Great Cape Breton Storytelling

by Great Cape Breton Storytelling (epub)

  Old-time fishers move without doubt. They haul the mackerel out of the water easy as lifting a clothesline strung with flimsy slippers. Holding the line in a two-handed arch they give it a sharp jerk that sends a rain of slippers to the deck, then scurry the line into the water again, all without having caught those flying needle-fine hooks in their shirt cuffs or on the gunnel ridge or in the bare skin of their wrists, let alone snarling them in among themselves like a catfight the way I will mine.

  Ariel stands beside me, a benign and single-minded huntress. Her back straight, her muscles sure, she lifts and sheds fish from her line in earnest.

  Me, I like to see the fish as music. Lift the line high, feel their pull and know their weight — their vigorous, portentous music — in every muscle. Bring the line down like a conductor signalling the entire orchestra to pounce on a chord and every note comes down brilliantly. Sometimes this works.

  All together our boats bob amiably. It’s a country dance: we hang out in the fishlot, dancing a syncopated jig. Doing The Mackerelle. Haul and thresh, haul and thresh — it is a dying art, small-time fishing being a failing economy. The seiners can scoop up fish in two-ton mouthfuls. But this looks and feels graceful as any act of harvest or animal of prey. Why do all the small fine movements have to end?

  Frenzied onslaughts of them end all too soon. Boats disperse to new spots. We drift over flutters — brief showers — mere spits of fish, sharp and flighty as déjà vu. Then nothing, again. The abrupt and dreaded nothing.

  To lose a codfish as it spirals up on your line is despair and abandonment. But a drift of mackerel interrupted brings giddy frustration. Breathlessness. The blues.

  “We’ve wandered out of their pasture,” I say. “We’ve drifted apart. Grown estranged. The sea is sad cowboy country. The fish are a hurtin’ song.”

  A skipper’s job is to counter their crew’s addlebrained remarks with common sense. Ariel scans the water. “It’s our featherbaits,” she decides. She means these new ones with the long red and yellow plumes. “The fish are down in the saloon, saying. Think we’re cheap? And laughing. That chilling mackerel laugh.” She shudders. “That bloodcurdling. Mackerel. Cackle.”

  You’d never guess Ariel was old enough to be my mother. Well, nearly.

  Bells ring in my armpits, in my hands. We could fill this emptiness easy: yell at the mountains like seagulls, like one-year-olds. If there were trees around we could forget the fish — or forget the trees, we could swing from each other’s limbs, hollering and cheeping like monkeys.

  A drizzly calm morning. Anicca carried us out the channel onto the sea. Tired, we moved between two greys: heavy dark of ocean asleep, damp light of air awakening, both of them soft to the eyes and skin as a herring gull’s feathers.

  Far ahead of us the pretty two-tiered seiners floated like fogged wedding cakes toward the horizon. Closer ahead the small boats — humbler predators — forayed toward the Point or the lighthouse, the two destinations a dozen kilometres apart.

  Ariel might decide to join them. But first and as usual she would check near the green buoy, just half a mile from the channel mouth. “If the fish are biting,” she liked to say, “why not get them close to home?”

  So close here we could see the house up on the hill and wonder which of us forgot to turn off the kitchen light.

  Anicca still in a curve of her settling, we let down our hooks.

  Unwind the line reluctantly. Down into dreams below, under the hull, in fearful darkness. How can we know what lurks down there, waiting to foist itself on us, emerging monstrous out of our own imaginations?

  Ominous nothing turned to conundrum quick. The lines went slack as though the leads had been bitten off. Tug at them and a weight grabs heavy, the line swoons — wommm — heavy as the drag of gravity when the earth seems to draw the blood down from your womb, nearly drawing you to your knees, only now there’s no ache only ponderousness, your senses all plunge underwater.

  “Here they are,” Ariel gasped.

  Strain at them. They give in — resist — give in and break into air at last, mackerel after all, and “Hoo! They’re big.”

  Shun them from the hooks onto the deck. No hesitation but they begin thundering, awesome and unnerving as black and grey bars of iron knocking on your bedroom floor in the night.

  We dropped our hooks again. They were taken so fast the lines swooped in great arcs through the water.

  “Here we are.”

  Time to harvest. Bring in the sheaves. Thresh the fish from the lines, saying “Hoo,” and “Huh,” and “Aah . . . ” with relief as every knot in the mind is undone.

  In happy labouring there is no haste or delay . . . . The morning passed out of time . . . .

  The deck was blue and silver, drumming and fibrillating and rumbling with slapping fish when Ariel looked up. “Whoa,” she called out. That stuttering laugh.

  The current had nearly hauled us up against the green half-mile buoy. Close enough for introductions. But Ariel just repeated, “Whoa.” As if the buoy were going anywhere. Portly it sat. Colossal, blinking, ironic. Ariel started the outboard; we went bowing back-ward out of its presence.

  We filled the hiatus with long-neglected chores. Blow the nose and doff the cap. Shed and bundle the oilskin jacket. Take a quick look around at the day.

  The mist had lifted, the sky was a soft high haze. The hills had turned green. The lights of the village had blended with daylight. Breakfast time. Prayer time. The houses and St. Mary’s Church were a dream of habit and faith. Land was the place where you could imagine God protecting you.

  The sea was placid enough, though. And apparently empty. Boats from the Point were motoring toward the lighthouse. Boats at the lighthouse had decided to try for the Point.

  Complacent now as a brood hen the Anicca turned and settled again.

  We dropped our lines; they collapsed and tensed. Whatever fish are wont to do when wise to one’s tricks or indisposed or just not hungry any more, these fish had not done. No.

  “Queens for a Day,” Ariel gasped, hauling her line with dayglo pinkies extended.

  “Patient as a Mackerel, they say.”

  “Forgiving as a Mackerel. Patient as a Pollock.”

  Their silver turned visible now just two or three fathoms down. The whole field had risen.

  Boat and all, the morning turned into a recurring dream. Our restless tossing and threshing brought ever more shimmying protest, more jubilant slaughter. Jolt the line, the fish fly, fish come apart at the gills. The joy of harvest side by side with the horror of killing makes for an impossible dance that sheds the mind again and again. No place for thought, just the pride of the hunter in the rhythm of her body.

  The mackerel kept crowding our lines and they were still hefty ones. They were beginning to be an illustration of that saying, Be careful what you wish for you might get it.

  Not shunned any more at the party but backed into a corner by nonstop talkers we began to sigh and roll our eyes. Our patience turned saint-like. The fish were tireless petitioners. They crept up our boots, rumbled three deep on the deck, spattered blood water.

  The nylon line was wearing out my thumb and jigging finger. It creased the glove into the groove worn into my hand by the line creasing the glove, and more fish were waiting below.

  It’s like the tyranny of a narrative line, I thought. Moving forward, forward, forward can seem just like standing still. Then why do people prefer stories with plots over ones that drift, spiralling over fish or no fish?

  The sun stood near noon. The water’s rocking and the day’s warmth gentled us toward sleep. Ariel and I each slogged through the fish once to lie down on the bow. We jigged languidly for a while, staring at the sky. There’s a game adults should play more often: you rest your head on each other’s bellies; when one of you starts to laugh the others are done for. Lying back on the bow,
Ariel and I rumbled the same way.

  A song would help us counter this lullaby. A hearty chant, like the chant of women washing clothes in a river, or pounding roots for flour. Or swishing and thumping new-woven cloth in a milling frolic. But we couldn’t manage a syllable.

  Dream a wish-fulfillment dream about not mackerel fishing. Hot, weary-boned, sore-muscled, it was time to wake up. The mackerel were up to our calves now, trapping us. We were fishing on the spot, and who’d caught whom?

  The Anicca no longer rocked. She wobbled and heaved.

  “Maybe we’ve done it,” I said. I meant, maybe we’d caught more than our share. Maybe, according to some universal law, we had gone over the limit. This mass of fish was about to shift, rolling us over. Hell is a place where harvests go to waste.

  “Maybe,” Ariel agreed, following her own train of thought. Hoisting another full line luxurious as an Amazon she sighed and said, “Is there no rest.”

  Close on the heels of her lament a gap opened. For a moment our hooks hung idle. Ariel hauled hers out lickety-split. “Wind it up,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The day had blossomed. An oblique sun shone through the haze. Warm breezes billowed over blue water. Hefty Anicca’s prow cut proudly into the sea heading home.

  I could let go the narrative line right now. Here at the happy prospect of home. But what is a caught fish without a boast? And what about the waiting wharf hands?

  “Wait’ll they get a load of us,” I said.

  “We should frown,” said Ariel. “Look bored, tough, disgusted. We wouldn’t want them to think we’re gloating.”

  “Right.”

  Anicca wallowed into the channel, a cornucopia bearing our harvest, our silverblue and bloodred charnel. Then she heaved into the wharf’s shadow, and something odd happened: as if at the flick of a shutter, the jewel fish turned black and white as commodities.

  We were the first boat in. Jack, Cyril and Jimmy emerged from the Co-op office and the ice room. They gathered overhead. Their eyes widened; their mouths opened; their hands reached out to grab our lines. “Jesus,” muttered Jack. “Better get the shovels,” said Jimmy.

  Ariel and I busied ourselves with this and that, scowling murderously the whole time. Until — look here.

  Old Mary Alice MacNeil, on her after-dinner stroll, had come floating up behind the guys. Her eyes were black and warm and bright. Her teeth grinned like monuments. Her husky voice gusted over to us, not wearing a shred of decency.

  “That’s right,” she shouted. “You show these guys you can do it!”

  So we broke open our happiness. We shovelled our mucky fish into boxes and got them hoisted onto the scales.

  “A jesus ton,” Cyril reported, at which Jimmy offered smokes.

  We all sat around puffing for a while, not saying anything, just nodding the occasional decisive nod and grinning. Then Ariel started the outboard and turned Anicca around.

  Light as plumed fancy featherbaits we glided back onto the sea. Washed the bloodslush out the scupper. Scrubbed the mire of scales from our oilskins and doused each other clean, sending a gasp of cool down the neck in mischief and in gratitude.

  Oh but lucky Queen. Oh but lucky us —

  Ellison Robertson

  Johanna, an tàillear

  The beginning of her tale wasn’t a memory but a story told by others so often she could look back from her old age and imagine she’d stood gossiping with the old women attending her birth. She too could have shaken her head over the unlucky outcome of her mother’s rash act, prayed silently as the first girl was born dead — strangled by the cord — and turned away in fear as the misshapen twin emerged.

  Johanna imagined herself left to squall pitiably while everyone, even her mother, turned to praying for the perfect, dead child. Some said later it was Johanna who strangled her twin in the womb through jealousy. Hearing that, she asked her mother and was told, “The fault was mine entirely. You’ve enough to bear without heeding foolish talk.”

  Her mother blamed herself because, when the fire died the day before the birth, she’d taken fire from a neighbour’s hearth without saying the prayer over the embers.

  Johanna had told this many times over the years, less often once there were so few who understood the Gaelic, and hardly ever after the time she told the girl, one of her great-grandchildren, who’d smugly said, “People were so superstitious. Isn’t it sad your mother couldn’t have seen your living as an affirmation?”

  Johanna had said angrily, “And myself with a club foot? It was that which told her there was evil in it. She often told me so as I was growing and we would kneel and pray for my leg to heal. Pray for the sign to be lifted from me.” Mother had told her too of burying the baby and her determination to love the crippled Johanna, and her greater determination to stay in the forested place she had feared since their boat had come in sight of the land. She’d said, “A part of me is in the ground of this place and now I’ll not be moved on.” Johanna had repeated the last in Gaelic, in the very words that came so often from her mother’s lips, and translated them as an afterthought for the thoughtless, ignorant child.

  Fear came alive, even now, with Johanna’s earliest memory. She didn’t know what age she’d been but she was still crawling about the grassy knoll behind their log home. She had crawled longer than most children, playing alone while they roamed.

  Her father and two other men, MacAulays, had emerged from the tree line on the mountain above the house. The two men carried a bear between them, the beast’s eyes glazed, blind in its swinging head. Her father led the way, “his gun carried proudly aslant his shoulder.”

  In the clearing they set about butchering the animal, singing of the mountains, of leaping deer, of the gun that “would not refuse,” and of a dark stream where flower petals coursed like the shifting highlights of the hair of a beloved maiden.

  They passed a jug as they worked.

  She idled upon the ground around their feet, prying up stones to finger the sticky blood pooling there. The men sat drinking away the afternoon, singing of hunting, of love, of ancient heroes and finally of drunkenness itself. Her mother came to fetch her and was told to leave her while the sun still warmed the ground.

  In the failing light Johanna looked up to see the morose eyes of her father upon her, his tears welling up, and his hands lifting the long rifle to set the barrel against her head.

  “It would be a mercy to the poor little one,” he’d said.

  His friends soothed him, passing the bruthas, their thoughts only for his sorrow and not at all for the wide-eyed child who was to know forever her father’s shame at his first-born, a crippled girl.

  The leg was a peeled stick. Shiny white. A twisted stick she thrust out before her with a heavy boot attached. That was made special, her father’d say, as if the thing was stamped, By Appointment to Her Majesty, when it was him made it in a grudging moment away from the endless work of the farm.

  She’d swing the stick leg out in front, pivot across it, halt as the foot became a weight she now must drag forward to swing out again at the end of the stick. Her mother knit an extra thick stocking for the leg to disguise its thinness; it itched in the heat and made the leg an angry red — ugly, but like a live thing at least.

  When she stood still her long skirts hid the leg and she thought she could forget about it if others would. The casual cruelty of the other children isolated her and, with her physical oddity, reinforced lonely strengths. The failure of her father’s sympathy made her mother’s ordinary attentions seem like devotion.

  She was taken to school and presented to the master, a rough, burly man named MacKay , as ill-suited to his job as the drafty hut that was to serve as schoolhouse. There were many who could not open a book throughout their lifetime without feeling the cruel blast of cold up their spines and the glowering eyes of the master upon the
ir bowed heads.

  “You see the way of it with her. Perhaps she’ll make a schoolteacher,” Johanna’s father Sandy said, as thoughtless of the schoolmaster’s feelings as of hers. Her parents had already come to the conclusion she must be prepared for some such spinsterish life.

  “Perhaps,” Mr. MacKay said, seeming to take no offence. “It is usually the refuge of the unmarriable and homely female, but she must have a modicum of intelligence.” He laughed for the first and last time Johanna ever heard.

  “She’s sharp enough,” Johanna’s mother Mary Sandy said shyly.

  Johanna did well under the constant threat of Mr. MacKay’s wrath, but it gained her no favour with the other children to whom she was offered as an example. Their teasing was mild enough when they were five and six, but their skill at slighting the limping girl quickly outstripped their progress in the classroom. She formed occasional friendships but those few children suffered a degree of her isolation which made for an instability in their affections. She soon spurned them all.

  Boys were the worst. “Step and a half, step and a half,” they’d chant until her cheeks flamed despite her determination to ignore them. They’d run away and she’d shuffle after them while they continued their taunts, swooping near like jeering ravens. Now and then she got her hands on one of them. She was tall and strong enough to beat any of the boys, but every blow was a sorrow laid upon her own heart. They were ordinary boys, yet every one would grow up to love someone and make a family for whom they’d be warm and caring. She would remain an object of fun.

  Mr. MacKay caught her once bloodying the nose of one of them. He sent the boy to cut a cane while he dragged her to the schoolhouse. “I’ve never whipped a girl,” he said, “but neither have I seen a girl behave like such a savage.’’

  He raised the cane, perhaps thinking she’d stand cowering, awaiting the blows as the boys did, but she scrambled out of reach and bolted out the door, past the awed, gaping children. From her hiding place in the brush she heard the impotent roaring of the master: “Come back this instant or never return!”