The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (136 page)

”

And then he ran out of gas.

He tried to start up the engine, but there was no doing so. No going anywhere. It hadn’t occurred to him that this could happen. He hadn’t thought about the gas tank.

“Oh, boy,” said nineteen-year-old Jim Burden.

He was now afraid as well as embarrassed. Some fisherman he was. Paying his gas tank no mind. How stupid could you get? Jim got on the radio and put out a staticky call for help. “Help,” he said, “I’m out of gas.” He wasn’t sure if there was a more nautical way to say this. He didn’t know all that much about boating, really. This was the first year he’d been out to haul by himself. He’d worked for years as a sternman for his father, so he thought he knew all about the ocean, but now he realized he’d been a mere passenger before. His dad had taken care of everything, while he’d just done the muscle work in the back of the boat. He hadn’t been paying attention all those years, and now he was alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

“Help!” he said into the radio again. Then he remembered the word. “Mayday!” he said. “Mayday!”

The first voice to get back to him was that of Ned Wishnell, and it made young Jim wince. Ned Wishnell was the best fisherman in Maine, people said. Something like this would never happen to Ned Wishnell, to any Wishnell. Jim had been hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that he could get through this without Ned Wishnell’s finding out.

“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice cracked.

“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice came again.

“This is Jimmy,” Jim said. “I’m out of gas. Sorry.”

“Where are you, son?”

“I . . . uh . . . don’t know.” He hated to say it, hated to admit it. To Ned Wishnell, of all people!

“Didn’t make that out, Jimmy.”

“I don’t know!” Jim shouted it now. Humiliating. “I don’t know where I am!”

There was silence. Then an unintelligible gargle.

“Didn’t make that out, Ned,” Jim said. He was trying to sound like the older man, imitating his cadence. Trying to maintain some dignity.

“You see any landmarks?” Ned asked.

“Fort Niles is, um, maybe two miles to the west,” Jimmy said, but as he said it, he realized he could no longer see that distant island. A fog had come up, and it was growing as dark as evening, although it was only ten in the morning. He didn’t know which way he was pointing.

“Drop your anchor. Stay put,” Ned Wishnell said, and signed off.

Ned found the kid. It took him several hours, but he found Jimmy. He had notified the other fishermen, and they’d all been looking for Jimmy. Even some fishermen from Fort Niles went out to look for Jim Burden. It was terrible weather. On a normal day, everyone would have headed in because of the weather, but they all stayed out, looking for young Jimmy. Even Angus Addams went out looking for Jim Burden. It was the right thing to do. The kid was only nineteen, and he was lost.

But it was Ned Wishnell who found him. How, nobody knew. But the guy was a Wishnell—a gifted fisherman, a hero on the water—so nobody was surprised that he found a small boat in the fog in the big ocean without the faintest clue about where to look. Everyone was accustomed to nautical miracles from Wishnells.

“Help!” he shouted. “Mayday!”

“Hi,” he said, lamely.

Ned tossed a line over to Jim and said, “Latch on.” His voice was tight with irritation.

“You sure it’s the gas run out?” Ned asked.

“Pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?” Disgusted.

Jim did not reply.

“It’s not another kind of engine trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” Jim said. But his voice had no authority. He knew he’d lost any right to sound knowledgeable.

Ned looked grim. “You don’t know if your boat has run out of gas.”

“I’m—I’m not sure.”

“I’ll take a look,” Ned said.

Ned Wishnell was in the water.

Jim’s reactions were fleeting, but they prevented him from taking the lightning-fast action that might have saved Ned Wishnell’s life. If he’d grabbed a gaff and thrust it down to Ned immediately, if he’d reached down to save Ned even as the man was falling in, things might have been different. But Jim stood there for that quick moment of amusement and pride—and a swell came and knocked the two boats together. Smashed them together, with a force that almost threw Jim off his feet. Between the two boats was Ned Wishnell, of course, and when the boats separated after the collision, he was gone. He had sunk.

He must have been badly banged up. He was wearing long boots, and they had probably filled up with water, and he couldn’t swim.

Whatever had happened, Ned Wishnell was gone.

That was the end of the fourth Fort Niles–Courne Haven lobster war. That pretty much did it. Losing Ned Wishnell was tragic for both islands. The reaction on Fort Niles and Courne Haven was almost like the nationwide reaction a few years later, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. A shocked citizenry faced an impossibility come true— and everyone felt changed by (perhaps even a little complicit in) the death. There was a sense on both islands that something was fundamentally wrong if this could happen, if the fight went so far that a man like Ned Wishnell died because of it.

It is not certain that the death of another fisherman could have stirred this feeling. Ned Wishnell was the patriarch of a dynasty that had seemed inviolable. He hadn’t been participating in this lobster war. Not that he’d taken his gear out of the water, as Stan Thomas had done, but Ned Wishnell had always been above this kind of conflict, like Switzerland. What need did he have to push or cut? He knew where the lobsters were. Other fishermen tried to follow him around, tried to learn his secrets, but Ned didn’t care. He didn’t try to chase them off. He barely noticed them. They could never make the catches he made. He was intimidated by nobody. He had no malice. He could afford not to have any.

The fact that Ned Wishnell had drowned while trying to help a boy who’d been sucked into this war struck everyone as ugly. It horrified even Ira Pommeroy, who had basically been responsible for the tragedy. Ira started drinking hard, much harder than usual, and it was then that he turned from a regular drunk into a serious drunk. A few weeks after the drowning of Ned Wishnell, Ira Pommeroy asked his wife, Rhonda, to help him write a letter of condolence to Mrs. Ned Wishnell. But there was no way to reach the Widow Wishnell. She was no longer on Courne Haven Island. She had disappeared.

She wasn’t from there to begin with. Like all Wishnells, Ned had married a beauty from away. Mrs. Ned Wishnell was a ginger-haired, leggy, intelligent girl from a prominent Northeastern family that had always summered at Kennebunkport, Maine. She was nothing like the wives of the other fishermen; that was for sure. Her name was Allison, and she’d met Ned when she was sailing with her family up the Maine coast. She’d seen this man in his fishing boat and been captivated by his looks, by his fascinating silence, by his competence. She encouraged her parents to follow his boat into the harbor at Courne Haven, and she approached him with great boldness. He excited her a good deal; he made her tremble. He was nothing like the men she knew, and she married him—to her family’s astonishment—within weeks. She’d been crazy about the man, but there was nothing to keep her on Courne Haven Island after her husband drowned. She was mortified by the war, by the drowning.

Mrs. Ned Wishnell was very young, just over twenty, when her husband drowned. Immediately after the funeral, she went back to her parents. She dropped her married name. She became Allison Cavanaugh again and enrolled in Smith College, where she studied art history and never told anybody that she had been a lobster fisherman’s wife. She left it all behind. She even left her son behind on the island. There didn’t seem to be much negotiating involved in that decision, and even less trauma. People said Mrs. Ned Wishnell had never been all that attached to her boy anyway; that something about her child frightened her. The Wishnells on Courne Haven made a strong case that the baby should remain with the family, and that was that. She gave him up.

The boy was to be raised by his uncle, a young man who had just come out of the seminary, a young man who had ambitions to be a traveling minister for all the obscure Maine islands. The uncle’s name was Toby. Pastor Toby Wishnell. He was the youngest brother of Ned Wishnell, and just as handsome, although in a more delicate way. Toby Wishnell was the first Wishnell not to be a fisherman. The baby— Ned Wishnell’s little boy—would be his charge. The baby’s name was Owney, and he was just one year old.

If Owney Wishnell missed his mother when she left, he didn’t show it. If Owney Wishnell missed his drowned father, he didn’t show that, either. He was a big, blond, quiet baby. He caused no one any trouble, except when he was taken out of the bath. Then he’d scream and fight, and his strength was a wonder. The only thing Owney Wishnell wanted, it seemed, was to be in the water all the time.

A few weeks after Ned Wishnell was buried, when it became evident that the lobster war was over, Stan Thomas put his boat back into the water and started fishing with supremacy. He fished with a single-mindedness that would soon earn him the nickname Greedy Number Two (the natural successor to Angus Addams, who had long been known as Greedy Number One). His little period of domesticity with his wife was over. Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas was clearly no longer his partner. His partner was whatever teenage boy was slaving away as his sternman.

Stan came home to Mary late every afternoon exhausted and absorbed. He kept a journal of each fishing day so that he could chart the abundance of lobsters in each area of the ocean. He spent long nights with maps and calculators, and he did not include Mary in this work.

“What are you doing?” she’d ask. “What are you working on?”

“Fishing,” he’d say.

To Stan Thomas, any work related to fishing was itself the act of fishing, even if it took place on dry land. And since his wife was not a fisherman, her views were of no service to him. He stopped calling her over to his lap, and she would not have dared to climb there uninvited. It was a bleak time in her life. Mary was beginning to realize something about her husband that was not pleasant. During the lobster war, when he’d pulled his boat and gear out of the water, she’d interpreted his acts as those of a man of virtue. Her husband was staying out of the war, she thought, because he was a peaceful man. She had gravely misunderstood, and it was now becoming clear to her. He had stayed out of the war to protect his interests and to make a killing when the war was over and he could start fishing again. And now that he was making a killing, he could scarcely stop gloating for a minute.