Baltimore's Mansion Page 14

  “He worked in a fish plant too,” Young Hunt says. “This man can split a fish faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.” This is true, if only because before this trip Young Hunt has never seen a fish split in his life.

  “What if we don’t let you go?” the manager says. “There’s only one way out of here, and we can block it off just like that.”

  Some shout their support of this remark. “We should dunk them off the wharf,” says the man who knocked Young Hunt’s helmet from his hands.

  A big man wearing rubber overalls and a yellow oilskin raincoat steps in front of the manager. “Go on,” he says, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. “Go on, get out of here. Go on home before someone gets hurt.”

  The crowd falls silent.

  The men of the Belle Bay turn around and make slowly for the boat.

  The people cheer as if they believe that by this retreat of the inspectors, the matter of their fish plant has been settled and outsiders will never interfere with them again.

  “Go on!” the man roars behind them.

  Young Hunt runs. Broadhurst and Manning pick up the pace. He’ll be damned if he’ll show them he’s scared. He feels something hit him between the shoulder blades and turns around. At his feet lies one small fish.

  “A fish for the fisherman,” a woman says. This is met with great guffaws.

  He turns around and is hit again, this time just below the backside. Soon they are pelting him with fish from the catch they condemned. Broadhurst and Manning run, Broadhurst shouting, “You’ll all be arrested for assault!”

  He keeps walking and they follow just a few feet behind him, hurling fish with all their might. Some of the fish hit him with such force that he is driven forward and almost falls. When he reaches the wharf, he climbs down the ladder to the boat, where Broadhurst helps him aboard and closes the door behind him.

  Fish hit the boat, thud on the roof, splatter against the windows, leaving trails of blood.

  “You all right?” says Broadhurst.

  He goes to his bunk, takes off his soiled clothing and lies down.

  FOR PART OF my father’s stint on the Belle Bay, we lived on the edge of Forest Pond, by pure chance in the summer house of Major Cashin’s brother, a house that the legendary Major must have visited or even stayed in overnight.

  My father, in talking about the house with his brothers or with neighbours, referred to it as “Cashin’s.”

  “We’ll be staying at Cashin’s until May,” he said, as if it was the Major’s house.

  This memory for some reason makes me feel the way I did in the first months of my adolescence: on summer nights when it was calm, trout breached in such numbers they registered like raindrops on the pond.

  It was in this house that I picked up from my father my mania for weather watching. He had acquired it on his Belle Bay expeditions, partly out of necessity and partly out of boredom; it was important while on the water to listen frequently to forecasts and note changes in temperature and wind direction and velocity, and learn how to predict the weather from the mere look of the water and the sky.

  In the evening, I listened to the Fishermen’s Broadcast on CBC radio and later at night to the island-wide “temperature roundup.” I took the radio into my room with me and, ignoring my brothers’ complaints about the noise, listened to it in the dark. Every evening there was the same cold-shiver-inducing litany of south-coast place names: Burgeo, Fortune, Hermitage. I imagined myself looking out to sea at night from the window of a house in Hermitage, a house where there was never more than one light burning.

  I was of course especially interested in what the weather was like along the south coast while my father was away. The Fishermen’s Broadcast included a weather forecast for both the coastal communities and the fishing grounds, the various “banks,” each of which I imagined as an expansive swell of water somehow clearly defined from all the others.

  The latter were especially interesting, for the Belle Bay often did not put into port until late at night and sometimes, if the weather was too rough for docking, not at all. There were several broadcasters, one voice giving way to the next as the forecast moved around the island.

  In spite of having seen the Belle Bay, I didn’t fret for my father’s safety, didn’t think it a real possibility that he would not return. But there was nothing like thinking of him out there, the lights of the Belle Bay glowing in the dark like those of the radio transistors that I could see by looking through the perforated panel on the back. Often the radio crackled with static and the voices were very faint, as if the signal were being sent by short-wave from some stormbound Arctic hut.

  “Winds light, west southwest, ten knots gusting to fifteen knots. Increasing rapidly to winds east, southeast, thirty knots gusting to fifty knots by midnight. Gale warning in effect.” There were almost always advisories or warnings of some kind. A warning was more serious than an advisory. I knew the wind-warnings scale: small craft, gale force, storm force, hurricane force. The advisories were always perfunctorily announced in a “purely for your information” kind of way. Mind you, storm warnings were only slightly less perfunctorily announced, as if the announcers had been chosen on the basis of having voices least likely to cause undue or even entirely justified alarm. They droned eerily on as if the forecasts were being read by a succession of hermits who had long since lost interest in the outside world.

  In the winter, there were often freezing-spray warnings. Freezing spray was water blown from the crests of waves onto ships, where it froze instantly. My father said that freezing spray made the Belle Bay look like a floating ice sculpture and often so increased her weight that she rode several feet lower than normal in the water and sometimes almost sank. He never spared us the details of the hazards of his trips, nor did my mother ever urge him to, at least not in front of us.

  The forecasts for the banks seemed especially dramatic. “Seas ten feet, increasing to seas twenty to thirty feet by midnight and to seas forty feet by dawn.” I curled up warm beneath my blankets and thought of my father out there where the voice on the radio made it sound so remote, a radio world accessible only via the Belle Bay, where it was always dark and there was always freezing spray, and nameless rime-encrusted small craft bobbed about unmanned, unseen.

  “Forecast for the south coast including the Argentia, Belleoram, Burin, Grand Banks, Fortune, Harbour Breton, Hermitage, Hare Bay, Grey River, Ramea, Ramea Islands, Burgeo and Channel-Port aux Basques banks.”

  Ramea was off the southwest coast on Northwest Island, one of the Ramea Islands, a small archipelago that also included Big Island, Southwest Island, Harbour Island and Grepe Island. All except Big Island had been completely deforested by settlers since the nineteenth century, bald islands on which nothing grew, the topsoil either unable to rise to the challenge of a second growth from scratch or burned off by forest fires altogether. A ferry connected the unimaginably isolated Ramea to the unimaginably isolated Burgeo on the coast.

  My father took photographs of the places they went to on the Belle Bay, and I remember especially well one that he took of Ramea: a man stands on a height of land; behind and below him is a harbour strewn with dories, an anachronistic pair of tall-masted schooners side by side; on the land beyond the harbour are scatterings of square, flat-roofed two-storey houses; and beyond the island the headlands of another island, partially obscured by mist.

  MY FATHER TOLD me once that the smell of a beach is not the smell of the sea. Once you have gone far enough from land, the sea doesn’t smell of anything except salt water, he said, water a hundred times saltier than blood. It isn’t that the smell of salt is masking other smells. There are no other smells. This is why, unless you happen to be seasick, food cooked at sea smells and tastes so good. The body, for so long deprived of it, craves sensation. After your first prolonged stay at sea, you smell things back on land that you never smelled before, things you thought had no smell. Rock, for instance. He said that the first thing you smell
on approaching Newfoundland by boat is rock. You smell it and even faintly taste it, a coppery metallic taste at the back of your mouth.

  My father, just back home after three weeks on the Belle Bay, walked around as though in a daze, eyes on the ground as though he were searching for something. He stood at the fence in the backyard, his hand on the rail, and simply stared at the proliferous landscape, as if it were all brand-new to him.

  It was not just smells and sights but sounds too — birds chirping, dogs barking, cars going by on the road outside the house, the distant whine of a power saw or, from somewhere far off in the valley beyond the ridge, a rifle shot. The sound he missed most, he said, was the sound of the wind in the trees, the rustle of the topmost leaves as a land breeze moved among them.

  He walked. What a novel sensation it must have been for him to walk, to propel himself more than a boat’s length in one direction and feel the earth hard and motionless beneath his feet.

  He walked up the road at a clip with no destination in mind. “I’m getting my land legs back,” he said when he returned hours later.

  The first couple of nights in his stationary bed he could not sleep — not that he minded much, for it simply allowed him to revel that much longer in idleness and in being back home, in not being on the water.

  When he did sleep, he slept as he had not since he was last on land, before he set sail on the Belle Bay. A night at sea was at best one long dwall for him, a slumberous sleep during which his mind raced and he was always at least dimly aware of his surroundings and circumstances.

  Even in winter, he spent as much of his week off as he could outdoors, shovelling snow, cutting a path in the driveway much wider than was necessary, pausing about every other shovelful to look around or relight a cigarette.

  When my father was home from his trips, my weather-watching habits did not change much. He had become, from his time on the Belle Bay, an obsessive tapper of barometers. He couldn’t pass by one without tapping it. We always had a functional barometer in the house, and often more than one. My father would cringe when the barometer registered a sudden drop in air pressure, and he knew bad weather was coming, as if it put him back on the Belle Bay, as if even during his time home he was vicariously on board with whoever rode on the Belle Bay when it was not his shift.

  He would not sleep while a storm was raging, for the sounds of the storm were incorporated into his sea dreams and made them that much worse.

  There was nothing I would rather do than watch a storm, so I kept vigil with him throughout the night, he sitting through hours of self-induced, nightmare-preventing sleeplessness, reading The Reader’s Digest or doing crossword puzzles while sipping on a rye and ginger ale, while I, with my face to the window, kept him informed on the progress of the storm. “For God’s sake, Wayne, get away from the window,” he said, as if by watching it I was encouraging the storm, as if unless it was ignored it would never peter out.

  Sometimes in spite of a storm he did go to sleep and spent the night thrashing about and shouting instructions to the skipper or one of the Belle Bay bunch while my mother lay sleepless beside him, afraid to wake him, for he always came roaring out of a nightmare when touched or spoken to as if such a prompt brought him in his dream to the brink of death, as if it sank the Belle Bay the last remaining inch below the waves.

  Telephones were rare in the outports, so when my father was away, his only means to call home was the ship-to-shore telephone. We got about half an hour’s warning from federal Fisheries that the call was coming, as it had to be patched through to our phone by some complicated series of connections. We took turns talking to him. The line crackled with static and his voice was very faint. He sounded as if he were calling from under water.

  We had to say “Over” each time we stopped to let him speak, which we boys thought was great fun but my mother hated. While we fought among ourselves over what order we should talk to him in, each of us wanting to go last so that we could say “Over and out,” my mother walked about arms folded, smoking, swearing that she was fed up with having conversations with her husband as if the two of them were in the Navy, having to say “Over” every fifteen seconds. But she always spoke to him.

  Fearful that by not calling he would give away the fact that he had been drinking, he was most faithful about calling when he was least able to pretend that he was sober.

  “You sound pretty pleased with yourself, over,” my mother would say, a code phrase she need not have bothered with — we knew what it meant. He protested his sobriety, but there was no fooling her.

  Her tone starting out would be reproachful, but perhaps because of having to say “Over” at the end of every sentence, rolling her eyes as she did so, she wound up laughing or making kisses into the phone as she never did when he was sober. My mother would make a long, drawn out smooching noise, then say, “Over,” bursting into giggles, then into gales of laughter when my father did the same. “Other people can hear this call you know, over,” she’d say.

  “Where are you calling from, Dad, over?” I asked him. When he told me — Roddicton, Inglee, English Harbour — I wrote it down so that later I could find it on the map.

  “I’m stormbound, Wayne, over.”

  “So are we. We’re stuck in the house. Are you on the Belle Bay now? Over.”

  “Yes. We’re tied up at the wharf in Ramea, over.”

  I could picture it, the Belle Bay moored and bobbing, my father’s view of Ramea like that of someone on a trampoline.

  “My God, Wayne,” he said once, his voice suddenly breaking with emotion. “What a country we could have been. What a country we were one time.”

  I fell silent. My mother took the phone from me, went out into the hall and closed the door.

  “I know,” I heard my mother say. “We still are, sweetheart. I know. Try not to think about it, now. Don’t be by yourself, all right? Stay with the others.”

  If they were docked and it was too rough to stay on board the Belle Bay, they found whatever accommodations they could. There were no hotels, bed and breakfasts or even boarding houses in most of the places they made port. If they were lucky, a priest or minister would take them in, or old couples who, because their children had moved away, had rooms not slept in for years. Otherwise, they displaced children from their beds, or slept on sofas, waking in the morning as a family of strangers began its day around them in self-conscious silence. The members of the crew would venture out from their various houses after breakfast and find some shed or flakehouse where they could pass the day together smoking and drinking the rum they had brought in case of such a stranding.

  Newfoundland is at the end of the line weather-wise, the last stop for storms that come across the continent or up the Atlantic seaboard from the Gulf of Mexico. And stop they often do, especially in winter, giant low-pressure systems remaining stationary, generating northeast winds and snow that lasts for days. Night after night, a large encircled L appears in exactly the same place on the television weather map, the weatherman sheepishly explaining why, despite his predictions to the contrary, the storm has not moved on.

  I remember my mother nervously smoking as she listened. She regarded the weatherman, Bob Lewis, with a kind of skeptical dread, owing to the inaccuracy of his forecasts. It was as though he was a symptom of some larger chaos that caused things to happen without reason or forewarning. “He can’t forecast the days of the week,” she said, staring at him on the screen as he described the track he believed some storm would take. But she watched him anyway. His forecasts, even if they were little more than fiction, gave to her anxiety some shape and substance.

  We gathered round the set and watched with her, waiting for the L’s to turn up on the map. It seemed that as soon as my father left on one of his trips, those L’s popped up everywhere. Even if there had been none on the entire map of the continent the day before, there were swarms of them the next.

  Troughs too shallow to be designated lows deepened as the Belle Bay
headed west. Within their zones of influence, the barometric pressure dropped, the isobars of each low compressed to a vortex of concentric shapes.

  Clipper storms stacked up like airplanes from east to west, destination Newfoundland; Gulf of Mexico storms hugged the coast until they plowed into the current south of Sable Island, banked off it and wildly veered northeast. The storms crossed three peninsulas, the Burin, the Avalon, the Bonavista, then stalled, brought up solid fifty miles off the northeast coast as if a mooring line with fifty miles of slack had at last run out. With the ocean to provide them with an endless source of moisture and the wind off the ice pack making sure the snow would never change to rain, there was theoretically no reason why they could not last forever.

  For me, the map was a representation not of space but time. It was a time grid whose various sections could just as easily have been numbered as named, for the names meant nothing to me. The provinces and states, whose existence I did not really believe in, were preconfigurations of the next few days, the moods that would prevail in the house. The past was off-screen right, the future off-screen left and the picture on the screen was a photograph of now. Here comes next week, there goes last week. It was easy to imagine that the past was recoverable, that you could pull it back like a ticker tape, and across the screen would go the L’s and H’s that in code contained the past.

  I imagined some giant L-shaped dirigible that would not move on until someone cut the rope by which it was moored to the island. Me trudging off through the storm, wading blindly through snowdrifts until I somehow found the rope that was thicker than a tree trunk and hacked at it with my axe until it broke and the ragged end of it trailed off across the snow as the storm withdrew.