A ripple of indignation stirred the room but there was enough truth in the harangue to keep them quiet. They knew nothing, Coaker told them. Not where their fish was sold or the price it sells for, not the cost of provisions they were paid with. They wouldn’t even know how to go about asking. A decade into the twentieth century and they caught and sold their fish the way it was caught and sold when Napoleon ruled Europe.—And what is your excuse for this sorry state? Coaker asked.—That there’s no changing the way things are because they’ve always been this way. The notion was so distasteful to him that it looked for a moment as if Coaker might spit. It was the only form of laziness, he said, that he’d ever observed in a Newfoundlander.
Eli felt himself pulled upright in his seat as the man went on, each new accusation ringing like a bell in the steeple.—Who among you gets their due from their labour? Coaker asked.—Do you receive your own when you have to work like a dog, eat like a pig, and be treated like a serf?
—No, Eli called out.
—No, Coaker confirmed.—You do not. Do you receive your own when your taxes pay for five splendid colleges in St. John’s while your so-called schools lack teachers and books and equipment?
—No, Eli answered and others with him. Coaker threw out questions until half the men in the pews were shouting the same response. He stopped to pace a few moments, letting them stew.—I’ve signed up a thousand men across Notre Dame Bay and more joining us every day, he announced.—Men who were never taught to do a sum or read a word or ask for anything more than what was given them. But they are done with the world of ignorance and pauperism they were born into. Suum Cuique, Coaker said.—Let each man have his own. This is our motto in the Fishermen’s Protective Union, one thousand strong and growing by the day. And I ask you now. Who here has the fortitude to join us?
—I do, Eli said, out of his seat with a hand raised high. He was ripe for it, the new life Violet prophesied for him, he felt ready to be born again.
Coaker asked those who wished to join to stay behind and a handful were still in the pews after the church emptied out, Val Woundy, Azariah Trim and his nephew Joshua, Doubting Thomas Trass. Coaker had one more night in Paradise Deep and they made plans to meet him again the next evening.—There’s much to be done, he told them.
—Do you have a bed? Eli asked.
—I was about to ask if I might impose on someone.
—We’ve got room if you don’t mind the walk.
Coaker said, A walk is just what I was wanting.
The three of them set out for the Gut, Eli and Val Woundy and the union man. It was almost an hour over the Tolt from the old church and Coaker talked the entire time, fish prices and overseas markets, competition and quality control, co-op stores and cash money in place of truck. The moon rising to light their way. Standards, Coaker harped on, standards and modernization. The fishery a shambles of dark-age technology and economics that had to be dragged into the modern world. Pricing had to be standardized, inspection and culling standardized, a minimum wage for labour legislated, compulsory schooling for all instituted, the quality of the cured product had to be standardized.
—Mr. Coaker, Val Woundy said, you aren’t about to standardize the bloody weather.
—Perhaps not the weather. But why should we be dependent solely on the sun to cure the fish?
Val glared at him as if Coaker’s lunacy was about to be confirmed.
—You mean dryers, Eli said.
—I mean let’s question everything about how we operate. Where there are problems, we look for solutions.
—Hot-air dryers, Eli said.—Set them up in a warehouse. It could rain every day in August and it wouldn’t make a peck of difference.
Coaker raised a hand.—Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
—I heard you was a farmer, Val said.
—Lay off him, Val, Eli warned but Coaker only smiled. Born on the southside of St. John’s, he told them. Worked as a fish handler in Town as a boy, organized a two-day strike for equal wages when he learned a competitor paid more for the same job. Skipped school to listen to political speeches in the Legislature.—Shambler was your man for Paradise District, he said.
—He was, God rest him.
—He got plenty of that in the House, Coaker said.
Hired to run a merchant store in Pike’s Arm when he was only sixteen, buying the operation outright at twenty. The bank crash buried the store and he purchased an island, set about farming it. Coakerville, he called the place. Taught himself the job of telegraph operator and worked at it through the winters to keep the farm from folding. Years of isolation to read and think, to pick apart the engine driving the country’s corkscrew of toil and misery, to scheme and read.
—You don’t seem old enough to have lived that much, Val Woundy said.
—All my living’s yet to come, Coaker said.—This is the life I was meant for.
Val turned off to his house at the foot of the Tolt and the two men carried on past Mary Tryphena’s. There was a light in Eli’s window across the garden and as they drew closer they could see Hannah sitting up at the kitchen table, her lap full of crochet cotton.—Your wife, Coaker said, nodding ahead.
—My wife.
—And what else, Eli Devine. You haven’t offered a word about yourself. You must have Scandinavian blood to get a shock of hair as white as that.
Eli shook his head.
—Well, your accent says Irish.
—We’re neither fish nor fowl, our crowd, Eli said and he looked away across the cove.—We could walk on a little ways, he said.—Unless you’re ready to call it a night.
They went as far as Kerrivan’s Tree and stood among the silvered branches while Eli made a maze of Tryphie’s scalding and his youthful obsession with America, his mother’s family garden and James Woundy’s mermaid and Hannah’s webbed fingers, of Judah and his whale, of Levi Sellers and Patrick Devine’s library and Obediah’s crooked limbs at the foot of the cathedral.—Abel was christened in this very tree, Eli said. He’d never been called upon to set his story in order for a stranger and could not lay his hand on a straight line. It confirmed his suspicion he’d made a royal mess of his life. He leaned his forearms on a tree branch to get that much closer to Coaker, to the notion that all his living might be ahead of him.—All I ever wanted was to get the hell away from here.
—I thought about leaving myself, Coaker said.—Years ago.
—And what is it kept you?
—I figured I could change myself, he said, or change the country that made me.
Coaker reached to take Eli’s scarred hand, running a thumb across the childhood injury a moment. There was a doctor’s practised ease in the gesture, as if he was simply evaluating how well the wound had healed.—Let each man have his own, he said.—Would you stay for as much, Eli? If all you wanted was here to be had?
Eli drew his hand away and tucked it under his arm. He said, Have you really got a thousand men signed on to this union?
—You aren’t having second thoughts already, Mr. Devine.
—Levi Sellers is a hard man, is all I mean. He won’t just sit back and watch.
—You’re afraid of Levi, is it?
—He burnt Matthew Strapp’s barn years ago, to keep him out of Shambler’s way.
Coaker nodded.—I don’t think that’s what scares you, he said.
Eli smiled to hide his confusion.—What is it scares me then?
—You think you’re meant for something different than what you’ve got.
—It might be.
—But you’re afraid to look a fool reaching for it, Coaker said.—That’s what scares you.
Eli straightened and looked out at the black water of the cove. He could feel the blood in his face and was grateful for the darkness. To hell with you, William Coaker, he was thinking, but couldn’t manage to speak it aloud.
—Perhaps we should get back, the union man suggested.—Your wife will be wondering where you’ve got to.
Hannah was half-asleep in her chair when they arrived.—We’ve got a stray for the night, Eli said though he seemed altogether poisoned by the man’s presence. She set Coaker up in Abel’s room and then went on to bed herself. Eli hadn’t slept in the same room with her since Reverend Violet’s visit and he lay on the daybed near the stove. He was up hours before light to fix himself a cold breakfast and was about to douse the lamp on his way out when he heard footsteps on the stairs.—Early to be up yet, Mr. Coaker, he said.
—I’m not much for sleep, Eli.
—There’s bread and a few capelin in the pantry, help yourself.
Coaker had his jacket across his arm, his suspenders hanging loose at his sides.—I wanted to say, he said.—If I overstepped yesterday night.
—You were right about me, Eli told him.—About everything.
They watched one another and Coaker nodded encouragement.—Then I’ll see you at the meeting tonight.
—Please God, I’ll be there.
It was a week after Coaker left before Eli was able to get to Tryphie. He hadn’t stepped inside the workshop since the accident, the Sculpin’s carcass abandoned outside the doors. Tryphie was hunched over a diagram with ruler and pencil and didn’t look up to greet his visitor. The walls above the workbenches were stripped clean of tools. Eli leaned in to watch awhile, trying to outwait him. Turned to stand against the bench finally.—If you were going to build a warehouse to dry salt fish, he said.
Tryphie glanced up, squinting.—A what?
—A warehouse for drying fish.
—Hot-air dryers, you mean.
—Could be.
—You’d want forced air.
—You think fans or what?
—You could rig it up with electric fans, Tryphie said.—But something that large you’d need your own power station.
—One bloody step at a time, Eli said.
Tryphie flipped the paper and began sketching a rough notion. Lost in the size of it, the technical issues that came piling one on the other. He was throwing out figures as he worked and the two men riffed back and forth on specifications and alternative designs, the exchange so fluid and singular it was almost sexual. They carried on another fifteen minutes before Tryphie paused in mid-stroke.—Who is it building a fish warehouse?
—You hear about William Coaker when he was here?
—The farmer? Tryphie said.—Jesus loves the little children.
—He’ve got a thousand men signed on in Notre Dame Bay, Tryph. Says another two or three thousand by next spring. I’m going up to Herring Neck the winter. See how the union locals work, how the co-op stores are set up.
—Does Levi know anything about this?
—You should come with me, Eli said.
Tryphie laughed and walked across the workroom floor.
—This is going to change the country, Tryphie, top to bottom.
—That’s a lot to ask of a fish dryer.
Eli picked up the sheet of paper and folded it.—We could be part of this, he said.—Me and you.
—Minnie’s set on the States.
Eli nodded to himself awhile. He asked a few half-hearted questions about arrangements for travel and where in Hartford they’d be living and Tryphie answered with his back to Eli, picking at a trunkful of tools.—I’ll go on then, Eli said finally but he didn’t move from where he stood. He said, I rolled the Sculpin, Tryph. I sank her on purpose. He let out a long breath.—I thought you should hear it from me. In case there was a question in your mind.
—You’re all right now, are you?
—Never better, he said.
Eli left for Coaker’s winter quarters in Herring Neck a month after Tryph and Minnie sailed for the States. Hannah moved over the Tolt to stay at Selina’s House while Eli was away doing God knows what in Notre Dame Bay. Bride set up a space for her in the upstairs room that Mr. Gallery had fallen into generations past, her cot set off from the hospital beds by a sheet hung from the ceiling. Hannah occupied her days with the tasks Minnie abandoned when she left, cooking and laundry and mopping floors. She read awhile to Abel each evening and drank a cup of tea with Bride while Newman carried out his last rounds. They discussed the day’s patients and weather and the minutest details of Abel’s condition. They talked often of the union, like everyone else on the shore. Coaker had passed through again at the end of October, speaking to three hundred men in the old Trim sawmill, making overnight trips with Eli to Red Head Cove and Spread Eagle and Smooth Cove where dozens more took the union pledge. Eli staying up half the night with Coaker to strategize, spending the days in clandestine discussions with fishermen, pushing the dream. It had been a relief to see him interested in the world again, if not in herself and Abel in particular. She thought he would come around to them soon enough. But there was a growing absence about her husband that was making her doubtful.—What do you think will become of it all, Bride?
Bride stirred sugar into her cup, set the spoon on the saucer. She’d heard people speak of Coaker as a tonic for the ills of the world. A visionary, they said. It made her squirm, that sort of church talk applied to someone flesh and blood. Coaker had the manner of a born pragmatist which made her suspicious of his lofty notions. As if she expected they would come to a bad end on the shoals of some tradeoff down the line.
They could hear Abel coughing in the next room and both women turned their heads to the sound, waiting for the spasm to end.
—I don’t know, maid, Bride said after the youngster went quiet.—I can’t help thinking there’s some lack in a man who would name a place after himself like that. Coakerville, she said. And the women laughed at the foolishness of it.
Coaker insisted that all F.P.U. members be able to read and write and he tasked Azariah Trim with arranging instruction on the shore. The union’s night-school classes began at the end of November and forty-five men gathered in a lamplit room once a week to learn their letters. Az recruited Bride to teach and she nursed her students along with the same mix of temerity and charm that made her so invaluable at the hospital. By the time they left for the seal hunt in March most of the original forty-five were able to write their own names and read simple Bible verses and count by fives and tens.
The regular union meetings preceded the school sessions and without Coaker’s guidance they degenerated into fractious free-for-alls. After those first heady weeks, a hangover of doubt set in. They had only Coaker’s word that such a thing as the Fishermen’s Protective Union existed. No one knew how the F.P.U. planned to outfit members for the fishery or sell their fish at the end of the year. Doubting Thomas Trass led a group demanding assurances, securities, but there were none to be offered.—We got nothing if we don’t hang together, Az Trim told the room.
—Levi Sellers will see us all hang together if he gets wind of this, Trass insisted.—Make no mistake.
The numbers at the meetings dwindled as the season crept closer. Thomas Trass stayed on despite his vocal reservations and it seemed that the schooling was all that held him. He was one of Bride’s slowest students, working at the lessons with a dull earnestness. He’d taken to tracing his name absently on the tabletop or his thigh during any idle moment, Thomas Trass, Thomas Trass, Thomas Trass, as if he had to continually remind himself who he was. Trass was past sixty and a lifelong bachelor. He was engaged to a girl in Smooth Cove as a young man and walked thirty miles down the shore the day before the wedding to find her dead. It was well after dark when he arrived, his fiancée laid out in the kitchen for her wake, and he’d turned to walk back to Paradise Deep without so much as taking off his jacket. There was something about Thomas Trass, people said, that was still out on that trail in the dead of night, somewhere between Smooth Cove and home.
After each night class he and Val Woundy accompanied Bride to Selina’s House and saw her through the door. Val headed home to the Gut then and Thomas lay an hour on his daybed as he’d been instructed. Not a light on the shore when he slipped back into the cold, no sound but
his footsteps over the snow. He walked along Sellers’ Drung toward Selina’s House, then beyond it to Levi’s property where he circled behind the house to the barn. Levi sitting on a stool at the rear, among the heat of the animals.—I was starting to think perhaps they turned you, Sellers said each time Trass picked his way past the stalls to offer a report on the night’s developments. It was all about to fall to pieces as far as Trass could tell and he’d be sorry to lose the schooling if it happened sooner rather than later.
Levi handed the man his two dollars and sat awhile longer after Trass left, avoiding his bed to spare himself the hours of lying there insomniac. He tried to think of the last proper night’s sleep he had, sometime long before Mary Tryphena Devine passed on. Levi used to watch for her from his office window, the woman on her trek to the fishing room where Judah wasted away, and he developed a grudging admiration for the old woman’s mettle. He’d had to keep reminding himself who she was to his father, but it all seemed so distant he barely felt it. She was just a marker in his days at the end, like a clock striking the hours.
It wasn’t until she died that he learned Judah was missing and Levi felt a surge of the old poison in his gut. He burned the white bastard’s crazy work scored on the walls of the fishing room, as if the absence of physical evidence might convince him the man had never existed at all. But he felt cheated of something by the disappearance. It was as if the old crone had made a cuckold of him. And that thought renewed his failing animosities.
He had Trass go along to Coaker’s initial gathering at the old church out of idle curiosity. Sent inquiries to acquaintances in Notre Dame Bay and St. John’s who reported Coaker was a loner and a fool, possibly delusional, addled by his years trying to conjure a farm out of rock and bog, by a marriage he was ill-suited for. The notion of him building a union was a joke, they said. Levi engaged Trass to attend the clandestine weekly meetings and he compiled a list of the local men who had taken the pledge. He was particularly gregarious when he crossed paths with them at church or on the streets, asking after their health and the health of their families, thinking how their faces would look when the union foundered and they came begging for credit. The spring promised to be as good as a concert.
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