Chain Locker (25 page)

“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 and 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.”

“You think so? With no ice, we could worry about drownin' instead,” said Henry.

“Oh yeah. Good point. I guess we're stuck with having it in the winter, then.”

“It's not us that picks when the hunt will take place; that's up to the seals. They decided to have their pups in the middle of March, so that's when we got to go after them, simple as that. No point in goin' huntin' when there's nothin' to catch. And, I'll tell you, they're around today. I just saw another one pop up. Keep a sharp lookout, now, to see if one comes aboard, and never mind the gabbin'.”

“Why aren't they around at other times, like in the summer?”

“The seals don't actually live around here. They come down from the Arctic and they're around in the winter but then they head back north in the spring. So you only get a short time to hunt them and then they're gone again. In a couple of months there'll be no seals around until next winter. If they lived around here you'd see a scattered one on the rocks or hanging around in the coves, but you only ever see them in the water. As far as I know, the only time they get out of the water is to have their pups. If there was no ice I'm darned if I know what they would do.”

“It's too bad we have to kill their babies.”

“You didn't like that, eh?”

“I guess I never thought about seeing them look up at you while you're killing them. I heard about whitecoats, but when I saw that little guy there it was the first time I realized he was just a newborn. Doesn't it bother you?”

“Nah, I don't much think about it anymore. Anyway, when you're with a gang of sealers you never talk about that kind of thing; you got to act tough, right? Everybody's puttin' on to impress everybody else.”

“Same as at school.”

“Same thing, exactly. It doesn't change when you grow up. You just harden yourself to what you got to do. We got to live, so something else has to die; it's the law of nature. All creatures eat one another. You just have to be bigger or smarter. We're not the biggest so I guess we're the smartest—athough I have to wonder sometimes.”