by Darrell Duke
Peter’s permanent absence makes her miss those important men more than ever now. She never fails to thank God for her sons, the way they continue to fill the unrestricted emptiness of widowhood, and for that she’s as well off as anyone. Although it’s not her true home, Fox Harbour is like no place else.
There will be no fretting over whether or not she’ll feel Peter’s loving presence again and again. She can see him now, hunched over the stove, one of his big hands resting on the top oven, making sure it’s banked safely for the night. The flue is adjusted so the chimney draws just enough air that it’s not freezing down in the kitchen in the morning. John has never failed to take care of her since his father died, and what would she ever do without him, especially now that Pad has a bad back? Biddy often sees Peter in the kitchen, standing, one arm behind his back, leaning over the daybed and looking out the window to see what’s going on in the harbour or who is coming and going up and down the road. How could she not feel him? If Peter was here now, she knows, he’d proudly watch John and talk about life when he, himself, was a shore boy, just like young Billy Penny on the wharf now, about to let go the Big Annie’s lines.
Once the men from the Pauline and the Lady Jane have rowed out to their berths, the Annie Healy slips gently from the wharf and turns gracefully on her way with the help of her twenty-horsepower Acadia engine.
Biddy watches with pride and joy at the sight of the three schooners sailing away. A few small boats coast alongside.
From the deck of the Annie Healy, Michael Mullins sings, in his beautiful tenor voice, a lovely old Irish ballad to his little sister, Mary Ann. She’s smiling from the shore but is sad to see him leave. Earlier today she overheard Michael telling someone of his bad dream, about falling in the water and of a boat sinking. He was making a joke out of it, but she felt he wasn’t happy about it. She longs for his return. He’ll help celebrate her eighth birthday next month.
Once faired up, the Annie slips through the tricky shoals and glides out behind the other schooners. When the boats disappear from sight, Biddy Mullins stands up and walks her chair back into the house.
Chapter twelve
At Sea
The crewmen of the Annie Healy are big and strong, most of them well over six feet, except Charlie Sampson, who’s five-ten. Their hands are massive, deeply torn, scarred from years of jigging and baiting hooks and hauling trawl lines and traps. Thick white lines in their palms and on their fingers and thumbs remind them where hooks of all sizes have caught hold, and where they’ll likely catch again. Not to mention the slivers and slices of flesh taken by splitting knives, and those other scars on arms and legs, from axes, bucksaw blades, and spoke shaves used for wood in fall and winter. Some old wounds to the hands have a job to heal, reopening and washed clean with the salt water. Again and again. Year after year. Getting cut is as natural as breathing, and each trip and the dangerous excitement it brings is worth a bit of lost blood. They take great pride in their strength while hard-sung shanties help them through the many tasks required for fishing. Really, it has to do with where the fish are, and whether or not they can find them. Nothing else.
The Big Annie is on her way to Tide’s Cove Point for bait. The trip across Placentia Bay to the Burin Peninsula is a time for the crew to catch up. When enough squid is aboard, it will be steady belt. No time for chatting once they take to sailing again. They’ll cut up bait until they reach Point Lance Rock, at the other side of Golden Bay. From then on it will be a vicious cycle of lowering dories, loading them with gear and bait, rowing, setting and hauling trawls, rowing back to the schooner, pewing fish aboard, carrying and packing it into the hold, and salting and stacking. Then back into the dories to do it all over again. They’ll be lucky to get a couple of hours’ rest before each dawn. So, now is the time to have a laugh, sing a song, to size up the lands they pass, tell a story or two.
Once clear of Fox Harbour’s shoals, it is clear sailing for the Annie. The daylight dances merrily on the water outside Pond Head, Argentia, where children and dogs run wild on dark, sandy shores. Little girls sit on big rocks worn smooth by time. They hold dying dandelions to their lips and blow the feathery seeds to the breeze. The white backs of young boys swimming just off Sandy Cove glisten in the water. The whitewashed clapboard of Point Latine Lighthouse glows, too, in the peaceful afternoon.
The white oil paint and dory-green trim of the schooner shines. It catches the attention of the Argentia children, who cease all play and run to a big rock to wave frantically. The crew hoists the sails to catch the Placentia Bay wind always stirring in one direction or another.
The small schooner makes a north-northwest tack to get around the outcropping of jagged rocks fortifying Argentia’s deep black bog from the great combers of the open sea.
To the right of the schooner, Fox Island lifts from the green sea like a round pan of bread in rise, buttered by the late August sun. The sea laps at the tiny island’s wild edges of limestone and granite while dozens of gulls circle above in a frenzy of perpetual hunger. Lighthouse Keeper Power sounds the foghorn to salute the Fox Harbour crew.
Tacking westward, the Big Annie joins the fleet of schooners, big and small, en route to Golden Bay. In the distance, to starboard, the sheer face of Red Island ignites in rugged splendour. The forest of schooner masts is carried along by wind and tide.
To port, scattered along Argentia’s rugged coastline, tiny figures lug seaweed. They’re tending to vegetable gardens planted along the edges of old graveyards walled in layers of rocks long since picked from the land. Leaning towers of marble still stand after a hundred years or more of punishing winds and salt spray from the sea. Farther along, Merasheen Bank basks graciously in the overflow of sunshine from Red Island.
As they sail past Argentia and First Beach, the crew has a gander in at the broken heart in the big hill of rock just outside Freshwater. The French named it Creveceour. With bigger sips of rum and moonshine, some of them take a stab at uncovering the poetry restless in their Irish blood. Each gives his spiel as to why the French christened it so, aside from its shape.
At times the crew sings together, while other moments are handed solely, respectfully, to one man. With tunes passed around on the wind, time often seems to stand still. Each mind lost in its infinite passion for the Old Sod from the patriotism handed down so strongly through generations of legend and song. At such times, thoughts lie neither in yesterday nor tomorrow. The words and tunes they love to sing came with their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and their few possessions on the filthy boats carrying them from Cobh. Other verses they’ve made up along the paths of their own lives in this little corner of big Placentia Bay.
Michael Mullins finishes his cigarette, coughs to clear his throat, and spits, the way he always does before singing. No one dares open his mouth, except to take a drag on a pipe or smoke.
The young man sings softly and passionately about Dublin in days of old and a lovely girl named Molly Malone. A few moments of silence follow the song’s end, and one by one the crew says how they envision themselves walking the alleyways and streets of Dublin. All but Michael say they’re sure they’ll never live long enough to have the means to go there. The older men wish they had Michael’s nerve for singing without the drink.
“You’d swear he was alongside her when she died,” Charlie says under his breath of Michael’s singing. Tears are in his eyes as he remembers the tune from his own younger years.
“. . . cockles and mussels,” he sings, looking into the horizon.
“Alive, alive-o,” the rest help finish the line.
“I doubts we’ll ever see cobblestones to walk on in Fox Harbour,” Pad says, laughing.
“Ah, but b’ys, don’t we have the good-looking girls like they says are in Dublin an’ Galway an’ Cork?” Charlie says proudly.
“Such brazen beauty could only be born of Irish
blood,” Michael says, thinking of his Katie. He’s inspired to sing another.
I went to a dance one night in Fox Harbour,
There were plenty of girls as nice as you’d wish.
There was one pretty maiden a-chawing on frankum,
Just like a young kitten a-gnawing fresh fish.
Jim King reaches down and grabs John Kelly by the arm, helping him up from his bed of twine. Arm in arm they swing around the deck, singing the chorus to Michael’s song.
We’ll rant an’ we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders,
We’ll rant an’ we’ll roar on deck an’ below . . .
“All right, b’ys! Get to work out of it!” Captain Mullins roars, keeping his smile back-on to the dancing men. “Hard to port,” he yells, as the Annie makes her third tack, this time on a southwest course for Tide’s Cove Point, near the entrance to Mortier Bay on the western side of Placentia Bay.
Several miles off Marticot Island is a black curtain of fog. Inside the fog bank a peculiar but familiar feeling of night prevails. The three-second blasts every thirty seconds from the horn at Marticot Light doesn’t stop Jack Foley talking about Gus. He’s talking to Pad again, finishing what lack of time wouldn’t allow earlier. He imagines if his boy was here with him. Leaving him at home the way he had to, sick on the daybed, to go to the same godforsaken place to fish never made a bit of sense. Then, to come home excited, as much as Jack got excited, from a boatload of cod to find poor Gus dead in the bed upstairs, then to bury him and get back in the boat to do it all again for the past three years. There’s little wonder why he spent the past week or more bitching and complaining to Lize.
“Gus was a great hand to salt fish,” Jack says. The rest of the crew nod in agreement.
“One of the best,” he says. “Curse the TB, anyhow.”
“Goddamn TB,” two or three of them say.
Tossing his head, Jack spits a mouthful of black tobacco juice into the white, frothy mass of water being pushed aside by the boat. Looking into the evening of the day, he tastes his pipe and whispers prayers for Lizzie and Gus, Lize, his daughters, Nell and Laura in Grand Falls, Margaret, Helen, and Jane in the States, Angela and her crowd in Fox Harbour. And Bernadette, Lize’s saving grace in his absence. Bernadette can bake a Christmas fruitcake as good as her mother, and her molasses and raisin bread is as good as any Jack’s ever tasted. A little smile comes to his lips. Someday he’ll tell her.
Knowing the jigging of squid will soon put a dent in his strength, Jack turns his attention back to his fellow sharemen, whose good humour never fails to calm his nerves.
John Kelly comes up from his bunk and joins in on the chat. He’s still white in the face but says he’d rather be no place else. The fog, he says, is better than the sun draining the life out of them.
“A boat cuttin’ us down in this blackness might drain the life outta ya, too, John,” Pad says.
They all nod to his good point, then laugh because it’s rare for Pad to say something without a smirk. The skin of salt pork tied around John’s neck hasn’t helped his sore throat one bit, and he flings the failed remedy overboard.
“Here!” Pad says, holding a small glass bottle to John.
“Wha?”
“Take a few swallies of that an’ yer throat will be better in no time.”
“What is it, b’y?” John wants to know.
“Kerosene an’ molasses. Uncle Watt said you’d be needin’ it. ’Tis good for what ails ya.”
“Here’s to Mr. Watt,” John says, raising the bottle to his lips. Pad waits for a reaction but doesn’t get it.
“Wha?” John asks. “Ya didn’t think ’tis the only time I ever drink this stuff, did ya?”
Michael stands next to his father at the wheel, watching how the captain allows the schooner to glide effortlessly over the water. And although he’s been on a schooner a fair amount in his life, Michael is still amazed how the staysail and jib are able to catch the slightest breeze and carry a big boat along. He watches the sails breathe in the light breeze and takes a drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly. The Annie clips along at six knots.
Jim King paces the sixteen feet from port to starboard, tapping the bait barrels and trawl kegs lashed around the mainmast along the way.
“I wonder if Bridge’ll have the baby while I’m away,” he says, his fidgeting large frame doing little to hide his nervousness.
At Jim’s request, all hands kneel where they are and say a few prayers for Bridge and the baby she’s carrying.
Up ahead, another boat comes into view. Captain John Stevenson from Fox Harbour gives a quick wave from the helm of the Lady Jane and points ahead to the sunshine peeping through a hole in the bank of fog.
The crew remains united in a bit of gossip and in wishing Michael a happy birthday.
“Young Katie will wait for ya, Mick, b’y,” mocks Jim King.
“If Bridge heard ya talkin’ ’bout young Katie, King, she’d have yer head,” coughs John Kelly from a bundle of net near the stacked dories.
“I thought Mullins told ya stay in the bunk till yer better, Kelly,” Jim says.
The rest of the crew, including Michael, joins in on the fun.
“Ah, sure, b’ys, I was handy to takin’ Mr. Watt on this run,” the captain bawls out from behind the wheel. “That woulda been somethin’.”
“Uncle Watt could show you a thing or two, Mullins,” shouts Pad, rolling a barrel of salt up the deck.
“’Deed he could, me son. ’Deed he could,” returns Mullins.
All hands agree.
The Annie Healy breaks through the fog and into the view of dozens of other schooner crews taking bait on near Tide’s Cove Point.
With the Annie’s head to the wind, Captain Mullins turns her wheel all the way to starboard until she slows in the lop. With orders to lower the sails, the crew gets to work. Pad takes the halyards of the jib and jumbo down and zigzags them around the cleat gunwales, letting the ropes slide slowly through his hands. The weight of the boom brings the sails down to the deck. Jack does the same with the foresail while Jim grabs the downhaul from the trip boom for the mainsail, allowing the biggest sail to fall more quickly.
“Let go,” roars the captain.
With that, Charlie trips the trigger and the bow anchor hits the water with great force.
Clouds of squawking gulls circle the Annie’s mastheads in hopes of a meal. Bullbirds and turr lounge patiently on every perch, without the cheek of the boisterous, dirty gulls soiling every exposed inch of the boat.
One by one, silhouetted schooners loaded with bait cross the shimmering horizon on their way to Cape St. Mary’s and Golden Bay.
Preparing to haul anchor nearby is Captain John Power of Marystown and his crew on the schooner Chase.
“Off to Golden Bay, Cap’n Power?” Captain Mullins bellows from the Annie’s stern.
“Yes, sir. Soon’s the last dory’s aboard. We left ya plenty of squid, John. Ya needn’t worry.”
It is suppertime and over four hours since the Fox Harbour crew left home. With the Big Annie safely moored, the three dories are uncovered and removed one by one from the stack and lowered onto the sea by a boom. The men drop their three-inch pieces of lead and hooks over the side of the dories. Captain Power was right; the squid are plentiful, going mad for the red jiggers, ignorant of their many hooks. As fast as they can be hauled up, the squid are removed, covering the men in their greasy ink. They’re tossed into wooden tubs in the dory. Aside from the sound of lead hitting the water, all is quiet for about an hour.
“Mind the freeboard, b’ys,” Jack yells to Jim and Michael, who have a tendency to load the boat to the gunwales.
“The last thing we needs is a dory gone,” Jack grumbles.
Within three hours the dor
ies are hauled up, stacked, and fastened back to the schooner’s deck and covered with oilcloth. With the last barrel of squid covered, the crew hauls anchor and heads across Placentia Bay.
Darkness creeps in from every corner of the earth as the Annie Healy cuts through the black water, soaking up the late summer night. Michael makes sure the oil lamps are full before placing them inside the red and green glass casings of the port and starboard lights. The clear light casing of the mainmast lamp gets snagged while Michael is running it up the line. He climbs up and down the masthead and fixes the tangle in no time.
The Annie’s freshly barked sails of reddish brown smoulder in the last ashes of evening light as the schooner breaks on a southeast tack into the open sea for Golden Bay. Within the hour a splendid gibbous moon sends slivers of light on the water in the schooner’s wake while the North Star twinkles like a guardian angel. To the starboard bow, smiling dolphins play quietly at great speeds. Humpback whales grace the surface now and again, sending sprays of their misty sighs into the cooling air. The tranquility helps prepare the crew for the hard work that lies ahead. Not another word is spoken.
As the Annie Healy nears her destination, the treacherous Cape Shore coast spits back the ocean with each impotent attempt by the surf to climb the craggy cliffs. These are the same cliffs that reminded the Irish of the Cliffs of Moher so long ago, enticing them to embrace the endless miles of beautiful coastline as their own.
Under the spotlight of the moon, white, frothy masses against chiselled rock faces allow plenty of warning to ships’ captains and crews to keep a safe distance. The houses dotting the cliffs shine like patches of spring snow in the woods but are no match for the beauty of the dancing dippers in the night sky.
Rolling combers gently lift and pass beneath the boat, travelling great distances to break heavily on beaches far from the reach of land lovers sleeping in their homes hundreds of feet above. When the waves hit the cliffs, thunderous crashing sounds reach far back across the sea, giving the night a different feel altogether.