Praise for Sylvanus Now
“Like the rock where it was born, Morrissey’s voice is at once haunting and heartbreaking, lyrical and pure. Anyone still looking for identity in Canadian fiction can call off the search.”
—Brad Smith, author of Big Man Coming Down the Road
“Deft and deliriously romantic … When [Morrissey] steps back and lets her characters do the talking, the results are electrifying … acute and bleakly funny … It is a novel to be taken to heart.”
—National Post
“There are detailed descriptions in this novel which are dazzlingly unique. Both physical and emotional landscapes are charted with care. A splendidly unique novel.”
—Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief
“An epic novel of love and loss … It is an arresting tale, recounted in powerful, lyrical prose … Morrissey’s strong descriptive powers elevate the landscape of Newfoundland to the status of a living, breathing character in the novel.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“Morrissey’s strength is in the way she evokes the dialogue and lost culture of Newfoundland outports.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Donna Morrissey’s considerable descriptive talents paint a compelling picture … [Sylvanus and Adelaide] are strong and thoughtful individuals.”
—Calgary Herald
“Skillfully rendered as a passionate love story as well as an exploration of the irreversible decline of the cod industry … In Sylvanus Now, Morrissey deftly captures the sorrows and passions of characters struggling unceremoniously to uphold tradition in the face of change.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Tell it well, she does … Whether describing the women working on the flakes … or conversations between Sylvanus and his brothers and friends, Morrissey always hits perfect pitch.”
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)
“Perhaps Morrissey’s greatest asset as a writer is that ring of truth. From the verisimilitude with which she depicts life in the outports to the note-perfect dialogue to the rich and colloquial narrative voice, Morrissey rarely falters … Sylvanus Now is a powerful, moving evocation of lives and times long gone but close enough to be in living memory, a world vanished but brought vividly back to life in Morrissey’s caring hands.”
—Quill & Quire
“[Morrissey] vividly evokes the Newfoundland way of life with refreshing honesty. With its details about a fishery so stunningly destroyed, Sylvanus Now is infuriating and troubling. Yet what’s hopeful is the [characters’] love, both heart-breaking and enduring.”
—The Daily News (Halifax)
“A beautifully written story about the struggle to maintain a unique identity … to remain true to ourselves as the world challenges our beliefs; and to continue to follow our dreams, despite things not always going as planned.”
—Downhomer Magazine (St. John’s)
“Absorbing human drama, in Morrissey’s best yet.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Morrissey generates a remarkable intensity of emotion here, and if the novel often seems oppressively sad, it is buoyed by the crispness of detail and the author’s ability to vivify the slow process through which an inner life is transformed.”
—Booklist
“Brilliantly displays multiple conflicts: between the individual and the state, tradition and progress, alienation and acceptance, and love of the land and the love of another.”
—Literary Review of Canada
Praise for Donna Morrissey
“There’s a sense in Morrissey’s writing that William Faulkner has met Annie Proulx … Morrissey is almost certain to set new boundaries in fiction in Canada.”
—Atlantic Books Today
“Morrissey’s voice, innocent, wise, funny and boisterous, and so expertly tuned to the music of the Newfoundland dialect, is simply irresistible.”
—Books in Canada
“A Newfoundland Thomas Hardy.”
—The Globe and Mail
“If you haven’t read any Donna Morrissey, there’s a trio of wonder waiting … as lively as Newfoundland and as sweet as the sea.”
—The Sun Times (Owen Sound, Ontario)
“Morrissey knows of what she writes.”
—Toronto Star
PENGUIN CANADA
SYLVANUS NOW
DONNA MORRISSEY is the award-winning author of four novels, Kit’s Law, Downhill Chance, Sylvanus Now, and What They Wanted, all set in Newfoundland and all subsequently translated into several languages. Kit’s Law won the CBA Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Prize, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Both Downhill Chance and Sylvanus Now won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and Sylvanus Now was the winner of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award. Her screenplay, Clothesline Patch, won a Gemini Award. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches, a small fishing outport in Newfoundland, and now lives in Halifax.
ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY
Kit’s Law
Downhill Chance
What They Wanted
DONNA
MORRISSEY
Sylvanus Now
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2005
Published in this edition, 2009
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Donna Morrissey, 2005
Illustration on page xi copyright © Bridgett Morrissey, 2005
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Morrissey, Donna, 1956
Sylvanus Now / Donna Morrissey.
ISBN 978-0-14-317032-7
1. Newfoundland and Labrador—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8576.O74164S94 2009 C813’.54 C2009-903803-X
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To her babies,
Milton, Verna, and Paul
Come and see. and I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
And I heard a voice … say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
—Revelation 6:5, 6:6, and 13:1
PART ONE
Sylvanus
SPRING 1949 TO SUMMER 1953
CHAPTER ONE
A MAN’S WORTH
SYLVANUS NOW had just turned fourteen that morning when he burst through the school doors for summer, shoved his dory off from the calm shores of Cooney Arm, paddled through the narrow channel protecting the cove, and headed for the choppy waters of the open Atlantic. Tucked inside his pants pocket was a credit note for his confirmation suit, priced at thirty-two quintals of dried salt fish (on hold at the merchant’s), and tucked around his feet were two coils of fishing twine, the end of each tightly knotted to a cod jigger.
Rowing half a mile along the rugged coastline, he anchored two stone’s throws from where Pollock’s Brook rushed out of a small estuary into the sea. Wrapping his fishing twine around each hand, he tossed the ends holding the jiggers overboard, their hooks more silvery than the underbelly of a herring as they sank into the sea. Rising, he planted both feet firmly on either side of his boat and began jigging: left forearm up, right forearm down; right forearm up, left forearm down. Thirty-two quintals of fish. A hundred and twelve pounds a quintal. He figured he could do it.
After scarcely five minutes of jigging, his left jigger hooked.
“Ah,” he grunted with satisfaction and, sitting back down, pulled in the fish. Ten pounds it felt. Fair size for drying and marketing. He grunted again. It was this, the immediacy of it, that fulfilled him. That even as he was twisting the jigger out of the cod’s mouth, he was already tallying his own worth—unlike the hours spent over school books, studying letters and figures that made no sense.
Pulling a skinning knife out of his rubber boot, he cut the cod’s throat to bleed it, cursing the gulls swooping and screaming overhead, one flapping so close he swung his knife at the yellowed eyes menacing him. Laying the fish aside, he tossed his jigger back into the sea and rose—left forearm up, right forearm down; right forearm up, left forearm down; up, down; up down—a sturdy figure in his father’s black rubber pants and coat, unyielding to the rocking of his dory, his sou’wester pulled low, darkening his eyes as he faced into the sun and the gannets swooping black before its blaze as they dove into the sea a dozen feet below his boat, beaking back the caplin that were luring the cod to his jiggers.
Fourteen pounds. A day’s jigging ought to land him half a quintal or more. With splitting, salting, and drying the fish on shore, it would take all three of the summer months, he figured, before he was able to dodge up to the merchant’s and barter the price of the suit—for thirty-two quintal was the price he was figuring on paying, not the forty-two the merchant was asking. Perhaps he was poor at book learning, writing his numbers and letters backwards and trying the patience of his teachers and elders alike as they tried breaking him from the foolishness of his habit; but he could figure, sometimes for hours on end, about such things as how many cords of split wood to fill a twelve-by-twelve crawl space, or how long to leave a fish curing in brine, or, no doubt, how many hours it took to cut and sew a size-forty suit and how many quintals of fish to make a fair trade.
Another hook—a hard one. Real hard. Excitedly, he leaned over the side of his boat, pulled in his fishing twine, hand over hand, seeing a fathom down into the sea and the glazed eyes of a cod whose tail flicked confusedly as it was hauled from its brackish bed, up, up, up, breaking into the startling light of the sun.
“Whoa, now, who do we have here?” he asked in astonishment as he pulled the forty pounder half out of the water, the brown of its back glistening wet, its belly creamy as milk and swollen with roe. A mother-fish. Rarely would she feed off a jigger, busy as she was, bottom feeding and readying herself for spawning. Reverently, he unhooked the jigger from the mouth of the quietly struggling fish and watched the sun catch the last glimmer of her gills as she dove back into the deep, the sack of roe in her belly unscathed. He felt proud. The ocean’s bounty, she was, and woe to he who desecrated the mother’s womb. The gods smiled, and within the minute he was pulling another fish up from the deep, a twenty pounder, twice the normal size for a hand-jigged cod, and his heart pounded as he flipped it into his boat.
Two hours later, the twine was chafing his hands and his shoulders had begun to weaken. His father, before the sea took him (along with his eldest brother, Elikum), would’ve held out jigging till the tide ebbed. Come evening, he would’ve returned again, filling his boat for the second time that day, getting home late, late evening, working long into the night, gutting and splitting and salting his catch. And perhaps I might, too, row back out for the second tide, he thought. If I gets the morning’s catch gutted and split and sitting in brine, and a good scoff of Mother’s cooking filling me gut, I just might. And perhaps, by summer’s end, I, too, might spend the whole day standing and jigging with nary an ache nor wish, like Father done.
Perhaps so. For now ’twas the most he could do to bleed the last fish, pull his anchor, and will his leaden arms to lift his paddles out of the water. Shoulders groaning, he rowed against a growing squall, plying harder on his paddles as he swerved back through the choppy waters that always choked the channel’s narrow neck. One last long haul on his oars and he hoisted them inside, gliding toward the shoreline of Cooney Arm. Then, as he’d seen his elders do after making it through the neck in worsening weather, he rose, raising his eyes as if in salute to the wood-coated hills that cuddled the scant few houses of the arm from the wind and sea.
But Sylvanus’s wasn’t the salute of his elders. This morning’s lop was a duck pond alongside the squalls they had survived. His was the salute of pride, for despite his having drawn ashore dozens of times before, sometimes with fifteen, maybe twenty pounds of cod for his mother’s pot, today he was straddling a hundred and twenty pounds or more—a few pounds more than a quintal—from just four hours’ fishing. A fisherman’s catch, for sure, and to be bartered at the merchant’s. And this thought cast his eyes anew upon the hills. Yet, unlike his elders’, his sought more the rock gorge to his right and the thousands of fathoms of white foaming water crashing down its cut and spewing across the meadow into the embodying arms of the mother sea as she buoyed him and his bounty to shore. Water. God’s blood, the elders used to say. And in his moment of pride, Sylvanus Now would’ve traded his last drop of red in gratitude.
THREE MONTHS LATER, the thirty-two quintals of fish bartered and stored in the merchant’s shed, he dodged home, a deep satisfaction filling his chest and the suit, carefully wrapped in brown paper, tucked under his arm. His mother, Eva, her aging hair bundled at her nape and her fading grey eyes bolstered by the black lustrous brows that she’d bequeathed to all of her boys, met him in the doorway. Proudly, he pulled the suit from its wrappings and held it before her—three sizes too big so’s to allow for his last few years’ growth—and announced he was quitting school and going fishing for good.
Eva sighed. His was the unsanctioned egg, the one who shuddered from her old woman’s body long after the others had been born and grown, and a month after her husband and eldest had been lost to the sea. Too wearied
was she to give chase when, the moment he found his legs, he was rattling doorknobs and gateposts and trotting along the beach, bawling to go out in the boat with her third eldest, Manny. And in vain were her protests when Manny, his own chin still soft with baby-down, yet his heart broader than his burly frame and sorrowing for this fatherless youngster, buttoned him inside an oilskin coat that fell below his knees, and hove him aboard his punt. Tying a length of twine with a jigger around Sylvanus’s pudgy hands, he shoved off from shore, heading for the fishing grounds. Now, as Sylvanus filled her doorway, grinning foolishly over the suit he held before her, his glut of coarse, dark hair and brows exaggerating a stubbornness fossilized since birth, she merely ambled past him, pulling on her gardening gloves.
Hooking his suit to a notch below the mantel, Sylvanus left the house and sauntered down to his father’s stage, untouched since the day of his drowning, and wriggled open the door. It was darkish inside and murky, the air sharp with brine. Filling his lungs, he stood, waiting, watching, as his eyes adjusted, giving shape to the bulks and bundles strewn around him.
CHAPTER TWO
COCKLESHELLS AND TOMMYCOD
THE SUIT NETTED him far more than a confirmation certificate. For if it hadn’t shamed him to leave such a fine garment hanging on his door, he never would’ve donned it, now a perfect fit, that Saturday evening four years later and motored in his new thirty-foot, four-horsepower motorboat over to Ragged Rock and the dance Eb Rice was holding in the new addition he was building on his house. Inside was already full of people when he got there, and the door was barred.
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