The Big Why (14 page)

On April Fool’s morning news came off the wire of the sealer
Newfoundland
in trouble. Its men were missing. A report leaked from the post office clerk that the
Southern Cross
had round-ed Gallery Head and was holding up in Renews. Relief charged through the shoulders of the Brigus crowd. They could see all their men sheltering now in Renews. Renews was all right. The people of Renews would be useful to them. They were imagining the
Southern Cross
tied up and the men greeted, the seals aboard and the men waiting out the storm with a big feed of grub on the table.

But then that hope was met by a discouraging official report: the boat in Renews was certainly not the
Southern Cross
. You had to erase what you thought you knew. What was the last thing heard of the
Cross
. Actually, nothing. There was no report that stood up.

The
Nascopi
was fine at the icefields, and William Coaker was calling a halt to the season.

Bartlett: William Ford Coaker. He’s a farmer, not a fisherman. And you know, Kent, Newfoundland has stamps for every kind of industry. Fishing, the swilery, woodcutting, mining, logging, but the one stamp theyve never made is for farming. You know why? Farming is useless. Coaker is a farmer from Green Bay and he heads up the Fisherman’s Protective Union. Now tell me something queerer. First union in the New World. Now he’s sticking his neck into the swilery. A farmer aboard to inspect the conditions of the men, and he has the gall to call a halt to it.

The union, Bartlett said so that everyone could hear, is strong around here. Too strong.

Then he changed topic, for he could be a diplomatic man. It was five years ago this very day, he noted, that Peary and Henson left me to make their dash to the pole.

And how was the weather.

At eighty-nine degrees? It was a clear, broad morning.

A boy thought Bartlett meant the temperature. He didnt know it could get so hot at the pole.

Latitude, son. Degrees of latitude.

I remained holed up with the Bartletts during these early days of April blizzard. It was frustrating. Mary Bartlett: You won’t return to that drafty cabin. A rogue wind, she said, could funnel in off the lighthouse, recoil off Red Head, and come snatch that cabin up and dump it in the harbour.

It was a second chance to look on the town in winter.

We woke up to news on page four of
The Evening Telegram
, fresh off the train — news of fifty dead off the
Newfoundland
. Fifty sealers had frozen to death.

In our harbour we saw three small boats.

There’s men in those boats, Bartlett said.

Open boats, Tom Dobie said. They look like rodneys.

Or a gunning punt.

Where they from.

Can they be from the seal patch.

Theyre not from no seal patch.

We went down to the government wharf and Bartlett pushed the
Morrissey
out. We steamed out through the young ice.

You can tell theyre in trouble, Tom Dobie said. Theyre barely rowing.

We got in amongst the three boat crews. Bartlett passed a looped rope down and each man pulled it over himself, and we hauled them aboard and gave them blankets. They were exhausted and cold. They were Carbonear men, and they’d been out for the day, one said. Just a mile out from home, on some swatchy ice, when the wind come up. No food or water or heavy coat, nothing on them.

Where’s your breadbox.

Ate it out.

How long you been out.

Since yesterday last.

There was a butter tub in one rodney that the three crews had shared. They’d had hard tack and tea and two coconut shells with cork stoppers. One for molasses, the other for butter.

Bartlett: You men you all got the fiddlers.

Yes, we’re beat to a snot. But happy now.

Sure that boat there is leaky as a flake.

She’s a clever boat for all that. Kept up with the other two.

Yes, I suppose she’s done you well.

The Carbonear men were like birds blown off course. The wind had driven them into the bottom of the bay. They knew that if they hung on they’d reach Brigus or Holyrood. Bartlett took them in and fed them pea soup and put them to bed aboard the
Morrissey
. They were frozen and hungry. Look at them eat, he said. Theyre face and eyes into it.

The next day, page six: seventy dead.

But no news of the
Southern Cross
.

Bartlett had to leave and I decided to go with him to St John’s. He was on his way west, to the
Karluk
rescue. I needed supplies from town and I wanted to see the steamers come in. Bartlett kissed his mother and hugged his sister Eleanor and shook his father’s hand and Rupert’s. Then we jumped aboard the pony cart that had Tom Dobie at the reins to take us up to the iron horse for St John’s.

I sat across from Bob Bartlett. Men were coming up to him. You know anything, sir? He did not. He said the prospects werent good, but we must hold our faith. Faith. I thought of Kathleen. She said once that faith is summed up by Jesus and Adam. She was reading a
pensée
from Pascal. Morality, she read aloud, is summed up by concupiscence and grace. You believe that? I asked, What is concupiscence. Kathleen: It is the inception of desire. Yes, Kathleen, I believe it.

St John’s. Bob and I stayed in a hotel on Cochrane Street. Across the road a fire had burnt down three houses, leaving just their chimneys. We walked over and Bartlett leaned into a fireplace. If a chimney, he said, is tall enough you can see stars even in the middle of the day. Take a look. I stretched in and looked up. And yes, deep down the black telescope of the chimney I saw a pin of light. That single star so deliberate, it looked fake. It was the fleck of white one leaves on the black pupil in a painting.

Theyre coming in.

Bartlett was shaking my hip. He was barechested, his trousers on. It was six in the morning and freezing. He had an enormous chest. It was when he was sideways on that you noticed it, when he bent over to pull on his socks. The swilers, he said.

I dressed and followed him down to the harbour. The snow had melted and frozen again. Bartlett passed me a slice of bread with molasses, and the bread had chunks of pork fat in it. I ate around the fat. There were thousands of men and women lining the finger piers, the air damp and heavy, their hands in pockets. Boys with oversized caps, their collars flicked up at the neck. Behind us people were carefully trudging down the steep, white hills, the towers of the Basilica breaking the cold plain of the horizon, the sun coating the rock of Signal Hill with a bright, thin icing. The delight and fright of a city in the bare morning. Men recognized Bartlett. He repeated the same conversation:

It was the
Newfoundland
’s crew what caught the brunt of it.

The
Bellaventure
had the men and would be first in.

Yes, followed by the
Nascopi
.

It was the
Nascopi
what ended the hunt, a man said, because William Coaker was on board.

Bartlett put a hand on the man’s shoulder. The hunt was over, he said, because it was the thing to do.

He took me by the wrist and we pushed forward into the men. He could be intimate, he knew when to be intimate. He waded into the men, offering support, and they recognized that this was the fate sometimes when sealers went to sea and I was getting upset that nobody seemed to be outraged. It was Coaker who’d ended the hunt and no one was telling Bartlett anything different, at least not persisting. There was deferral. And I thought, There is something to be said for persistence. They were too passive for me.

The flags were up on the hill, so we knew that they were coming in. And then quickly this black vessel steaming hard into port. It had all its flags flying. It felt odd, the speed and the flags. It looked joyous. It belched its horn, zipped through the cold blue water, and sidled up to dock.

Bartlett: That’s not the
Bellaventure
.

It’s Billy Winsor, a man said. What a cunt.

Billy Winsor had spurted past the
Bellaventure
portside. Billy Winsor flying all flags fast into St John’s harbour with a full load of pelts.

Bartlett: You hear that?

What.

There are no cannon.

I dont get it.

You win the race home you get the cannon. There are no cannon for Billy Winsor.

The men and women were fifty deep against the stageheads and finger piers. Billy Winsor tossing out a hawser, but the men at Harvey’s refused to tie him on. He slipped down the harbour apron. Past us and farther west. A couple of sealers jumped over the side to tie on to stanchions and they were pushed back aboard. They found a spot near the shipyard.

Perhaps, Bartlett said, Billy Winsor is a man who believes that in the face of a tragedy, it is best to maintain the structure of tradition.

The slow nose of the
Bellaventure
rounded Signal Hill. Arms began to point. She swung her bow towards Chain Rock and then slipped through the Narrows to Harvey’s pier. Her flag at half-mast.

Look at her forehatch, Bartlett said.

It was heaped with seals under a tarpaulin. I was surprised there were any seals aboard her. Why do they have seals aboard?

Those arent seals, he said.

Well, there’s one.

Men were pulling at the tarpaulin, rope had iced onto the deck. They levered the stiff carcass of a big seal with blunt hatchets. They carried the frozen seal to the side as the
Bellaventure
moored. But the seal was not a seal. It was the pelt of a seal, and inside the pelt was a frozen man. You could see a sliver of his body through the open belly of the seal. His hands together, as if in prayer. They handled this body with no more care than if it had been a seal, for the men knew only one way to offload cargo. It frightened them to touch this half seal, half man, they were nervous around unlucky things. The hard, buckled body slid from ropes and thudded to the apron with the shock of a hollow weight. It is wrong for all the majesty to be gone from the body.

He crawled in there, Bartlett said, to stay warm.

The
Nascopi
,
with Coaker aboard, docked beside the
Bellaventure
and the crew tumbled over the side to assist. William Coaker was a big man but not very strong. He had a cane. Constables pushed back the crowd, and I realized we were part of the push towards the harbour. I was leaning into the men in front of me. Stretcher-bearers carried off the frostbitten, but they could not get through. A pulse pushed us back and there was room. George Tuff, Bartlett said. We watched as George Tuff was helped off, determined to walk, and there were men with white bandages past their elbows and knees who were crying with pain at the thought of touching their limbs. Their arms pointing upwards, as though still in shock at the empty horizon. We pressed the crowd back.

One survivor: I was froze for two days and now I’m on fire.

Another: I’m so tired my eyes are falling together.

The men were ready to talk. Their gaunt heads and white hands. They described the wind and snow lifting off the white surfaces of the ice. Two crews watching as Abram Kean’s
Stephano
vanished in the squall. You could still see her smoke. Then they walked away from this ship, as ordered by Kean himself. To kill seals and get back aboard the
Newfoundland
. But where were the seals? And where was the
Newfoundland
?

The dead men were laid out in the basement of the King George Institute. The corpses were covered in sheets along theatre chairs and on the floor of an empty swimming pool. They brought bathtubs from all over St John’s. Nurses were thawing the bodies in tubs of warm water. Their knitted caps still frozen to their foreheads. In one tub they were coaxing the thawed seal pelt away from the dead man. Yes, thawing allows the human to return.

And near them, in the seal-oil factory, men were skinning thick layers of fat from seal hide. Billy Winsor’s catch of whitecoats and older seals — the ones buttoned up the back — and large adult hood seals. The hide, Bartlett said, is sent to England to be worked up into leather. The fat ground up, steam-cooked, refined, and then sunned in glass-roofed tanks until it becomes pure, white, tasteless, and odourless: oil for soap.

In my hotel room I read a special edition of the
Telegram
. Now the paper’s first few pages were no longer devoted to the advertising of Smallwood’s chrome tan wellingtons (light as a feather, tight as a cup) or Sunlight soap at T. J. Edens. The front page, under a large black headline, spoke of the
Bellaventure
’s arriving in St John’s with the bodies of the
Newfoundland
, of Arthur English’s account of his time on the ice. There was a photograph of George Tuff being helped off the
Bellaventure
, and there in amongst the heads of the men, my own face, mine and Bob Bartlett’s.