Sylvanus Now

by Donna Morrissey

  “Give it up, Manny,” said Sylvanus wearily. “I’m doing what I’m doing till there’s no more doing, and then I’ll think of some other way. But I’m just not packing it in first sign, is all.”

  “First sign?” Manny sat back on the thwart, looking up at his brother in resignation. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Just let me say this—I’ll just say it once!” he yelled as Sylvanus grunted in exasperation. “It’s not all that bad, all right. Getting rid of the flakes is not all that bad. Just hear me, all right, just hear me. Since we started selling straight to the plant, I sees a big difference in a day. Don’t have to be out in the stage all hours of the night, gutting and scrubbing, and the least bit of rain sending me running to the flakes, or else a whole bloody load of fish is spoiled. You don’t have to hang on to all of it, Syllie. There’s a comfort, brother, in hauling your nets and passing your catch straight to the plants—especially now, with other things that might be coming. Anyway.” He rose to leave as Sylvanus’s eyes brooded onto his.

  “What other things?” asked Sylvanus. “What’s this other thing you keeps hinting about? Well, you might as well tell me,” he hollered as Manny brushed him aside, leaping upon the stage. “What? Is bloody Noah floating by on his ark? Oh, I knows—he can’t find a pair of codfish, so he’s after mine, is that it, brother? Noah wants me fish—oh, and me stage, too?” he asked as Manny turned, jabbing a finger back at him. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Noah wants me stage.”

  “Bang-o, buddy. I didn’t know how to tell you,” said Manny. “Better tell him to hold off, though, because the first load of fish me and Jake catches in our new skiff, we’re dumping right here on your stagehead. That’s right, bawl all you likes, now,” he said over Sylvanus’s scoff, “but that’s just what we’re doing—giving you our first catch. So, start hauling up your bleeding boat before it’s too late in the evening and you’re out on the water in the dark. Got Mother drove off her head, worrying, you have.”

  Sylvanus threw down his prong. “Now, you listen here!” he said angrily.

  “Nothing left to listen to,” said Manny. “Come over after you’ve done, and have one of Jake’s new brews. He’ll be fine, then. Don’t give me that,” he said threateningly as Sylvanus snorted. “Mother don’t like goings-on like this. And look, there’s a fish beneath your boot, not even bled. Getting slack, my son, getting slack.”

  Sitting back on the thwart as Manny vanished inside the stage, Sylvanus picked up the missed fish, his hands shaking. Making Mother worried, he mocked. She’d be more bloody worried seeing me off to sea with Jake in the mornings. She’d be worried then!

  Pulling his skinning knife out of his boot, he slit the fish’s throat, imagining it his own should fortune send him aboard a thirty-foot skiff, hauling in gill nets for hours on end, listening to Jake’s ongoing sputtering, and the arguing and spitting and farting of two or three others crowding around him, spoiling the quiet of a morning.

  “Not a bleeding chance,” he muttered out loud, “not a bleeding chance.” Climbing out of his boat, he angrily cleared off his splitting table, trying to figure the one thing making him the angriest—the overfishing or arguing with Jake. Attacking his small pile of fish, he started gutting and splitting, gutting and splitting, his hands creating a rhythm that eventually hammered all else outside, no matter he was missing that sense of comfort that always came when he centred himself amongst his labours; no matter his half-emptied puncheons were stealing his sense of worth; no matter the dying babies and how desperately he lay beside his Addie, wanting her; no matter it took him sixteen hours to do what normally took twelve. His mainstay was making fish. And making them proper. And when the last one was gutted and split and carefully laid out in the puncheons, he rose with a grim satisfaction and stepped outside, taking a stretch and a breath of clear air.

  It was growing dark. His mother’s lamp was already lit, her face peering through the window—and was that Addie? Yes, it was Addie, letting herself out through his mother’s gate, picking up some rocks and whipping them at a couple of crows having a late-evening feast on some garbage rotting near the side of the yard. She was most times at his mother’s since she started helping in the garden. She glanced his way, her features lost in the hour just past twilight.

  “Are you finished for the day?” she called out.

  He nodded, feeling a warmth as she stepped into his mother’s lamplight and smiled, the shadows playing over her face. She started toward him, and he sucked in his breath, cursing that he stood in his oilskins, streaked with blood, and with the stench of gut upon his hands.

  Backing into his stage, he called out, “I’ll be home in a minute.” Closing the door, he glimpsed through the window, watching as she stood there for a minute before turning homeward. He glanced about his stage, dimly lit by an old kerosene lantern, its mantle partially blown. After pumping more air into the lantern for more light, he skimmed out of his oilskins, and whereas in the past he had scrubbed his hands and face before going home, this evening he stripped proper—sweater, shirt, pants, and underwear—and stood naked in the shadows. Unclamping the cold-water hose, he hosed the length of himself, then started lathering the broad expanse of his chest, the length of his arms, digging deeply into the black, hairy crux of his pits. He bent over with a grunt, soaping his navel, his loins, his heavily muscled thighs, his bowed knees, his calves, all hairy, black. “Like the beast,” he grunted, “like the mute beast.”

  His teeth chattering with cold, he hosed himself off, then scrubbed himself dry with a ratty, threadbare towel and hastily climbed back into his dirty clothes. Holding down his head, he hosed his hair, the cold water numbing his scalp. Flicking it dry, he finger-combed it back in place, and getting a tidied view of himself in a cracked piece of pane, he stepped back outside, feeling somewhat heartened, and hurried home.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  OLD SAW TOOTH

  ONE LATE AFTERNOON, and the tide already partway in, Sylvanus shoved off his boat with a heavy heart. He ought to be out on the water by now, already jigging, not just pushing off from shore. But with the small fish he was hooking these days, it took forever to catch his morning quota. And by the time he’d cleaned and salted them, and laid out those in the faggots and turned those on the flakes, well, it felt like he was always racing the tide to get back out for the evening catch, and then racing against the falling light, now that fall was taking on, to get back to shore.

  It was not just the lateness of the hour that was deflating him this afternoon. He was getting used to that, fishing all hours of the day and evening. No, something a whole lot worse he’d just heard on the fishermen’s broadcast was causing the sickness in his stomach. The haddock fishery was at the point of collapse. Collapse! A fish that was as abundant upon the sea as the cod near gone. Fished out. Fear swept up and down the shores like fire.

  Didn’t we say, Sylvanus silently cried out, standing in his boat, steering his way through the neck, didn’t we bloody say? And the cod won’t last, either. This shows she can’t last—not when the spawning grounds are being fished out. What kind of fool can’t figure that? What kind of fool can’t figure we’re farmers, not hunters; that we don’t search out and destroy the spawning grounds, that we waits for the fish to be done with their seeding, and then they comes to us for harvesting? What kind of fools can’t figure that what’s happening to the haddock will happen to the cod? That’s it’s already starting with the smaller fish and shorter seasons? That what’s happening on top of the water is a sure measure of what’s happening beneath? That with the mother’s immeasurable depths and complexities, a fish once lost can never be found? What kind of fools—what kind of fools can’t figure that?

  And that’s when a great silence fell upon him. Any man could figure that logic. What truth, then, was this?

  They knew. The weight with which this thought struck him forced him to sit. They knew. Of course they knew. Everybody knew. Governments. Corporations. Merchants. Even the fishermen working the
big boats knew. But they would keep doing it anyway, like a youngster gobbling down the profits from his jelly bean business— knowing the difference, but unable to stop.

  Sickened, he anchored two stone’s throws past Pollock’s Brook and tossed his jiggers into the sea; left arm up, right arm down; right arm up, left arm down. Left, right, left, right. Two hours went by with a quarter of the bites he was used to getting. His stomach knotting with hunger, he rowed up to Gregan’s Hole and went ashore. There, he kicked together a pit and skinned the smallest cod in his boat, throwing it into his pan with hardtack and onions.

  “Government,” he grunted, stoking the fire so’s to stew the fish faster and get back to jigging, “a bloody government is what we needs, one who’s not afraid to stand up and stave off this glut off our shores, who’s not scared to go out and do what Jake says, blow the bastards off the water. And never mind talk; talk don’t do nothing because nobody’s listening to talk. And for the name of jeezes, don’t give us another ten years of research because your last ten years proved to be wrong, and now you needs another ten to figure why. A limit is what we needs, a goddamn two-hundred-mile limit like the Chileans got so’s to protect the spawning grounds—our spawning grounds!—and drive all them foreigners the hell home to fish out what’s left of their own shores.”

  Fingering back the last of the fish, he shucked the bones to the gulls and started back out to sea. Anchoring over Gregan’s Hole, he stood wearily, left arm up, right arm down, right arm up, left arm down, right down, left up, left down, right up, his mind tiredly playing over and over the rest of the broadcast he had heard that morning, the governing fathers responding to the accusatory voices of the fishermen after the announcement of the collapsing haddock fishery.

  “Yes, b’yes, no doubts you’ve seen things, learned things over time, and no doubts your bits of lore might have some truth,” they had said placatingly, “but it’s not weighty enough to be sorted—not like the research our experts are doing on the trawlers and the factory freezers. No, sir, there’s still lots of fish in the sea. We know because we’re catching them—and it’s what you need to do, too, as we keep telling you. What you need is a better means of catching them, a better way of processing them, and better markets to sell them to. And forget this blasting boats out of the water business; you can’t go blasting boats off the water, not when most of them have been fishing out there longer than you have, and not when they’ve families to feed, just like you. But a boundary, yes, you’ve a right to a boundary, and we’re working on getting one, the day is coming, b’yes. Just give us time, give us time.”

  “Time,” muttered Sylvanus, tossing his jiggers back out into the water, “time for what? For us all to starve?”

  He jigged for near on two hours. Still his catch was far lower than what it ought to have been. Raising his eyes, he checked the clouds—feathered whites, racing a bit hard, but it was a blue sky with lots of light left yet, and the sun nice and warm for late September. Instead of heading home with the belly of his boat not quite fed, he heaved on the flywheel and putted another thirty or forty minutes out on the open waters of the bay, jigging the undersea gully of Woody’s Inlet, searching for the larger blackbellies.

  The fates were with him, and he hooked a fish within minutes after tossing his line—not the size he was hoping for, but, hell, he was starting to be appreciative of a tommycod these days. They continued biting, and he felt some of the tension leave his body. Not all bad, I suppose, he thought. Stories drifted daily up and down the bay about the lone fisherman forced into trap fishing, the liners, or the plants. Some poor bastards were forced to move, not just by the lull in fishing, but by their wives and youngsters, too, buying into the bloody nonsense resettlement program the government was pushing more rapidly these days. He shook his head. It didn’t make sense to him, moving people from a smaller place to a larger one— easier to build roads, no doubt, and drive poles for electricity. But not to find fish. You had to go farther along the shore to find fish—a cove or arm or headland where nobody lived—then hunt out different spots, different runs. That’s how they’d always done it in the past, and it made more sense than this crowding families into the one cove and the fishermen out on the same shelf, especially when those already settled there had the best spots. It was not as if you could drop anchor beside somebody else’s boat and start fishing their hole. Nor were there signs planted on the water telling everyone where the plates and ridges and shelves were located, and where best to find a good run and the kind of fish that fed there. Not an easy thing to move and start figuring the belly of the sea around you. Might as well give yourself the best chance if you did have to move, and go where nobody else lived and get yourself first pick.

  Some of the morning’s gloom started leaving him as he slowly filled his boat. As bad as things were getting, he was lucky, he supposed. Least nobody else hand-lined in Cooney Arm, which gave him lots of room to move about and lots of holes to fish. Perhaps it was taking him longer on the water to get lesser catch than he had before, but he didn’t mind the extra work, as long as she held out the rate she was—as long as she just bloody held out!

  Despite the late hour, the sun grew warmer. He threw off his oilskin, feeling its heat burning through to his skin like a strong liniment. Right arm up; left arm down; left arm up; right arm down; up, down; up, down; right, left; left, right. He yawned, starting to feel the length of the day. Times, he swore, if it wasn’t for the fish hooking his lines, he could pass himself off as a horse and sleep standing up. And perhaps he did sleep, he was to tell himself later, and that’s why he stayed jigging as long as he did that evening. He should’ve known better—he did know better; smaller boats fished inshore, not midshore, not offshore. They fished inshore because there was always time to get the hell home if a bad wind started up, whether it was a full-on blowout, a die-down easterly, or the savage nor’westerly that, without warning, screeched out of a sunny-lit sky like twisters, skidding into the sea, and sending drifts of water ten, twelve feet in the air before they spread out like a black cloud overhead, falling back into the water like a heavy rain. And it was this, the savage nor’westerly, that first got him.

  He rode it just fine. Spiteful as they were, there were saving graces in nor’westerlies. Their squalls were isolated gusts, never measuring more than five to ten feet wide when they struck the sea, and they were sporadic; a squall here, a squall there, never more than two striking at once, and then, never less than hundreds and hundreds of feet apart. Which gave Sylvanus lots of room to figure where the next one wouldn’t hit. Yet, instead of grabbing a paddle and rowing to where the first squall had just now purged itself, he stayed where he was, pulling in a hooked fish.

  “Christ!” he muttered as another squall skidded into the sea a direct line behind him, raising a sheet of water and sending it hurtling toward him and his boat. But hell if he was going to lose this fish! Madly hauling in his line, he hunched down in his boat, wishing to jeezes that he’d had time to haul his oilskin back on. A gale of iced water sluiced against him, drenching him, knocking him sideways. He swore and clenched more tightly to his line, gripping the thole-pins as his boat rocked and bucked like a overwrought ram.

  “Son of a bitch!” he swore again. But no matter. His boat was sound, and the squall was gone as quick as it hit, sucking up its venom for another strike some distance away, leaving him sitting on a patch of sea that within minutes was calmer than a duck pond. And the sky still blue.

  Flicking aside the fringe of black hair now plastered to his forehead and streaming salt water into his eyes, he finished hauling in his fish and bled it. His hands—his whole body—were becoming chilled from the water seeping through his garnsey into his bones. Tearing off the garnsey, he pulled on an old workshirt from the cuddy, hauled it on over his wet undergarments, and donned his oilskin. The squalls were pitching more frequent than he liked, stirring up water first to this side of him, then to the other, till it felt as if he were sitting on
a giant checkerboard, waiting to be hurtled to the wayside.

  Time to get the hell home, he silently muttered, then cursed as a black ridge out on the open waters, past Cape Ray, caught his eye—the nor’westerlies were circling about into a full-out blow coming from the east. It was possible to sit through a nor’westerly, if you had faith in your boat, but only fools attempted sitting through a full-out blow in a motorboat loaded down with fish and a half hour from shore. Coiling his lines, he lunged for his motor, cursing at the bloody nemesis keeping him from a decent hour’s fishing this evening. Studying the sky once more and seeing dark clouds moving in from the east with dark fog trailing below, he opened his throttle, avoiding the dead straight route to the head, and steered toward shore instead. In twenty minutes the winds would either be full pitch and levelling off, or building for a stronger blow. Better to be close to shore than caught going through the snarling waters of the neck in a full-out blow.

  Ten minutes later and the wind had outraced the fog, bumping his boat along on choppy waters. Half hunkered beside his engine, he leaned his elbow on his knee, watching the cold, galloping winds and the dirty-grey clouds outstrip the warm sunny evening. Dismal. The only time he didn’t like the water was when he was being shuttled about by the easterlies with damp grey sky pressing down on him. The wind was battling harder now, and he nosed himself a bit more in alignment to the shoreline so’s to keep most of the wind at his stern and not be broadsided. It was easier motoring into a wind than having it push at his rear like this, threatening to swamp him with a far-flung breaker. Little Trite popped out from behind a bend, its windswept shoreline bereft of souls, the lamp-lit windows like little suns through evening’s falling light. He tightened his throttle. Good place to put ashore—but, hell, the fish had to be cleaned, and he was a dirty mess, and swear to gawd, he could smell roasted mutton trailing from Mother’s door. Besides, another ten minutes and he’d be rounding the head—but, hell, in this wind the neck would be broiling beneath its breakers. Still, he’d seen his brothers put through in rougher waters than this.