Leamond huffed, as though deciding between sitting at the table or joining the ruckus over the ratchet. “What boats! Neither one left to float on,” he said testily, choosing to sit and scratch at his weather-reddened neck. “Nothing, sir, nothing! Last schooner sailed today—the last one. Goddamn arse-up governments,” he muttered, oblivious to Adelaide and Florry, who both turned to him in astonishment.
“What’s that—what’s you saying?” asked Florry, shaking her head as if she never heard right. Pulling up a chair, she sat, leaning toward him as he spouted off more about the last schooner sailing, and goddamn arse-up governments.
“Catches on to something new, the first thing they does is get rid of the old. You wouldn’t know, bejesus, fresh fish was God’s gift to Peter, never mind we salters who been eating it and working it since before the Ark.”
“Well—not for good,” said Florry, still struggling to understand, “you don’t mean the last schooner sailed for good.”
“You knows that’s what I means,” shrilled Leamond. “What the hell do you think I means? The last schooner sailed! She’s over. Everybody’s getting liners and selling straight to the plants—goddamn stuff!”
“Aah, not that bad, now. They can’t sell everything to the plants, not that many around to sell everything to.”
“No, not yet, there’s not. Give them another year and we’ll see what’s out there—more plants than flakes, I guarantee you that! Soon won’t see a flake, you watch.” He grunted. “Not that it matters, price of salt fish low as it is. They’ll never get it back up this time—and they’re not bleeding trying, either, arse-up governments! They wants everybody off the flakes, they do, and into them plants, you watch and see if that’s not what they’re scheming for—getting rid of salt fish and working only with fresh.”
“Ah, you worries about nothing,” said Florry. “Always be markets for salt fish. And I don’t mind the prices going down. Up and down like a dog’s stomach, the price of fish. Been like that since I can remember. Gawd, the stink of you, knock a cat off a gut-wagon. Take off that shirt and get over here,” she ordered, shoving herself to her feet and trudging wearily to the washstand. “Hurry up, I gets a wash myself. Lord, I’m dead on my feet this evening. Oh, what’s the matter now?” she cried out as Adelaide, the ratchet wrestled out of Janie’s hand, let out a yelp as her father, stripping off his shirt, headed for her pan of water. “Name of gawd, Addie, you can let your father have a wash, can’t you?”
“Women and youngsters,” spluttered Leamond, dipping his hands into the water and dousing his face, “that’s what spoiled our salt fish markets—letting women and youngsters working the fish” splash splash “bringing down quality” splash splash “and it was the big fish-killers that done that; bringing in more fish than they could handle. Goddamn fools” splash splash splash “can’t keep up quality with women and youngsters working the fish. Where’s the soap, Flo, where’s the soap—got any soap?”
“Ah, you can’t keep it, sir, for the youngsters forever running off with it. Janie, what they got done with the soap? Love of God, Addie, you going to stand there all night pouting? Get that halibut I brought home for supper. Scrub your neck, Leam—I knows now, women can’t work a bit of fish.”
Adelaide slammed the ratchet into the drawer. “More than one maggoty fish I let go then,” she said loudly, then turned to find her father’s eyes stricken upon her, water dripping from his whiskers.
“I like to have them here now!” he roared at her. “You’d be eating them for supper if I did, you slovenly thing!”
“Mind now, she never meant that,” said Florry, blotting the water off his face with a towel. “Best worker in the plant, she is. Here’s the soap—hurry up and scrub. She’s the crooked thing, she is, if she can’t have her wash—and you mind now,” she yelled as Janie delivered a kick to her sister’s shins and darted for the door.
Leamond twisted away from Florry’s scrubbing rag as Adelaide let out a yelp and darted after Janie. “Jeezes, I got to listen to this agin,” he yelled. “like youngsters, young women acting like youngsters.”
“Mind you, don’t start now,” Florry exclaimed with a extra hard scrub. “Enough I got with them all the time at it. Janie, touch that door I’ll break your fingers—go make your father some tea. Show, is that Ivy coming with the young ones? My gawd, you can’t see a thing,” she complained, brushing aside the clutter on the windowsill so’s to peer out. “What’s that? Is that your oilskins?” She pulled back from the window, eyes widened with surprise, clamping a little, round hand to her mouth. “Leamond Ralph, you quit the boats!”
His eyes popped. “Jeezes, isn’t that what I been saying!?”
“I never thought you quit quit!”
“I never quit quit. The boats quit. I knows you don’t listen, brother.”
“Well, sir, I never thought I’d see the day you’d quit the boats. God’s sake, Janie, don’t split the cup,” she cried out as the younger girl stirred her father’s tea, the spoon clanging all sides. “Now, isn’t that something, your father living home. What’s the youngsters going to think of this? Sure, they hardly knows you. Addie, look out the window and see if that’s Ivy I hears coming. Blessed Lord, here they comes then,” and the door burst open and two young ones, couple of years out of diapers, raced in, their shrieks a mix of fear and excitement as Johnnie and Eli bolted after them on all fours, butting at their behinds with their heads and neighing like horses. “Blessed God, Johnnie, leave them be—the mess they’re in! Get their boots off, Janie. Where’d Ivy go? Where’s she gone too? Addie, fill up the washpan, I gets myself a wash; hurry on now, I gets your father’s supper. Did you find that halibut? Well, sir, that’s going to take some getting used to, your father home.”
“SUPPOSING THEY GETS RID of the salt fish trade?” asked Adelaide through a yawn a few mornings following. They had put ashore near a mussel bed around the bend from Little Trite. Sylvanus, an old felt hat shading his eyes from the sun, stood knee-deep in salt water and kelp, his pant legs tucked inside his rubber boots, his jacket sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he bent over, feeling amongst the seaweed and rock for mussels.
“Always be markets for salt fish,” he said airily, tossing a fist-sized mussel into a pot of salt water by her feet.
“How come they’re burning their flakes in Labrador, then? The last schooner sailed last week.”
“What makes you say that?”
“My father said it—the last schooner sailed last week and he was on it. Now he’s not. Now he’s home for good,” she added with a downward twist of her mouth.
“Fits right with me. I wouldn’t feed a dog what they cures down Labrador, much less send it abroad.”
She bristled against that cocky manner of his. “They been doing it for years. Can’t be that hard to get right, curing a fish.”
“Heh. You’d think they’d be putting out more than cullage, then. Because that’s all they been putting out down there for years—bloody cullage—brittled and yellowed as jaundice from salt. That’s what’s costing us our markets, cullage. I wouldn’t barter a fish if it weren’t high grade, damned if I would. That’s what got you soured this morning, is it, your father being home?”
“I’m not sour.”
“No, you’re not. If it weren’t for gritting your teeth, I wouldn’t know you had any. How come he went down to Labrador every summer?”
“I dunno. Likes it, I suppose.”
“He could’ve fished offshore here, on the schooners, and been home every two to three weeks for a few days if he wanted to. No need to have gone to Labrador all summer long.”
She shrugged uninterestedly. “Perhaps he liked not coming home,” she offered, and silently thanked God that he hadn’t, as she fought back another yawn, reminding her of the extra twenty minutes she’d spent standing over the stove every morning since his return, flipping pancakes as he wolfed them down, slurping noisily at his tea whilst ranting and whining about prices and long
liners and arse-up governments.
“Wonder what that’ll do to the shores of Labrador,” Sylvanus was saying, “no more schooner fishing off their banks. I say lots will just stay on, build there. Settle with them that’s already settled there. Perhaps they’ll start putting out some good fish, if they goes working for themselves and not the big fish-killers.”
“Oh, for gawd’s sake,” she interjected, “you sounds like Father.”
“Then he knows something of what he says. I don’t mean that you can’t turn a fish, Addie. I just means you don’t have the same interest in drying high-grade fish as somebody working by himself, for himself. And all this cullage that’s being put out is what’s bringing down the markets. A man shouldn’t fish no more than what he can rightly cure and dry himself. Try telling Manny and Jake that. They went off last week and bought themselves another cod trap and are now netting more fish than they can rightly cure. Now they got to have their women and youngsters working their flakes for them.”
Adelaide rose, impatiently kicking together some driftwood as he switched back to prattling about the liners again, and the midshore in full swing, and the government giving away more and more money for them who wanted a liner built, and how there would soon be as many liners on the water as there used to be schooners, and fishermen ought to be watching out because there wasn’t as much money in owning a liner as there was in owning cod traps, and everybody was getting into debt for nothing—no different from her father’s prattling since he got home. Ugh, fish, liners, and governments; fish, liners, and governments, she thought. Was there ever a place that never smelled a salted fish, never saw a cod cheek, a cod tongue, and wouldn’t know but that britches was a man’s garment? Small chance of that when even Jesus sucked their bones. She inwardly groaned and, piecing together some flat rocks, built a pit for their fire. “You never did answer me,” she accused after he lapsed for breath, still rooting through the water.
“Answer what?”
“What you would do if fresh fish puts an end to the salt fish trade.”
“Like I said, not going to happen.”
“If it did!” she stated emphatically. “I’m asking—what would you do if it did?”
“Not something that’s worrying me. Forty million pounds a year, that’s how much salt cod we sends over them seas a year, and a hundred mil of fresh. Figures like that don’t change overnight. And it’s not just a way of preserving a fish, either,” he said more strongly, pointing at her with a mussel shell. “That’s where you’re getting it wrong if you thinks it’s all about preserving fish. It’s more than that—it’s the taste. People wants salt fish because they wants the taste. Cripes, if I had to go a week without a scoff of drawn butter—” His words fell off, his face grimacing as he fathomed such a thought.
“You still never answered,” she said hotly. “I asked what would you do if—ooh, never mind. I knows exactly what you’d do. What everybody else is doing is what you’d do—switch over to fresh and sell straight to the plant. For sure you’d never give up your precious boat. Not even listening,” she muttered as he sauntered through the kelp-twisted waters, effortlessly ripping from the roots those vines that didn’t flow with him. Like a frigate, she thought resentfully, settling down on her patch of grass near the pot of mussels, stalwart as a frigate when he was on or near water. She was starting to prefer the clumsy gait he took whenever he was too far from it, like traipsing behind her on the meadow or along the roads of Ragged Rock, feeling unsure of himself and keen on pleasing her. Least then she stood a chance of persuading him of something.
“Ooh!” A fist-sized mussel plopped into the pot, splattering her bared ankles with ice-cold water.
“You just going to watch?” he called out, now the defrocked priest with his shirt collar white against the dark of his throat, and his shirt-tail hanging below the black of his jacket, and his forefinger jabbing wickedly toward her.
She wrinkled her nose. “Wriggly tails.”
“Wriggly tails!” He examined the wet, black hair matting his forearms, checking for sea lice. “Thinks I’m lousy, do you? Bet that don’t feel too good, huh, dining with a lousy fisherman? Bet you would’ve stayed home, had you known this, huh?”
“Had I somewhere else to go, I would’ve,” she said contrarily.
He fell quiet, his eyes losing their revelry, and she flushed at her forthrightness. Sloshing ashore, he stomped the water off his boots, his mouth twisted angrily.
“If I hated a place as much as you, I’d crawl out,” he said evenly. “Must be why you hates babies so much—they reminds you of yourself.”
“What’s that suppose to mean?”
“Means you sees in their helplessness your own. They can’t get about without nobody leading them, and neither can you, it seems. Else, as you just said, you’d be gone.”
He looked away as her eyes sharpened onto his and, searching through his pockets, pulled out some matches. Kneeling beside the firepit, he struck a match, cursing softly as the flame died, and struck another. Two more matches met the same fate, and he leaned closer to the pit. A flicker of fire started, and he sat back, feeding it birch rind and wood chips till he had a good-sized blaze going. Placing the pot of mussels on top of two sticks he’d crisscrossed atop the firepit, he squatted, watching her through the rising film of heat and smoke.
“I didn’t mean what I said,” she offered.
He nodded. Picking up a stick, he idly poked at the fire. Laying down the stick, he clasped his hands around his knees, his face troubled. Finally, in barely audible tones, he spoke.
“I’m not much of a chance for you, am I? No, that’s fine,” he said more deeply as she opened her mouth to protest. “I knows what I am. I’m like the bull I hunts, always walking into the wind. The second I gets whiff of someone, I skelters. I was in Corner Brook just once. Not for me, cities aren’t—people milling about everywhere, and impossible to get near the water for docks and freighters. All for being by myself, I am. And you’re the other way around.”
“Don’t know how you can say that when I’m always hankering to be by myself.”
“City crowds is what you’d like. People everywhere but nobody knowing you—and no flakes and fish for a hundred miles. You hates it—fish and flakes.”
“Throw in babies,” she said, and felt contrite beneath his pained look. “What do I know what I likes?” she then asked. “I might be a great dancer or dressmaker for all I knows. The closest I ever got to a wonder is the falls in Cooney Arm.”
“Then you should find yourself one,” he replied. “Hunting—that’s a wonder to me; how it’s always taking me somewhere different in my mind, figuring this, figuring that, the time of day, the time of year, the wind, old habits, new tricks by me and the bull alike. Same with fishing—tides, currents, habits.” He shook his head. “Everything—warm water, cold water, where they’re feeding, when they’re not, where best to moor. It gets in your blood, thinking and figuring like that all the time. Even when you’re cutting logs during the winter, you’re figuring next spring’s tracking, mooring, when the caplin might roll. Nothing else gets in my blood like that. Nothing I hears on the radio, unless they’re talking the price of fish, or the new nets coming out, or the markets. You got to lose yourself in something, Addie, and that’s when you finds the wonder of it.” He lapsed at the far-distant look in her eyes, as though she stood watching him from another shore.
“It’s something that you even find time to gather your thoughts like that,” she said after a while. “Even when I’m sleeping, there’s a youngster bawling out for a bottle, his piss-pot, or a piece of jam bread. I can’t remember a thought that’s mine.”
“Let me build you a house,” he urged, his eyes sweltering through the heat of the fire now leaping between them.
She shook her head, raising her hand as though to keep him at bay as he practically leaped the short distance between them, his feet scrunching through the rocks as he lowered himself beside her, nud
ging her aside for more room on her patch of grass.
“I’ll build it on the meadow, right next to the brook. You love it there, I can tell.”
“No, it’ll be the same.”
“No, no it won’t. It’ll be your house. It’s a different thing then; it’ll feel different.”
“You said it yourself—it’s when you chooses a thing it makes you rich. And now you’re just choosing for me, like everybody else.”
“What about me? Would you choose me?” he asked, his hands heavy as he laid them upon her shoulders. “Would you have danced with me, had I asked? Would you?” he half whispered, rubbing his cheek against hers. She closed her eyes, liking the roughness of his skin against hers, the heat of his chest breeching her blouse.
“Like holding on to a finch,” he murmured, circling both arms around her, his breath warm against her ear. “It’s a wonder the wind don’t up and blow you away. If I built you a house near the neck, I’d have to tether you to the porch.”
She struggled to protest, but the air was full of him, his arms bands of heat that suddenly she would be cold without.
“You won’t ever have to touch a fish agin,” he said thickly, “or even see a flake—I grant you.”
“No, because I’ll be too busy having babies,” she cried, making a feeble attempt to free herself. But in that moment her defiance became a grace that overthrew his timidity, and he pulled her to face him, his lips softening, trembling as she knew they would.
“We don’t have to,” he whispered urgently, “as long as I can touch you, is all; as long as we can do this,” and a tremor shot through her as he touched his mouth to hers, his fingers stroking fire through her belly. And as his desire created desire within her, that other thing was created: the need for someone. And who more better than he, now lying back upon the grass and pulling her atop of him, his chest cushioning her breasts and his hands roving her back, pressing her, pulling her, tightly, more tightly against him.
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