Sylvanus Now (2 page)

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To her babies,

Milton, Verna, and Paul

Come and see. and I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice … say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and
see
thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

—Revelation 6:5, 6:6, and 13:1

PART ONE

Sylvanus

SPRING 1949 TO SUMMER 1953

CHAPTER ONE

A MAN’S WORTH

S
YLVANUS NOW
had just turned fourteen that morning when he burst through the school doors for summer, shoved his dory off from the calm shores of Cooney Arm, paddled through the narrow channel protecting the cove, and headed for the choppy waters of the open Atlantic. Tucked inside his pants pocket was a credit note for his confirmation suit, priced at thirty-two quintals of dried salt fish (on hold at the merchant’s), and tucked around his feet were two coils of fishing twine, the end of each tightly knotted to a cod jigger.

Rowing half a mile along the rugged coastline, he anchored two stone’s throws from where Pollock’s Brook rushed out of a small estuary into the sea. Wrapping his fishing twine around each hand, he tossed the ends holding the jiggers overboard, their hooks more silvery than the underbelly of a herring as they sank into the sea. Rising, he planted both feet firmly on either side of his boat and began jigging: left forearm up, right forearm down; right forearm up, left forearm down. Thirty-two quintals of fish. A hundred and twelve pounds a quintal. He figured he could do it.

After scarcely five minutes of jigging, his left jigger hooked.

“Ah,” he grunted with satisfaction and, sitting back down, pulled in the fish. Ten pounds it felt. Fair size for drying and marketing. He grunted again. It was this, the immediacy of it, that fulfilled him. That even as he was twisting the jigger out of the cod’s mouth, he was already tallying his own worth—unlike the hours spent over school books, studying letters and figures that made no sense.

Pulling a skinning knife out of his rubber boot, he cut the cod’s throat to bleed it, cursing the gulls swooping and screaming overhead, one flapping so close he swung his knife at the yellowed eyes menacing him. Laying the fish aside, he tossed his jigger back into the sea and rose—left forearm up, right forearm down; right forearm up, left forearm down; up, down; up down—a sturdy figure in his father’s black rubber pants and coat, unyielding to the rocking of his dory, his sou’wester pulled low, darkening his eyes as he faced into the sun and the gannets swooping black before its blaze as they dove into the sea a dozen feet below his boat, beaking back the caplin that were luring the cod to his jiggers.

Fourteen pounds. A day’s jigging ought to land him half a quintal or more. With splitting, salting, and drying the fish on shore, it would take all three of the summer months, he figured, before he was able to dodge up to the merchant’s and barter the price of the suit—for
thirty
-two quintal was the price he was figuring on paying, not the forty-two the merchant was asking. Perhaps he was poor at book learning, writing his numbers and letters backwards and trying the patience of his teachers and elders alike as they tried breaking him from the foolishness of his habit; but he could figure, sometimes for hours on end, about such things as how many cords of split wood to fill a twelve-by-twelve crawl space, or how long to leave a fish curing in brine, or, no doubt, how many hours it took to cut and sew a size-forty suit and how many quintals of fish to make a fair trade.

Another hook—a hard one. Real hard. Excitedly, he leaned over the side of his boat, pulled in his fishing twine, hand over hand, seeing a fathom down into the sea and the glazed eyes of a cod whose tail flicked confusedly as it was hauled from its brackish bed, up, up, up, breaking into the startling light of the sun.

“Whoa, now, who do we have here?” he asked in astonishment as he pulled the forty pounder half out of the water, the brown of its back glistening wet, its belly creamy as milk and swollen with roe. A mother-fish. Rarely would she feed off a jigger, busy as she was, bottom feeding and readying herself for spawning. Reverently, he unhooked the jigger from the mouth of the quietly struggling fish and watched the sun catch the last glimmer of her gills as she dove back into the deep, the sack of roe in her belly unscathed. He felt proud. The ocean’s bounty, she was, and woe to he who desecrated the mother’s womb. The gods smiled, and within the minute he was pulling another fish up from the deep, a twenty pounder, twice the normal size for a hand-jigged cod, and his heart pounded as he flipped it into his boat.

Two hours later, the twine was chafing his hands and his shoulders had begun to weaken. His father, before the sea took him (along with his eldest brother, Elikum), would’ve held out jigging till the tide ebbed. Come evening, he would’ve returned again, filling his boat for the second time that day, getting home late, late evening, working long into the night, gutting and splitting and salting his catch. And perhaps I might, too, row back out for the second tide, he thought. If I gets the morning’s catch gutted and split and sitting in brine, and a good scoff of Mother’s cooking filling me gut, I just might. And perhaps, by summer’s end, I, too, might spend the whole day standing and jigging with nary an ache nor wish, like Father done.

Perhaps so. For now ’twas the most he could do to bleed the last fish, pull his anchor, and will his leaden arms to lift his paddles out of the water. Shoulders groaning, he rowed against a growing squall, plying harder on his paddles as he swerved back through the choppy waters that always choked the channel’s narrow neck. One last long haul on his oars and he hoisted them inside, gliding toward the shoreline of Cooney Arm. Then, as he’d seen his elders do after making it through the neck in worsening weather, he rose, raising his eyes as if in salute to the wood-coated hills that cuddled the scant few houses of the arm from the wind and sea.

But Sylvanus’s wasn’t the salute of his elders. This morning’s lop was a duck pond alongside the squalls they had survived. His was the salute of pride, for despite his having drawn ashore dozens of times before, sometimes with fifteen, maybe twenty pounds of cod for his mother’s pot, today he was straddling a hundred and twenty pounds or more—a few pounds more than a quintal—from just four hours’ fishing. A fisherman’s catch, for sure, and to be bartered at the merchant’s. And this thought cast his eyes anew upon the hills. Yet, unlike his elders’, his sought more the rock gorge to his right and the thousands of fathoms of white foaming water crashing down its cut and spewing across the meadow into the embodying arms of the mother sea as she buoyed him and his bounty to shore. Water. God’s blood, the elders used to say. And in his moment of pride, Sylvanus Now would’ve traded his last drop of red in gratitude.

T
HREE MONTHS LATER
, the thirty-two quintals of fish bartered and stored in the merchant’s shed, he dodged home, a deep satisfaction filling his chest and the suit, carefully wrapped in brown paper, tucked under his arm. His mother, Eva, her aging hair bundled at her nape and her fading grey eyes bolstered by the black lustrous brows that she’d bequeathed to all of her boys, met him in the doorway. Proudly, he pulled the suit from its wrappings and held it before her—three sizes too big so’s to allow for his last few years’ growth—and announced he was quitting school and going fishing for good.

Eva sighed. His was the unsanctioned egg, the one who shuddered from her old woman’s body long after the others had been born and grown, and a month after her husband and eldest had been lost to the sea. Too wearied was she to give chase when, the moment he found his legs, he was rattling doorknobs and gateposts and trotting along the beach, bawling to go out in the boat with her third eldest, Manny. And in vain were her protests when Manny, his own chin still soft with baby-down, yet his heart broader than his burly frame and sorrowing for this fatherless youngster, buttoned him inside an oilskin coat that fell below his knees, and hove him aboard his punt. Tying a length of twine with a jigger around Sylvanus’s pudgy hands, he shoved off from shore, heading for the fishing grounds. Now, as Sylvanus filled her doorway, grinning foolishly over the suit he held before her, his glut of coarse, dark hair and brows exaggerating a stubbornness fossilized since birth, she merely ambled past him, pulling on her gardening gloves.

Hooking his suit to a notch below the mantel, Sylvanus left the house and sauntered down to his father’s stage, untouched since the day of his drowning, and wriggled open the door. It was darkish inside and murky, the air sharp with brine. Filling his lungs, he stood, waiting, watching, as his eyes adjusted, giving shape to the bulks and bundles strewn around him.

CHAPTER TWO

COCKLESHELLS AND TOMMYCOD

T
HE SUIT NETTED
him far more than a confirmation certificate. For if it hadn’t shamed him to leave such a fine garment hanging on his door, he never would’ve donned it, now a perfect fit, that Saturday evening four years later and motored in his new thirty-foot, four-horsepower motorboat over to Ragged Rock and the dance Eb Rice was holding in the new addition he was building on his house. Inside was already full of people when he got there, and the door was barred.

Elbowing his way through the boys bunching around a window, he peered in through the paint-smeared glass, and that’s when he saw her. She was standing, leaning against the opposite wall, watching others either milling about or dancing to a jig being keyed out on an accordion. Tiny, she was, and pale; yet the whiteness of her skin appeared to usurp the light in the room, enhancing her luminescence and leaving all else as moving shadows of grey.

Despite her being off to herself, she wasn’t without attention, he noted, seeing others casting curious glances toward her. Nor was she without conceit, for each time she encountered the eyes of another in the flickering lamplight, she raised her chin, haughtily drawing her gaze away, eclipsing the poor, offending souls once more into shades of grey. And she was proud; he saw that when Rubert Baldwin let his hand graze the roundedness of her arm as he reached past her for his tumbler of brew. Swatted him, she did, and turned her back to him, her face twisting with displeasure as he laughed. Folding her arms protectively beneath the curve of her breasts, she flounced away from him, and upon encountering the chiding looks of some of the dancers, she swung her slender hips exaggeratedly. As though sensing the looks of disapproval following her, she sauntered toward the window Sylvanus was clinging to and smiled, a smile as cool as it was deliberate, yet one that Sylvanus melted into as did Icarus’s wings into the sun.

It were as if he had been entombed in a pit and her single ray of light had split him apart, raising him from himself. Others tried to elbow him aside but he held stubbornly to his spot, watching as she was finally persuaded to dance, his eyes clinging to the green, swinging silkiness of her dress as she cavorted into the foxtrot, and then waltzed into his dreams during the night, her siren’s song wrestling low the arm trying to jerk his jiggers come morning, taunting him with her dance upon the water, her skin radiant with light and sparkling in the sun. How blue the sea whilst she sashayed, how sweet the pine. And the breeze a gentle fanning for the heat of his brow.

“Syllie, jeezes, what’re you gone mental?” cried his brother Manny as Sylvanus leaned against his stage door later that morning, gazing at the sky, a silly grin twisting his face. He shook himself awake and feigned fiddling with the door latch as Manny let himself out of their mother’s gate, heading along the pathway toward him.

“Come on over to Jake’s,” called Manny. “Ambrose just got back from St. John’s. He went and bought himself a new boat, a longliner.”

“Ambrose? Where’d he get the guts to do that?”

“What, buy a liner?” Manny huffed. “Try sitting aboard a schooner for weeks on end. Not hard to find courage then, you got piles and splinters rotting your arse. Nice boat, too, she is, buddy. Sixty-footer, half the size of a schooner.”

“Liners, schooners—all the same to me,” Sylvanus replied, jiggling the door to ensure it was latched.