The east coast fishing industry was in a sorry mess and had been for most of the decade. There were fewer and fewer fish. And more and more foreigners catching them, using ever larger, ever more sophisticated factory freezer trawlers equipped with all the latest fish-finding, fish-vacuuming gear.
Nova Scotia fish companies, most small-town pop-and-son operations, were caught in a double whammy: there were no longer enough fish to catch, and the fact that they were catching so few made it impossible for them to convince bankers to lend them money to upgrade their fleets to compete with the foreigners.
Some of the owners, well-educated second- or third-generation types, not unlike Junior himself, were happy to walk away from their fathers’ debts and into new lives in the city. Unlike them, however, Junior saw a future—though a very different future—in fishing. He was only too happy to help them out by taking over their parents’ antiquated processing facilities, cold storage plants and aging wooden trawlers. He paid fire-sale prices. If the company owed the provincial government’s Fisheries Loan Board for money it had borrowed in more optimistic times, Junior would offer to take the company off their hands in exchange for taking over their loan payments. Then Jack would use his connections to negotiate a deal with the Liberal-appointed Loan Board not only to forgive the company’s outstanding debt but then also provide Eisner with new grants and no-interest loans to upgrade the plants and build new, modern, steel-hulled trawlers.
Following that neat template, Eisner Fisheries International had quickly transformed itself from a modest catching and processing operation in Eisners Head into the largest privately owned and vertically integrated fish company in Atlantic Canada. It had a fleet of three dozen, mostly antiquated trawlers and eleven small plants dotted from one end of the province to the other.
Junior and Jack had what Jack called “the five-year plan.” It had begun recently with a lobbying effort in Ottawa, trying to convince their political friends there to forget the plodding, bureaucratic United Nations Law of the Sea Conference and unilaterally declare Canada the lord and master of all it surveyed for two hundred miles off its coasts in every direction. The government could then kick all the foreigners out so Canadian companies could replace the foreign factory freezer fleets with homegrown ones. Like Eisner Fisheries.
Which is where, Ward guessed now, he was supposed to come in. Ward was a lawyer (though he’d never practised a day since he graduated) and the son of a local trawlerman (though his father had never fished a day since Junior blacklisted him). That made Ward Justice the ideal person to represent the interests of Cabot County and the fishing industry of Nova Scotia—which is to say Eisner Fisheries—in Halifax. And in Ottawa, too.
The Liberals were still in power in Ottawa, but Nova Scotia voters had sent very few MPs from the province to sit on the government side. Since the party’s prospects in the next election seemed almost as dim, Jack and Junior decided a strong provincial Fisheries minister could lobby his federal counterpart on their behalf. Ward was the next best thing to having a Fisheries minister of their own in Ottawa.
Even before they’d asked Ward to run and let him in on at least part of their plan, Jack and Junior had cleared his path of all potential rocks, brambles and other unpleasant obstacles.
First, they’d convinced the incumbent Fisheries minister, Etienne Thibeault, a folksy fisherman from the Acadian shore, to retire from politics. Before surprising everyone by winning a seat in the Legislature in 1970, Thibeault had been a longline fisherman of the sort who’d leave his home port each morning before dawn, bait the hooks on his lines, toss them over the side, haul away, fill up his Cape Islander with whatever fish were running that day and return home to sell whatever he’d caught to the local buyer at the wharf.
Etienne Thibeault had won his seat in 1970 by tapping into the frustrations of independent inshore fishermen just like him. They believed the real reason there were so few fish to catch was not just because the foreign fishing fleets were taking them all but because the entire offshore industry, foreign and Canadian, was using destructive trawling technology. They argued that the offshore fleets’ huge, bottom-scraping trawls scooped up everything in their way, including spawning, endangered and undersized fish and the plant life that nourished them. They wanted the government to ban trawling entirely.
Thibeault agreed. Which made him an unlikely candidate to lobby Ottawa on behalf of Eisner’s planned deep-sea factory freezer trawler fleet.
Thibeault had to go. So Jack offered Thibeault a new position as Eisner’s vice-president, Inshore Division, at slightly more than twice his Cabinet minister’s salary. What Jack didn’t tell Thibeault was that the company planned to scuttle the aging inshore fleet as soon it got the okay from Ottawa to lease its own factory freezer trawlers. Just as it planned to close all the seasonal fish plants that depended on those outdated vessels to supply them with fish.
After Thibeault’s surprise announcement that he wouldn’t run for re-election, Jack and Junior secured Seamus O’Sullivan’s pledge that if the Liberals won, as seemed likely, and if Ward could win the Cabot County constituency, as seemed just as likely, O’Sullivan would name Ward his new Fisheries minister.
All that was left was to orchestrate Ward’s nomination, stoke the gossip fires already burning around Dauphinee and paint in broad strokes a picture of Ward as the bright young fisherman’s son from Eisners Head who’d gone off to the big city, made good, and was now coming back home to do even better for his people. A few details had been conveniently airbrushed out of that feel-good portrait, including, most notably, the circumstances under which Ward’s family had left town. The strike was now an unpleasant memory best left unplumbed.
The only person, in fact, who seemed reluctant to let it go was Desmond Justice. There’d been a flicker of fatherly pride when Ward told him he planned to run for the Legislature in Eisners Head, but it had been snuffed the moment Ward said he’d be staying at the Eisners’ old house during the campaign.
“What the hell you wanna do that for?”
“Because Junior offered.” Ward had expected this. He just hadn’t figured out how to respond, so he responded in the worst possible way. “Junior’s supporting me,” he said. “He was the one who asked me to come back and run.”
His father said nothing.
“Besides, it’s convenient,” Ward tried again. “I mean, there isn’t a hotel in the whole friggin’ county . . . and I’m going to be there for six weeks or more campaigning . . . so I’ll need a place to stay.” More silence. “Anyway, Junior doesn’t live there any more.” Why did Ward feel the need to make it sound as though Junior’s not being there was somehow a good thing? He had no beef with the man; that was all between his father and Junior. And it was in the past.
Ward, in fact, quite liked Junior. Jack had first brought them together for lunch at the Halifax Club six months ago. He’d introduced them, of course, in his Jack way: “I just thought that the Future Premier of Nova Scotia and the Future King of the World of Fish should get to know one another,” he’d said, and his delighted-with-himself laugh filled the club.
One of Junior’s first questions that day was about Ward’s father. “How is your dad, anyway?” he asked after they’d ordered drinks.
“Good.”
“As I’m sure you know, he and I had some problems,” Junior continued. “I’ve always regretted that. Your father’s a good man, even if we didn’t see things the same way. But that’s all water over the side now, and it shouldn’t get in the way of our being friends.”
Ward should have told his father what Junior had actually said about him instead of saying Junior didn’t live in Eisners Head any more.
Junior’s, of course, was far from the only family to have abandoned Eisners Head. About half the houses in town, including the one where Ward had grown up, were empty. Ward never knew who his father sold their property to when they left tow
n, but whoever it was had apparently decided he couldn’t afford to stay either, and since, by then, no one was buying houses in Eisners Head, he’d just walked away.
Junior had held on to the family homestead. Old Jimmy Parsons, who had lived in the Eisners’ guest cottage down by the wharf ever since his wife threw him out, took care of the place when Junior wasn’t there, which was most of the year. Three years ago, Junior had bought a house in the south end of Halifax and moved his family there in order to be nearer Eisner’s new head office in the old Capital Fisheries Plant. Just before he died, Junior’s father had bought Capital for far more cash than it was worth. That was, in fact, one of the causes of his falling out with Junior and the reason, probably, that Junior dropped his father’s initials from the name of the company as soon as he took it over.
Junior and his family spent July in Eisners Head, mostly because the kids, who were nine and eleven, still liked it there. In August, they decamped to the new place Junior had had built in Chester so he could enjoy its annual Race Week festivities and, not coincidentally, hobnob with the province’s elite. Junior had written off the purchase of the Chester place as a business expense.
After Ward agreed to run, Junior suggested he and his family spend July in Chester while Junior’s family was in Eisners Head. “The cottage will be a good place for you to rest up,” Junior said. It was, but it was no cottage.
The Fish House, as envious locals called it, was a sprawling mansion with a basement-to-roof glass wall that enclosed the entire front of the house facing their sheltered cove. Watching Junior’s racing schooner bobbing at its mooring made looking out the window seem like admiring a living oil painting. “Take ’er out for a sail,” Junior had urged him, but Ward didn’t. He didn’t know how. Victoria did, but she was too busy mothering and smothering Meghan to have time for sailing. Or, later, for campaigning. Or even coming down to Eisners Head tonight to celebrate his election victory with him.
“I’m pregnant,” she’d screamed into the phone that morning. “Fucking pregnant. In case you hadn’t noticed. But how would you notice? You haven’t been home in five weeks.”
Ward had given up trying to understand. Victoria was the daughter of a politician; so she had to have known the demands of the political life. Yet she’d encouraged him to run, even after he’d been the one to fret about leaving her at home with an eighteen-month-old and another on the way. “We’ll be fine,” she’d said. “Don’t worry about us.” That was then.
She’d even posed for the requisite family photo for Ward’s campaign flyer. You couldn’t tell from the photo that Victoria was pregnant again. And you wouldn’t know from the brochure that she’d been four months pregnant when they married “in a sunset ceremony on the rocks at Peggys Cove.” That bit had been Jack’s idea. “Connects you to the sea,” he said. “People like that. Too bad you didn’t decide to do it in Eisners Head, though.”
Peggys Cove had been Victoria’s idea. She liked the stark beauty, she said. Her father had got special permission to have the wedding there. Victoria wrote the ceremony in which they pledged to “be there” for each other. And picked the music, “A Groovy Kind of Love.” The soloist—a friend of Victoria’s from her school days in Switzerland who was, apparently, a minor rock star celebrity in her native Belgium—sang it in heavily accented English while Ward and Victoria and their attendants (Jack was Ward’s best man) disappeared inside the lighthouse to sign the official papers.
Was that the beginning of the end? Ward asked himself, taking one last drag of his cigarette before flicking the glowing butt off the roof and down through the darkness to the wet grass below. From a wedding on the rocks to a marriage on the rocks?
Victoria’s mood could careen from bubbling optimism to boiling anger in the course of a short phone conversation. This morning, she’d seemed to be in an upbeat mood, telling him excitedly about a house she’d seen for sale just a few blocks from her parents’ place. “It’s perfect for us. Four bedrooms, a big fenced backyard for the kids. It needs work, of course. The kitchen looks like it’s out of the fifties and there’s no bathroom on the first floor, but it’s just up the street from the Grammar School. The kids wouldn’t even have to cross a street . . .”
Ward had tried to be encouraging. He hadn’t even raised the can-we-afford-it caveat he usually fell back on whenever Victoria started talking about houses. It wasn’t that he didn’t know they needed a bigger place, especially with a second child on the way, and he agreed an apartment was no place to raise children. But the very idea of debt scared him. And a mortgage? His parents would be dead before they paid off their little bungalow. He had to keep reminding himself he wasn’t his parents. He had an education, a law degree, the promise of a Cabinet position. And he had friends.
Even though Ward had never asked, Junior had offered to help him get a mortgage. “You’re going to be a Cabinet minister,” he’d said. “You’ll need a house where you can entertain.” He hadn’t explained what he meant by helping out, but Ward knew Junior had good contacts in the upper ranks of the banks. Maybe he could get him a favourable interest rate.
“How big is the living room?” Ward had asked Victoria, trying not to ask the how-much question. “We’ll need a big living room for parties after—” He was getting ahead of himself. “—if I win tonight.”
“Oh, you’ll win all right,” she said. “You’re a winner.”
“Which is why I called this morning,” he said by way of segue. “It’d be great if you could come down for the party tonight. Junior’s hired this Irish group to play. Everyone says they’re great for dancing. I’ll even dance, if you want! Old Jimmy said he’d drive down and get you this after—”
That’s when she’d exploded. And hung up. He was alone again tonight.
The truth was that no one in Ward’s family had been there to support him during his entire campaign. He’d tried to talk his father into campaigning with him—“You could see all your old friends again”—but he’d flatly refused.
“And where would I stay?” Not, it was clear, at Junior’s house.
People did ask after him, though. “How’s your dad?” they’d say. No one mentioned the strike. “We still miss your mother at the church,” one old woman said to him when he knocked on her door. “She made the best date squares.”
Even his mother had turned down his request to come to Eisners Head. “I’ve been having problems down there,” she said delicately, pointing toward her nether regions. “You don’t want to know. But I shouldn’t be straying too far from home.” Ward wasn’t sure she was telling him the whole truth; she knew he wouldn’t press her for details on whatever was wrong “down there,” so it could be left to hang, ominously, in the air. Most likely, she just didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire between father and son, and so chose to absent herself instead. He couldn’t blame her.
Ward’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness now and he could finally make out the outlines of the clapboard bungalow where he’d grown up. It was probably only a few hundred yards away but the life distance was an Atlantic Ocean. And yet he’d made it. He lit another cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter to fend off the wind, which had picked up in the past few minutes.
So why did he feel like shit? Perhaps he was tired; it had been a long campaign. But he didn’t feel tired. Just depressed. Maybe it was his conversation with Victoria that morning. She had an uncanny way of making her mood his. As if his mood only existed through hers. That was it, he thought to himself. It was not so much their conversation that had depressed him as the realization that he could be so easily bent and shaped, even twisted, by other people’s moods, or beliefs, or desires, and make them his own.
Did he even want to be a politician? He’d never thought about that or—more to the point—allowed himself to consider any other possibility. Was there any other possibility? Jack had never left him alone long enough to explore an
y other path. No, he was not being fair. Why was he always so eager to blame his inadequacies on others? On Jack. On Victoria. On Junior.
Ward hadn’t been prepared for Junior. “A surprise,” was all Jack had said when Ward asked who they were meeting for lunch that day at the Halifax Club. His first thought when Jack led him to Junior’s table had been to turn around and walk out. He hadn’t. He didn’t want to be disrespectful to Jack. Or cause a scene. At least that was how he rationalized it after. So he sat down, shook Junior’s hand, nodded as Junior explained away those “problems” he’d had with Ward’s father. Part of Ward wanted to confront the man who’d ruined his father’s life; instead he smiled and made polite conversation and then went along with Jack’s suggestion that Junior become the chief fundraiser for his—or was that Jack’s?—election campaign in Cabot County.
Ward knew, without anyone saying so, that there would be a price to pay for Junior’s support. He understood how Nova Scotia politics worked; he’d got his education at the feet of the master. He’d gone along with all that too, of course. Perhaps, at first, he’d been too awestruck by the newness of it all to know how to react. But gradually, he’d decided, without ever actually deciding, that this was just the way the system worked, that there was nothing he could do about it, that everyone did it, and now . . . well, he was part of it too. No wonder his father didn’t like him, or at least didn’t like what he’d become. For all his many faults, and Ward could list them too, his father understood who he was and what he believed. His father had backbone, character. Unlike his son.
Suddenly, from behind him, Ward heard the door to the widow’s walk open and the sounds from the party below—fiddles and the noise of revellers shouting to be heard over them—spill out onto the deck. He turned around. It was Jack, followed by Junior. Junior was carrying a forty-ouncer of rum in one hand, three glasses in the other.
“You’re missing a good party, Mr. Future Premier,” Jack said as Junior set the glasses up on the balcony railing and began to fill them with straight rum.
Reparations Page 25
