Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Mazeroski raised his left arm in triumph to show the screaming fans he’d caught the ball. It was over. The Pirates had won. They’d defeated the hated Yankees. They were World Series champions again!

  And all because of Elroy and Bill—and fourteen-year-old Ward Justice, who was both of them. Not to mention Maris and Richardson and whoever else the play-by-play in his head required.

  “Little early for baseball, isn’t it?” Old Jimmy Parsons shouted across the field as he climbed out of the cab of his pickup truck. He was smiling at Ward in his goofy way. “Hockey’s not even over yet.”

  “Spring training,” Ward replied, and smiled back at him. “I think the meeting’s already started,” he added, nodding toward the house.

  Jimmy was always late. Ward’s father said it was on account of his drinking. Jimmy’s wife—a “Jee-hovah,” according to Ward’s mother—wouldn’t allow alcohol in her house, so Jimmy had to keep his quart behind the driver’s seat of his truck. Whenever he was anxious, which was most of the time these days, Jimmy would drive around town, drinking the rye straight from the bottle. He must be really anxious this afternoon; Ward thought as he took in the slackness of Jimmy’s grin.

  The strike had affected them all, including his father. But in a good way. Before the strike, his father rarely spoke to their neighbours. He wasn’t unpleasant. He just preferred to keep to himself. “’Fore the strike,” Jimmy had said, “nobody never heard your daddy say boo to nobody. Now, he’s all the time tellin’ them fellas in the gov’ment up in Halifax what we want. You’re a lucky boy. You got a great man for a father. Remember that.”

  Ward would. It was his father, after all, who’d been responsible for starting the strike in the first place. Last February, when the Sara Eisner had returned to port after an unsuccessful trip, Desmond Justice, Jimmy and Nigel Parsons and Martin Hennessey had drawn shore chores, so, while the rest of the crew got to spend the day with their families, they’d had to spend the morning unloading what little catch they’d brought back, the afternoon repairing tears in the trawl netting and the inky, early evening waiting for the truck from Eisners’ General Merchandise to arrive so they could load and stow the provisions for the next trip. Only after all of that would they finally get to go home to their families, too.

  This trip had been an awful broker—after nearly two weeks at sea, they’d hauled less than eighty thousand pounds of fish. On a good trip, they might bring in that much in a day. After his share of all the trip expenses had been taken off the top—food, bait, wages for the cook, wages for the engineer and, this time, seventy-five more dollars for what his pay stub described as “electronic gear”—Desmond Justice was handed a small envelope containing his net wages for the trip: one dollar and thirty-four cents. In cash.

  “It’s not wages,” Dale Eisner corrected him when Desmond complained. “You’re a co-adventurer, just like Dad and the company and me,” he explained as if to a child. He had a smirk on his face. “That’s what the court says. That’s what the government says. And that’s what I say. We share in the good times, and we share in the bad.”

  So how come, Desmond wanted to reply, you live in a fucking mansion and I live in a prefab I had to put up myself? The system was rotten, and everyone knew it. There may have been a time when fishermen really were co-adventurers, neighbours who’d go out for the day on somebody’s Cape Islander, catch as many fish as they could, then steam back to port and split their earnings. But those days were gone. Now everyone worked for the company.

  In this town, that meant J. F. B. Eisner & Company. Some people in town said the J.F.B. stood for “Jesus Fucking Bastard,” but never to the old man’s face. Dale—everyone called him Junior—was J.F.B.’s son. He was being groomed to take over from his old man.

  The Eisner family had ruled the local fishing industry since long before Desmond Justice arrived in Eisners Head in 1932. Only it wasn’t called Eisners Head then. It was Cabot Landing, named after the famous Italian explorer who mayor may not have landed in the harbour during his ventures to the New World. If he did, Ward’s father said, it was by mistake.

  The community had been plunked down on a rocky, windswept promontory where what passed for trees refused to poke their heads more than a few feet into the salty sea air. The earth was so rocky no one even bothered to try to put a foundation under a house; most of the clapboard shacks squatted on posts or rested on great slabs of granite that had heaved up to the surface long before Cabot arrived.

  Even today, the town seemed—to Ward at least—almost as isolated as it must have been in Cabot’s day. It was twenty miles by dirt road to the nearest highway, and even that was an old secondary road, partly paved and partly not, depending on how the residents had voted in the last election. The residents of Eisners Head voted Liberal, usually the right choice in Nova Scotia. But the Tories had won the last election. Now they’d have to wait until the next provincial election to get the potholes filled.

  Old Man Eisner was the chief Liberal in these parts. The chief everything, in fact. Back in the forties, he had successfully petitioned the Legislature to change the town’s name, and the name of the harbour, and the name of the point of land on which the family fish plant sat, in order to recognize the Eisners’ many and various contributions to the community. J. F. B. Eisner & Company’s fish-processing plant and wharves now sat on the edge of the town of Eisners Head at a jut of land at the eastern end of Eisners Harbour known as Eisners Point.

  No one had had to change the name of the building that housed the Eisners Head town hall. Back in the thirties, Eisner Contractors, another of the family enterprises Junior would soon inherit, had built the community’s only three-storey building and named it after themselves. The Eisner Building on Main Street—thankfully, the family had left the street name alone—also housed the town’s only general store, Eisners’ General Merchandise, the post office and the liquor commission along with the offices of the Eisners Head Gazette, the local member of the Legislature and even the federal department where the fishermen had to go to file their unemployment insurance claims whenever they were out of work. Which, of course, they weren’t eligible for now because they weren’t technically unemployed; they were on strike. Or not. Depending on who you asked.

  J.F.B. didn’t own St. Paul’s Anglican, the only church in town, but he didn’t have to. The Eisners were generous contributors to the cause and had recently financed the acquisition of the new stained-glass windows Father Rhodeniser had been lusting after for so long. No one had to tell Father Rhodeniser where he stood on the strike. Over the past fourteen months, he’d made the strike—and the Godless communists who organized it—the subject of many a sermon. But his audience was diminishing. Many of the fishermen and their families, unhappy to be called Godless communists, or, worse, dupes of Godless communists, no longer attended services.

  Was his father a Godless communist, Ward wondered? Perhaps, but it was only because Junior Eisner had pushed him too far. Desmond Justice had asked Junior Eisner to explain that seventy-five-dollar deduction for electronic gear. He wouldn’t.

  “If you don’t like the way I run my business, Mister Justice”—the Mister dragged out and exaggerated to transform it into a mocking salutation—“well, why don’t you just go out and start your own fish company?”

  His father must have been seething, Ward thought, but still, he held his tongue, grimacing, swallowing the foul taste of his anger like a wad of snot caught in his throat. But then Junior, fresh out of the MBA program at Dalhousie University, ratcheted Desmond’s anger one final notch. After they’d finished stowing the last of the provisions for the next trip, Eisner blithely announced that the Sara Eisner would be sailing again at first light. Desmond and the rest of the crew were to report back aboard at four in the morning.

  Junior Eisner had never fished, never been to sea except on sunny Sundays in his daddy’s sailboat. So he didn’t have a clue
what it was like to be a trawler fisherman. When you worked on a trawler, Desmond could have told him—he’d told Ward more often than he wanted to hear—you didn’t catch fish, you chased them. Once you shot your trawl the first time, it became a race to fill the hold with fish before the first of the catch started to rot. If the fish were running, you could work eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six hours without a break. Desmond himself had once worked sixty straight hours without sleep. You worked whatever the weather: rain, snow, sleet, a pounding gale. Lots of times, it was dangerous just being on deck. Over the years, Desmond had watched helplessly as three of his mates were washed overboard off icy or rain-slicked decks. They hadn’t recovered their bodies.

  Fishing, Ward’s father said, was no choice for any man who had a choice. He had been pounding that mantra into his son’s brain for four years. It had started when he was ten. It was his parents’ anniversary, one of the rare ones his father had been home for, so his mother had organized a family picnic to celebrate. That afternoon, on their way to the provincial park just outside of town, Ward asked, for no good reason he could remember: “When can I go out fishing with you, Dad?”

  His father was driving, his mother in the passenger seat, Ward between them. Desmond Justice shot a quick glance over Ward’s head toward his wife. Then he slammed on the brakes and pulled the pickup off to the shoulder of the highway. His father turned on him. “You’re never going fishing! You hear me?” he practically shouted in that scary God-voice he used only rarely, and only when Ward had done something incredibly bad. “You’re going to go to school, and you’re going to get an education, and you’re going to get out of here. I’d rather cut you up for bait than see you grow up to be a fisherman.”

  His own hatred of what he did to make a living might explain why Junior Eisner’s offhand order that night tipped his father over the edge. Desmond Justice had plans. He was going to go home, soak in a long, hot bath until all the salt and fish stink disappeared down the drain, and then make love to his wife. The next day he would sleep in, relax, probably do a few chores Ada had been saving up for him. Now, instead of that, he would have to squeeze what he could manage into less than eight hours.

  “Tomorrow morning!” he shouted at Junior. “Jesus fucking Christ, we’ve been out for nearly two weeks. You’re supposed to give us at least two days to do—”

  “Who says? You? Listen, Mr. Justice. There’s fish out there. The skipper of the Mary Elizabeth”—another company trawler—“Just called in from the tail to say they hauled a hundred thousand of red-fish in the last twenty-four hours. Their hold is full, but he says there’s still plenty where they were hauling, so you guys are going to go out there and bring it back for us.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Mr. Justice,” Junior said, turning to walk away.

  “There’s plenty more like you. If you don’t want to fish, then stay home.”

  “Maybe I will,” Desmond called after him. “Maybe all of us will. What do you say, boys?”

  That got Junior’s attention. He was halfway down the gangplank when he turned back toward Desmond and the others. He stared hard at the Parsons brothers and Hennessey, as if daring them and threatening them at the same time.

  There was a long silence while Jimmy Parsons considered. There were rules against alcohol on board ship, and the skipper knew enough to keep an especially close watch on Jimmy. Jimmy had been looking forward to being home ever since they’d left port. Jimmy stared back at Eisner, meeting his dare.

  “I’m with me mate,” he said simply.

  Nigel, who looked up to his older brother and followed his lead, nodded his head. “Me too,” he said.

  Martin Hennessey looked uneasy, but then he remembered his Uncle Eric. Last fall, his uncle had been swept overboard in a gale and drowned. Martin’s own boat had been only a day out of port when it happened, but the company refused to allow him to hitch a ride back to port on the Mary Elizabeth, which was passing his ship on its way back. “Who’d do his job?” Junior had demanded after the skipper radioed in Martin’s request.

  “Count me in as well,” Martin said quietly now. “Count me in.”

  And that was the start of it. That night, Desmond and the others called the rest of the crew to tell them what had happened. The next morning, no one but the Sara Eisner’s skipper and chief engineer reported for duty. When an angry Junior got on the phone to recruit replacements, he discovered that word of the “mutiny”—that’s what he said it was—had spread. Not one fisherman in all of Eisners Head was willing to sail on the Sara Eisner. Or, it soon became clear, any other Eisner trawler either. That afternoon, Junior’s father fired “every last no-good one of them,” even though, as he himself had insisted for years, none of them were, in fact, employees of his company.

  The next day the union reps from Halifax hurried to town with union cards and the promise that, if the fishermen signed them, they’d be eligible for strike pay. Most did.

  The company tried to hire replacement workers from other ports along the coast, but it would have taken a brave man to walk past the fifty or so burly fishermen who blockaded the road from the plant to the wharf. No one was that brave.

  In the beginning, most of the townspeople supported the strikers. But then the processing plant closed because there was no more fish to process. And since no one had any money to spend, the local merchants began to feel the pain, too. Now there was talk that old man Eisner might move his entire fishing operation fifty miles down the coast to Somerset, where the town council was offering to provide the company with land for a new plant free of charge. No wonder the plant workers, the merchants, all of the schoolteachers and most of the town employees—even some of the fishermen themselves—wanted the strike settled and didn’t much care any more how it happened.

  All of that, of course, eventually trickled down to the schoolyard. Ward learned the downside of having a father who was considered the person most responsible for the strike. Whatever criticisms the other children heard around the supper table at night they brought with them to school the next day. Manny Soloman, whose father managed the Steadman’s department store, said Ward’s father was a pinko and challenged him to a fight after school. Ward came home that day with a black eye. He refused to tell his parents what had precipitated the fight. “It just happened,” he said.

  The company, of course, was doing its best to single out Ward’s father and the union agitators from away who were destroying the peace and prosperity of their town. Junior Eisner had let it be known he was willing to meet with a delegation of the fishermen to see if they could find a way to settle the dispute “like men,” but only on condition that neither Ward’s father nor the union be involved. After much argument, the fishermen agreed to Eisner’s terms. Desmond Justice did not object. He told his wife he was fed up with being the focus of attention anyway.

  So this afternoon, the fishermen, perhaps two dozen of them, had come back to Ward’s house, still the unofficial strike headquarters, to find out what Eisner had told their representatives. Ward’s mother had sent Ward outside to play soon after the first of the fishermen arrived. But the meeting had lasted longer than anyone expected. So, after he’d won as many World Series as he could stand, Ward slipped quietly back into the house through the side door. He was planning to go directly to his room and read but the shouting from the kitchen was loud and Ward was curious. He positioned himself at the top of the stairs, out of sight of the men, and listened.

  It didn’t take long to figure out what they were arguing about. Junior Eisner had made the fishermen a proposition. The company would take them back under the same terms and conditions as before the strike, provided they voted to get rid of their union and agreed the company would blackball Desmond Justice. If they didn’t agree, Junior said, J. F. B. Eisner & Company would build its new wharf and processing plant in Somerset. The company would, of course, have to hire Somer
set fishermen to crew their vessels. The choice was theirs, he told the fishermen, take it or leave it.

  Henry Zinck, who’d been a mate aboard the Mary Elizabeth before the strike, had been one of the fishermen chosen to represent everyone else at the meeting with Eisner. And he’d come back from that meeting arguing in favour of accepting Eisner’s offer. “What choice do we have now?” he demanded, his eyes sweeping the room. “We do it their way or they go away. Principles is fine but it don’t put food on the table.”

  “Junior’s just bluffing,” countered Eddie Green. He was thirty-five and single. He still lived at home with his mother. “Eisners has been here for fucking ever. They’re not going to just fucking up and leave and start over again somewheres else.”

  “Easy for you to say,” shouted someone whose voice Ward couldn’t identify. “Fuckin’ momma’s boy.” There was a frantic scraping of chairs on linoleum then, and everyone seemed to be yelling at once.

  “Enough,” Henry Zinck bellowed finally, and calm slowly returned. “We’ve talked at this long enough. It’s time to vote.”

  “No need.” It was Ward’s father. Ward hadn’t heard him say a word until now. He imagined him sitting in his old wooden rocker in the corner by the woodstove enveloped in a haze of smoke from one of the Export As he always seemed to be holding in his hand. “There’s no need to vote,” Desmond said quietly. Suddenly, the room was as still as the church when Father Rhodeniser ordered his weekly moment of silent prayer. Ward could imagine the rest of the men leaning toward his father, waiting to hear what he had to say. “Henry’s right,” he said after a long pause. “Junior’s not bluffing. He’ll take the company and move it to Somerset. He’s a stubborn one, just like his daddy, and he’s going to win this thing one way or t’other.”

  The silence seemed to stretch on to forever as everyone drank in the import of Desmond Justice’s words. Finally, Martin Hennessey broke the silence. He sounded to Ward as if he was about to cry again. “But what about you? I walked out with you and I want to go back with you.” Ward heard murmurs of assent but he couldn’t be sure whether it was the majority of the men.