Claudia Gahlinger

Harvest

Scullerymaids

The morning was a beautiful bottomless bowl but empty. So empty it could make you forget you’d ever felt that sudden blooming, that sense of being on the verge — when you’d caught something miraculous — of knowing the ocean whole. This feeling, if it made a sound, would go wommm, as in woman, and womb. Like marsupials we could carry the sea in our bellies.

This morning might in truth have been full, teeming with timid, suspicious or aloof codfish and untold millions of mysteries. But I doubted it. For months now Ariel and I had been catching codfish, making a living at it. But it was easy to forget this. Slouched on the gunnel, yanking at the line, I examined my boots all morning for possible defects. Found none of those either.

Into the emptiness crept fishermen’s opinions. Two women together are two women alone. And women alone who venture out to sea in a twenty-foot open boat are a sly mocking at Potency. Women will wander cheerfully into squalls. Sit patient over schools of mud and sea urchins. Catch nothing but dogfish and then feel sorry for them.

We just don’t belong on the water. Some say alone, some say at all. Our flesh is too soft, our will too weak, our body cycles are embarrassing. Then there’s our need of a bucket and privacy to pee in instead of pissing manly over the side —.

It may be true about the peeing, but the rest is a private matter between ourselves and the sea, isn’t it?

Ariel held herself proud all this while. She gazed at the mountain-lines unperturbed, a professor interpreting emptiness her own way. “People think fish are our evolutionary inferiors,” she said. “But when you’re sitting in a boat like a lonely corner at a party you recognize them for what they are: guileless. Enviably simple. Such unity of purpose. It’s ironic,” she added, “to love the fish yet want to kill them.”

I didn’t want to kill them, of course. Just catch them. And sell them.

I was praying to the line again, Oh make this beautiful bowl full, when Ariel jerked forward, pouncing on something invisible. Then she relaxed and began to draw light and quick. “Oh,” she said, disappointed before even a first glimpse.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, still drawing. “Something that wriggles. Flutters. Too light for a codfish.”

Sea cucumber. Sea urchin. Sea butterfly: that would be a change.

“Probably a pollock,” Ariel said.

Oh the little pollock. Mediocrity of the sea. Grey, soft and frivolous, forever ready to hop aboard unasked. Since they’re not worth a cent at the size we catch them we work pollock off our hooks and send them home. Mediocrity, damaged in transit. Must we mark this day with a small act of sadism?

But breaking free of water the silver rising on Ariel’s line proved to be something entirely different. A shimmying, rich-coloured jewel flew off her hook and hit the deck.

“Well . . . ” came Ariel’s stuttered laugh.

Wommm. It was a Persian fish. An Arabian Nights fish. A smooth bar of cobalt blue with emerald stripes, faint opal rainbows on its silvery underside. For a second it held still, as if shocked or amazed, then began to swim hard, drumming sidelong across the deck.

Curtains of myth and fairy tale fell sheer before my eyes. I thought, This must be the kind of fish that carries a ring in its belly. A golden ring, inscribed with a plea for help: there’s a queen, and she’s labouring under a curse that keeps her a scullerymaid. And rescuing the queen would in turn release us from catching fish. This happy, humble task with its hideous aspect: diverting creatures each from its own urgent message about life.

We dropped our lines again but no reply. Still. “They’ve started to come into the bay,” said Ariel happily. “Too bad we don’t have our mackerel jigs. We might as well head in.” She pulled at the outboard cord and pointed the Anicca’s bow at the channel mouth, three or so kilometres distant. “Here, you steer,” she said. Then, “Mackerel. Great. I’ll fillet it for lunch.’’

Which she did, tossing the guts to the gulls.

No sign of a ring. If there was a queen she would go on as a scullerymaid. And we would go on fishing.

Mackerelle

They began to swarm into the bay under cover of water. Sometimes when they rose up we’d see their schooling agitation from shore: dark patches of them, frittering near the surface. Close up from aboard the Anicca they appeared as a broad, sinister slashing like an arena of miniature sharks fighting.

We would venture out in the early dark. Motor over a calm sea. Pull on dayglo orange mackerel gloves made for men with immense fingers, the insides cool and clammy from the day before. Unwind lines strung with five hooks and a lead weight into the water. As it slithers down, drifts down, meanders, dawdles like a leaf from a tree, you give the line random yanks. Because, while codfish gravitate to the bottom, mackerel shift up and down as if they were adrift themselves.

“Nothing here,” Ariel would say. “We’ll try further out.”

Try again. This time the slithering line buckles to nothing, the lead weight has been stolen clean away — no, a sharp tug reveals that the knaves are caught.

“Here they are,” Ariel whispers.

This is surely a hair-raising business.

A blind quivering sense of them, like intuition or dream memory or words on the tip of the tongue, rises reluctant — surrendering — rebellious. Some stealthy hand-over-hand hauling and they appear at last: one or two shards of silver, spiralling. Draw against them, with them, against them until they break clear of their element. Hoist them in and flip them off the hooks. They bang against the deck — hold still for a second — then begin drumming, vigorous and uncanny.

Drop the line again quick. Hoist and drop, haul and shake, the fish spin across the deck five and one and three at a time. When we’ve let down our hooks again and again catching fish every time, “Here we are,” Ariel will say, meaning we’re not just transient over a random scatter of mackerel now but afloat over a school of them. I imagine them rippling in the current like a field of silvery oats in a breeze.

So we fish. And so we drift. And so we forget who or where we are. Until sometimes, looking up, we find ourselves among other boats like a parking lot of wobbling cars, all occupied by fishers bringing in mackerel. Families, all ages and sizes. Married couples jigging side by each. Great splinter-sided hulls holding crews of three or four men, all surly and shy. I steal glimpses of their labouring and try to learn.

Old-time fishers move without doubt. They haul the mackerel out of the water easy as lifting a clothesline strung with flimsy slippers. Holding the line in a two-handed arch they give it a sharp jerk that sends a rain of slippers to the deck, then scurry the line into the water again, all without having caught those flying needle-fine hooks in their shirt cuffs or on the gunnel ridge or in the bare skin of their wrists, let alone snarling them in among themselves like a catfight the way I will mine.

Ariel stands beside me, a benign and single-minded huntress. Her back straight, her muscles sure, she lifts and sheds fish from her line in earnest.

Me, I like to see the fish as music. Lift the line high, feel their pull and know their weight — their vigorous, portentous music — in every muscle. Bring the line down like a conductor signalling the entire orchestra to pounce on a chord and every note comes down brilliantly. Sometimes this works.

All together our boats bob amiably. It’s a country dance: we hang out in the fishlot, dancing a syncopated jig. Doing The Mackerelle. Haul and thresh, haul and thresh — it is a dying art, small-time fishing being a failing economy. The seiners can scoop up fish in two-ton mouthfuls. But this looks and feels graceful as any act of harvest or animal of prey. Why do all the small fine movements have to end?

Frenzied onslaughts of them end all too soon. Boats disperse to new spots. We drift over flutters — brief showers — mere spits of fish, sharp and flighty as déjà vu. Then nothing, again. The abrupt and dreaded nothing.

To lose a codfish as it spirals up on your line is despair and abandonment. But a drift of mackerel interrupted brings giddy frustration. Breathlessness. The blues.

“We’ve wandered out of their pasture,” I say. “We’ve drifted apart. Grown estranged. The sea is sad cowboy country. The fish are a hurtin’ song.”

A skipper’s job is to counter their crew’s addlebrained remarks with common sense. Ariel scans the water. “It’s our featherbaits,” she decides. She means these new ones with the long red and yellow plumes. “The fish are down in the saloon, saying. Think we’re cheap? And laughing. That chilling mackerel laugh.” She shudders. “That bloodcurdling. Mackerel. Cackle.”

You’d never guess Ariel was old enough to be my mother. Well, nearly.

Bells ring in my armpits, in my hands. We could fill this emptiness easy: yell at the mountains like seagulls, like one-year-olds. If there were trees around we could forget the fish — or forget the trees, we could swing from each other’s limbs, hollering and cheeping like monkeys.

A drizzly calm morning. Anicca carried us out the channel onto the sea. Tired, we moved between two greys: heavy dark of ocean asleep, damp light of air awakening, both of them soft to the eyes and skin as a herring gull’s feathers.

Far ahead of us the pretty two-tiered seiners floated like fogged wedding cakes toward the horizon. Closer ahead the small boats — humbler predators — forayed toward the Point or the lighthouse, the two destinations a dozen kilometres apart.

Ariel might decide to join them. But first and as usual she would check near the green buoy, just half a mile from the channel mouth. “If the fish are biting,” she liked to say, “why not get them close to home?”

So close here we could see the house up on the hill and wonder which of us forgot to turn off the kitchen light.

Anicca still in a curve of her settling, we let down our hooks.

Unwind the line reluctantly. Down into dreams below, under the hull, in fearful darkness. How can we know what lurks down there, waiting to foist itself on us, emerging monstrous out of our own imaginations?

Ominous nothing turned to conundrum quick. The lines went slack as though the leads had been bitten off. Tug at them and a weight grabs heavy, the line swoons — wommm — heavy as the drag of gravity when the earth seems to draw the blood down from your womb, nearly drawing you to your knees, only now there’s no ache only ponderousness, your senses all plunge underwater.

“Here they are,” Ariel gasped.

Strain at them. They give in — resist — give in and break into air at last, mackerel after all, and “Hoo! They’re big.”

Shun them from the hooks onto the deck. No hesitation but they begin thundering, awesome and unnerving as black and grey bars of iron knocking on your bedroom floor in the night.

We dropped our hooks again. They were taken so fast the lines swooped in great arcs through the water.

“Here we are.”

Time to harvest. Bring in the sheaves. Thresh the fish from the lines, saying “Hoo,” and “Huh,” and “Aah . . . ” with relief as every knot in the mind is undone.

In happy labouring there is no haste or delay . . . . The morning passed out of time . . . .

The deck was blue and silver, drumming and fibrillating and rumbling with slapping fish when Ariel looked up. “Whoa,” she called out. That stuttering laugh.

The current had nearly hauled us up against the green half-mile buoy. Close enough for introductions. But Ariel just repeated, “Whoa.” As if the buoy were going anywhere. Portly it sat. Colossal, blinking, ironic. Ariel started the outboard; we went bowing back-ward out of its presence.

We filled the hiatus with long-neglected chores. Blow the nose and doff the cap. Shed and bundle the oilskin jacket. Take a quick look around at the day.

The mist had lifted, the sky was a soft high haze. The hills had turned green. The lights of the village had blended with daylight. Breakfast time. Prayer time. The houses and St. Mary’s Church were a dream of habit and faith. Land was the place where you could imagine God protecting you.

The sea was placid enough, though. And apparently empty. Boats from the Point were motoring toward the lighthouse. Boats at the lighthouse had decided to try for the Point.

Complacent now as a brood hen the Anicca turned and settled again.

We dropped our lines; they collapsed and tensed. Whatever fish are wont to do when wise to one’s tricks or indisposed or just not hungry any more, these fish had not done. No.

“Queens for a Day,” Ariel gasped, hauling her line with dayglo pinkies extended.

“Patient as a Mackerel, they say.”

“Forgiving as a Mackerel. Patient as a Pollock.”

Their silver turned visible now just two or three fathoms down. The whole field had risen.

Boat and all, the morning turned into a recurring dream. Our restless tossing and threshing brought ever more shimmying protest, more jubilant slaughter. Jolt the line, the fish fly, fish come apart at the gills. The joy of harvest side by side with the horror of killing makes for an impossible dance that sheds the mind again and again. No place for thought, just the pride of the hunter in the rhythm of her body.

The mackerel kept crowding our lines and they were still hefty ones. They were beginning to be an illustration of that saying, Be careful what you wish for you might get it.

Not shunned any more at the party but backed into a corner by nonstop talkers we began to sigh and roll our eyes. Our patience turned saint-like. The fish were tireless petitioners. They crept up our boots, rumbled three deep on the deck, spattered blood water.

The nylon line was wearing out my thumb and jigging finger. It creased the glove into the groove worn into my hand by the line creasing the glove, and more fish were waiting below.

It’s like the tyranny of a narrative line, I thought. Moving forward, forward, forward can seem just like standing still. Then why do people prefer stories with plots over ones that drift, spiralling over fish or no fish?

The sun stood near noon. The water’s rocking and the day’s warmth gentled us toward sleep. Ariel and I each slogged through the fish once to lie down on the bow. We jigged languidly for a while, staring at the sky. There’s a game adults should play more often: you rest your head on each other’s bellies; when one of you starts to laugh the others are done for. Lying back on the bow, Ariel and I rumbled the same way.

A song would help us counter this lullaby. A hearty chant, like the chant of women washing clothes in a river, or pounding roots for flour. Or swishing and thumping new-woven cloth in a milling frolic. But we couldn’t manage a syllable.

Dream a wish-fulfillment dream about not mackerel fishing. Hot, weary-boned, sore-muscled, it was time to wake up. The mackerel were up to our calves now, trapping us. We were fishing on the spot, and who’d caught whom?

The Anicca no longer rocked. She wobbled and heaved.

“Maybe we’ve done it,” I said. I meant, maybe we’d caught more than our share. Maybe, according to some universal law, we had gone over the limit. This mass of fish was about to shift, rolling us over. Hell is a place where harvests go to waste.

“Maybe,” Ariel agreed, following her own train of thought. Hoisting another full line luxurious as an Amazon she sighed and said, “Is there no rest.”

Close on the heels of her lament a gap opened. For a moment our hooks hung idle. Ariel hauled hers out lickety-split. “Wind it up,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The day had blossomed. An oblique sun shone through the haze. Warm breezes billowed over blue water. Hefty Anicca’s prow cut proudly into the sea heading home.

I could let go the narrative line right now. Here at the happy prospect of home. But what is a caught fish without a boast? And what about the waiting wharf hands?

“Wait’ll they get a load of us,” I said.

“We should frown,” said Ariel. “Look bored, tough, disgusted. We wouldn’t want them to think we’re gloating.”

“Right.”

Anicca wallowed into the channel, a cornucopia bearing our harvest, our silverblue and bloodred charnel. Then she heaved into the wharf’s shadow, and something odd happened: as if at the flick of a shutter, the jewel fish turned black and white as commodities.

We were the first boat in. Jack, Cyril and Jimmy emerged from the Co-op office and the ice room. They gathered overhead. Their eyes widened; their mouths opened; their hands reached out to grab our lines. “Jesus,” muttered Jack. “Better get the shovels,” said Jimmy.

Ariel and I busied ourselves with this and that, scowling murderously the whole time. Until — look here.

Old Mary Alice MacNeil, on her after-dinner stroll, had come floating up behind the guys. Her eyes were black and warm and bright. Her teeth grinned like monuments. Her husky voice gusted over to us, not wearing a shred of decency.

“That’s right,” she shouted. “You show these guys you can do it!”

So we broke open our happiness. We shovelled our mucky fish into boxes and got them hoisted onto the scales.

“A jesus ton,” Cyril reported, at which Jimmy offered smokes.

We all sat around puffing for a while, not saying anything, just nodding the occasional decisive nod and grinning. Then Ariel started the outboard and turned Anicca around.

Light as plumed fancy featherbaits we glided back onto the sea. Washed the bloodslush out the scupper. Scrubbed the mire of scales from our oilskins and doused each other clean, sending a gasp of cool down the neck in mischief and in gratitude.

Oh but lucky Queen. Oh but lucky us —