Stern Men (6 page)

But that all happened after the funeral. In the meantime, the service continued smoothly. Eventually, Mr. Pommeroy, idling in his long and leggy spruce box, was packed down in the dirt. The men dropped clods of earth upon him; the women dropped flowers upon him. Webster Pommeroy fidgeted and paced in place and looked as if he might start running any minute now. Mrs. Pommeroy let go of her composure and cried prettily. Ruth Thomas watched in some anger as the drowned husband of her favorite person in the entire world was buried.

Ruth thought,
Christ! Why didn’t he just swim for it instead?

Senator Simon Addams brought Mrs. Pommeroy’s sons a book that night, in a protective canvas bag. Mrs. Pommeroy was making supper for her boys. She was still wearing her black funeral dress, which was made of a material heavy for the season. She was scraping the root hairs and rough skin from a bucket of her garden’s carrots. The Senator brought her a small bottle of rum, as well, which she said she thought she wouldn’t be having any of, but she thanked him all the same.

“I’ve never known you to turn down a drink of rum,” Senator Simon Addams said.

“All the fun’s out of drinking for me, Senator. You won’t be seeing me drink anymore.”

“There was fun in drinking once?” the Senator asked. “There ever was?”

“Ah . . .” Mrs. Pommeroy sighed and smiled sadly. “What’s in the sack?”

“A gift for your boys.”

“Will you have supper with us?”

“I will. Thank you very much.”

“Ruthie!” Mrs. Pommeroy said, “bring the Senator a glass for his rum.”

But young Ruth Thomas had already done so, and she’d brought him a chunk of ice, too. Senator Simon rubbed Ruth’s head with his big, soft hand.

“Shut your eyes, Ruthie,” he told her. “I’ve got a gift for you.”

Ruth obediently shut her eyes for him, as she always had, ever since she was a very small girl, and he kissed her on the forehead. He gave her a big smack. That was always his gift. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He loved her.

Now the Senator put the tips of his two index fingers together. “OK, Ruthie. Cut the pickle,” he said.

Ruth made scissors of the fingers on her right hand and snipped through his fingers.

“Get the tickle!” he exclaimed, and he tickled her ribs. Ruth was too old for this game, but the Senator loved it. He laughed and laughed. She smiled indulgently. They sometimes performed this little routine four times a day.

Ruth Thomas was eating supper with the Pommeroys that night, even though it was a funeral night. Ruth nearly always ate with them. It was nicer than eating at home. Ruth’s father wasn’t much for cooking a hot meal. He was clean and decent enough, but he didn’t keep much of a home. He wasn’t against having cold sandwiches for dinner. He wasn’t against mending Ruth’s skirt hems with a staple gun, either. He ran that kind of house and had done so ever since Ruth’s mother left. Nobody was going to starve or freeze to death or go without a sweater, but it wasn’t a particularly cozy home. So Ruth spent most of her time at the Pommeroys’, which was much warmer and easier. Mrs. Pommeroy had invited Stan Thomas over for dinner that night, too, but he’d stayed at home. He was thinking that a man shouldn’t take a supper off a woman freshly grieving the funeral of her husband.

The seven Pommeroy boys were murderously glum at the dinner table. Cookie, the Senator’s dog, napped behind the Senator’s chair. The Pommeroys’ nameless, one-eyed dog, locked in the bathroom for the duration of the Senator’s visit, howled and barked in outrage at the thought of another dog in his home. But Cookie didn’t notice. Cookie was beat tired. Cookie followed the lobster boats out sometimes, even when the water was rough, and she was always very nearly drowning. It was awful. She was only a year-old mutt, and she was crazy to think she could swim against the ocean. Cookie had been pulled by the current once nearly to Courne Haven Island, but the mail boat happened to pick her up and bring her back, almost dead. It was awful when she swam out after the boats, barking. Senator Simon Addams would edge near the dock, as close to it as he dared, and would beg Cookie to come back. Begging and begging! The young dog swam in small circles farther and farther out, sneezing off the spray from the outboard motors. The sternmen in the chased boats would throw hunks of herring bait at Cookie, yelling, “Git on outta heh!”

Of course the Senator could never go out after his dog. Not Senator Simon, who was as afraid of water as his dog was inspired by it. “Cookie!” he’d yell. “Please come on back, Cookie! Come on back, Cookie! Come on back now, Cookie!”

It was hard to watch, and it had been happening since Cookie was a puppy. Cookie chased boats almost every day, and Cookie was tired every night. This night was no exception. So Cookie slept, exhausted, behind the Senator’s chair during supper. At the end of Mrs. Pommeroy’s supper, Senator Simon caught the last morsel of pork on his plate with his fork tines and waved his fork behind him. The pork dropped to the floor. Cookie woke up, chewed the meat thoughtfully, and went back to sleep.

Then the Senator pulled from the canvas sack the book he’d brought as a gift for the boys. It was a huge book, heavy as a slab of slate.

“For your boys,” he told Mrs. Pommeroy.

She looked it over and handed it to Chester. Chester looked it over. Ruth Thomas thought,
A book for those boys?
She had to feel sorry for someone like Chester, with such a massive book in his hand, staring at it with no comprehension.

“You know,” Ruth Thomas told Senator Simon, “they can’t read.”

Then she said to Chester, “Sorry!” thinking that it wasn’t right to bring up such a fact on the day of a boy’s father’s funeral, but she didn’t know for certain whether the Senator knew that the Pommeroy boys couldn’t read. She didn’t know if he’d heard of their affliction.

Senator Simon took the book back from Chester. It had been his great-grandfather’s book, he said. His great-grandfather had purchased the book in Philadelphia the only time that good man had ever left Fort Niles Island in his entire life. The cover of the book was thick, hard, brown leather. The Senator opened the book and began to read from the first page.

He read: “Dedicated to the King, the Lords Commissioner of the Admiralty, to the Captains and Officers of the Royal Navy, and to the Public at Large. Being the most accurate, elegant, and perfect edition of the whole works and discoveries of the celebrated circumnavigator Captain James Cook.”

Senator Simon paused and looked at each of the Pommeroy boys. “Circumnavigator!” he exclaimed.

Each boy returned his look with a great lack of expression.

“A circumnavigator, boys! Captain Cook sailed the world all the way around, boys! Would you like to do that someday?”

Timothy Pommeroy stood up from the table, walked into the living room, and lay down on the floor. John helped himself to some more carrots. Webster sat, drumming his feet nervously against the kitchen tile.

Mrs. Pommeroy said politely, “Sailed around the whole world, did he, Senator?”

The Senator read more: “Containing an authentic, entertaining, full, and complete history of Captain Cook’s First, Second, and Third Voyages.”

He smiled at Mrs. Pommeroy. “This is a marvelous book for boys. Inspiring. The good captain was killed by savages, you know. Boys love these stories. Boys! If you wish to be sailors, you will study James Cook!”

At that time, only one of the Pommeroy boys was any kind of a sailor. Conway was working as a substitute sternman for a Fort Niles fisherman named Mr. Duke Cobb. A few days every week, Conway left the house at five in the morning and returned late in the afternoon, reeking of herring. He pulled traps and pegged lobsters and filled bait bags, and received ten percent of the profits for his work. Mr. Cobb’s wife packed Conway his lunch, which was part of his pay. Mr. Cobb’s boat, like all the boats, never went much farther than a mile or two from Fort Niles. Mr. Cobb was certainly no circumnavigator. And Conway, a sullen and lazy kid, was not shaping up to be a great circumnavigator, either.

Webster, the oldest boy, at fourteen, was the only other Pommeroy old enough to work, but he was a wreck on a boat. He was useless on a boat. He went nearly blind with seasickness, dying from headaches and vomiting down his own helpless sleeves. Webster had an idea of being a farmer. He kept a few chickens.

“I have a little joke to show you,” Senator Simon said to Chester, the nearest boy. He spread the book on the table and opened it to the middle. The huge page was covered with tiny text. The print was dense and thick and faint as a small pattern on old fabric.

“What do you see here? Look at that spelling.”

Terrible silence as Chester stared.

“There’s no letter
s
anywhere, is there, son? The printers used
f
instead, didn’t they, son? The whole book is like that. It was perfectly common. It looks funny to us, though, doesn’t it? To us, it looks as if the word
sail
is the word
fail.
To us, it looks as if every time Captain Cook
sailed
the boat, he actually
failed
the boat! Of course, he didn’t fail at all. He was the great circumnavigator. Imagine if someone told you, Chester, that someday you would
fail
a boat? Ha!”

“Ha!” said Chester, accordingly.

“Have they spoken to you yet, Rhonda?” Senator Simon asked Mrs. Pommeroy suddenly, and shut the book, which slammed like a weighty door.

“Have who, Senator?”

“All the other men.”

“No.”

“Boys,” Senator Simon said, “get out of here. Your mother and I need to talk alone. Beat it. Take your book. Go outside and play.”

The boys sulked out of the room. Some of them went upstairs, and the others filed outside. Chester carried the enormous, inappropriate gift of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations outdoors. Ruth slipped under the kitchen table, unnoticed.

“They’ll be coming by soon, Rhonda,” the Senator said to Mrs. Pommeroy when the room had cleared. “The men will come by soon for a talk with you.”

“Fine.”

“I wanted to give you some warning. Do you know what they’ll be asking you?”

“No.”

“They’ll ask if you’re planning on staying here, on the island. They’ll want to know if you’re staying or if you’re planning to move inland.”

“Fine.”

“They probably wish you’d leave.”

Mrs. Pommeroy said nothing.

From her vantage point under the table, Ruth heard a splash, which she guessed was Senator Simon’s pouring a fresh dollop of rum on the ice in his glass.

“So, do you think you’ll stay on Fort Niles, then?” he asked.

“I think we’ll probably stay, Senator. I don’t know anybody inland. I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.”

“And whether you do or do not stay, they’ll want to buy your man’s boat. And they’ll want to fish his fishing ground.”

“Fine.”

“You should keep both the boat and the ground for the boys, Rhonda.”

“I don’t see how I can do that, Senator.”

“Neither do I, to tell you the truth, Rhonda.”

“The boys are so young, you see. They aren’t ready to be fishermen so young, Senator.”

“I know, I know. I can’t see either how you can afford to keep the boat. You’ll need the money, and if the men want to buy it, you’ll have to sell. You can’t very well leave it on shore while you wait for your boys to grow up. And you can’t very well go out there every day and chase men off the Pommeroy fishing ground.”

“That’s right, Senator.”

“And I can’t see how the men will let you keep the boat or the fishing ground. Do you know what they’ll tell you, Rhonda? They’ll tell you they just intend to fish it for a few years, not to let it go to waste, you see. Just until the boys are big enough to take over. But good luck taking it back, boys! You’ll never see it again, boys!”

Mrs. Pommeroy listened to all this with equanimity.

“Timothy,” Senator Simon called, turning his head toward the living room, “do you want to fish? Do you want to fish, Chester? Do you boys want to be lobstermen when you grow up?”

“You sent the boys outside, Senator,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “They can’t hear you.”

“That’s right, that’s right. But do they want to be fishermen?”

“Of course they want to be fishermen, Senator,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “What else could they do?”

“Army.”

“But forever, Senator? Who stays in the Army forever, Senator? They’ll want to come back to the island to fish, like all the men.”

“Seven boys.” Senator Simon looked at his hands. “The men will wonder how there’ll ever be enough lobsters around this island for seven more men to make a living from them. How old is Conway?”

Mrs. Pommeroy informed the Senator that Conway was twelve.

“Ah, they’ll take it all from you, for sure they will. It’s a shame, a shame. They’ll take the Pommeroy fishing ground, split it among them. They’ll buy your husband’s boat and gear for a song, and all that money will be gone in a year, from feeding your boys. They’ll take over your husband’s fishing territory, and your boys will have a hell of a fight to win it back. It’s a shame. And Ruthie’s father probably gets the most of it, I’ll bet. Him and my greedy brother. Greedy Number One and Greedy Number Two.”

Under the table, Ruth Thomas frowned, humiliated. Her face got hot. She did not entirely understand the conversation, but she felt deeply ashamed, suddenly, of her father and of herself.

“Pity,” the Senator said. “I’d tell you to fight for it, Rhonda, but I honestly don’t know how you can. Not all by yourself. Your boys are too young to stage a fight for any territory.”

“I don’t want my boys fighting for anything, Senator.”

“Then you’d better teach them a new trade, Rhonda. You’d better teach them a new trade.”

The two adults sat silently for some time. Ruth hushed her breathing. Then Mrs. Pommeroy said, “He wasn’t a very good fisherman, Senator.”