The Doryman

by Maura Hanrahan

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hanrahan, Maura, 1963-

  The doryman : a novel / Maura Hanrahan.

  ISBN 1-894463-40-4 (print) 9781771172448 (epub) 9781771172455 (kindle)

  1. Hanrahan, Richard--Fiction. 2. Windstorms--Newfoundland--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8565.A5875D67 2003 C813’.6 C2003-904533-1

  ————————————————————————————————

  Copyright © 2003 by Maura Hanrahan

  All rights reserved. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

  Printed in Canada

  First printing September 2003

  Second printing July 2004

  Cover design by Dale Wilson

  Flanker Press Ltd.

  P.O. Box 2522, Station C

  St. John’s, Newfoundland A1C 6K1

  Toll Free: 1-866-739-4420

  Telephone: (709) 739-4477

  Fax: (709) 739-4420

  www.flankerpress.com

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

  The Doryman

  by Maura Hanrahan

  Flanker Press Ltd.

  St. John’s, Newfoundland

  2003

  Dedication

  This book is written in loving memory of my grandfather Richard and is dedicated to my uncle Vince

  Maura Catherine Hanrahan

  August, 2003

  Author’s Note

  This book is a fictionalized account of my grandfather’s life in the Grand Banks schooner fishery of the early twentieth century. It is based on first-hand accounts from family members, and family stories, and supplemented by articles in the Daily News, the Evening Telegram, the Halifax Herald, and the Berwick Register of the day, as well as other historical records.

  Readers may find it useful to consult the glossary for fishery and Newfoundland words.

  Table of Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part 2

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Part 3

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Glossary of Newfoundland, Fishery, and Other Terms

  List of Ships in The Doryman

  Deaths in the Tsunami (Tidal Wave) of 1929

  Some Dorymen, Mates, and Captains lost in the prosecution of the Newfoundland Banks Fishery

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART 1

  Chapter One

  Richard rushed into the kitchen with his bucket full of cranberries that had over-wintered, and then stopped dead. His mother was standing by the wood stove, her dark face pulled taut. The words she had just spoken still hung in the air. “He’s only nine. He’s too young to go fishing.”

  The wiry, stoical form of his father sat with his head firmly cocked to one side, a posture which Richard knew to mean he had made a decision and would not move. Both of them looked at Richard, his mother with a kind of desperate longing, his father opaquely.

  Richard could almost feel his body splitting in two. To his mother he was the sharp student who liked school and would stay there as long as possible. To his father he was a shareman in the making, one who could not waste time idling at lessons of no practical use.

  Richard put the bucket of berries on the floor. The sting of embarrassment hit his cheek like lightning and then rippled through his body. His mother lowered the dishcloth in her hand and silently let it come to rest on the table near her husband. She caught Richard’s eye again almost with a hint of apology.

  Over the next few days, Richard prepared for the change in his life. His father, Steve, was in the Banks fishery. The weeks-long voyages would be too much for nine-year-olds, even by Steve’s standards, the Little Bay men joked. Thus, Richard was to go fishing with his grandfather Jim Hanrahan and his Uncle Michael in the shore fishery. That was their custom, to fish with brothers and uncles and fathers.

  It was 1898 and Richard had spent his nine years of life surrounded by women and children. The men were more often than not away at sea; they were on the Grand Banks or on their way to the West Indies or Portugal or Spain, and sometimes to Greece and Italy. In Little Bay on the Burin Peninsula on Newfoundland’s South Coast, the children played down near the salt water where they held contests to see who could skim stones the farthest, or in the thick evergreen woods where they dared each other to look for fairies as the warm summer evenings drew in. In the fall, their mothers gave them wooden pails and told them not to come back till they were full of blueberries. Picking berries was work but it was fun, too, especially watching the older girls and boys flirt with each other. Once in a while, Richard saw them sneak off in pairs to the deep woods, where no one would be able to find them.

  “Well, we know what they’re up to!” his sister Rachel would yell, forcing young couples to do about-faces, turning back into the openness of the barrens.

  The boys made small wooden boats and sailed them in gullies or even in the harbour. They sewed bits of twine, fashioning little nets, in imitation of their fathers, who spent their winters mending cod traps. Once in a while they fought, even coming to blows over silly things.

  Since Steve announced that his son would go fishing, Richard found himself standing aloof from these activities. It was as though he had been pulled by some invisible cord from his companions. He would never again sit in a school desk, he knew, and the thought of this caused him such grief he banished it as soon as it intruded into his consciousness. He felt as if he were just waiting now, though he didn’t know for what. It was no
t as if he looked forward to going fishing.

  *

  During Steve’s long absences, Richard had always marvelled at his mother, Elizabeth. She was a model of industry. Her abilities seemed to know no end. Everyday she made delicious bread from flour, water, and yeast, and on Sundays she added raisins if she had any and made tea buns. She made doughboys, too, and popped them in the meat and potatoes simmering on the wood stove. She grew the vegetables they ate: the plump potatoes, sweet carrots, tart onions, bitter cabbage, and juicy turnips. She worked capelin into the ground every summer to make the vegetables grow. Some of these crops she pickled and put in the long pantry at the back of the house her husband had built. She raised damson plums, too, and cherries and strawberries. From all these she made jams, putting them up every fall. Her ambition, Richard knew, was to grow apricots. If she didn’t realize it, then she was confident her daughter Rachel would. “That girl is smart as a top,” Richard often heard her say.

  Like the other women in the harbour, Elizabeth made pies, but not too often because she had to “spare everything along” as she always said. The very phrase seemed to accompany the motion of kneading, chopping or scraping. She was a hunter, too. His mother went into the woods and onto the barrens, where she found rabbit trails and set small snares the way her father had taught her. She skinned the little animals and baked their dark meat, making gravy with their juices, and using their bones for soup.

  She was a doctor as well, most often using the cherry tree as the source of her medicine. In the spring, she gathered trailing juniper from the hills along the coast and boiled it to make a tonic. “Drink it all down,” she told her children. “It’ll clean your blood right out.” When they were run down and had boils, she made bread poultices that they held tight to their wounds. She burst blisters and stopped infections. She ground juniper for women to take as they struggled to give birth. She even made a cast from birchbark when one of Richard’s cousins fell from a tree and broke his arm, with no other doctor around for many miles. She made sure Rachel and the other girls, Mary Jane and Annie, watched her and remembered what she did, so that they would be able to heal the ills of their own families someday.

  Chapter Two

  At nine, Richard had about a year and a half of schooling altogether and was very smart, Elizabeth thought. He could read pretty well for a child with just a touch of learning. But she knew her husband had other plans for him, and she knew it was useless to argue. That afternoon when Steve told her he would send Richard fishing, she was upset but not surprised. He had been grumbling that the boy was always away with the fairies, always living in his head. And he was impatient that Richard couldn’t fix on the task at hand, whether it was lugging barrels of flour up the hill to their house or spreading freshly caught capelin on their burgeoning vegetable patch.

  Elizabeth was amazed how quickly Richard grew. Already he was a thickly set child with a pale face and square jaw. The pupils of his eyes were navy, rimmed with sky blue. Only his tendency to tan instead of burn hinted at the Micmac blood he inherited from her. Her girls, though – Rachel, Mary Jane, and Annie – they were “real Indians,” with black braids down their backs and coal-black eyes. Their skin was burnt umber. They were like her own people from Piper’s Hole River and Gallows Harbour way up in the bay. Richard, Elizabeth felt, was a Hanrahan, full of the Englishness of his Spencer ancestors from Marystown and England before that, and the Irishness of his forebears who had stolen into these coves and bays two and three generations ago, trading one form of harshness for another.

  The Hanrahan men, who came long before any European women did, had married Micmac women, and maybe Beothuks, when they first over-wintered here. “There was only Indians here one time,” the old people said. “This was the Indians’ country.” And that’s why, Elizabeth thought, old Jim Hanrahan’s face had the striking combination of sea-blue eyes and high, ruddy-brown cheekbones.

  *

  Richard fished near Beau Bois with his Uncle Michael, Steve’s oldest brother, for a few years and with his grandfather Jim for one year. Jim had first fished in the 1820s. Beau Bois was where the Hanrahans fished, though no one seemed to know why or when they laid claim to the spot. Other families had other berths in the coves around Mortier Bay and on the way to Burin. Richard’s stomach was delicate on the water, and he fought valiantly against the threat of seasickness which he felt constantly. The open air helped. So did the sight of land, somehow, or being able to fix his eyes on it anyhow. When the swell rose and he turned green, Jim put a piece of pork fat in his mouth. Almost instantly the boy threw up and felt immediate relief. Then he would be sick no more. In the first part of the fishing season he was throwing up almost every day. The men told him not to tell his mother; she would wonder why he wasn’t growing. When he was thirteen and fourteen, Richard fished with his Uncle Dick, after whom his parents had named him, and some of his cousins.

  The shore fishery was filled with cold early mornings, handlines and jiggers, dories bursting with slimy cod and the odd dogfish, especially in the summer when the water was thick with them. His world was peopled by men as well as women now, and he saw how they needed each other. As a child, he’d only been on the beaches with the women as they’d made the fish; now he saw how the men slaved away on the water to get it.

  *

  During the months of the shore fishery, Elizabeth watched her oldest son roll wordlessly into bed each night. He would rise even before she would in the morning. He spent the winters in his uncle’s fishing rooms repairing their cod traps. He turned ten, then eleven, and soon he had a hint of the stockiness of an adolescent.

  But there was never very much time to think about it. Elizabeth worked in the shore fishery too and spent all her summers on the beaches at Little Bay, Beau Bois, and Marystown, making fish with every other woman and girl in the bay who was old enough. Through the spring, summer, and fall months, the men and boys appeared in their dories, many of them from the Banks, others from the shore fishery. They hauled barrel after barrel onto the beaches. They dumped hundreds of pounds of fish in big piles on top of the rocks. Then Elizabeth and the other women started in on them. They washed the fish first in great vats of water, making sure that they were free of the salt they’d been preserved in at sea. Sometimes the boys helped with this task.

  Elizabeth and the others uncurled each fish and flattened it completely so that it was splayed. They lightly salted them; this was the most important task of all, for the preservation of the fish depended on it. Then, with their long skirts rustling about their ankles, they bent down and laid them out, side by side by side till the beaches were obliterated by them. Sometimes they laid the fish on flakes, platforms made out of poles. They usually covered the flakes with tree branches so air could circulate around the fish. They worked fast, hoping the weather would not turn against them. Dry days with some sun and breeze offered ideal conditions for this work. Overcast days meant delays in curing fish, while rain was cruel, spoiling the fish.

  In July and August the women sweated as they salted and spread the fish and rose up frequently to wipe their foreheads. The women tried their best to ignore the hunger pains that persisted in their bellies. They couldn’t stop; they had to keep making the fish before the men dropped the next load at their feet.

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth worried about Rachel’s day back home, where the little girl baked and cooked for her brothers and sisters. On the beaches, the summer sun dried and cured the fish, thus making it ready for markets on the Iberian peninsula and in Jamaica. At the first sign of night, the women began stacking the drying fish in rows five feet high. These they covered in canvas to keep the night and morning dew away, until they could return to it after dawn. The women were not paid for their work.

  As Elizabeth watched Richard work through the latter years of his childhood, she thought the sea was no place for anyone, really. In recent years, her people were more woodspeople. Th
ey had come to the Burin Peninsula from Bay d’Espoir, where they had been forced to retreat long ago when the island had been almost overrun by settlers. Then, later, they came back to the peninsula through the headlands of Fortune Bay to carry the mail overland. Only the Micmac knew the ancient paths and rivers between the South Coast and Trinity Bay and the Avalon Peninsula. They laid the telegraph cables, too, connecting one side of the island to the other with wires that meant news came faster than you could blink. It was awfully hard work in the wind and snow and ice, and solitary and dangerous. There were always repairs needing to be done. But they did the work because, like the settlers they now lived alongside, they knew little else.

  *

  When Richard turned fifteen, Steve decided to take him to the Banks. When she heard of her husband’s decision, Elizabeth felt like one of the rabbits in her winter snares. She knew there was no sense arguing with her husband. He was a bit of a tough nut, they all said of him. Besides, he was that much older than her, which gave him even more authority than most men had. She was his second wife, too, so she never felt quite right in the marriage, even when they had loved each other long ago and she had left her home to come to his, as was expected of her.

  *

  It was mid-February when Steve and Richard set out on foot for Marystown. Earlier that week a cold front had moved into Mortier Bay, warning them of more wintry weather to come. Then an Arctic Screamer had arrived from the northwest. Its strong cold winds pushed snow into drifts as high as houses and bent bodies nearly double as they walked into it.

  Now the winds had died down, but the cold remained. The harbour in Little Bay was just about frozen over, so Steve and Richard copied across it, their small canvas bags holding a few possessions on their backs. It was a relief to get to the other side without getting their feet too wet. The air was frigid, so cold that the snow made scrunching noises with each step they took. The ruts in the path that led to Marystown were covered over with snow, but Steve and Richard walked along them as if they could see them. There were a few houses on this side of Little Bay, but not many, not like on the other side. Most of the homes over here were out on the Point, the bit of land that stretched into Mortier Bay. They climbed the hill out of the village and then went down the other side towards Marystown. Then the little dwellings petered out into nothing but a woods path that ran along the coast, and they began crossing Marystown and curving round to Mooring Cove. It was still several miles away.