by John Straley
As the storm blew itself out, Slip and Ellie agreed to travel with Johnny up through the outer island passages to the cannery just south of the Alaska border. There they would see if there was any work and make their choices. They would travel long days to make up his lost time, and they would have to hit every narrows at the optimum time even if that meant pushing past daylight. It would take three days to get to the cannery.
As they passed Campbell River, Johnny opened his side port all the way and looked over the waterfront. The black hulk of the Admiral Rodman hunched in front of the town. Smoke from a dozen chimneys rose a few hundred feet, then smeared to the north over the ridge. There was a slight ripple on the water and the lights of the houses built against the hill were beginning to blink on. Johnny was tired and wished he were going to sleep in a bed on land. He wanted to be able to walk away from his troubles, but of course he couldn’t. He set his course for the mouth of Seymour Narrows. As the sun moved low against the hill, he closed the port to save some of the heat in the old boat. He reached out to wipe the moisture off the glass so he could see the water sliding under the bow.
Johnny had heard many stories of the tidal currents along the Inside Passage. Old men who had fished the northern grounds told stories of whirlpools big enough to tip a seine boat on its side and suck a skiff straight down only to shoot it up again in pieces. There were Indian legends about spirits that lived under the water and reached their bony fingers to embrace unwary mariners. Johnny hadn’t given much weight to these stories but it was easy to be dismissive when sitting around an iron stove in the chandlery back home. As he traveled north and the familiar country gave way to densely forested hills wearing different shades of green, he began to feel the iron grit of fear build up in his stomach. The cedar trees dripped over the steep-sided passages and the current blossomed up in cauliflower forms. Sometimes rips came when he didn’t expect them and the water moved quickly in two directions at once. The ravens that sat on the branches were as big as cats and some of them seemed to grow horns as they heckled the boat from their perches.
Despite its fearsome reputation, when they got to Seymour Narrows the waters were mild. The rock that had claimed so many ships was a benign ripple in the channel, leaving plenty of room to maneuver. Once they were past the narrows a steamship overtook them. Johnny put his hand outside the port and waved it up and down. There looked to be half a dozen people standing on the back deck of the ship and one of them waved in return.
They spent two days drying out their gear in every warm part of the Pacific Pride. The smell of boiled coffee and mildew saturated the wheelhouse. Slip and Ellie slept long hours in their bunks and dozed off at almost any time of day. Annabelle played with Buddy and looked at pictures in catalogues piled in one of the drawers. Johnny gave them all lessons on steering and assigned them all, including Annabelle, regular shifts to stand watch. But Johnny never was long off the bridge and if he slept during the day, it was only lightly in his half bunk near the helm.
The big both ways river pushed and pulled at the boat so that when the current was against them they slowed considerably and the trees along the steep-sided fjords seemed to creep past. But as they learned to ride the current to their advantage they were able to slide along as if they were sitting in a streetcar. Ellie loved steering the big boat and often stood watch for Slip. Annabelle would not relinquish her turn at the wheel. She kept a close eye on the brass clock above Johnny’s bunk, and when the first second ticked of her watch she would haul her wooden box out, stand up on it, and begin to review their course.
Turnips and corned beef simmered in the pot all day long as they drove up the narrow passages. They passed tugs with barges and fishing boats with men sleeping on the webbing piled on the back decks. Annabelle would wave and most often the men would raise their heads and wave lazily back. Slip drank coffee and mended his clothes. He put salve on his blistered hands and cleaned the cuts on his face. His bruises were turning from dark purple to jaundiced yellow. Each morning he made coffee and flipped pancakes on the big diesel stove. They all ate, stayed dry, and became drowsy in the hum of the engine.
It was a little past three o’clock when they pulled into the Inland Packing cannery. Johnny was happy to see it, partly because he was eager to get off the crowded boat. The fjord was so deep that there had been no place to anchor for more than twenty miles. Along this stretch of the coast there were a few trees clinging to the sheer rock at waterline. Streams fell down bluffs for more than a thousand feet. A deep-draft boat could motor directly under these falls and take on fresh water. But the walls of rock were so steep both above and below the surface, no boat carried enough anchor chain to put in for the night anywhere along this fjord.
The cannery was built back in the only shallow bay. The mountains came down in three walls around the bay with one opening directly behind the massive wooden cannery buildings. A river pushed down the narrow valley and rumbled down a rock falls into a shallow estuary.
The little anchorage was a bluster of sounds, the white noise of the falls echoing around the mountain slopes and the churning of the cannery machinery rolled on underneath everything. A pile driver on skids worked on the dock replacing a piling, the iron hammer rising and falling in a heavy rhythm, and somewhere in the midst of it all Annabelle could hear children playing.
There was a floating raft with a narrow ramp to shore, and small vessels were moored in the back bay. Johnny decided to tie up first and talk to someone at the plant to see where they wanted him to unload his cargo of box wood. It took only a few minutes to secure the Pacific Pride to the float and tie the dory alongside. Then Johnny was up the slick ramp to find a supervisor. Ellie slowly packed her dry gear into a suitcase.
“Now what?” she said aloud what each of them had been thinking.
“Do you think Johnny is going to kick us off the boat?” Annabelle said. She sat cross-legged on the short bunk, not giving any indication that she would leave willingly.
“We can look for a job, get a spot in the bunkhouse,” Ellie said. “Didn’t you hear the kids here?” She touched the girl’s knee with the tip of her finger.
The girl pushed her glasses up and scuttled out of the boat without a word to anyone.
As they walked up the ramp Slip combed his hair with a pocket comb, wiped it on his pants, and handed it to Ellie, then placed his cap on top of his head at a jaunty angle. “Got to try and look good,” he said, winking at her.
Ellie rolled her eyes but she took the comb and made a couple of passes through her hair.
They walked through the barn-style doors off the loading dock into the cavernous production line. There was a clatter of chains and sprockets. Belts whirred off of the main shaft that ran high up the center of the room. The shaft spun and turned the belts that ran to each of the machines. At each machine a person stood with a stub of a pencil and a notebook counting cans as they slipped past. There were clutch handles by each machine to stop the mechanical apparatus and a man in an apron standing near each one. There were white people and Filipinos, some Chinese and some Indians. At one end of the room Indians stood at steel tables cutting up salmon. Down the line, the Chinese were stuffing cans, and the Filipinos worked the steam cookers, labelers, and boxers. And most of the people holding the pencils and notebooks appeared to be white.
“It’s a split shop,” Ellie shouted over the clatter.
“What?” Slip cupped his hand to his ear.
Ellie pulled him closer so she didn’t have to yell. “All these people belong to different unions: the Indians, the whites, the Chinese, and the Filipinos, they’re all represented by different unions. Management can play one against the other.”
“Please, Ellie,” Slip beseeched. “We need some money and we need a place to live for a bit.”
“Relax. Your good looks are going to get us work, right?”
They walked through smaller rooms where caldrons of steam vented out across the floor. There was a carpentry shop
where a crew of men hammered boxes together. Slip looked around and everything was in place; the hammers had numbers branded into the handles and the bins of nails were neatly marked. Ellie walked out the door and down a hall. She walked with such purpose none of the tired men or women in the hall asked their business.
At the end of the hall there was a door to the machine shop. “Let me just take a look and don’t do anything,” Ellie said, grabbing Slip’s arm. He made a sour face and turned away from the door Ellie was ducking into.
The shop was cramped with machines, most of which Slip didn’t recognize. There were lathes, presses, band saws; there was a forge and a man standing at an anvil with a rounding hammer. He was wearing goggles and he looked up at them as they stood in the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Ellie called out with a singsongy tone that Slip had never heard before. “Have you seen the super?”
The man with the rounding hammer wiped his nose and then wiped his hand on his leather apron. “You try his office?”
“Oh, of course, but I was wondering if he was around here now.” She smiled and took a half step in, leading with her hip and curling one arm behind her back almost as if she were going to ask the man to dance.
“Christ, I hope not,” the big man said. “You seen the super around here, Clyde?” he turned and yelled over his shoulder. Back behind some gray humming piece of machinery, a greasy-looking man squinted up from a shower of sparks.
“What, are you crazy? He don’t come around here. Go back to the office.”
“You two do all this work around here?” she said round-eyed and gesturing into the room. She stumbled over a pile of sprockets and a rusted pair of pliers, then stopped to pick them up.
“You’re looking at it. Both shifts, if needs be. The bastards.”
“Well, you must be good at it,” she said, and looked at them both in a kind of sex-infused wonder as if she were deciding which one of them she wanted to eat. “Thank you,” she whispered, then backed out and closed the door.
“You know what you are?” Ellie said, looking straight at Slip.
“No,” he said.
“You’re a goddamn machinist’s assistant.”
He rolled his eyes and walked on. They found a door to the outside and turned toward the loading dock at the front of the cannery. Johnny was moving the Pacific Pride from the float over to the main pier to unload his box wood from the hold. Annabelle stood on the bow holding a line. Annabelle saw the two of them standing at the bull rail of the wharf, and she jumped up and down waving.
A surly man with a black watch cap and a leather windbreaker stood by the davit winch. From there he could lower a hook and some chokers into the hold of the boat and lift the flats of lumber up onto several steel carts. As Johnny eased up to the wharf the man rolled a cigarette and lit it.
“So, you bring your family on vacation then?” he said with a thick French Canadian accent. “Bunch of yachtsmen, I suppose.”
“We just hitched a ride. Who do we talk to about a job around here anyway?” Slip asked.
“That’d be Charlie, up at the office. But don’t get too excited ’cause he ain’t been hiring in weeks. Unless you’re a crooked bookkeeper, I doubt he could use you.” Then he spit into the water, just barely missing the bow of the Pacific Pride as it eased up against the pilings some twelve feet below where they were standing.
Slip and Ellie turned and walked up the outside stairs to the office that had big windows overlooking the operation. The French Canadian yelled down at Johnny and Annabelle, telling them how to tie the boat while he unloaded her. Ellie went in after Slip and closed the door on the commotion. Slip asked to see the boss. He didn’t say that he wanted a job but when the woman at the counter asked his business he started stammering. Ellie eased around his shoulder and said they had a proposition she was sure Charlie would want to hear.
Inside the office the walls were painted green four feet up from the floor and white all the way up to the ten-foot ceiling. The front-facing wall had three large windows and a windowsill with several pairs of binoculars resting on it. The other walls were dotted with ephemera from the fishing fleet: calendar photos of boats in foreign ports and snapshots of fine-looking boats unloading their catch at the cannery. There were pictures of schooners and dories. There were a couple of shots of massive halibut hanging from hooks with men in their oilskins smiling next to them.
Finally Charlie Hayes walked out of his office. He wore a vest and his tie was unknotted. Both of his sleeves were rolled up.
“I’m sorry,” he said loudly, and he gestured toward the big front windows. “We’re just not taking anybody on.” He started to put on a wool coat and walk out the door but Ellie stopped him.
“My man’s a machinist’s assistant. A good one. I can help him. You got a mess down there in the machine shop and we’ll fix it up for you in a couple of days. You give us food and a cabin for a week and we’ll work for free. If you don’t like what we do then you can send us down the road.” And when she came to the end of her sentence she smiled sweetly and crossed her ankles so she teetered there in front of him.
Charlie Hayes stared at her for a moment as if he were judging a show horse. Then he said, “Hell with it. Check with housing. The machine shop’s a fright. No pay for now but food and a bed.” Then he turned and walked back out the door.
The French Canadian winch man was unloading the wood from the hold. Johnny was down in the boat rigging the pallets and Annabelle was the go-between signal for the winch man.
“Up just a teensy bit,” she called up to him.
“Is that a teensy bit or a teensy-weensy bit?” he called down in his gruff tone.
The girl squinted down into the hold and looked back up, shifted her glasses back up her nose, and held her fingers about an inch apart. “Just a teensy bit will do, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it at all, miss,” the winch man said, popping the handle back on the winch for half a second.
Ellie and Slip helped with unloading the wood. Then they loaded their personal gear into the dory and talked the winch operator into hauling it up onto the dock and onto a dolly. The dock boss let them wheel the dory over to a far corner of the dock where they let boats that delivered fish store their gear. Ellie, Slip, and Annabelle took their gear out of the dory, including the cage with the defiant yellow bird sitting on top, and went in search of the housing manager.
Within half an hour they were walking down a row of cabins along a boardwalk back where the mountain shouldered against the cannery. It didn’t feel like the sun ever shone down where the cabins lay. Six kids ran across the soggy ground and up onto the boardwalk.
“Is that your bird?” a towheaded boy asked.
“Yes,” Annabelle replied, unable to conceal her pride.
“You gonna eat him?” another blurted out.
“No!” she said, and walked away from the group of children with her head held high.
The cabin was about twelve by sixteen. Two walls had wooden bunk beds. The bottom bunk by the back wall had been modified to be a double bed. There was an electric heater, a table, and four straight-back chairs. Nails were driven into the walls where it appeared people hung their clothes. The room smelled of boiled vegetables, tobacco, and mildew. Buddy flew up from his cage and came to rest on a two-by-four rafter.
The housing manager told Ellie to keep the wet clothes well away from the coils of the electric heater and that they could eat their meals in the dining hall. There was no smoking in bed, and he pointed his index finger at each of them, even Annabelle, as he said, “And don’t let me catch anyone drinking spirits in camp.”
Before he left, the housing manager stopped by the open door and said, “I’d keep your girl here pretty much to this part of camp. Not really safe around the Indians or the Chinks. Filipinos won’t hurt her but it would still be best if she stayed in this part of camp.” Then he was gone and Annabelle looked up at Ellie and Slip with round eyes.
&n
bsp; “Ellie, is he a management stooge?”
Slip shook his head and set his bedroll down on the double bunk. Ellie fiddled with the electric heater, then motioned the girl to come close.
“You know, honey, we’ve got a pretty good setup here for a bit. It wouldn’t do for you to talk that way around here for a while.”
“You’re not going to try and unite the workers?”
Slip looked back over his shoulder at Ellie, and she brushed him off. “Well, not straight off. I got to get them listening to me, and you know … liking me first. Otherwise we’ll just get run out of here and nothing happens. So we take it slow. Try and make friends. Okay?”
“My Lord!” Slip jumped back as the prongs of the cord sparked in the socket and the exposed coils of the heater began to glow.
“Okay, then,” Ellie clapped her hands together and stood up. She didn’t look at Slip, who was spreading blankets out on the bottom bunk. Annabelle climbed up onto the top bunk. She was able to hang Buddy’s cage on a nail in the rafter just above her feet. The yellow bird walked over and hopped onto the cage and pecked in through the bars for a few seeds. The little cabin began to warm to the heater’s glow.
Out on the boardwalk they could hear people walking back from the cannery buildings. The housing manager had told them that because there were no boats with big loads due in, they were running just one ten-hour shift. Later when the big runs started coming in, they would stretch that out to a sixteen-hour shift. If the boats backed up at the dock they might work straight through.
The sound of footsteps thudded to a slow rhythm, tired men and women coming home to clean up for supper. Ellie opened the door to their cabin and greeted some of the folks walking back. They still had their aprons on, and they nodded but didn’t stop to talk. White folks and Filipinos, Indian and Chinese walking together. The whites’ quarters were closest to the plant. Then the Filipino and the Chinese. The Indians had built their own village back up by a small tributary of the main stream. The Filipinos and Chinese each had their own kitchens and communal dining halls. The Indians fended for themselves, with each family cooking for itself. Sometimes a grandmother stayed home to cook the wild food they put up themselves or to open a can of stew they bought at the company store. Ellie nodded to them all and said hello to the ones who had the energy to look up at her and smile.