Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert
“There wasn’t even a jail,” Angus said. “You got in trouble, you had to sit in old Roy’s living room for a while.”
“That sounds about right,” Fred said. “That’s how it should be with police on an island.”
“If there’s going to be any police at all, that is,” said Angus.
“That’s right. If.”
Angus then told the joke about the polar bear kid who wants to know if there’s any koala blood in his family, and Fred Burden said that reminded him of the one about the three Eskimos in the bakery. And Don Pommeroy told the one about the Japanese guy and the iceberg, but he screwed it up, so Angus Addams had to tell it right. Carl Cobb said he’d heard it a different way, and he gave his whole version, and it was practically the same. That was a waste of time. Don contributed the joke about the Catholic lady and the talking frog, but he wrecked it pretty bad, too.
Angus Addams went off to the bathroom, and when he came back, Don Pommeroy and Fred Burden were arguing. They were really going at it. Someone had said something. Someone had started something. It sure hadn’t taken long. Angus Addams went over to figure out what the fight was about.
“There’s no way,” Fred Burden was saying, his face red and his lips spitting when he talked. “No way you could! He’d kill you!”
“I’m just saying I could,” Don Pommeroy said, slowly and with dignity. “I’m not saying it would be easy. I’m just saying I could do it.”
“What’s he talking about?” Angus asked Carl.
“Don bet Fred Burden a hundred bucks he could beat up a five-foot monkey in a fight,” Carl said.
“What?”
“You’d get creamed!” Fred was shouting now. “You’d get creamed by a five-foot monkey!”
“I’m a good fighter,” Don said.
Angus rolled his eyes and sat down. He felt sorry for Fred Burden. Fred Burden was from Courne Haven, but he didn’t deserve to get into a stupid conversation like this with a known fool like Don Pommeroy.
“Have you ever seen a goddamn monkey?” Fred demanded. “The way a monkey is built? A five-foot monkey would have a six-foot arm span. You know how strong a monkey is? You couldn’t beat up a two-foot monkey. You’d get demolished!”
“But he wouldn’t know how to fight,” Don said. “That’s where my advantage is. I know how to fight.”
“Now that’s stupid. We’re assuming he’d know how to fight.”
“No we ain’t.”
“Then what are we talking about? How can we talk about fighting a five-foot monkey if the monkey can’t even fight?”
“I’m just saying I could beat one if he could fight.” Don was speaking very calmly. He was the prince of logic. “If a five-foot monkey could fight, I could beat him.”
“What about the teeth?” Carl Cobb asked, genuinely interested now.
“Shut up, Carl,” said his brother-in-law Fred.
“That’s a good question,” Don said, and nodded sagely. “The monkey wouldn’t be allowed to use his teeth.”
“Then he wouldn’t be fighting!” Fred shouted. “That’s how a monkey would fight! By biting!”
“No biting allowed,” Don said, and his verdict was final.
“He would be boxing? Is that it?” Fred Burden demanded. “You’re saying you could beat a five-foot monkey in a boxing match?”
“Exactly,” said Don.
“But a monkey wouldn’t know how to box,” Carl Cobb observed, frowning.
Don nodded with composed satisfaction. “Exactly,” he said, “why I would win.”
This left Fred Burden with no choice but to punch Don out, so he did. Angus Addams said later he’d have done it himself if Don had said another goddamn word about boxing a five-foot monkey, but Fred was the first who couldn’t take it any more, so he laid one across Don’s ear. Carl Cobb looked so surprised that it really annoyed Angus, so Angus punched Carl. Then Fred punched Angus. Carl punched Angus, too, but not hard. Don came up off the floor and threw himself, bent over and howling, right into Fred’s gut, sending Fred tumbling backward into some empty barstools, which clattered and wavered and fell.
The two men—Fred and Don—set to rolling on the floor of the bar. They had somehow got laid up against each other head to foot and foot to head, which was not an effective posture for fighting. They looked like a large clumsy starfish—all arms and legs. Fred Burden was on top, and he dug his boot tip into the floor and spun himself and Don in a circle, trying to get a grip.
Carl and Angus had stopped fighting. They hadn’t had that strong an interest in it, anyway. Each had got in a punch, and that took care of that. Now they stood beside each other, backs to the bar, watching their friends on the floor.
“Get ’em, Fred!” Carl hooted, and shot a sheepish look at Angus.
Angus shrugged. He didn’t particularly care if Don Pommeroy got beat up. He deserved it, the idiot. A five-foot monkey. For Christ’s sake.
Fred Burden set his teeth into Don’s shin and clamped. Don howled at the injustice, “No biting! No biting!” He was outraged, it seemed, because he’d made that rule perfectly clear with regard to the monkey fight. Angus Addams, standing at the bar, watched the awkward scramble on the floor for a while and then sighed, turned around, and asked the bartender if he could settle the tab. The bartender, a small, slight man with an anxious expression, was holding a baseball bat that was half his height.
“You don’t need that,” Angus said, nodding at the bat.
The bartender looked relieved and slid the bat back under the bar. “Should I call the police?”
“You don’t need to worry. It’s no big deal, buddy. Just let ’em fight it out.”
“What are they fighting about?” the bartender asked.
“Ah, they’re old friends,” Angus said, and the bartender smiled with relief, as if that explained everything. Angus settled his bill and walked past the men (who were wrestling and grunting on the floor) to go upstairs and get some sleep.
“Where you going?” Don Pommeroy, on the floor, shrieked after Angus as he was leaving. “Where the hell you going?”
Angus had walked out on the fight because he thought it was nothing, but it turned out to be something after all.
Fred Burden was a tenacious bastard, and Don was as stubborn as he was stupid, and neither man let up on the other. The fight went on for a good ten minutes after Angus went to bed. The way Carl Cobb described it, Fred and Don were “two dogs in a field,” biting, kicking, punching. Don tried to break a few bottles over Fred’s head, and Fred broke a few of Don’s fingers so fiercely, you could hear them snap. The bartender, a not very bright man who had been told by Angus not to worry about the fight, didn’t.
Even when Fred was sitting on top of Don’s chest, fistfuls of hair in his hands, pounding Don’s head into the floor, the bartender did not intervene. Fred pounded until Don was unconscious, then sat back, heaving. The bartender was polishing an ashtray with his towel when Carl said, “Maybe you should call somebody.” The bartender looked over the bar and saw that Don was not moving and that his face was mashed up. Fred was bloody, too, and one of his arms was hanging in a funny way. The bartender called the police.
Angus Addams didn’t hear about any of this until the next morning, when he got up for breakfast and prepared to head back to Fort Niles. He learned that Don Pommeroy was in the hospital, and that things didn’t look good. He hadn’t woken up, Angus heard. He had some “internal damage,” and the rumor was that a lung was punctured.
“Son of a bitch,” Angus said, deeply impressed.
He’d never thought the fight would turn into something so serious. The police had questions for Angus, but they let him go. They were still holding Fred Burden, but he was so beat up himself that he hadn’t yet been charged with anything. The police weren’t sure what to do, because the bartender—their one sober, reliable witnes—insisted that the two men were old friends who were only kidding around.
Angus arrived at the island
The daily details of this war are not significant; it was a typical lobster war. There was fighting, cutting, pushing, vandalism, theft, aggression, accusation, paranoia, intimidation, terror, cowardice, and threats. There was virtually no commerce. It’s hard enough to make a living at fishing, but it’s harder still when the fisherman has to spend his days defending his property or attacking the property of another man.
Ruth’s father, with little fuss and no hesitation, took his traps out of the water, just as his father had done during the first Courne Haven- Fort Niles lobster war, back in 1903. He took his boat out of the water and stored it in his front yard. “I don’t get involved in these things,” he told his neighbors. “I don’t care who did what to who.” Stan Thomas had it all figured out. By sitting out the war, he would lose less money than his neighbors. He knew it wouldn’t last forever.
The war lasted seven months. Stan Thomas used the time to fix up his boat, build new traps, tar his lines, paint his buoys. While his neighbors fought steadily and drove themselves and each other back into poverty, he polished his business apparatus to sparkling perfection. Sure, they took over his fishing territory, but he knew they’d burn themselves out and that he’d be able to take it all back—and more. They would be beaten. In the meantime, he fixed his gear and made every piece of brass and every barrel gorgeous. His brand-new wife, Mary, helped a great deal, and painted up his buoys very prettily. They had no trouble with money; the house had long been paid for, and Mary was wonderfully frugal. She’d lived her whole life in a room that was ten feet square and had never owned a thing. She expected nothing, asked for nothing. She could make a hearty stew out of a carrot and a chicken bone. She planted a garden, sewed patches into her husband’s clothing, darned his socks. She was used to this kind of work. Not all that much difference between darning wool socks and pairing and matching silk stockings.
Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas tried, gently, to persuade her husband to take a job at Ellis House and not go back to lobstering, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want to be near any of those assholes, he told her. “You could work in the stables,” she said, “and you’d never see them.” But he didn’t want to shovel the shit of the horses of any of those assholes, either. So she let it drop. It had been a quiet fantasy of Mary’s, that her husband and the Ellises would grow to love one another, and that she would be welcomed back at Ellis House. Not as a servant but as a member of the family. Maybe Vera Ellis would come to admire Stan. Maybe Vera would invite Stan and Mary for luncheons. Maybe Vera would pour Stan a cup of tea and say, “I’m so happy Mary married such a resourceful gentleman.”
One night in bed in her new home with her new husband, Mary started, in the meekest way, to hint at this fantasy. “Maybe we could go to visit Miss Vera . . .” she began, but her husband interrupted her with the information that he would eat his own feces before he would visit Vera Ellis.
“Oh,” said Mary.
So she let it go. She put all her resourcefulness toward helping her husband through the dry months of the lobster war, and, in return, she received small, precious acknowledgments of her worth. He liked to sit in the living room and watch her sew curtains. The house was immaculate, and he found endearing her attempts at decoration. Mary set wildflowers on the windowsill in water glasses. She polished his tools. That was the most adorable thing.
“Come here,” he’d tell her at the end of the day, and he’d pat his knee.
Mary would go over and sit on his lap. He’d open his arms. “Come in here,” he’d say, and she’d fold up against him. When she dressed prettily, or styled her hair in a nice way, he called her Mint, because she looked freshly minted, shiny as a new coin.
“Come here, Mint,” he’d say.
Or, while watching her iron his shirts, he’d say, “Nice work there, Mint.”
They spent every day, all day, together, because he was not going out to sea. There was a feeling in their house that they were working together toward a common goal, and that they were a team, untainted by sordid quarrels of the rest of the world. The Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war raged around them, corroding everybody but them. They were Mr. and Mrs. Stan Thomas. They needed, Mary believed, only each other. They made their home stronger while the homes of others shook.
It was—those seven war months—the happiest time of their marriage. Those seven war months gave Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas a soaring joy, a sense that she had made the unquestionably right decision in leaving Vera Ellis to marry Stan. She had a true sense of worth. She was well accustomed to working, but was not at all accustomed to working for her own future, for her own benefit. She had a husband, and he loved her. She was essential to him. He told her so.
“You’re a great kid, Mint.”
After seven months of daily care, Stan Thomas’s fishing gear was a paragon. He wanted to rub his hands together like a millionaire when he looked over his gear and his boat. He wanted to laugh like a tyrant as he watched his friends and neighbors fight themselves into ruin.
Fight it out, he silently urged the others. Go ahead. Fight it out.
The longer the others fought, the weaker they would become. All the better for Stan Thomas when, finally, he would put his boat back in the water. He willed the war to go on, but in November of 1957 the fourth Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war ended. Lobster wars tend to die down in the winters. Many fishermen stop working in November under the best of circumstances, because the weather is too rough. With fewer fishermen out there, the chance of confrontation eventually grows lower. The war might have run itself out because of the weather. Both islands might have sunk into their winter slumbers, and when spring came, the old disputes might have been dropped. But that’s not how it happened in 1957.
On November 8, a young man from Courne Haven Island, by the name of Jim Burden, set out for a day of lobster fishing. He had meant to fuel up his boat first thing in the morning, but before he could get to the pumps, he found a stranger’s buoys, painted a hideous, garish green, bobbing among his traps. They were the buoys of Ira Pommeroy, from Fort Niles Island. Jim recognized them immediately. And he knew who Ira Pommeroy was. Ira Pommeroy, wife of Rhonda, father of Webster and Conway and John and so on, was the brother of Don Pommeroy. Who was in a hospital in Rockland, learning how to walk again, an ability he had lost after being beaten by Fred Burden. Who was Jim Burden’s father.
Ira Pommeroy had been harassing Fred Burden and young Jim for months, and Jim had had enough of it. Jim Burden had set these traps right off the north coast of Courne Haven only the day before. They were so near Courne Haven that Jim could practically see them from his house. They were in a place where a Fort Niles fisherman had no business. To set those rogue traps, Ira Pommeroy must have come over in the middle of the night. What would drive a man to do that? Didn’t the man ever sleep?
It should be noted that the buoys Ira Pommeroy had set on Jim’s little shoreline were dummies. There were no traps at the end of those lines; there were cement blocks. Ira Pommeroy’s plan was not to take Jim Burden’s lobsters. The plan was to drive Jim Burden nuts, and it worked. Jim, a mild-mannered nineteen-year-old who’d been pretty much intimidated by this lobster war, lost every shred of meekness in an i
He got to Fort Niles and set out to look for Ira Pommeroy’s boat. He didn’t know for sure whether he’d recognize it, but he was damn sure set on finding it. He more or less knew his way around the waters near Fort Niles, but he still had a few close calls with rocky ledges he couldn’t spot from behind the throttle. And he wasn’t paying all that much attention to the bottom or to landmarks that would help get him back home. He wasn’t thinking about getting back home. He was looking for any boat belonging to a Fort Niles fisherman.
He scanned the horizon for flocks of seagulls and followed the seagulls to the lobster boats. Whenever he found a boat, he would zoom right up to it, slow down, and peer at it, trying to see who was aboard. He didn’t say anything to the fishermen, and they didn’t say anything to him. They stopped their work and looked at him. What’s that kid up to? What the hell is the matter with that kid’s face? He’s purple, for Christ’s sake.
Jim Burden didn’t say a word. He zoomed off, searching for Ira Pommeroy. He hadn’t planned exactly what he was going to do once he found him, but his thoughts were somewhere along the lines of murder.
Unluckily for Jim Burden, he didn’t think to look for Ira Pommeroy’s boat in the Fort Niles harbor, which is where it sat, bobbing quietly. Ira Pommeroy had taken the day off. He was exhausted from a night spent dropping cement blocks near Courne Haven, and he’d slept in until eight in the morning. While Jim Burden was speeding around the Atlantic looking for Ira, Ira was in bed with his wife, Rhonda, making another son.
Jim Burden went way out. He went much farther out to sea than any lobster boat needs to go. He went past all the pot buoys of any kind. He followed what he thought was a flock of seagulls far, far out to sea, but the seagulls, as he came nearer, vanished. They dissolved into the sky like sugar in hot water. Jim Burden slowed his boat down and looked around. Where was he? He could see Fort Niles Island shimmering in the distance, a pale gray apparition. His anger was now frustration, and even that was beginning to wane, replaced with something like anxiety. The weather was getting bad. The sea was high. The sky was whipped with fast, black clouds, which had come up quickly. Jim wasn’t sure at all where he was.