The Winter Sea

by Morrissey, Di

  ‘Hi Frank, what’s the matter?’ Cassie came out from behind the counter.

  Frank’s face was red and furious. ‘I’m amazed you can show your face here! How could you? I can’t believe you could be so two-faced, so sneaky! You conned him! An old man! What a bitch!’

  ‘Excuse me, Frank, I suggest you back off, calm down and explain yourself. What are you talking about?’

  But Frank was so angry he was almost at the point of being out of control.

  Cassie stood her ground. Bill moved close beside her, never taking his eyes off Frank.

  ‘You know damn well how you weaseled, how you stole, money from Uncle Ricardo. He was old, he didn’t know what he was doing!’ Frank was shouting.

  ‘Frank, sit down! I don’t know what you are talking about!’

  ‘Why do you lie? It’s written in black and white. How do you think the family feels at what you’ve done? And after what our family has done for you?’

  Cassie was close to tears. ‘I’m calling Michael. I don’t understand. Tell me what I have done!’ She raised her voice but it trembled. Bill gave a low growl.

  Frank narrowed his eyes and hissed at her, ‘My grandfather’s will. We’ve been told what’s in it. Now why would he leave you a quarter of a million dollars? You! With your family. Your father of all people! Did you come down here just to get in the old man’s ear? At least tell us that.’

  Cassie simply stared at him. ‘I have no idea what you are saying. Ricardo’s will? He left money to me in his will? That’s impossible. It must be meant for someone else.’

  Frank’s voice now dropped to a menacing whisper. ‘After what your father did. Don’t think we won’t fight this. It’s wrong. You conned us all. You won’t get away with it.’ He paused and said deliberately, ‘And I’ll make sure that no one will supply this place with food so no one ever comes here again. I’ll see to that.’

  ‘What do you mean about my father? What did he do?’ There was a knot in Cassie’s belly and tears filled her eyes. ‘What’s my father got to do with this? I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘No? Well, I don’t believe you. You have some hide coming to Whitby Point and bringing back all the pain and the bad memories.’

  ‘What happened? Tell me! Tell me.’ Cassie thought that at least one of them was mad.

  ‘You’re Cassandra Sullivan, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was before I got married.’

  ‘And your father was Patrick Sullivan, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he was Pat Sullivan, but why do you want to know all this?’

  ‘When anyone is stealing a quarter of a million from my family, I want to know who it is, so I had my solicitor make enquiries.’

  ‘But I still don’t see . . .’

  ‘Everyone knows that your father killed Michael’s grandfather, Carlo. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. And now my grandfather leaves you money in his will. How did you work it?’

  ‘Never! No way,’ Cassie shouted, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘How can you say my father killed someone?’

  ‘A court of law said he did. And he went to gaol for it. He should never have been let out. And now you have the cheek to come down here and try to get in with us using another name. How low can your family go?’

  ‘I just don’t understand what you’re saying. I never tried to get money from your grandfather. I only spoke to him for five minutes. Michael was there the whole time,’ she cried, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Say what you like. No one here will believe you, especially not Michael when he learns that you’re Patrick Sullivan’s daughter. And you’re not getting your hands on our two hundred and fifty grand. No bloody way. That money belongs to my family.’

  He spun on his heels and stormed off, slamming the door behind him.

  Cassie stared after him trying to take in the facts of Frank’s tirade. Her beloved father, the wise and gentle Patrick, had killed Michael’s grandfather? Gone to gaol for it? Impossible. And now Ricardo had left her a quarter of a million dollars. Why on earth would he do that? It was all madness.

  Shaking, Cassie picked up the phone to call her mother, hoping that she could give her some answers, but then her heart lurched as if being squeezed. Maybe her mother didn’t know anything. Maybe her father had kept it all a secret. Could it possibly be that his walking away from his past as if it never happened was his way of putting some dreadful event behind him? Or maybe her mother knew everything and was keeping it all a secret from her. But would her mother do that? She felt confused and betrayed. She put the phone down. She needed to think. It all had to be a terrible mistake. There had to be a simple explanation. But a quarter of a million from a man she had met for only five minutes needed more than a simple explanation.

  Then she thought of Michael. When he found out about the money, he would hate her too.

  Cassie crumpled to the floor and flung her arms around Bill. She buried her face in his fur and sobbed.

  Whitby Point, 1933

  Joe stepped away from his car and wiped his hands on the polishing cloth. He was about to drive up to Wollongong to see his father-in-law and then catch the train to Sydney. He took great pride in owning this car and wanted it to look as new as the day he’d purchased it. He rested his hand on the curve of the maroon mudguard and thought back to his first ride in a car when Franco Riviera, his father-in-law, had driven him in a Model-T Ford to a boarding house in Wollongong. From that day Joe had dreamed of owning a car of his own. And now here he was, a successful fisherman with his own staff of young men, managing part of a network of fishing businesses owned by Franco, as well as being a well-respected citizen of this small coastal town. Australia certainly had proved to be the land of opportunity for Joe Aquino.

  ‘Giuseppe!’

  Joe smiled to himself. The rest of the world called him Joe, except for his mother.

  ‘Yes, Mamma. Please get the children. I am ready to say goodbye,’ he said in Italian, for his mother had refused to learn any English.

  The boys raced to him; their mops of dark brown hair shining in the sun. Ricardo, the oldest at age eleven, reached him first, followed by Pietro and then five-year-old Carlo, the littlest one, who hugged him around his legs.

  ‘I won’t be long. I will be back the day after tomorrow,’ Joe promised them. ‘I am going to see Grandfather Franco and then the next day I have business to do in Sydney. Now you be good for Nonna. Promise?’

  ‘Yes, Papà,’ said Pietro.

  ‘We are always good,’ said Ricardo impishly.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ said little Carlo.

  ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

  ‘Nonna won’t speak English,’ complained Ricardo.

  ‘Good, so you will learn two languages. You are very lucky that Nonna has come to love you and look after you,’ said Joe firmly. ‘When I come home, we can do something special.’

  ‘Can we go out on your big boat? Sea Queen?’ asked Ricardo.

  ‘You are still too young for the trawler.’

  ‘Let’s go to the pictures, then,’ said Pietro.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll all go fishing down at the beach when I come back. But only if you are well behaved.’

  ‘They will be fine,’ said Giuseppe’s mother, Emilia, gathering them to her side.

  ‘Grazie, Mamma.’ Joe kissed his mother, grateful as always that she had agreed to come to Australia and help raise his sons after the sudden death of his wife Evalina. Joe’s life had turned upside down when Evalina had died giving birth to Carlo. She had devoted herself to running their home and raising the children and took little interest in the fishing business except to fret during the days Joe was away at sea. Indeed, she became happier as the business grew and Joe spent more time on land, only going out occasionally on one of their smaller vessels, but never on the trawler, which stayed out at sea for a week at a time. Joe had always appreciated Evalina and had been saddened by her passing.

  After Ev
alina’s death Joe had hired a succession of women to help him look after the boys, but, as far as Joe was concerned, none of them reached the high standard of care and devotion set by their mother. Joe could think of only one solution and so he sent a message to his mother back in Italy, asking her to come and help.

  Emilia d’Aquino knew where her duty lay. Although both her husband and mother had died, she had not been lonely. Her numerous children visited her every day, as did her lifelong friends in the village, but Giuseppe now needed her, so she agreed to make the voyage to Australia to raise her grandsons.

  Sometimes Joe worried that his sons would not remember their mother, but he made sure that they visited her grave frequently. He also remained close to Franco, Evalina’s father, and Silvio, his brother-in-law, not just as business partners, but as good friends, and he visited them every time he went to Wollongong.

  *

  As Joe’s Chevrolet pulled into Franco’s driveway in Wollongong, Franco came out to greet him.

  ‘Welcome, welcome!’ Franco said as he hugged Joe. Over the years, Franco had changed little, except to put on a some weight. He was still the welcoming, gregarious man he had been when Joe first met him more than ten years ago. ‘Are you taking the car all the way to Sydney, or leaving it here and catching the train?’

  ‘I’ll leave it here and take the early-morning train. I don’t want to deal with the busy streets of Sydney.’

  ‘Good, good. Come inside, have coffee and we can discuss your meeting with the bank tomorrow.’

  Although there was a branch of their bank in Wollongong, Franco had always made it a habit to discuss his company’s business with the bank’s head office. He always said that he didn’t waste his time with anyone less important than the man at the top.

  ‘We have to ask for a loan to repair and even replace some of my equipment, especially the engines on the small boats,’ said Joe, accepting a cup of coffee. ‘And Franco, I also want to raise the matter of a canning factory. If you can preserve vegetables and meat by canning them, then I’m sure you can do the same with fish. This is what we should be doing.’

  ‘You’re probably right. There are always better ways of doing things. Look how road transport is taking our fish, packed in ice, up to the Sydney markets the same day it’s caught. Ten years ago we would never have been able to do that. In those days the fish we caught in Wollongong were sold in Wollongong. Now we have a much wider market. But Joe, this Depression is making the banks very cautious about lending money. They won’t take any chances, so I doubt they’ll give you a penny for your canning idea, but you can always ask. Just make sure you get the loan for your engines.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It is good that you are always thinking about ways to improve the business. You like to try new ideas. You know, many Australian fishermen don’t try different things. They do what they have always done and so they have not weathered the present hard times as well as we have,’ said Franco.

  ‘Remember how I was so worried when I first started out working for you that I would lose my fishing gear because I didn’t know the seabed, that I made myself a special line to discover the layout of the seabed!’ said Joe, smiling.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve heard that story,’ said Silvio, Franco’s son and Joe’s brother-in-law, as he joined them.

  ‘Pour yourself some coffee,’ Franco said to Silvio. ‘I’m surprised that you don’t know what Joe did, but it was very clever. Go ahead, Joe, tell him.’

  One of the nicest things about Franco was his pleasure in reminiscing about the cleverness of his son and his son-in-law. He never tired of their success stories, no matter how often they were told.

  ‘Actually, Silvio, it was quite simple,’ said Joe. ‘I took some sinker lead and melted it down and poured the lead into an empty tin and stuck a loop of wire into it so I could attach a line to it. I made the lead into a concave shape and let it cool.’

  ‘How did that help you work out what was on the bottom?’ asked Silvio.

  Before Joe could tell him, Franco answered with obvious delight, ‘That was the clever part. He filled the top of the tin with mutton fat and dragged it slowly over the seabed. When he pulled it up, he could see by the markings on the fat if there were traces of sand or seaweed on it, or if it had passed over a rocky area. Then he knew where the best places were to fish. Clever.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Silvio.

  ‘And I learned the sea bottom so well I decided to use the long line like we had back in the old country,’ said Joe.

  ‘I did not think that long line would work when you told me about it,’ said Franco. ‘Actually I did not understand it at all until I saw it in action, and it caught so many fish.’

  ‘But only if the weather conditions were right,’ Joe reminded him.

  The line Joe had constructed was around two hundred metres long and had about fifty branch lines, each with its own hook. One end of the line was attached to a weighted buoy and as the boat moved away from it, the branch lines were flung out of the boat, to the left and to the right until the last branch line was dropped and then that was attached to another weighted buoy.

  ‘I remember the first time you used it, you took me out with you to show me how it worked and by the time you had finished dropping the last buoy line, it was time to return to the first one and haul it up. Fish after fish were coming up and most of them were big snapper. It was the same for all the lines,’ said Franco with relish.

  ‘I remember that,’ said Silvio. ‘Joe caught so many fish. We sold them to the coalminers and railway workers and the crews from the coal ships. I was so busy dealing with the sales that I could stop going to sea altogether, and we were also able to buy Joe his own fifteen footer.’

  ‘I loved that boat,’ said Joe, with a smile. ‘It had a sail, so I didn’t have to row all the time.’ He sighed. ‘New ways are good, but some old ways are good, too. My family has a long history as fishermen, so I don’t want to discard all their ideas.’

  ‘Your people certainly knew how to fish, and they taught you well,’ said Silvio.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Franco. ‘With your skills, Joe, it is no wonder that the business is doing well, even in these troubled times. Five steamboats at Whitby Point, as well as the trawler. Maybe you will be able to convince the bank that some of the engines should be converted to diesel. But enough of this business talk. It is getting late. Do you know what I have arranged for your dinner, Joe?’

  ‘Steak,’ answered both Joe and Silvio together. It was a family joke that Joe the fisherman liked nothing better than a good steak.

  ‘You thought I didn’t know that you sneaked off with a snapper to swap for steak at the butcher’s shop,’ said Franco, laughing. ‘But I did, and you earned it.’

  ‘I don’t think that I will ever be tired of steak. What a country to be able to get such meat – lamb, mutton, steak. I had very little meat as a boy. I never tire of it now,’ said Joe, recalling that although his mother had always managed to put a meal on the table, the occasional chunk of sinewy goats’ meat was a great treat.

  ‘Yes, your favourite meal has been prepared for you: steak, eggs and chips.’

  ‘Thank you, Franco. You know, my mother is still amazed that I can eat so much meat at one meal. She thinks that a large family in Sicily could live off what I can put away.’

  Joe always enjoyed the company of Franco and Silvio. They were always so optimistic and obviously fond of him and they always made him feel not just part of their business, but part of their family as well. Franco had even suggested from time to time that Joe should remarry to provide a mother for his grandsons. Joe would shrug his shoulders and say maybe one day.

  *

  Next day on the train, Joe carefully placed his hat on the rack and settled into his seat to think about what he planned to say to the bank manager. Franco was right. They needed to convert the engines of the small vessels into diesel. It would make the operation much more efficie
nt and cut down on their overheads because the boats would need smaller crews, and, more importantly, they would not be tied to a central coal-loading depot. On reflection he also realised that the times were not right for his idea for a canning factory so he would have to wait until things were better before he pursued that plan.

  At Central Station Joe pushed through the crowds on the concourse to the exit. He had planned to take a tram to Martin Place in the heart of the city, where the head office of the bank was, but as he was early he decided to walk.

  It was a bright spring morning and the leaves of the plane trees in the park were just coming into bud, but the rest of the area near the station was shabby and run-down. Joe became quite distressed by what he saw. The effects of the Depression were far more obvious in this part of the city than they were in Whitby Point.

  Men, down at heel, with drawn, worried faces, stood in groups, some sharing a cigarette. Some looked as though they might be farm people hoping to find work in the city. Joe thought about the city people who had turned up in Whitby Point, also looking for jobs. But there was no work anywhere. Not surprising, he thought, when the unemployment rate was twenty-five per cent.

  Desperate-looking women clutching children asked for money to buy food. As he walked on, Joe saw a long queue and realised that there must be a soup kitchen nearby. He knew how well-off he must look and his heart twisted in sympathy for the people in the queue. It was not so long ago that he had been poor. But despite the poverty on his island, his family had always had something to eat, even if it was just weeds and nettles collected from the hillside and made into a broth.

  Joe trudged on, his head down, avoiding eye contact with anyone. He passed a partially demolished building, which he could see was being used as a shelter by those with nowhere else to go.