Manny scoffed. “Not that I knows of. Look, you just got to give up your stubbornness, is all. Just give up your blasted stubbornness!”
“Stubbornness! What the hell you talking about, stubbornness?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about—stubbornness! And don’t fly off your head at me,” he warned as Sylvanus groaned. “See! See, that’s just what I means!” he said as Sylvanus turned from him impatiently. “You don’t listen, Syllie, you don’t listen to nothing or nobody.”
“What things—what bloody things? In the name of Jesus, say something and I’ll listen,” yelled Sylvanus.
“Nothing! I’m not trying to say nothing! No sense talking to the likes of you about nothing when it comes to fishing!”
“Right, right, just like Father, just like Father— whoever the hell Father was,” and he wiped at his mouth, near frothing he was so bleeding mad.
Manny grinned—a hard grin, one that was more a curse than a grin. “My son, you’re the case,” he said. “Boundaries, b’ye, that’s all. We finally got them—just heard it on the radio. Twelve miles. Perhaps that’ll change everything. Come on, let’s go to Jake’s.”
“Boundaries? Hell, that’s not what’s up your arse this evening. Boundaries!” he spat, as Manny swung away from him. “Some good now, to make boundaries when the fish makes their own. Horseshit, is all that is, horseshit!”
Manny spun about. “Yeah, well, why don’t you go have a little chat with the fishies,” he said, jabbing hard at his brother’s chest, “and when you gets everything straightened out between them and the wops and the limeys and the krauts and all else who’s out there, you give me a shout and we’ll have another chat, all right?”
“Oh, bugger off!” snarled Sylvanus, knocking his hand aside. “Bugger off!” he warned as Manny, enraged, curled a fist. “By the jeezes, you won’t get away with that agin.”
“Manny! Syllie!”
They both turned at their mother’s voice. She came running, her winter shawl weighing down her thin shoulders and her boot laces all untied. Adelaide hurried behind, pulling on a coat, her hair whipping with the wind.
Manny stove his fist behind him. “For gawd’s sake, Mother, get back in the house,” he yelled.
“What’re ye fighting over?” cried Eva. “Manny?”
“Nothing, we’re not fighting over nothing,” said Sylvanus. “Take her back, Addie. Jeezes, she’s freezing,” he cried, draping an arm around her shoulders to shield her.
The old woman broke clear of him, her brow as dark as her boys’. “I’m not so lame I needs to be led. Did you tell him?” she asked Manny.
“No. No, look, Mother, go on inside.”
Sylvanus raised his hands to the heavens. “Yup, here we go agin.” Turning appealing eyes to his mother, he fell before her on one knee, his hands mockingly clasped in prayer, asking, “In the name of Jesus, will you tell me what it is ye haven’t told me?”
“They’re moving us.” It was Adelaide who spoke.
Sylvanus rose, looking to her. Her face was white with cold, her lips blue. “Who?” he asked, despite his incomprehension of her words. “Who’s moving us?”
“The government,” she said.
Manny’s voice was strained. “You’re the last one to hear it, brother. The government’s moving us—everybody. Resettlement,” he added almost irritably as Sylvanus kept looking from one to the other with a blank look. “The whole shebang—except for them who won’t go. But from what I hears, there’s nobody saying no—except the old midwife, probably. And Mother, if you don’t go,” he added as an afterthought.
Sylvanus stared speechless at his brother, an awful dawning opening his eyes as he heard, finally, what his brother had been trying to tell him for some time.
“How long have you known this?” he asked, then lapsed a second before falling back as though struck. “You’re all for it. You’re all for it,” he repeated, as though to convince himself of his words. “And Jake—no doubt Jake’s for it—he’s talked you into it, hasn’t he, hasn’t he, Manny? Yes, he has, that son of a bitch,” he yelled as Manny shook his head. Again Sylvanus lapsed into silence, his eyes beseeching his brother to tell him no, no, it isn’t so, that he, Manny, wouldn’t go along with no government plan to shut down Cooney Arm, shut down their homes, their fishing. No, no, not so, nobody would want this, to shut down Cooney Arm, to be moved.
A sickness crept into his heart, leaking into his guts, his testicles, weakening him, and he stared disbelievingly at this brother who was now shifting uneasily, dragging in deep breaths for words of persuasion.
“Stick it,” said Sylvanus in the awful quiet of a voice whose anger has been shorn by its source. “Stick anything else you got to say. It’ll sicken me to hear it.” He turned to his mother, her aging face sinking into the hollows of her skull, her eyes pleading with his to be fine.
“I knows it’s hard, Syllie,” said Manny. “But we can come back whenever we like, keep our houses for a summertime place—”
“Screw you! Screw you, a summertime place! And you knows dick if you thinks this is going to fix anything. How long have ye known this?” he asked his mother and Addie. “Bloody hell,” and he punched his knuckles into his palm as his mother’s eyes fell away.
“Only yesterday,” said Adelaide. “You haven’t been home long enough to say nothing to.”
She reached out to touch him, and he shrank from her. “You knows the way to the stage,” he said stealthily. “You wouldn’t have gotten dirty poking your head in for a minute.”
She flushed red and he was surprised by his cutting her. He was surprised too, as if he’d just awakened, at the sight of his mother standing there in the freezing winds, wearing only a shawl.
“For gawd’s sake, take her back in,” he said to Adelaide, and then turned to Manny, grabbing his shoulders, his voice strong, “Manny, jeezes, b’ye, we don’t have to follow through with this. What the hell, Manny, move? Everybody move? What the hell, brother, we don’t have to move.”
“Not just for we, buddy, for the youngsters, too,” said Manny. “They’ll have better schools and roads. We’re too small and too out of the way to get some of the things they’re getting in Ragged Rock, Hampden, places like that. Look, b’ye,” he said as Sylvanus turned from him, “it’s not what we wants, all right? It’s all that’s left for us, that’s all. The whole goddamn thing’s turned around. They don’t need we salting fish no more, not with the factory freezers on board. And you can’t help but see the truth of it. Might not be what we wants, but it’s a better way, simple as that. Freezing fish is a better way of keeping them than salting. Bigger boats is a better way of catching them. Simple as that. And if we don’t go along with it, we’re out in the cold.”
“Bullshit! That’s bullshit,” Sylvanus snorted. “That’s just what they wants you to think because it’s too bloody much trouble to keep after the markets, is all, and they all wants the new stuff—the new markets, and them big, pretty boats, and everybody wearing aprons and looking white and clean and modern—modern!” he mocked. “That’s what they’re always saying, isn’t it, that we got to be modern, that we’re backwards with no vision? Shamed of us is what they are, shamed of a bloody sou’wester and a punt.
“Well, you better watch out, buddy, because they’ll have you trading your skiff for a trawler next, and your sou’wester for a derby, and next thing you’ll be all nice and modern on the deck of a freezer, doing to us what the rest of the bastards have been doing for years now—wiping us out. Vision!” he spat, his mouth contorting with anger. “There’s more vision in the eye of my dick than what’s in their heads. Ye go, then, along with everybody else listening to their crap. But I’m not. I’m bloody not, youngster or no youngster.”
He couldn’t bring himself to look at Adelaide as he spoke this last. Lowering his head, he lurched past her, past his stage, and onto the shore, hunching his shoulders against the sky already darkened with low, heavy clouds, and the
winds swooping off the land, and scuds of foam flitting along the beach from the fevered sea.
Move. A sickness churned in his stomach, and he stood still against the squalls as though to feel the steadiness of the rock beneath his feet, to assure himself that it, too, wasn’t about to erode. It started to drizzle, the wet scenting the air with a fleet of smells that, under this threat of moving, were already alien with nostalgia. He’d been breathing them since the day of his birth. He hadn’t noted them a separate thing from all else around him. Pine smoke, birch smoke, green vir—cripes, he knew whose chimney they were pouring from: Manny hated vir; Jake burned only vir; Ambrose, as he himself, loved the nice clean smell of birch.
Blind. He could walk blind through this place and know the exact pebble he stood upon simply from the smells. There, roasted squid; only Ambrose had dried squid this early in the year. And that sour smell was from the old midwife sloshing dirty dishwater outside her stoop for the past thirty years. And there, the smell of Melita’s chicken coop; never cleaned it, she didn’t— though it was the only thing not spruced to a shine around her. And the wet of Manny’s sawdust heaped beside his wood-house, the seaweed rotting minerals into his mother’s potato beds, the strong trouty smell of the brook water, the freshness of the falls, the sweet smell of grass from the meadow luring him more quickly toward the footbridge, leading home. And if the wind was off the sea, smothering everything with the smell of brine, the sounds would guide him along: the muffled voices behind the doors, each of them distinguishable in their familiarity, the hens clucking, the baa from his mother’s goats, the rushing of the brook, the deepening roar of the falls.
He strolled off the beach, crossing over the footbridge. The brook was wild beneath it, and with the escalating roar of the wind, the falls, and the sea, it felt as though he were caught in a full-out storm. He paused before the back wall of his house. Even if there was anybody inside with the fire going and lamp lit, you’d never know it, he thought grimly. From this vantage point, it always looked emptied, abandoned.
Bending into the wind, he veered off the path leading to his door and trekked instead down over the meadow to the beach and up toward the neck. The sea was a dirty grey crashing upon the rocks. Soon, with the failing light, and aside from the sparkles of plankton rippling like stars along the catacomb shoreline, she would be black. But he didn’t need to see her. Like the land, she, too, had been imprinted into his brain. He knew her every fit, her every calm—from her ripples as she stirred with the first breath of morning into wavelets as the breeze taunted her further. Best of all, he knew her laziness beneath an easy wind, how her long, slow swells lent a greater buoyancy to his boat. And he knew, too, how quickly those swells could deepen and be whipped into twenty-foot peaks by squalling winds, and how to get the hell home afore those peaks crested and toppled, toppling him and his boat, too, if he were too heavy with fish. And when she stirred too deeply, when she scraped her floors and hurtled herself forward, and her whole surface darkened beneath the white of her spit, and ships disappeared in the length of her troughs, and her fury reverberated through the rocks of the head as she thundered and crashed against them— well, he felt then the strength of this mother, and he wondered at his fear of overfishing, that mere man could hamper such a powerful, massive thing as an ocean.
He wondered, too, at his resistance to leave the shores of Cooney Arm, when it was the same sea that washed upon all shores, for it was the ocean that mattered, never the land upon which she cascaded. In his grandfather’s day, the hills had no names, for it was toward the sea that they looked, and her shelves and ridges that they named. But, no, not so for him. It was the headlands and harbours that graced her shores that he was just as beholden to, most especially this arm, Cooney Arm, onto whose land he was born. Like a homespun blanket, it was, whose four corners held firmly to the bedpost, despite the ripples, bulges, and protrusions caused by the growing, squirming souls sheltering beneath it.
He had stood, once, amidst the ruins of an abandoned settlement. He had seen the stumps of the homes that had once been; the well, all emptied and dried; window frames and doors flung hither by the wind and rotting into the ground; mounds of dirt and grass covering the floors like graves. And he had felt cold, standing there, listening to the moaning of the trees as though lamenting the loss of the souls they had once sheltered, and the grass bending to and fro with the wind, searching for the children who had once adorned the fields like daisies.
He rose from the rocks upon which he clung, looking back through the darkening settlement of Cooney Arm and the little patches of yellow light stitching her shores. Now she, too, was threatened with death, her homes mutilated to stumps, her wells parched, and the wharves and flakes left to rot. For without the breath of her homesteaders sweeping through her grass, without their blood trumpeting down her hillside, carousing across her meadow, without their hands moulding her seedlings and touching their tongues to her fruit, she, too, would die.
No, he thought. Not him. Maybe others could up and move, but not him. He was as rooted into this strip of land as were the woods around him.
A burst of flankers poured from his chimney, its fiery orange burning through the evening. She was home. Had she spoken? Had she protested his thought? He paused as a patch of yellow lit up his window. His shoulders sank as he heard his brother’s accusations that he was stuck in the past, still living in his father’s day. Was she accusing him, too? And was he? Was he so embedded that time swept past him? That he was no more than the mute beast in the field? Is that what she, his Addie, saw—one of his mother’s goats, mindlessly chomping back feed all day long whilst the rest of the world grew modern around him?
It was a sickening thought, yet almost immediately his answer was no. Undoubtedly, as a feathered creature shapes and grows into its habitat, so was he woven into the fabric of this land. But it was when he lifted his head at the day’s end that he differed, when he saw the all of what he’d done and what he had become. For he was more than the land and the sea. He was an accumulation of all that had come before him—his father, his grandfather, his greatgreat-grandfathers who had coddled and had been coddled by these waters since time began. A repository, that’s what he was, a casket into which the old put themselves. No, not a casket, a sieve whereby they continued to flow through him, and those others who, God willing, would come from him. An ocean of ancients is what lay behind him, and he, little more than a drop of rain before his immersion into that great sea.
Perhaps she did see him as a mindless galoot covered in gurry. Perhaps the whole damn world saw him as that. But he knew different. And to remove himself from the very thing that sustained him would kill him as it would kill it. Yet that was the very thing being asked of him—no, not asked, told—that he go pour himself over the outgrowth of another. And for some, that ought to be the way of it, to pull their past forward and combine it with the newness of another to make a different thing.
But ought not there be some things that remained the same, as with the trees and rocks around him? Ought not some things stand still for those others caught in the cyclone of change, should they need to return? Even he, this lowly man clinging to a rock, could see in the buildup of the offshore fishing fleets the germ of their own demise. What then? Had it been for a better thing, merely because it was bigger, newer?
The patch of yellow beyond which Addie had sat dimmed. She was standing now, blocking the lamp, her hands cupped against the pane, staring out, looking for him. He should go in; she might be worried, he thought. Since the night she’d led him and his mother off the head, she had become edgy whenever he was a bit late.
She pulled away from the window, and immediately his house vanished into darkness. He half rose. Had the lamp run out of oil? No, no, he could see its flickering now through the bedroom window, a faint flickering, as though she had set it down in the hallway near the bedroom door. She was taking herself to bed. His stomach sank a bit further. He felt cold without the warmth of
her light, without her watching out for him. His eyes trailed along the dots of light around the arm. But it was hers he kept coming back to, kept wanting for comfort.
Immediately, his window lit up. She was back, lifting the curtain aside, her light spilling out through, and with it another part of the awful, beautiful truth he’d already learned that evening: that just as those from the past continuously flowed through him, so, too, were those in his midst a grid through which he himself had to pass. And who more than she? Had he not built himself around her as he had the sea? No doubt he could resist a faceless government, tighten his belt and live as he always had, but could he resist her should she start packing? And even if he could persuade her to stay alongside him on a deserted beach with a failing way of life and where never a gadget of modernity could reach her, would he?
He sank back down, shaking his head. No doubt, in true Addie fashion, she probably would stay beside him, alone in Cooney Arm, and never once complain. But, cripes, how long could he continue living alongside such favour without searching her eyes for reproach each time she glanced his way? He’d already persuaded her once to live with him in Cooney Arm, promising her she’d never have to turn another fish. In that, he had failed her. He failed her again in believing that a nice house of her own would bring her joy, despite her telling him on that first day they had sat upon the meadow that it were those within a house that brought it joy. And no doubt the cock crows three times, he thought with a wretched sigh, shifting back on the rock as a rogue wave crashed heavily at his feet, for during her deepest times of need he’d failed her again in not guarding her solitude, in trying to supplant her need with his. But she sure as hell stood guard over his, hadn’t she, turning his fish, protecting him from further intrusion of his collapsing world.
Another sounder crashed before him, dampening his brow with a cold spray, rattling up over the rock, snatching at his feet. The mother was getting too wanting. Raising his eyes onto that yellowed window of his house, he rose wearily, climbing back over the rocks toward home and a decision he hadn’t been aware he was making.
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