The Big Why (19 page)

I dont get it.

The roe, Tom explained, looks like a pair of pants.

Then the entire white meal wafted into me. I rinsed the enamel plates in the water. Tom served up the fish and potatoes. We poured on salt from a tin and ate joyously.

This, Tom said, is the best way to eat fish.

We sat there with our plates on our knees. The heat of the meal coming through the enamel, nice on our knees.

He felt he was saying things his father would have said. He had to say them now.

I do the same thing, I said. Say things I know my father said.

Tom nodded to this.

It’s not fair, he said. But enough’s been said about the dead.

The fish held together in chunks, which you could flake apart. It was the sea itself you were eating, a fresh, pure, thriving taste, elusive as the taste of water.

I love this, Tom said. Again, he was being his father.

So this is what you find beautiful.

This is correct.

Sitting here after a feed of fish and potatoes on the water. This feeling, I said, is what I paint.

Youre good company on the water.

Me: I feel I’m home.

I love it here too.

I looked back on the land. Do you love the woods?

I love being on the water more. Can’t swim a stroke, but I love it.

My family was waking up. Kathleen fetching water from the brook. I waved but she did not see me. She was just a chalk mark of white.

I suppose it would be difficult to keep more sheep in Brigus.

No, it would not be very hard.

Tom talked about the fish and the work. He was manly. Physical. And yet he did not talk about Emily. He spoke of who had a berth aboard what vessel. Who had sixty quintals or fifty quintals yesterday.

Quintals, I said.

That’s a hundred and fourteen pound.

He talked about the trap. He worried over it. If his was right. He asked himself, not even speaking to me, because the day before he and Stan Pomeroy had only perhaps five quintals out of it. I wonder, I heard him say, if we got the leader right. I wonder has a whale gone through it. And then, Ah, we’ll go over all the leader tomorrow and see what’s happening.

And then, as we’re jigging: Who’s that going up there?

And we watched another crew with a load.

There were three more crews behind him, each with a load. And Tom looked to see where they’d come from and how long it’d taken and how sunk down was their gunwale. All day long that’s what he talked about.

The church organized a drive to raise funds. I had the children help me make puppets. It would be a Punch and Judy theatre. But what would our characters be. The children were often asking questions, and so I thought to make a question puppet and an answer puppet.

Rocky: How about a bird that wonders and a cat that answers.

So little Kathleen made a bird and we called him the Wonderbird. He flies under things.

He gets to the bottom of things.

The underbelly bird.

No, it’s Wonderbird.

Rocky made a cat and called it a panther.

He answers to the Wonderbird.

He’s the anther panther.

The Anther Panther and Wonderbird.

Those, I said, are terrific.

I built a portable theatre that folded and we marched down to the Stand, where there were booths for cookies and punch and a spinning wheel. Men were gambling at a crown and anchor. I sat under the theatre and had Wonderbird ask every question it could think of and the Anther Panther solved the world’s problems in no less than ten solid hours, until every loose penny from every pocket was collected and donated to the Methodists’ worthwhile cause, whatever it was.

I should have been easier with the children. But I did not want to have children with bad manners. Kathleen was much more generous, and it was the only thing she’d get mad about, my judgment. My attempts at laxity were strained. I was not easy about letting them be the way they were or even playing with them. I had opinions. I was quick to warn them if they almost knocked over a glass. I’m too proscriptive. But maybe that’s a good thing, Kathleen said.

They were outside, pitching buttons at a stick.

Well, theyve made me pull up my socks. Theyve forced me, I said, to be responsible.

Youre serious about the painting.

About making a living at it. We should have Emily Edwards over more, to help with the children.

A few hours now and then would be good.

Kathleen was exhausted.

Have you seen Tom Dobie?

I havent seen him all day.

I went over to the Pomeroys’. To talk to Stan. But they were gone, his father said. Stan and Tony Loveys and Tom. Off mending the nets and getting the cod trap set up, and theyve been gone since dawn and he wouldnt see them again before nightfall.

It began to rain and Emily Edwards made my son a sandwich. Rocky said he liked how Emily made food. She makes it look real tasty. Even brown rice. But especially apples and sandwiches. He said, Emily says things like, When I’m eighty I’m gonna live in an apartment in Manhattan forty storeys up and smoke on the window ledge and look out on all the people walking past.

I heard her say, Let’s open a window. The wind will help us clean the table.

Every action Emily did she spoke of aloud. She’d say to Rocky, I’m taking off my shoes and hanging up my coat. She’d say, Let’s get the kettle on and let’s put a piece of fish on to soak and cook him and eat him. I heard her say, If you go to the Pomeroys’ for eggs, Rocky, you have to wash your hands after. All this through my studio door.

I found myself thinking about her. I was trying to paint but I was writing a poem in my head. Or a poem that is like an equation. That she is round but has an edge to her, like an eye is round but has a corner. People say she is round, but I’ve found an edge to her. There is nothing I have given her. She has found it all in her roundness. Every edge, every corner of the room she’s found me with something other than her.

I had Rocky and little Kathleen eat before we left for dinner at the Bartletts’. They had big appetites and I didnt want them embarrassing us.

We hadnt seen Tom Dobie, so I walked over to Frogmarsh. They were out checking the trap, Rachel Dobie said. Tom and Stan Pomeroy and Tony Loveys. I hate it when theyre late.

She was by the root cellar with a piece of watersoaked fish — that was the kind of fish they kept for themselves, fish they could get only a number-two price for. She’d decided they hadnt caught much. Had I seen anything. I hadnt.

Me: Can three men handle a trap?

Rachel: Yes sir they got to.

Tom had got up, she said, in the dark with a hangover. She could smell it. He’s been on a square bender, that one.

The boy had marched past his mother and into the porch and flung his boots on the oilcloth. Then he laced them on. He filled the black kettle with water from the dipper and placed it, dripping, on the back hob and they both listened to the branding sizzle. That was the last she saw of him.

I walked back to Kathleen. The sky had darkened and it was windy. Where there’s a break in the houses you blew away. This was their first excursion of the season, I said. So we stayed up and played cards. The wind abated.

Kathleen: There’s a light.

A quiet lantern rounded the Head. A lone trap skiff rowed into the bay. We went outside. Once you saw the skiff you could hear the rub of the oarlocks. There were two figures at the oars. Tom Dobie and Tony Loveys.

I’ll go down, I said. They must be exhausted.

Rachel Dobie was there to tie them on. They were prying a large fish from a sheet of canvas on the floor of the skiff.

Tom: I need a hand, Kent. My handwrists are all worn away.

I hoisted myself down, and from there the fish turned into the stiffened body of Stan Pomeroy. He was white and frozen flat, with a gaff mark in his jaw. He was dead and half-naked in the shaky light. He looked like he’d been dead all his life.

Tom Dobie said not a word, except, quietly: One two three. Together we cracked Stan out of the frozen canvas sheet. Strands of unmixed blood swam in the sea water in the bottom of the boat. We hauled him to the stagehead. I was at the feet. Bare cold feet.

Tom: What do you think, Mother.

As if she had a plan to revive him yet. To dip Stan in warm water. Thaw him alive again, gently. Tom hadnt seen our faces. We were trying our best to stay calm.

Pass up the gear, boys.

There seemed to be no urgency in the situation. Items were passed up. Then we climbed up the wharf side. Tony Loveys: I’ll go get Old Man Pomeroy.

Tom Dobie stood guard with us, the corpse of the barefooted Stan Pomeroy rimed in a crust of ice. Stiff. The wharf was a cold wooden water. What a good kid, I said.

Tom Dobie took off his jacket and laid it over Stan’s bare cold feet.

That’s about all I can do now.

He knew, at least, that the bare feet were wrong and needed protection from the elements.

He was leaning over the cod trap, Tom said. You could hear the fish chopping on the surface when they rowed near the trap. Stan had one foot up on the gunwale and it was icy. That’s how we went at it. We had the haul ropes hooked and the doorways shut off and Stan was checking the spy bucket. Trap’s crammed with fish, he said in a soft voice. Fish were thick, their mouths full of kelp. The walls of the trap were straining and Stan was drying up the twine. So he got full up on the gunwale and he almost capsed her, but then he fell over.

He slammed into the icy water. Just melted into the crowd of fish. I saw him wrestle over onto his back. It was like a jelly of bodies crowding him. His hands they came up very white. None of us can swim, me, Stan, or Tony. So he just sank beneath the fish.

Tom Dobie was telling us this when Tony Loveys came down the path with Mr Pomeroy. I’m disgusted, he said. Mr Pomeroy looked over his dead son and waited.

Tom: We hauled in the trap, sir, to save him, but the catch was heavy and there were only the two of we.

Mr Pomeroy nodded at this. He knelt down and touched Stan’s face.

We poured the fish into the skiff, trying to get at Stan. But he was smothered. We had fish up to the gangboards. I saw his hand rise out of the fish, and I made a grab for it to haul him out of the fish, but he was — sir, there was nothing.

Tony: He was gone.

So we kicked out all the fish to make room in the skiff hey Tony, and we started to rub him down. We rubbed his arms didnt we and pulled off his boots and Tony had a go at his feet. We tried to coax the air into his lungs.

Tony: His eyes were out of his face.

He didnt drown I reckon. We just couldnt get any air to him.

Tony: He suffocated for the success of the fish.

This is the story Tom Dobie reported to us that night. He told it once again, to Stan’s mother at the Pomeroy kitchen table while Stan’s body lay over it, before Mrs Pomeroy covered him in a tablecloth. Go home, Tom Dobie, she said. And take Stan’s gear and store it in the twine loft. I’m lonesome, she said, to have it in the house.

Mrs Pomeroy didnt say anything else to us but went up to her room with her husband. We saw off Tony Loveys, and then Tom and I walked over to Frogmarsh with his mother. He went up into his room, he told me later, and all the whites of the bedroom were lit by the moon, even his own feet at the heel of the bed, numb and strange to him. The birch ribs of the bunk bed, the same wood as the skiff and the wharf, the stage and the house and even what they burnt for heat. It was all connected: home, boat, stagehead, fish.

I lay in bed with Kathleen and thought of the image of Stan Pomeroy amongst the fish, in the dark, while the far wall of the bedroom shone a blue light. The wall was a pale cream in the morning — what was it with colour. Everything seems to depend on circumstance. But I had seen a large fish at first in the bottom of the skiff, and ever since all I’ve seen is Stan Pomeroy. So in truth a thing is a constant thing, though we may believe it to be something else occasionally. Yet here was the wall changing before me and what did it mean? To say sunlight versus moonlight or artificial light?

Sad, sad. They kept Stan’s body packed in brine and on a warm day in June they took him from the root cellar and laid him barefoot on the kitchen table again. They had a wake. Rachel Dobie bought a dozen clay pipes and spread out a cloth full of tobacco. The men walked in and filled the clay pipes and stood and smoked. I was among them. Stan had whitened and his flesh was of an old fish. Where they had held him the flesh stayed pushed in. The brine ran off his cuffs and trousers and ruined the tablecloth. The wound on his jaw was grey. There was a grimace on his face. On his chest was a white square made of ribbon with the letters
IHS
. I Have Suffered.

Tom Dobie and Tony Loveys dug a hole at Grave Hill and they lifted Stan Pomeroy off the table and put him in a box. They did not carry the box — instead, the pallbearers escorted the box on a cart. They did not have a lid on the box. The pallbearers wore white bands around their caps. They carted the pickled corpse up Grave Hill and lifted him out of the box and lowered him in the hole with the tablecloth wrapped about him. I did a sketch of this. Mr Pomeroy had taken some of the soil and warmed it in the oven. They spread handfuls of this warm soil on the tablecloth. Then Stan and Tony Loveys shovelled over the cold soil. It still had ice crystals. It was hard earth they dropped onto Stan’s body.