Chain Locker

by Bob Chaulk

  “No,” he said faintly.

  “You wanna be a sealer you got to get used to this stuff.”

  As his survival instinct slowly took hold, Jackie began to feel embarrassed at his impulsive reaction. “Yeah, I’m pretty hungry. Thirsty, too,” he replied with the most enthusiasm he could dredge up.

  “Well, b’y, we can take care of both o’ those,” said Henry. “We’ll have something for you in just a minute. First, we got to find something to drain the blood into.”

  Henry hacked a chunk of ice from the top of a pinnacle and set to work scooping it out with his knife, his hand shaking with anticipation. He started to laugh as he worked.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I just thought up a joke.”

  “Oh yeah? Tell it to me.”

  “These two guys are out on an ice floe and they need a bowl, see. So the first guy says to his buddy, ‘I got good news and I got bad news. Which do you want first?’ So his buddy says, ‘Well, gimme the bad news first.’ ‘All right,’ he says, ‘since we’re stuck out on this floe there’s nothing to make a bowl out of except ice.’ ‘Oh, that is bad news,’ his buddy says. ‘So, how about tellin’ me the good news, now?’ ‘The good news,’ the first guy says, ‘is that we got plenty of ice, so we can have all the bowls we want.’ Ha, ha, ha! Pretty good, eh?”

  “Pretty lame,” said Jackie. “Is that the best you can come up with?”

  “I gotta remember that one to tell the crowd on the rescue ship,” said Henry. “They’ll think that’s pretty funny, comin’ from two guys who been stuck out on the ice.”

  In a few minutes he had fashioned a crude bowl. “Well, your mother wouldn’t use it for company, but I guess it’ll do,” he said, licking his lips. The pain in his stomach intensified in anticipation of the upcoming meal. “We better make another one before I cut buddy’s throat there, because we won’t be able to stop the blood once it starts comin’.”

  When he had finished he handed the two bowls to Jackie. “Okay, coopy down here and hold the bowls steady. I’m going to cut his throat and I’ll try to aim the blood into the bowls. You catch as much of it as you can. And for God’s sake, if the seal slips outa my hands hang onto the bowls and don’t let them turn over. All set?”

  Jackie nodded.

  Squat down with the seal in his lap, Henry thrust the point of the knife into its throat. The gush of blood revolted Jackie. It was so red! And there was so much of it! He could feel the heat as steam rose from the two bowls and the blood spattered on his bare hands, the first warmth he had felt in nearly two days. It was glorious. He felt like shoving both hands into the seal’s carcass and leaving them there for a long, long time.

  When the bowls were full, Henry, more excited than Jackie had ever seen him, flung the carcass aside and lifted one of the two-inch thick bowls to his mouth, trying in vain not to spill any. He looked like a vampire lapping at it. He had blood on his chin, his unshaven cheeks and the tip of his nose, but he could not have enjoyed himself more if he were dining with the King. He paused and looked at Jackie, who was staring at him with his mouth hanging open. “Come on, Buddy; have a swig before it melts your bowl. It’s better while it’s warm.”

  The whole exercise looked repulsive to Jackie but he knew he had to go through with it. He brought the bowl to his mouth and gagged at the strong, sickly odour as it leapt up from the warm liquid that had been coursing through the seal’s veins just minutes ago. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and threw his head back, gulping as he went, like a gull swallowing a flatfish. The sensation enervated him, and as the warmth gushed into his empty stomach, he felt a great sensation of well-being come over him. He had never experienced such hunger and thirst, and now the experience of their remedy was unlike anything he had ever felt. He looked over at Henry with a big grin. “Your face is in a fine state,” he joked. “You got blood from your chin to your eyebrows.”

  “Hah! Just listen to the pot callin’ the kettle black,” Henry chortled. “We’ll need to swab our gobs when we get through with this.”

  “S’pose so.”

  When the blood was all gone, they both kept slurping at the water coming from the melting bowls, wolfing down the extra liquid.

  “Hey, this water’s a lot better than I thought it would be,” Jackie exclaimed, smacking his lips. “I thought the water from the ice would be a lot saltier than this.”

  “That’s because I took it from the top of the pinnacle, where the ice is not so salty. Most of the salt settles to the bottom. Not bad, eh?”

  “Mmm, a little bit salty,” said Jackie.

  “It still has some salt in it but you can manage to drink it. If we had run short of water on the ship, we would have started using this stuff to make tea out of; we call it pinnacle tea. But I’ll tell you where the best ice is from: what the old fellers call an island of ice.”

  “An iceberg?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ve had lots of iceberg ice.”

  “You have?” said Henry, with a doubtful glance. “Where?”

  “Home. I’ve picked up lots of pieces when they drift ashore, outside the harbour.”

  “I’ll be darned. Ever use it to make ice cream?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, I have. Many’s the time I’ve rowed out to an iceberg on a warm day in the summer to get some ice to make ice cream. When you’re still a long ways from the big ones, the air starts to turn cold.”

  “I never been that close to one.”

  “It’s a great treat on a hot summer’s day, gettin’ up alongside one. They’re kind of greenish blue when the sun shines on them, like a giant diamond sometimes. You can hear them sizzle from the salt in the water. And then you dip up half a puntload of ice and row home like the dickens to make some ice cream before it melts.”

  “I was told in school that you should never go near one because they could roll over,” said Jackie.

  “So was I,” said Henry with a wink, as he got to his feet and reached for the seal. “All right, skipper, you won’t be needin’ that jacket anymore.”

  With a long sweep of his sculping knife he opened the seal from the bottom of its lip to the scutters of its tail, and in a short time had divested it of its valuable pelt, the blubber still attached.

  “You’re pretty fast at that,” said Jackie.

  “I’m a bit out of practice now, where I was away at sea for a few years. But I sculped my first seal when I was thirteen and I’m twenty-three now, so I’ve done a few I suppose.”

  Jackie was transfixed as he watched the nauseating spectacle. New clouds of smelly steam rose from each cut as Henry sliced the seal’s belly open. “That’s some sharp knife, eh?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Henry. “You got to sharpen it a lot because it loses its edge with all the sculpin’. You ever seen an animal killed before; a sheep or a pig or anything?”

  “I beaned a rat at the dump last summer, and I saw a dead cat or two that was full of maggots.”

  “I guess that explains your pale face when I whacked that seal.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty obvious, huh? I saw the pelts coming aboard the ship yesterday—the day before; whenever it was—but it’s a lot different seein’ them get killed.”

  “When you grow up in an outport you get used to seein’ animals killed,” Henry said as he picked the tiny heart from a handful of entrails before tossing them aside. “There’s always a pig or sheep to be killed in the fall of the year, or you might have to wring a chicken’s neck for supper and hold the thing in your hand until it’s dead. But, even if you grow up with it, not everybody has the stomach for that kind of thing.” He laid the dripping heart on the carcass and cut it down the middle. “It never bothered me. I don’t think you should mistreat animals, but if you raise an animal—say a pig—for food, then when the time comes you got to do what you got to do, you know what I mean? The way I see it, they’re just dumb creatures placed on earth to provide for our survival�
�and even then, survivin’ can be tough.” He made more cuts to reduce the heart to bite-sized cubes and handed a piece to Jackie.

  “Here you go, Brud. Lower this down.”

  “I guess we got to eat it raw, eh?” Jackie asked.

  “Unless you can find us a stove and a fryin’ pan—and maybe a few onions while you’re at it. Sure, you were just drinkin’ warm blood, you foolish mortal!” He popped a piece of the warm heart into his mouth and swallowed it. Jackie glanced at the morsel, closed his eyes and gingerly inserted it into his mouth, followed by a quick gulp, trying to get the dark red cube from his hand to his stomach without having it touch his mouth. Before long, he was shoveling it in with gusto.

  In seconds the heart was gone and they were digging into the rest of the carcass, their energy and their hope being renewed with each bite. “The Eskimos on the Labrador eat raw seal meat all the time,” said Henry, “and it never done them any harm. Years ago, raw seal was all the meat the crowd on sealin’ ships would get. Once they were into the fat that was pretty well what they lived on; ate it right off the seals while they were sculpin’ ’em. That’s because the owners of the ships were too stingy to feed them. Uncle Hayward told me that when he first went to the ice all they got for five days of the week was hard tack and black tea. In the morning the galley-bitch would make up the tea in ten-gallon sluts. He would throw in a handful of tea and a scoop of molasses and that was your tea for the day. As it got drank down they would throw in more water but, of course, no more tea or molasses. Ooh, no.”

  “I hate that word,” said Jackie.

  “What word?”

  “Galley-bitch. That’s what Reub used to call me.”

  Henry smiled. “In the lumber woods you’d be called the cookee. Like that better?”

  “A lot better.”

  “Then, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he said they got duff, which was just flour put into bags and boiled with a bit of salt pork, nothing as fancy as the figgy duff you fellas were makin’ up in the galley.”

  “My mother wouldn’t consider either one to be very fancy,” said Jackie.

  “She wouldn’t consider their Sunday feast very fancy, either; they got a bit of smatchy salt fish with their hard tack and that was supposed to be fish and brewis. I don’t s’pose they even got a few scruncheons with it. Probably not.”

  “Well, they can have my fish and brewis anytime,” said Jackie. “Every single Friday of my life we have fish and brewis. I hate comin’ in the door from school and bein’ met by the stink of the fish cookin’ and the smoke from the scruncheons fryin’. Yech.”

  “Don’t like fish and brewis? What kind of Newfoundlander are you, at all? I wouldn’t mind a feed right now, let me tell you, with nice new potatoes, big salty flakes of fish, a couple cakes of brewis and some nice crunchy scruncheons fried up with lots of rendered pork fat poured over it all.”

  “You’re crazy. Sure, there’s nothin’ to taste on brewis. It’s just like soggy bread. I’d just as soon eat a poultice from somebody’s foot. And you can keep the friggin’ scruncheons. Little bits of fried fat that taste more like chunks of salt.”

  “Gettin’ kinda picky about your grub now that you got something in your belly, ain’t you? When the rescue vessel picks us up they’ll probably set a big plate of fish and brewis in front of you. They’re going to think you’re pretty ungrateful if you don’t mish into it. Whaddaya think: they’re gonna take your order for something else instead?”

  “I dunno. Maybe I’ll ask if they got any raw seal.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Henry as he leaned happily against a pinnacle. We’ll make a swiler outa you yet.” With the subject of food no longer taboo, Henry continued, “About fifteen or sixteen years ago—I think it might have been after the Newfoundland and the Southern Cross disasters, which would have been in 1914—the government made a law to force the owners to serve better grub on the sealing vessels. After that they got pea soup twice a week. Apparently one old skipper wasn’t too pleased. He figured the sealing game was over now that they were pampering the sealers; said there was too much luxury and that he could remember a time when there weren’t even any stoves aboard because the owners thought the men would hang around the ship warming themselves instead of going out onto the ice after the seals. Did you ever hear of the like? He had a lot of nerve to be talking about luxury, when he got paid twenty times what an ordinary sealer gets.”

  “Twenty times?”

  “Twenty times; that’s what I heard. Sure, go into Wesleyville or Newtown or Greenspond and see the mansions. Where do you think the money came from for those places? Not from a man swingin’ a gaff or haulin’ a cod trap, I’ll tell you.”

  “I never saw much luxury on the Viking,” Jackie said.

  “No, and neither did I!” replied Henry. “It was rough on Uncle Levi’s schooner, God knows, but at least there was plenty to eat and she wasn’t so dirty and filthy as the Viking was. You know, she was a tough old girl, but she wasn’t fit to be aboard and she didn’t have enough power to get out of her own way. All the wooden walls are like that.

  “To tell the truth, I’m not sure things are much better today than they were thirty or forty years ago. These days there’s way more sealers than berths, so the companies can get away with what they bloody well want. Bringing change to the seal fishery is like waiting for an eel to die.”

  “Eels don’t die too fast?” said Jackie.

  “They’re a bugger to kill. It takes them forever to die.”

  “I guess I don’t know much about killin’ stuff.”

  Henry stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if this was sarcasm or Jackie’s usual directness. “You know, in some ways I’m glad to be off the Viking,” he continued. “If it wasn’t for the explosion and ending up out here like this, I mean. I wonder how many men got killed.”

  “I can’t get Reub outa my mind,” said Jackie. “He was right there in the galley yellin’ out to me about something that didn’t please him, and when the blast came that was the last I saw of him. What do you think caused her to blow up?”

  “I hate to say it but I think it just comes down to carelessness in handling the explosives; that’s the long and the short of it. While they were carryin’ the tins of powder aboard some of it was leaking onto the deck; I saw it with my own eyes before we left St. John’s.”

  “Hah! So did I!” said Jackie. “While the lookout was yelling at them about it: that’s when I snuck on board.”

  “If they were as careless as that down in the magazine and somebody flicked a cigarette in there…then up she goes. What else can you expect? And the magazine was right next to the head. I seen many a man comin’ and goin’ in and outa there with a cigarette or pipe in his mouth.

  “And you must have seen where the cartridges were stowed right next to the toilet. They would sit on the throne puffin’ away, and you could see on the crates where they would tap the ashes out when they were done. It was only a matter of time.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Jackie. “There was one box in there with a whole bunch of burn marks. Musta been from cigarettes.”

  “She carried a shockin’ lot of explosives, you know, Jack. Besides her usual supply for blasting out of the ice, those Americans brought their own aboard for their moving picture scenes. Then she had emergency flares and there was thousands of bullets for the old-seal hunt.”

  “Was that what I heard goin’ off like firecrackers?”

  “Yep. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like a machine gun—probably a whole box at a time. We’re lucky we didn’t get shot up. There was probably fellers that did. It’s a wonder to me that every sealing ship at the ice ain’t blown up.”

  “She took this godawful roll just before she blew up,” Jackie replied. “I came close to being scalded to death when the tea came flyin’ off the stove.”

  “Yes, b’y, she went right down on her beam ends. I suppose that could’ve turned over one of the stoves on board an
d started a fire that found its way to some explosives. Did the galley stove turn over?”

  “No. All the pots went over the rails and onto the floor and there was stuff flyin’ everywhere but the stove stayed put. It must have been bolted to the floor.”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure what it was,” said Henry.

  “Did she ever burn fast, eh?” said Jackie.

  “Lots there to burn I guess. I’ll bet the hull was a couple of feet thick and I know the bow would have been a lot thicker than that.”

  “Nim Crowe said the bow of the Terra Nova is ten feet of solid oak,” said Jackie.

  Henry whistled. “There you go. And all that wood would have soaked up fifty years worth of seal oil. All it needed was something to get it going. Who’s Nim Crowe?”

  “An old guy who comes into our store sometimes. He used to be a sealer and he always has a story or two.”

  “Good ones, I hope. You better tell me a few of them before we get picked up.”

  chapter twenty-nine

  “Well, we got a pretty decent mess around here now, with all that blood and guts,” said Henry. “At least it’s a nice change of colour.”

  Sizing up the pelt with its thick layer of blubber, Jackie said with a grin, “I guess we’re into the fat now, eh?”

  Henry smiled. “We are b’y; we’re into the fat! This one won’t get tallied, though. Let’s hope we get a few more.”

  “You think we will?”

  “I’d say the chances are half decent. If you keep your eyes open you see the occasional head pop up out of the water, and I’ve spotted at least half a dozen on other ice floes, so there’s bound to be another one or two show up on ours.”

  As they tucked themselves away in their shelter to keep watch, they were feeling optimistic. They had food in their stomachs, the weather was holding and the prospects of a rescue ship finding them were good.

  “It would be nice if the seal hunt took place in the summer, wouldn’t it?” said Jackie. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about freezin’ to death.”