The Black Joke (2 page)

As Jonathan looked across the harbor at her on this fine spring day, he should have been happy, but in fact he was deeply troubled. The great depression of the '30's was in full swing, and hard times had come to Newfoundland. Though the seas were still full of codfish, markets and money seemed to have vanished. Fishermen could hardly give away their catch, let alone sell it. In every outport it was the same story–near starvation, and growing debts to the local merchants upon whom the fishermen were dependent for the miserable rations of flour, molasses, and tea which had now become their staple diet.

Few of the merchants were generous men, and fewer
still believed in charity. In Ship Hole four of the five schooners belonging to the place had already passed into the hands of the local merchant, Simon Barnes, as part payment of their ex-owner's debts.
Black Joke
still remained free because the Spences had always fought shy of the merchant. The Spences had always paid their own way, for they had seen how easy it was to fall into debt to the merchant for food, clothing, or for fishing gear–and how difficult it was to escape again. They had observed that many outport people eventually came to be working for the merchant rather than for themselves.

Consequently, the Spence family bought little from Barnes, and sold even less to him. They preferred the adventurous alternative of sailing to St. John's each autumn with their summer catch of cod and selling it there. When they sailed home again, they would bring with them most of the supplies they would need in the year ahead.

The independence of the Spences did not endear them to Simon Barnes. Not only was he unable to make a profit on them, but their example was a dangerous one, for it tended to spread to other fishing families.

Jonathan knew perfectly well how Barnes felt, and he was worried. Ever since his brother Kent had been lost at sea during the annual seal hunt two years earlier, Jonathan had been hard put to keep things going.
Black Joke
was still free of debt, but Jonathan knew that unless he could find work for her, work that would bring in cash money, he would eventually lose her. He
had thought of making a voyage to Labrador or to the Banks fishery–but what was the use of that when he would be unable to sell his fish for even enough to pay the cost of grub for his crew? He had thought of risking
Black Joke
in a voyage to the ice after seals, but the loss of his brother in a vessel even larger than
Black Joke
made him realize that this would be too foolhardy a venture. For a time he had hoped to be able to charter the ship to one of the big St. John's fish merchants for a spring voyage to carry salt cod to the Caribbean. With her reputation for fast sailing, she ought to have had no trouble finding charters; but merchants stick together, and Barnes had persuaded the merchants in St. John's not to give
Black Joke
an opportunity.

Jonathan was still staring at his ship, and puzzling over her future–and his own–when the door behind him swung open and he was almost bowled over as the two boys of the household, Peter and Kye, came bursting through the doorway wrestling fiercely with one another. Quick as a cat, Jonathan recovered himself and with one swift lunge grabbed each boy by the back of his homespun jersey.

They were an oddly assorted pair. Peter was lean and lanky with a wild mop of sandy hair and piercing blue eyes. His face was crimson with wind and sun, except for a thick band of freckles across his nose and cheekbones. By nature he was an enthusiast, often reckless, and usually heedless of the troubles he was storing up for himself.

Kye was of a different build: heavy-set and chunky
with lank black hair and a face as brown and round as that of an Indian, which was not surprising, for his mother, who had died when he was born, had been a Micmac from the nearby Indian settlement of Conne River. Kye was of a different nature from his cousin, tending to be more stolid and cautious, though he had a droll wit and an easy and engaging smile.

“By the Harry,” Jonathan said when the lads had stopped struggling. “Is it bear cubs I have in this house–or b'ys? Answer me, ye whelps, or I'll skin ye and find out!”

He gave them both an affectionate shake that almost loosened their heads from their shoulders. Still panting, Peter wriggled in his father's heavy grasp.

“Leave be, sorr, please,” he begged. “ 'Twas just that Kye said
Black Joke
would have the dry rot afore we ever got around to givin' her an overhaul, and I told him 'twas
he
had the dry rot–in his head!”

Jonathan chuckled and released them. They stood before him looking sheepish. Good sturdy lads for their years, he thought to himself. It's a sad thing that Kent can't see his own boy now.

“Well, ye meant nothin' by it, Kye,” he said aloud. “And ye may not be so far off the mark. The truth of it is I can see nothin' for the ship to do; no work at all. Still…that's no reason to neglect her. And broodin' and thinkin' won't keep her fit. It's past time we turned-to and got her into shape. Come on then, ye pair of connors! Down to the stage with ye and we'll do some proper work.”

 

2

A Merchant Makes a Plan

F
OLLOWED
by the boys, Jonathan picked his way down the path toward the shore. It wound steeply between immense gray boulders that had scaled off the surrounding cliffs in ages past.

Each family owned its own stretch of beach from which the business of the cod fishery was conducted. A rough shanty, called the “fish store” or simply the “store,” stood near high-tide mark and contained fishing and sailing gear, supplies of salt for making salt cod and, in season, piles of dry salt fish ready for market. Laid out haphazardly to shoreward of the stores were the drying flakes: flimsy platforms of spruce poles covered with boughs. On these the split, salted cod were laid to dry and cure during the warm summer days. Poking out into the harbor from each store was a rough-built dock of small logs decked with spruce poles. This was the “stage,” where the fish were landed and where the men and boys gutted and split them.

One of the Spence dories–a flat-bottomed, high-sided boat about sixteen feet long–was moored to the end of their stage and while Peter and his father collected brooms, scrapers, brushes, paint, and tar from the store, Kye climbed nimbly down into the dory and began bailing out the accumulated rainwater. After loading the gear into the boat the others joined Kye, and the two boys took up the double set of oars and began to row toward the islets. They rowed standing up, leaning hard against the oars so that the narrow little boat leapt forward and in a few minutes was bumping her bow against
Black Joke
's side.

Apart from a weekly visit to pump out her bilges, the ship had been deserted since the preceding autumn. When Kye pushed back the slider over the companion hatch leading down into her forepeak, he was greeted by a gust of damp, foul air.

“Whew!” he said. “Seems like we must have left half the fish in her last fall.”

“Open her up, b'ys, open her up!” said Jonathan. “Let her breathe and she'll soon be sweet again.”

The boys jumped to obey, opening ports and hauling off hatch covers to let the spring air into the dark lower spaces. Meanwhile Jonathan walked aft and, standing with his hands on her big wheel, let his eyes wander over his ship. He was seeing her, not as she was now, dirty and unkempt, but as she would be when she put to sea again.

She was not a big vessel–about seventy feet long on the deck line, if you did not count the big bowsprit
which jutted out for another dozen feet. Just behind the bowsprit was a homemade anchor windlass and just aft of this again was the curved hood of the companionway leading down into the dark little forepeak where the crew lived and slept. The forepeak was like a cave, lit only dimly by a single round deadlight set into the deck overhead. It contained six narrow bunks in two tiers of three, a triangular deal table between the bunks, and a rusty stove. Apart from the deadlight, the only other illumination was supplied by an ancient brass lamp which swung in gimbals so that it would always stay upright no matter how much the vessel rolled or pitched.

Aft of the forepeak was the main fishhold, a cavernous black space stretching from the foot of the foremast to abaft the foot of the mainmast, a distance of nearly thirty feet. Dark as pitch, it stank of bilge water, salt fish, and wet wood.

Astern of the fishhold was the engine room, a tiny hold just big enough to take the old-fashioned single-cylinder gasoline engine which was the ship's auxiliary power. This “bullgine,” as it was called, was twenty-five years old–an antique–but
Black Joke
was lucky to have even this aged monstrosity, for most of the coast schooners could afford no engine of any kind.

In the stern of the ship was a tiny cubbyhole known as the “master's cabin” but this was only a courtesy title for it was so small and damp that the captain never used it, preferring to bunk and eat with the crew in the forepeak.

The helmsman stood right out in the open; and in heavy weather, salt spray burst over him with every sea that came aboard. As Jonathan stood at the wheel now, he could almost feel the spray in his face and, looking up at the bare spars, he could imagine a full press of canvas bellying to the gale as he had so often seen it on
Black Joke
's long sea passages.

The thought that he might have to part with this ship, which he loved next to his own family, struck him with intolerable pain. Shaking his head to put the thought out of mind, he left the wheel and went forward to where the boys had already lit the galley stove in the forepeak and had placed a pot of pitch to soften on its top.

Once started, the boys and the man worked with a will. Equipped with a sharp, three-sided scraper, Peter was soon swarming over the vessel's upperworks, scraping away the peeling paint and laying bare the clean spruce beneath; and Kye worked in the engine room, oiling the old motor and repairing the bilge pump. Meantime Jonathan, equipped with a caulking mallet and a wad of tar-smelling oakum, was busy caulking the deck seams. As he finished each seam, he sent Peter below to fetch the pot of hot pitch, and then he carefully poured a fine stream of it into the seams, over the oakum. A little wind came curling around in the quiet harbor and the smell of oakum, pitch, and wood tingled in the nostrils.

All three were so engrossed in the pleasurable task of getting the ship ready for sea that they did not even
look up when the
bumpu-bump-bump
of a single-cylinder engine came echoing across the still waters. A big open motor skiff had cast off from the elaborate wharf in front of Simon Barnes's store and warehouses, and was bearing down on the cluster of moored schooners. Standing up at the tiller was Simon Barnes himself, a lump of a man who had once been as powerfully built as an ox, but who had gone soft with many years of easy living. His jowls were whitened with a week-old beard, but above his craggy nose his black eyes still shone as bright and hard as those of a gull.

The motorboat came alongside
Black Joke
and Barnes pulled the switch to cut the motor just as Jonathan looked up. Barnes waved a hand.

“Morning, Skipper. Fine day for boat work, ain't it now?”

At the sound of the voice, Peter popped his head out of the engine room where he had been helping Kye to clear the suction of the bilge pump. His cheerful face hardened into a look of dislike as he recognized the merchant.

“Kye!” he called softly. “That ole dogfish Barnes's come alongside. Stand by to repel boarders!”

Pirate phrases and pirate thinking came naturally to both boys. They relished the ancient family association with Captain John Phillip, and the fact that the first
Black Joke
had been one of the most famous pirate vessels in Atlantic waters. Kye's reaction to Peter's challenge was immediate.

“All right,” he whispered back. “You sneak out on
deck and slip the pump hose through the scupper where he's got his boat. Give a kick on the deck when she's all set…I'll do the rest.”

When Barnes hailed him Jonathan answered politely, for it is in the nature of the outport people to be polite–even to those they do not like.

“It's a good enough day, Mr. Barnes…for any kind of honest work,” he replied slowly.

There was just the slightest extra emphasis on the word “honest,” but if Barnes noticed it, he paid no attention. He seemed determined to be amiable.

“Yiss,” he said. “A fine day, indeed. Though it do seem a pity, the time it takes a man to overhaul his vessel, and no work waitin'. What you plan to do with her this summer, Skipper Spence?”

Jonathan answered with calculated vagueness.

“Well now. That do depend. Might be I'll take a voyage to the Banks. Then might be, again, I won't.” He stooped and deliberately began to pour a stream of hot pitch into a seam, as if he assumed the conversation to be at an end.

Barnes was irritated by the rebuff, but he kept his temper.

“These do be right hard times, Skipper,” he said affably. “However, your name's as good as any on the coast. A man would never lose on you. Anything you need for fittin' out, now, you let me know. Anything at all. You come alongside t'store and let me know. I likes to see a man who don't give up easy. Yiss, sorr, I likes to give a hand to a man….”

He was suddenly cut short. With a gruesome gurgle a big rubber hose that had eased its way through a scupper hole under
Black Joke's
rail, directly over the motorboat, began to jet a black and stinking flow that pulsed with every ounce of pressure Kye could exert on the rotary bilge pump. The solid mass of bilge water caught Barnes just below the chin. Staggered more by surprise than by the strength of the jet, he lost his balance and fell on one knee so that the water hit him square on the side of the face. His white stubble-beard turned black with old bilge oil and, as he opened his mouth to yell his anger, the filthy water trickled into it and almost gagged him.

From the deck Jonathan's stentorian bellow echoed across the harbor.

“P
ETER
. K
YE
. L
AY OFF THAT PUMP
!”

The jet of water slowed to a trickle and then stopped. Kye turned to his cousin with wide-open eyes.

“We got him, Peter! We got him square! Only I guess now
we'll
git it too!” he muttered.

“Worth it, a million times,” Peter replied; but there was a quaver of uncertainty in his voice.

On deck, Jonathan was leaning solicitously over the rail.

“Now that's a turrible thing to happen, Mr. Barnes,” he said. “The b'ys never know'd you was alongside. I'll whop them good for bein' so careless.”

Barnes had no answer that he could trust himself to deliver. Scrambling to his feet he bent and spun the
flywheel of the engine and, as the boat got under way, he deliberately turned his back upon
Black Joke
and spat, with feeling, into the harbor. It may only have been, of course, that he was trying to get the taste of bilge water out of his mouth….

As Barnes's boat puttered down the harbor, Jonathan called the boys on deck. They came slowly, dragging their feet and refusing to look at him. When they were only a yard away he said in his sternest voice of command:

“Look up, ye pair of tom-cods! Look
UP
, I say!”

Reluctantly they raised their eyes; only to find Jonathan standing with his legs widespread, and a grin on his broad face that no amount of self-control could master. Even as they watched, the grin spread wider and the big man slapped himself on the stomach and broke into a rolling bellow of uncontrollable laughter.

“Oh, ye young devils!” he sputtered when he could talk again. “Ye should have seen his
face….
” But here a new wave of laughter overwhelmed him. The boys, knowing Jonathan of old, realized that there would be no sore seat for either of them and they relaxed, joining their mirth to his.

As he cut his engine to come alongside his own wharf, Simon Barnes heard the echo of that laughter and his fists clenched. He knew very well that the incident would become a story to be told against him for three hundred miles along the coast. Nevertheless, as he threw the mooring line to one of his clerks and climbed ashore,
Barnes displayed no sign of the anger he felt, for he had good reason to believe the Spence family would soon have little enough to laugh about.