Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Damn it,” Jim Burden said. “Damn him.”
And then he ran out of gas.
“Damn it,” he said again, and this time he meant it.
He tried to start up the engine, but there was no doing so. No going anywhere. It hadn’t occurred to him that this could happen. He hadn’t thought about the gas tank.
“Oh, boy,” said nineteen-year-old Jim Burden.
He was now afraid as well as embarrassed. Some fisherman he was. Paying his gas tank no mind. How stupid could you get? Jim got on the radio and put out a staticky call for help. “Help,” he said, “I’m out of gas.” He wasn’t sure if there was a more nautical way to say this. He didn’t know all that much about boating, really. This was the first year he’d been out to haul by himself. He’d worked for years as a sternman for his father, so he thought he knew all about the ocean, but now he realized he’d been a mere passenger before. His dad had taken care of everything, while he’d just done the muscle work in the back of the boat. He hadn’t been paying attention all those years, and now he was alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
“Help!” he said into the radio again. Then he remembered the word. “Mayday!” he said. “Mayday!”
The first voice to get back to him was that of Ned Wishnell, and it made young Jim wince. Ned Wishnell was the best fisherman in Maine, people said. Something like this would never happen to Ned Wishnell, to any Wishnell. Jim had been hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that he could get through this without Ned Wishnell’s finding out.
“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice cracked.
“This is the Mighty J,” Jim replied. He thought it would make him sound more adult to name his boat. But he was immediately embarrassed by the name. The Mighty J! Yeah, right.
“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice came again.
“This is Jimmy,” Jim said. “I’m out of gas. Sorry.”
“Where are you, son?”
“I . . . uh . . . don’t know.” He hated to say it, hated to admit it. To Ned Wishnell, of all people!
“Didn’t make that out, Jimmy.”
“I don’t know!” Jim shouted it now. Humiliating. “I don’t know where I am!”
There was silence. Then an unintelligible gargle.
“Didn’t make that out, Ned,” Jim said. He was trying to sound like the older man, imitating his cadence. Trying to maintain some dignity.
“You see any landmarks?” Ned asked.
“Fort Niles is, um, maybe two miles to the west,” Jimmy said, but as he said it, he realized he could no longer see that distant island. A fog had come up, and it was growing as dark as evening, although it was only ten in the morning. He didn’t know which way he was pointing.
“Drop your anchor. Stay put,” Ned Wishnell said, and signed off.
Ned found the kid. It took him several hours, but he found Jimmy. He had notified the other fishermen, and they’d all been looking for Jimmy. Even some fishermen from Fort Niles went out to look for Jim Burden. It was terrible weather. On a normal day, everyone would have headed in because of the weather, but they all stayed out, looking for young Jimmy. Even Angus Addams went out looking for Jim Burden. It was the right thing to do. The kid was only nineteen, and he was lost.
But it was Ned Wishnell who found him. How, nobody knew. But the guy was a Wishnell—a gifted fisherman, a hero on the water—so nobody was surprised that he found a small boat in the fog in the big ocean without the faintest clue about where to look. Everyone was accustomed to nautical miracles from Wishnells.
By the time Ned got to the Mighty J, the weather was really rough, and Jim Burden had been pulled—despite his little anchor—far away from where he’d sent his call for help. Not that Jim knew where he’d been in the first place. He heard Ned Wishnell’s boat before he could see it. He heard the motor through the fog.
“Help!” he shouted. “Mayday!”
Ned circled him and emerged out of the fog in that huge, gleaming boat of his, with that handsome, manly face of his. Ned was angry. He was angry and silent. His day of fishing had been ruined. Jim Burden could see the anger immediately, and it shrank his guts. Ned Wishnell pulled his boat up right beside the Mighty J. It had begun to rain. It was warm for Maine in November, which meant that it was miserable and freezing and wet. The wind blew the rain sideways. In his gloves, Jim’s hands were chapped and scarlet, but Ned Wishnell wasn’t wearing gloves. He wasn’t wearing a hat. Seeing this, Jim quickly took off his hat and dropped it at his feet. He immediately regretted this decision as the freezing rain pinged his scalp.
“Hi,” he said, lamely.
Ned tossed a line over to Jim and said, “Latch on.” His voice was tight with irritation.
Jim tied the boats together—his small, cheap boat up against that Wishnell beauty. The Mighty J bounced, silent and useless, as Ned’s boat chugged and chugged in a competent idle.
“You sure it’s the gas run out?” Ned asked.
“Pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure?” Disgusted.
Jim did not reply.
“It’s not another kind of engine trouble?”
“I don’t think so,” Jim said. But his voice had no authority. He knew he’d lost any right to sound knowledgeable.
Ned looked grim. “You don’t know if your boat has run out of gas.”
“I’m—I’m not sure.”
“I’ll take a look,” Ned said.
He leaned over his rail to pull the Mighty J closer, to get it side by side with his boat. He used his fishing gaff to yank Jim’s boat, and he did it with a jerky motion. He was really annoyed. He was usually gorgeously smooth with boats. Jim also leaned over to pull the boats closer. The boats bounced and bounced in the rough sea. They separated and smashed together. Ned put one booted foot on his rail and made a move to swing himself over to the Mighty J. It was a stupid move. It was a very stupid move for a high-line sailor like Ned Wishnell. But Ned was annoyed and was being careless. And something happened. The wind blew, a wave rose, a foot slipped, a hand lost its grip. Something happened.
Ned Wishnell was in the water.
Jim stared down at the man, and his first reaction was almost amusement. Ned Wishnell was in the water! It was the damnedest thing. Like seeing a nun naked. Would you look at that? Ned was soaked from the drop, and when he popped out of the water, he gasped, and his mouth made an unimpressive, weak little circle. Ned looked up at Jim Burden with panic, an expression wholly incongruous on a Wishnell. Ned Wishnell looked desperate, stricken. And this gave Jim Burden a moment to enjoy a second reaction, which was pride. Ned Wishnell needed Jim Burden’s help. Now wasn’t that a hell of a note?
Would you look at that?
Jim’s reactions were fleeting, but they prevented him from taking the lightning-fast action that might have saved Ned Wishnell’s life. If he’d grabbed a gaff and thrust it down to Ned immediately, if he’d reached down to save Ned even as the man was falling in, things might have been different. But Jim stood there for that quick moment of amusement and pride—and a swell came and knocked the two boats together. Smashed them together, with a force that almost threw Jim off his feet. Between the two boats was Ned Wishnell, of course, and when the boats separated after the collision, he was gone. He had sunk.
He must have been badly banged up. He was wearing long boots, and they had probably filled up with water, and he couldn’t swim. Whatever had happened, Ned Wishnell was gone.
That was the end of the fourth Fort Niles-Courne Haven lobster war. That pretty much did it. Losing Ned Wishnell was tragic for both islands. The reaction on Fort Niles and Courne Haven was almost like the nationwide reaction a few years later, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. A shocked citizenry faced an impossibility come true—and everyone felt changed by (perhaps even a little complicit in) the death. There was a sense on both islands that something was fundamentally wrong if this could happen, if the fight went so far that a man like Ned Wishnell died because of it.
The fact that Ned Wishnell had drowned while trying to help a boy who’d been sucked into this war struck everyone as ugly. It horrified even Ira Pommeroy, who had basically been responsible for the tragedy. Ira started drinking hard, much harder than usual, and it was then that he turned from a regular drunk into a serious drunk. A few weeks after the drowning of Ned Wishnell, Ira Pommeroy asked his wife, Rhonda, to help him write a letter of condolence to Mrs. Ned Wishnell. But there was no way to reach the Widow Wishnell. She was no longer on Courne Haven Island. She had disappeared.
She wasn’t from there to begin with. Like all Wishnells, Ned had married a beauty from away. Mrs. Ned Wishnell was a ginger-haired, leggy, intelligent girl from a prominent Northeastern family that had always summered at Kennebunkport, Maine. She was nothing like the wives of the other fishermen; that was for sure. Her name was Allison, and she’d met Ned when she was sailing with her family up the Maine coast. She’d seen this man in his fishing boat and been captivated by his looks, by his fascinating silence, by his competence. She encouraged her parents to follow his boat into the harbor at Courne Haven, and she approached him with great boldness. He excited her a good deal; he made her tremble. He was nothing like the men she knew, and she married him—to her family’s astonishment—within weeks. She’d been crazy about the man, but there was nothing to keep her on Courne Haven Island after her husband drowned. She was mortified by the war, by the drowning.
The beautiful Allison Wishnell learned the details of her husband’s death, and looked around her and wondered what the hell she was doing on this rock in the middle of the ocean. It was a ghastly feeling. It was like waking up in a stranger’s dirty bed after a night of drinking. It was like waking up in jail in a foreign land. How had she got here? She looked around at her neighbors and decided they were animals. And what was this house, this fish-smelling house, in which she was living? And why was there only one store on the island, a store that sold nothing but dusty canned goods? And what was with this appalling weather? Whose idea was that?
Mrs. Ned Wishnell was very young, just over twenty, when her husband drowned. Immediately after the funeral, she went back to her parents. She dropped her married name. She became Allison Cavanaugh again and enrolled in Smith College, where she studied art history and never told anybody that she had been a lobster fisherman’s wife. She left it all behind. She even left her son behind on the island. There didn’t seem to be much negotiating involved in that decision, and even less trauma. People said Mrs. Ned Wishnell had never been all that attached to her boy anyway; that something about her child frightened her. The Wishnells on Courne Haven made a strong case that the baby should remain with the family, and that was that. She gave him up.
The boy was to be raised by his uncle, a young man who had just come out of the seminary, a young man who had ambitions to be a traveling minister for all the obscure Maine islands. The uncle’s name was Toby. Pastor Toby Wishnell. He was the youngest brother of Ned Wishnell, and just as handsome, although in a more delicate way. Toby Wishnell was the first Wishnell not to be a fisherman. The baby—Ned Wishnell’s little boy—would be his charge. The baby’s name was Owney, and he was just one year old.
If Owney Wishnell missed his mother when she left, he didn’t show it. If Owney Wishnell missed his drowned father, he didn’t show that, either. He was a big, blond, quiet baby. He caused no one any trouble, except when he was taken out of the bath. Then he’d scream and fight, and his strength was a wonder. The only thing Owney Wishnell wanted, it seemed, was to be in the water all the time.
A few weeks after Ned Wishnell was buried, when it became evident that the lobster war was over, Stan Thomas put his boat back into the water and started fishing with supremacy. He fished with a single-mindedness that would soon earn him the nickname Greedy Number Two (the natural successor to Angus Addams, who had long been known as Greedy Number One). His little period of domesticity with his wife was over. Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas was clearly no longer his partner. His partner was whatever teenage boy was slaving away as his sternman.
Stan came home to Mary late every afternoon exhausted and absorbed. He kept a journal of each fishing day so that he could chart the abundance of lobsters in each area of the ocean. He spent long nights with maps and calculators, and he did not include Mary in this work.
“What are you doing?” she’d ask. “What are you working on?”
“Fishing,” he’d say.
To Stan Thomas, any work related to fishing was itself the act of fishing, even if it took place on dry land. And since his wife was not a fisherman, her views were of no service to him. He stopped calling her over to his lap, and she would not have dared to climb there uninvited. It was a bleak time in her life. Mary was beginning to realize something about her husband that was not pleasant. During the lobster war, when he’d pulled his boat and gear out of the water, she’d interpreted his acts as those of a man of virtue. Her husband was staying out of the war, she thought, because he was a peaceful man. She had gravely misunderstood, and it was now becoming clear to her. He had stayed out of the war to protect his interests and to make a killing when the war was over and he could start fishing again. And now that he was making a killing, he could scarcely stop gloating for a minute.
He spent his evenings transcribing the notes he had taken on his boat into ledgers full of long, complicated figures. The records were meticulous and dated back for years. Some evenings, he would page backward through his ledgers and muse over exceptionally great batches of lobsters in days gone by. He would talk to his ledgers. “I wish it could be October all year round,” he would tell the columns of figures.
Some nights, he’d talk to his calculator as he worked. He’d say, “I hear you, I hear you.” Or “Quit teasing!”
In December, Mary told her husband she was pregnant.
“Way to go, Mint,” he said, but he wasn’t as excited as she hoped he’d be.
Mary secretly sent a letter to Vera Ellis, telling her of the pregnancy, but she got no response. That devastated her; she cried and cried. The only person, in fact, who was at all interested in Mary’s pregnancy was her neighbor Rhonda Pommeroy, who, as usual, was pregnant herself.
“I’ll probably have a boy,” Rhonda said, tipsily.
Rhonda was drunk, as usual. Drunk in a charming way, as usual, as though she were a young girl and this was the first alcohol she had ever tasted. Drunk like wheee! “I’ll probably have another boy, Mary, so you have to have a girl. Did you feel it when you got pregnant?”
“I don’t think so,” Mary said.
“I feel it every time. It’s like click! And this one’s a boy. I can always tell. And yours is going to be a girl. I’ll bet it’s a girl! How about that? When she grows up, she can marry one of my boys! And we can be related! ” Rhonda nudged Mary so hard, she almost knocked her over.
“We’re already related,” Mary said. “Through Len and Kitty.”
“You’re going to like having a baby,” Rhonda said. “It’s the funnest thing.”
But it wasn’t the funnest thing, not for Mary. She got stuck on the island for the delivery, and it was a living nightmare. Her husband couldn’t take the screaming and all the women around, so he went fishing and left her to deliver the baby without his help. It was a cruel act on many levels. There had been bad storms all week
“Oh, isn’t she the dearest little baby?” Simon said, again and again, as the women laughed at his tenderness.
“What should we name her?” Mary asked her husband, quietly. “Do you like the name Ruth?”
“I don’t care what you name her,” Stan Thomas said, of his daughter, who was only an hour old. “Name her whatever you like, Mint.”
“Do you want to hold her?” Mary asked.
“I have to wash up,” he said. “I smell like a bait bag.”
10
What say you to a ramble among the fairy rock pools, weed-covered ledges, and gem-decked parterres bordering the gardens of the sea?
—Crab, Shrimp, and Lobster Lore W. B. Lord 1867
JULY ARRIVED for Fort Niles. It was now the middle of the summer of 1976. It wasn’t as exciting a month as it might have been.
The Bicentennial passed on Fort Niles without any outstanding revelry. Ruth thought she lived in the only place in America that wasn’t getting its act together for a decent celebration. Her dad even went out to haul that day, although, out of some patriotic stirring, he gave Robin Pommeroy the day off. Ruth spent the holiday with Mrs. Pommeroy and her two sisters. Mrs. Pommeroy had tried to sew costumes for them all. She wanted the four of them to dress up as Colonial dames and march in the town parade, but she’d managed to finish only Ruth’s costume by the morning of the Fourth, and Ruth refused to dress up alone. So Mrs. Pommeroy put the costume on Opal, and baby Eddie immediately vomited all over it.