The Doryman Read online

  As they walked along, Steve kept wiping his mustache with his hand, which was covered in the grey wool mittens that Elizabeth had made over Christmas. He was trying to get the ice crystals out of his beard. He said nothing. Although he’d never admit it, he was not looking forward to the days of slaving that awaited them. It’d be good for Richard, though, he told himself. It was time for him to get out from under his mother’s skirts, which could not happen as long as the boy was engaged in the shore fishery.

  Richard was silent, too. He kept himself occupied by thinking of the morning’s events. That morning, Rachel had scurried into the room he shared with Jimmy and young Jack.

  “I have a surprise for you, Richard,” she said, her brown face all smiles. She pumped up and down on her tiptoes, making her almost as tall as her brother. Then she handed him a small package wrapped in brown paper.

  He said nothing, but looked right at her. He was moved, but he didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, don’t you want to open it?” Rachel asked impatiently, holding the package towards him. Oddly, he noticed how big her hands were.

  “Come on, open it!” she cried.

  Richard slowly took the parcel in his hands and gently pulled the string, loosening the paper around the small bundle. Then he sat on his bed and pulled out a pair of woollen gloves of brilliant white and hunter green. He turned them over in his hands.

  “They’re the colours of the woods in winter,” Rachel announced. “And I made them for you, all by myself. I even carded the wool. Mom’s been showing me how.”

  She smiled with pride and her brother pulled her close in a hug.

  “Thank you, Rachel,” he said. “I never even saw you making them.”

  Now he smiled at the memory of his sister’s present as he trudged alongside his father, the gloves keeping his hands warm.

  His mother, too, had tried to make his first Banks fishing trip a little less nerve-racking.

  One evening, when Steve was in Uncle Dick’s fishing room down the hill, Elizabeth called her oldest son to her. She was sitting in the corner chair near the wood stove, sewing cotton shirts for her younger boys, though the light was quite dim. She spent every evening this way, darning countless pairs of socks and putting new elbows in shirts and knees in pants. She made clothes from brin bags and dyes of blue, black, red and purple from berries and plant roots. Some nights she brought crazy patterns of colours together in the blankets and quilts that covered their beds and kept them warm at night. Sometimes she carded wool, sheared from the sheep she kept. Now she drew a scarlet ribbon bearing a medal out of her sewing bag.

  “This is for you to take with you, Richard,” she said. The medal twirled on the end of the ribbon, flirting with the light from the oil lamp. It was St. Anne, her hands clasped in prayer.

  “It was blessed at St. Pierre on St. Anne’s Day a long time ago, before you were born,” she said. She smiled gently, and she noticed that Richard’s lips were clamped together. He was not one to show emotion. Her own people were like that and, briefly, though they seemed so far away now, she recognized them in her son’s face. So she brushed his cheek with her long, dark fingers. Then he looked at her and smiled shyly.

  “It’ll keep you safe out there,” she said reassuringly. “St. Anne will watch over you. Put it round your neck and keep it on ... all the time.”

  Steve and Richard finally reached Mooring Cove, named after the English warships that had been moored there long ago. Then they saw the Laura Claire, named for one of the Brinton girls in Burin, on the east side of the harbor. She was a proud forty tons, one of the biggest ships Richard had ever seen this close. The glistening ice needles that hung off her railings made her look only more elegant.

  “She’s moored now with two anchors. She’ll take in 2,000 quintals of fish this trip, maybe as much as 500 quintals more than that,” Steve announced, not expecting an answer from his son. “Not bad.”

  Richard’s blue eyes scoured the vessel. Her hull was dark green with deep crimson rails and yellow trim. She was beautiful, no doubt about it.

  “You’ll get a one-quarter share,” Steve said, patting Richard on the shoulder, “being a boy and first time out.”

  Then he looked down at his son and his face grew serious; there was even a hint of grimness. “I was fourteen when I started Banks fishing,” he added, as if to comfort the boy. “Or maybe I was younger.”

  Chapter Three

  In the forecastle that first night, the men lay in their bunks and told stories of western boats and dories. They had kicked off their boots and removed the oilskins and sweater coats that would offer some protection from the winter wind once they reached the Banks. The captain and his mate slept aft in their own cabin.

  “We went into the deep woods near Winterland,” Matty Dober recounted his winter of boatbuilding. “Me and the brother-in-law, Tim Walsh. Tim made the model early last fall. We always built from models,” he said for Richard’s benefit.

  “She was a pretty little thing, apple-bowed and flat-bottomed. And she was plumb-stemmed. That’s the way they are, these boats. We were making the boat for Captain Clarence Hollett over in Burin. He knows Tim is the best around for making models. And I sure don’t mind the woods myself after being on the water all summer.”

  He drew smoke from his cigarette.

  “Captain Hollett used to buy his schooners in Essex in the Boston States. But in the later years, he wants to make them. ‘Tis cheaper, I suppose.”

  “Yes, with we fellows pretty well indentured servants, I suppose it is!” said Steve. The men laughed grimly.

  “Yes, there’s after being thousands of schooners built in Newfoundland these late years especially,” Matty said. “Before that, they used square-rigged ships and brigs.”

  “Schooners are ten times better, no matter which way you look at it,” said Steve.

  “Why, Father?” Richard asked, as he tried to imagine a brig.

  “Lots of reasons,” Larry Walsh from Beau Bois piped up. “For one, you need less hands with a schooner. The skipper’s got to like that. More money for him!”

  “Schooners can take the wind from either side, too,” Steve explained. “And they’re easier to sail in cold weather. Comes in handy in this country and on the Labrador.”

  “With the brigs you needed a hell of a lot of deck space for storing the sails and the rigging,” Matty added. “So the jacks came in, the smaller schooners. And then the western boats came on and got real popular. That’s what Captain Hollett wanted this winter, another western boat.”

  He began to describe them. “They have square sterns, son, the western boats, and the rudder is hung outdoors.” Then he stopped. “Well, you’ve seen dozens of them.”

  Richard nodded – he had indeed seen dozens of the small schooners – and Matty continued. “We spent all October and November hauling wood and carrying it over to Burin. Shipbuilding was always winter work. The Captain’s son Philip, he’s the master builder, takes after his mother’s crowd from Fox Cove, I suppose. And then there was the painting, lots of painting.” He paused for another draw on his smoke.

  “Red copper bottoms and green hulls,” Richard said enthusiastically. “And you had to tan the sails.”

  “That’s right, son, that’s a real job of work, sails are so heavy. Mainsails are hundreds of pounds.”

  He stopped again to emphasize the full import of the numbers.

  “And then there’s the dories,” he continued, confident in his audience. “Captain Hollett used to buy his dories from Mr. Carter over in the Bay of Islands, Thomas Carter. The Captain always had double dories, of course. Thomas Carter started making them around ‘85. Before that the Captain brought them in from St. Pierre or up in the Boston States. The Lowells at Amesbury, they invented the dory, see? It wasn’t invented in this country, though you might thi
nk it. We’ve been using them in the Banks fishery in this country for more than twenty years now.”

  Richard nodded.

  “Simeon Lowell, that was the fellow’s name,” Steve added.

  “That’s right,” Matty continued. “They started building boats more than a hundred years ago, in 1793, the Lowells, one generation after another. They charged one dollar a foot for each dory. So the average price would be fifteen dollars. They made them for the Portuguese and the French, besides the Americans, their own people, and the Canadians over in Nova Scotia. A lot of their dories were brought into this country, too. That stopped when the government here put a two-dollar tax on every dory you brought into Newfoundland.”

  “It was a good way to get dory-building started here,” Steve said. Richard had never seen his father so talkative.

  “Yes, true, true,” Matty agreed. “Soon enough, Herder and Halleran started making them in St. John’s. They had a factory on Hill O’Chips right near the harbour.”

  Richard imagined the crowds and noise of the city. He so desperately wanted to go there. His father had been there and to Halifax over in Canada. His uncles from Marystown had been even farther: to Spain and Portugal, and to hot countries in the West Indies, where they got rum and bananas. He wanted to see these places, too. He wanted to swelter in the heat like they did. Maybe this spring trip would be the start of all that.

  “But Herder and Halleran’s shop didn’t last too long,” Matty continued, obviously enjoying the fact that Richard was enthralled. “It burnt down in ‘91, when you were a baby, lad. They never rebuilt it.”

  “And the next year the whole damn city burnt down,” roared Danny Spencer, who’d been quiet up till now. The men laughed at his tone. “Old Herder and Halleran were ahead of their time!” Danny added, to more laughter.

  “Shouldn’t laugh at other men’s misery,” Steve said sternly, rapidly changing the mood. Although Danny was a cousin, Steve thought him too frivolous and feared he’d be unreliable in a crisis. Danny sensed Steve’s disapproval of him and, despite his sense of humour, tended to keep quiet around Steve.

  “Well, they made fine dories, Herder and Halleran,” said Matty. “They were fifteen and a half feet long and five-foot-four beam amidships. They used local pine, which is a nice wood. I must say, I like Newfoundland pine. She’s got a nice feel and is easy to work with.”

  The kerosene lamp flickered in the corner as the men talked of Monk boats from Monkstown up in Placentia Bay and of Harris boats. Gradually their talk grew more distant, and Richard found himself lying down and then drifting off. He dreamed of wide streets and houses piled on top of another and busy finger piers, rows of them, one after the other, as his father had described St. John’s. There were horses and people everywhere, and shops, every kind of shop, most of them with candy in their windows.

  “Put a blanket over him,” Danny said.

  “He’ll be fine,” Steve snorted. “If he’s too cold to sleep, he’ll wake up. We can’t be babying him, I need him to work like any other man.”

  Chapter Four

  “Get up and get to work!” a deep voice bellowed the morning after Richard’s first night on the Laura Claire. It was 5:00 a.m. and still pitch-black. Richard tried to pull himself out of his sleepy state. He saw with some surprise that he still had his clothes on from the night before. At home he usually slept in a long nightshirt. Someone lit the kerosene lamp and Richard struggled to make out the faces before him. Everyone looked exhausted – they’d all walked long distances to get here – but the real work hadn’t even started yet. The boy noted how grim they all seemed; the mood of the previous night had vanished as if it had never existed. The men were all business now. They quickly hauled on their clothes and jumped out of their bunks. Then they shoved their stockinged feet into their boots.

  Richard smelled the strongness of toast right under his nose; the galley was right here in the forecastle. His face brightened at the thought of it as his eyes fixed on the cookstove in the cramped little space. Behind the cookstove was a hogshead that the men would fill with enough provisions for three weeks: salt pork, sacks of flour, oatmeal, dried beans, tea. The galley also held a water tank that they would fill to the brim.

  But breakfast was an unceremonious affair on the Laura Claire. No one spoke as they grabbed cups of tea, barely taking time to drop sugar or milk into them. Then they took buttered slices of toast and ate them quickly, hauling their jackets on while they ate. Suddenly they all rose and dunked their dishes and cups in a pot of soapy water on the stove, giving them a cursory wash. They dried them and stacked them before hurriedly making their way through the hatch to the top deck. Richard followed, hoping someone would tell him what to do next, maybe his father.

  But his father’s thin frame was way ahead of him, and the boy himself trailed behind the last of the men, his relation, Danny Spencer, who was impatiently turning his foot in his boot to make it fit right.

  On deck, Richard first saw Captain Brinton, a barrel-chested man with the dark beard the boy expected to see on a captain. The Captain nodded at each man as he emerged from down below. He even tipped his head toward Richard.

  “This your boy, Steve?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” came the answer. For some reason, his father’s tone made Richard feel something he had rarely felt before, something worse than embarrassment, deep in his belly. He couldn’t quite pin a name on it, but he thought it was shame.

  Then they all stood around the anchor chains, thick, heavy, ice-encased, and tangled on the deck.

  “The sooner we get these sorted out, the sooner we can get on with the rest of it,” the Captain announced.

  As he walked away, the men lunged at the chains. They’re as heavy as Hero, Richard thought, recalling the old horse his family kept back in Little Bay. He tried to figure how they could possibly untangle them. But the men had already begun chipping the ice off them, then lifting and turning them, grunting hard as they did so. Almost immediately, beads of sweat formed and then covered their foreheads, though it was freezing. Before long, Steve had removed his sweater coat; after an hour, Matty and Danny stripped down to their bare chests. So did Larry Walsh eventually. Sweat poured down their backs as they hauled more of the chain onto the deck. Somehow they managed to untangle it, link by heavy link.

  Then some more chain appeared. Richard wondered if the anchor chain went all the way to the Grand Banks. He found the sight of his father labouring like this slightly painful, though he didn’t understand why. He felt helpless; at his still boyish size, his efforts amounted to little. Good old Danny had figured out a way to make him useful, though; he got the boy to wipe seaweed and slub off the links to make them slightly less slippery.

  At midday the men stopped work. Steve, Danny, and the other Catholics began the Angelus. In the grey cold, they raised their rote prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. By now, Richard’s stomach was roaring with hunger, and he struggled mightily to concentrate on the prayers as his mother had taught him.

  Dinner was pea soup, with not nearly as much ham as Elizabeth used in hers. There was hardtack, too, really hard tack. He feared he’d crack his teeth as he tried to soften it up in his mouth. He wished he was back home eating some of his mother’s cooking, with Jack, Jimmy, and the girls at their long kitchen table. But then he admonished himself for being such a baby. What would the other men think if they could read his mind?

  At this meal, too, the men ate in silence and in a hurry. They shoved their empty plates onto the counter and leaned back for a stretch. Then they collected their plates, washed, dried, and stacked them. No one asked for seconds. Then they grabbed hot mugs of tea and downed the liquid in a matter of seconds. At once, it was all over, and they rushed back up to the deck.

  Back to the tangled chains. All afternoon they strained and sweated and grunted like animals as they pulled the links this wa
y and that. Richard imagined he could see the flesh fall off his father’s body, the man was working so hard. Steve was not a heavy man; he was tall and all sinew and muscle. No wonder, thought Richard, trying to guess how long his own puppy fat would last. Not long at this rate, he figured.

  They worked as the sun went down over the peninsula and the darkness of the night descended rapidly upon them. The air turned frosty, and it was too cold to snow. Even as he sweated, Richard shivered. As the evening closed in, he began to grow dizzy.

  Then someone, maybe Danny, shouted, “That’s it! Six o’clock. Merchant’s time is over.”

  “Thank God.” Richard echoed one of his mother’s favourite phrases as his bones screamed with exhaustion. He could sink into sleep so easily ...

  “Come on, boy,” his father said. “Time for supper. Then we’ve got to get to the trawls. The trawl tubs are waiting.”

  Chapter Five

  Untangling the anchor chains took another couple of days of hauling, heaving, straining, and sweating. On the third day the sky grew bluish-grey, Steve looked up and said, “There’ll be weather anytime now.” He was right, for ice pellets began to rain on the men as they strained over the links of the anchor chains.