Michael Crummey

by Galore

  —I’ll just start the fire.

  He knocked around the kitchen awhile but couldn’t stay inside, pushing out the door into the weather. He walked into Paradise Deep while it was still dark, the wind so fierce on the Tolt he had to crawl on his hands and knees to stay on the headland. The sun came up a gray disk on the horizon as he walked to Tryphie’s workshop behind Selina’s House, the room empty but for the bulk of the Sculpin. Eli stood there as the day’s slow rise brought the machine out of the shadows. He hauled himself up top and swung the hatch open to peer inside. The entryway as big around as an outhouse hole and he stripped out of his pants and shirt to slither through, settling himself nearly naked among the pedals and gearshifts and tackle. Through the starboard porthole he saw Tryphie come in the door and Eli lifted his head above the hatch.

  —Jesus Eli, Tryphie said. —Don’t mess around with her.

  —Can’t let you leave and not launch this thing, he said. He squiggled back into the seat.

  —How does it feel in there?

  —Snug as a casket, Eli shouted.

  The Sculpin was wheeled to the shoreline the following Sunday. A huge crowd on the waterfront to watch the strange device being towed to the middle of the harbor on a barrel raft. Eli stripped to his skivvies and climbed inside, Tryphie leaning over the hatch to review the operation one last time. —You have to keep her trim when you let go the ballast tanks, he was saying. Eli looked up at his cousin as one esoteric instruction after another rattled his way, yaw and pitch, stern planes and rudder. —Shut up Ladybug, he said.

  Tryphie reached to shake his hand and Eli held on awhile.

  —You’ll do well, Tryphie told him, not to worry.

  —I wish you were dead, Eli said.

  Tryphie sealed the hatch and stepped off into a dory where he set about hammering holes in the barrels to scupper the raft. The iron fish floated clear into the bay, the sea around her boiling with escaping air and the vessel descending gracefully enough until she was halfway underwater. She started rolling aft then, Tryphie shouting correctional adjustments that seemed no help to Eli. The keel broke the surface a moment and the capsized vessel sank slowly into the black.

  There was no plan for what in the aftermath seemed altogether predictable. Men scrambled to get boats on the water, half a dozen dories sculling to the spot where she went down. It was seven fathoms to the bottom and they tried to hook some part of the hull with grapples, casting where air bubbled to the surface. Two lines were rowed to shore and fifty men dragged the weight of the machine into the shallows where she lay on her side. A flood of seawater poured clear when Tryphie released the hatch, Eli extracted from the innards by the white of his hair. He was unconscious and his lungs waterlogged and the doctor worked him over for fifteen minutes on the beach before he could be brought to the hospital.

  He didn’t come to himself until the next morning, his eyes trolling slowly about the bed where Hannah and Bride and Tryphie stood watching him. Bride called for the doctor and Eli shook his head against the pillow. —This was all a mistake, he said.

  —Don’t waste your strength, Bride told him.

  He was home the next day and back on the water with Strapp’s crew two days later. But he refused visitors and never left the house except to work. He talked in monosyllables and ate his food with an apathy that verged on revulsion. No one spoke of the accident for what it was but Hannah could see that Eli was skewed somehow, as if his mind had capsized along with the Sculpin. For weeks she tried to pass Eli’s listlessness off as a kind of hangover, as if the shadow on his heart was a physical bruise that would fade with time. But when she could stand it no longer she went to see Reverend Violet, thinking a dose of the evangelist’s forcefulness and drive might be the tonic Eli needed.

  The minister came to visit the house on a Sunday afternoon. —I thought I’d drop in, he said. —I’m not keeping you from something? He sat on the edge of a chair, hitching his pants up at the knee. Violet was past sixty and just as relentless as the missionary who appeared on the shore forty years before. His wife had raised a family of seven children while he proselytized the coastline and he had installed sons in the pulpits of new churches in Spread Eagle and Smooth Cove. Half the shore flew the Methodist banner as a result of his tireless campaigning. He had no time for prevarication. —Your wife is afraid there’s some harm come to you.

  —I’m fine, Eli said.

  —You give yourself a good fright, he said.

  —Never felt better.

  They danced awkwardly back and forth the room this way for half an hour and neither man would surrender the lead. Violet stood finally and went to the door. —The Lord brings us low to lift us up, he said. —When you’re stripped bare, that’s the time to seek your true life, Eli. The minister pointed across the room with his hat. —Ye must be born again, he said.

  Eli watched Violet walk across the garden and pass Mary Tryphena’s empty house before he stood from his chair and set it carefully beside the table. He went upstairs and lay in his son’s bed and he didn’t budge before it was time to go out on the water the next morning.

  In the middle of August word of a visitor passed along the shore. Eli heard of him from the other men on his fishing crew while they rowed out to the cod trap. A fellow named Crocker or Croker was calling a meeting of fishermen at the old Episcopalian church. Out of Notre Dame Bay, some said, though others claimed he was born and bred in St. John’s, the son of a carpenter. Lost a merchant store in the bank crash and spent most of the years since running a farm on some island near Herring Neck. —A farm, Lord Jesus, Val Woundy said. The man had to be some sort of lunatic to persevere at the venture so long. He was supposed to have beaten his wife often enough to drive her away to St. John’s with their only child in tow. A union he’d come to speak to them about, that and his plans to reform the country’s fishery. From all reports Mr. Crocker or Cooker or Creaker—closet townie, failed merchant, crackpot farmer—had never caught a fish in his life. He’d worn the leather off his shoes gathering men in stores and church halls and kitchens across the northeast of the island. —Son of a carpenter, Val Woundy said, and fancies himself the fishermen’s messiah.

  It promised to be an entertaining evening and Eli’s crew showed up at his house to drag him along, thinking the diversion might do him some good. Most of the men were away fishing on the Labrador which ensured a modest turnout, twenty or thirty scattered through the pews in the late-evening light. The hush in the damp church just enough to tamp down the undercurrent of ridicule they’d brought with them. At one minute past the appointed hour Thomas Trass suggested it was all a joke and no such man as Mr. Cracker ever lived.

  The door to the vestibule opened then and he came up the center aisle without looking left or right, leaning his weight on a cane. He turned below the pulpit to face them. —Thank you all for coming, he said. He was thickset though he carried the weight like a working man. Face falling into flesh and a trim little moustache, a receding hairline that made him appear older than his years. —My name, he said, is William Coaker.

  He had the rhythm and demeanor of a preacher, the same bluff assurance. He began with an overview of the sad facts of a fisherman’s life, the deplorable conditions they lived and worked in, the parasites in St. John’s who bled them dry. A sycophantic tone to the presentation that made the men restless, the grievances so familiar they could have rhymed them off in their sleep. But Coaker paused at the end of the list, breeding anticipation with his silence, and they all leaned slightly forward in their pews. —You people, he said finally. He pointed with his sausage fingers. Grovelers, he called them. They were living the same miserable lives their fathers lived and their fathers’ fathers before them. The wealth of the nation made on their backs and every one of them content to beg at Levi Sellers’ door. They were backward and illiterate and happy to leave their children no hope of a better life.

  A ripple of indignation stirred the room but there was enough truth in the h
arangue 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 labor? 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 labor 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 practiced 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. —W
e’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?