At the fire station four firemen in blue shirts sit in portable chairs on the wall looking over the road. They watch my progress.
Maisie and Una visit with a loaf of bread, an apple, a grapefruit, and a sesame-seed snack. Maisie’s given up smoking and resumed running, to supplement her rowing. Yesterday, twenty-eight minutes. There’s so much to do, she says, and here’s another thing.
What thing.
The not smoking, she says.
26 At about two Helmut calls. He is leaving port at four oclock.
There is a defined half moon accompanying the sun. Lydia and I drive down to say bon voyage to the crew and their company boat. Helmut invites us on. All the men are tanned, with thick forearms and tall. Most are American. I leave the crutches and hop aboard. A famous marine artist has painted a school of tuna across the bow The navigation is tied to satellite imagery. Helmut shows us St John’s harbour on a screen as it looks from the sky. We let him have a minute with Iris.
Boyd Coady says, loudly, I’d rather fly to Boston. Saw one of those tupperware boats caught in ice last year. Sunk before you could blink.
Helmut asks Lydia to take the video camera, to catch them heading for the Narrows. He starts up the auxiliary outboard and spews forward, ducking under the boom. He describes a wide curve and returns to the dock, cutting power. Helmut leans to collect the camera, waves, then slips on the wet gunwale. He falls into the boat, hitting his head, and two of the crew come to assist him. But he’s up quickly and laughing and opens the outboard throttle, embarrassed.
Iris jogging to Cabot Tower, to wave them off. Gulls sit with their chests against the pavement.
They will sail to Boston on a dry run before heading to Brazil, where Iris will meet them.
Boyd: You wouldnt catch me in one of those contraptions. He’s German, I say, as if that explains something.
27 As I walk up Cabot Street a ten-year-old girl asks me to stop the ball. I stop it with my crutch. I look tough with the crutches swung over my shoulder. The neighbourhood so shoddy. A dog in a second-storey window, silently clawing at the inside glass. A man with an apron opens the door to a house adjacent to Leo’s Fish and Chips. He’s smoking. He goes back inside.
Often I am afraid of new life. Of pushing into the new. Maisie says when you have a kid there’s an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month grocery bill. I watch Boyd Coady feeding a baby in the back seat of a Chevette, his seven-year-old standing beside him Boyd looks fiercely down Long’s Hill to the Narrows. Helmut in that storm last night. Lydia saying to Iris, He must be some loner to do that. And Iris: Helmut is looking for love. He’s mad at me.
28 The caplin are sighted in Flatrock and Torbay. I have two five-gallon buckets in Jethro’s trunk. I pick up Lydia and Tinker Bumbo and we head north.
There are men on the stone beach preparing cast nets and as evening falls they light three bonfires on the landwash and this will guide the fish in. There are wheelbarrows and buckets and families making it a picnic.
The caplin will look like a force of bad weather. And they will strike fast and roll.
The men wade in a little with their cast nets.
The water is green and darker green and there are white boulders and kelp fanning in slow motion and I can see a flounder sitting passively in the green.
The green pitches to black. It swarms black and darts like a vision behind the eyelid. About ten square feet of soft grey-black curve and then a slick of silver pins as the curve darts and separates around our feet like a beaded curtain. There’s no way to get them in a bucket.
But in a few minutes a wave launches in full of their silver bellies. The bonfires light up their silver and they wriggle in the smooth wet sand and stone.