Stern Men

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  When Ruth Thomas was nine years old, she experienced a significant event. Her mother left Fort Niles. Her father, Stan Thomas, went with her. They went to Rockland. They were supposed to stay there for only a week or two. The plan was for Ruth to live with the Pommeroys for a short time. Just until her parents came back. But some complicated incident occurred in Rockland, and Ruth’s mother didn’t come back at all. The details weren’t explained to Ruth at the time.

  Eventually Ruth’s father returned, but not for a long while, so Ruth ended up staying with the Pommeroys for months. She ended up staying with them for the entire summer. This significant event was not unduly traumatic, because Ruth really loved Mrs. Pommeroy. She loved the idea of living with her. She wanted to be with her all the time. And Mrs. Pommeroy loved Ruth.

  “You’re like my own daughter!” Mrs. Pommeroy liked to tell Ruth. “You’re like my own goddamn daughter that I never, ever had!”

  Mrs. Pommeroy pronounced the word daughtah, which had a beautiful, feathery sound in Ruth’s ears. Like everyone born on Fort Niles or Courne Haven, Mrs. Pommeroy spoke with the accent recognized across New England as Down East—just a whisper off the brogue of the original Scots-Irish settlers, defined by an almost criminal disregard for the letter r. Ruth loved the sound. Ruth’s mother did not have this beautiful accent, nor did she use words like goddamn and fuck and shit and asshole, words that delightfully peppered the speech of the native lobstermen and many of their wives. Ruth’s mother also did not drink vast quantities of rum and then turn all soft and loving, as Mrs. Pommeroy did every single day.

  Mrs. Pommeroy, in short, had it all over Ruth’s mother.

  Mrs. Pommeroy was not a woman who would hug constantly, but she certainly was one to nudge a person. She was always nudging and bumping into Ruth Thomas, always knocking her around with affection, sometimes even knocking her over. Always in a loving way, though. She knocked Ruth over only because Ruth was still so small. Ruth Thomas hadn’t got her real size yet. Mrs. Pommeroy knocked Ruth on her ass with pure, sweet love.

  “You’re like my own goddamn daughter that I never had!” Mrs. Pommeroy would say and then nudge and then—boom—down Ruth would go.

  Daughtah!

  Mrs. Pommeroy probably could have used a daughter, too, after her seven handfuls of sons. She surely had a genuine appreciation of daughters, after years of Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and so on and so on, who ate like orphans and shouted like convicts. A daughter looked pretty good to Mrs. Pommeroy by the time Ruth Thomas moved in, so Mrs. Pommeroy had an informed love for Ruth.

  But more than anyone else, Mrs. Pommeroy loved her man. She loved Mr. Pommeroy madly. Mr. Pommeroy was small and tight-muscled, with hands as big and heavy as door knockers. His eyes were narrow. He walked with his fists on his hips. He had an odd, scrunched-up face. His lips were always smooched in a half-kiss. He frowned and squinted, like someone performing difficult mathematics in his head. Mrs. Pommeroy adored him. When she passed her husband in the house hallways, she’d grab at his nipples through his undershirt. She’d tweak his nipples and yell, “Tweaky!”

  Mr. Pommeroy would yell, “Whoop!”

  Then he’d grab her wrists and say, “Wanda! Quit that, will you? I really hate it.”

  He’d say, “Wanda, if your hands weren’t always so warm, I’d throw you out of the damn house.”

  But he loved her. In the evenings, if they were sitting on the couch listening to the radio, Mr. Pommeroy might suck on a single strand of Mrs. Pommeroy’s hair as if it were sweet licorice. Sometimes they’d sit together quietly for hours, she knitting woolen garments, he knitting heads for his lobster traps, a bottle of rum on the floor between them from which they both drank. After Mrs. Pommeroy had been drinking for a while, she liked to swing her legs up off the floor, press her feet against her husband’s side, and say, “Feet on you.”

  “No feet on me, Wanda,” he’d say flatly, not looking at her, but smiling.

  She’d keep pressing on him with her feet.

  “Feet on you,” she’d say. “Feet on you.”

  “Please, Wanda. No feet on me.” (He called her Wanda although her true name was Rhonda. The joke was on their son Robin, who—in addition to having the local habit of not pronouncing r at the end of a word—could not say any word that started with r. Robin couldn’t say his own name for years, no less the name of his mother. What’s more, for a long time everyone on Fort Niles Island imitated him. Over the whole spread of the island, you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio. And you could hear the great strong women asking whether they could borrow a garden wake.)

  Ira Pommeroy loved his wife a great deal, which was easy for everyone to understand, since Rhonda Pommeroy was a true beauty. She wore long skirts, and she lifted them when she walked, as if she imagined herself fancy in Atlanta. She wore a persistent expression of amazement and delight. If someone left the room for even a moment, she’d arch her brows and say charmingly, “Where have you been?” when the person returned. She was young, after all, despite her seven sons, and she kept her hair as long as a young girl’s. She wore her hair swung up and around her whole skull, in an ambitious, glossy pile. Like everyone else on Fort Niles, Ruth Thomas thought Mrs. Pommeroy a great beauty. She adored her. Ruth often pretended to be her.

  As a girl, Ruth’s hair was kept as short as a boy’s, so when she pretended to be Mrs. Pommeroy, she wore a towel knotted around her head, the way some women do after a bath, but hers stood for Mrs. Pommeroy’s famous glossy pile of hair. Ruth would enlist Robin Pommeroy, the youngest of the boys, to play Mr. Pommeroy. Robin was easy to boss around. Besides, he liked the game. When Robin played Mr. Pommeroy, he arranged his mouth into the same smooch his dad often wore, and he stomped around Ruth with his hands heavy on his hips. He got to curse and scowl. He liked the authority it gave him.

  Ruth Thomas and Robin Pommeroy were always pretending to be Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy. It was their constant game. They played it for hours and weeks of their childhood. They played it outside in the woods, nearly every day throughout the summer that Ruth lived with the Pommeroys. The game would start with pregnancy. Ruth would put a stone in her pants pocket to stand for one of the Pommeroy brothers, unborn. Robin would purse his mouth all tight and lecture Ruth about parenthood.

  “Now listen me,” Robin would say, his fists on his hips. “When that baby’s bawn, he won’t have any teeth. Heah that? He won’t be weddy to eat that hard food, like what we eat. Wanda! You have to feed that baby some juice!”

  Ruth would stroke the baby stone in her pocket. She’d say, “I think I’m about to have this baby right now.”

  She’d toss it on the ground. The baby was born. It was that easy.

  “Would you just look at that baby?” Ruth would say. “That’s a big one.”

  Each day, the first stone to be born was named Webster, because he was the oldest. After Webster was named, Robin would find another stone to represent Conway. He’d give it to Ruth to slip into her pocket.

  “Wanda! What’s that?” Robin would then demand.

  “Would you just look at that,” Ruth would answer. “Here I go, having another one of those goddamn babies.”

  Robin would scowl. “Listen me. When that baby’s bawn, his foot bones’ll be too soft for boots. Wanda! Don’t you go stick any boots on that baby!”

  “I’m naming this one Kathleen,” Ruth would say. (She was always eager for another girl on the island.)

  “No way,” Robin would say. “That baby’s gonna be a boy, too.”

  Sure enough, it would be. They’d name that stone Conway and toss him down by his big brother, Webster. Soon, very soon, a pile of sons would grow in the woods. Ruth Thomas delivered all those boys, all summer long. Sometimes she’d step on the stones and say, “Feet on you, Fagan! Feet on you, John!” She birthed every one of those boys every single day, with Robin stomping around her
, hands heavy on his hips, bragging and lecturing. And when the Robin stone itself was born at the end of the game, Ruth sometimes said, “I’m throwing out this lousy baby. It’s too fat. It can’t even talk right.”

  Then Robin might take a swing, knocking the towel-hair off Ruth’s head. And she might then whip the towel at his legs, giving him red slashes on his shins. She might knock a fist in his back if he tried running. Ruth had a good swing, when the target was slow, fat Robin. The towel would get wet from the ground. The towel would get muddied and ruined, so they’d leave it and take a fresh one the next day. Soon, a pile of towels would grow in the woods. Mrs. Pommeroy could never figure that one out.

  Say, where’d those towels go? Hey! What about my towels, then?

  The Pommeroys lived in the big house of a dead great-uncle who had been a relative of both of them. Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy were related even before they were married. They were cousins, each conveniently named Pommeroy before they fell in love. (“Like the goddamn Roosevelts,” Angus Addams said.) To be fair, of course, that’s not an unusual situation on Fort Niles. Not many families to choose from anymore, so everyone’s family.

  The dead Pommeroy great-uncle was therefore a shared dead great-uncle, a common dead great-uncle. He’d built a big house near the church, with money made in a general store, back before the first lobster war. Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy had doubly inherited the home. When Ruth was nine years old and stayed with the Pommeroys for the summer, Mrs. Pommeroy tried to get her to sleep in that dead uncle’s bedroom. It was under a quiet roof and had one window, which spied on a massive spruce tree, and it had a soft wooden floor of wide planks. A lovely room for a little girl. The only problem was that the great-uncle had shot himself right there in that room, right through his mouth, and the wallpaper was still speckled with rusty, tarnished blood freckles. Ruth Thomas flatly refused to sleep in that room.

  “Jesus, Ruthie, the man’s dead and buried,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “There’s nothing in this room to scare anybody.”

  “No,” Ruth said.

  “Even if you see a ghost, Ruthie, it would just be my uncle’s ghost, and he’d never hurt you. He loved all children.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It’s not even blood on the wallpaper!” Mrs. Pommeroy lied. “It’s fungus. It’s from the damp.”

  Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth that she had the same fungus on her bedroom wallpaper every now and again, and that she slept just fine. She said she slept like a cozy baby every night of the year. In that case, Ruth announced, she’d sleep in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom. And, in the end, that’s exactly what she did.

  Ruth slept on the floor next to Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy’s bed. She had a large pillow and a mattress of sorts, made from rich-smelling wool blankets. When the Pommeroys made any noise, Ruth heard it, and when they had giggly sex, she heard that. When they snored through their boozy sleeping, she heard that, too. When Mr. Pommeroy got up at four o’clock every morning to check the wind and leave the house for lobster fishing, Ruth Thomas heard him moving around. She kept her eyes shut and listened to his mornings.

  Mr. Pommeroy had a terrier that followed him around everywhere, even in the kitchen at four o’clock every morning, and the dog’s nails ticked steady on the kitchen floor. Mr. Pommeroy would talk quietly to the dog while making his breakfast.

  “Go back to sleep, dog,” he’d say. “Don’t you want to go back to sleep? Don’t you want to rest up, dog?”

  Some mornings Mr. Pommeroy would say, “You following me around so you can learn how to make coffee for me, dog? You trying to learn how to make my breakfast?”

  For a while, there was a cat in the Pommeroy house, too. It was a dock cat, a huge coon-cat that had moved up to the Pommeroys’ because it hated the terrier and hated the Pommeroy boys so much that it wanted to stay near them at all times. The cat took the terrier’s eye out in a fight, and the eye socket turned into a stink and mess of infection. So Conway put the cat in a lobster crate, floated the crate on the surf, and shot at it with a gun of his father’s. After that, the terrier slept on the floor beside Ruth Thomas every night, with its mean, stinking eye.

  Ruth liked sleeping on the floor, but she had strange dreams. She dreamed that the ghost of the Pommeroys’ dead great-uncle chased her into the Pommeroys’ kitchen, where she searched for knives to stab him with but could find nothing except wire whisks and flat spatulas to defend herself. She had other dreams, where it was storming rain in the Pommeroys’ back yard, and the boys were wrestling with each other. She had to step around them with a small umbrella, covering first one boy, then another, then another, then another. All seven Pommeroy sons fought in a tangle, all around her.

  In the mornings, after Mr. Pommeroy had left the house, Ruth would fall asleep again and wake up a few hours later, when the sun was higher. She’d crawl up into bed with Mrs. Pommeroy. Mrs. Pommeroy would wake up and tickle Ruth’s neck and tell Ruth stories about all the dogs her father had owned, back when Mrs. Pommeroy was a little girl exactly like Ruth.

  “There was Beadie, Brownie, Cassie, Prince, Tally, Whippet . . .” Mrs. Pommeroy would say, and eventually Ruth learned the names of all the bygone dogs and could be quizzed on them.

  Ruth Thomas lived with the Pommeroys for three months, and then her father returned to the island without her mother. The complicated incident had been resolved. Mr. Thomas had left Ruth’s mother in a town called Concord, New Hampshire, where she would remain indefinitely. It was made pretty clear to Ruth that her mother would not be returning home at all. Ruth’s father took Ruth out of the Pommeroy house and back next door, where she was able to sleep in her own bedroom again. Ruth resumed her quiet life with her father and found that she did not much miss her mother. But she very much missed sleeping on the floor beside the bed of Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy.

  Then Mr. Pommeroy drowned.

  All the men said Ira Pommeroy drowned because he fished alone and he drank on his boat. He kept jugs of rum tied to some of his trap lines, bobbing twenty fathoms down in the chilled middle waters, halfway between the floating buoys and the grounded lobster traps. Everyone did that occasionally. It wasn’t as if Mr. Pommeroy had invented the idea, but he had refined it greatly, and the understanding was that he’d wrecked himself from refining it too greatly. He simply got too drunk on a day when the swells were too big and the deck was too slippery. He probably went over the side of his boat before he even knew it, losing his footing with a quick swell while pulling up a trap. And he couldn’t swim. Scarcely any of the lobstermen on Fort Niles or Courne Haven could swim. Not that being able to swim would have helped Mr. Pommeroy much. In the tall boots, in the long slicker and heavy gloves, in the wicked and cold water, he would have gone down fast. At least he got it over with quickly. Knowing how to swim sometimes just makes the dying last longer.

  Angus Addams found the body three days later, when he was fishing. Mr. Pommeroy’s corpse was bound tightly in Angus’s lines, like a swollen, salted ham. That’s where he’d ended up. A body can drift, and there were acres of ropes sunk in the water around Fort Niles Island that could act like filters to catch any drifting corpses. Mr. Pommeroy’s drift stopped in Angus’s territory. The seagulls had already eaten out Mr. Pommeroy’s eyes.

  Angus Addams had pulled up a line to collect one of his traps, and he’d pulled up the body, too. Angus had a small boat, with not much room for another man on board, alive or dead, so he’d tossed dead Mr. Pommeroy into the holding tank on top of the living, shifting lobsters he’d caught that morning, whose claws he’d pegged shut so they wouldn’t rip each other into a slop of pieces. Like Mr. Pommeroy, Angus fished alone. At that time in his career, Angus didn’t have a sternman to help him. At that point in his career, he didn’t feel like sharing his catch with a teenage helper. He didn’t even have a radio, which was unusual for a lobsterman, but Angus did not like being chattered at. Angus had dozens of traps to haul that day. He always fished through his chores, no matter what he found. And so
, despite the corpse he’d fished up, Angus went ahead and pulled his remaining lines, which took several hours. He measured each lobster, as he was supposed to do, threw the small ones back, and kept the legal ones, pegging their claws safely shut. He tossed all the lobsters on top of the drowned body in the cool tank, out of the sun.

  Around three-thirty in the afternoon, he headed back to Fort Niles. He anchored. He tossed Mr. Pommeroy’s body into his rowboat, where it was out of his way, and counted the catch into the holding crates, filled his bait buckets for the next day, hosed off the deck, hung up his slicker. When he was finished with these chores, he joined Mr. Pommeroy in the rowboat and headed over to the dock. He tied his rowboat to the ladder and climbed up. Then he told everyone exactly whom he’d found in his fishing grounds that morning, dead as any idiot.

  “He was all stuck in my wopes,” Angus Addams said grimly.

  As it happened, Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and Timothy and Chester Pommeroy were at the docks when Angus Addams unloaded the corpse. They’d been playing there that afternoon. They saw the body of their father, laid out on the pier, puffed and eyeless. Webster, the oldest, was the first to see it. He stammered and gasped, and then the other boys saw it. They fell like terrified soldiers into a crazy formation, and broke right into a run home, together, in a bunch. They ran up from the harbor, and they burst, fast and weeping, past the roads and the collapsing old church to their house, where their neighbor Ruth Thomas was fighting with their littlest brother, Robin, on the steps. The Pommeroy sons drew Ruth and Robin up into their run, and the eight of them shoved into the kitchen at the same time and rushed into Mrs. Pommeroy.