The Bottom of the Harbor (13 page)

We left Susan Walker's grave and returned to the road and entered another path and stopped before one of the newer graves. The inscription on its stone read:

FREDERICK ROACH

1891–1955

REST IN PEACE

“Freddie Roach was a taxi-driver,” Mr. Hunter said. “He drove a taxi in Pleasant Plains for many years. He was Mrs. Addie Roach's son, and she made her home with him. After he died, she moved in with one of her daughters. Mrs. Addie Roach is the oldest woman in Sandy Ground. She's the widow of Reverend Lewis Roach, who was an oysterman and a part-time preacher, and she's ninety-two years old. When I first came to Sandy Ground, she was still in her teens, and she was a nice, bright, pretty girl. I've known her all these years, and I think the world of her. Every now and then, I make her a lemon-meringue pie and take it to her, and sit with her awhile. There's a white man in Prince's Bay who's a year or so older than Mrs. Roach. He's ninety-three, and he'll soon be ninety-four. His name is Mr. George E. Sprague, and he comes from a prominent old South Shore family, and I believe he's the last of the old Prince's Bay oyster captains. I hadn't seen him for several years until just the other day I was over in Prince's Bay, and I was going past his house on Amboy Road, and I saw him sitting on the porch. I went up and spoke to him, and we talked awhile, and when I was leaving he said, ‘Is Mrs. Addie Roach still alive over in Sandy Ground?' ‘She is,' I said. ‘That is,' I said, ‘she's alive as you or I.' ‘Well,' he said, ‘Mrs. Roach and I go way back. When she was a young woman, her mother used to wash for my mother, and she used to come along sometimes and help, and she was such a cheerful, pretty person my mother always said it made the day nicer when she came, and that was over seventy years ago.' ‘That wasn't her mother that washed for your mother and she came along to help,' I said. ‘That was her husband's mother. That was old Mrs. Matilda Roach.' ‘Is that so?' said Mr. Sprague. ‘I always thought it was her mother. Well,' he said, ‘when you see her, tell her I asked for her.'”

We stepped back into the road, and walked slowly up it.

“Several men from Sandy Ground fought in the Civil War,” Mr. Hunter said, “and one of them was Samuel Fish. That's his grave over there with the ant hill on it. He got a little pension. Down at the end of this row are some Bishop graves, Bishops and Mangins, and there's Purnells in the next row, and there's Henmans in those big plots over there. This is James McCoy's grave. He came from Norfolk, Virginia. He had six fingers on his right hand. Those graves over there all grown up in cockleburs are Jackson graves, Jacksons and Henrys and Landins. Most of the people lying in here were related to each other, some by blood, some by marriage, some close, some distant. If you started in at the gate and ran an imaginary line all the way through, showing who was related to who, the line would zigzag all over the cemetery. Do you see that row of big expensive stones standing up over there? They're all Cooleys. The Cooleys were free-Negro oystermen from Gloucester County, Virginia, and they came to Staten Island around the same time as the people from Snow Hill. They lived in Tottenville, but they belonged to the church in Sandy Ground. They were quite well-to-do. One of them, Joel Cooley, owned a forty-foot sloop. When the oyster beds were condemned, he retired on his savings and raised dahlias. He was a member of the Staten Island Horticultural Society, and his dahlias won medals at flower shows in Madison Square Garden. I've heard it said he was the first man on Staten Island to raise figs, and now there's fig bushes in back yards from one end of the island to the other. Joel Cooley had a brother named Obed Cooley who was very smart in school, and the Cooleys got together and sent him to college. They sent him to the University of Michigan, and he became a doctor. He practiced in Lexington, Kentucky, and he died in 1937, and he left a hundred thousand dollars. There used to be a lot of those old-fashioned names around here, Bible names. There was a Joel and an Obed and an Eben in the Cooley family, and there was an Ishmael and an Isaac and an Israel in the Purnell family. Speaking of names, come over here and look at this stone.”

We stopped before a stone whose inscription read:

THOMAS WILLIAMS

AL MAJOR

1862–1928

“There used to be a rich old family down here named the Butlers,” Mr. Hunter said. “They were old, old Staten Islanders, and they had a big estate over on the outside shore, between Prince's Bay and Tottenville, that they called Butler Manor. They even had a private race track. The last of the Butlers was Mr. Elmer T. Butler. Now, this fellow Thomas Williams was a Sandy Ground man who quit the oyster business and went to work for Mr. Elmer T. Butler. He worked for him many years, worked on the grounds, and Mr. Butler thought a lot of him. For some reason I never understood, Mr. Butler called him Al Major, a kind of nickname. And pretty soon everybody called him Al Major. In fact, as time went on and he got older, young people coming up took it for granted Al Major was his real name and called him Mr. Major. When he died, Mr. Butler buried him. And when he ordered the gravestone, he told the monument company to put both names on it, so there wouldn't be any confusion. Of course, in a few years he'll pass out of people's memory under both names—Thomas Williams, Al Major, it'll all be the same. To tell you the truth, I'm no great believer in gravestones. To a large extent, I think they come under the heading of what the old preacher called vanity—‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity'—and by the old preacher I mean Ecclesiastes. There's stones in here that've only been up forty or fifty years, and you can't read a thing it says on them, and what difference does it make? God keeps His eye on those that are dead and buried the same as He does on those that are alive and walking. When the time comes the dead are raised, He won't need any directions where they're lying. Their bones may be turned to dust, and weeds may be growing out of their dust, but they aren't lost. He knows where they are; He knows the exact whereabouts of every speck of dust of every one of them. Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit.”

Mr. Hunter turned and looked back over the rows of graves.

“It's a small cemetery,” he said, “and we've been burying in it a long time, and it's getting crowded, and there's generations to come, and it worries me. Since I'm the chairman of the board of trustees, I'm in charge of selling graves in here, graves and plots, and I always try to encourage families to bury two to a grave. That's perfectly legal, and a good many cemeteries are doing it nowadays. All the law says, it specifies that the top of the box containing the coffin shall be at least three feet below the level of the ground. To speak plainly, you dig the grave eight feet down, instead of six feet down, and that leaves room to lay a second coffin on top of the first. Let's go to the end of this path, and I'll show you my plot.”

Mr. Hunter's plot was in the last row, next to the woods. There were only a few weeds on it. It was the cleanest plot in the cemetery.

“My mother's buried in the first grave,” he said. “I never put up a stone for her. My first wife's father, Jacob Finney, is buried in this one, and I didn't put up a stone for him, either. He didn't own a grave, so we buried him in our plot. My son Billy is buried in this grave. And this is my first wife's grave. I put up a stone for her.”

The stone was small and plain, and the inscription on it read:

HUNTER

1877
CELIA
1928

“I should've had her full name put on it—Celia Ann,” Mr. Hunter said. “She was a little woman, and she had a low voice. She had the prettiest little hands; she wore size five-and-a-half gloves. She was little, but you'd be surprised at the work she done. Now, my second wife is buried over here, and I put up a stone for her, too. And I had my name carved on it, along with hers.”

This stone was the same size and shape as the other, and the inscription on it read:

HUNTER

1877
EDITH
1938

1869
GEORGE

“It was my plan to be buried in the same grave with my second wife,” Mr. Hunter said. “When she died, I was sick in bed, and the doctor wouldn't let me get up, even to go to the funeral, and I couldn't attend to things the way I wanted to. At that time, we had a gravedigger here named John Henman. He was an old man, an old oysterman. He's dead now himself. I called John Henman to my bedside, and I specifically told him to dig the grave eight feet down. I told him I wanted to be buried in the same grave. ‘Go eight feet down,' I said to him, ‘and that'll leave room for me, when the time comes.' And he promised to do so. And when I got well, and was up and about again, I ordered this stone and had it put up. Below my wife's name and dates I had them put my name and my birth year. When it came time, all they'd have to put on it would be my death year, and everything would be in order. Well, one day about a year later I was talking to John Henman, and something told me he hadn't done what he had promised to do, so I had another man come over here and sound the grave with a metal rod, and just as I had suspected, John Henman had crossed me up; he had only gone six feet down. He was a contrary old man, and set in his ways, and he had done the way he wanted, not the way I wanted. He had always dug graves six feet down, and he couldn't change. That didn't please me at all. It outraged me. So, I've got my name on the stone on this grave, and it'll look like I'm buried in this grave.”

He took two long steps, and stood on the next grave in the plot.

“Instead of which,” he said, “I'll be buried over here in this grave.”

He stooped down, and pulled up a weed. Then he stood up, and shook the dirt off the roots of the weed, and tossed it aside.

“Ah, well,” he said, “it won't make any difference.”

(1956)

Dragger Captain

The biggest fishing fleet in the vicinity of New York City is a fleet of thirty wooden draggers that works out of Stonington, Connecticut. Stonington is four local stops beyond New London on the New York, New Haven & Hartford. In the winter, when the trees are bare, a corner of its harbor can be glimpsed from a train. It covers a rocky jut in the mouth of Fishers Island Sound, it is close to fertile flounder grounds, it has two fish docks, and its harbor, protected by three riprap breakwaters, is an unusually safe one. Its population is approximately two thousand. There are elms on its sidewalks. On four of its narrow streets—Water, Main, Church, and Elm—are eight clapboard houses that were built in the eighteenth century. The gardens in back yards are fenced with discarded fish nets; some gardeners put seaweed under their tomatoes and skates and sculpin and other trash fishes under their rosebushes. It is an old port, once rich and busy, that has declined; from the Colonial period until the Civil War, it had shipyards, sail lofts, a ropewalk, a forge that made harpoons, a ship-biscuit bakery, and a whaling fleet, and it had a sealing fleet from around 1790 until around 1895. In the eighteen-seventies, this fleet brought in a hundred thousand sealskins a year for coats and lap robes. Nathaniel Brown Palmer, who discovered the Antarctic Continent, according to one school of geographers, and for whom Palmer Land in the Antarctic was named, and Edmund Fanning, who discovered the Fanning Islands in the Pacific, were Stonington sealing captains; they were looking for new seal rocks. Many of the draggermen are descendants of whalers and sealers. One Stonington sealer, Mr. Ben Chesebrough, is still around. There is a drafty shack adjacent to Johnny Bindloss's fish dock, at the foot of a lane off Water Street, in which the draggermen kill time when it is too rough or foggy to go out on the grounds. They sit on upended lobster traps and read the
Atlantic Fisherman
and drink coffee and play poker and sharpen knives and grumble. On such days, Mr. Ben sometimes drops in and talks about his experiences as a seal skinner long ago in the Antarctic. In the early summer, herds of seals would come up on the beaches of islands in the Antarctic to breed and while they were breeding the skinners would creep out from behind rocks and brain them by the dozens as cleanly as possible with clubs made of polished Connecticut oak; bullets would have marred the skins.

Stonington and Fulton Fish Market are closely linked. Several of the oldest commission firms in the market were founded by fishermen who came down from Stonington to handle shipments from relatives and friends and then branched out. Sam and Amos Chesebro (originally Chesebrough; they dropped the last three letters to save ink and time), who founded Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham, were Stonington men. This firm occupies Stall 1 and is the biggest firm down there. Sam and Amos had long lives. Sam was approaching ninety when he died. Amos died a few years after him, in December, 1946, lacking a month of reaching ninety-three. He spent his last fifteen years reading and meditating and dozing in a sunny apartment on an upper floor of a house in Brooklyn Heights, directly across the East River from the market; on clear mornings he sat at a living-room window with a glass of whiskey and water at his elbow and, as if looking back through time at his youth, peacefully watched through binoculars the turmoil on the market piers. Others from Stonington or close by who came down and founded firms, or became partners in ones already founded, were Hiram Burnett, Frank Noyes, A. E. Potter, George Moon, the Haley brothers, Caleb and Seabury, the Gates brothers, Stanton and Gurdon, and the Keeney brothers, Frank, Gideon, and George. The Stonington draggers catch twenty million pounds a year for Fulton Market. They go out primarily for flounders and they bring in five species—flukes, blackbacks, yellowtails, witches, and windowpanes—all of which differ in looks and flavor and all of which dishonestly appear on menus under the catchall culinary term “fillet of sole” none of them belong to the sole family. Another species, the Baptist flounder, is caught in abundance but thrown back; it goes bad shortly after it comes out of the water, whence its name.

The Stonington draggers range from thirty to seventy feet. They are built wide for their length and about as close to the water as tugs. Half have gasoline engines, and the other half, the newer ones, have Diesels. Each has a cramped pilothouse. Each has a combined cabin and galley containing from two to six bunks, an oilcloth-covered table, two benches, and a coal cookstove, on which there is always a big, sooty pot of coffee. Each has a mast and a boom, from which the towropes to the net depend. Each has a winch for hoisting the loaded net aboard. Each has a fish hold and an ice bin. The Stonington draggers are well made and sturdy and are frequently overhauled. Even so, lined up at the docks, with their seaweedy nets hanging every which way from their booms to dry and with the harbor gulls fluttering down to snatch fish scraps off their decks, they always look gone to pot. They cost from ten to forty thousand dollars. A few are owned by absentees, but the majority are owned by their captains, or by their captains and crews, who are Portuguese, Italians, and old-stock Yankees. They fish off eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island and on the coastal shelf south of Block Island in grounds known as the Mouth, the Yellow Bank, the Hell Hole, and the Mussel Bed, working chiefly in depths between sixty and a hundred and sixty feet. The crews prefer to stay on the grounds only one day at a time. They go out before dawn, weather permitting, and drag steadily all day, sorting and icing and barreling one haul while dragging for the next. They return at sundown and land their barrels, some at Bindloss's dock—once known as the Hancock dock, which dates back deep into sealing days—and the others at Tony Longo's dock, the old Steamboat Pier, which was used in times long past by the Stonington Line, whose sidewheel steamers ran daily between Stonington and New York. The barrels are loaded on trailer trucks owned by the proprietors of the docks and transported during the night to the stalls in Fulton Market. Occasionally, a dragger that has picked up an exceptionally heavy load does not go to its dock but makes an overnight run down Long Island Sound straight to the market. Stonington fish are among the freshest we get.

A dragger is a small trawler. The principal difference between the Stonington draggers and the trawlers that work out of Gloucester and Boston and New Bedford and stay on the Nova Scotian banks a week a trip is size. Trawlers are two and three times the size of draggers. Both use otter trawls, which are heavy, clumsy, wide-mouthed, cone-shaped nets that are slowly dragged over the bottom and take in all the fish in their paths. The otter trawl towed by a medium-sized Stonington dragger, a fifty-footer, is a hundred and ten feet long. The mouth is eighty feet wide but puckers up to half that width when fishing; it is kept open by two doors, or otter boards, which are about as big as house doors and are rigged at such an angle, one on each side, that the pressure of the water flares them out. Towing this net at two miles an hour, a dragger can strip the fish off ten acres of bottom in an hour. Otter trawls snag easily on obstructions, and a snagged trawl usually has to be abandoned. They are expensive; the smallest, even when rigged with homemade doors, costs a hundred dollars. A Stonington captain once snagged three in one morning; he went home and got in bed and stayed there until Sunday, when he showed up in church for the first time in years, exclaiming brokenly, as he walked up the aisle, “Pray for me! Pray for me!”

There are a great many shipwrecks, clumps of rocks, and other obstructions on the Stonington bottoms. The Hell Hole is the dirtiest. It is a ground of approximately six square miles in Block Island Sound, it is crisscrossed by coastwise shipping lanes, and there are two dozen wrecks lying in it, some of which always have rotting otter trawls hanging on them. Every now and then, after a gale or a hurricane has opened up a wreck and washed it out, a haul made in the Hell Hole is dumped on the deck of a dragger, and human bones—most often a skull or a pelvic bone; they seem to last the longest in salt water—are found among the fish. On the bottom of the Mussel Bed, a ground in the open ocean off Block Island, there is a group of immense beds of horse mussels, the lips of whose shells point upward and are jagged and sharp. Dragger captains must know the locations of these beds and keep acquainted with their endlessly changing contours, and they must take great pains to skirt them; a net that even grazes one will come up with scores of holes cut and chafed in its underside, through which the fish have escaped. This ground also contains some wrecks. One is a collier, the
Black Point,
which was torpedoed by a German submarine in May, 1945, in the last week of the European war. The submarine lies nearby; it was depth-bombed by a destroyer as it tried to get away. The Yellow Bank is a narrow ground that runs along the Rhode Island coast from the lighthouse at Watch Hill to Weekapaug Point, a distance of six miles, and its bottom is broken here and there by beds of sponges—elephant flop sponge, which grows in slippery yellow lumps the size of cabbages, and a limp, tentacular species called dead man's fingers. Both of them are worthless. These animals do not damage nets, but they clog them, and they have to be sorted out of hauls, one by one, and thrown back, a time-wasting task. Some time ago, a net that had been dragged into a sponge bed came up bearing two and a half barrels of fish messily mixed in among approximately fifteen barrels of sponges. In the Mouth, a ground at the mouth of the Thames River, below New London, there are rank patches of seaweed, predominantly bladder wrack, the black, bulby kind on which live lobsters are displayed in the windows of seafood restaurants, and these have to be dodged for the same reason. All these grounds except the Mouth were entered a number of times during the war by enemy submarines, and Army and Navy aircraft dropped hundreds of aerial depth bombs in them, particularly in the Mussel Bed. Some of the heavier bombs, mostly six-hundred-and-fifty-pounders, stuck in the mud and did not explode, and are lying there still. They will be a menace for years, like the German mines in French farm land. There are suspect areas in the Hell Hole and the Mussel Bed that are shunned by draggermen and spoken of as the bomb beds. In the old days, when a winch creaked and backfired as it began to hoist a net off the bottom, indicating an exceptionally heavy haul, crews were elated and someone always shouted, “Money in the bank!,” but nowadays the noise of a straining winch makes them uneasy; the net might be heavy with flounders or it might have a bomb in it. Five draggers—the
Carl F.,
the
George A. Arthur,
the
Gertrude,
the
Marise,
and the
Nathaniel B. Palmer
—have brought up bombs in their nets. The first four had their nets on deck before the bombs in them, hidden by fish, were discovered. Rather than attempt to dump them back, each went cautiously to the nearest dock, to which Navy bomb-disposal officers were summoned. The bomb caught by the fifth dragger, the
Palmer,
was plainly visible, but it exploded shortly after the net hove out of the water, while the crew stood staring at it, wondering what to do. It blasted the dragger and three of the four men in the crew to pieces; the fourth man was freakishly thrown clear.

Because of these hazards—rocks, wrecks, mussel beds, sponge beds, bladder wrack, and bombs—it is necessary for a dragger captain to have a picture in his mind of what lies beneath every possible foot of water in the grounds he works. A captain's standing among his colleagues and the amount of ice and oil he can get on credit from the dock proprietor are based on his knowledge of the bottoms and his thriftiness with gear, and not on the quantity of fish he catches. A raw captain may drag blindly and bring up huge hauls for a while, but sooner or later he will snag or mussel-cut so many nets that his overhead will eat up his profits. The most highly respected captain in the Stonington fleet is a sad-eyed, easygoing Connecticut Yankee named Ellery Franklin Thompson, a member of a family that has fished and clammed and crabbed and attended to lobster traps in these waters for three hundred years.

         

Ellery—he says he is called Captain Thompson or Mr. Thompson only by people who want to get something out of him—is captain and owner of the gasoline dragger
Eleanor,
which usually carries a crew of three, including himself. Ellery is forty-seven years old and has been a draggerman for thirty years. He has worked out of five Connecticut ports—New London, Groton, Noank, Mystic, and Stonington, all of which are close together—and out of two Rhode Island ports, Newport and Point Judith. Stonington has been his home port since 1930. He keeps the
Eleanor
at Bindloss's dock, but he lives in New London, fourteen miles away, and drives an automobile to and fro. He lives in a four-gabled, shingle-sided, two-story house on Crystal Avenue. His widowed mother, Mrs. Florence Thompson, keeps house for him. He used to sleep in a woven-wire bunk aboard the
Eleanor
and do his own cooking year in and year out, going home only for Sundays, but in recent years, because of rheumatism, he has got so he rests better in a bed. He says he has discovered that home life has one disadvantage. He is a self-taught B-flat-trumpet player. While living on the
Eleanor,
he spent many evenings in the cabin by himself practicing hymns and patriotic music. Sometimes, out on the grounds, if he had a few minutes to kill, he would go below and practice. One afternoon, blundering around the Hell Hole in a thick summer fog, he grew tired of cranking the foghorn and got out his trumpet and stood on deck and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” over and over, alarming the crews of other draggers fogbound in the area, who thought an excursion boat was bearing down on them. After he went back to sleeping at home, he continued to practice in the evenings, but he had to give it up before long because of its effect on his mother's health. “At that time,” he says, “I was working hard on three hymns—‘Up from the Grave He Arose,' ‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,' and ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.' I had ‘What a Friend' just about where I wanted it. One evening after supper, I went in the parlor as usual and Ma was sitting on the settee reading the
Ladies' Home Journal
and I took the easy chair and went to work on ‘What a Friend.' I was running through it the second or third time when, all of a sudden, Ma bust out crying. I laid my trumpet down and I asked her what in the world was the matter. ‘That trumpet's what's the matter,' Ma said. ‘It makes me sad.' She said it made her so sad she was having nightmares and losing weight. Under the circumstances, I decided whatever trumpet practice I did in the future, I would do it four or five miles out at sea.”