Sylvanus Now (14 page)

“So, you don’t want youngsters because they’ll get in your way.”

“They won’t be in my way because they’ll
be
my way, once I haves them—if that makes any sense to you. Anyway, you want more tea?” she asked as Elsie locked her brow in puzzlement.

“Did you mean that, Addie,” Sylvanus probed after Elsie had left and Adelaide was gathering up the dirty cups, “about not hating babies?”

“Don’t mean I’m looking for them,” she replied. “But when that day comes—and it will—I’ll be fine with it. Like I said, least they’ll be of my making and not somebody else’s. Besides,” she said with a grin, “the trick is to have lots—that way the eldest feeds the youngest and the mother just gets to sit, ordering them about. That much I learned from Mother.”

He appreciated her grin and her saying that, but he felt the weight in her tones and practised diligently the tricks he’d learned so’s not to have babies. He might’ve done and said more, but she was skittish talking about those private things. So he left it alone, filling his time with loving her instead.

Over supper one evening, with the fishing season closed and him leaving the house in the dark hours of early morning to work cutting wood and not returning home till nightfall, he worried she might be lonely, being by herself all day long over here on the other side of the brook.

“No!” she exclaimed, her face hardening as though unjustly accused. Then, shaking her head, she broke into a laugh, laying the tips of her fingers onto his hand. “Remember what I said? I likes being alone more than anything. It’s a joy having a place all to one’s self.” And he saw that it was—in the way that she’d pat a loaf cooling on the bin and raise it before his heartening glance, and how she relished keeping her kitchen as neat and tidy as could be with the arms of her chairs and centre of her table covered with every spare piece of cloth or rag embroidered with the coloured thread she begged of Eva. Hanging above the large picture window he had brought out from Corner Brook and built into her southern wall were bunches of aster and hawkweed, their mingled smells perfuming the kitchen—and killing his fishy smell, she said one evening as he jokingly complained the outer world was taking over their inner.

He minded not. Her little quirks and wants endeared her further, giving him more ways with which to please her. And as for the wall with no window, shutting out the rest of the arm and his stage and his boat and his flakes— what cared he? A different room is what his stage and his boat were, and he’d promised her different rooms. What cared he that she preferred some more than others? They were all within his house, even that small corner she’d curtained off for herself.

She never told him about it, but he felt its presence the first time she pulled out a little well-read book about some saint she didn’t like to talk about and became lost in its pages for hours, sometimes brooding, sometimes smiling, oblivious to his lying and pacing about, wanting her attention. And, too, he was told by others often enough that she sometimes slipped into their little clapboard church during
week
days, glancing about first, as though making sure no one was watching her.

“Can’t think what she’s doing there on a
week
day with no minister or nobody about,” Elsie tut-tutted to him once, her eyes relishing the hint of another of his Addie’s oddities. He merely shrugged, saying something about God keeping no specific hours since the day creation was finished. Yet shamed as he was admitting it to himself, he was a bit jealous that she was doing things sly of him. And he’d brood a bit then, thinking perhaps it was the house, not him, she had married: a means of escape from her own wretched life. But so deeply did he feel himself a part of the walls encircling her, he figured that curtain would soon crumple, and she’d stand with all of herself bared before him. Besides, she always seemed so much more impassioned after one of her church visits, or after a good hour’s reading from her little saint book, that he started figuring the books, the church, and God were a prelude to that coming good moment.

Brushing aside jealousy then, he bent himself to his loving her. Nothing mattered then, not a hundred curtained corners if she so desired them.

Her comfort was all he wanted, and she seemed comfortable. Even when their first winter together came, and ice entombed most of the falls and the brook, and snow buried the meadow, she appeared as contented as he, listening to the wind yodelling outside, the stove crackling cheerily, and nothing but a handful of dishes waiting to be done. Truly, his heart nearly burst one evening when she looked up from her supper of corned beef hash, a startled look widening her clear blue eyes, and told him he had become her first best friend. Later that morning, as she sat beside the southern window, laying back her head and closing her eyes to the white of the hills against a full blue sky, he crept toward her, knowing how she disliked such foolish things, and leaned his cheek so close to hers he felt the heat of it without touching it, then allowed the softest flutter of his lashes against hers, like filaments of velvet brushing her lid.

“A butterfly kiss,” he whispered as her eyes sprang awake.

“My Lord, how do you think of such things?” she exclaimed, and tutted as he strolled back across their tiny kitchen, his chest taking on that fullness it always took whenever she attributed to him some simple little thing, as though he were its creator—which is what he felt like sometimes watching her putter around the kitchen, polishing the kettle, the doorknobs, the leaves of her wandering Jews, her windows—her creator, taking her away from mind-numbing wretchedness and building her a house that pulsated with a life of his making.

’Course, creators need souls to realize their works. And thus far Adelaide had complemented him wonderfully. And were things to have remained stationary, great harmony might’ve persisted in that tiny household. But as Sylvanus might well have known from his days fishing on the water, nothing is stationary, but always in a state of change, either for the better or the worse. And undoubtedly, given the omen preceding the news of Adelaide’s first pregnancy, he prepared himself for the worst.

CHAPTER TEN

STATE OF CHANGE

S
PRING CAME EARLY THAT YEAR
, breaking up the frozen water of the arm and sending it drifting through the neck and dispersing around the head. Soon as the arm was cleared, Sylvanus launched his boat, some dinner stogged in his cuddy, and his rifle and a shotgun resting alongside. The sky was creamy white, making for pearly-grey waters in the windless morning. A perfect day for spotting the rippling black V of a young seal’s nose cutting through the water as it swam on its back. Outside the neck, Sylvanus opened his throttle, heading out of the bay.

Several times he spotted the slick black coat of an old harp sharply outlined upon a pan of white ice. But, nay, he wasn’t wanting to cut speed just yet; not this, his first day on the water since October past, and the wind softened by a touch of warmth. He loved it, he did, the openness and the sense of freedom he gained from motoring on those soft, calm days with a warm southerly.

A good twenty miles out, the headland rounding into Cape Ray neared to his right. Several motorboats dotted the water, all a fair distance from one another, motoring easily in various directions. Sealing, they were, and as he watched one boat of hunters cut their motor and drift silently into the pathway of a black snout rippling toward them, he thought to cut his motor and join in the hunt. But something else caught his attention, something white and big appearing above the ridge of Cape Ray like a huge iceberg. Which is what he thought it was at first, but as it moved steadily forward from behind the cape toward the open waters, he felt his mouth drop. It was a ship—unlike nothing he’d ever seen, or could’ve imagined—thrice and thrice more the size of trawlers and ocean-going freighters, its smokestack bigger than the boat Sylvanus was sitting in.

He gave a low whistle. Must’ve got caught in pack ice, he thought, and took refuge behind the cape. The massive ship rounded the headland and would’ve swamped a dozen trawlers had they been in her path. About three hundred feet long she was, and a thousand tons for sure, he was to tell his brothers later, and flying high above her smokestack was the British flag, and scrolled along her hull in huge white lettering was
The Fairtry
. But it was the net rigging on her stern that was most astounding. A fishing boat?

Nay. Not possible. Not possible that this leviathan of the seas could believe itself a fishing boat. He shook his head in wonder as it cleared the headland, heading out to the open waters, black smoke belching out of its stack and the deep braying of a horn warning of its arrival. In minutes it was vanishing, the white of its deck houses pluming white against the spring sky, its stern gliding effortlessly through the water.

“Jeezes, where you been at, brother, you never heard tell of she?” said Jake, after Sylanvus had motored home and ducked into his brother’s stage, telling of what he had seen. He listened with both awe and foreboding as his brothers, busy with mending nets and gear in preparation for the summer’s fishing, told how the British ship—just this year put to sea—was a plant and freezer all in one, filleting and freezing thirty tons of fish a day, and how it could stay on the water for eighty days without putting ashore.

Thirty tons of fish a day for eighty days. Sylvanus tried, but couldn’t figure such a thing. He thought of the trawlers, five hundred sitting on the sea a number of years ago, and their colossal thousand-foot nets catching upwards of fifty thousand pounds of fish or more from just one hour’s dragging, and did so about six, seven times a day, storing the tonnage in her hold before heading back to her homeland. And he thought of Ambrose—and others, since—telling him of the waste: the split nets, the dumping of unwanted catches. Christ, and his breathing tightened, how heavily carpeted would be the waters with this leviathan beast fouling her nets and losing or dumping her load? And more—much more than fouled nets and dumping—how heavy a price would those mammoth nets extract from the spawning grounds? And that was what sickened Sylvanus Now—that something too big for a mind to figure was out there fishing the spawning grounds.

There’s talk, too, his brothers were saying, about the Russians having hoodwinked the British out of the blueprints for the factory ship. But the Russians had no fishing fleet yet—small worries there. It was the ones already out there, the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Americans. Jeezes, there were more colours out on the fishing grounds these days than on an old woman’s quilt, the brothers agreed.

“Yes, sir, buddy, the foreigners caught more fish out of the sea this past year than we did,” said Manny. “First time that’s ever happened, sir—the foreigners catching more fish than all of Canada.”

“They did?” asked Sylvanus with surprise.

Jake, hunched over his skinning table chiselling out a thole-pin, threw him a look of disgust. “Jeezes, douse some water in his face, wake him up,” he said to Manny, “else the trawlers will be tying up to his stage, carting off his fish.”

“Aah, marital bliss,” said Manny. “That’ll end soon enough. Better get yourself home, my son, there’s something waiting for you.”

Sylvanus was unhearing. All his life he’d been listening to the old fishermen talking of their fathers and their fathers before them, pleading and begging and petitioning governments to scourge the ocean of the trawlers that pillaged and pillaged again the belly of the sea, leaving destruction and waste in their wake, and that threatened the extinction of a way of life—
his
way of life. And he heard again and again the placating response of those governing fathers since time beyond: “Sit back, my boys, for as vast as the sky is the ocean, and more plentiful than the stars are her fish. So worry ye not about a few trawlers when the fish is so thick ye can walk on water, and worry ye not about the ocean’s floor when a good trawling is necessary for thinning her beds and thickening her growth.”

“Look, Syllie,” said Manny, pausing before him with an armload of netting, “there’s always going to be bigger and better ways of doing something, my son. You just got to jump on board, buddy, and ride it to the end.”

“And we all knows what end that’s going to be,” said Jake. “Fished out, that’s what. They seen it in Father’s day after the First War, and we’re seeing it now after the Second—the same goddamn thing. Another war is what we needs, blow the bastards off our waters—”

“Yes, my son, yes—another war,” cut in Manny, heading out of the stage with his load of netting, grimacing over his shoulder as Jake blustered into his well-worn tirade about the buildup of trawlers on the banks before the First World War, and how the catches went down, but grew again during the war with the submarines and mines keeping the waters free of fishing vessels, “and we seen the same bloody thing with the Second War,” he argued, following Sylvanus who was following Manny outside. “Dozens of trawlers out there fishing, catches go down, and along comes the submarines blasting everything off the water, and what do you know—the catches start rising agin, fish coming ashore in droves. So don’t bloody tell me you can’t overfish. All the proof they needs right there. We can be overfished, plain as day, plain as the jeezes day.”

“Yes, b’ye, plain as day,” said Sylvanus.

“And now they got a boat bigger than a plant sitting on the spawning grounds. You watch and see, buddy, if the fishing’s not going to go agin, you damn well watch and see. Another war is what we needs, and by jeezes, if they tears up another one of my nets, that’s what they’re going to get, and it won’t be no jeezling cannon shot from shore, either. You can snicker, buddy,” he threw at Manny, who was shaking his head and grinning as he spread his netting over the beach, “but I ain’t laughing, I guarantee you. I won’t mind picking off a few of them foreign bastards—and our own government along with them—they keeps tearing up my nets.”

“Yes, b’ye, go blow them up,” said Manny. “Syllie, get your arse home. Didn’t I tell you there’s was something waiting for you? Never mind what, just get the hell home,” he hollered.