WHEN MY FATHER had put in enough years on the south-coast run to quit if he wanted to, he did. He worked now in a federal Fisheries laboratory that had been part of the U.S. Army base in the Second World War at Pleasantville, St. John’s, a place of converted barracks and dormitories and squat three-storey wooden buildings constructed by the Americans for a war that, for all they knew, would last for decades.

That science could not save or even much improve the fisheries he had by this time known for years. He performed on a rote basis quality-control tests on samples of fish collected around the island by younger men who told him he had no idea what their lives were like. He became so adept at it that he could think of other things or even think of nothing while he worked. It seemed to him sometimes that he was the opposite of everything he wished to be. All he wanted was to spend his days outdoors, away from microscopes, Bunsen burners, beakers, test tubes.

My father and his brothers, almost every morning from the age of ten, fished for hours with their father before they started school, as much part-time fishermen as he was. When they came back into the Pool and landed their catch, they walked down the road to the schoolhouse past Most Holy Trinity Church on the landward side of the road, and their father went up the hill to the forge behind his house and began his other job. They had all been working for five hours by the time the school bell rang at nine o’clock.

He had not been at sea for seven years, had not been fishing for thirty, but my father shaped his day like the fisherman he once was, rising every morning he was able to at four o’clock, the time his father used to wake him and his brothers in the years they spent together on the water. At no time of the year was the sun up at four in the morning. Every day began in darkness. It was important to him that it did. It was important to him that he not begin his day getting ready for work, that work he disliked not be his reason for rising when he did. He had at least that much control, was to that degree at least not fatefully bound by his ill-chosen profession.

Then, too, there were the dreams he had. For some reason, he had his worst dreams when he slept past four o’clock. He told me that he dreamed of his father. Sometimes that he and his father and brothers were about to wreck on Ferryland Head, which they had many times come close to doing. He dreamed of the time he and his father lost the sled when they were cutting ice, when he walked for hours not knowing that his spleen was ruptured. My father, lost in the dark wood of his dreams, called out to his father while my mother lay beside him, trying as gently as possible to coax him into wakefulness, whispering his name. “Art, Art, wake up.” He always woke with a start, the bed shaking as if he had just dropped into it from some great height.

I was eighteen, attending college in St. John’s. Every morning when I got up I found him standing at the kitchen window, the day for him already hours old. He loved to have the house to himself when it was dark outside. Wearing slacks but barefoot and shirtless, he would lean on the kitchen counter, side-on, just to the right of the sink into which he tipped the ashes of his cigarettes as he looked out the window, waiting for the first lightening of the sky above the Shoal Bay Hills, watching the hills themselves come into view, a rolling horizon a shade darker than the sky above it. He stood there looking out the window for hours.

At seven o’clock, he started his day again and ours for the first time by turning on the radio, which was always tuned to the CBC. (Joey was gone, the CBC no longer off limits.) He listened to the marine forecast as if it still mattered to him how high the waves would be that day and what the chances were of freezing spray and when the tides would ebb and flow. He noted it all in his journal/log, was often still writing in it when we came out for breakfast. He kept a meteorological diary, and to his weather observations appended notes in ship’s-log form throughout the day. “February 9, 1976. Snow flurries and drifting snow. Had to dig the car out. Snow with southeast winds expected by mid-afternoon, changing to rain overnight. Wayne home from school with flu. Because of storm, Mom taking day off too…”

He took an early retirement at the age of fifty-five. “The fish will soon be gone,” he said, as if by way of explaining his retirement. He and his co-workers had been telling their superiors for years what the fishermen had been telling them. The fish would soon be gone. And perhaps their superiors had been telling their superiors. No one knew for certain. Nothing was done. And then one day — and it seemed to happen that suddenly — the fish were gone.