Good times and bad times, the lump of whale bone had absorbed them all like a thirsty sponge. Given the events of recent years, he now wondered if the bone hadn’t begun to favor the bad over the good, somehow attracting ill-luck to itself, and he questioned whether he was to blame for this. Maybe it was a cursed object, blighted from the moment he first removed it from its natural resting place.
He didn’t dismiss such ideas. Like most fishermen he was given to superstitions – no talk of pigs or knives around the boat, no women or preachers aboard, no whistling in a breeze. He even knew a Swedish lobsterman in Sag Harbor who refused to put to sea in the company of a Finn, but that had as much to do with ancient rivalries between the two nations as it did arcane beliefs. Men for whom death was a daily and very real possibility were inclined to respect the precautionary wisdoms, however curious, of those who’d gone before them. It was the reason Conrad still cherished the caul that had masked his blunt, newborn face.
The patch of diaphanous skin, moist and clear when he was first dragged into the world, now lay dry and crinkled like a piece of old parchment in the shallow wooden pine box made specially by his father to house it. Prized as a potent charm against drowning, deep-sea whalemen used to pay big money for a baby’s caul to carry with them on their perilous voyages, though most found themselves rounding the Horn with little more than a scrap of cow’s after-birth in their pockets, sold them by some unscrupulous type wise to the lucrative trade.
That Conrad should have been born with a caul was as good a portent as any fisherman could wish for his son. It meant that the child was somehow touched, that the gods looked favorably upon him, that this was one boy who would never get to share the company of Davy Jones. Whether there was any truth in this, who could say? All Conrad knew was that he was still alive while others had been taken by the sea.
A sharp pain in his hand brought Conrad to his senses. He flicked the cigarette butt away and turned towards the oyster house, aware again of the noisy debate taking place inside.
It was some years since the beds off the north shore had yielded oysters of sufficient number or size worthy of the New York market, and little remained in the cavernous hall to indicate the building’s original function. The long benches for cleaning and packing the oysters had been stripped out – bought by old Mabbett for a song when he had expanded his fish-packing business – and the community of Amagansett men who followed the sea now referred to the rickety building as Oyster Hall. It was where they collected to while away the slow, fragmented winter months in idle chat. When the weather was too severe for even the most reckless among them to put to sea, the place would be packed with bodies. Right now there were fifty or so men gathered inside, but not one of them turned as Conrad entered.
Some were on their feet, gesticulating wildly, disturbing the pall of pipe and cigarette smoke hanging below the rafters. Others hurled insults at each other. The meeting had degenerated into a free-for-all.
‘Shut it off!’ bellowed Rollo’s father, Ned Kemp. He was seated behind a table on the far side of the hall, flanked by Jake Van Duyn and Frank Paine. Beside them, on a worn square of zinc nailed to the floor, stood the big airtight stove, its long and rickety pipe snaking above their heads, suspended by wires from the ceiling. Grabbing a poker, Ned beat on the pipe.
‘Shut it off, goddamnit!’ The deafening sound restored some kind of order to the assembly.
Ned advanced through the rows of men ranged on chairs before him, brandishing the poker. ‘You, Osborne, bring your ass to anchor.’ Art Osborne duly did as he was told.
‘God in heaven,’ snapped Ned. ‘What do you think the sports’d say if they saw us now? I tell you what they’d say, they’d say they got the battle won, and they’d be right, you sorry sonsabitches.’
Conrad caught sight of Rollo standing with his brothers against the wall in the corner, looking completely puzzled. His father wasn’t naturally given to profanities.
‘We got to get us organized,’ Ned went on. ‘Else we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of beating the bill, that’s sure enough.’
The bill in question was a proposed amendment to the state fisheries law sponsored by the growing lobby of sportsfishermen. Like the bill narrowly defeated before the war, it called for a total ban on all fishing by means of nets, traps and trawl lines within the tidal waters of New York State, ascribing natural fluctuations in all fish populations to wholesale pillaging by the commercial fishermen. When it came to it, though, everyone knew the real reason the rod-and-line men were calling for action. They wanted to board the train at Penn Station in New York at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning in the knowledge that no one else had tampered with their precious waters off Montauk since the previous weekend.
Conrad had witnessed the ‘Fisherman’s Special’ pull into Montauk Station only once, but it wasn’t a sight you were ever likely to forget – hundreds of grown men, many of whom had been on their feet for the past four hours, grappling with their gear and with each other to get off that train, leaping from the carriages, scrabbling through windows, anything to beat their friends-turned-rivals to the favored spots on the boats lined up along the Union News Dock on Fort Pond Bay, a short but sapping sprint away.
To the fishermen of the South Fork, the building crusade against them was an affront of such profound impertinence it made the blood beat in their ears. These were men whose families had fished the waters off the East End for as long as anyone could remember, for twelve generations in the case of the older Amagansett clans. They were the representatives of a tradition reaching back hundreds of years, and many still spoke with the same Kentish and West Country inflections of their seventeenth-century English ancestors who had first settled the village.
Ned Kemp understood that these romantic notions counted for nothing in Albany. The sportsfishermen were wealthy, they could afford the best lawyers, and they were accustomed to getting their own way. It was the reason Ned had called the meeting at Oyster Hall, to urge the fishermen to meet like with like, to act with level-headed pragmatism. But the discussion had clearly become mired in a collective venting of the spleen.
‘I know I ain’t a tub of wisdom,’ said Noah Poole, too old now to do anything but grub for piss clams in summer. ‘The way I sees it though, God Almighty put the fish in the water and the birds and animals in the woods for the people, and when you make any fool laws that stops the people from using ’em, then God Almighty makes ’em scarce.’
‘You’re right …’ said Jack Holden. Noah accepted the compliment by smoothing the few lonely wisps of hair on his head. ‘ … You ain’t no tub of wisdom,’ continued Jack.
This triggered a chorus of sniggers from the other young men he was seated with.
‘You boys got nothin’ better to contribute,’ said Ned, ‘you might as well clear off.’
‘What’s to say? This crap them sports is trying to put over on us, it burns me up,’ said Jack. ‘Sometimes the fish don’t run so good. There’s good and bad seasons for fish just like crops to a farm.’
‘Yeah.’
‘The bass and blues is down right now. Come next year they’ll be running like a damn army. That’s just the way things is.’
‘Always has been.’
Ned looked down at the younger men, deep furrows in his lean dark face, his white hair clipped so short it sat like a dusting of frost on his square skull. ‘We know that,’ he said. ‘Now we got to show it. Prove it.’
‘How’n the hell we gonna do that?’ came a voice from across the hall.
‘First off, I say we co-operate with that young fellow who’s around right now.’
‘You mean that screwball who keeps wantin’ to scrape scales off of my fish?’
There was a smattering of laughter from around the hall. The source of their amusement was a young fisheries biologist with the New York State Conservation Department.