Galore (34 page)

Eli and Hannah considered following after the Blades themselves before Abel took sick over the Christmas season and Newman diagnosed him with tuberculosis. There was little chance of recovery, the doctor said, and only a year of enforced rest offered any hope. Everything in the old servant’s quarters at the back of Selina’s House was shifted to an outbuilding, a small stove rigged up for heat. They moved in a bed and Patrick Devine’s library and Abel settled into the exile he’d been rehearsing for all his life. There were periodic visits from the doctor to take fluid off his lungs, and from Bride who brought his meals and took away his filthy sputum box. But his mother and the books his grandfather salvaged from the Atlantic were his only real companions. A veranda was built outside the back door as far as the southeast corner and Hannah set him up on a cot for the fresh air when the weather allowed, Abel drifting in and out of sleep as she read to him. He entered and left the stories by side doors and windows and found it impossible to distinguish one book from another. The complications and disappointments and modest epiphanies of those disparate lives seemed part of a single all-encompassing story that had swallowed him whole.

Eli went back at the fish in the spring, on the water before light six days a week, clearing the last of the cod in the whorl of seal-oil torches before walking gingerly home in the black, half-asleep on his feet. And no clue if there’d be a copper to show for it come the fall. Hannah already in bed and pretending to sleep when he came through the door, a plate of food kept in the oven. They never spoke of it directly, but he knew Hannah blamed him for dragging the boy out in all weather. And he supposed she might be right to think so. On Sundays he helped set Abel out on the veranda and then left them to the books, spending the duration of the visit in Tryphie’s workshop.

The Sculpin still occupied the center of the room. Tryphie declared it ready for a test voyage but his hunchback made it impossible to squeeze into the cockpit and no one else was willing to risk the job. Eli leaned against the Sculpin as they talked aimlessly about Tryphie’s latest undertaking or the state of Abel’s health. —He’s a tough little bugger, Eli said.

Tryphie felt a particular empathy for the boy’s predicament and he took exception to Eli’s glib assessment. —You haven’t got a goddamn clue, Tryphie insisted, you know that?

—That’s quite a claim coming from the inventor of the Sculpin.

Tryphie reached for a screwdriver.

—I was just leaving, Eli said, backing away with his arms in the air.

Tryphie turned to the workbench to set the screwdriver down. —I’ve been meaning to tell you, he said over his shoulder. —Been offered a job in Hartford. Me and Minnie are heading up there come September month.

Eli was at the door and he leaned against it. —When did you hear? he asked finally.

—A few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to tell you.

Eli nodded over the news awhile, his eyes on his shoes. —You’ll do well, he said.

Eli lay awake a good part of that night and woke early to the wind beating at the house like a sledgehammer. His heart hammering against his chest in the same wild fashion. He got out of bed and Hannah called after him. —You won’t be going out on the water in this, she said.

—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 harangue 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.