The wiry man grasps Noble’s hand in a show of strength, introduces himself as the first mate. His name is Spoon. Noble casts his eye down the row of tarnished teaspoons that serve as buttons on the man’s jacket but is drawn back to his face. If he’s going for nicknames, then why not Spot? The man’s left cheek is an obscenity of dark crimson abscess, clusters of puss-filled boils bubbling at the surface. His pupils are pinpricks, and his pale grey eyes glitter. Has pain bled them of colour? It is difficult not to stare. When the captain strides over, Noble is grateful, now he has someplace else to look. The helmsman joins them, his name unpronounceable: Noble can call him Max. The captain points and Spoon heads for the aft cabin. The others follow but Noble hesitates, suspicious. What could be back there that requires his know-how? He scans the deck again. No cargo nets. No coal dust or wood splinters. And no fishy smell. There’s something not quite right about the Esmeralda.
Below in the cargo hold, Noble’s apprehension grows. He has never seen anything like it. At least not strapped to the keel block in a wooden sailing ship.
“It’s an airplane engine.” A water-cooled Liberty V12, the best contribution the Yanks made to the war effort. He wonders where in hell they got it but knows better than to ask. Likely war surplus, same as his truck.
Spoon fixes him with his bleached eyes. “I could’ve told you it was from an airplane, bright spark. Now can you fix it?”
“That depends on what’s wrong with it.” He can’t move it, that’s for sure. The thing must weigh close to half a ton. Which means working down here. He glances around. Ventilation is practically non-existent and the smell of gasoline is making his head thick. He worries there’s a leak somewhere. Worries there’s a bloody big gas tank sitting over their heads.
“May I?” He holds out his hand for Spoon’s flashlight, shines it around the hold.
Spoon cracks his knuckles. “The engine’s over ’ere, mate.” Noble obliges, running the light along the length of the camshaft. Filthy. One of the pins holding the lifters is a bent nail, and the cooling pipe has a leak patched with a rag.
“I’m more used to cars, trucks, that sort of thing.”
“I thought you said you knew engines. Now you’re saying you can’t fix it?” The air splits and fissures around Spoon. Could be he doesn’t like confined spaces, or he’s been sniffing the gasoline too long. Probably it’s the carbuncle on his face, it’s got to be throbbing something fierce.
“I didn’t say I couldn’t fix it.” He’ll learn. Fly by the seat of his pants. If these men are up to what he thinks they are, they have plenty of money to throw around. He looks to the captain and then Max.
“So you say she’ll start no problem?”
“The helmsman pushes his fingers through his hair. “She start. She run. But pushing down the throttle it is missing sometimes.” Max mimes with his thick-fingered hands. “Duddle, duddle, phhs, duddle duddle phhs. And less power. When she is going faster, she is shaking.”
“How fast you been pushing her?”
Max clears his throat, shuffles his feet on the dunnage. Spoon cracks his knuckles.
“Does it matter?” The cavernous space amplifies the captain’s baritone.
“It might.” Noble bends to take a closer look and shift his face out of the crossfire. He smells mutiny. “You come through the channel on the flood?” Without raising his eyes to theirs he walks around to inspect the cylinders along the other side. “Tide turns on you it can put a hell of a strain on her, even a big engine like this.” Four hundred and ten horses. That’s some getaway power. He spots what looks like a silencer just before the screw. The gasoline in the air has been tossed about to hide another smell. Noble feels the thrill of danger tightening his skin.
“One of the cylinders has a broken lifter. See?” He turns and gestures, his finger on the culprit. They should see for themselves so they don’t think he’s some village con artist. Max takes a step forward and hesitates, trapped by the tension between the two other men. The captain’s jaw is rigid. Why does Noble feel as if Spoon is in charge? He wipes his face on his sleeve. Spoon is using up all the oxygen, or his face is burning it off.
“Can you fix it?”
Noble turns to Spoon, fastens on the space above his right shoulder. “I’ll need a little time.”
“Take whatever time you need.” The captain nods and turns to leave.
When Noble climbs the ladder to the wharf, the broken lifter tucked in his pocket, Spoon’s parting words ringing in his ears — “Remember, village boy, I’ve got my eye on you” — Miss Murchie is standing there looking officious. For a brief moment Noble thinks she has come for him, to deliver in person the package he’s been waiting for. He even checks to see if it’s tucked under her arm. But Miss Murchie glances past him to the men on the deck of the schooner. In addition to being postmistress, Miss Murchie is also the customs officer for the village. As he walks away Noble hears her call out to see the ship’s papers. Something else that probably isn’t quite right about the Esmeralda.
Noble drives to the end of Shad Beach Road, then slows before edging his truck onto the tidal flats. Two hundred yards out into the basin stands Begging Dog Weir, a narrow, elongated V-shape of eight-foot-high birch stakes and woven brush whose uneven east and west wings together span more than two thousand feet. As the tide drops, the longer straighter east wing guides the fish towards the point of the V; the shorter and slightly curved west wing, the fishing wing, traps the fish once the water level has fallen enough to expose the tops of the stakes. The position of the weir has shifted slightly over the years to accommodate the basin’s ever-changing tidal currents, but the track Noble follows, an ancient stream bed reinforced over the years with rocks and gravel, has not. A couple of feet on either side and man, horse and especially a truck would quickly become mired in the sticky red mud.
Noble pulls up near the edge of the shallow pool that the retreating tide leaves behind in the point of the trap. Bess is standing somewhere near the centre of the pool, seawater lapping over her fetlocks. She is dozing in the sun. Every minute or so the alignment of her rump shifts as she alternates her resting foot. Butler is a yard or two in front of Bess, bent to his task. Before getting out of his truck Noble changes into his rubber boots. He slams the door but Butler doesn’t look up.
“Morning.”
“Afternoon.”
Noble rolls his eyes at the cloudless sky, then wades into the pool and grabs a dip net from the wagon hitched behind Bess, which is already half-filled. At this time of year the catch is mainly cod, smelts and herring, though as the water warms gaspereau and mackerel migrate into the bay, followed by shad, sturgeon, bass flounder and then salmon. Butler’s jacket and sweater are tied, arms together, around the horse’s neck.
“They keeping you busy?”
“I haven’t time to be pissing about, Matheson. If you’re here to help then roll up your sleeves and get on with it.” Noble kicks at the water and a couple of gulls at the pool’s edge lift off, only to land again a couple of yards away, bend their beaks and resume pecking at the fish.
“Did you get a chance to check out the schooner?”
“What do you think?” Butler steps back, winds up and sends a startled skate, wings dark against the sun, hurtling over the top of the weir. Noble shades his eyes to witness the skate’s trajectory over the wall of woven spruce and birch saplings. The skate, spinning like a wobbly tin lid through a forget-menot blue sky, lands with a small splash, and Noble wonders if any of the skates and dogfish tossed from the weir as useless bycatch ever survive their ordeal. The gulls won’t touch them. They probably suffocate long before high tide. He swishes his net through the water. Now he’s worried about dogfish? — Lawson’s influence. His brother has been on his mind a lot lately.
“Well, I did.”
Good for you.”
Butler clicks his tongue and Bess pulls forward slowly, drawing the cart with her. Noble follows, tapping the seabed with his rubber-booted feet before transferring his body weight, feeling for flounder that may have burrowed themselves into the rich red mud. Up ahead, Butler executes the same strange dance. Bess takes it all in her watery stride. Bess was Butler’s birthday gift from his father the year he turned ten. A playful two-year-old with a penchant for sugar cubes, Bess was bought to pull the cart to and from the weir twice a day. Not much of a gift then. Still, after sixteen years man and beast have mastered a working rhythm. Bess doesn’t need tying to the weir while Butler fishes. Butler has so much faith in his animal he doesn’t bother turning around to see if she’s obeyed.
Bess stumbles and Noble runs a hand down her hind leg, watching her feet as they draw through the water. Could be she’s tired, or at eighteen she’s just plain getting too old for the job of hauling the catch every low tide, mid-May through October, not to mention the heavy winter work, hauling upwards of three thousand birch, maple and spruce saplings from the woods to rebuild the weir after the ice has ground out the previous year’s poles.
“You should be thinking about retirement, there, old girl. Those feet of yours weren’t made for toiling in salt water.”
“She’s plenty years left in her yet,” Butler shouts at the weir.
“You should get yourself a truck. Join us in the twentieth century.” Noble pats Bess’s grey and white dappled rump. Her ears switch back and forth.
“And give myself another headache.”
“What headache’s that?”
“You’re never done fixing that contraption of yours.”
“It gets you around when you want.”
Butler lobs a fair-sized cod at Noble, who ducks so that the fish sails over the cart and smacks Bess on the back of her ears. She never even flinches.
“That’s animal cruelty. You don’t deserve her anyway.
“We have an understanding, don’t we, old girl?
“Right.”
Listen, Matheson. When I get a truck it’ll be shiny and brand new, not some jalopy tied together with baling wire.”
Noble scoops up a cod with his net, dumps it in the cart. “Maybe I’ll beat you to it. I got myself some repair work on board that schooner.”
“You said you’d help out here. I need two pair of hands, especially these next few tides.”
“I’ll be here. It’s just that this is real work for a change.” the second the words leave his mouth he wishes he could call them back.
Butler straightens, a fish hooked through its gills dangling from each thumb — real weir fishermen don’t use dip nets. “And this isn’t work?” the fishes’ mouths open and close in a mock jeer.
“I didn’t say that.” A toadfish breaks the surface, and noble nudges it aside with the dip net, bends to chase the silver-blue back of an early shad. Or is the silver a trick of the bright spring sunshine?
“Funny, that’s what came out your mouth. There’s a village full of men’d be more than grateful to be lending a hand out here. Come to think of it, there’s a village full of men better qualified to be fixing a damaged schooner than you. You don’t know your awls from your planes.”
“Aye, but I can rig a dodgy camshaft, strip a cylinder clean and put her back together without having anything left over.”
“What’re you saying?” Butler tosses the fish into the cart. ”
I’m saying they’ve rigged up an auxiliary — a liberty V12 with a silencer.”
Butler’s face splits in a grin. “Rum-runners.
“That’s what I thought too. She’s painted black, but it’s all dull port side — little flecks of different coloured paint, you know, like she’s been tied up alongside other boats out at sea. Thing is she’s empty — a gaping great cargo hold with nothing in it but rock ballast.”
“So what? They’re probably between hauls.”
All the way up here? I doubt it.”
“A rum-running expert now, are we? Go on then, what’s your theory this time?”
“I figure they dumped the liquor on the way in.”
“You been reading too many books, Matheson.” Butler is bent over behind Bess, hands chasing another thrashing tail, but Noble can sense his friend’s keen attention.
“No, think about it. It makes perfect sense. They drop it overboard on the way in and pick it up on the way back out.”
“They dumped it in the water?”
It’s the perfect hiding place. And the cargo nets are gone. I make it sitting out there on the mud flats.”
“It’d get dragged out with the tides.”
“Not if it was weighted down.”
“So it’s anywhere from here to Cape split.”
“It’s behind Moose Island.”
“You got it all worked out, don’t you?”
“They came in on the tide — no one would see them working a cargo boom at night, right? So think about it. In order to pick it up on the way out, they set anchor and wait for low tide. When the booze magically reappears, they hook it and haul it back in, sail out on the tide.”
“And you think they’d do this behind Moose Island?”
It’s the perfect cover. Only the birds and a few rock crabs to see them.”
“How bad’s the schooner?”
“The bow’s all banged up. Jibs are gone. Enough to slow them down, make navigation difficult. Someone had a good hand and eye bringing them in that sweetly in the dark.”
“Full moon last night.”
“True.”
“How about the engine?”
“Broken lifter on one of the cylinders.” Noble swishes his dip net through the murky water and scoops up the damn toadfish.
“You can fix this?”
“That depends on McFadden.” He tips the wide-mouthed ugly brute back into the pool.
“McFadden?”
“I need a part cast.”
“You asked him yet?”
“You have to pick your moment with McFadden. Liable to get your head bitten off, you approach him at the wrong time.”
“True. Get out, you vicious bastard.” A thrashing in the water as Butler, two-handed, heaves a small dogfish into the air. He wipes his hands on his pants. “Wouldn’t fancy being his kids.”
“Or his wife.”
“Wouldn’t fancy being anyone’s wife there, Noble.”
Which is rich coming from a man whose own wife has to suffer his pathological skirt-chasing, much of which, conducted within eyesight and earshot, feels designed to drive her away. Noble watches the sand shark buckle and twist through the air. It’s probably injured or they would have noticed it earlier.
“They eat them in England. You see that ever?”
“Wives?” Butler pushes back the brim of his salt-stained fedora and grins wickedly.
“Dogfish.”
“Butler pulls a face.
“God’s honest. Some fish and chip shops. Battered and deep-fried.”
“My friend, you can take home all the dogfish this weir can hold.”
“No thanks.” They hold dogfish in the same regard as carrion. Even one or two in the weir can make a mess of things, but they hunt in packs. In the Cheverie weir they caught over three hundred of them in one tide. This was a few years back. Smiler, Franklin Beattie’s mare, walked herself home with what the men could salvage of the catch while Franklin and Bert Simpson stayed behind and tied all the dogfish they could get hold of to the weir before the tide chased them out. Noble can just imagine the look on his mother’s face if he brought one home for supper, with its poisonous spines and its mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth.
“You should go see him soon as we’re finished up here.”
“Huh?”
“McFadden. Strike while the iron’s hot, I say.”
“Funny is my middle name, Matheson.”
“Got any jokes I could use, then? Stories to soften a blacksmith’s heart?” Something about Paul McFadden sets Noble’s teeth on edge. There’s altogether too much of him for a start, though Noble appreciates that size in McFadden’s job is a definite advantage. But unlike Butler, who with his 6’ 4“ frame can easily out-walk and outrun anyone in the village, the smith carries his size threateningly. At least around men. Rumour has it McFadden plucked out the hearts of Krauts on the battlefield with his bare hands, that he once dined on Kraut flesh. Noble thinks McFadden probably started the rumours himself; with his trade he would most likely have been on horse detail. Not that he wouldn’t have seen any action that way. Lawson had always said that no matter what your duty, there was no way you could avoid hoisting a rifle to your shoulder and firing away at the enemy. His brother had fired his gun a lot. Still, there was a difference between shooting a man and killing him with your bare hands.
“He’s not so bad.”
“You’ve changed your tune. Anyway, you’re a horse owner. I have a truck. To him I’m some evil portent of the future. He isn’t the most enlightened man I’ve ever met.”
“Enlightened? Portent? You swallow a dictionary or something, Matheson? Getting fancy ideas at Lillian MacAllister’s Friday night lending library?”
Noble glances at his friend sharply.
“Remember, you want to tell a good story, you leave out the big words — they get in the way.”
Noble bends to scoop a fish. Butler can’t possibly have guessed anything, it’s just his uncanny way of zeroing in on the truth. He seems to pick people’s thoughts from the air, as if they were radio waves and he a giant antenna.
“What makes you think I’m interested in your kind of storytelling?”
“Women?”
“They’re all over me. I have to fight them off. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah. Five-year-olds.”
“Accompanied by their lovely young mothers, older sisters and cousins, doting aunts and grandmothers. My stories charm women of all ages while the best you can do is lonely Lillian McAllister. You’re jealous, Matheson.”
“No, I —” He feels sorry for eliza, though saying so will only get Butler’s dander up. And maybe he is a little jealous. But not because of the women. It’s the stories that spill effortlessly from his friend’s lips, the way Butler blends fact and legend with his own peculiar twist, engaging his listeners’ attention, whatever their age and station, and holding it.
“There’s a girl on the schooner.” Now why’d he go and say that? Butler will discover as much for himself soon enough. As will Eliza.
“Well, well. What kind of girl goes to sea with a ship filled with men, do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then use your imagination, bonehead.”
He has. All he’d caught sight of was the length and sheen of her blue-black hair, her athletic carriage, unusual in a woman but far from mannish. He’d willed her to turn around but she was oblivious, talking and laughing with the Douglas woman. “She was wearing men’s clothing.”
“Men’s clothing?” Butler wades towards the centre of the trap. “She pretty at all?”
“Couldn’t say.”
Butler weaves the end of a sapling that has worked itself loose back through the birch framework. The point of the weir’s elongated V takes the force of the catch, and while its bottom is reinforced with rocks, the poles and brush frequently need mending. “Might be worth a gander.”
“Well, I’ve already been down there once today. So you’re on your own.”
“Suits me fine. You’ll cramp my style, anyway.”
“You okay to split and salt this lot?” The tide is creeping back in and Bess’s cart is full.
“I’m fine. The wife can help. You on your way to see Mc-Fadden?”
“Oh, so now you’re taking an interest in my work?” Butler’s no fool. Everyone has heard stories of the money to be made hooking up with the rum-runners. One of his cousins claims to be involved. He passed through early last winter, bragging and waving a clipful of cash around, trying to get a poker game going. He said it was dangerous work, but a deckhand could get something like sixty or seventy dollars a month, a mate closer to a hundred and fifty. Lunenburg and shipyards east and west of there were busy refitting schooners and building rum boats with engines and speeds the U.S. Coast Guard hadn’t a hope in hell of keeping up with.
“I couldn’t give a monkey’s about your work, Matheson. Just wondering how long the rummies’ll be around. See you tonight?”
“Eight-thirty okay?”
“Fine.”
Noble walks back to the truck, sets the choke and pushes the starter. The engine turns over but doesn’t catch. He tries again but the battery sounds run down. Butler, now sitting up on the edge of the cart and coaxing Bess to head for home, grins and doffs his hat.
“I rest my case, Matheson.” Noble grabs the crank and gets out of the truck.
“Battery’s low,” he grumbles as Butler and Bess pull past him.
“Battery, choke, throttle, starter. It’s always something, eh, girl?”
Noble pulls up twice on the crank, releases the choke and She’s fired. No kickback either. Where’s Butler when you want him to be looking? Carefully noble turns the truck around and heads back to the village. Halfway up shad Beach Road he honks as he passes Butler and Bess, flashes the V for Victory sign. McFadden can wait. The mail should be in from Great Village by now. And Miss Murchie should be back behind her counter at the post office.