A Whale for the Killing Read online

  It had also acquired a town council. It had a mayor—the owner of the fish plant. He was a man after Smallwood’s own heart, and one whose motto might well have been “What’s good for me is good for Burgeo.” Since the town council was chosen for the most part from among his employees, or his sycophants, he encountered little opposition.

  There was also a fine new school built to mainland standards and staffed with “modern” teachers who were skilled at denigrating the old ways, rejecting the past and arousing in their students the lust for the golden dreams of the industrial millennium.

  The people of the Sou’west Coast, and of Burgeo in particular, were “hauled into the twentieth century” so speedily that few of them had any understanding of what was happening to them. The age-old patterns of their lives collapsed in rapid succession. The inner certainties which had sustained them in past generations were evaporating like water spilled on a red-hot stove. But not all Burgeo people failed to grasp the significance of what was happening to them. Some of them understood.

  There was Uncle Bert, for example. He lived with his “Woman,” as he always referred to his wife, in a tiny but im-peccably neat little house a stone’s throw from us at Messers. In the evenings Uncle Bert would sit at his oilcloth-covered kitchen table listening disdainfully to a squalling transistor radio as it yammered out the daily tale of hate and horror, of suffering and disaster, which it offered as the news of the world.

  When the tale was told, Uncle Bert would switch off the radio, pour himself half a glass of straight alcohol (smuggled in from the offshore French island of St. Pierre), top it up with boiling water, add a spoonful of sugar, and toss the mixture down in a couple of gulps. Then, bald head shining with sweat from the effect of the “alky,” big, twisted hands gesticulating in the light of the oil lamp, he would bellow out his derision.

  “By the Lard livin’ Jasus, dem mainland fellers is gone altogether foolish! Foolish as a cut cat, me son! And de great joke onto it... dey don’t know it! Dey got to tinker wit’ every goddamn t’ing dere is... and everyt’ing dey tinkers wit’ goes wrong! And dat, me darlin’ man, dat’s what dey calls pro-gress!

  “Dey says dey’s makin’ a heaven on dis eart’ for we. But de troot onto it is, dey’s headin’ dereselves and all of we for hell, in a hoopin hurry-all. Smart? Oh yiss, dey do believe dey’s de smartest t’ings God put on dis old eart’... dem politicians and dem scientists, and all dem fine, big-moneyed fellows. But I’m tellin’ ye, byes, de codfish and de caribou, dey’s ten t’ousan’ times smarter in de head. Dey got de sense to lave well enough be. Dey’ll niver blow up de world; no, nor pizzen us all to deat’... Bejasus, byes, I t’ink de healt’s gone right out of we!”

  It was not gone out of Uncle Bert. At seventy-six he still went fishing single-handed in his dory, winter or summer, whenever the fish “were on the go,” even though he and his Woman between them had an ample income from their old- age pensions.

  “I goes because I got to fish! ’Tis what I wants to do. ’Tis out dere, on de sea, dat’s where I wants to be. Dat’s where I knows what I is, and who I is... a damn good man, and I ain’t feared to tell it!”

  He minced no words in describing what he thought about the new way of life in Burgeo. “Dem poor bloody bastards as works to de plant! Workin’ for wages and t’inking deyselves some lucky! I’ll tell ye what dey is, me sons... dey’s slaves. No better dan slaves! And de wors kind of slaves, ’cause dey’s grateful for a chance to work for de owner in dat stinkin’ shithole down to t’Reach for de rest of dere lives, so’s dey can buy some goddamn t’ing is no more use to dey dan legs is to a fish! Cars, byes, and tely-veesion. Sewry poipes and houtboard ingines! Dem fellers don’t know who dey is no more... dey only knows what dey wants! And what dey wants is enough to bloat a hog until he busts. Dey’s comin’ out no different from all de people up along in Canada and America. Dey wants it all! And so dey gets de chance, dey’s goin’ to take it all. And den, by de Lard livin’ Jasus, dey’s goin’ to choke dereselves to deat’ on dere own vomit!

  “Sometimes I tinks de lot of ’em should be in de Mental.* Whatever dat plant owner fellow tells ’em, dey eats down as slick as cold boiled pork. But he don’t give a bloody damn for dey. One marnin’ dey’ll wake up wit’ nothin’ left ’cept a razor for to cut dere t’roats.†

  * * *

  *The St. John’s Mental Home, an obsolete institution for the deranged, in St. John’s.

  †In the late summer of 1971 the workers at the fish plant finally struck for union recognition. This was refused them. When they persisted, the plant owner simply closed down the plant and departed, lock, stock and barrel; abandoning the plant, his job as mayor, and Burgeo itself.

  Preferring not to face the stench of Firby Cove, I landed at the slightly less malodorous Ship Dock and, leaving Albert to look for rats among the accumulation of garbage on the shore, made my way through a crowded and slovenly collection of shacks and shanties to the brand-new post office which had become the prime symbol of Burgeo’s new goals. It was box-square and ultra-modern, built of brick and glass and chrome—the only such building on the entire Sou’west Coast. It had been built during my absence abroad, replacing a cosy, crowded room in one of the old wooden houses where the mail had been sorted and distributed for thirty years by Uncle Ted Banfield.

  I was going to miss Uncle Ted, who had been forcibly retired when the new post office opened. He knew more about the Sou’west Coast than any man alive and he was free with his knowledge. On cold winter days he was free with his hospitality too. The long walk from Messers against a winter gale was something to chill the blood of an Eskimo, but it was Ted’s kindly habit to take you into his kitchen and pour you a warming four-finger glass of rum before delivering up your mail. Banfield’s old house had been a place in which to linger, to chat with friends, to hear the local news. The new post office, ultra-sterile under the glare of fluorescent lights (NO DOGS ALLOWED... WIPE YOUR FEET BEFORE ENTERING), was a place to go into and get out of again with the utmost speed. I hardly recognized the pallid and harassed-looking young man who thrust my mail at me without uttering a single word. He was Uncle Ted Banfield’s son.

  Back in the dory I set a return course for home which would take us out and around Eclipse Island and through the deep channel known as Steamer Run. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the whales, but on this fine day they must have gone to sea with the other fishermen, for I saw no sign of them.

  3

  APART FROM OCCASIONAL VISITS TO the post office, Claire and I saw little, by preference, of the eastern end of Burgeo. Messers was our home and we had come to feel very much at home there. We had been given tolerance and friendship by all the families whose trim and cared-for houses stood, well spaced, around the rocky rim of the clean little cove. They were people who had lived all of their lives, even as their forbears had done before them, in this place. They had not yet been much affected by the changes which were so rapidly transforming the rest of Burgeo.

  During the first week after our return we were visited by most of our neighbours; and warm, welcoming visits they were too.

  One of the first to come was Onie Stickland, a sad-faced bachelor of middle age, and one of the few dorymen on the coast still fishing single-handed. Onie brought us a bucket of fresh herring. The herring schools were beginning to run heavily inshore, he told us, and he would be glad to bring us some every day. That about exhausted the conversation since Onie was a listener, not a talker. Shy, gentle, almost pathetic in his eagerness not to be an imposition on us, he was content to sit silently for hours in our house covertly glancing now and again at Claire with an expression of distant adoration.

  Simeon Ballard was another frequent visitor. Heavy-set, bluff-browed and a seaman through and through, he was as loquacious as Onie was reticent. Simeon had been a great wanderer, sailing to the Caribbean in three-masted schooners laden with salt cod, returni
ng with cargoes of salt, molasses and rum. In sail, or in steam, he had visited the great ports in South America, the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Between voyages he had not been idle, for he had sired nineteen children, seventeen of whom were still alive. Although still in his prime at the time of Confederation, he had hardly gone to sea since then.

  He was a soft-spoken and extremely courteous man who made a point of calling me “Skipper” because I owned what may well have been the last schooner in Newfoundland still under sail.

  “Them days,” he meant before 1949, “they was always eight or ten big schooners belonged to Burgeo. Spring and fall we fished the banks, and summertimes we voyaged foreign. ’Twas a hard life, I suppose, but never seemed that way to we. They was a dozen skippermen in Burgeo and no place on the seas they couldn’t take a vessel. Aye, and bring her home again!

  “After Confederation that all went abroad. Seems they fellows in Canada had no use for we. The schooners was laid up to rot and the steamers was mostly sold away. Some of we went at the fishing game, but that began failing too, and so the most of us had to come ashore. ’Twas hard for a man my age—forty I was then—with my master’s ticket and all, and still good for it, but no work to be had.

  “Aye, ’twas hard enough. But they tells we ’tis all for the best. They tells we a man has a better life working in a factory. Maybe ’tis so, but I thanks my God for the life I had at sea.”

  One evening well after dark, when not too many people would notice his coming, we had a visit from Uncle Samuel. He was a whipcord little man whose walnut wizened face betokened his Indian blood. He was not much of a fisherman and, indeed, he did not like the sea; but he was a famous countryman—infamous if you listened to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable who was Burgeo’s arm of the law.

  Uncle Samuel was a hunter and trapper. His world was the bleak, wind-eroded barrens which stretched north from the coast for a hundred miles. On this visit he brought us a huge, dripping brown-paper parcel which contained not one, but several feeds of “country meat,” the euphemism for illegally killed caribou.

  Warming himself generously with my rum, Uncle Samuel talked for hours of the things which were his world. He told us it was a great year for lynx; that scores of the big cats had left the shelter of the distant forests to roam the barrens in pursuit of hares. Moose, he said, were fairly common in the river valleys, but he bemoaned the growing numbers of “sports” (he used the word with supreme contempt) from “down to The Reach” who were using their paycheques to buy magazine-loading rifles with which to kill every moose they saw.

  “’Tisn’t the killing as I minds,” Samuel complained. “’Tis the wicked waste. They fellows now, they’ll go into the country and if they spies a calf or a cow they’ll kill it quick as they would a bull. Aye, and likely nivver carry a pick of meat back out with them.

  “’Tis not like the old times. Them days, if a man was lucky enough to have a gun and shot and powder, and killed a deer, he’d carry ivvery last scrap home to the mouths of his woman and his young’uns...”

  Uncle Samuel paused to shake his head in disgust.

  “’Tis hard times when growed men’ll take on like they does now. ’Tis something new. They’s not a man I growed up alongside would kill more’n him and his folks could use. Now, be Jasus, them fellows down to the plant is all for goin’ gunnin’ ivvery chance they gets, for ivvery thing as crawls, or walks, or flies. Last week some of they killed two gripes* just for the sport onto it. I never heered of ony man shoot one of they before. ’Tis spiteful against nature, ’tis what I calls it!”

  * * *

  *Bald eagles.

  Although most of our visitors were from Messers, occasionally people from “the other end” (the term by which our neighbours obliquely referred to The Harbour and The Reach) also came calling. One afternoon Albert’s stentorian barking brought me to the window. Picking their ways nervously across the footbridge which joins Messers to the rest of Burgeo were five strapping-big saddle horses. The riders were the husband-and-wife doctor team from the Burgeo Cottage Hospital, their two children and their amiable handyman, whom they liked to call their groom. All save the “groom” were impeccably dressed in English riding costumes—jodhpurs, riding crops, hunting jackets and duck-billed caps. They were followed by two of those enormous black woolly mammoths which are called “Newfoundland” dogs but which actually originated in England a century ago.

  The doctors’ family was one of two comprising the Burgeo “aristocracy.” As recent immigrants from Britain, the doctors perhaps considered themselves to be on a higher social plane than the second family, which was that of the fish plant owner. But both were united in their determination to impose the social standards of country gentlefolk on the Burgeo background, and they competed mercilessly for top billing, using the tools of conspicuous consumption. Thus when the doctors bought a jet-propelled speedboat which would do thirty knots, the plant owner responded by purchasing a cabin cruiser of regal splendour. It was an unfair competition. The doctors, as salaried employees of the Provincial Health Service, had to make do on a fixed income not much in excess of $35,000 a year, but this was a pittance compared to the income the plant owner and his wife drew from their several enterprises.

  The competition also had its ludicrous side; one which was not lost on the people of Burgeo. When the doctors went equestrian and imported two riding horses, the plant family riposted by buying four thoroughbreds. The doctors met this challenge by bringing in two more horses and a Shetland pony. The plant owner’s reply was to import four more horses... and a Mexican burro. Then, to settle the matter for good, he added a brace of Peruvian llamas! The doctors gave up and turned the competition into different channels.

  “No telling where ’twould have stopped,” was Sim Spencer’s acid comment. “I don’t doubt they people’d have brung in gee-raffs next, and elephants, ’til they’d have been no room left for we!”

  AFTER A WEEK at home our lives had settled down to the Messers pace and we were beginning to regain the feeling of tranquility which was one of the great benefits of outport living. There was time for long walks along the shores, beachcombing; or for treks into the country where we occasionally glimpsed herds of caribou; or to the Barasway, a saltwater lagoon surrounded by white sand beaches which were much favoured in summer by children’s swimming parties and clam-digging excursions.

  One sunny afternoon Albert and I crossed the precarious suspension bridge—it was barely three feet wide and swung like a skipping rope in heavy weather—that links Grandy Island to the mainland on the west. Together we climbed the steep slopes of The Head, a massive dome of granite towering two hundred feet above the seas breaking against the encrusting ice.

  When we reached the crest it was to find we were not the first to seek this magnificent vantage point, with its horizon-wide sweep of islands and open ocean. Sitting as motionless upon a lip of granite as if he were an extension of the rock was a man whose lean, attenuated figure and hawk-nosed profile belonged to the patriarch of Messers, Uncle Arthur Pink.

  Uncle Art was peering out toward Rencontre Island through the tube of a big brass telescope which must have been even older than he was. At seventy-eight, Uncle Art was another fisherman who clung resolutely to the old ways. His boat was an elegant lapstrake trap skiff which he had built himself and fitted with a thunderous five-horsepower “make-and-break” engine of almost prehistoric vintage. In this little vessel he would go anywhere in any weather. People used to say of him:

  “Dey’s nothin’ to stop that man! He’d sail to hell and pull the devil’s nose if they was fish to be got!”

  But Uncle Art was much more than a master fisherman. He was also a man possessed of an amazingly keen and curious mind. Whatever he saw, heard, smelled or touched became a part of his awareness... something to be remembered and thought about. All his life he had minutely observed everything u
pon the sea and much that lay beneath its surface.

  “Evening, Uncle Art,” I said. (Any time after noon is “evening” on the Sou’west Coast.) “Scunnin’ for whales?”

  He lowered the glass and gave me his slow smile.

  “Aye, Skipper. And isn’t they some smart? See that herring seiner off yonder? Brand-new iron ship, she is... two hunnert tons or more, I’d say. She’s got every modern kind of gear for killing herring. I been watching her work. And half a mile inside of her they’s a pod of whales. I been watchin’ they, too, and I’ll wager they be fishing twice as smart as all that fine machinery, and twenty men besides.”

  He chuckled happily, which seemed a little odd since by all the rules of the game he ought to have been on the side of the fishermen and against any animal which competed with them. However, I knew that Uncle Art was a whale enthusiast. At the age of ten he had begun accompanying his father in a four-oared dory to the dangerous offshore fishery at the Penguin Islands. Here, while handlining for cod, he met his first whales.

  “’Twas a winter fishery them times, and hard enough. The Penguins lies twenty miles offshore. They’s nothin’ more’n a mess of reefs and sunkers, feather-white with breakers in any kind of a breeze, but the foinest kind of place for cod, and herring too. We’d row out there on a Monday and stay till we’d finished up our grub... sometimes ten days. Nighttime, and in bad weather, we’d pitch on the rocks under a bit of sailcloth.