Stormy Cove

by Bernadette Calonego

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he shouted. “It’s not going to get eaten today.”

  Laughter accompanied his words.

  Lori swiftly recovered from her surprise.

  “Doesn’t matter, still makes for a good picture.”

  “Go ahead,” another man shouted.

  She put the salad bowl on a box.

  “Are all of you Noah’s brothers?”

  “Brothers, nephews, cousins—take your pick!”

  “And uncles.”

  “A big family,” Lori said as she snapped away.

  “You bet!”

  There were wet feathers lying everywhere, and water was bubbling in a huge pot. Obviously, plucking was a man’s job.

  “And what kind of ducks are they?”

  “Eider.”

  “Did somebody shoot them this morning? I heard shots.”

  “That’d be Jack over there.”

  A figure stepped forward out of the dark, a boy Lori figured was seventeen at most. He still had his shotgun on his back.

  Interesting. A young teenager who’d shot two dozen ducks for grown men to pluck. He stood there with his legs wide apart, one hand on his hip, the other against a wooden post: every inch the proud hunter. She lay down on the floor to shoot from below, ignoring the dirt on her jacket. Then she entered his name in her notebook: Jack Day.

  “I’m Noah’s cousin’s son,” he said as she put away her camera. She had him point out the way to go upstairs.

  She took off her shoes before entering a brightly lit kitchen filled with loud voices and laughter, and with women and children, for the most part. Curious eyes turned in her direction, but nobody came over to welcome her. She put the salad on a large table loaded with brimming bowls and plates, and looked around the open living and dining room. Noah wasn’t there to help her navigate this difficult moment.

  She approached a woman putting a plate of Nanaimo bars on the table.

  “Hi, I’m Lori. Where can I find Greta?”

  “Greta?” She scanned the crowd. “Over there,” she said, making a not very helpful nod toward the left corner of the living room.

  Fortunately, she added, “I don’t know how she does it, but I always see her with a baby that isn’t hers.”

  Lori spotted a woman with strong arms rocking an infant while carrying on a lively conversation with the people ringed around her. She was blond and animated, with cheerful facial features that didn’t look at all like her brother’s. While not pretty as Robine had been in the picture, she radiated a freshness and health that even the most expensive cosmetics couldn’t fake. Lori worked her way over to Greta, who suddenly noticed an unfamiliar face. She called out, “Are you that photographer from Vancouver?”

  All of a sudden, it was noticeably quieter, and Lori felt the onus of being the focus of everyone’s attention.

  “Thank you for inviting me to your birthday party,” Lori said, “and happy birthday!”

  She handed Greta a small box containing a pretty key chain with a killer whale carved from gray-blue argillite by the Haida First Nations.

  “Oh, I knew if I invited you then everyone would come by to have a look at you!”

  Greta laughed at her own joke, and that set the whole group laughing. She said to an elderly lady on the sofa behind her, “Mother, this is Lori from Vancouver. She takes photographs and we’re all going to be in her book.”

  Noah’s mother. Short, gray hair, astonishingly thin for a woman who’d had eleven children, with dark, almost angry eyes beneath thick eyebrows. A bit masculine, which didn’t surprise Lori. Anybody around here who was too soft didn’t survive. Particularly during the grim old times when this woman had raised her passel of kids.

  Noah’s mother threw her a disparaging glance and said, “You won’t like the weather here. You won’t be able to stand it for very long.”

  Lori hadn’t counted on this kind of welcome, but her voice struck a jaunty note as she said, “I’m not here for the weather, Mrs. Whalen, I’m here for the fat fish. Fish are so expensive in Vancouver, I can’t afford them anymore.”

  That elicited a general murmur and some heckling.

  “Yes, we’ve got fat fish here, alright,” a woman hollered, “and yummy fishermen!”

  “Maybe they’re not fat enough for her!”

  “She’s already got one on her hook. Don’t get your hopes up, Blake.”

  Another woman: “Are you a hangashore, Blake?”

  A loud outburst of laughter.

  Greta turned to Lori. “Hangashores are guys who don’t actually fish—they just hang around on the shore and flirt with the women left behind.”

  “And stick them with kids,” a woman muttered.

  “Stop that whispering,” Noah’s mother shouted.

  “Oh, you always act like you’re hard of hearing but your ears are sharp as tacks!”

  Greta bent down to her mother and put a loving arm around her shoulders. They obviously understood each other well. But that same mother had kicked one of her daughters out of town because she loved women.

  Suddenly, the energy in the room changed. Archie Whalen had arrived with a crew of men in his wake, Noah among them. He scoured the room until he saw her, but didn’t come over. Peer pressure, Lori thought to herself.

  The men charged the buffet. Lori caught the attack with her camera. Then she got shots of a gaggle of half-grown girls in skintight stretch pants and T-shirts. They must have ordered their provocative clothing from the Sears catalog; Lori had picked one up in the village store too, and browsed through it at home. Girls always found ways to keep up with fashion, even in Stormy Cove. Lori was so busy with her camera that she didn’t get to eat until the buffet had almost been swept clean. There was only one dish nobody had eaten from: her potato salad was untouched. The paltry remains of another potato salad, gleaming with mayonnaise, lay on a platter. It probably wasn’t even real mayonnaise, Lori guessed, but the substitute they called “Miracle Whip” in these parts.

  Nursing her injured pride, Lori served herself some of her salad, combined it with a chicken leg, and ignored the rest of the remains. Since every seat was taken, she ate standing up, while prying eyes fastened on her off and on. She sipped at her beer. Noah still hadn’t talked to her. He was engaged in an obviously marvelous conversation with the young mother of the baby. Was he trying to show his family that the rumors about him and that Vancouverite were completely unfounded? Just as Lori was starting to feel thoroughly uncomfortable, somebody invited Greta to cut her birthday cake. The cake was flat as a box of chocolates and covered with white icing and mint-green garlandlike decorations. Lori reached for her camera.

  Greta divided the cake into pieces and began to distribute the plates. Then one of Noah’s brothers—it was Lance—smashed a piece of cake all over Greta’s face and hair—hard. Lori automatically put down her camera and yelped, “Hey!”

  Every head turned toward her.

  Greta just shook her head, laughing, and gave her brother a playful slap. Some cake seemed to have gotten into her right eye, and she tried to rub it out with her finger. Someone gave her a paper napkin and she hurried off to clean up.

  Noah was suddenly at Lori’s side.

  “Is everything OK?” he asked.

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “Oh, it’s a ritual here, but it’s not as common as it used to be.” He looked a little embarrassed. “You didn’t take a picture, did you?”

  Lori shook her head. Was that all he was interested in? That his family might be seen in a bad light?

  He served her a piece of cake.

  “Best cake around.”

  This time he stayed at her side while she stuffed herself in silence.

  Greta came back into the kitchen, her damp hair hanging down on one side. She took Lori’s arm.

  “Come with me, I’m opening my birthday cards.”

  Lori followed her into the living room, where Greta opened her envelopes and took out so
me bills. Lori was astonished to see her hand the money over to another woman, who counted it carefully and wrote the amounts on a sheet of paper. So that’s what people were looking for: money, not for a pretty, but maybe unwelcome, key chain.

  “Three hundred and twenty dollars,” the woman announced, and all the bystanders acknowledged their satisfaction with the haul.

  Now Greta opened Lori’s little package and held up the key chain. Lori was embarrassed, but what could she do?

  “What’s that?” a little girl shouted.

  “A key chain,” somebody said. “A whale.”

  Fortunately, Greta saved the situation by giving Lori a hug and thanking her.

  Lori needed a glass of water and some fresh air. The men had congregated in the kitchen, each with a can of beer in hand. Noah gave her an inquiring look. She pushed past him to the faucet, but Archie intercepted her.

  “You don’t want water; only animals drink water around here.”

  Archie’s tone of voice told her that he now regarded her as a friend of the family. She dodged yet another debate about drinking by showing Archie the ice-fishing photograph.

  “Who’s this man? I haven’t been able to get his name.”

  Nate Whalen leaned over the picture before Archie could respond.

  “That’s Gideon. Gideon Moore.”

  “Is he related to you?”

  “Gideon is Archie’s buddy. They used to fish together.”

  “And then the boat burned down,” a man shouted, who was a little tipsy. “Then Gideon bought a lodge and it burned down, too!”

  “And Gideon got a lot of money from the insurance, and bought a helicopter and now he’s—” shouted a young blond red-faced man who Lori hadn’t seen before.

  Archie cut him off.

  “None of your bullshit, Taylor! Gideon works hard and doesn’t spout off all the time like some guys here.”

  But the young red-faced man was full of Dutch courage.

  “Archie, you’ve got to admit that some guys made a nice pot of money from boats that burned. You can’t even get insurance in Saleau Cove anymore because so many boats were torched all of a sudden.”

  “Not for houses either,” another man broke in vehemently. “And how do you explain the pictures hanging in the new houses that were hanging in the ones that burned down?”

  The men laughed, but not Archie.

  “You’re a bunch of blabbermouths,” he thundered. “Stupid gossip, nothing but stupid gossip.”

  He left the crowd, and the rest of them stood around, looking a bit chagrined.

  Lori and her questions had once again brought discord into a family party.

  Two couples with children got up to leave. Maybe it was time for her to go too. She looked around at the guests and was startled to see one of the very young, provocatively dressed girls sitting in a man’s lap. Her uncle or her father? The man crossed his arms over the girl’s chest and jiggled her breasts up and down. Lori was shocked, but none of the bystanders seemed to find anything wrong. She tried to locate Noah, but he wasn’t around.

  He didn’t show up until she’d said good-bye to Greta and her mother and a few others and was putting her salad bowl in her Toyota.

  “Do I get some of that?”

  She straightened up beside the car.

  “Nobody touched it, not even you. Does it look that unappetizing?”

  “No, no, not at all. It’s just that people here only eat what they know.”

  “It’s just a damn potato salad, anybody can see that!”

  “Maybe it looks different, dunno . . . I’d like to try it.”

  “But not in front of all the guests, oh no!” she said. “You’d never do that.”

  He said nothing but looked out on the bay. Then he said, “I can bring some sausage and moose meat.”

  She couldn’t be angry with him. He’d grown up in this world, and he obeyed its rules. He had to keep on living here long after she moved on.

  “OK,” she said. “The salad will taste even better tomorrow.”

  His clouded face brightened.

  “Yes, a lot of things improve if you let them sit for a while.”

  I must remember that, she thought as she started the motor.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was five in the morning when she slogged down to the harbor with leaden feet. She waddled like a duck in the heavy rubber boots Noah had lent her, and her life jacket felt like a suit of armor over the winter jacket that was bulky enough already. It was drizzling, and her hood didn’t keep the dampness off her face.

  Get over yourself, Lori. It’s not a beauty contest, just a job.

  Her only consolation was that Noah, who, together with Nate, was shoveling crushed ice into brightly colored containers, looked just as ungainly in his rubber jacket and pants.

  Lori was shivering. She didn’t know if it was the aftermath of the flu that had chained her to her bed for the past week or the chill of the gray dawn. How could it still be so cold at the end of May! Snow still clung to the hilltops. In Vancouver, the cherry trees began to bloom as early as March.

  Maybe it was also the anticipation of her first adventure on Noah’s fishing boat that sent shivers down her spine. She hadn’t seen him for ten days, and wasn’t thrilled for him to see her with her nose rubbed all red, her swollen eyes, and a lingering air of the sick bed on her. Patience had insisted on coming over daily, making tea and bringing food Lori was too feverish to eat. The nearest doctor was a three-hour drive away. What did these people do if they had heart attacks and other emergencies?

  Nate interrupted her thoughts.

  “Do you get seasick?”

  She shrugged.

  “Never happened before. Will it be rough today?”

  “Nah, sea’s pretty calm. Sometimes it gets to me.”

  “What? A fisherman who gets seasick?”

  “For sure, and I’m not the only one. If it’s really blowing out there, it’s no fun, no fun at all.”

  But he smiled all the same.

  The brothers heaved a box of ice on board. Then Noah held out his hand.

  “Welcome aboard, milady.”

  He helped her climb onto the rocking boat and find her footing among the buckets and white plastic bags. Then he slacked off the ropes from the bollards. Nate started the engine, and the boat chugged out of the cove. Lori kept a hand on the jamb of the wheelhouse door and watched the village of Stormy Cove vanish into the thin morning fog. The boat hugged the coastline, and its tall black vertical rocks.

  Lori felt the boat rolling, breathed in the salty, fishy air. She was filled with a dizzying sense of lightness and freedom, and she felt deeply insignificant but uplifted by the sublime power of the sea.

  Noah sat on the railing, his rain hood pulled up over his baseball cap. Lori sat down beside him.

  “How many times have you set out from this cove?” She had to yell to be heard over the engine.

  “Thousands of times. I know every rock and every shoal.”

  He pointed a finger at the cliffs.

  “Over there are the Devil’s Footprints. Do you see the claw marks in the stone? There’s the White Dog, the bright-colored rock that looks like a dog from this side. And over there’s the Oven, a cave.”

  He looked at her.

  “Rain doesn’t hurt your camera?”

  “No, not this little drizzle. But I wouldn’t take it into the water.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “Of course. You?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know any fisherman who can swim.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing a life jacket?”

  “It’s pointless. You’d freeze to death just like that in this cold water.”

  “Not if somebody can pull you out of the water fast. Surely you don’t freeze in a minute.”

  He shook his head again and said nothing. Lori knew him well enough to know she had to drop it. But then there was a new sound.

&nbs
p; “The hydraulic hauler,” Noah shouted when he saw the puzzled look on her face. “Hauls in the nets.”

  Lori photographed the nets coming up over the bow, the wriggling fish caught in the mesh, and Noah pulling at the stern. He grabbed the fish with his orange rubber gloves, freed them from the mesh, and threw them on the deck, where they still twitched a little, their mouths snapping in the air.

  Filled with curiosity, she studied their plump, slimy bodies: gray blue, greenish, sometimes nearly black. The upper fin was almost as big as a rooster’s comb. So that’s the lumpfish. Or lumpsucker—she’d looked it up on the Internet. Genus Cyclopterus in the family Cyclopteridae, a description she found delightful.

  “They don’t have scales,” she yelled.

  Noah laughed.

  “Fat bellies make up for it!”

  She knew he meant the roe in the females; it’s what he was after. Her camera caught Noah throwing the nets over the rail and gradually sliding them back into the ocean. The boat started up again.

  Noah took a big, sharp knife and opened a lumpfish’s belly. Caviar gushed out, thousands of tiny pink fish eggs that he dripped into a white bucket. He shoved a hand into the open belly and cleaned out what was left. She grimaced.

  “Are the fish dead? Do they suffer?”

  Noah looked up briefly as he kept working. She repeated the question.

  “No, they don’t suffer. Do you hear a loud scream when I slit them open? They don’t have any feeling, these fish.”

  His argument was unconvincing. But what right did she have to question thousands of years of fishing tradition? She enjoyed eating fish, not to mention lobsters and crabs and mussels and snails. She’d tried going vegetarian when she was very young, and had failed miserably because of her love of meat and her inability to concoct enough tasty meals.

  It was a long day. The boat went from net to net—eighty in all—and Noah and Nate worked without a break for ten hours. All Noah wolfed down was a chocolate bar and an apple, Nate a sandwich washed down with Mountain Dew, which he offered to Lori. After one swallow of the sugary soft drink, she opted for tea from her thermos, but that put her in a bind. There was no toilet on the boat. Men simply peed over the rail. Noah handed her a big pail and closed the wheelhouse door so she’d be undisturbed.