The sheriff? said Horace. You just barely missed him. He and Abel both; just barely gone. Heading for the docks, they said.
Ishmael Chambers put down the receiver and sat with his forehead held in his palm, remembering Carl Heine from high school. They had both graduated in ’42. They had played on the football team together. He remembered riding the team bus with Carl to a game against Bellingham in the fall of ’41. They rode wearing their uniforms, their helmets in their laps, each boy carrying his own towel. He remembered how Carl looked sitting beside him with his gym towel draped around his thick German neck, glaring out the window at the fields. It was dusk, a brief November twilight, and Carl was watching snow geese land in low flooded wheat, his square chin set, his head tilted up, a man’s blond stubble on his jaw. ‘Chambers,’ he’d said. ‘You see the geese?’
Ishmael slid a notepad into the pocket of his pants and went outside into Hill Street. Behind him he left unlocked the office of the Review – three rooms that had once housed a book and magazine shop and still contained its many wall shelves. The bookshop had ultimately not been profitable because of the steep hill on which it was situated; Hill Street discouraged tourists. Ishmael, though, liked this feature of it. He had nothing in principle against the vacationers from Seattle who frequented San Piedro all summer long – most islanders disliked them because they were city people – but on the other hand he did not especially enjoy seeing them as they wandered up and down Main Street. Tourists reminded him of other places and elicited in him a prodding doubt that living here was what he wanted.
He had not always been so ambivalent about his home. Once he’d known how he felt about it. After the war, a man of twenty-three with an amputated arm, he’d left San Piedro without reluctance to attend school in Seattle. He’d lived in a boardinghouse on Brooklyn Avenue and taken, at first, history classes. He had not been particularly happy in this period, but in that regard he was like other veterans. He was keenly aware of his pinned-up sleeve, and troubled because it troubled other people. Since they could not forget about it, neither could he. There were times when he visited taverns near campus and allowed himself to act gregarious and animated in the manner of younger students. Afterward he inevitably felt foolish, however. It was not in him to drink beer and shoot pool. His more natural domain was a high-backed booth near the rear of Day’s Restaurant on University Way where he sipped coffee and read his history.
The next fall Ishmael took up American literature. Melville, Hawthorne, Twain. He was prepared, in his cynicism, to find Moby Dick unreadable – five hundred pages about chasing a whale? – but, as it turned out, it was entertaining. He read the whole thing in ten sittings in his booth at Day’s and began pondering the whale’s nature at an early juncture. The narrator, he found upon reading the first sentence, bore his own name – Ishmael. Ishmael was all right, but Ahab he could not respect and this ultimately undermined the book for him.
Huckleberry Finn he had read as a child, but he couldn’t remember much of it. He recalled only that it was funnier then – everything was funnier – but the story had fled his mind. Other people spoke fondly and knowingly of books they had read decades before. Ishmael suspected this was pretense. He sometimes wondered what had become of the books he’d read many years earlier – if they were still somewhere inside him. James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, William Dean Howells. He didn’t think any of them were still there. He couldn’t remember them, anyway.
The Scarlet Letter he read in six sittings. He closed down Day’s finishing it. The cook came out from behind the swinging doors and told him it was time to leave. Ishmael was on the last page when this occurred and ended up reading ‘ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES,’ while standing on the sidewalk outside. What did it mean? He could only guess what it might fully mean, even with the explanatory footnote. People hurried past him while he stood there with his book open, an October gust blowing in his face. He felt troubled by this ending to the story of Hester Prynne; the woman, after all, deserved better.
All right, he decided, books were a good thing, but that was all they were and nothing else – they couldn’t put food on his table. And so Ishmael turned to journalism.
His father, Arthur, had been a logger at Ishmael’s age. Wearing a handlebar mustache and calf-high caulk boots, frayed suspenders and woolen long johns, he’d labored in the service of the Port Jefferson Mill Company for four and a half years. Ishmael’s grandfather had been a Highland Presbyterian, his grandmother an Irish zealot from the bogs above Lough Ree; they met in Seattle five years before the Great Fire, wed, and raised six sons. Arthur, the youngest, was the only one to remain on Puget Sound. Two of his brothers became mercenary soldiers, one died of malaria on the Panama Canal, one became a surveyor in Burma and India, and the last made tracks for the eastern seaboard at seventeen, never to be heard from again.
The San Piedro Review, a four-page weekly, was the invention of Arthur’s early twenties. With his savings he acquired a printing press, a box camera, and a damp, low-ceilinged office in the rear of a fish-processing warehouse. The inaugural edition of the Review displayed a banner headline: JURY ACQUITS SEATTLE’S GILL. Brushing shoulders with reporters from the Star, the Times, the Evening Post, the Daily Call, and the Seattle Union-Record, Arthur had covered the trial of Mayor Hiram Gill, accused in a liquor scandal. He ran a long feature on George Vandeveer, charlatan attorney for the Wobbly defense in the Everett Massacre deliberations. An editorial pleaded for the exercise of common sense as Wilson moved to declare war, another celebrated the recent extension of ferry service to the leeward side of the island. A meeting of the Rhododendron Society was announced, as was an evening of square dancing at the Grange and the birth of a son, Theodore Ignatius, to the Horatio Marches of Cattle Point. All of this appeared in Centurion bold type – already antiquated in 1917 – with delicate hairlines separating seven columns and subheads in bold serif relief.
Shortly thereafter Arthur was drafted to serve in General Pershing’s army. He fought at Saint-Mihiel and Belleau Wood, then came home to his newspaper. He married a Seattle woman of Illini stock, com blond, svelte, and somber eyed. Her father, a haberdasher on Seattle’s First Avenue and a real estate speculator, frowned on Arthur, who seemed to him a lumberjack posing as a reporter, a man without prospects and unworthy of his daughter, nevertheless the two were married and settled down to the business of rearing children. They had only one, though, after much effort; they lost a second at birth. They built a house at South Beach with a view of the sea and cleared a path to the beach. Arthur became an astute and deliberate vegetable gardener, an inveterate observer of island life, and gradually a small-town newspaperman in the truest sense: he came to recognize the opportunity his words provided for leverage, celebrity, and service. For many years he took no vacations. He put out extra editions on Christmas Eve, during election week, and on the Fourth of July. Ishmael remembered running the press with his father every Tuesday evening. Arthur had bolted it to the floor of a boat-building warehouse on Andreason Street, a dilapidated barn that smelled permanently of lithographic ink and of the ammonia in the typesetting machine. The press was an enormous lime green contraption, rollers and conveyor pulleys in a cast-iron housing; it started with the hesitancy of a nineteenth-century locomotive and shrieked and bleated while it ran. It was Ishmael’s job to set the impression meters and water fountains and to act in the role of fly boy; Arthur, who had formed over the years a symbiotic relationship with the machine, ducked in and out inspecting the plates and printing cylinders. He stood mere inches from the clattering rollers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that – as he’d explained to his son – were he caught by a sleeve he’d be instantly popped open like a child’s balloon and splattered across the walls. Even his bones would disappear – this was part of Arthur’s warning – until somebody found them scattered among the stained newsprint on the floor, looking like strips of white confetti.
A group of businessmen from th
e chamber of commerce had tried to persuade Arthur to run for the Washington state legislature. They came to the house dressed in overcoats and checkered scarves, reeking of pomade and shaving soap, and sat down to snifters of blackberry cordial, after which Arthur declined to run for office, telling the gentlemen from Amity Harbor that he harbored no illusions, that he preferred to turn sentences and prune his mulberry hedges. The sleeves of his striped oxford shirt lay rolled to his elbows so that the hairs on his forearms showed; his back formed a long hard wedge of muscle against which his suspenders rode tautly. On his nose, a bit low, sat his steel-rimmed full moons, gently prosthetic and handsomely discordant with the sinewy length of his jawline. The cartilage in his nose was twisted – it’d been broken by the lash of a wayward logging cable in the winter of 1915. The men from Amity Harbor couldn’t argue with this or with the fixed upward tilt of his chin and jaw. They left unsatisfied.
An unflagging loyalty to his profession and its principles had made Arthur, over the years, increasingly deliberate in his speech and actions, and increasingly exacting regarding the truth in even his most casual reportage. He was, his son remembered, morally meticulous, and though Ishmael might strive to emulate this, there was nevertheless this matter of the war – this matter of the arm he’d lost – that made such scrupulosity difficult. He had a chip on his shoulder: it was a sort of black joke he shared with himself, a double entendre, made silently. He didn’t like very many people anymore or very many things, either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism – a veteran’s cynicism – was a thing that disturbed him all the time. It seemed to him after the war that the world was thoroughly altered. It was not even a thing you could explain to anybody, why it was that everything was folly. People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids. He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody’s head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous. He found that he was irritated with complete strangers. If somebody in one of his classes spoke to him he answered stiffly, tersely. He could never tell if they were relaxed enough about his arm to say what they were really thinking. He sensed their need to extend sympathy to him, and this irritated him even more. The arm was a grim enough thing without that, and he felt sure it was entirely disgusting. He could repel people if he chose by wearing to class a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the scar tissue on his stump. He never did this, however. He didn’t exactly want to repel people. Anyway, he had this view of things – that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous. He could not help but possess this unhappy perspective, no matter how much he might not want it. It was his and he suffered from it numbly.
Later, when he was no longer so young and back home on San Piedro Island, this view of things began to moderate. He learned to be cordial to everyone – a sophisticated and ultimately false front. Add to the cynicism of a man wounded in war the inevitable cynicism of growing older and the professional cynicism of the journalist. Gradually Ishmael came to view himself as a one-armed man with a pinned-up sleeve, past thirty and unmarried. It was not so bad, and he was not so irritated as he had once been in Seattle. Still, though, there were those tourists, he thought, as he walked down Hill Street toward the docks. All summer they looked at his pinned-up sleeve with the surprised, unaccustomed faces his fellow islanders had stopped making. And with their ice cream and clean faces they elicited in his gut again that bilious, unwanted irritation. The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn’t find a way to do it.
His mother, who was fifty-six and lived alone in the old family house on the south end of the island – the house where Ishmael had lived as a child – had pointed out to him when he’d come home from the city that this cynicism of his, while understandable, was on the other hand entirely unbecoming. His father before him had had it, she said, and it had been unbecoming in him, too.
‘He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings,’ she’d told Ishmael. ‘You’re the same, you know. You’re your father’s son.’
Art Moran was standing with one foot up on a piling, talking to half a dozen fishermen, when Ishmael Chambers arrived that afternoon on the Amity Harbor docks. They were gathered in front of Carl Heine’s gillnetter, which was moored between the Erik J and the Tordenskold – the former a bow-picker owned by Marty Johansson, the latter an Anacortes purse seiner. As Ishmael came their way a south breeze blew and caused the mooring lines of boats to creak – the Advancer, the Providence, the Ocean Mist, the Torvanger – all standard San Piedro gill-netters. The Mystery Maid, a halibut and black cod schooner, had fared badly of late and was in the process of being overhauled. Her starboard hull plate had been removed, her engine dismantled, and her crankshaft and rod bearings lay exposed. On the dock at her bow by a pile of pipe fittings, two rusted diesel barrels, a scattering of broken plate glass, and the hulk of a marine battery on which empty paint cans were stacked. A sheen of oil lay on the water just below where scraps of rug had been nailed down to act as dockside bumpers.
Today there were a lot of seagulls present. Normally they foraged around the salmon cannery, but now they sat on drag floats or buoy bags without stirring a feather, as if made of clay, or rode the tide in Amity Harbor, occasionally flaring overhead, riding the winds with their heads swiveling. Sometimes they alighted on unattended boats and scavenged desperately for deck scraps. Fishermen sometimes shot duck loads at them, but for the most part the gulls were given free rein on the docks; their gray white droppings stained everything.
An oil drum had been turned onto its side before the Susan Marie, and on it sat Dale Middleton and Leonard George, dressed in mechanics’ grease suits. Jan Sorensen leaned against a plywood garbage Dumpster; Marty Johansson stood with his feet planted wide, his forearms folded across his bare chest, his T-shirt tucked into his pants waist. Directly beside the sheriff stood William Gjovaag with a cigar lodged between his ringers. Abel Martinson had perched himself on the bow gunnel of the Susan Marie and listened to the fishermen’s conversation with his boots dangling above the waterline.
San Piedro fishermen – in those days, at least – went out at dusk to work the seas. Most of them were gill-netters, men who traveled into solitary waters and dropped their nets into the currents salmon swam. The nets hung down like curtains in the dark water and the salmon, unsuspecting, swam into them.
A gill-netter passed his night hours in silence, rocking on the sea and waiting patiently. It was important that his character be adapted to this, otherwise his chances of success were dubious. At times the salmon ran in such narrow waters that men had to fish for them in sight of one another, in which case arguments brewed. The man who’d been cut off by another man up tide might motor abreast of the interloper in order to shake a gaff at him and curse him up and down as a fish thief. There were, on occasion, shouting matches at sea, but far more often a man was alone all night and had no one, even, to argue with. Some who had tried this lonely sort of life had given up and joined the crews of purse seiners or of long-line halibut schooners. Gradually Anacortes, a town on the mainland, became home to the big boats with crews of four or more, the Amity Harbor fleet home to one-man gill-netters. It was something San Piedro prided itself on, the fact that its men had the courage to fish alone even in inclement weather. An ethic, with time, asserted itself in island souls, that fishing alone was better than fishing other ways, so that the sons of fishermen, when they dreamed at night, dreamed of going forth in their lonely boats and hauling from the sea with their nets large salmon that other men would find impressive.
Thus on San Piedro the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man. He who was too gregarious, who spoke too much and too ar
dently desired the company of others, their conversation and their laughter, did not have what life required. Only insofar as he struggled successfully with the sea could a man lay claim to his place in things.
San Piedro men learned to be silent. Occasionally, though, and with enormous relief, they communicated with one another on the docks at dawn. Though tired and still busy, they spoke from deck to deck of what had happened during the night and of things only they could understand. The intimacy of it, the comfort of other voices giving credence to their private myths, prepared them to meet their wives with less distance than they might otherwise bring home after fishing. In short, they were lonely men and products of geography – island men who on occasion recognized that they wished to speak but couldn’t.
Ishmael Chambers knew, as he approached the knot of men gathered before the Susan Marie, that he was not a part of this fraternity of fishermen, that furthermore he made his living with words and was thus suspect to them. On the other hand he had the advantage of the prominently wounded and of any veteran whose war years are forever a mystery to the uninitiated. These latter were things that solitary gill-netters could appreciate and offset their distrust of a word shaper who sat behind a typewriter all day.
They nodded at him and with slight alterations in posture included him in their circle. ‘Figure’d you’d a heard by now,’ said the sheriff. ‘Probably know more ’n I do.’
‘Hard to believe,’ answered Ishmael.
William Gjovaag tucked his cigar between his teeth. ‘It happens,’ he grunted. ‘You go fishing, it happens.’
‘Well, yeah,’ said Marty Johansson. ‘But Jesus Christ.’ He shook his head and rocked on his heels.
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