ONE

THERE were no pictures of his mother and rarely was she mentioned.

He could recall the first time he heard her name. Gladys. The sound of it had startled him. Just the fact of her having a name, and it such an odd-sounding one, as if attempting to be full of good things but held back from being that way. Once, when he was ten, someone at Sunday supper called her ‘Aunt Glad’ and the boy pushed away from the table and made for the step outside the back door. Sullen and lost for not knowing what to do until he turned and saw his father standing behind him.

Paddy wore stiff, wool trousers, their cuffs not reaching his shoes, in the days before Margaret was old enough to pay attention to his clothes. The cuffs were frayed and discoloured with dirt, the shoes salt-stained, missing their tongues, although laced tightly enough that it might have gone unnoticed had the boy not been so close. He didn’t look up.

‘What’s wrong with you? Son.’ The last word added.

‘Nothin’.’

‘You sick?’

He shook his head enough that it held back the tears. ‘How come we never talk about her?’

‘There’s nothin’ to talk about. She’s been dead too long to talk about. We got enough to bother about here and now.’

‘How come we got no picture or nothin’?’

‘We can’t be all the time moanin’ over pictures.’

Paddy went back inside, shutting the door behind him.

Sam’s mother had been young and slight, with russet hair that she tied back with dark green ribbon. He imagined that much as he grew older and needed to have an image of her to compare with the mothers of other boys. In his mind she was girlish and trim, different from the fleshy mothers of his friends, or the delicate, sickish ones.

He had assumed she had come from someplace along the Conception Bay shore, within walking distance of Harbour Main, until it struck him that no relatives of hers ever visited. Sam had thoughts of leaving home himself when he discovered deep in a drawer a hymnal with the inscription on its flyleaf: ‘Gladys Carew. Conche.’ Likely in her own hand. The first tangible connection he had ever made with her. In school the next day he asked the man who taught Geography if he had heard of Conche and if he could tell him where it was on a map.

It was tucked in the northern coast of the island, close to its very tip. So far away that Harbour Main must have been another world to her. How his father and mother met he would never ask, but assumed it was during one of the summer schooner trips his father made to fish the waters farther north still, off Labrador. Now Sam had another strand to add to the picture of her in his mind. She was a foreigner. Never entirely fitting into her new home. And with a husband who must have been a dozen years older than herself.

It was forever someone other than his father who spoke her name. One of his uncles most often, recalling something she had done as a young woman. Once it was a prank she had played on Paddy, how it had been the cause of so much laughter. At those times Sam was silent. The mention of her gave rise to feelings he couldn’t identify. Sorrow of a type. Not grief. He would have had to know her for it to be grief. Rather it was seeing something that needed to be touched but was out of reach. Like the time, as a five-year-old, he had lain against the warm body of a lamb, wanting to stroke her side, but didn’t for fear of causing her to run away.

Sam was left with his father and his sister. An improbable family of three. With no thought ever given to the possibility of his father marrying again.

In his father he saw a man he was at odds to understand. Paddy was part of a long line of Kennedys who had arrived a century before from Ireland and settled in Conception Bay. Eventually they moved deeper in the bay, the whole lot of them, to Harbour Main where everyone was Catholic. Planters they were called, although they planted nothing other than enough root vegetables to last them through the winter. Their lives had all to do with fishing for cod, what anyone living along the Conception Bay shore ever did. It was a better life than they had known in Ireland, although Sam couldn’t imagine it was much better.

They settled into a frugal and amenable lot. There was no reason to do battle with a neighbour. What few fights they had were with Protestants, and the prods were far enough away that life generally unfolded in obscure Catholic serenity, poverty-laden though it was for many.

Sam thought of his father as a simple, hard-working man, until Sam reached the age when he realized that, while everyone worked hard, no one’s life was simple. The turns in his father’s life had complicated the man, though he never spoke of them. He lived to complain and then he grew tired of even that. His lot was what it was. One day he would die and the world as he knew it would not have changed.

The times Sam saw his father stirred to life were when he drank. Rum or home brew on a Saturday night. He didn’t need much and Sam came to think it was the idea of it, the ritual, that enlivened him as much as the alcohol itself. It made for his fondest memories of his father. The man could ‘hold his liquor’ as they all said. There were even times when his father would sing. ‘Give us one from the old country, Paddy.’ As if Paddy had ever been there or had somehow inherited the song from an unbroken chain of ancestors. His best was “As I Roved Out One Morning,” a song that, as Sam dove into puberty and the latter verses become more suggestive, set him to thinking his father must have had a youth of some spirit, even though it was long lost.

From his father, Sam inherited what singing abilities he had. Good within a certain range. And likely his fondness for musical instruments, although he had never known his father to take one in hand.

His father’s one night of indulgence led to successive days of grinding hard work. As Sam came to see it, the fishermen of Harbour Main stood ragged in the face of the merchant, as if circled by a lanyard, its knot growing tighter and tighter with each passing year. All-seeing, all-knowing, the merchant supplied the gear while the fishermen were paid in credit at the merchant’s store, where their fishing profits circled back into the merchant’s hands, where the fishermen never freed themselves from the immortal yoke of debt.

The fisherman was left beholden to a man no better than himself. Mere luck as to who was born on which side of the picket fence. The trial of circumstance was all.

Sam had his Mary Kavanagh to be sure. She in Avondale and he in Harbour Main. Five miles each way. Walked three times a week the summer he turned sixteen, for her father would never let Mary venture near Harbour Main on her own.

Walked both ways and that after a day at the cod. He was desperate to have her under him in some woods, his naked flesh lolling against hers, driving her arse in the cushion of moss, careful no twigs would stunt the fun of it. He had come close in the chill of May, but she managed to fend him off again. But teasing him all the same, leaving him to think the time would come, all well and good some summer night. He walked the five miles in everlasting hope.

And fear. Of Father Roe, another Irish priest. Did they breed like rabbits in Ireland? This one, meted out from County Kilkenny, prowled about the roads at night with a horsewhip, eyes peeled for young fellows and their girls kissing in the bushes. ‘Johnny the Whip’ the boys called him. Fouler mouths than Sam’s said the priest’s cock got more of a whipping than any of them ever would.

Mary was worth the chance. Sam liked the fact there was an upright piano in the parlour that he could sit at and attempt to play. He liked her mother’s pea soup and still-warm bread almost as much. He felt comfortable with Mary’s mother, though her father had no time for him. A railway station master after all, he wanted something better for his Mary and not the fisherman Sam was bound to end up becoming even with his education. That wouldn’t get him anywhere, any more than it would the others of the Kennedy horde who lined the shores of Harbour Main. Still he couldn’t lay down the law and stop Sam from spending time with Mary. He knew she might turn against him if he did. A stubborn sort, her father knew her to be, never one to take to being told. Just pray to God she didn’t get pregnant.

No chance of that. Sam trooped back and forth every few days rooting around for more. Eventually Mary saw him for what he was—an impulsive sort who didn’t know what he wanted, just knew it was more than what he had. One day Mary took the train into St. John’s to stay with her sister for a week, and that was the end of that. Suddenly there were more fellows than Sam Kennedy in the world, and some courteous enough to buy her an ice-cream sundae at Miller’s Restaurant and expect nothing but a smile in return.

The day that Sam, about to turn eighteen and clutching his matriculation certificate, freed himself from school and its unrelenting nuns was the day he figured he would take his world in hand.

Yet that summer he went cod fishing with his father, as he had done every summer since he was twelve, and when he had no schooling to return to in the fall, he stayed at it. As his father expected, as his father thought right.

Paddy had made what living he could fishing alone, fishing cross-handed, as he called it. He rowed his fourteen-foot skiff every day to his fishing berth, in the same way he had every year since his wife died. No oarlocks, only thole pins, the oars kept in place by a ring of twisted spruce roots slipped over each oar and pin. When the ice was clear he fished those cold spring months alone, until Sam was old enough and came aboard, after school closed in June. At fourteen Sam took over the rowing, without question, for Paddy was feeling the muscles turn ropey in his shoulders and back, even if he would never admit it, even if he was not yet fifty.

Sam didn’t know whether to admire his father’s stubbornness for working at the cod by himself, or to think him foolish at not throwing in his lot as a crewman on a bigger boat as he once did, a boat that worked a cod trap instead of hook-and-line. There had grown an obstinacy in Paddy that mocked logic, and he kept it that way even in years when his poor catches threatened the family with worse hardship than they already knew.

He had his fishing berth and no other fisherman in the harbour dared think anyone but Paddy Kennedy had rights to it. If there were years he did poorly, there were years he did better than most. And if he brought fish to shore when everyone else had nothing but a water haul, no one questioned that he should share the berth. ‘Your turn will come,’ was all the satisfaction he gave them. ‘Then I’ll be the one starin’ at the bare bottom of the boat.’

Paddy’s Shoal it was, and few bothered to think it used to be called Southern Shoal, least of all Paddy. Once, when he first went with his father, Sam made the mistake of asking him who gave it the name. ‘It couldn’t have been that. Not when you wasn’t around.’

‘Never you mind.’

Sam was about to ask what the name would be if his father ever gave up fishing, but caught himself. He had learned his limits with his father. Hour after hour in the boat, just the two of them, and Sam’s youthful innocence was quickly displaced by a reluctance to say anything if it wasn’t about the job they were there to do. He learned what it took to keep the peace.

There was plenty more going through his head, as there likely was his father’s. ‘The fish, Sam. Keep your mind on the fish.’ An impossible boundary. One that one day would be broken, although Sam had no clear notion of how or when.

For now there was the routine of fishing for cod. Up before dawn, tea and two dry biscuits at a kitchen table set out the night before. Sam’s eyes working to unglue themselves from sleep, his muscles to uncoil from the warm cocoon of the bed. The young fellow rarely made it home the previous night before midnight.

They walked, Paddy a few steps ahead, from the house to the shed in the dank hour to daylight. Not far, but far enough that a fellow had to watch his footing in the wet grass. By then just enough light making its way into the shed to haul on the oilskins and rubber boots, Sam every time faster than his father, using those extra seconds to take another leak over the wharf. For some reason he hated having to do it when they were in the boat, over the side, his father a few feet away from him.

Nothing said, nothing needing to be said. What gear they took with them—oars, gaff, bailer, dipnet, grub bucket—never varied. The bait box had been filled the evening before and, as Paddy lowered it down to him, Sam was thinking it had to be easier with two, though his father would not be one to admit it.

On the way out to the fishing grounds Sam wore mitts. Cuffs, his father called them. To keep in the warmth Sam had dipped them in the saltwater, wrung them out before slipping his hands inside. The saltwater had long ago shrunk them to half their knit size, had molded them to his hands, to the curve of the oars.

On calm days it was a steady half-hour of rowing, muscle-hard but not troublesome once he found the rhythm. Rare it was when there wasn’t some wind, if not on the way out, then on the way back in. If it was enough to stir up a fair-sized lop, that could make it tricky, but Paddy was a good hand at forecasting wind and not one to take chances. If the sea was more than Sam was used to, he learned fast how to handle it. And one thing for certain, Paddy was never short on advice.

It was what they had to talk about—the wind, the weather, the fish. Mostly the fish. Sam couldn’t deny the thrill of a lusty big cod snagged on a baited hook, of seeing it flounce over the gunwale, flop about vainly in the bottom of the boat. When they came fast and furious, as they did on more than a few mornings, there was a great deal of satisfaction all around. More than that, there was the feeling of refuge, of being able to look ahead to more food on the table, clothes to replace what should have been discarded years ago, kerosene when they needed it, a new bucksaw the next winter.

Fish wasn’t money, but fish was all Paddy had, and by Sam being in the boat with him it came his way a bit easier. Sam was not prepared to deny him that.

Catching fish gave into chance and the weather, but once the fish reached shore Paddy had dominion. No one in Harbour Main did a better job of taking a freshly caught cod and transforming it to the gutted, salted and dried vestige of itself. When the day was done and all the steps had fallen into place, no one handed over to the merchant a better grade of saltfish.

Sam stood calf-deep in fish and pronged them one by one—through the head so it wouldn’t damage the flesh—from the bottom of the boat, up and onto the stagehead, where Paddy directed them into the pound that stood alongside the splitting table.

Margaret showed up from the house in rubber boots and donned an oilskin apron and cotton gloves. At the splitting table she was the cut-throat and with a thin, pointed knife she slit the throat of the cod, then inserted the tip of the blade in the opening and sliced open the belly. Sam, the header, took the fish and plucked out the liver, flinging it into an open barrel nearby, where it would render into cod liver oil. He saved the cod tongue and sounds before tearing away the head and the guts and sending them down a hole into the sea. He slid the fish across the table to his father. Paddy was the splitter, whose precise stroke with the square-ended knife cut down one side of the backbone. He lifted away the end of it, then slid the knife deftly under and along the bone, extracting it whistle-clean, without touching the flesh.

The fish were stored in a vat where eventually they would be washed clean with saltwater, before being laid down in salt inside the shed. When drying weather arrived in the summer they were washed free of the salt that hadn’t sunk into the flesh, then carried to vast platforms of sticks covered with boughs, elevated so air could circulate beneath them. The fish would be spread to dry all day, then spread out again the following day, and for more days after that until fine weather brought the salted and dried cod to top grade, merchantable prime.

In early fall came Sam’s chance at cash. Squid showed up in the waters of Harbour Main, in their thousands, teeming schools prime for the jigging, as fast as a fellow could haul the slimy buggers aboard, the air murky with their ink. Squid was a godsend, what with a ready market, cash on the barrelhead. Ships heading to the Grand Banks greedy for bait anchored just outside the harbour and bought up all the fishermen could catch. Some keeners had even laid down ice in sawdust over the previous winter and sold that too. It was all a fine bit of excitement and Sam was eyes and ears into it.

He came away with a tidy sum in the tin box beside his bed. Though, when all was said and done, cod was still the business of the Kennedys in Harbour Main. As it stood, one man’s price for fish set in stone the welfare of the other.

It was not something Sam was able to unravel. The merchant had set himself up in business a decade before. Now, besides the catch of the inshore fishermen, he had seven schooners going to the Labrador fishery. There was money being made, and Paddy Kennedy never saw one red cent of it. The merchant outfitted him in the spring, handed over food for the family through the summer. All on credit until, in the fall, Paddy’s store of dried fish was carted to the merchant premises where it was culled and weighed and tallied. Most years it was enough to mark off the credit, and enough to supply the food and goods from the merchant’s store that carried Paddy over to the next spring, when the wheel would start another turn.

Sam stood by and watched it unfold. He was not to open his mouth. This was his father’s dealings and if there were words to be had with the merchant they would come from him. As it was, few words were spoken. Paddy had no dispute with the culler. His cartloads were generally top notch, as expected, and what wasn’t, Paddy dismissed himself as due a lesser grade. The crowning moment came when the merchant revealed the market price for fish. It was prefaced with talk of how the markets were ‘not bad’ or ‘not so good,’ how Spain was not buying like it used to, and the West Indies was wanting more, but then again never taking the best grade. It was the merchant’s word and Paddy had no way of knowing if there was more he was not being told. When a man had no head for the figures the merchant tossed about and enough schooling to sign his own name, but little else, his confidence lay vacant, surrendered to the taller, shirt-and-tie man with the pencil and tally sheet in hand. When Paddy signed his name to the sheet it was as if it was a renewed measure of the man, not to be signing with an X, as other fishermen had to do, signing an X and waiting while the merchant wrote the fellow’s name after it.

Once they were home and drinking tea at the kitchen table, the fishing season over except for stowing away the gear, Sam couldn’t keep it in any longer. ‘He should be paying in cash, not credit. We got no way of knowing if his prices is fair.’

‘He’ll see us through the bad times as well as the good. He’ll not have us starve in a year when there’s no fish. You remember that. When the boats come to shore empty day after day, you remember that.’

To Sam’s mind there had to be a better way. From other parts of Newfoundland came word there was.

‘Coaker should be runnin’ a man in the election,’ Sam told his father, treading lightly, it being politics. ‘He deserves a chance.’

‘What’s Coaker got to do with Harbour Main?’

As much as his father might pretend otherwise, William Coaker had a lot to do with Harbour Main.

He and his FPU. A union, Sam was thinking. For fishermen. For Christ’s sake.

Coaker’s Fishermen’s Protective Union which cut out the merchant. Where fishermen bought their own supplies and sold their own fish. That alone should have been enough for Paddy to heed the man, to give Coaker a chance to get his foot in government now that he was leading nine men to run for office.

‘A Coaker man in this district? Talk sense,’ said his father. Meant to be a blunt end to the conversation.

Sam’s focus shifted to his father’s meager, unknowable eyes. Politics and religion, especially a mixture of the two, could cause them to slowly burn.

‘Then vote Liberal,’ Sam said, knowing the possible consequences of saying it, in some ways welcoming them. ‘They’ve formed a coalition, the Liberals and the FPU.’

‘What, and turn me back on me own. You’re not bloody right in the head!’

Turn your back on the Church is what Sam would have countered had there not already grown so broad a gap between father and son, though he as much as said it with the look that passed between them.

The Catholic Church had come down like a hammer on the FPU. The Archbishop of St. John’s said it all in the letter read at Sunday Mass. Said the FPU was “calculated to cause great confusion, and an upheaval of our social fabric; to set class against class, and to end in the ruin and destruction of our commercial and business system.”

Horseshit.

Muttered under his breath when he got home from Mass the next day.

‘Hold that tongue of yours, Sam. For Christ’s sake, hold that tongue!’

Father Shean, the priest who followed Johnny the Whip, had quoted the letter even though the Archbishop had no authority in Harbour Main. Somehow the priest had gotten hold of the letter and read it out, as if the words were a papal encyclical, direct from Pius X.

Sam kept at it. ‘Coaker’s got a man running in Port de Grave.’

‘For what bloody good that’ll do ya!’

‘I’m goin’ to the rally. I’ll hear for meself what he’s all about.’

‘Father Shean’ll have something to say about that when he hears. Mark my words.’

‘He’s not gonna hear.’

Not unless his own father told him. Or Margaret blurting it to one of the nuns at school, as if it were a sin not to tell.

Margaret was so full of the Church that Sam told her she’d lost her common sense. She had all the makings of a nun herself and there was no doubt in Sam’s mind that was where she was headed, even if she wasn’t about to admit it.

Margaret was a nervous sort, for no sound reason as far as Sam could tell. She cooked and took care of the house, catered to her father hand and foot, and seemed to have no time for anything else, except schoolwork. And whereas schoolwork for Sam had always been something he made time for reluctantly, for Margaret there was no getting enough of it. Her one relief from the drudgery around the house. Sam doubted she was the smartest in her class, but she applied herself rigorously. Schoolwork became her constant source of pride and she never failed but come away with the top marks.

There was a lethargy to their conversations that only grew more pronounced when Sam had finished with school. The pair had even less in common. Sam willingly adopted the expectations of his father, of Margaret cooking his meals and cleaning up after him. She washed and dried his clothes, and Sam did nothing to dissuade her. In some ways she became more a servant than a sister.

If the talk at mealtimes was something beyond their fishing life, she might show some interest, but then again she was just as likely to nod and offer a half smile, before going back to her kitchen routine. He suspected Margaret had a world in her head he would never be privy to, that willfully excluded him.

Sundays were the one exception. On Sundays Margaret took control. It was she who saw to it that the two men in the house were up and fed and looking their best before the walk to Mass. It was she who made sure they each knew what day it was on the church calendar and what the Lord had endured on that day. Sam went along with it, if only because it allowed Margaret so much satisfaction to have her small enclave of Kennedys give a good account of themselves before the priest.

If Paddy was generally mute and did little more than mumble the responses during the service, it was no different than what it had been for years. And if Sam endured the service with hardly a change of expression, at least he was there. Margaret’s devoutness and earnest singing voice more than made up for the rest of the family. When the service was over and they encountered Father Shean on the church steps, the priest fussed over Margaret without reservation. She swelled at his attention. It left her feeling that much closer to God, Sam suspected, and deservedly so, since she put so much effort into it. He just wished he had a sister who might laugh unexpectedly or find the nerve to contradict her father when he did something that irritated her as much as it did Sam.