Far Cry, page 9
“Humpbacks was mostly what we were after,” Frank Sr. said. “Down through Georgia Strait.”
Grace nodded. “Whenabouts would this have been?”
“Well, I was fifteen when I started, so that’s, what, ’65, ’66. I stuck it for five years or so before heading south. San Francisco, now there’s a town. Too many Chinamen, mind you, and not enough skirts. Still, I could tell you stories. Not for a lady’s ears.” He grinned. “The strait was about whaled out by then, and anyhow, humpbacks are a bugger to bring in. You can lower and make fast all right, but then they run. Big bull towed a boat I was in for miles in a fog, and then didn’t the bastard give up and sink. Took the ship the best part of a day and night to find us. No fun, is it, Andy?” He slapped the table in front of me. “I say it’s no fun, getting lost in the brume.”
I shook my head, the smoke wagging at my lip.
“Don’t say much, does he?”
“Depends,” said Grace.
“Hey,” said Frank Jr., “what about the game?”
His father’s eyes shifted.
“Hang on,” said Grace. “Wouldn’t be Christmas supper without mince tarts.” She was up again, shuffling to keep from stepping on the dog. “No, pup, you’ve had your supper. Go on, back to your bed.”
“You’re not keeping that mongrel, I hope,” Frank Sr. said. “Wolves at heart, every one.”
“Oh, now.” She found the tarts and carried them back at a dangerous tilt. “Tommy’s mum’s recipe, isn’t that right?”
Tom squinted up at her.
“Your mother’s tarts.”
“Best,” he said. “You make ’em best.”
“Charmer.” She set the plate down and laid her hand to the back of his neck, a gesture that brought a dull pain to my chest. I reached for a tart. It was the first time I tasted mincemeat, and the fatty tang of it caught me off guard. I took another bite. Filling my glass, I swilled the spice over my tongue.
“Bowhead,” Frank Sr. said, swallowing. “Now there’s a whale you want to hunt. Lazy and full of oil. Baleen too, good long plates.” He swung his head Grace’s way. “You ladies gotta have your whalebone.”
She laughed. “Not much call for corsets round here.”
“No,” he said. “I dare say.”
“Bowhead’s the same as a right whale?” Frank Jr. said.
“Close, not the same. Why you think they give them different names.”
The son gave a sheep’s grin. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t think, more like. No, there were still a few rights up around the Aleutians—we’d lower for them while we waited for the ice to draw back. Hardly worth it. The ones that were left were nervous of men. Slap an oar on the water and they were off.” He took a second tart and pushed it into his mouth.
Grace looked pleased. “Better than a whale-oil doughnut.”
“Damn right, Missus.” Frank Sr. wiped a knuckle across his lips. “Tell you what, though, you gotta watch your step around those cauldrons. Whole ship gets greasy when they’re lit.”
He turned his forearm in the light of the lamp. Among the coarse black hairs, a hundred shiny freckles gleamed—a pattern of spatter burns. Grace clucked her tongue. Beside her, Tom gave a delayed shake of his head. For my part, I could think only of the speckled greenling—not the lifeless body but the life before.
“My last season on the Anna May,” Frank Sr. went on, “this dumb bugger of an oarsman is fishing scrap out of the cauldron when he goes in ass over ears.”
Grace’s hand went to her mouth. “No.”
Frank Sr. nodded. “I ought to know, I’m the one who pulled him out. Got this for my trouble.” Leaning back, he dug both hands down the front of his trousers and dragged up his shirt. Grace obliged with a wincing breath. Across his chest he wore a glassy scar, as though the hair there had been polished away. Plenty of hair below it, though. Black curls swirling under his nipples, a dark arrow down his belly’s midline.
The son was sitting forward in his chair, watching a show he had doubtless seen before. “He lived, though,” Grace said.
“Oh, he lived all right.” Frank Sr.’s expression darkened as he drew down his shirt. “I shouldn’t’ve bothered.”
“Don’t say that,” said Grace. “You saved his life.”
“Damn right,” Tom said to his lap.
“Dobbs was his name.” Frank Sr. made a sound in his throat, and I saw the puppy stir in its box. Beside me, the son lowered his face to his drink.
“What?” said Grace. “What happened?”
“What happened, Missus, is that we laid this Dobbs out screaming on deck and doused him with sea water. By then the cook had caught wind, so up he comes from the galley with a can of molasses—”
“Molasses?” said Grace.
Tom nodded. “Hell yes, molasses.”
“I took a smear of it myself.” Frank Sr. patted his chest. “But the cook painted Dobbs all over, and when the bugger looked like a black boy crying for his ma, he dusted him down with flour and made him white again.” His grin flared. “That kept his skin on for the sail down to the doc.”
How long had it been since I had spoken? I took a drink. “So what was the trouble?”
Frank Sr. looked at me. They were your father’s eyes, Kit, your eyes—and they were not. All the spark but not a flicker of the warmth.
“The trouble was that Dobbs was a liar.” He swept his gaze around the table. “I was the one pulled him out of there, right?”
“Right,” Frank Jr. said.
“You seen the evidence. Risked my own skin.”
The son nodded vigorously, and the others along with him. My own head, heavy with drink and the hour, somehow bobbed along.
“That Dobbs, that sonofabitch.” He shook his head. “He said I was the one who pushed him in.”
It was the smallest of movements, a split-second cut of those eyes. What had Dobbs done, I wondered, to single himself out in Frank Sr.’s gaze?
Tom broke the quiet, scraping his chair back and standing, hands spread on the table until he located what sense there was left in his legs.
Grace looked up at him. “All right, love?”
He felt out beside him for the wall. “All right.”
He was wise to take his leave—we had all drunk more than enough. Frank Sr. lifted his glass. “Happy Christmas, Tommy!”
And Frank Jr., like a magpie, “Happy Christmas!”
“Good night, Tom,” I said, reaching for the bottle.
“Christmas,” he said, lurching off through the doorway. “Night.”
9
It was late when the singing began. I remember Grace doing a hymn on her own, the puppy whining when she hit the high notes, making her laugh. And I remember “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” fast the way your father always sang it, with Grace taking the sweet line and Frank Sr. shouting along down low. I kept time banging on the table, but Grace felt sorry for me not knowing the words, and she pressed for a song in my own tongue. You know the one, Kit, you have heard it every Christmas of your life. I was surprised the first time your father asked for it. I thought he would wish to forget that year at the Fortunes’, but it seemed he wanted to paint over parts of it, making a picture he could keep.
I had not heard “Mitt Hjerte Alltid Vanker” for more than twenty years, but when I opened my mouth, it was there. It was eerie, hearing my voice carry the tune alone, my mother and father mouthing along like phantoms. I managed the first verse only, up to Jeg kan deg aldri glemme, Velsignet Julenatt!
Frank Jr.’s eyes were shiny when I fell quiet. Grace too looked as though she might cry.
“Oh, now,” she said. “Wasn’t that pretty?”
“I’ll say.” The father gave a dark smile. “You hit some notes there, Andy-boy. Thought you were gonna strain yourself.”
“What’s it mean?” said the son.
I looked at him. He was beautiful, Kit, you know he was—but it was his spirit, the life he carried inside himself, in spite of the father he served. “My heart,” I said, “my heart always wanders.”
He nodded. “What else? What about the end?”
“The end? The end says I cannot forget you. And Happy Christmas. Happy Christmas night.”
* * *
—
I do not know how I found my way to the cot in the stockroom. I can only thank heaven for that long doze in the Coot—even though it was a fool’s rest that might have delivered me to my death. Without it, who can say how deeply I would have slept after all that good food and drink.
My eyes blinked open in the dark, but I shut them again, thinking the sound was a gull mistaking night for day. Grace told me later how she bit the hand he closed over her mouth. Had she not, I would have rolled over beneath my blanket and sunk back into sleep.
Tom did not wake to the sound of his wife crying out. Her second scream brought me stumbling from my bed. I ran a hand along sacks until I found the door. Lamplight showed the way to the kitchen, and the source of what was now a scuffling, breathless sound. Frank Sr. was jammed up against Grace, bending her back against the kitchen workbench. And yes, his hand was clamped over her mouth.
A single lamp, the wick down low, yet I could see her wide-open eyes. At Frank Sr.’s feet a shadow moved. The puppy was tearing at his trouser leg, and now, given the sudden shout, the needle teeth found flesh. Frank Sr. kicked the animal to the wall, its yowl cut short when it hit.
“Jævel!” I shouted, for a devil he appeared in that light. “Let her go!”
Or was it the son who yelled those words from the door behind me? Or perhaps the two of us bellowing as one?
I reached his father first. As a boy I had clung to my own father’s mare as she ran—that was the feeling of Frank Sr.’s neck in the crook of my arm. His elbow hammered back, driving the breath from my chest, almost knocking me off my feet. He whirled to face me, and Grace slipped like something spilling to the floor. The hand she had bitten was dark with blood. I saw it curl and come hurtling toward my jaw.
“Dad! Leave him!” Frank Jr. grabbed his father’s arm, but Frank Sr. shook him off, kicking out sideways to drop him to his knees.
Grace was up on all fours now, crawling away. The father drew into himself and seemed to grow. I had heard men laugh in the course of their violence, but I had never seen the like of his wordless grin. My body remembered the beating it had taken behind the stables, the raging Swede. I gulped for air. I leapt. We went down in a thrashing pile.
“Enough! Enough now!” I shouted, wrestling free.
“Dad!” Frank Jr. was on his feet again, and for a second I feared a son’s loyal boot in my side. Until I saw what he was seeing—his father no longer moving, that grin filled up with dark.
“Dad?” This time the son came to his knees on his own.
Grace let out a sound. I scuttled across to help her out from under the table, propping her against the wall.
“I’m all right,” she said, her hands feeling up and down her crossed arms. Her dress was torn at the shoulder. Glancing across at Frank Sr., I saw his trouser buttons were undone. Nothing showed at the flap of his long johns—was that not a hopeful sign?
Frank Jr. had picked up one of his father’s hands. He held it as though testing its weight. “He sent me out to the boat,” he said. “He sent me.”
Grace took a shaky breath. “Is he dead?”
“Yes,” I said. “His heart, maybe.”
She nodded, and I helped her up onto a chair. Frank Jr. took one of the blankets she had put out for them, and covered his father head to boots. I opened the stove door and shoved in a log, then filled the kettle and set it to boil. It was then that I heard the whimper. Grace glanced toward the sound. Her eyes had emptied out—she sat under the blessing of shock. I crossed to crouch down where the puppy lay. If anything was broken, I would take care of it. Carry the poor creature outside and swing its skull against the dock.
I showed the puppy my hand, then felt along the small, soft form for any sign of pain. Instead, there came the touch of its tongue. Skygge, I thought, and so he had a name. Shaggy, you called him when you were small, mistaking the sound, She-geh. It was a good fit for a beast in a ragged grey coat, but skygge means shadow, you know that, Kit. I named him for where he lay that night, and for all he had witnessed. For the shade he might have become.
* * *
Last morning on the grounds, and the bacon and bread are all gone. With the coffee coming to a boil, Kit guts the small sockeye she kept back. Her finger hooked under the jaw, she rinses the fish over the side. Laying it beside her on the thwart, she lops off the back fin, turns the blade against the head and runs it down along the spine. Lifting the fillet away, she slices up under the ribs, freeing them in a ribbon of flesh.
That’s the way. Her father, seated by the tiller, letting her learn with his knife. She rests in the memory until it twists, taking her back to the dock. Again she approaches the Dogfish at its mooring. Again she finds him floating, drowned alongside his own boat.
Kit shakes her head to clear it. Another quick rinse, and she takes her blade to the salmon’s second flank. How many fish has she cleaned in her life? Come to that, how many has she eaten? Just about every supper, give or take the odd worn-out chicken or hash of bully beef, the annual stretch of venison while they worked their way through an autumn buck.
Even Christmas called for fish. They celebrated on the twenty-fourth, the way Uncle Anders had done it back home. It started weeks before that, though, when he rowed out to bait his line for a fat ling cod. It was not skrei, he never failed to mention, but it would have to do. Drying the fish was a trick amid winter storms; often he would carry it inside to hang alongside the stove. A stink in the cottage, but nothing they weren’t used to. Nothing to what would come.
When the hinged fillets had the look of two grey boot soles, her uncle would soak them in water for days. Then in lye. Finally, to save poisoning them all, a bath in fresh water again. Kit could look but not touch. The swollen, jellied lutefisk required handling with care.
Meantime, she and Bobbie walked the headland to gather boughs snapped off by snow or rain. They laid them along shelves and windowsills in the cabin and the cottage. They wound two fragrant wreaths. Kit thought up the crowns—smaller wreaths, really, sized to their four skulls. Only the softest cedar tips would do.
She helped her mother on the twenty-third too. Bobbie would catch the chicken and pull its neck, but Kit had the touch for plucking. On the day itself, she was always the first one over to the cottage. Uncle Anders would cook the lutefisk when it was time, but before that there were lefse to be made. “No lumps,” he said as she stood over the pot of steaming potatoes, masher in hand. He was strict about it, running a fork through her work before letting her whip in the butter and cream. She had always been allowed to form the warm little balls, and there came a time when he trusted her with the rolling pin too. He manned the fry pan, though, and that was fine. She could decorate the table with sprigs of spruce. She could spread butter and sugar on the finished pancakes, roll and stack them for the feast.
By then her parents would have arrived, Frank setting down the pickled beans and onions before tramping back out for wood, Bobbie unwrapping the roast bird she’d swaddled like a newborn against the cold. Skygge and later Lys moved between them all, leaning up against a leg, touching a nose to the back of a hand.
Lutefisk in the pan made a smell like an alarm. Frank wouldn’t touch the stuff, but Bobbie always forced down a bite for kindness’ sake. Like her uncle, Kit had grown up with the reeking treat. Soft like so many of the sea’s bodies, slippery. No chewing required. And the taste—not ocean so much as ocean floor, a flavour she longed to know.
Year after year, her father ate both drumsticks off the chicken, leaving the thighs for his wife. With plenty of meat still on the bird, he broke open each leg bone and sucked the marrow. He twisted the neck off at its root and went over it like a cob of corn. There seemed no end to the number of lefse he could pack away.
There was whiskey, of course, and for Kit there was cordial and milky tea. As many chocolate drops and gingersnaps and sugared almonds as they could manage—and more to be had from the store next door. There was singing, and once the hymns had opened their throats, there were stories. What was it about Christmas that got Frank onto whaling? His own father had ranged all over the Nor’west Ground, even hunting sperm whales in the waters off San Francisco Bay. Kit knew the shape of that coastline; Uncle Anders had set her a lesson to trace the continent’s western edge.
“Now that was a hunt.” Her father was wearing the crown she’d made him, a branchlet drooping down over one eye. “Right down to the bottom those buggers go, you know that? After the squid. Not squid like you seen, Kit, more like the size of a skiff.” He held up his plate, a cracked bone rolling onto the table. “Leave a sucker mark this big.”
Bobbie laughed, the window behind her a picture of a winter’s night. “Geez, Frank, you’ll never get her back in a boat.”
“You kidding?” Frank reached for Kit, pulling her by the arm to sit on his knee. “She’s made of sterner stuff than that, aren’t you, Kit?”
She nodded, her mind still on the sperm whale, the headlong descent into the squid’s pale tangle of arms. Not sweet stories—not Christmas stories—but she wanted them. And what did it matter if her father told them as though they were his own?
Up in the crow’s nest on the lookout, the scramble to lower the boats. No time to waste once a carcass was tied alongside—it was all hands on deck to strip the blubber, or the sharks would have the lot. It seemed an impossible feat, even for a ship full of men. Of course, there were times when it was. The eighty-foot blue they lost to a pod of blackfish. The right whale they had to cut free when it stove in one of the boats. The humpback that towed them deep into a fog before it gave up the ghost and sank.
