They are listening to Information Morning out of Saint John. The transistor radio in the kitchen sometimes struggles with the signal — the CBC usually surrenders to that station just over the border in Calais — but today it is strong and clear. Matt has offered a few times to do something about it with his phone. Apparently, you can get the radio over your phone if you know what to do. It doesn’t make any sense, she has told him, stopping short, though, of admitting it’s confusing. When he tried to demonstrate it to her, with her trusty transistor still blaring, they had discovered that the phone or the internet, or whatever it is, lags a little behind the radio. She was able to use that as her trump card: her news is fresher than his.
Matt has an irritating tendency to try to correct everything he hears on the show. The host sometimes muddles his words (who wouldn’t, getting up at three for a six a.m. start?). The newscaster has a number of habitual mispronunciations (who cares how the u is supposed to sound in municipal or that the l is not silent in vulnerable?). And some of the weekly featured guests consistently offer opinions that Matt pronounces ill-informed, illogical, or ill-expressed. Some mornings it is hard to hear any of the program. When she suggests he turn it off, though, he always insists he is loving it.
This morning, a piece from one of the stringers Matt has been known to mock quite mercilessly has captured his attention enough to shut him up. During a recent nor’easter, a herring-brining shed in Maine was blown off its pilings into Lubec Narrows. It floated south, neatly navigating the trestles of the international bridge before washing up on a beach on Campobello Island. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places as the last traditional smoked-herring facility to have operated in the United States. A heritage group has been trying for years to restore it as a museum. The reporter tells them that the shed crossed the border remarkably unscathed — even with its chimney intact — but it was met by scavengers on the beach, many of them wielding chainsaws and claiming salvage rights. It all has the makings of an international incident if you believe the CBC. The piece ends with a clip from a Lubec councilwoman: “The last sardine house has met its grave.”
“RIP,” says Penelope.
She is in the sparkling, white-tiled packing room when she hears the first of the rumours. The fact that there is actually any idle time for gossip adds credibility to the story. The herring just are not running. Most of the little that is being caught is going to Maine or to Connors’ plant up in Blacks Harbour. The girls, even she, could easily pack three times what is coming to them in a day. Most of the clams and the beans they have canned in the off-season are still sitting in the warehouse, so those alternatives have already been exhausted.
Hilde, a girl with unpleasant breath whom Thora suspects of having slept with Nils before he disappeared, has heard from one of the men who run the boilers. It is not hard to picture her sweating in the bowels of the factory with her skirt up around her waist in exchange for the information. “They plan to shut the steam off at the end of the month. They’ll be letting us all go. All except the office people, of course.” She licks the olive oil off her fingers before reaching for another handful of herring without cleaning her hands.
“Hilde!” shouts one of the really religious girls. It is either Nora or Hedvig. Thora can’t tell them apart.
“What? What would they do? Fire me? Nobody is ever going to eat these sardines, that’s what I am trying to tell you. We could pee in the cans for all the difference it would make.”
Hedvig (or Nora) mumbles what may be a prayer against the Evil One, but most of the other girls laugh.
By the evening meal, the stories have multiplied. The manager is running from the sheriff; his yacht has been seized in Eastport. The stockholders are selling in panic. Sir William Van Horne will turn the model town into guest houses for his overflow on Ministers Island. The Norwegian consul is coming the next day, and the day after that they will all be on a boat back to Bergen. Nobody is complaining about the food, for once. Every last mealy potato disappears. Some of the girls stuff their blouses with the bread they usually sneer at. You never know where the next meal is coming from.
Only one of the stories, the one she heard in the packing shed, is true, though several will become true in the months that follow. They are all told at breakfast the next day that they are to report to the concert hall rather than to their usual stations. Mr. McCann has an announcement he wishes to make.
Morris McCann is an object lesson in the mysterious operations of fate. He lived into his surname at the age of thirty when he registered patents on no fewer than five types of tin cans with key openers. Van Horne poached him away from Eastport to run Casarco, giving him carte blanche in the construction of the plant and town. McCann arranged a contract that set his salary at a percentage of the costs of building and equipping, which meant that he had spared no expense. The workers didn’t like him, said that he didn’t need the factory to be a success. Between his special contract with the company and the steady income from his patents, it didn’t matter to him whether the herring ever ran or not.
Her dealings with him had been different. It was unlikely they should ever have met in the first place. The lines were clear. While on special occasions — well, Christmas and New Year’s as it turned out — the bosses and the workers were all to gather together for an evening of eating and drinking and dancing, the rest of the time there was to be no fraternizing. Even around the Christmas tree, the groups remained separate, eyes cast upward to the star as they sang, with only the bravest souls venturing a sideways glance. And at midnight a week later, following speeches about what a great year 1913 would be and the singing of some song none of the Norwegians knew, they parted, oil and water — the workers back to their dormitories and shared cottages, the bosses to the larger cottages or their mansions in the town a few miles away.
It was before all that, in the fall, after the sardine girls had moved out of the makeshift living quarters in the clam factory in town and had started using it for practice runs, that her path first crossed McCann’s. Fate. Her ears were bruised from the yelling of the supervisor who threatened to let her go if she didn’t improve. Daily, the woman asked her where the hell she had learned to pack sardines. She didn’t dare tell her she was learning on the job. She wished she had never listened to Nils. There must have been a simpler way to foil her parents’ orders that she stop seeing him. People didn’t go halfway around the world just to be with their boyfriends. Especially when the boyfriend turned out to be not the person you had thought. She had gone for a walk along the shore, arriving finally at the rocky bar that connected Ministers Island to the mainland when the tide was low. The bar appealed because it was a path that also wasn’t a path, being wiped clean, eradicated, twice a day. She had no certain idea of what the tide was doing at that moment. From the look of the beach it was still going out, so she decided to venture. She knew Van Horne, the millionaire railwayman who owned the island, was in Montréal. Everyone knew the comings and goings of the rich and famous. She wouldn’t care about being warned off by one of the barn workers or a gardener.
Once you were on the bar, there was no cover, of course. You were out there for anyone to see. And your purpose could hardly be in doubt. She wondered, later, how long the man had watched her. Long enough to develop a plan and rehearse a speech.
She was just starting up the cedar-lined lane that branched off to the right once you were on the island when he called out, “A nice afternoon for a stroll.” The man held a cigarette in his right hand — one of those black ones from France — and was leaning against a stone gatepost. She thought instantly of portraits of the devil.
“Very,” she muttered, uncertain whether she should be addressing him at all, thinking that she now must turn around and make her way off the island.
“Have you seen the house?” He spoke to her as though she were an equal, another casual visitor to the island.
She could only shake her head.
“Well, you mustn’t go back without at least a glimpse. There’s nobody at home. But then I suppose you knew that.”
She didn’t like the suggestion that she was there for some nefarious purpose. It was as if he were accusing her of planning to rob the empty house. “I came to walk, sir. Just to walk. I have no interest in the house or any of the buildings. I needed to think. I think perhaps I should return —”
“Nonsense. Please continue your walk. I will accompany you. They know me here. We don’t even need to talk.” After a few hundred yards of silence, though, he had begun to pry. She supposed a man who knew so many ways of opening a can couldn’t leave things alone. “You are from Norway?”
It was a diplomatic way of saying he knew she was one of the cheap labourers at the company that he ran. She nodded.
“And you have a lot to think about.” When she just continued walking, he went on, guessing, “You are a long way from home, from family.”
“I came with my brother, Nils.” She thought it important to let him know she was not without male protection. If that is what Nils was or had ever been.
“Ah.” McCann had evidently heard enough “brother” stories that he had cracked the code long ago. “I come here to walk quite often. To think. I have quite a lot to think about.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “I am the manager of the plant, the one across the harbour there.” He gestured vaguely back in the direction from which they had both now walked for five minutes.
“I know who you are.”
“Then you have the advantage of me. Morris McCann.” He held out a hand she could not refuse.
“Thora Halvstad.” It would do.
“I wonder, Miss Halvstad, whether we might be able to help each other: two people who like to walk and think, who have lots to think about.”
“What could I —?”
“I think you might be a good listener.”
“Oh.” Men often said that when your ear was the last hole they were interested in.
“No, not listen to me. For me. I wonder whether you might listen to others, for me. I need a pair of ears on the ground. Sorry. That’s not the image I want to portray. I need someone to listen to the workers, to tell me things I need to know.”
“You want me to spy for you.”
“To provide me with intelligence. Yes.”
She knew there had been trouble with the Italian crews they had brought in for construction. Everybody knew that. Their foreman had not been shy about making his crew’s demands known. But there were others who supported the Italians, shared their grievances. McCann might not know so much about them. Most of the Norwegian men were fed up. With the plant still not operating, they were being ordered to do jobs they would never have contemplated. There had been some vandalism — nothing major, some broken glass and smashed walls, and one small fire. She had known about all of that before it happened. Nils still confided in her, even if he had transferred his affections elsewhere. She thought about how the supervisor had threatened her. It might not hurt to have a friend in high places. The highest place. “Perhaps we can come to an … arrangement.”
That arrangement had weathered nearly a year — ten months of setbacks in the business and assaults on her position as a packer. Her information had been crucial in fending off two potentially violent incidents and once resulted in a visit from the Norwegian consul to sort matters out. McCann, she thought, was getting good value for his protection of her. Had they known, her coworkers would view what she was doing as betrayal. She knew it was simply a matter of survival.
But now, as he addressed the assembled workers, outlining how they would be paid off and the plant closed down, she knew the old arrangement no longer served either of them anymore. Intelligence about what the workers were thinking when they were no longer the workers was no use to the boss when he was no longer a boss. And it wasn’t her ability to keep her job that was at stake. It was whether or not she would be able to stay in the country, because staying is what she had decided she must do.
The radio has moved on to the eight thirty news. Matt is making faces, pushing on his cheeks with thumb and middle finger to make his lips form the ew sound in municipal. The newscast ends with a brief clip from the piece on the brining shed. Penelope hears again the councilwoman from Lubec: “The last sardine house has met its grave.” She thinks of her mother and what things must have been like for her.