“Because they don’t,” he said. He tossed another one in the ocean.
“Why don’t you keep them?” Ruth said.
“Can’t!” Owney cried.
“When did you set the trap?”
“Last week.”
“Why do you keep the buoy under water, where you can’t see it?”
“Hiding it.”
“From who?”
“Everyone.”
“How did you find the trap, then?”
“I just knew where it was,” he said. “I know where they are.”
“ ‘They’?”
He threw the last of the lobsters into the sea and tossed the trap over the side with a mighty splash. As he wiped his hands on his overalls, he said, with tragic urgency, “I know where the lobsters are.”
“You know where the lobsters are.”
“Yes.”
“You really are a Wishnell,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are your other traps, Owney?”
“Everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
“All over the coast of Maine?”
“Yes.”
“Your uncle knows?”
“No!” He looked aghast, horrified.
“Who built the traps?”
“Me.”
“When?”
“At night.”
“You do all this behind your uncle’s back.”
“Yes.”
“Because he’d kill you, right?”
No answer.
“Why do you throw them back, Owney?”
He put his hands over his face, then let them drop. He looked as if he was about to cry. He could only shake his head.
“Oh, Owney.”
“I know.”
“This is crazy.”
“I know.”
“You could be rich! My God, if you had a boat and some gear, you could be rich!”
“I can’t.”
“Because somebody-”
“My uncle.”
“-would find out.”
“Yes.”
“He wants you to be a minister or something pathetic like that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s a big fucking waste, isn’t it?”
“I don’t want to be a minister.”
“I don’t blame you, Owney. I don’t want to be a minister, either. Who else knows about this?”
“We have to go,” Owney said. He grabbed the oars and spun the boat around, his broad, straight back toward the shore, and started to pull through the water in his beautiful long strokes, like a gorgeous machine.
“Who else knows, Owney?”
He stopped rowing and looked at her. “You.”
She looked right back at him, right at his big, square blond head, at his blue Swedish eyes.
“You,” he repeated. “Only you.”
8
As the lobster increases in size, it grows bolder and retires farther from shore, although it never really loses its instinct for digging, and never abandons the habit of concealing itself under stones when the necessity arises.
– The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D. 1895
GEORGES BANK, at the end of the Ice Age, was a forest, lush and thick and primeval. It had rivers, mountains, mammals. Then it was covered by the sea and became some of the finest fishing ground on earth. The transformation took millions of years, but it didn’t take the Europeans long to find the place once they reached the New World, and they fished the hell out of it.
The big boats sailed out with nets and lines for every kind of fish-redfish, herring, cod, mackerel, whales of many varieties, squid, tuna, swordfish, dogfish-and there were draggers, too, for scallops. By the end of the nineteenth century, the bank had became an international city afloat; German, Russian, American, Canadian, French, and Portuguese boats all pulled up tons of fish. Each boat had men aboard to shovel the flopping fish into the holds as thoughtlessly as men shovel coal. Each vessel stayed out there for a week, even two weeks at a stretch. At night, the lights from the hundreds of ships shone on the water like the lights of a small city.
The boats and ships out there, stuck in the open sea, a day from any shore, were sitting targets for bad weather. The storms came up fast and mean and could wipe out a whole fleet, devastating the community it came from. A village might send a few fishing boats out on a routine trip to Georges Bank and a few days later find itself a village of widows and orphans. The newspapers listed the dead men and their surviving dependents, too. This was perhaps the crux of the tragedy. It was imperative to count who was left, to estimate how many souls remained on shore without fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, uncles to support them. What was to become of them?
46 DEAD, the headline would read. 197 DEPENDENTS LEFT BEHIND.
That was the truly sad number. That was the number everyone needed to know.
Lobster fishing is not like this, though, and never was. It is dangerous enough, but it isn’t as deadly as deep-sea fishing. Not by a long shot. Lobster towns don’t lose men in battalions. Lobstermen fish alone, are rarely out of sight of shore, are generally home by early afternoon to eat pie and drink beer and sleep with their boots on the couch. Widows and orphans are not created in crowds. There are no unions of widows, no clutches of widows. Widows in lobster-fishing communities appear one at a time, through random accidents and freak drownings and strange fogs and storms that come and go without doing other havoc.
Such was the case of Mrs. Pommeroy, who, in 1976, was the only widow in Fort Niles; that is, the only fisherman’s widow. She was the only woman who had lost her man to the sea. What did this status afford her? Very little. The fact that her husband had been a drunk who fell overboard on a calm sunny day lessened the catastrophic dimensions of the event, and as the years went by her tragedy was by and large forgotten. Mrs. Pommeroy was something of a calm sunny day herself, and she was so lovely that people had difficulty remembering to pity her.
Besides, she had managed well without a husband to support her. She had survived without Ira Pommeroy, and did not show the world any signs of suffering from her loss. She had her big house, which had been built and paid for long before she was born and was constructed so solidly that it required little upkeep. Not that anyone cared about upkeep. She had her garden. She had her sisters, who were irritating but devoted. She had Ruth Thomas for daughterly companionship. She had her sons, who, though pretty much a pack of deadbeats, were no worse deadbeats than anyone else’s sons, and they did contribute to their mother’s support.
The Pommeroy boys who stayed on the island had small incomes, of course, because they could work only as sternmen on other people’s boats. The incomes were small because the Pommeroy boats and Pommeroy territory and Pommeroy fishing gear had all been lost at the death of their father. The other men on the island had bought everything up for a pittance, and it could never be recovered. Because of this, and because of their natural laziness, the Pommeroy boys had no future on Fort Niles. They couldn’t, once they were grown men, start to assemble a fishing business. They grew up knowing this, so it came as no surprise that a few of them had left the island for good. And why not? They had no future at home.
Fagan, the middle child, was the only Pommeroy son with ambitions. He was the only one with a goal in life, and he pursued it successfully. He was working on a squalid little potato farm in a remote, landlocked county of northern Maine. He had always wanted to get away from the ocean, and that’s what he had done. He had always wanted to be a farmer. No seagulls, no wind. He sent money home to his mother. He called her every few weeks to tell her how the potato crop was doing. He said he hoped to be the foreman of the farm someday. He bored her senseless, but she was proud of him for having a job, and she was happy to get the money he sent.
Conway and John and Chester Pommeroy had joined the military, and Conway (a Navy man all the way, as he liked to say, as though he were an admiral) was lucky enough to have caught the last year or so of action in the Vietnam War. He was a sailor on a river patrol boat in a nasty area of contention. He had two tours of duty in Vietnam. He passed the first without injury, though he sent boastful and crude letters to his mother explaining in explicit detail how many of his buddies had bought it and exactly what stupid mistakes those idiots had made that caused them to buy it. He also described for his mother what his buddies’ bodies looked like after they’d bought it, and assured her that he would never buy it because he was too smart for that shit.