Sylvanus Now (6 page)

“The day they comes back with none is the day you got no bread,” said the eldest Dyke sister, Effie Jean, sitting close enough to catch her groan. Shrugging, Adelaide finished her tea, flung the dregs into the fire, and leaving her mother breastfeeding the baby with two other mothers, she trudged back to the dwindling faggots. Come noon, the faggots were gone, the fish all laid out beneath the sun, and with her back screaming louder than the gulls, she followed the women back to the beach fire. A longer rest this time, with yesterday’s leftover bread pudding and a thick slice of uncooked bologna for sustenance. When the mothers had their breasts tucked back inside their clothes once more, and the babies tucked back inside their baskets, she tiredly shoved herself upright, traipsing with everybody else back to the flakes. Starting at the front again, where they’d started out that morning, they began flipping over the fish already laid out; this time, flesh side up, head to tail, tail to head; flesh side up, head to tail, tail to head.

Late afternoon the wind died out and a battalion of black fishflies buzzed in, whizzing about her head. And the mosquitoes, hellish they were, whining and nuzzling around neck, ears, and nose till reason was lost and she was smacking at her face and throat with salt-crusted hands that served to further ignite the dozens of bites that were already stinging and reddening her exposed flesh. But even that was preferable to the beads of fly spit that grew more and more plentiful as the days wore on, all beaded and glistening wet upon those scattered spots of the fish that had escaped salting, and oftentimes already turning to maggots before they were firked off with a stick. Christ, it curdled her stomach, it did, firking off maggots with a stick, and more than once she simply turned the fish, pretending not to notice the spit, caring not a damn for the rot that would set in, spoiling the fish. Rot, for all she cared. It was bloody rotted anyways, from the stench of it. And unlike the low of her back, which strengthened as the days wilted into weeks, and the palms of her hands, which calloused after her first month rolled past, nothing immunized her to the stench of soggy salt fish.

She straightened one morning midsummer, her neck as crusted with salt as her hands from scratching at fly bites, and felt a heavy spatter of rain hit her cheek. Immediately, another one struck, and another, followed by squeals from the women as an unexpected sun shower unleashed itself. Holding out her hands, Adelaide raised her face to its cold, wet sweetness as though it were her first christening.

“Get at it, get at it! Cripes, what’s you, addled?” yelled Gert, clipping her on the shoulder. Reluctantly, she joined the scurrying, frantic group snatching up fish to keep them from getting wet and mouldy, and running with them to the faggots, stacking them one atop the other and covering them with canvas. When the last fish was rescued and the babies collected, and all hands huddled inside the stagehead, and those that smoked jumbled in the doorway, lighting up butts, Adelaide kept standing by the faggots, unwilling to leave the cool, clean rivulets washing down her throat, soaking her skin.

She prayed for rain after that. No odds that each rainfall disrupted drying time, which sometimes led to slimy fish and lower prices, or, the worst dread of all, dun would set in: that green, mouldy fungus that can sometimes spread over an entire fish and infect others and send yaffle after yaffle to the dump. What mattered, thought Adelaide, about losing a few fish when the fishermen kept coming ashore twice a day, day after day with boatload after boatload of more and more? Daily she prayed that each fish caught would be the last in the sea, that the flakes would rot and crumble from lack of use, and never, never again would she have to hobble hunchbacked, laying out fish, head to tail, tail to head, firking off spit, firking off maggots, firking off the damn, bloody flies needling her neck, her ears, face, and eyes.

One burly September morning, she looked up from the flakes to see a couple of women hurrying along the road toward the school with their scrubbing buckets and cleaning rags. Her eyes filled with hope. Emissaries, she thought, sent by angels, signalling the end of the fish-drying season, and a scant few weeks more before she, Adelaide, would be hurrying along the road, her books tucked under her arm, for hadn’t her mother said she might start back to school again in October?

She snorted, bending back to her work. One truth she knew: a girl never went back to school once she got took out. No, two truths: a girl never got out of the outports, either, without education or money. Unless it was to marry. Or go serving somewhere for her keep. And given how there wasn’t a man’s hand in Ragged Rock that wasn’t soaked in gurry, and doubly worse to be a serving girl in a stranger’s house, she shut down her mind from all thought except the work at hand.

Her eyes crept back to the road and chanced upon old Mr. Jacobs creeping down the church steps, the door left ajar behind him, lending her a glimpse of the little baby Jesus lying in his manger and those gloriously robed figures standing about him. The fish slipped awkwardly in her arms, and she clawed them back, staring at her hands, those long, tapered fingers that had so gracefully scrolled calligraphic lettering across the pages of her scribblers. They were all reddened now and scaly from brine and bone bits.

“Addie,” her mother croaked from somewhere behind her. She watched as her mother’s fat, swollen body shuffled toward her, struggling with a yaffle of fish. “Addie,” called Florry, breathlessly, “quick—the fish’s slipping.”

Pretending she hadn’t heard, Adelaide bent over her work.

Gert darted toward them, hollering, “Name of gawd, Ad, what’re you in a trance? Sweet jeezes, Florry, time to go home and drop that youngster, don’t you think?” she yelled, catching the woman and her armload of fish.

Adelaide continued with her work, any guilt she might’ve felt buried beneath the anger of a soul forced along another’s wake.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE KING NO MIGHTIER THAN SELF

T
WO YEARS OF SCRUBBING FLOORS
and youngsters and working the flakes, Adelaide’s anger began wearying itself. Thus, on her eighteenth birthday, as roads and electricity began creeping through the outports, she listened with a calm heart to the governing fathers as they lectured the fishermen to “haul up your punts and burn your flakes, b’yes, for the midshore fishery and sixty-foot liners is where she’s going to be, and fish plants and freezers are the new way of curing fish and providing healthy paying jobs for women as well as men.”

Hope glimmered for Adelaide then, when the government encouraged the local merchants to buy a couple of longliners and build a fish plant in Ragged Rock, poohpoohing the old-timers still wanting the flakes. “It’s not the poor Negro markets over the seas you want, my boys, but the North Americans,” they lectured, “and their nice modern housewives and their want for nice recipes and fish sticks made out of fresh fish. And just think, my sons, how organized it’ll all be then, with you men bringing fish straight to the plants, no more salting and drying, and your women cutting and packing them, ready for the markets, and the prices all set and everyone getting regular pay. Can you imagine that, outport housewives? No more working the flakes? Nice indoor jobs all year round with regular pay, and dressing your youngsters in nice clothes from the catalogues, and getting rid of them old oak dressers, and furnishing your kitchens with vinyl and chrome and all those other nice things you’ll be seeing on your nice new television sets once we gets you electrified and everything modernized?”

“Mod-er-nized,”
drawled out Joycie-Anne, Gert’s girl, huddling to the front of the stage with a bunch of others one morning, waiting for a light rain to hold up. “That’s all I hears about these days, getting
mod-ernized
. I wonder what we’re all going to look like when we gets
mod-er-nized
.”

“Aah, Joycie, you’ll be prettier than a fancy city woman,” said Suze, tightening her skully against the rain as she leaned against a faggot next to Adelaide. “God bless their little pinkies—they think that worms lives only in the ground. What you say, Addie, think we’ll all have pretty pink fingers then, when we haven’t got bones jabbing them to bits? Imagine,” she carried on as Adelaide, face held to the drizzle, said nothing, “no more lugging in wood and emptying ashpans. Just flick a knob on a stove and there she’ll be—a hot oven for our chickens. I say, sir, we’ll have the prettiest pink fingers around.”

“I says they’ll be pink,” cut in the only man amongst them, an old geezer too crippled to haul a net. “And not only your fingers that’ll be pink, but your stumps too, because that’s all’s going to be left of your fingers you works in a plant long enough—stumps! Your fingers froze up and cut off.”

“Ooh, jeezes, here he goes,” groaned Gert.

“Ah, you’ll find out,” he wagered, a mock shiver crimping his face. “I tell you, she’s not nice, cocky, working them plants in the wintertime, not when you got your hands in icy water, freezing your blood up to your elbows. Cut off your arm then, and it wouldn’t bleed—I’m not joking!” he countered the skeptical looks darting his way. “Ask the wife. I sliced open me hand one day and not a stain a blood come out—whiter than the fish, the cut was. No wonder the wife got sick, cooped up on pieces of cardboard all winter long and breeding gout.”

“Hey!?”

“That’s right—bits of cardboard. Gets so cold they puts bits of cardboard under your feet to help keep them warm. You try standing for hours in a pair of rubber boots on a concrete floor with a bit of cardboard tucked underneath. Fine thing it was when she did get sick, brother, for another winter would’ve killed her.”

“Cripes, if it was cold that breeded gout, we’d all be crumped up like accordions,” said Gert.

“I never said was the
cold
that breeded gout. It’s the
hot water
they puts out that breeds gout,” said the old-timer. “Ye-es—hot water! They fills up barrels with hot water and puts them right besides ye on the floor to dip your hands in when they’re too cold to hold on to a knife. That’s what breeds gout—dipping your hands in hot water when they’s freezing. Even youngsters knows not to put their hands in hot water when they’re freezing. Cold water you puts aching hands into, a good drop of cold water.”

“How come your missus didn’t know, then?”

“She knows. Everybody knows. Even them that’s putting the water there knows. They just wants you working faster, is all, and they don’t give a tinker’s shit how they does it. Even when your hands is so gnarled up they can’t keep a knitting needle straight, they’re still coaxing you to dip them in hot water. And you does it, too. I knows because I done it meself, enough times, and now here I got gout along with arthritis. Ye can have your plants, I say. I’ll stick with the flakes, cocky.”

“Well, my son, if that’s your calling, stick with it,” said Gert, “because there’s always them that’ll bide by the old, no matter what good comes along. But I dare say there’s a few of us won’t mind a real paycheque to buy the odd spud and leave off the gardening, because I can’t stand gardening, I can’t. Worth a couple of knobs never having to haul a weed agin.”

“Hope they does better with the liners than Am’s doing, then,” said Suze. “He’s after warning everybody that they takes too much expense to make a profit. But the government’s going right on ahead, building more of them, and bigger plants, and not knowing how it’s all going to work out. I says they ought to keep the salt fish markets up, I do. No need to put it all in the one basket.”

“And that’s what they’re doing then, cocky, all in the one basket,” said the old-timer. “I hears them on the radio every morning, coaxing everybody off the flakes and into the plants.”

“Won’t have to coax me much,” said one of the nursing mothers inside the stage, “because I can’t wait for next summer, I can’t, get off them jeezes flakes.”

“Me either. Get out from under Mother,” said Joycie Anne, a dark look at Gert. “What’s you going to do, then, Mother, you got nobody to boss about?”

“Watch your gob. I might still be boss yet. Just because you’re
mod-er-nized
don’t mean you’re not ordered about. All right, back at it,” she sang out as the rain feathered off, “before ye all starts rusting. Addie, hold on there a minute. What’s you doing with the fish? Full of spit, them ones you been piling in the faggot.”

Adelaide heartened as Suze, as she’d done dozens of times these past summers, stood before her, facing Gert.

“Someone’s spitting on them, then,” said Suze, “because we been working side by side all morning, and all we’re doing is firking off spit and flies.”

Gert’s brow arched disbelievingly. “How do you explain all the spit in that last faggot, then—and that’s where she’s been piling hers, in that last faggot.”

“Middle faggot,” said Suze. “We been piling ours in the middle faggot. Check out the old geezer. It’s him piling the last faggot. Must be his fingers are too crumped up to hold a stick. Come on, Addie, our turn to get wood for tea.” The mere squaring of Suze’s shoulders as she marched off defied any further objection, and Adelaide, ducking beneath a cantankerous look from Gert, hastened after her.

“Tongue like a logan, that got,” said Suze. She looked back toward the faggots and broke into a grin. “Look, look at her, going after the old fellow. Not spitey now, is she, she got put straight.”

“Foghorn,” said Adelaide without looking back.

Suze grasped her arm. “Hurry on, we best get out of her sight, because for sure we got her gander up now. Gawd, I can’t wait for next summer, I can’t, when they gets the plant built and we haven’t got she harping down our throats everyday. Brrr, I can’t stand that woman, I can’t. And now you owes me a favour, Addie,” said Suze, coming to an abrupt stop. Her grey eyes glistened like wet rocks. “I wants you to be the baby’s godmother. He’s not here yet—or she, whatever it is,” she added with a quick grin, laying a hand on her belly at Adelaide’s puzzled look. “March. I’m expecting in March. I’m sure it’s a boy; feels just like Benji did when I was carrying him. I even got his name picked out, Stewie, after Am’s poor old father, God comfort him. Now, say yes. Say yes!” she implored as Adelaide’s gaze fell to the wayside.