The Doryman
Authors: Maura Hanrahan
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hanrahan, Maura, 1963-
The doryman : a novel / Maura Hanrahan.
ISBN 1-894463-40-4 (print) 9781771172448 (epub) 9781771172455 (kindle)
1. Hanrahan, Richard--Fiction. 2. Windstorms--Newfoundland--Fiction. I. Title.
PS8565.A5875D67 2003 C813'.6 C2003-904533-1
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Copyright © 2003 by Maura Hanrahan
All rights reserved
. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any meansâgraphic, electronic or mechanicalâwithout the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.
Printed in Canada
First printing September 2003
Second printing July 2004
Cover design by Dale Wilson
Flanker Press Ltd.
P.O. Box 2522, Station C
St. John's, Newfoundland A1C 6K1
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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.
The Doryman
by Maura Hanrahan
Flanker Press Ltd.
St. John's, Newfoundland
2003
Dedication
This book is written in loving memory of my grandfather Richard and is dedicated to my uncle Vince
Maura Catherine Hanrahan
August, 2003
Author's Note
This book is a fictionalized account of my grandfather's life in the Grand Banks schooner fishery of the early twentieth century. It is based on first-hand accounts from family members, and family stories, and supplemented by articles in the
Daily News,
the
Evening Telegram
, the
Halifax Herald
, and the
Berwick Register
of the day, as well as other historical records.
Readers may find it useful to consult the glossary for fishery and Newfoundland words.
PART 1
Chapter One
R
ichard rushed into the kitchen with his bucket full of cranberries that had over-wintered, and then stopped dead. His mother was standing by the wood stove, her dark face pulled taut. The words she had just spoken still hung in the air. “He's only nine. He's too young to go fishing.”
The wiry, stoical form of his father sat with his head firmly cocked to one side, a posture which Richard knew to mean he had made a decision and would not move. Both of them looked at Richard, his mother with a kind of desperate longing, his father opaquely.
Richard could almost feel his body splitting in two. To his mother he was the sharp student who liked school and would stay there as long as possible. To his father he was a shareman in the making, one who could not waste time idling at lessons of no practical use.
Richard put the bucket of berries on the floor. The sting of embarrassment hit his cheek like lightning and then rippled through his body. His mother lowered the dishcloth in her hand and silently let it come to rest on the table near her husband. She caught Richard's eye again almost with a hint of apology.
Over the next few days, Richard prepared for the change in his life. His father, Steve, was in the Banks fishery. The weeks-long voyages would be too much for nine-year-olds, even by Steve's standards, the Little Bay men joked. Thus, Richard was to go fishing with his grandfather Jim Hanrahan and his Uncle Michael in the shore fishery. That was their custom, to fish with brothers and uncles and fathers.
It was 1898 and Richard had spent his nine years of life surrounded by women and children. The men were more often than not away at sea; they were on the Grand Banks or on their way to the West Indies or Portugal or Spain, and sometimes to Greece and Italy. In Little Bay on the Burin Peninsula on Newfoundland's South Coast, the children played down near the salt water where they held contests to see who could skim stones the farthest, or in the thick evergreen woods where they dared each other to look for fairies as the warm summer evenings drew in. In the fall, their mothers gave them wooden pails and told them not to come back till they were full of blueberries. Picking berries was work but it was fun, too, especially watching the older girls and boys flirt with each other. Once in a while, Richard saw them sneak off in pairs to the deep woods, where no one would be able to find them.
“Well, we know what they're up to!” his sister Rachel would yell, forcing young couples to do about-faces, turning back into the openness of the barrens.
The boys made small wooden boats and sailed them in gullies or even in the harbour. They sewed bits of twine, fashioning little nets, in imitation of their fathers, who spent their winters mending cod traps. Once in a while they fought, even coming to blows over silly things.
Since Steve announced that his son would go fishing, Richard found himself standing aloof from these activities. It was as though he had been pulled by some invisible cord from his companions. He would never again sit in a school desk, he knew, and the thought of this caused him such grief he banished it as soon as it intruded into his consciousness. He felt as if he were just waiting now, though he didn't know for what. It was not as if he looked forward to going fishing.
*
During Steve's long absences, Richard had always marvelled at his mother, Elizabeth. She was a model of industry. Her abilities seemed to know no end. Everyday she made delicious bread from flour, water, and yeast, and on Sundays she added raisins if she had any and made tea buns. She made doughboys, too, and popped them in the meat and potatoes simmering on the wood stove. She grew the vegetables they ate: the plump potatoes, sweet carrots, tart onions, bitter cabbage, and juicy turnips. She worked capelin into the ground every summer to make the vegetables grow. Some of these crops she pickled and put in the long pantry at the back of the house her husband had built. She raised damson plums, too, and cherries and strawberries. From all these she made jams, putting them up every fall. Her ambition, Richard knew, was to grow apricots. If she didn't realize it, then she was confident her daughter Rachel would. “That girl is smart as a top,” Richard often heard her say.
Like the other women in the harbour, Elizabeth made pies, but not too often because she had to “spare everything along” as she always said. The very phrase seemed to accompany the motion of kneading, chopping or scraping. She was a hunter, too. His mother went into the woods and onto the barrens, where she found rabbit trails and set small snares the way her father had taught her. She skinned the little animals and baked their dark meat, making gravy with their juices, and using their bones for soup.
She was a doctor as well, most often using the cherry tree as the source of her medicine. In the spring, she gathered trailing juniper from the hills along the coast and boiled it to make a tonic. “Drink it all down,” she told her children. “It'll clean your blood right out.” When they were run down and had boils, she made bread poultices that they held tight to their wounds. She burst blisters and stopped infections. She ground juniper for women to take as they struggled to give birth. She even made a cast from birchbark when one of Richard's cousins fell from a tree and broke his arm, with no other doctor around for many miles. She made sure Rachel and the other girls, Mary Jane and Annie, watched her and remembered what she did, so that they would be able to heal the ills of their own families someday.
Chapter Two
A
t nine, Richard had about a year and a half of schooling altogether and was very smart, Elizabeth thought. He could read pretty well for a child with just a touch of learning. But she knew her husband had other plans for him, and she knew it was useless to argue. That afternoon when Steve told her he would send Richard fishing, she was upset but not surprised. He had been grumbling that the boy was always away with the fairies, always living in his head. And he was impatient that Richard couldn't fix on the task at hand, whether it was lugging barrels of flour up the hill to their house or spreading freshly caught capelin on their burgeoning vegetable patch.
Elizabeth was amazed how quickly Richard grew. Already he was a thickly set child with a pale face and square jaw. The pupils of his eyes were navy, rimmed with sky blue. Only his tendency to tan instead of burn hinted at the Micmac blood he inherited from her. Her girls, though â Rachel, Mary Jane, and Annie â they were “real Indians,” with black braids down their backs and coal-black eyes. Their skin was burnt umber. They were like her own people from Piper's Hole River and Gallows Harbour way up in the bay. Richard, Elizabeth felt, was a Hanrahan, full of the Englishness of his Spencer ancestors from Marystown and England before that, and the Irishness of his forebears who had stolen into these coves and bays two and three generations ago, trading one form of harshness for another.
The Hanrahan men, who came long before any European women did, had married Micmac women, and maybe Beothuks, when they first over-wintered here. “There was only Indians here one time,” the old people said. “This was the Indians' country.” And that's why, Elizabeth thought, old Jim Hanrahan's face had the striking combination of sea-blue eyes and high, ruddy-brown cheekbones.
*
Richard fished near Beau Bois with his Uncle Michael, Steve's oldest brother, for a few years and with his grandfather Jim for one year. Jim had first fished in the 1820s. Beau Bois was where the Hanrahans fished, though no one seemed to know why or when they laid claim to the spot. Other families had other berths in the coves around Mortier Bay and on the way to Burin. Richard's stomach was delicate on the water, and he fought valiantly against the threat of seasickness which he felt constantly. The open air helped. So did the sight of land, somehow, or being able to fix his eyes on it anyhow. When the swell rose and he turned green, Jim put a piece of pork fat in his mouth. Almost instantly the boy threw up and felt immediate relief. Then he would be sick no more. In the first part of the fishing season he was throwing up almost every day. The men told him not to tell his mother; she would wonder why he wasn't growing. When he was thirteen and fourteen, Richard fished with his Uncle Dick, after whom his parents had named him, and some of his cousins.
The shore fishery was filled with cold early mornings, handlines and jiggers, dories bursting with slimy cod and the odd dogfish, especially in the summer when the water was thick with them. His world was peopled by men as well as women now, and he saw how they needed each other. As a child, he'd only been on the beaches with the women as they'd made the fish; now he saw how the men slaved away on the water to get it.
*
During the months of the shore fishery, Elizabeth watched her oldest son roll wordlessly into bed each night. He would rise even before she would in the morning. He spent the winters in his uncle's fishing rooms repairing their cod traps. He turned ten, then eleven, and soon he had a hint of the stockiness of an adolescent.
But there was never very much time to think about it. Elizabeth worked in the shore fishery too and spent all her summers on the beaches at Little Bay, Beau Bois, and Marystown, making fish with every other woman and girl in the bay who was old enough. Through the spring, summer, and fall months, the men and boys appeared in their dories, many of them from the Banks, others from the shore fishery. They hauled barrel after barrel onto the beaches. They dumped hundreds of pounds of fish in big piles on top of the rocks. Then Elizabeth and the other women started in on them. They washed the fish first in great vats of water, making sure that they were free of the salt they'd been preserved in at sea. Sometimes the boys helped with this task.
Elizabeth and the others uncurled each fish and flattened it completely so that it was splayed. They lightly salted them; this was the most important task of all, for the preservation of the fish depended on it. Then, with their long skirts rustling about their ankles, they bent down and laid them out, side by side by side till the beaches were obliterated by them. Sometimes they laid the fish on flakes, platforms made out of poles. They usually covered the flakes with tree branches so air could circulate around the fish. They worked fast, hoping the weather would not turn against them. Dry days with some sun and breeze offered ideal conditions for this work. Overcast days meant delays in curing fish, while rain was cruel, spoiling the fish.
In July and August the women sweated as they salted and spread the fish and rose up frequently to wipe their foreheads. The women tried their best to ignore the hunger pains that persisted in their bellies. They couldn't stop; they had to keep making the fish before the men dropped the next load at their feet.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth worried about Rachel's day back home, where the little girl baked and cooked for her brothers and sisters. On the beaches, the summer sun dried and cured the fish, thus making it ready for markets on the Iberian peninsula and in Jamaica. At the first sign of night, the women began stacking the drying fish in rows five feet high. These they covered in canvas to keep the night and morning dew away, until they could return to it after dawn. The women were not paid for their work.
As Elizabeth watched Richard work through the latter years of his childhood, she thought the sea was no place for anyone, really. In recent years, her people were more woodspeople. They had come to the Burin Peninsula from Bay d'Espoir, where they had been forced to retreat long ago when the island had been almost overrun by settlers. Then, later, they came back to the peninsula through the headlands of Fortune Bay to carry the mail overland. Only the Micmac knew the ancient paths and rivers between the South Coast and Trinity Bay and the Avalon Peninsula. They laid the telegraph cables, too, connecting one side of the island to the other with wires that meant news came faster than you could blink. It was awfully hard work in the wind and snow and ice, and solitary and dangerous. There were always repairs needing to be done. But they did the work because, like the settlers they now lived alongside, they knew little else.
*
When Richard turned fifteen, Steve decided to take him to the Banks. When she heard of her husband's decision, Elizabeth felt like one of the rabbits in her winter snares. She knew there was no sense arguing with her husband. He was a bit of a tough nut, they all said of him. Besides, he was that much older than her, which gave him even more authority than most men had. She was his second wife, too, so she never felt quite right in the marriage, even when they had loved each other long ago and she had left her home to come to his, as was expected of her.
*
It was mid-February when Steve and Richard set out on foot for Marystown. Earlier that week a cold front had moved into Mortier Bay, warning them of more wintry weather to come. Then an Arctic Screamer had arrived from the northwest. Its strong cold winds pushed snow into drifts as high as houses and bent bodies nearly double as they walked into it.
Now the winds had died down, but the cold remained. The harbour in Little Bay was just about frozen over, so Steve and Richard copied across it, their small canvas bags holding a few possessions on their backs. It was a relief to get to the other side without getting their feet too wet. The air was frigid, so cold that the snow made scrunching noises with each step they took. The ruts in the path that led to Marystown were covered over with snow, but Steve and Richard walked along them as if they could see them. There were a few houses on this side of Little Bay, but not many, not like on the other side. Most of the homes over here were out on the Point, the bit of land that stretched into Mortier Bay. They climbed the hill out of the village and then went down the other side towards Marystown. Then the little dwellings petered out into nothing but a woods path that ran along the coast, and they began crossing Marystown and curving round to Mooring Cove. It was still several miles away.
As they walked along, Steve kept wiping his mustache with his hand, which was covered in the grey wool mittens that Elizabeth had made over Christmas. He was trying to get the ice crystals out of his beard. He said nothing. Although he'd never admit it, he was not looking forward to the days of slaving that awaited them. It'd be good for Richard, though, he told himself. It was time for him to get out from under his mother's skirts, which could not happen as long as the boy was engaged in the shore fishery.
Richard was silent, too. He kept himself occupied by thinking of the morning's events. That morning, Rachel had scurried into the room he shared with Jimmy and young Jack.
“I have a surprise for you, Richard,” she said, her brown face all smiles. She pumped up and down on her tiptoes, making her almost as tall as her brother. Then she handed him a small package wrapped in brown paper.
He said nothing, but looked right at her. He was moved, but he didn't know what to say.
“Well, don't you want to open it?” Rachel asked impatiently, holding the package towards him. Oddly, he noticed how big her hands were.
“Come on, open it!” she cried.
Richard slowly took the parcel in his hands and gently pulled the string, loosening the paper around the small bundle. Then he sat on his bed and pulled out a pair of woollen gloves of brilliant white and hunter green. He turned them over in his hands.
“They're the colours of the woods in winter,” Rachel announced. “And I made them for you, all by myself. I even carded the wool. Mom's been showing me how.”
She smiled with pride and her brother pulled her close in a hug.
“Thank you, Rachel,” he said. “I never even saw you making them.”
Now he smiled at the memory of his sister's present as he trudged alongside his father, the gloves keeping his hands warm.
His mother, too, had tried to make his first Banks fishing trip a little less nerve-racking.
One evening, when Steve was in Uncle Dick's fishing room down the hill, Elizabeth called her oldest son to her. She was sitting in the corner chair near the wood stove, sewing cotton shirts for her younger boys, though the light was quite dim. She spent every evening this way, darning countless pairs of socks and putting new elbows in shirts and knees in pants. She made clothes from brin bags and dyes of blue, black, red and purple from berries and plant roots. Some nights she brought crazy patterns of colours together in the blankets and quilts that covered their beds and kept them warm at night. Sometimes she carded wool, sheared from the sheep she kept. Now she drew a scarlet ribbon bearing a medal out of her sewing bag.
“This is for you to take with you, Richard,” she said. The medal twirled on the end of the ribbon, flirting with the light from the oil lamp. It was St. Anne, her hands clasped in prayer.
“It was blessed at St. Pierre on St. Anne's Day a long time ago, before you were born,” she said. She smiled gently, and she noticed that Richard's lips were clamped together. He was not one to show emotion. Her own people were like that and, briefly, though they seemed so far away now, she recognized them in her son's face. So she brushed his cheek with her long, dark fingers. Then he looked at her and smiled shyly.
“It'll keep you safe out there,” she said reassuringly. “St. Anne will watch over you. Put it round your neck and keep it on ... all the time.”
Steve and Richard finally reached Mooring Cove, named after the English warships that had been moored there long ago. Then they saw the
Laura Claire
, named for one of the Brinton girls in Burin, on the east side of the harbor. She was a proud forty tons, one of the biggest ships Richard had ever seen this close. The glistening ice needles that hung off her railings made her look only more elegant.
“She's moored now with two anchors. She'll take in 2,000 quintals of fish this trip, maybe as much as 500 quintals more than that,” Steve announced, not expecting an answer from his son. “Not bad.”
Richard's blue eyes scoured the vessel. Her hull was dark green with deep crimson rails and yellow trim. She was beautiful, no doubt about it.
“You'll get a one-quarter share,” Steve said, patting Richard on the shoulder, “being a boy and first time out.”
Then he looked down at his son and his face grew serious; there was even a hint of grimness. “I was fourteen when I started Banks fishing,” he added, as if to comfort the boy. “Or maybe I was younger.”