Silver Donald Cameron

Snapshot: The Third Drunk

The man on the left is Phonse. The man on the right is Wilf. The man in the centre appears to be drunk.

Falling down drunk. Head lolling, hair lank. Slumping between Phonse and Wilf. His knees loosely bent. Held up by an arm over Phonse’s shoulders, another over Wilf’s, each of them grasping his hand to keep him from falling. The drunk wears a dark suit. Phonse and Wilf in shirt-sleeves are grinning, grinning too heartily. Even in this dog-eared wrinkled old photograph, the well-dressed drunk looks pale.

Phonse stamps on the plank floor of the Anchor Tavern roaring for another.

“See ’im,” grunts Jud. “Says it’s dear, but he’s havin’ another.”

“Didn’t make beer money today anyways,” Phonse says. “Got just about enough for a chowder, that’s all.”

“Them scales is wrong,” Jud repeats. “We had that old box full up last week and they said it was two thousand pounds. Now we get half-filled and they say fifteen hunnert.”

And the smell: the pungent, malty tavern, the sour reek of the fishmeal plant, sweat and tobacco, and beneath all, like a bass figure in an old song, the salt nip of the beaches and kelp, and cold spray over the stones . . . .

“What the Jesus you gonna do?” Phonse shrugged. “Not like the old days. Didn’t need no money in the old days.” He winks at me. “You should of been here then, boy. By the Jesus, we had some right roarin’ times in them days.’’

“Need money now,” Jud said.

“You can’t starve a fisherman, though,” Phonse insisted. “Old Wilf Rattray used to say that all the time, ye can’t starve a fisherman. D’you mind old Wilf, Jud?”

“Can’t really say so. I was just a kid.”

“He must have drowned in — let’s think now. In the big storm in ’sixty-three, just before Christmas. He was on a wooden side dragger out o’ North Sydney.”

“I was about ten then.”

“Must of been that ’sixty-three storm. Wilf was at Reg Munroe’s wake in ’sixty-two, and there wasn’t anyone from here drowned off a dragger for a couple of years after ’sixty-three, I don’t believe.”

“I got a sort of vague recollection of him.”

“Oh, Jesus, he was a great old boy. Your old dad there, he’d mind him, don’t you, Alfred?”

“Great old boy?” Alfred rumbled. “He was a god-damn Jonah, was Rattray. Black Foot Rattray, we used to call him.”

Phonse winked at me again. “Call ’em Black Foot when they’re so god-damn unlucky their feet get dirty in the bath.”

“Black Foot Rattray,” muttered Alfred, shaking his head.

“Great old fellow all the same,” Phonse insisted. “He wa’n’t so much unlucky as stupid. Sign him on as engineer, he’d go down and tinker with the engine. A tinkerer, that’s what he was. No matter how sweet she’d been runnin’, Rattray’d have her bustin’ head gaskets and burnin’ out bearings the first day at sea.”

“I shipped along of him once,” Alfred declared. “Never again. That was the trip he cut off his finger in the winch, an’ Jesus, he’d already had us back home once with engine trouble.”

Phonse started to laugh. “He was a Jonah, right enough. But he was a barrel of fun at a party. We had good parties in them days.”

Alfred chuckled. “We did so,” he murmured. “We had some parties, all right.”

No bullshit: there is no bullshit in Widow’s Harbour. Drifting along the coast with a little money and no plans, all my futures behind me, I followed the back roads off the back roads and discovered Widow’s Harbour at the dead end of a rocky peninsula thrusting into the Atlantic like an arthritic finger. In Toronto, someone else was editing manuscripts. Someone else was meeting the Senator for lunch at the Westbury. Someone else was agreeing to be at the television studio a little before 3:00 for makeup. Someone else.

As for me, I was sitting on a precarious lobster trap at the end of a sagging wharf, sharing a bottle of Abbey Rich Canadian port ($1.40) with Phonse and Alfred Nickerson. After that there was a dozen of Tenpenny and some talk about gill-netting and long-lining and the lobster season, and then there was some Captain Morgan rum, and then there must have been something resembling a decision not to drive on that night. Around noon the next day I found myself surrounded by clean flannelette sheets with the threads showing, in a small, white, slant-ceilinged room, and when I stumbled downstairs I discovered Phonse’s wife Laura making lunch for the kids who would soon be coming home from school. Laura snickered at my headache and poured some black coffee. Phonse had gone fishing at 4:00 a.m.

“He’s usually away by three,” she said, “but I guess you fellows really tied one on last night. Phonse, he was some full.”

There seemed no reason to leave the next day, or the next, and when I found the shack across the road was for rent, I took it. I could make enough to get by on if I were to run into Halifax every week or so with some radio talks, and I had friends in Widow’s Harbour. It was a good place to read, talk, drink, and grow strong. In the scrubby woods, mushrooms erupted from the spruce needles underfoot. I combed the beaches for driftwood to be converted to lamps for the shack. There were deer and rabbits to be hunted with Purvis, my landlord; nets to be mended with Phonse and Alfred; and radio talks to be written about these things and others. I found I was living comfortably on about a sixth of my Toronto salary, and at that I was making a good thousand dollars a year more than Phonse or any of the others.

Widow’s Harbour can afford no bullshit: It lives too near the bedrock of health and illness, shelter and food, death and tax sales. No one can hide: The snow-filled easterlies and the neighbors’ tongues scour every cranny. Toronto’s bruises soon fade. They are not, after all, catastrophes: On this bare rock, along this open coast, where even death is contemptibly familiar, the loss of a salary or a lover stands revealed as a petty misfortune at most.

“Come on over for some breakfast,” says Phonse, shaking my shoulder, “and get a wiggle on. Supposed to be a blow coming up tonight, but we’ll make a few sets before she hits.”

Two shirts, heavy sweater, pea jacket; long johns, two pairs of pants; extra socks, rubber boots. Crossing the road in the coal black night, slithering on ice, yawning and blinking. Phonse frying bacon and eggs. The kitchen clock: 2:15.

“You usually have bacon and eggs?”

“Me? Naw, just bread and molasses and away I go. Don’t usually have company for breakfast though.”

“For Christ’s sake, Phonse.”

“Stop bitchin’ and eat.”

Down the snowy road to Alfred’s, plastic bags of bread and molasses in our hands. Grunts of greeting, and down to the wharf. Fluffy snow on the Harvey and Sisters, a sweet, forty-foot Cape Islander with a high flaring bow. The Buick V-8 sends a throaty purr through the big hot stack spearing up through the wheelhouse. Frost on the windshield. A light chill wind ruffles the harbour.

The purr turns to a heavy burble as we clear the harbour mouth, line up the yellow leading lights, and make an hour’s straight steaming to the fishing grounds on Widow’s Bank. Desultory talk. Phonse pisses over the side, back in the wide cockpit among the waiting tubs of trawl.

Then overboard go the highflyers, buoys with tall flagstaffs, easy to see even in the eerie predawn, and the trawl pays out, the baited hooks every fathom or so, and a highflyer at the end. Steaming back up the long lines for an hour and a half at sunrise, and hauling in fish.

“Another taxi driver, Jud.”

“Why do you call pollock taxi drivers?’’

“Dunno. We just do, that’s all. Oho! Them big steakers is what we like to see.”

Monkeyfish and dogfish to be thrown back. Cod and flounder. A day of heavy hauling, icy water everywhere, with one coffee break, bobbing around in the fo’c’sle with the engine shut off. As the short day closes in, Alfred spins the wheel, heads Harvey and Sisters toward shore.

And Phonse with a deft slash rips each fish from vent to gill and throws it to Jud, who scoops the guts out and overboard in one swift motion, tossing the fish into the bin in the centre of the cockpit. They gut a fish every six seconds. Every forty feet, regular as dripping blood, the guts hit the ocean, and the gulls come, a few at first, then a crowd, finally a swarm, dropping like dive bombers on the livers and intestines and half-digested mackerel. Ten minutes ago there wasn’t a gull in sight; now hundreds hover over Harvey and Sisters.

The wind is rising, the whitecaps multiply, the promised blow is coming. Numb with cold already, I hunch in the wheelhouse, watching the first flakes of snow fly over the black water. Alfred has swung a hinged bench into place, and sits high behind the windshield, holding her steady by the compass now, back to Widow’s Harbour. Phonse and Jud stamp in, shaking like wet dogs.

“Son of a bitch,’’ Jud observes.

“Yessir,” Phonse agrees. “Yessir, she’s all of that.”

Just outside the harbour, the storm hits: The sea begins boiling, the shriek of the wind sails in above the throb of the V-8. A whitecap foams into the cockpit.

“Self-bailing,” Phonse reassures me. Another whitecap froths over the stern.

“Runnin’ her a little close, Alfred,” says Alfred.

“Save us some scrubbin’,” Jud philosophizes. And we are in, inside the harbour, with the wind down to nothing and the sea no more than a chop. The motor dies down, and Harvey and Sisters idles over to the fish buyers’ dock. After Jud and Phonse fork the fish into the crates for weighing, we will scour the boat clean and bait the trawl for the next day, coiling it carefully in the tubs so it will pay out smoothly.

“What’s the time gettin’ to be, there?” Phonse asks me.

“Two-fifteen.”

“Good enough,” Jud nods. “Be home by seven-thirty, quarter to eight.”

“Might even be time for a beer,” Phonse reflects for a moment. “Do you think, Alfred?”

“Might be,” says Alfred.

You can’t starve a fisherman. In the old days you didn’t need money.

“Why, sure,” says Phonse, draining a beer glass. “Look now, everyone had his own cow, so there was your milk and butter and cheese. Everybody had a few chickens, so there was your eggs and some of your meat. Everybody had a kitchen garden, so there was your vegetables, and the women got enough in preserves — well, you seen Laura’s preserves even now, ain’t you? We got enough there for two years even if we never ever got anything out of the garden this year. And there was always deer in the woods, more ’n now, and rabbits and ducks, sometimes a moose. You didn’t have to be any too fussy about the season then, either. Then you had your wild berries — blueberries and cranberries and blackberries and bakeapples — you ever see bakeapples growin’ wild? They look like a little orange hat on a green spike, just one to a bush, the swamps was full of ’em. Some folks had pigs and sheep, and the sea was always full of fish and lobsters, and we wa’n’t too upset about the season on them, neither.”

“You still aren’t,” I said, remembering an evening with a dozen of the biggest, reddest, juiciest out-of-season lobsters I ever saw.

“So they say,” Phonse countered, with a huge grin. “’Course I wouldn’t know. You take a chance now, you can lose your boat and your car and pay a big fine. I wouldn’t fool around with that sort of stuff.”

“Christ, no,” I said shaking my head. “Wouldn’t be worth it.”

Alfred burst out laughing.

In the old days, the cows were put out to summer pasture on Meadow Island, in the harbour mouth. You took a rowboat and two men: One rowed, and the other held the cow’s head up, and the cow swam over to the island. Horses will swim without coaxing, but you have to help a cow.

“I mind one time,” said Phonse, “I had to go get the cow at the end of the summer. Well, Jesus! Spent two days on that god-damn island and do you think I could catch that old son of a whore? No sir, couldn’t get near it. ’Course I always hated that Christly cow. I’m not a goddamn farmer, I’m a fisherman. But my old mom, she hadda have a cow, so of course I hadda get it out to the island in the spring and back in the fall. But I couldn’t even catch the bastard.

“So I come back with six other fellows and a motorboat, and we cornered the bugger and put a rope around her neck and led her down to the beach, but when we got her there do you think she’d go in the water? Not on your Jesus life she wouldn’t. We all got in the boat and sagged on the rope, and she wouldn’t budge an inch. Just dug her old hooves down in the sand and that was that.

“Well, I got mad. I said to myself, I don’t care if I kill that cow or break its neck or whatever the hell happens I don’t care. So I cracked the old throttle full out, and I let out all the slack and went roarin’ out into the harbour, and that rope come taut and ’bout jerked that cow’s head right off. She drove her hooves down in the sand to the knees and then she buckled, just come a-flyin’ up in the air like a cork out of a bottle and hit the water about thirty feet out. I never let up on the throttle one bit till I got to the other side, I like to drowned that fuckin’ cow, and she was comin’ up and down and sideways and wallowin’ around, her eyes buggin’ out, you never saw anything like it. Jesus, I said to myself, that’s the last time I ever have anything at all to do with that cow; and it was. Vet killed her before the next spring come around.”

I was laughing too hard to speak.

“It’s true, honest to God. And we had some parties, too.”

“We did,” sighed Alfred. “Oh, I guess we did.”

“Remember that time Muriel Naugler and Loretta O’Leary got loaded at the beach party?”

“Lord, Lord,” said Alfred.

“Jesus, that was some funny. The two of them got lit, and Loretta, she’d been foolin’ around with Harry Naugler, and Muriel started to come onto her about it. So Loretta gave her a scandalizin’, said if she was any kind of a wife to him there wouldn’t be nothin’ anyone could do about it, and Muriel — well, I guess she got right savage wild then. So she starts screamin’ about how she’s got a dose of clap from Harry bringin’ it home from Loretta, and Loretta says it was Harry give it to her in the first place, so who’d he get it from, that’s what she wants to know, and before anybody can say Boo they’re clawin’ at each other and tearin’ off each other’s clothes and pullin’ hair and I don’t know what all, and they’re practically bareass to the weather — and all the guys standin’ around, you know, and cheerin’ and watchin’ and havin’ the finest kind of a time.”

“What a night,” sighed Alfred.

“’Twas the women broke it up, but it must of took ’em a good half hour. Those days,” Phonse explained, “used to have parties someplace or other every night, practically. Nothin’ else to do. There wa’n’t no television, and you couldn’t get nothin’ on the radio, and the movies was a travelin’ affair, used to come here once every two weeks, so what else could ye do?”

“The wakes was the best,” Alfred opined. “D’ye mind Reg Munroe’s wake?”

“Guess I do,” declared Phonse. “’Twas me picked up the coffin.”

The cable from Halifax was very specific: TRAWLER ATLANTIC STAR RAMMED AND SUNK BY FREIGHTER HALIFAX HARBOUR, it said, REGINALD MUNROE KILLED STOP REMAINS SHIPPED CNR MONKSTOWN CHARGES COLLECT STOP PLEASE ARRANGE COLLECTION REMAINS YOUR END STOP SINCEREST REGRETS DEEPEST CONDOLENCES THIS TRAGEDY STOP CORONER CITY OF HALIFAX.

Phonse had been living with Reg’s sister Alice, and while Alice comforted her mother, Phonse offered to take his pickup truck the fifty miles to Monkstown and bring Reg’s corpse home.

“Lord dyin’ Jesus, I’ll never forget it,” said Phonse. “I got down there about noon, and didn’t they have him standing on his head in the freight shed? They had boxes of stuff and bales and rolls of linoleum and bicycles, and tucked away right in the middle of it was old Reg, standin’ on his head. I said to the agent he might at least let the fellow lie down, but he said he was stuck for space, it was just before Christmas, you know, and the shed was right jammed. It looked some strange, though, that coffin standin’ on its head in all that pile of stuff.” Phonse waved his glass in the air. “I believe I’ll have another.”

“Me too,” said Jud. “Phonse, I been wondering if there ain’t some way we can get them scales checked.”

“Dunno,” said Phonse. “We could try, I guess.”

I tried to imagine that trip home over the twisting road to Widow’s Harbour with the corpse of your woman’s brother behind you in the truck. Tried to imagine how you would secure it against the swings and bounces of that unkempt gravel road. What would the coffin look like? Plain, no doubt; would there be places to tie ropes?

The road winds through fifteen miles of forest with hardly a house to be seen, nothing but scrubby evergreens in low, folding country. Perhaps it would have been snowing, isolating Phonse and the corpse in a moving dome filled with drifting white flakes, settling a coating of fluff on the coffin so that in the truck’s lights it would seem, as you looked over your shoulder through the rearview mirror, as though the coffin were becoming vague in outline, but alarmingly larger. The truck would be slipping and slithering around rock outcroppings, over little wooden bridges, past the entrances to abandoned logging roads. The coffin growing and fading.

Reg Munroe, fisherman. Alice’s brother. Dead, as you could be dead yourself any day of your working life. Drowned. Lying back there in the box of the truck, cold and bloodless, chewed up by the big blade of some freighter.

The road comes down to the shore at Owl’s Cove, a handful of houses clustered around a gas pump. The winter night comes down, and nothing shows but a scattered light; and after that, darkness, and surf beside the shore road, flying cloud and wind.

Phonse would have remembered, surely, all the ghost stories: the Spanish galleon in flames that enters one little cove every seventh year, the woman in white seen in the bows of a sinking windship just before a shipwreck, the tales of jealousy, torment, and murder recalled in minor-key folk songs as common as rocks along this shore. Once, fishing in a dragger on the Grand Banks, Phonse had found a human skull and a thigh bone in the nets: some poor sailor or fisherman drowned God knows how many decades or even centuries before, one of those lost at sea whose bodies were never found, nibbled clean by the codfish and sand fleas. The crew had gathered around on the afterdeck, passing the skull from hand to hand, uncertain what to do with it, and finally they had cast it back into the heaving sea whence it had come, to continue its long rest without further disturbance.

Reg Munroe, Alice’s brother, fisherman, in a coffin in the back of the truck, a coffin growing larger as the snow continued to fall and the truck ground along the foaming edge of a cold sea . . . .

“Jesus, Phonse!” I said. “That must have been some spooky ride.’’

“What’s that?”

“Down from Monkstown with that coffin.”

“Nah, shit, there wa’n’t nuthin’ spooky about that. There was three of us went and we took a bottle o’ rum and got right polluted. Nah, somebody had to do it, an’ I had the truck, that’s all.” He pulled at his beer and then wiped his lips on his checked shirt-sleeve. “But I tell you somethin’ that wa’n’t too canny when we got here.”

A mile before Widow’s Harbour they nearly went off the road, swerving to avoid a snow-shrouded figure trudging along. Stopping the truck to give the fellow a proper old scandalizing, Phonse was greeted by a cheery, “Evenin’, Phonse, thanks a lot,” and Jack Kavanaugh climbed into the crowded cab. “What’s in the back?”

“That’s Reg Munroe’s corpse.”

“No,” said Jack. “It ain’t.”

“It is,” Phonse protested. “I picked him up in Monkstown. I got signed papers and everythin’.”

“You look inside?”

“Hell, no.”

“Well, it ain’t Reg.”

“How come you’re so Jesus sure?”

“Well,” said Jack, “Reg’s body come in by sea this afternoon. I seen it. I’m just goin’ in to the wake.”

“Go away.”

“It’s true, Phonse.”

“Snappin’ Jesus Christ,” said Phonse reverently. “Then who the hell have I got in the back of the truck?”

“It ain’t Reg; that I do know.”

“Well, Jesus,” said Phonse grimly. “Soon’s we get to town I think we better have a look at you, stranger.”

Under a streetlight they stopped and opened the coffin. A man’s face stared out at the sky. Snowflakes fell on his eyes: They did not melt. Phonse whistled low.

“My God, it’s Teddy Lundrigan.”

“I didn’t even know Teddy was dead,” Jack marveled.

“Nor I,” Phonse agreed. “But I’d say he is, all right.”

“That was some wake,” Phonse chuckled. “By the Jesus, I was half cut already. I went right wild that night.”

“I’ll never forget you runnin’ down them stairs with your trousers around your ankles,” said Alfred.

“Oh my God, yes. Jesus, Ma Munroe was some savage when she come up and found all four couples ridin’ together in them two beds. Didn’t she take the broom to us, though?”

“Didn’t she?”

“And Alice, she was right owly when she found out about me being up there with Stella.”

“But she wa’n’t nobody to talk. She was married to Buzz when you were livin’ with her, wa’n’t she, and him off workin’ the lake boats in Upper Canada?”

“He always wanted to get me for a divorce,” Phonse said. “But he never did.” He turned to me. “But that ain’t the best of it, or the worse, dependin’ how you look at it.”

“No?”

“Hell, no. See. Later on that night we was just right out of our trees, you know? I don’t think I was ever so full, never ever in my life. And old Wilf Rattray, him that drowned on that dragger, him and I heard that old Reg was cut up some when that freighter run them down. So what d’ye suppose we did?”

“What’d you do, Phonse?”

“We went into the room where the two corpses war, see, ’cause it was one big wake for the two of them, and we took old Reg out of his box and stripped him down. There was nothin’ on his face, but his chest and legs was cut up pretty bad, all black and blue and the chest crushed in. Funny thing to see, all them cuts and him not bleedin’.”

“Jesus, Phonse!”

“Well, hell, we didn’t think old Reg’d mind. I wouldn’t have minded, if it had of been me instead of him in that box. I mean, shit, we was old friends. Anyways, what d’ye suppose we did then?”

“Christ, Phonse, I hate to think.”

“Why, we dressed him all up again, just like he was, and then old Wilf and me, we put one of his arms around each of our necks and had our pictures took.”

“That’s right,” said Alfred, shaking his head. “That’s right. God save us, you did that.”

“Sure,” said Phonse. “Sure we did. I still got the picture.” He drew out his wallet.

The man on the left is Phonse. The man on the right is Wilf. The man in the centre appears to be drunk.