Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  A green pickup came along the beach from Amagansett, and William said, “Here’s Richard. That fella had him a mess the other evenin.” The night after Richard had wrenched his back as a volunteer fireman, the rusted-out axle on his trailer had given way, dropping his boat on the road. Stuart Vorpahl and Tom Field had given him a hand, and Stuart had jerry-rigged a new axle, but this one, too, had busted under the heavy boat, and the men did not get home until two in the morning.

  Wearing thin street pants and street shoes, Richard looked stiff as he got out; he held onto the truck door as he watched the haul. Any other day he would be shouting at the other fishermen, teasing them in his rough cheerful way, but today he kept apart and remained silent. He was behind two payments on his house, and his small dragger, the Rainbow, was for sale.

  Doug Kuntz was dealing with driftwood snarled up in the net, and I took the line down to the water to tie on. My hands remembered how to do it, but when I lifted one hand in signal to William to take up on the winch, Richard hollered, “You forgot how to tie on there, bub? Got to face the ocean, the way I do!” He was grinning, but he moved carefully, and his eyes looked red and tired. “Works better this way,” he said, showing me his style, then looked uncertain as my own hitch, working just fine, bobbed past his street shoes. “For me, anyway,” Richard said.

  We watched the bunt just coming in to the soft breakers. There was no sign of fish at all, and the men were quiet. “Rough life, ain’t it? What we gonna do this winter?” Richard threw his head and shoulders back and jerked his chin at me, just as Ted used to do when posing a question for which there was no answer. He cleared his throat. “Know something, Pete? This is the first time I been broke in twenty-eight years!” He said this in a bewildered way, as if still unable to believe it. “Always had a couple thousand dollars in the bank, a little money in my pocket; now I’m down to nothin and can’t pay my bills!” He tried to laugh, as if this was just ridiculous, but others were as desperate as he was. Someone had said that Danny King had two bank accounts, one of which held twenty-eight dollars and the other seventeen. “Well, he’s the president of the Baymen’s Association,” another said. “Guess we can’t all be rich.”

  Now Donnie Eames had come up in his truck, and Richard called, “What’s the matter with you fellas? Never hauled?” Donnie said that most of Calvin’s crew had wanted to wait a little while before going off, for fear of dogfish, and that Calvin had yanked the dory off the beach and headed home. “He’s been so wired up and nervous this past week, with nothin goin for us, nobody can talk to him!”

  “Well, how come you ain’t nervous?” Richard demanded. “Everybody else is!”

  “Not me. I was takin it out on my wife, y’know, practically had a divorce! Everybody on the beach been doin that, snappin at each other right over the radio. And then I figured there ain’t nothin I can do about no weather and no goddamn fish and no goddamn money and that goddamn law, nothin at all, I just got to take her one day at a time.”

  “Shit!” Richard said. “You got your bills paid, ain’t you? Guess I could take her one day at a time, I had my bills paid. Somebody show me five hundred pounds of them short bass, I’d know what to do with them, by Jesus!”

  “You ain’t the only one.” Donnie glanced at me. “Them people are makin criminals out of us,” he remarked bitterly. (“Might as well go to jail, get somethin to eat,” says Wally Bennett. “Give us somethin to do for the next five years.”)

  Now Jens Lester had arrived, and J.P. Fenelon came up in an old beach wagon, driving Bill Lester, who had come to see the last haul of the year. Cap’n Bill greeted me out of the window: “Don’t like this cold weather much no more, do you?” Bill said he had fixed some caviar from a sturgeon taken recently by a Shinnecock dragger but otherwise had not been doing much. “Got eighteen pounds out of it, but kind of fatty, y’know. There’s only so much you can do with it.”

  Someone had seen a striped bass in the bunt, and Richard, favoring his bad back, walked down slowly toward the water. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken, ain’t that right, Pete? Maybe you and me better get together, write up my story.” He managed a short laugh, and Donnie Eames laughed, too. “He’s got stories, all right! Can’t even write his own name hardly, Richard can’t, and here’s he’s talkin about writin books! Open up that book, find nothin but X’s in there!” Donnie yelled with laughter, we all laughed, Richard, too. “People ain’t gonna go for that shit, Richard!” The laughter died as the bag came up into the shallows.

  “Have a daylight,” Donnie muttered, stepping up onto the boat-sized bag and treading on the sliding creatures, balanced like a tightrope walker; the anger in the gesture was disturbing. The bag was solid full of dabs, two tons or more of worthless daylights, mixed in with a few skates and squid, a sculpin, some short bass: there were only eleven medium bass, less than one hundred pounds in all, that could be marketed under the new law. There was also the last bluefish of the autumn, and with it the first whiting of the winter. Ben Havens opened the puckering string, and the pile of brown fish poured away into the shallows.

  The season was over and the long winter had begun, and Ben and Billy loaded the net in silence. Asked what they would do this winter, Billy Havens said, “Go on the draggers. With scallops the way they are, we got no choice.” Ben Havens nodded, as Jens and Richard and Donnie and Old Bill walked up the beach to their cars.

  22.

  South Fork Spring:

  Montauk, Georgica,

  and Hither Plains

  One cold spring morning of 1984, I met Francis Lester at his house in Poseyville. The last time I drove into this yard, which lies just east of Ted Lester’s former property, was an early winter evening, thirty years before, when Francis tossed those cod out of his boat that would disappear under the snow. The oldest son of Cap’n Frank, and Ted’s contemporary, he is spry at the age of seventy-five, and continues to live a fisherman’s life, though happy to have help with his boats and nets where he can find it. Francis is one of the few baymen who continues to set fykes for black-backed flounder and white perch as soon as the ice breaks and fish begin to stir in the late winter, just as his father and his Uncle Harry did for a half century.

  “S’posed to blow fifteen-twenty southeast this mornin,” Francis said, “so we’d better get started, ain’t we?” In his rust-ridden red truck, dragging his scarred sharpie on a trailer, we drove over to Stuart’s Seafood on Oak Lane to scavenge some old filleted fish from the big bins, then headed down across Napeague and Hither Hills to the Star Island boat landing on Montauk Lake, where we shoved his homemade boat into the water. I had chosen this morning to leave my own waders behind, and I cursed as a cold tongue of winter water came curling into Francis’s knee boots, which he’d let me borrow. “Never told you, did I, bub,” Francis said, mildly embarrassed. “That goddamn right boot’s got a hole into it.”

  Like his father before him, and his son, Jens, too, Francis is famous for his loyalty to decrepit gear, and his fatalistic attitude about it. Tom Lester, who hauled seine with him for seven years, describes a day when, going down the beach, Francis lost the gas tank off his truck and never noticed, driving on until the truck coughed to a stop; the gas tank was way back down the beach, sitting in a hole. “Wonder what’s the matter now?” Francis said. “Think I got fuel problems.” The second truck, honking in vain, had retrieved the gas tank, but with all the fittings rotten with salt rust and the gas line broken, there was no way to mount it. Francis rigged a hose from the gas-oil mix in the dory’s outboard motor tank to the truck carburetor and, blowing thick black smoke, kept right on going.

  On Francis’s skiff, the outboard clamps have worn holes through the transom, so that the motor must be set off center. “Had a piece of plywood crost there once; don’t know what happened to it. Got to find me another.” The motor itself appeared exhausted, coughing and shuddering as we lifted a few lobster pots along the west shore of the lake. Francis reviled it, concluding sadly,
“After all the work I done on her, I could have swore she’d be runnin like a charm!” Switching the spark plugs (but not changing them), Francis urged the old motor on in a running tirade of perplexity and abuse, and observing this resourceful fisherman—the broken-down gear, the nervous hurry, the ceaseless improvising and worried chatter, the Posey nose, blue eyes, and sly innocent grin—I remembered that damned Ted and could not help smiling. “We want to get done out here today, we got to get more speed out of her than that!” Francis was saying, lifting the cap from his wind-burned face to scratch his pale wispy head.

  Near the south end of the lake, Francis ran the boat ashore, disgusted, and replaced the motor with another that was lying in the bows. Like its companion, this motor was so old that its original identity lay hidden beneath the coats of gray surplus paint that held the rust together, and its own bad noises were mingled with the clatter of a loose screwdriver that Francis kept handy inside the motor housing. This motor, too, started up smartly with the first pull of the rope and puttered along, coughing too hard, thereafter. Despite the salt water that splashed onto the wiring as the wind increased, Francis ran both motors with their housings off, the better to tinker with them and keep their spirits up. “Got five or six of ’em, you know,” he sighed, “and every damn one of ’em cantankerous; must be out of date or somethin. Fella tryin to put together a day’s pay don’t need this kind of aggravation. I make any money lobsterin this summer, first thing I’ll do is get me a new one. Yis, yis, bub! Got her all picked out!”

  The first pot we lifted held four lobsters, three of them big counters up to four pounds each; another big lobster came up in the next pot, together with some thick red rock crabs, which, like so many unmarketable sea creatures, are very good to eat. “Damn!” Francis said. “Never get lobsters big as this out in the bay, now ain’t that funny? Think they’d be bigger out there but they ain’t.” Old reeking cod heads, white and colorless, were replaced by the fish carcasses we had scavenged earlier at Stuart’s; each pot also contained a bright piece of metal or other shiny object to attract the lobster, which suffers from a fatal curiosity. We slid the pots back over the side, moving on south to the cove where two of Francis’s three fykes had been set out close together, then across the lake to a third fyke on the eastern shore.

  Fyke nets, rigged on a series of four hoops, each three to four feet in diameter, are pulled to their full length by a pair of anchors, creating a kind of miniature fish trap. A wing net leading out from shore turns the fish toward the fyke, and they enter the trap in attempting to go around the offshore end. Together the three fykes produced about sixty pounds of good-sized perch and almost the same amount of flounder; there were also a number of horseshoe crabs and bunkers that Francis tossed into the bow for his son Jens. “Big horsefoot like that, now, bait three–four eel-pots with that. Eels runnin good this spring, nice big ones, too. Jens had three hundred pound in thirty pots the other day, up Georgica.”

  The pots on the east shore were empty, and we hauled them aboard and took them back to the west side to be set again. At the landing, we loaded the fish and lobsters into the truck and hauled the sharpie over the Montauk moors to Ford Pond Bay. From the beach, Francis honked at Jimmy Lester, who was out on a raft rigged with a water jet, sinking his trap stakes. The tarred and copper-painted stakes—usually oak sapling—are driven about four feet into the bottom, with perhaps six feet protruding at high water.

  Jimmy waved without turning around and kept on working. Asked who owned the raft, Francis answered, “He does. Good raft, too. Every piece of gear that fella has is good, and he takes good care of it. Ain’t like me.” Francis laughed in his worried way, contemplating his old boat and old motors, the bilges awash in oily brine, bait, rusted tools, rubber bands for lobster claws, old bits of rope, gaffs, crabs, and buckets, unmatched oars, torn rain gear, rags, and a mislaid flounder half dissolved in black salt and gurry. “Some mess, ain’t it? Good enough for niggers and Bonackers, that’s what they used to say, niggers and Bonackers.” Finishing his coffee, Francis tossed his white styrofoam cup onto the plastic beach litter along the tide line and picked up an old piece of plywood with brass fittings. “Fit this plywood crost that transom, maybe. Doin pretty good today, ain’t we?”

  We shoved the sharpie off the roller and went out along the eastern shore of Fort Pond Bay. Where the old fish companies once stood was the lately defunct Ocean Science Laboratory, which Perry Duryea and other Montauk speculators, it was said, were promoting as a site for condominiums.

  Francis’s two gill nets had been set in deep water southwest of Culloden Point, and one of the nets was missing its flag buoy. As a result, it had a big tear where a dragger or lobsterman had run right through it. “Hell, that don’t hurt nothin,” Francis said, hitching the cork line back together and setting the net again without mending the hole. “That’s good enough. Been mendin this old rag for thirty years, seems like, just ain’t worth mendin her no more.” I wondered if this was the ancient net that Francis had scavenged years ago from William Havens’s backyard, after William had abandoned it forever.

  I took the lead line and we hauled the net, wrenching out dead mackerel and bunkers. The mackerel run, which begins every year between the twelfth and fourteenth of April, reaches its peak a fortnight later, and should be strong until mid-May, but this year the run was tapering off early. Because of the continuing bad weather, the nets had not been lifted in four days. A number of bunkers had been badly chewed by cormorants, and most were rotten, and the crimson gills of the night-blue sea-striped mackerel had already begun to lose their vivid color. “Struck in two days ago, looks like,” Francis said. “But meat’s still firm; this April water’s better’n a ice house. Good price on mackerel last week, you know, Benny got 107 cartons one day on the beach, but now everybody’s into ’em, all the way down to Jersey, so the price is dropped—that’s fishin for you.”

  Francis lifted his cap and scratched his ear, then lit his pipe before we started for the shore. “Course you got to like this life or you wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it. But if I had mine to live over again, what I’d do is make a lot of money before I come back to fool around the bay.” Once a man started making money, I suggested, it was hard to return to a simpler life, even with a good wife who approved. Francis nodded. “Don’t see too many millionaires out here, now do ya? Not this time of year, anyways.” He squinted at the sky, which had turned dark gray. “Comin on cold. We’d better head back west to Devon, lift that other net I got off there, or that wind’s goin to catch up with us.” This was the first I had heard of that other net.

  On the Napeague stretch, we turned off the highway, crossing the rail bed and cranberry bog and heading north on the road toward Lazy Point, where Francis’s Grandfather Eames had settled when he came here from Connecticut. “Guess they called it Lazy Point because 90 percent of the people here drank heavy and laid around whenever there was money enough for rum. When the rum was gone, they’d just go clammin two–three days, cause in them days the clams was thick all over Napeague, and there was always a market for ’em. Boat would come over from Connecticut, load up clams maybe once a week, oysters and scallops, too; you just pushed a dip net through that eelgrass and come up clean scallops. When I was a kid, back in World War I, we used to go down and stay there at my grandfather’s shack, so many people in there sometimes that the kids slept on the floor. Never bothered us none. Them was the good old days, and the livin was easy.”

  Francis headed the truck west toward Promised Land, turning off into the fish hatchery operation1 that has leased some of the old Edwards Brothers property from Norman Edwards. Here he traded his four lobsters for fifty dollars while I peered at the twenty-pound striped bass in the tanks. These Chesapeake bass, bought from the watermen to be used for breeding, had swollen eyes turned a sick white, and later, I heard, produced a roe that was black and dead.

  From Promised Land we went around the bay to Fresh Pond landing. The wind had
backed into the east and was blowing harder, with cold rain; whitecaps were forming on the bay. Francis cursed at his balky motor, checking the plugs again, adjusting the needle valve, waiting her out when she got flooded, barking the knuckles of his tough old hand as he yanked futilely on the cord. There was no cough. “I’d get me an electric starter, but net’s always gettin hung up, you know, when you keep batteries and all that shit in the damn boat!” Eventually the old outboard kicked over, and we went out on the bay and lifted the net as the waves slapped over the uncovered motor. There were only a few old gray-blue mackerel gilled in the mesh, and we took the net aboard with its buoys and anchors. “Never mind them few fish,” Francis said, when I started to pick out the mackerel. “I’ll clean ’em out later, in my yard.” We returned ashore and winched the boat onto the trailer.

  Back in the truck and out of the cold rain, he fished out his tobacco pouch. With the lobsters, mackerel, white perch, and flounder, he had a fair day’s pay, and was content. “I’ll light my pipe and we’ll be under way,” he said, looking and sounding just like Cap’n Frank, old Cap’n Smoker.

  Francis did not think there was much future in fishing. In fact, he said, he had tried to talk Jens out of it. There were too few fish and too many regulations, too many “people from away”—scallopers, gill-netters, and draggermen from up-Island where the clam beds were already polluted and the fishing had gone all to hell. But he felt that the men who had been fishing longest would also be the last to quit. They’d been through scarcity before, and would always believe that something would turn up.

  In the old days, when fishing was poor, there was usually a good clam set in Bonac or Napeague, and the baymen could all go clamming for the summer people. Now the clams were too thinned out to support more than a few baymen, scratching together a poor bushel here and there. Once the codfish, too, had been dependable; they turned up in the bass nets around Thanksgiving and would remain from a quarter mile to three miles off all winter. Francis had enjoyed codfishing ever since those boyhood days when he had gone with Ted, and he had persisted in it long after most others had given it up, sometimes with old Stuart Vorpahl and sometimes with his Uncle Bill. He and Bill cod-fished together for ten or fifteen years, Francis remembers. “We was the last ones to go. We was the last codfishermen on the beach here.” Then the cod had dwindled, and those that were left had moved offshore, under pressure from the ever-increasing draggers. In the last few years, however, Calvin had set some of his father’s tubs off Hither Plains, and had done better than he was letting on. It looked as if the cod might be coming back.