The Doryman

by Maura Hanrahan

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Laura Claire pulled into the mouth of Mortier Bay after sailing all day. Her crew were happy to leave the cold, wet air of St. Pierre Bank behind them. It was warmer here in this little micro-climate, and they noticed the edge of comparative dryness in the April air.

  As the schooner moved into the bay, Richard looked over and smiled, thinking how he would finally see his mother before the day was out. His hands were calloused and hard now, but his wrists were covered in water pups, blisters, that refused to heal. They’d been put there by the chafing of his oilskin sleeves against his skin. Were they ever tender! Worst of all, they sent pain right through him whenever he used his hands, to lift food to his mouth, to haul the last of the trawls back into the tubs, to pull a line, to cut the head off a codfish. There was no relief.

  “You get used to those water pups,” Matty had said.

  Richard doubted it.

  He was pleased for at least one thing. His seasickness had almost completely disappeared. All the men were surprised by this, except, apparently, Steve, who said nothing whenever they spoke of it and marvelled at it. He would only look into the distance, his gaze directed at something far off.

  Richard was relieved to no end. But he also felt a kernel of anger that it took a beating from his father to cure it. Now as they headed into Mortier Bay, he looked over at his father and saw again the deep curves that radiated out from the corners of his eyes, and the downward lines of his lips. His mother raised him with stories of Indians spearing eels in shallow pools in the darkness of the night, and walking deep into the woods to hunt bear and render the grease that was so special to them. The comforting feel of her soft body would always stay with him, as would the sound of her gentle voice. He felt happy, even loved, in her company. His father, though, had given him no stories. He realized that he hardly knew Steve, a man who seemed to spend most of his time in his own thoughts and said little.

  Before Richard knew it, the Captain had dropped anchor. They were outside Little Bay, and Richard could easily make out his family’s small white house on top of the hill on the east side of the fjord. On the shore he saw figures in long skirts that blew up like balloons in the wind; they had seen the schooner and were waiting! His heart jumped a beat at the thought of his mother standing there waiting for him. Maybe Rachel will be there, too, he hoped. They’d both be proud of him, he knew, and his little brothers would be in awe of him. They’d see him as a man now, he reckoned. It was a nice thought that gave his heart comfort.

  The men lowered Dory Number 2 into the deep waters of the bay. This was Richard’s cue to join his father in the little boat. Next they set down Dory Number 4, from which Larry Walsh and Val Kilfoy fished. They were going back home to Little Bay, too.

  The deck was full of activity now as the men pitched salt fish out of the dark hold and into the dories below. The fish kept coming and coming. The Captain counted them, and when he saw Steve’s thin lips move silently, Richard knew his father was counting, too. “Never trust the skipper or anyone else,” he had said firmly so many times as they’d fished in the fog.

  Finally their dory was bulging with fish and the pitching stopped. Up to their hips in fish, Steve and Richard rowed towards their village, stroke by stroke. As they neared the shore, they jumped out of their boat and strained to pull it onto the beach.

  *

  Richard was in his mother’s arms. “Oh, darling,” she said again and again as she hugged him tight, ignoring his wet, bulky oilskins. “You’re all grown up.” Her eyes were darker than he’d remembered – they were almost black – though it had only been weeks, and she’d swept her long hair under her bonnet. Her skirt, wet at the hems, reached the rocks on the beach.

  Then Rachel, lanky in a cousin’s hand-me-downs, rushed up to the pair of them and pulled them apart so she could see her brother.

  “You’ve grown taller,” she announced to the entire harbour. Then she opened her brother’s jacket and sized up his chest and legs. “But you’re awful skinny!” she added.

  “Get to work now,” Steve interrupted, ending the reunion that Richard had conjured up so many times as he rowed back and forth to St. Pierre Bank. The women moved back and the men began filling wheelbarrows with salted fish; these had been fetched by the local boys. Steve, Richard, and the other men pushed the wheelbarrows over the beach rocks to their premises. Then they stacked the fish in tidy rows in their fishing rooms. It was too early in the year for the women to make fish – to lay it flat on the beaches where it could dry and cure in the sun. April drizzle and fog created a dampness that seeped into everything. So the fish would stay in storage until June.

  His water pups aching – his mother hadn’t noticed them during their brief meeting – Richard got back into Dory Number 2 with his father and rowed back out to the Laura Claire. The schooner’s deck was awash in codfish, and when the dories reached the ship, the men rapidly filled them to the thwarts with it again.

  After Richard dumped his last load of fish, his mother came over to him. “Go on up to the house,” she said quietly but firmly. He could see that she had planned to say this for some time, but Richard hesitated; he wasn’t sure if he should go back to the schooner. That’s what his father seemed to be doing. He didn’t want to defy his father, or displease the Captain. But he wanted to go home and see his younger brothers and sisters. He knew they’d be impressed with him.

  “Go on with you,” Elizabeth said, pressing the palm of his hand between her long calloused fingers. “Run on up now.” She nodded, urging him on.

  So he did. His oilskins streaming behind him, he lunged forward in the direction of his home at the top of the hill. He ran and ran as fast as he could, leaving the Laura Claire, the drying fish, Dory Number 2, and his father far behind. As he neared the top of the hill, his jacket fell off and he left it there behind him in the late spring slush. He continued running, hard and fast. He was surprised to find his eyes filling with tears. He let out a dry, deep, solitary sob as he ran into the April wind and neared his home. But he didn’t know why he was crying, for never had he felt so free.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Oderin was once the most important island in the bay. Lying in the western part of Placentia Bay, it was only one and a half square miles, fashioned like a horseshoe. Its open end looked to the southwest and offered ships welcome shelter against the gales that haunted the bay each year, especially in August.

  It was named in the 1660s, after Audierne, a small port in Brittany, France. Oderin had a central place in the history of Newfoundland’s South Coast and appeared very early on in the historical record. The first people to winter over on the island were two Frenchmen in 1704, Ricord and LaFosse, men whose first names are lost to time. LaFosse came with his family; he was on the run from the French, who had accused him of spying for the English. Everyone who lived on Oderin knew that he had buried treasure down on the beach, in a tunnel between Beach Pond and Castle Island. The old people said LaFosse’s ghost haunted the tunnel, and they had no wish at all to see him.

  The rise of Oderin as a centre of commerce began when Christopher Spurrier, a merchant from Poole in England, set up a fishing and shipbuilding enterprise there in 1773, on the north side of the harbour. An ambitious man with his sights set on the growing South Coast fishery, Spurrier set up premises in Burin and other spots at the same time. He sent some of his 150 fishing servants stationed at Oderin to Baine Harbour, Boat Harbour, and Rushoon on the Burin Peninsula to cut timber, for there was very little on the island.

  The people who came to Oderin from then on were mostly English: the Baileys, the Butlers, Drakes, Smiths, and Mannings. They had winter houses on the Burin Peninsula where they could better access wood and hunt rabbits and partridge from December through to March. Eventually some of them began to stay on the peninsula year-round, but others returned to prosecute the summer fishery from Oderin
. Then Spurrier descended into bankruptcy. Injecting a bit of glamour into Oderin life, local rumour had it that Spurrier’s wife frittered his fortune away at the gaming tables in England.

  Spurrier’s place was taken by an Irish-born merchant called James Furlong, who set up shop with another man called Hamilton. Irish settlers followed Furlong to the island: the Murphys, Powers, and Clarkes, people who had had enough of being itinerant or tenant farmers for English landlords, others who’d been driven off the land, a few in search of adventure.

  Late in the nineteenth century, a young Mr. Edward P. Morris, the brother of the local priest, came to Oderin to take up his first teaching position. Later, he would become prime minister of Newfoundland, something in which the island people would take pride.

  Politics was not new to Oderin, though. Richard McGrath was elected the Member of the House of Assembly for Placentia and St. Mary’s Bays in 1861. More than twenty years later, his son James F. was elected to the position. Oderin became the hub of the bay and certainly its most important island. The way officer was stationed at Oderin, so that letters might be sent and received. So was the police constable, and the customs officer. Early in the twentieth century, Dr. McCullough came to the island; he was the only doctor on the Placentia Bay islands.

  In those days, the sea was a highway and Oderin was one of its main stops. Every fall, huge shipments of fishing gear – nets, dories, navigation equipment for schooners – came in from the St. John’s firms of Job and Bowrings, who bought the island’s renowned fish. Men carried crates of supplies from ships to wharves and fishing premises: tea, molasses, sugar, pork, and flour. Local schooners went to Prince Edward Island in Canada to buy beef and farm produce that they sold all along the South Coast, stopping first in Oderin where they knew there was a good market for it. Spirits, tobacco, and rubber boots were brought in from St. Pierre. Gear for the five lobster factories on the island was landed. This was a prosperous place.

  At the centre of Oderin society was Lady Day, the annual devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and garden party held in August. On the morning of Lady Day, the harbours of Oderin were chockablock with dories, western boats, and tern schooners. People came from all over the bay, whether they were Catholic, Church of England, or Methodist, to celebrate and see each other in the middle of the summer fishery. There was food, games, and dancing, and for a young woman, the chance to meet the man who would become her husband.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Angela Manning was a native of Oderin, the great granddaughter of William Manning who had come to the little island from Bristol, England with his wife Margaret in the early 1800s. She had just returned to Newfoundland from New York, where she had worked as a maid for four years. She wanted to see something of the world before she settled down and got married back home, as she always knew she would and as she wanted to. Lots of the young women from Oderin were going into service in New York and Boston then. They used the connections their fishermen brothers and uncles had from fishing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts to get good situations. It was more exciting than going to St. John’s, as so many of the unmarried women of the South Coast did.

  In New York, Angela worked for the Spurrells who lived in a Brooklyn brownstone. They were a family of English descent whose father had spent some time in Newfoundland with a fishing enterprise in Trinity Bay. The Spurrells still had relatives “back home” as they called it, even those who had never lived there.

  Angela’s day was cluttered with work. She rose long before dawn to start the fires in the kitchen and drawing room, where Mrs. Spurrell would start her needlework right after breakfast. Her next task was to help the cook, a black woman called Rosa. The cook was elderly now and had been born a slave in Georgia. She had been in service her whole life and had never married.

  Angela took the bread from the breadbox – white, they never ate brown – and cut enough slices for Mr. and Mrs. Spurrell and their four children, Lillie, Andrew, Evelyn, and George. Then she got the oats off the top shelf in the pantry and laid out the butter, sugar, tea and milk for Rosa to prepare breakfast. She buttered some bread for herself and gulped some of the tea that Rosa made for the two of them. Then she crept into the bedrooms and collected the chamber pots, which she then dumped outside. She cleaned them out before replacing them, fresh for the first use of the morning.

  By now, the younger children had awakened. Angela went into the boys’ room and fetched baby George’s clothes from the wardrobe. Then she went into the girls’ room and chose a dress for little Evelyn. She went back to George then and dressed him. When she was done, she returned to Evelyn and helped the little girl, who was into her petticoats by then. Lillie and Andrew were old enough to dress themselves.

  Rosa set the table, between stirring the oatmeal and making the toast, but Angela always cleared it and brought the cutlery, cups, and dishes back into the kitchen. As Mrs. Spurrell settled into the drawing room, Angela always remembered to ask her if she was comfortable with the fire. Angela had figured out early on that it was best to have the mistress of the house as an ally, should anything go wrong. Like most girls on the Placentia Bay islands, she had only three years of schooling; her mother had plucked her out of the classroom to help with the younger children. But Angela’s brain worked non-stop, and she was described proudly by her parents in Oderin as “smart as you can get.” She was more than a competent reader, and in the top drawer of her bureau she kept a notebook into which she copied prayers and her favourite poems.

  After Mrs. Spurrell was settled away, and the two littlest children by her side in the drawing room, Angela got Mr. Spurrell’s briefcase from his study and put it out by the door so he could take it as he left for work. He was an accountant for an import-export firm, who took the subway into Midtown Manhattan every day. He never spoke to Angela, only nodded in her direction once in a while. That’s for the best, Angela often reflected, all too aware of the pinching, teasing, and worse, much worse, that other young women in service had to contend with.

  Then Angela walked Lillie and Andrew to school a half-mile away, answering Lillie’s incessant questions about everything under the sun on the way. Although the Spurrells seemed to Angela to be well off, both children attended Public School 30 in central Brooklyn, rather than a private academy. She wondered if this was a philosophical decision, or whether the Spurrells conserved their funds in case providence decided to deal them a financial blow someday. After all, their roots were in Newfoundland, where few people took the future for granted.

  After the children were ensconced in school, Angela walked back to the house, where a mountain of chores awaited her. She made the seven beds in the home, swept the three layers of floors, beat the area rugs, fetched wood from the basement, stoked the fires, washed windows and walls, dusted in every room, mopped the porch and hallway floors, and did laundry.

  Washing clothes was the hardest and most time-consuming task of all. Angela started by gathering the dirty clothes from the three bedrooms upstairs. She stripped sheets and pillow cases off the beds and tore down any curtains that needed a wash. Then she took the clothes to the basement – sometimes this took two trips from the top floor – and sorted the fabrics by type and colour. She went upstairs again and boiled water on the stove upstairs in a large pot. When the first pot was boiled, she carried it downstairs and put another on the boil. Downstairs, she poured the water into a steel tub, added lye soap – store-bought, not like back home where they made their own soap – and soaked the clothes. After a time she ran upstairs to check on the boiling water, which she carried downstairs, and took the soaking clothes out of the tub. Then she put the washboard in a washtub with clean water, loaded the clothes in, and started scrubbing. It took her the better part of the morning, because she always had more than one load, and she had to start the process with each load. By the end, her arms were sore and her hands chapped.

  She fed George and Evelyn their lu
nch at midday. Rosa had laid it all out. It was usually tomato sandwiches with vegetable soup, though sometimes the children had pea soup or chicken sandwiches. Angela brought Mrs. Spurrell her lunch in the drawing room. Angela ate her lunch, which was whatever the children were having, on the run. She cleared the table and then brought George and Evelyn upstairs for their nap. Evelyn hated her nap and usually refused to go to sleep. She cried and tried to cajole Angela into letting her stay up, but Angela was firm and took no nonsense.

  With the children finally asleep, Angela went into the kitchen and got the shopping list from Rosa. It was the younger woman’s job to go to the butcher’s, three-quarters of a mile away, and get the meat. Some days it was flank steak, others it was ham. Occasionally fish was on the menu, and Angela always took careful note of the quality of the fishmonger’s offerings. Walking to the butcher’s or fishmonger’s was the most enjoyable part of Angela’s day. She had no children hauling on her skirts and no one telling her what to do. She was alone with her thoughts. Sometimes she thought of Oderin and her parents and brothers and sisters. Other days she merely enjoyed the Brooklyn street sights: the crowds, the endless rows of brick houses, the buggies, even the odd car. She loved to pause over the flower stalls and smell flowers she had never seen before. Most days the butcher, young, dark-eyed Giovanni Casanelli, flirted with her. “I hava the besta meata for you, Mizz Angela,” he said to the tiny, blue-eyed woman. And “Are you sura you are notta Italian?” But Angela laughed out loud and did her business; she had no real time for New Yorkers because she had her heart set on going back home.