Stormy Cove

by Bernadette Calonego

  We had cows too.

  Cows were Abram’s idea ’cause he wanted fresh milk. But then one walked in front of the fish inspector’s car. Bloody idiot. There was hell to pay. Had to tether them after that. And milk them every day. Also did the hay. And the garden—planted turnips and cabbage and rhubarb. Picked berries in summer, bakeapples and blueberries and partridgeberries and wild strawberries. And baked my own bread—twice a day. No end to the cooking. Damn food always burned, hadn’t time to stay at the stove.

  You want more about Noah?

  He takes after me, in looks. Dark hair and dark skin, not blond like Abram and no blue eyes. Eskimo blood? Who fed you that bullshit? No Eskimos in my family. Anyways, there are dark-skinned people all over the world. You think every Mexican’s got Eskimo blood? Cut the bullshit.

  Gimme some more questions, or I’ll turn on the TV.

  Yes, Noah was always up to something. Didn’t come home when dinner was ready. Hung around on the cliffs at Devil’s Claws, where Barton Wicks’s boy fell off and drowned. Spanked him. With a leather belt so he’d damn well feel it. Abram couldn’t stomach it, left it to me.

  I’m telling you, women here gotta wear the goddamn pants or they’re finished. Life’s hard. I didn’t want this life. Often damn near killed me. I could only have a good cry at Aunt Vernetta’s—mother was long dead. Aunt Vernetta said if other women can stick it out, so can you. That it wouldn’t be fair to Abram if he lived by himself. He worked hard and loved the kids.

  Life here ain’t for wimps.

  Or crybabies from the city.

  I saw her go into Noah’s house. I can see it all out my window.

  If you ask me, it was that photographer. She wanted to be rid of the other woman. It bugged her that a girl was hanging around the wharf. She got in her way.

  Mavis told Cassie how Lori behaved at the store. If she didn’t find something, she’d bitch. Looked for butter and didn’t find any. “How can anybody live without butter?” she said.

  We’ve lived without butter for generations, and if we think marge is better, then it’ll do for her, too. Mavis didn’t tell her that, of course. We’re friendly folks.

  Why doesn’t he want a woman from Stormy Cove or Crockett Harbour or Isle View? Hardly any girls left here. Not good enough for them here. It’s Corner Brook or St. John’s they want. Or farther away. Hardly anybody but old widows around here now, like me and my sister Cassie. I put it to him: What’s wrong with Jessie? She can cook and do the laundry and help you in the woods. She’d be good for you. Jessie works in the fish plant during the summer, not lazy. Got divorced two years ago, but you can’t be choosy in these parts.

  “Mother,” Noah told me, “I don’t need a woman to wash and cook, I need somebody to talk to.”

  Since when does a body need someone to talk to? Abram’s dead, and after they dragged him out of the water, Archie took over the tiller.

  I told Archie my mind: “Abram’s shoes are much too big for you, Archie.” Didn’t like to hear that, naturally. Could tell by the look on his gob. Snapped his jaw shut and curled his lips in tight to his teeth.

  His mother gave him away to Abram’s parents to raise him, and now he acts like the family boss.

  But nobody forgets Abram. Noah called his first boat Abram’s Pride.

  Yes, of course, women fish here too. What a stupid question! I often went out with Abram. Agnes, our youngest, was ten. Up out of bed at four in the morning, in all weather, nothing could stop me. The old people in the house had to pitch in. Felt good on the boat. Felt free. Always used to working hard.

  I helped Abram with the nets, picked fish out of the mesh. We caught cod, herring, mackerel. And crabs. Hauled up the crab pots and tossed them into plastic tubs. Wind, water, rain, cold, sun—couldn’t slow me down!

  Folks said I looked pretty much content. The kids sensed it too. Never got out the leather belt ever again. We had a bit more money for Christmas presents, two for everybody instead of one. And I got a nice blouse, sometimes.

  But never a dress. Just wore pants all my life.

  Many folks take me for a man at a distance. Real convenient sometimes.

  What do I mean?

  None of your goddamn business! Told you too much already.

  CHAPTER 16

  They weren’t alone for long. Noah’s brother Nate burst in as they were in the middle of playing Scrabble. Nate and his wife Emma lived next door. Lori was surprised that Noah just dropped the game as if that was a completely natural thing to do. He and Nate went down to the basement without explanation, where they began spreading out a net and mending it in the dim light. Lori followed them with her camera.

  She watched them mending the torn mesh with a needle and colored twine. While they joked around, Lori took close-ups of the concentration on their faces and of their bearlike hands—she’d never have guessed they were so nimble fingered. They chatted about the storm and the kids holed up in the schoolhouse that the obliging people in Crockett Harbour had fed and comforted. The children would be spending the night on cots in the gym because the road was still impassable. Then talk turned to a neighbor’s father who was in the hospital and probably not long for this world. But they kept coming back to the weather and ice conditions, and how long it would be until the ice broke up and they could finally get back on the water.

  To Lori’s ears, it sounded like an urgent incantation: Nate would repeat Noah’s words in a friendly mutter. She started to feel uncomfortable about eavesdropping and went upstairs. Her laptop screen displayed the last of her storm pictures from earlier.

  She copied the photo to the folder dated May 7, where she came across the picture she’d filed earlier and not deleted. She zoomed in to see the framed pictures on the little table more clearly. Two of them were in the foreground. One was of a group of young people standing in front of a dockyard; she could make out fishing vessels behind them. She didn’t recognize any faces; the picture was probably fifteen or twenty years old, so the people would have changed. The second photo looked like a posed family portrait, the kind that used to be taken at weddings, though she couldn’t spot a bridal couple. Some family members were sitting in the foreground, others at the back, all dressed in their finest. All except a dark-haired man near the right edge; his arms were folded and his legs spread wide apart, like a cowboy’s. He wore a partly unbuttoned shirt and jeans, and glared at the camera half challenging, half bored, as if he’d been forced to come to the party. She then recognized Noah but with some difficulty, because the young man before her had a smooth, open face. Subsequent years had etched it deeply.

  She was also struck by the face of a pretty young woman, almost a girl, whose expression Lori knew from young actresses certain they were on the verge of their big break. Hungry for recognition, but at the same time a little truculent because the success they felt entitled to wasn’t coming fast enough. This young beauty didn’t fit in with the unassuming fishing family in an isolated village in the extreme north of Newfoundland. She didn’t look like the other women, who Lori presumed were Noah’s sisters.

  But then she had to admit that her own brother Clifford hadn’t looked like her either; sometimes siblings just didn’t.

  She went back to the first photo, the one at the dockyard, and now noticed that the group was made up of young men clustered around a woman in a striped blouse. Lori couldn’t tell if this woman was also in the family portrait; her face was blurred.

  “Like some fish?”

  Lori jumped. Noah stood in the doorway. The howling storm and noisy generator had drowned out his footsteps.

  “Still no power?” she asked as she furtively whisked the picture off the screen.

  “Even if there was, I’d keep it secret so you’d stay for dinner.” He grinned.

  Nate appeared to have gone home.

  “I had no idea you liked to cook.”

  “Don’t expect too much. I can make two meals: fish and moose.”

  It had grown dar
k, but the screaming wind was no quieter. Lori understood why early man had made ritual sacrifices to the forces of nature in order to placate them.

  When they sat down to the meal Noah had prepared, Lori couldn’t find any fish in it.

  “It’s fish ’n’ brewis, fish and hard bread,” he explained while she jotted notes in her red book. “Soak hard bread in water, then mix it with dried cod softened in water as well.”

  “Peasant food,” she said without thinking.

  “Yes, anybody could afford fish and bread. Poor people in Newfoundland used to live on lobster in the old days; it was cheap, lots of it. Rich folks used to give it to their servants.”

  “Fish and shellfish are getting scarce now, eh? And awfully expensive, even in Vancouver, where people live right on the Pacific.”

  “Expensive in the stores, maybe, but the money sure isn’t going to us fishermen. We’re making less and less with what we catch.”

  Lori served herself some applesauce that stood in for the vegetables Noah didn’t think important.

  “So somebody must be getting rich,” she said. “Middlemen.”

  “Yeah. Some people make a fortune at it, while we struggle. Pretty frustrating these last few years.”

  Lori thought about the men she’d gone out with in Vancouver, who were quick to drop hints about all the money they were intending to make. Noah seemed to be saying the opposite.

  After they’d washed and dried the dishes, Noah suggested they finish their game of Scrabble. As he stood beside the table, his long, heavy arms seemed to pull him downward.

  “Hope this isn’t boring you,” he said.

  She felt an impulse to embrace him, but her caution overpowered her desire. She didn’t want to make things complicated in Stormy Cove.

  “No, no, not at all. When . . . when I was married I’d have loved to play games like this with my husband in the evening, but . . .”

  She fell silent, afraid of revealing too much.

  Noah sat down and pushed the board between them.

  “He didn’t like games?”

  “We lived in a big house with another family and some patients, so we were rarely by ourselves.”

  “I don’t get it, patients? Was it a hospital?”

  Lori shook her head, already sorry she’d brought up her marriage. It was so difficult to explain.

  “The house owner was a therapist helping drug addicts, and he cared for a bunch of young people in recovery. They’d live in his house for a while until they could find a place of their own. And we lived in the same, really huge house because . . . my husband and the therapist were childhood friends and—he just didn’t want to live anywhere else. But it was very hard on me—I mean, with so many people around. I’d rather have lived alone with him and our child.”

  Noah rubbed his chin and stared at the Formica tabletop. Had he been thrown off guard by her disclosure?

  “Always were a lot of people in our house too: eleven kids and two adults, not counting visitors,” he remarked, “but living with strangers—that’s another story.”

  She nodded in assent. “You can feel very much alone even with a lot of people around you.”

  “Did you feel alone, even with your husband and child?”

  “Yes, my husband worked in town and would come home late at night. And then somebody else commandeered him.”

  She visualized Katja standing before her, a girl who’d had to walk the streets as a twelve-year-old. She was nineteen when she came to the Lindenhold estate and was still pretty despite her past, but—as Lori could see today—she was an immensely needy child. She wanted to discuss her writing with Volker for hours, pieces she hoped to publish, even though Volker was no creative writing expert.

  One night, Lori’s patience was exhausted, and she aired her frustration in their bedroom.

  “You’re not jealous, by any chance?” he’d responded.

  Lori felt like her head was going to explode.

  “Maybe, but the point is I’m practically still a newlywed and I’d like to spend a little time with my husband—alone! Is that so hard to understand?”

  Volker responded with a lecture on marriage as a union of two individuals that stays vibrant by means of external relationships. He informed Lori that she was arguably attempting to compensate for her father and brother’s deaths by demanding undue attention from him.

  After that, Lori felt more inadequate than ever. Especially compared to Rosemarie, Franz’s wife, who supported her husband in everything, unquestioningly. Rosemarie was magnanimous, never jealous, and had no doubts about her husband’s love. She understood a therapist’s work. Why couldn’t Lori be like Rosemarie?

  Suddenly, she felt a warm hand on hers. Noah’s worried face and dark eyes were before her.

  “What is it? Did I say something wrong? You look so sad.”

  She tried to smile.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t bring up old times—they’re over and done with.”

  She was not the helpless, browbeaten stranger anymore, always trying too hard to be a good wife and always failing. Nowadays she was careful never to be too dependent on other people.

  That was the reason she had to be on her guard with this ruggedly handsome fisherman who offered her food and shelter, who was now leaning over the table toward her. It would be the height of imprudence to get attached to a strange man in a remote village at the end of the earth. And yet her skin burned beneath his touch.

  Noah squeezed her hand before getting back to the Scrabble board.

  “Whose turn?”

  He was far ahead on points, to her chagrin, since she prided herself on her talent for Scrabble. But he used uncommon words for all things fish she didn’t know, or tools, or machine parts—vocabulary she was powerless against.

  He beat her, and it turned out he was a poor winner.

  “I win!” He wrote above his name on the score sheet. “Never thought I’d be better than you,” he said teasingly. “After all, you speak proper English and we only talk Newfinese.”

  “Oh, come off it! In a moment of triumph, you should treat your opponent with grace.”

  “Not if I’m up against a mighty opponent like you.”

  “Aren’t you the loudmouth! Why do people say you’re shy, again?”

  “All strategy, my dear. If you don’t say much, you can’t say anything wrong.”

  “OK, then you’d best say nothing at all, or else—”

  “Or else I’ll annoy you even more?”

  He was right, of course; the defeat irked her. But she was also irritable because it was her bedtime, and she had to forgo being near him.

  “I’m really tired,” she said abruptly. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go to my room. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me.”

  They stood up at the same time, and for a second, she had the feeling he was going to hug her. But the moment passed, and he said instead, “I’ll build up the fire some more; it’ll keep you warm all night.” He paused. “Mind if I watch TV for a bit? I’ll shut the generator off after.”

  She assured him it was fine. Washing her face in the bathroom, she heard him adding wood to the stove. She scurried into her room and locked the door carefully so he wouldn’t hear.

  Then she got into pajamas, took out her notebook, and sat on the bed; the metal springs protested loudly. She made herself pick up the pen and watched as words appeared on the paper.

  I don’t want any amorous complications, I must maintain a neutral position, I can’t screw up this assignment. I’ve had it with passing affairs, I don’t want to get burned again or risk any more heartache. My career’s back on track, I’ve got grand plans. How could I put them at risk for a bit of warmth next to a physical body? I can get a cat for that.

  She giggled softly at that last sentence. The touch of levity felt good, better than old murders and conspiracy theories and a small town’s deep dark secrets.

  Even so, she plunged into a mystery novel. She heard
Noah turn on the weather channel—what else?—but the report was repeatedly interrupted, probably by the storm pounding on the satellite dish. Eventually, he turned the generator off and her reading light blinked out. She wrapped herself in a multicolored patterned quilt as the bed squeaked.

  She woke up with a start in the middle of the night. It took a while to figure out where she was. There were muffled voices in the house. A man’s and a woman’s. She recognized Noah’s mellow sing-song. But who was the woman? She sounded insistent, pleading. A door slammed and footsteps came nearer. Should she venture out of her room and play Little Miss Naïve and ask what was up? She decided she wasn’t comfortable with the thought of Noah seeing her in her pajamas. So she stayed in bed, her heart racing, not daring to move and make the springs squeak. Not until the house was quiet again did she gently roll onto her side, but the angry storm whistled in her wakeful ears for a long time.

  In the morning, she came into the kitchen freshly showered to find Noah at the stove. The aroma of fried bacon reached her nose.

  “I don’t hear the generator,” she yawned.

  He turned and gave her a scrutinizing look, as if trying to read her face.

  “Yes, power’s back, phone, too. Want some bacon and eggs?”

  “I’m so famished I could eat my boots.”

  Her eyes focused on the kitchen clock. Twenty to ten.

  “Am I wrong, or has the storm let up?”

  “It has, but doesn’t mean anything. Could get really bad again this afternoon. Road’s still closed, and the kids will stay at the schoolhouse no matter what.”

  “Then I should eat my breakfast fast and get back home before it starts up again.”

  Noah handed her a full plate.

  “You can stay here as long as you want.”

  “That’s nice of you, but I have to call my mom and my son.” She assumed a mischievous tone. “I’m not here on holiday, if that’s what you mean.”

  Noah didn’t return her smile. He scraped the last bacon scrap out of the pan and dropped it onto his plate. Two pieces of toast popped up in the toaster; he spread margarine on them with great care.