by Gary Collins
Jake worked hard and was soon as good a fisherman as any in the Place. Not only that, Jake was a clever one. He could do the figuring, and you had to be shrewd to get the better of him. He was soon shareholder along with a couple others in the Skipper’s fishing business. Jake was forever looking for a better way to farden his lot. The rumour was he was seeing the Maid, young Eliza, who was hired out by her parents to work a couple doors up the hill from their own.
I heard the guns at midnight blasting in the year of 1914. I was awake in my room without a lamp burning, thinking back on the memory of this night, as I had every New Year’s since I had borne Jake screaming into the world. I celebrated nothing. I only wanted to be free from this island of misery and didn’t know how to loosen the shackles that bound me to it.
Jake spent that winter in his own twine loft mending and making new gear for the coming season. There was always a crowd cuffering and working in his twine loft. Everyone loved the new Jake. Spring brought the endless ice floes and the seals. The best seal hunter in the Place was Saul. The Swiler, they called him, after the old name for seal hunters. Saul could find fish, too, almost as well as Guy, but no one could hunt seals like he could.
The law was put in place by the government before the bend of the century to ban hunting seals on Sunday. But the Swiler hunted seals seven days a week. The snick of his seal knife was known to all, and he willingly shared the seal meat. The ones who wouldn’t hunt on Sunday’s because of law or religion were still part of the “cut and come again” crowd who came to his stage for the free meat.
I watched Jake pull Tobe’s sea bag from the storage under the stairs in the hall. He was stuffing his clothes into it when I saw him. It was late evening, and I knew he had been out with the Maid again. I still couldn’t see past the image of his father. I wondered if Jake and the Maid courted on No Denial Rock.
“Where are you going?” I asked him.
“The S-swiler s-spoke a b-bert’ fer me at the s-seal hunt. I’m g-gonna be a i-ice hunter.” He would be leaving on the schooner that had come in harbour yesterday, he told me. “I-I’ll b-be makin’ c-cash m-money!” He beamed with pride.
“I’ll be takin’ half yer earnings fer the keep o’ the house, then,” was all I said.
Jake looked at me as if expecting me to say more. I walked up the stairs and left him there packing the duffle. I heard the commotion from the leaving schooner before daylight the next morning. I peeped from the window and saw him go lightly down the path with his scant spare clothes bouncing in the bag slung on his back. He stopped once, looked toward the upstairs window, and quickly turned away. I dropped the curtain and crawled into bed.
It was thirty days later before Jake returned to the Place. He sailed home on the same schooner on which he had sailed away. Everyone watched as she came in under the land from the south. They lost their eagerness when she was reaching up the tickle, though. Their shouts of glee at the returning sealers turned to cries of despair. A flag was standing at half-mast on her mainsail. The schooner was bringing death with her, but was it someone from our island? If so, who was it, and how many? The tickle was never so long, hands never wrung so tight. The schooner crept closer. Then, with her poles bared of all except that cruel flag, she entered the harbour.
The Swiler’s wife screamed, not even knowing yet if her man was dead or not. Someone watching from higher ground yelled out, “There’s a coffin on her foredeck!” Saul’s wife swooned into a woman’s arms. I couldn’t see Jake on her deck and didn’t flinch. Then I saw him and silently cursed him. Jake was standing at the taffrail. His long red hair was uncut and fell upon his strong shoulders. His stance showed remorse. But I had none. The look of him standing at that rail carried me back again to that fateful day. I fled up the path, not in joy that my son had come home, but in sorrow because he had not.
The coffin, brought from St. John’s, held the body of Saul the Swiler. He was just one of seventy-eight men who had died on the ice in a terrible winter storm while hunting seals. Jake was pressed hard to tell the story, and though he stammered badly, no one made fun of him. They hung on to his every word.
He had hoped to get a berth with the Swiler in St. John’s on the old SS Newfoundland, one of the last “wooden walls” to take part in the annual seal hunt. By some fluke he wasn’t aware of, Jake ended up on the Stephano instead, one of the first icebreakers in the world. The men of the Newfoundland became trapped on the ice for two nights and a day. Of her 132 sealers, seventy-eight of them died. The Swiler was one of them. Jake stammered that he allowed he would have been one of the dead, too, if he had shipped on the Newfoundland. With tears rolling down his face, Jake tried his best to tell everyone how Esau, known as the consummate Swiler, toughest of men, had perished.
“H-he sh-should not h-have d-died,” he said. “J-jumped in t-t-to s-save a f-feller wh-wh-who was d-drownin’. P-pushed ’im right out of the w-water, too. S-soaked, he w-was. The f-feller was p-pretty f-far gone. Sh-shiverin’ to d-deat’. The S-swiler w-went d-down on the i-ice and c-cradled ’im in h-his arms. Th-they f-found the m-man alive n-next d-day, and the S-swiler p-perished.” Saul’s wife, held in the arms of Aunt Jane, wept silently.
Over the next few days, more details trickled among the islands, from passing schooners, dated newspapers, and punts rowed here from other places, of the horrific tragedy out there on the ice that spring. Embittered with life though I was, my heart went out to the Swiler’s wife. She was a good woman, and I wondered how she would get by now with four small children and the man who fed them gone. All around our island, many wives had been widowed because of the hunt for harp seals out there on that expanse of Arctic white. I hated the ice. I felt all the more imprisoned when it moved in under our cliffs to hide the water that could free me from the Place.
We finally got the true story from a sealer who had been aboard the old SS Newfoundland and who had barely survived the ordeal. He was sailing home aboard a northbound schooner when a sudden blow brought her into our harbour to wait it out. He willingly told the tale. It was one of the rare times when I stood with the crowd. For the moment the bitterness I lived with vanished and my sympathy was for others.
It was on the ice, in a storm, where the sealers of the venerable SS Newfoundland were simply left to die, he told us. He was a young man, and it was his first trip to the ice. It would be his last, he assured us. We listened in disbelief as he spun the tragedy. I can still hear his voice to this day:
“You heard me speak true, all right. We was left to die out there on that Great White Plain. Jammed solid in the ice, we aboard the ol’ Newfoundland was, and our skipper, Wes Kean, tryin’ his best to get along, with a great head o’ steam up, smoke pourin’ out her stack like a house afire. And the other ships takin’ seals all around us. Couldn’t get to ’em, we couldn’t, much as we longed to.
“’Twas supposed to be a secret between Skipper Wes and his father, Abram Kean—the Ol’ Man, everyone calls ’im—captain of the Stephano. But we all knew, when the after derrick was hauled half up on the Stephano, the father was letting the Son know there were herds of seals near and that he should send his sealers over the ice in his direction. Even though the two ships were owned by different companies. ’Twas a warm day, but that mornin’ we had all seen the sundogs, meaning bad weather was coming, as ye all know. But over the side as ordered we went and made our ponderous way over the shifting ice to the Stephano.”
The young sealer had us all in his thrall. So vividly did he describe the scenes out on that plain of death, he had created a portrait and we had not even noticed he had been painting. Some of the sealers left their heavy coats and hats on hummocks of ice, so warm was the day, he told us. Not paying heed to the seasoned sealers who warned against it.
“I was not one of them,” he said. Up over the side of the new Stephano, in contrast to the old Newfoundland, for the sealers was like exiting a tilt and entering a hotel. They w
ere tired and hungry after walking most of the day over the unforgiving ice. Many of them had fallen between the pans and were soaked to the skin. They regretted leaving warm clothing behind. No matter, now. The warm Stephano had given them shelter. They would spend a night on a ship of modern wonders.
But the Old Man didn’t even give them time for a mug-up before ordering them over the side of his ship again. Out into a storm, already upon them. The sealers walked away over the ice, away from the Stephano, even farther from the Newfoundland, and got lost in the storm. With a single blast of its whistle, the Stephano turned its stern to them and left them to die. The storm raged all that night. Bitter cold descended. Next day and night were colder. No help came. No one searched for them. Men died of cold, of hypothermia, of despair. Another night without shelter, and still no rescue. More sealers died. Rescue finally came, but too late for seventy-eight of them.
“Oh Lord save us, the horror I witnessed,” the storyteller said and dropped to his knees. He looked skyward and folded his hands in prayer.
“I saw ’em fall down on the ice without a sound. They didn’t have enough strength left to heed the warning of, ‘A man down is a dead man.’ Some of them died and then fell, man and boy. I had a sweetheart waiting. I’m young and wasn’t ready to die. With help from others and by God’s will I survived the ordeal. I hope I can survive the memory.”
The young sealer turned toward the Swiler’s wife. Her eyes were as red as open sores, and her face was contorted with grief. She hadn’t stopped crying. He spoke to her directly. His voice changed from troubadour bearing news to gentle comforter.
“The one we all called the Swiler, Saul, fearless hunter, friend to all, died a hero, ma’am. He was cradled in the shelter of the blessed Master’s arms that day fer sure, for as God’s own Word says plain, greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his own life for that of his brother. Out there on that Great White Plain we ice hunters were all of the brotherhood. I share your grief in the loss of your man. He was a hero. You have lost a husband. All of us sealers have lost a brother.”
Captain Kean stayed hunting seals after the surviving crew members of the Newfoundland and her victims had been taken ashore. Out of respect for their fellow sealers, all of the other sealing ships sailed home in the Newfoundland’s wake. Despite an unwilling crew, Captain Kean stayed and continued the hunt. With no competition, the Stephano sailed home loaded with seal pelts. She didn’t receive her traditional welcome in her home port of St. John’s that year.
17
With the money he earned from the seal hunt, Jake invested as shareman with Guy and his crew. He was openly seeing the Maid and had suddenly become a very knowledgeable and respected fisherman. He was doing well, and I should have been proud of him but was not.
Then a fisherman working the Offer Ground near where Tobe had disappeared pulled from the bottom and brought ashore Tobe’s trousers, with braces still attached. I knew they were Tobe’s the moment I saw them on the wharf. I knew the stitch I had made on the buttons of the braces. In the tortured recesses of my mind I pictured Jake cutting the braces, which I envisioned had become entangled in a thole-pin after Tobe’s supposed fall over the punt’s gunnel while taking a leak. And with a deviousness I hadn’t known I possessed, I concocted a dire plan to punish the innocent for the deeds of the guilty.
Bending over the trousers splayed across the wharf lungers, and with my back to the onlookers, I waited for the right moment. The trousers were covered in slub, mud, and crawling creatures pulled from the depths of the Offer Ground. With my scissors, I cut one of the braces!
“Tobe was murdered!” I shouted like a banshee in a gale. “He might’ve fallen over the punt’s gunnels, all right. But I say he was saved be his braces hooked in a t’ole-pin. He would have made it, too, save fer someone cuttin’ the braces and sendin’ him to certain drownin’. He couldn’t swim a stroke.”
“You are out of yer mind, woman!” Skipper Guy shouted at me. The crowd voiced their agreement without exception.
“Then how can you explain his cut braces? Cut cleaner than a crab or a shark could do it, they are. Come and see fer yourself!”
“Aww, yer jest fishin’ fer fat cod with lean bait. Dere’s many creatures livin’ in the sea as could shear a man’s braces clean as a pair of scissors could do.” I wondered why Skipper Guy hadn’t mentioned a knife, to which he was accustomed, but rather to scissors, to which he was not. For a moment I thought my ruse had been discovered and that I had tipped my hand.
“Tell me one creature in the water that you know could cut clean as a pair of . . . as a sharp knife!” I caught myself in time.
“Aww, ’ow the ’ell do I know, woman? I just know there is. I know, too, that Tobe’s goan over the side of his punt had nothin’ to do with Jake. The boy is innocent.”
“Well, I’m taking charge of Tobe’s trousers. I’ll keep ’em fer a kinda memory of ’un.” They all stared at me, knowing full well I didn’t give a damn about Tobe’s memory. I lugged the soggy trousers up the path and slung them in the porch corner behind the woodbox, where the sea lice crawled out and eventually died. The breeks remained there, untouched, until the day came when I secretly gave them to a constable making his way to Greenspond.
The fishing season of 1914 was a good one for Skipper Guy and his crew. Thanks to the money Jake had invested, they bought the first “make and break” gasoline engine in the Place and installed it in their large trap skiff. The engine saved them hours of sailing or rowing to the fishing grounds. The slap of its noise was loud in the Place as it made its way in and out of the harbour. The engine was largely the reason for a successful voyage of fish, which were cured on the flakes by children old enough to fetch and carry. And by women. I was not one of them. I never went to the flakes anymore. I was becoming a recluse.
Jake and the others loaded their cured catch into the trap skiff one day for their merchant in Greenspond. It was late fall when they steamed out the harbour into a headwind blowing up the long bight separating our island from Greenspond Island in the distance. I anxiously awaited the boat’s return and was suddenly afraid of the confrontation with the Skipper when she did. I didn’t expect Jake to return with them.
Late the next day, with a fair evening breeze to bring them home, I heard the bluster of the trap skiff bearing them up the tickle. I felt the sudden silence pressing into my mind when its engine stopped in the harbour. I barely had time to light the lamp and place it on the kitchen table before the door opened. I turned, expecting to see Guy there, but to my astonishment, Jake entered and threw the brin bag he was carrying at my feet. Both my hands flew to my face and I cried aloud without thinking, knowing as I did that I had betrayed myself, “Tobe’s trousers!”
“S-so it w-was y-you!”
Jake’s face looked defeated, and just then he looked like the young boy I had not raised well. I hadn’t expected this, and suddenly I feared the consequences. For the first time ever, looking at the stricken face of my son, I wasn’t seeing the image that had consumed my life. I saw only the face of innocence. But it was too late.
“I-I t-told the c-constable it w-was you. H-hopin’ I w-was wr-wrong.”
“How did you know?”
“O-open the b-bloody b-bag.” I had never heard my son curse before. I dropped to my knees in a daze of emotions and opened the bag as he ordered. It was filled with nothing but dirty rags!
“Where—”
“The c-constable b-burned th-them.”
“But I don’t understand.”
Jake told me what happened. The constable had tried to arrest him, all right. Oh my God, I thought, I had planned it!
The constable had shown Jake and the Skipper the trousers with the knife cut on one of the braces. But Jake’s keen eye and quick mind picked up something neither the constable nor I had noticed. The trousers, even dried out, were stained with brackish mud
and slub from lying so long on the bottom of the Offer Ground. The cut on the braces, which were made from coarse cotton, showed white. The cut had to have been made with something sharper than tooth or claw. Something very sharp indeed. And made after they had been dragged out of the water. The evidence was plain. There was no real evidence against Jake now, or anyone else, for that matter, and after listening to my son’s sober explanation, and the Skipper’s testimony that there had been no sign of a struggle in the punt, the constable signed Tobe’s disappearance as being one of the unexplained deaths at sea. Jake struggled more than usual with the explanation. His mind was as puzzled as his tongue.
“I c-could h-have b-been h-hanged! Wh-why d-do you h-hate me s-so, M-mom?”
His statement shook me, and in that instant I saw it wouldn’t have been my molester hanging from a St. John’s gibbet. No, it could have been my innocent son. His question hurt me. I was beginning to see through the fog of paranoia lodged deep in my soul. I fell upon the bag and wept. I couldn’t tell him I had been raped by his biological father. My shame was too great for that.
“I don’t know,” I cried, then, “I . . . I don’t hate you anymore.” The words tumbled out as I sobbed into that accursed bag. When I looked up, Jake was in the hall, taking Tobe’s sea bag from under the stairs. I knew then he was leaving again. Leaving me, I thought. I was terrified. I would have no one.
“Where are you going, Jake?” I whimpered.
“I’m g-goan to w-war!” he said and walked out of my life.
On the morning he and a few others from the area left by schooner to meet the train in Gambo, a day’s steam up the bay in the trap skiff, I stood by the window and watched him go. He came from the twine loft, where he had spent the night with Eliza, the Maid. As before, when he left to go to the seal hunt, I didn’t bid him goodbye. Unlike before, I wanted to. I just didn’t have the courage to do it. So I stayed by the window, and when my son looked up to see if his mother was seeing him off to a war we barely knew existed, I let the curtain fall again and wept. I wept more for the boy whom I had lost more than I did for the man who would be a soldier. The years behind me had been wasted.
