just heaved most of the net out of our boat to make her lighter, all one wing and quarter and the bunt, and cut her off and got the hell down the beach and went off after ’em.”

  Calvin is a strong, quick man with wild blond hair and glasses; like his Uncle Ted, he never stops moving. At thirty-one, he has already made a reputation as one of the best fishermen on the East End, hard-working, shrewd, and well-endowed with the mysterious gift called Posey smell, which anticipates where the fish are going to be. He is also hotheaded and outspoken, and he was angry that local newspaper accounts of the dory sinking got certain details wrong; it was almost as if he were defending the integrity of his way of life, and doing it fiercely out of frustration that his own stubbornness and dedication might not be enough to prevent that way of life from going under. “One said we was haulin when word come that Jens’ dory sunk, and another said we was loadin the net into the dory! Weren’t doin neither one! And they said J.P. [James Fenelon] was in the dory, and he don’t never go into the boat; the only ones that go are me’n Donnie! [Don Eames, Jr.] People read this stuff! Why can’t they get it right?”Calvin glared at me because I was a writer, and one of the guilty writers was my friend. “Anyway, I don’t see why they make so much of goin after ’em. What’re we goin to do now, leave ’em out there? All the crews came up, helped ’em straighten things out, and a dragger, too, and them fellas would have done the same for us. Sure, they was scared, but they’re okay, and we got a diver out there, brought the dory up. It’s all part of this life, and you have to accept it.”

  Captain Bill Lester, discussing the episode when I stopped in to visit him next morning, recalled the time that Frank’s younger boys and young Walter Bennett had their dory somersault
on top of them “down Hither Plains”; he was pleased when I reminded him that I was there that day. “B’god, bub, that’s right, you was with us, you was! Know what I’m talkin about, you do.” He reidentified me for the benefit of his wife, Lottie, who offered us coffee at the kitchen table in the small house on Cross Highway in Poseyville where Bill has lived most of his life. On the wall behind him was a photograph of Bill and his son Calvin. Though Bill has five daughters, Calvin is his only surviving son; a younger boy, Paul, died in a car accident about ten years ago. Bill did not mention any daughters’ names; it is noticeable, among older fishermen, that even when present, daughters (as well as other women) are apt to be called Sis.

  Bill’s first wife died of cancer back in 1949, and all four children of that first family are dead, too. “Kenneth drowned—don’t remember Kenneth? Girl died of leukemia, other girl never seen life at all, and she was in perfect shape; her mother thought she was such a nice healthy girl. Few years ago, 1979, Billy, my oldest boy, why, he died, too.

  “Yep, I had a lot of hard luck and some pretty good luck. After I lost my wife, you know, I didn’t care for nothin, give all my land away and all. And then I found another beautiful woman”—he nodded in the direction of Lottie Lester, who had gone out to tend to something in the garden before going to work. “I been called an old miser, y’know, cause I love to save, and she’s just the opposite, money burns a hole in her pocket! But she’s a worker! Good thing for me, ain’t it? Just lucky, I was. That’s better’n bein a billionaire, now ain’t that right?” Bill got up slowly to answer the telephone. “Damn arthur-itis. If I get any lamer, I’ll be lame, won’t I?”