Baltimore's Mansion (14 page)

T
HEY ARE HEADING
west, an hour out of Fortune with the engine at full throttle.

It is two years since he was made inspector. It was not a promotion but his children think it was. He travels the inaccessible-except-by-boat south coast with a group of other inspectors on a boat called the
Belle Bay.

His family was with him the first time he saw the
Belle Bay.
It was docked in St. John's harbour. It was much smaller than he expected. He had formed an impression of it from stories he had heard of storms that it survived at sea.

As he drove along the apron of the waterfront to where the
Belle Bay
was docked, he passed a good many ships moored with hawser ropes as thick as schooner masts. He would not have been disappointed to be told that any one of them was the
Belle Bay.
But the
Belle Bay
was tucked in between two such ships, as if it had been expertly parallel parked, and he could barely see its radar pole above the dock. To board it you had to walk down a rickety gang-plank. It was at least modern, almost new, in fact, with a rounded fibreglass hull. It had the moulded, watertight look
of a capsule that would stay afloat while on its side or even upside down.

The boat was being readied for departure by a man who introduced himself as “the skipper,” who seemed to think that by giving each of the children an apple he could hide from them the fact that he was drunk.

“It's pretty small,” his wife said, staring at the boat.

“Oh, it's just a pup of a tub,” the skipper said. It seemed he was about to add some reassuring qualification of this remark, but then he walked away.

He looks around, surveys what for weeks will be his home.

It has six sleeping bunks crammed into one end and an unbelievably compact laboratory at the other, trays of test tubes and beakers, and glass slides for storing microscopic samples and a battery of three microscopes mounted like miniature cannon along one wall.

There is a galley about a quarter the size of their kitchen at home. No one is allowed to set foot there but the cook, whose sole job it is to make meals for six men. There is a little wheelhouse above the foredeck for the skipper. The
Belle Bay
is white all over and flies two flags, the Canadian Maple Leaf and the Union Jack.

His fellows on the south-coast run are a man named Broadhurst, another named Manning, both about his age, a twenty-nine-year-old who looks like a teenager whom they call “Young Hunt,” the skipper and the cook. On the morning of their first voyage, they seemed to him as unpromising a crew as he had ever seen. Nothing they have done since has made him change his mind.

Telling his sons anecdotes about his trips, he speaks these
names as soldiers do those of the men they went through combat with, the men of a platoon whose trials and afflictions were unprecedented and the full extent of which only they who have been through them can understand.

They set out every fortnight, congregating at dockside in the morning with their bags and their equipment, wearing black overcoats or parkas that identify them as federal Fisheries inspectors, blue-and-yellow badges on their shoulders. After the skipper, he is looked on as the seaman of the group. How far he is from being a seaman only the skipper knows. All the others are from St. John's and spent little or no time on the water before they were assigned to the
Belle Bay.

Although he is spending more time on the water now than he did when he was young, his body has not changed. He still gets sick just once and only once each time they put out to sea.

The others seem to think he wills himself to be sick, as if this is a bit of sea savvy he picked up long ago: get sick as soon as you set sail and after that you'll be all right. He wouldn't be surprised to see Young Hunt try it — not that he would blame him, for Young Hunt is always sick. There have been times that such was his state that they all but wrote him off. He is a sickly looking fellow, even on dry land, pale, freckle-faced, very slightly built, with red hair as long as the department will allow, combed across his forehead so that when he stands with his head hung down, his hair obscures his face. Broadhurst is able to resist the urge to be sick in almost any weather, but once he starts he cannot stop. Manning is fine until he starts drinking, which he vows not to do, but he always gets so bored that after a few days, he cannot help himself.

He has begun keeping a log of his life, not just of his time on the water but his whole life. A “log” is a better word for this record than “diary” or “journal” because of the style in which he writes it. The entries that have to do with the south-coast trips read like those of the last-surviving member of some doomed expedition, the laconic voice of a man resigned to the fact that he is writing for posterity, that he must record the tale for he will never live to tell it. “May 19, 1971. Thirty miles from Gaultois. Can't keep anything down. Young Hunt always sick. Hasn't left his bunk since Tuesday. Broadhurst in better spirits today. Manning and the skipper drinking all day long.”

There is a storm a hundred miles to the west, which, if they turn around, the skipper says, “might or might not” catch them before they make St. John's. Instead of deciding what to do, the skipper lets them put it to a vote. In the long run, turning back will just mean an extra three days away from home. They all vote to go on. He voted first, and the others followed his example while the skipper sat back watching and said nothing.

They are in rough water now. They are not in trouble, but Young Hunt has been asking him for hours what he thinks their chances are, if he has ever seen a sea as bad as this one. None of them ever consult the skipper on such things, as he never seems the least bit concerned no matter what their circumstances. On the rare occasion when one of them does ask him something, he tells them to “go play with their toys,” by which he means their microscopes.

He knows that to Young Hunt he is living proof that they have nothing to fear from any sea that is not as bad as the worst
one he has ever seen, so he is constantly asking him “Have you ever seen it this bad, Art?” This is just what he asked his father when he made his first trips in the punt when he was twelve. “Have you ever seen a storm like this?”

“Never,” his father would say, winking at his older brother. “Worst I've ever seen.”

He tells Young Hunt that the best thing he can do is go to bed and try to sleep.

The bunks are equipped with straps that when fastened keep him and the others from being tossed out of bed in rough weather. It is a strange thing to lie in bed in a storm-tossed boat. One second you are upside down, praying your restraints will hold, the next “standing” erect like a mummy, head up as the ship plunges into a trough and then feet up as the ship climbs to the crest of the next wave. Standing in the vertical ship, they turn their heads and look at one another, each gauging by the angle of the other person's body if the boat is going past vertical on its way to turning upside down.

“I can't stand it in the bunk,” Young Hunt says. The only other thing to do is drink. Young Hunt digs his rum out from under his bunk and the others join him.

They leave it to him to decide when the skipper is “too far gone” to be trusted at the wheel.

The skipper, though he knows the south coast as well as anyone and is a master seaman, is so often drunk that “mutinies” are commonplace. Several times he and the others have strapped the skipper into his bunk, after which he has piloted the boat as best he can, the skipper roaring that he would have them arrested, that the RCMP would be waiting for them at dock-side in St. John's. But there is a stalemate between skipper and
crew; he dares not inform on them for fear it will come out that he operates the boat while drunk, and they dare not inform on him for fear they will be charged with mutiny.

By now, he is so concerned that he replies, “I don't know,” when Young Hunt says, “Are we going to be lost, Mr. Johnston?”

Young Hunt is so fear-struck by this answer that he falls silent, staring out the window at the surging water as if it makes no sense that all this is being staged just for his extinction.

For a second, the
Belle Bay
lists almost to the point of turning over completely onto its starboard side. They pass within a few feet of a clanging bell that warns of submerged rocks.

“We're too close to the shore,” he says and goes up top. He stands outside between the cabin and the rail and tries to gauge how much higher the swell is than it was at nine o'clock. He goes up to the wheelhouse. The skipper does not make even a token effort to hide the glass of rum beside the wheel.

He tries to convince the skipper to keep steering straight into the waves, but the skipper is inclined to “run,” that is, travel with the waves, which increases the chances of being swamped from the stern since you cannot see what is coming at you. Running from a storm has its advantages, though, especially in the most extreme weather, when a ship's hull might not hold up against the sea, and the waves are so large and the crest of one so far from that of the next that it is possible, if you have all your wits about you, to sail along between the crests, keeping perfect pace with the storm. But these waves are not big enough for that, and the skipper is well on his way to being drunk. The hull hits a wave with a sound like the head-on collision of two cars, and the skipper yells, “It's time to run!”

“There's not enough room between the crests!” he shouts. “We'll be swamped!”

“Go play with your toys,” the skipper says and begins the slow process of bringing the boat about.

He doubts that in his state the skipper will even manage that manoeuvre. He goes down below. Young Hunt is drinking rum straight from the bottle, hoping for an oblivion, a descent into sleep that in these circumstances no amount of booze will bring.

He looks at Broadhurst and Manning.

“Are you sure?” says Broadhurst.

He nods.

The trip has been routine for the first eight days. Rencontre East, Rencontre West, Boxey Harbour, McCallum, Mosquito, Goblin, Harbour Breton, Isles aux Morts, Gaultois. They have “hit” all these and are still on schedule. They have issued just three warnings. No catch of cod has been dumped, and no fish plant has been closed.

The south-coast settlements are by far the most isolated on the island. The cross-island highway is more than two hundred miles of uncharted wilderness away. One community is connected, if at all, to its neighbour on the coast by a footpath through the woods.

Though most of these remote outports voted overwhelmingly in favour of Confederation, they consider the inspectors to be their arch-enemies since they can, as it seems to the fishermen, order them on a whim to dump their entire catch, deeming it to have been improperly stored or preserved, or on a whim close down a fish plant because its standards are too low. To the fishermen, they are meddlesome townies, not men
who make an honest living from the sea but men whose knowledge of the sea and fish comes from books and is therefore beneath contempt. In these tiny places, there is no one to enforce the law, no one they can appeal to for protection.

But all has gone well.

They walked about each settlement after work, had dinner at its one eatery, risked a drink at its one tavern, the six of them staying together, forever vigilant, sticking out like sore thumbs in their uniforms, which they thought it best to wear as reminders that anyone who trifled with them would have to answer for it.

There was not much to do. They grew bored, as always. They smoked, played cards, drank too much. They spoke to anyone who seemed not to know who they were or not to care. They left the taverns, stood side by side, the six of them, leaning on fences and breakwaters, looking out to sea as it was getting dark, the end of yet another day, putting off for as long as possible their return to the claustrophobic confines of the boat. They spent their nights in their bunks at dockside and moved on in the morning. All has gone well and now it is day nine of their inspection tour.

They round the point to head into a harbour. Word of their coming must somehow have spread, for they see hordes of people running about among the houses perched on the hills, people running to and from the fish plant, on the beach a line of fishermen making for the wharf. It is as if the whole town is putting into effect some long-established, much-rehearsed invasion-repulsion plan.

When they dock, all except the skipper and the cook disembark. They are met on the wharf by a man they take to
be the fish-plant manager. He wears a suit but no tie, a pale yellow shirt with a white T-shirt underneath.

He assures them they are welcome but wonders if they would like to have a drink before they go about their work. Broadhurst politely declines the offer.

The man says that to spare them the trouble he will go up to the plant and bring them back a sample of their fish. Broadhurst shakes his head. “We have to inspect the plant,” he says.

He leads an ever-growing delegation along the road that leads up from the beach to the fish plant. Fishermen follow them. Children come running from the school just up the hill. Women walk beside them and in front of them, but no one says a word.

It is apparent the instant they set foot inside the plant that they will have to close it down. The place reeks of fish gone or going bad. Young Hunt stifles the urge to gag, takes his white helmet off and puts it over his face so that only his eyes are showing. The man who met them at the wharf gives him a look.

They go through the motions of inspecting the plant. They have to. Something tells him it might be their only hope of escaping unmolested. Young Hunt still holds his helmet to his face. It looks like an oversize surgical mask.

The manager and sundry others who came up with them from the beach follow them about and, despite Young Hunt, look hopefully at them as if to say, You see, everything is in good shape.