Hank lifted the heavy bundle of coiled line and hooks and staggered with it over the rolling, slippery deck. He had been too engrossed to notice the force of the seas around their legs, and now he righted himself just as a wave surged over the rail and slapped him in the chest. Icy seawater sloshed down his neck and saturated the top of his long johns.
The others clicked as a team, never rushed, yet unbelievably fast and adept. Olaf lowered himself into the hold, and after the sound of his shovel loosening ice, he called up. Hank at Trygve’s direction slid down the first halibut they had caught, which had been lying gutted for at least half an hour. Suddenly the creature thrashed its tail against his arm with the force of a two-by-four.
From being too idle, he soon had more work than he could perform. Just when he would begin to catch up chopping bait, Ralph and then others in their turn would yell “Skate!” and he staggered another coil aft where one man baited. The halibut piled in the checkers while the icer kept calling Hank for more fish. In the middle of it, Trygve set him to scrubbing slime off the deck. When he finished, he tried to grab a moment to rush below for a drink of water to ease the salt in his mouth. Olaf practically screamed and Trygve said gruffly, “You don’t wear dirty oilskins in the cook’s galley. And, hey, you call that scrubbed? Wait till you slip some day. Scrub him harder.”
About three in the morning Olaf poked his head from below— Hank had not noticed his descent—and declared solemnly “Comen.” The deck work continued at a slower pace as they took turns below after hosing the slime from their oilskins and hanging them by the hatch door. The table below was set with a roast the size of a halibut, with stacks of bread and butter, and big tureens of oatmeal, noodles, potatoes, and thick gravy. Hank ate with Sven, the blue-eyed man his own age, who silently dumped everything together with gravy on his plate, then bent close and pushed it into his mouth with bread as fast as he could chew and swallow. He downed it with six cups of coffee. In fifteen minutes he was climbing to deck again.
So it went, day after day. Somewhere each day, Igvar called time for three to five hours’ rest, depending on the soaks. They would all descend the ladder, lay cross-armed in their bunks, and drop off on the instant. When Igvar called them awake again, Hank rose stiffly with the rest, already longing for the next time he could lie down. More than once he was in such a misery of pain and fatigue that he vowed to quit when they reached the blessed shore.
At least after a few days he hit a rhythm, and learned to block sleep from his mind for hours at a time. Under Trygve’s tutelage he was first entrusted with cutting octopus, then with baiting the hooks unsupervised, then actually with slicing the poke. He bent all his effort to doing each job to their standards. As for dressing the halibut as they thumped under his hand, he had cut heads from hundreds of living salmon without a thought to the life he was snuffing and had probably crushed underfoot a few thousand shrimp, but never had he extinguished such large lives as these. In his sleep the first nights aboard he had chopped endless herring to the sound of Igvar’s shouts, and now it was the thrashing halibut that he was helpless to clear from his dreams.
The first time the man at the roller yelled for help and the others grabbed gaff hooks from the rack, Hank did as Trygve had told him and watched from the side. They all bent over the water, plunged hooks into the creature’s head, and heaved up together. Igvar judged the weight at one hundred and fifty pounds. The men relaxed enough to joke about it in Norwegian before returning again to silent work. “Dot’s a baby soaker,” Trygve told him. He hammered its head repeatedly, but it still thrashed its tail so hard against the bin that the boards bowed outward. “Vait till you see a real-size soaker.”
When it came, Hank grabbed a gaff hook with the rest. Leaning over the water into the huge thumping fish, with the spray of the combat churned up into his face, he felt as if he faced cannon smoke. He drove his hook into the flesh with a blood cry and felt through his arms and back the fantastic weight in motion as they lifted the halibut aboard. It was too large to throw into a checker. For a moment it lay still, seemingly defeated, its bulging double eyes staring with the desperate malevolence of the cornered.
“Goddam, who gaff him in de side?” roared Igvar. All the punctures were in the head except Hank’s, which had torn into the body and exposed a slice of bleeding meat. The others turned to him in solemn disgust, as Trygve explained quietly that he had mined the fish for the highest price, because the flesh around the wound would spoil before it had reached the unloading dock. “And that’s a halibut maybe two hundred fifty pound, a hundred-dollar fish at forty cents a pound if it was in good shape.”
In his fatigue Hank’s voice broke as he apologized. It seemed, in the isolation of the roiling gray seas, like a capital and unforgivable crime rather than a blunder from ignorance.
“Yaaw,” said Igvar mildly, signaling the end of the incident. “You don’t do it again. Roll the gurdy, no money comes in otherwise.”
Suddenly the boated fish rose double, straightened with a snap, and broke two boards. They clubbed it several times but did not dare to lift it to the dressing table. Three hours later, after lying quiescent, it exploded into one final action.
Next time a soaker came to the rail, Hank approached with trepidation. He drove his gaff squarely into the head with the others, and watched panting with relief when it was over without new disgrace.
There were no Sundays on the halibut grounds. They passed other of the wooden schooners laying and hauling. One day they stood guard as a Russian trawler worked the water close by, and Igvar remained on the gear they had just set, to protect it.
The creak of the wooden timbers, the galley stuffiness from the smoke, the rolling of the sea itself, and the weight and smell of halibut all became so concentratedly a single world that after two weeks none other existed for Hank. His tired body tuned more and more to what he was doing. One day his crewmates, after considerable discussion among themselves in Norwegian, allowed him to accompany Trygve into the hold to ice the halibut. As Trygve explained, none of them in the old country had entered the hold for half a year.
Icing was heavy, close work, all of it predicated on the need to preserve the halibut without freezing for up to three weeks from the time of catch. The icer first stuffed ice into the raw poke where the viscera had been removed. Then he stacked the heavy carcasses like shingles and sealed ice around their edges. All this with the continuous, sometimes violent motion of the boat. The most important thing of all, said Trygve gravely, was to lay the halibut white-side-up, since otherwise blood would settle into the meat and discolor it so nobody would buy.
On the day the trip ended, Hank felt himself a man returned from a year in the far deserts even though Albatross Bank was only a few hours’ run from Kodiak.
The houses among the misty hills and the square buildings of the waterfront, even the low corrugated sheds of the canneries, had a beauty beyond their appearance. He hoped Sandra might be waiting on the pier, but she was not. Still hours of work ahead. He followed the others behind Igvar to a room in the cannery. There, with a blackboard on the wall and a bottle of whiskey, Igvar sat at a table with the managers of rival plants and bargained the price per pound for his catch. The crew stood behind him, watching silently. The ceremony took more than two hours. On the boards were squares for the size categories of halibut and a column for each of the bidders. Igvar held out firmly for the price he wanted while drinking shots of the whiskey, bantering, slouching back in his chair for long periods without a word. Once he declared they would go on to Seward or Pelican for a better price. At length, he came down half a cent on mediums and one cent on large (which fetched a higher basic price), while the winner of the bidding rose two and a half cents on each. The men around the table shook hands, and the manager of the host cannery offered drinks to the crew.
They moved the Lincoln to the pier of the high bidder and started unloading. Hank worked in the hold with Sven and Trygve. They gaffed the huge carcasses fr
om their ice sealent and slid them into a cargo net, which a crane raised. The catch of a few weeks took several hours to unload. Then they hosed the ice apart with hot water—the hold filled with steam like a sauna—and scrubbed all the boards with disinfectant.
As part of an agreement within the halibut fleet, the schooners laid up several days between trips. The others planned to fly home to Seattle next morning, stopping in Anchorage en route to call on their injured crewmate, who had been flown there to be hospitalized.
“Ja,” said Igvar, “we go out again in eight days.”
“See you then,” said Hank.
“I t’ought maybe you was tired of halibut inbreaker. We probably find some Norwegian with experience down home. You know you got to join the halibut union in Seattle if we keep you?”
“I’ll join,” he declared, forgetting all vows never to fish halibut again.
Igvar told Hank to phone his home in five days. “You t’ink about it and I t’ink about it.”
Rain poured steadily, as it had for days. Hank slogged to the apartment in the dark, utterly depressed. At least there was Sandra.
Her first comment: “Don’t they have a shower on that boat?”
Hank exploded. Without a further word she put on her raincoat and left. He drank cold beer as he bathed and bathed. He fell asleep in the tub, finally climbed into the empty bed. What kind of fisherman’s woman was she, to understand so little? He wondered about it a very short time before falling asleep again.
Hank and Sandra made it up next morning by common silence and no discussion of their differing viewpoints. It being Sunday, they spent most of the day together in bed. The next two days for Hank were a luxury of hot baths and sleep. On the third he ventured out. The rain still poured. He found Seth, who remained a prisoner of the beach. Seth listened with glum hostility as Hank explained how he had approached the Lincoln before, and knew one of the crewmen. “Captain wasn’t going to hire any greenhorn until Trygve spoke up, so I wasn’t cutting you from anything. And man, you can thank your luck. Halibut inbreaking makes that trip with Nels Hanson into pleasure.”
“Okay, let’s trade places.”
“Come on, I’m buying booze and lunch.”
Hank welcomed the comfort and rest, but by the time of his talk with Seth he was glancing across the floats at the halibut masts. By the morning of the fifth day, he stood wistfully in the rain in front of the Lincoln, yearning to remain part of her.
He finally summoned courage to phone Igvar in Seattle. The injured crewman would need months to recover, Igvar said. He needed a man for the season. Hank asked to remain. The unbelievable answer: “Ja. Okay, you doing pretty good, Hank. I put you on half share next trip, and then we see.”
Back aboard the Lincoln, any euphoria vanished after a day’s baiting and dressing in heavy weather.
The standards of his crewmates were absolute, rigid. He could only be one of them by accepting the same standards and concentrating to reach them. It meant to coil for practice in a precious few minutes of leisure, to cut the herring and octopus exactly, to measure the right placement of each bait on the hook, to bait with a constant eye toward bent hooks that needed to be set, to drive the gaff with precision when a thrashing halibut came to the rail, to leave no membrane in the poke when cleaning, to handle each heavy fish without bruising and to ice it neither too much nor too little, to scrub slime again and again until not the slightest trace remained. It meant to do each job so no one had to repeat it or so that no mishap occurred from a deficiency, and to maintain this standard at a steady speed even when groggy with fatigue. He came to appreciate the long old-country apprenticeship as he watched the quality of his crewmates’ work. They, finding that he tried as hard as he could and that he was improving, began to address him by name and quietly offer pointers. They even dealt him into the pinochle.
On a calm day—it was still raining steadily—they had a conference over his head in Norwegian, and then solemnly Trygve beckoned him to the roller. Trygve showed him how to stand and pointed to a lever. “You see a halibut coming up, stop the gurdy when the halibut is this far from rail, ja? Then you gaff him over the rail onto deck. You got to gaff him right the first time, or you maybe see him swim away and everybody sorry as hell.” The roller man was also expected to knock loose the remaining baits just before the hooks passed through the gurdy. “The hooks, now, Hank, watch out for those bastards. A hook fly loose over the gurdy, cuts you like a sharp knife. You got to watch it all the time.”
Behind Hank’s back at the rail, the steady rhythm of the boat’s work had slowed. The gurdy moved by someone’s adjustment at a fraction of its usual speed as he fidgeted to watch the water and knock loose the bait simultaneously. He broke into a sweat as he was forced to halt the motion altogether to clear some of the baits, using the hook awkwardly.
“Jaw, Hank,” drawled Olaf as he stood behind Hank and coiled. “Iss okay.”
Trygve nudged him. “Look at de vater and keep steady.”
Hank tensed and almost cried out. A huge white shape rose with increasing clarity through the layers of green water, flapping slowly. The sheaves of the gurdy creaked with the weight of it and the taut line snapped off flecks of water. He had never seen one so big. His legs locked as he grasped the gaff hook and leaned over. “My God, she’s a soaker, everybody better—”
Trygve beside him shooshed the others back.
Up came the halibut. No soaker, but the hugeness of it! It began to twist.
“Use de gaff hook,” said Trygve sharply.
Hank reacted. He stopped the gurdy, and with a single sweep accompanied by a yell gaffed it in the head and swung it over the side.
They all cheered as Hank stood panting and excited, Trygve knelt, swiped his hand across the halibut’s body, and smeared it on Hank’s face to their approving laughter. Blood pounding, he started the gurdy again.
He lost the next one, and the gaff hook besides, as the outraged fish twisted straight from his grasp.
“You want to take it back?” he asked Trygve, scared.
“No.
Hank licked his lips, flicked a bait, and braced for the next twisting white shape as it rose. He landed it correctly, even though it flapped and wrenched his arm. Sweat streamed from under his wool cap to blur his eyes. A snapping hook sliced through the sleeve of his rain jacket.
After one skate, which yielded eight halibut and two stray black cod, plus the halibut lost, Trygve said, “Ja, Hank, that’s good for the first time, you go rest a minute now.”
Hank relinguished the gaff hook, but to show he was okay he went straight to the baiting table and started to cut. His legs and hands were shaking. Olaf, who had gone below, handed him up a mug of coffee. “Tak,” Hank said, using a word of the basic Norwegian he had set himself to learn. The others went about their jobs as in gruff but amused Norwegian they discussed his performance.
When he was allowed at the roller again the following day, he did a smoother job. The day after was so rough that they passed him by. As seas rose and swept over the rail, Sven at the roller sometimes had to scramble up and cling to the shrouds to keep from being washed away. Everybody worked grimly, but they did not stop.
Finally the blow became so severe that the line snapped. They went to the marker at the other end and worked in the remaining skates —no one considered abandoning the gear despite the weather—and then Igvar declared work suspended. They stowed and lashed down everything they had been using. Then, since land was forty miles away with a headwind, they hove to and endured the weather. The salt-bearing wind howled and rattled around them. Except for the man on watch they slept. Hank took his tricks at the wheel, then lay braced in his cubicle of a bunk with hands on his chest like the others. The smell of their smoke and the cadence of their Norwegian contented him, as did the loud groaning conversation of the wooden boat itself with the sea. This was fishing: ultimate, basic, classic.
Hank’s honeymoon with the schooners halted abruptly
one day at the roller. He yelled “Soaker!” for good reason, and collectively they all gaffed aboard a two-hundred-pound fish. He leaned down just as the creature gave a terrible thrash of its tail. A wrecking ball could not have smashed him more effectively. It broke his left arm in several places, and at the least dislocated his shoulder. Two hours later, biting a wad of cloth against the pain, he rose in a basket to a Coast Guard helicopter and somewhat later lay weighted by a cast between the drearily clean sheets of a bed in the Kodiak hospital.
Igvar carried insurance that covered injuries, so Hank continued on boat’s pay. They all visited him at least once, and Trygve was very kind. But Igvar brought up a cousin from Seattle to replace him, and the Lincoln soon left on its next trip. Hank walked the town glumly under the weight of a shoulder cast, a man of enforced leisure and temporary income. Sandra possessed him again, along with the compromising forces of civilization.
“It’s a shame you had to bum your bridges like that with Swede,” she said. “Why don’t you see if one of the other canneries would consider hiring you as a foreman?”
The suggestion depressed him further, but it was certainly practical, since he was stuck with a cast until beyond the start of salmon season. He delayed looking, however. The steamy shrimp lines again, after the halibut schooner, was too sudden a comedown.
At the Ship’s Bar one afternoon, Swede Scorden settled beside him and nodded at the cast. “That the new way of clubbing halibut?” “Beats reasoning with them.”
After a relaxed pause, Swede asked if he had ever worked in a salmon cannery. Hank reminded him of the time in sixty-three before he ran off on the Rondelay. “Hell, I made boxes for you, pewed, gutted, headed, retorted, canned—did everything but handle the money.”
“Yes, now you mention it. Never were reliable.”
“Not in canneries. Just to change the subject, you told me once you had fished. Get tired of it?”
“Smart enough to go before it killed me.” Swede ordered cigars and a new round. “Before I went in the Quartermasters during the war, I’d purse-seined up and down Puget Sound.”
Highiliners Page 26