The Doryman (2 page)

Chapter Three

I
n 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 think 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

“G
et 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 way 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

U
ntangling 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.

“It's too bloody early for hail,” Danny said. “It's not April.”

“It's not you who says what weather we gets,” Steve answered, grim-faced and tilting his head skyward. Then he added, “That's it, that's all you can do. Best keep working.”

Larry nodded, Danny sighed, and they all carried on. Richard paused for a minute to stare at the sky. The translucent spheres came down hard and fast, hitting the deck with little thuds. They bounced slightly, as if they were jolly and happy, putting him in mind of the small rubber balls his brothers Jack and Jimmy played with. Then he remembered that he was here to work, and he went back to the chains.

After their quick suppers, the men began preparing their tubs of trawl, the line with which the fish were caught. The
Laura Claire
carried five dories. Each dory required six tubs: four to be carried in dories to the Banks and two to spare. The trawls were 2,000 feet long, made of strong strands of tarred cotton. Every thirty-five inches or so another line, a ganger, was spliced into the trawl. The ganger was about thirty inches long and held a strong steel hook. Every trawl line had about 600 hooks. Until almost midnight the men repaired the trawls, replacing rusted hooks with new ones and inspecting every inch of every line.

The hardest work, after a day with the anchor chains, was stretching the main trawl to get the kinks out. Once again, the men strained and sweated, this time in the cold, dark night. Then they coiled the trawls again and placed them into the tubs.

“We're not allowed to do this during the day,” Matty told Richard. “Not on the merchant's time, no sir.”

“No?” the boy asked in disbelief.

“Uh-uh,” Matty shook his head.

Richard didn't know it, but they would be at this work every night for the next three or four weeks. It was slow work that required some concentration in spite of its tediousness. It was dangerous work, too, and as the weeks passed, nips and cuts appeared on all the men's hands.

During the third week, when he could hardly see straight from work, Richard asked his father, “How much money have we made so far, Father?”

Steve snorted and then laughed from somewhere deep inside himself.

“Not one red cent,” he said finally. “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Richard was stunned. He could form no words.

“This is just preparation time,” Matty elaborated. “We're just getting ready for the real work. We got to do all this so our gear is in working order to go fishing. Now
that's
the hard stuff.”

Richard's mouth went dry and he tried to swallow. He thought of his mother and Rachel and wanted to go home, back to the shore fishery. Even further deep down, he wished he could be in school like his little brothers. But he couldn't. He was stuck on the spring trip, and he feared he'd be stuck on every spring trip for the rest of his life. He returned to the broken hook in his hands and, in his only expression of anger, ripped it off the trawl.

The crew of the
Laura Claire
gradually got through their daytime work, straightening out the anchor chains and then overhauling all the running gear, replacing what needed replacing. It was oily, smelly work, sometimes making Richard queasy. He was afraid he'd get seasick if the onshore smells affected him this much. Several times during shore fishing he'd nearly thrown up. Only the fresh open air had saved him. But he couldn't worry about that now. He had work to do, and plenty of it.