Читать книгу Rockbound - Frank Parker Day - Страница 5

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Poverte is hateful good, and as I gesse

A ful greet bryngere-out of bisynesse,

A greet amendere eek of sapience

To hym that taketh it in patience.

CANTERBURY TALES.

Lanterns hung from the thick brown beams made spots of yellow light, but dimly illuminated the dusky corners of the great fish house which Uriah's father and uncle, George and Edward Jung, had built from the wreckage of vessels lost on the Rockbound shoals. In the southwest corner was the salt bin, holding hundreds of bushels of wetted yellow salt taken from the bankers in September; along the southern side stood row upon row of puncheons full of pickled cod, mackerel, and herring, the mackerel and herring to be packed in smaller barrels and carried to the main from time to time, and the cod to be laid on rocks and flakes, when the September sun came with heat enough to make the fish without burning them. On top of the puncheons were piled nets, hand barrows, trawl buoys, decoys, and lobster pots, in a welter of confusion. About the beams and in niches of wall or studding were hung or stuck articles of fishermen's use--cotton gloves, nippers, hanks of cod line, finger stalls, and spare splitting knives. In the east end of the room was the flat salting table rimmed with a strip of wood and piled high with yellow salt and gleaming herring. The floor of beech and maple planking, salvaged from a wrecked ship, still showed the trunnel holes and was soaked with the brine and blood of seventy years. In mid-floor stood big tubs, half puncheons, some filled with sea water for washing the fish, some to catch torn-out milt and roe, and some to receive the herring guts, these last to be carried out and spread upon the new-mown timothy land. Tiny spots of light were caught and reflected from thousands of fish scales that sequinned tubs, blood-empurpled floor, and yellow oilskins.

Beneath a swaying lantern, where he could watch and command all, sat Uriah, his swift, keen knife ripping open the bellies of herrings, his horny thumb, unprotected against sharp bones by glove or stall, tearing out entrails or roe to be thrown into the appropriate tub.

"Dese ain't de fish dat was here in April; dese is he fish mostly; dey's full o' milt." He kept up a conversation to make the boys forget their weariness and to drive them on to work.

"My body's good but my legs's gone," said he in apology for sitting on a box. "But I kin still split fish wid ere a man. Me an' my brudder Simeon stood on yon beach an' split eighty barrels o' mackerel from tree one afternoon till sundown nex' day an' never stirred nor eat 'cept when de women folks poked a piece o' bread in our mouf. Dere ain't no men kin work so now'days, ain't it!"

"Men's jus' as good now'days, Fader, but times is changed," growled Casper from the salting table.

"Jus' as good, is it?" jeered the old man. "An' here's dis crew wonderin' if dey kin gib fifty barrels o' herrin' 'fore midnight."

Uriah, the king, a man of seventy, wore a battered straw hat; his squat figure was clad in yellow oilskins and rubber boots. He had a short grizzled beard, his right eye drooped, and an upward twitch in the right corner of his mouth suggested that some day he would suffer a stroke of paralysis. He was rich, avaricious, and had a passion for work; he slept little, was tireless, and drove everyone before him. He ripped open fish with lightning darts of his swift knife and tore out guts with remorseless hand.

"Jus' as good, is it! Jus' as good, is it! I'd 'a' liked to seen you boys keep yur end up when me an' my brudder Simeon was young men," he jeered. "Ain't it, Sim?" yelled Uriah, for Simeon was deaf.

"Ay, so it be, Ury," answered old Simeon, though he had heard never a word of the preceding conversation.

Simeon, the old dotard, worn out with seventy years of incessant labour, sat in a dim corner gibbing feebly. His head bobbed to and fro as he split, a perpetual fond smile was on his face, and saliva drooled from the corners of his mouth. Only the shadow of a man, still working from habit of work, remained.

Joseph, Uriah's son, and Noble Morash, the gaunt black sharesman, emerged from the darkness lugging a barrow piled up with herrings from the boats, and dumped them with a smack on the soaked floor, to add to the great slithering pile already there.

"More work fur de women an' ole men," said Joseph gaily.

Uriah snorted and began, "When me an' my brudder Simeon . . ."

But Joseph waited not to hear; he was always in a hurry; he never walked, he ran. He was avaricious and loved money like his father, and was already the slave of labour. He hustled Noble Morash out into the darkness again to fetch water from the drawn-up dory for the washing tubs. Joseph was a huge fellow with broad shoulders and slim hips and legs; he had a hawk nose, brick-red face, and piercing blue eyes. He was clad like the others in yellow oilskins, long boots, and sou'wester. His nostrils were well cut up on the side, and his face had somehow a strange Turkish or Oriental caste. Uriah had married a Levy from Little Outpost, and the Levys, time out o' mind Baptists, had once been German Jews, though none knew what had converted them, unless it had been the wearisome argument of the sea. Joseph was a money maker, a shrewd bargainer, who peddled cabbages and mackerel through the streets of Liscomb when there was no sale on the wharves; he kept the wooden box into which the Jungs put their common earnings to be divided at the end of each month with much acrimony and mutual distrust. He darted to and fro in the spotty light, sousing the split herrings in the washing tub, transferring them to the second tub, or scooping them out in a dip net, to carry them and smack them down on Casper's salting table. While he kept up a foolish chatter, his thoughts ran thus:

"Fifty barrels at six dollars a barrel is three hundred dollars cash money, and a fifth part of that will be mine, and I'll put it in the bank with the rest. Sixty dollars more for me, and some day next autumn I'll go to the bank in Liscomb and get the cashman to count my money all over for me and tell me again it's all there."

It was a Saturday night, and Uriah knew in his heart that they could not gib the fifty barrels of herring before midnight.

"Me and my brudder Simeon nor my fader before us neber worked on de Lord's Day," he said to spur them on.

"Did us, Sim?" he yelled.

"Dat's a fac', dat's a fac'," babbled the old dotard.

Uriah's thoughts, however, were as follows: "T'ree hunderd dollars fur dis lot; what a pity to-morrow's Sunday! If de leas' sea gits up, de herrin' will go off in deep water, an' we'll have to use sunk nets. My boys is tough, dey don't need no day o' rest, an' dey can't shoot de seine till broad daylight on Monday, for you can't see a herrin' on de bottom till two hours arter sun-up. The Lord should give me a big jewel in my crown for laying dis crew off to-morrow. T'ree hundred dollars gone!" and he groaned inwardly.

Uriah's wife, the Levy from Little Outpost, sat in a darkened corner gibbing silently. She was a big woman with a placid face, who had endured many hardships with fortitude. She was by fifteen years Uriah's junior and had borne him fourteen children. Eight of them had died at birth, for when the fish came plentifully she had worked every night in the fish house, or toiled in potato and cabbage patches even when her time was approaching. Everyone must work on Uriah's island from long before sunrise to dark. She listened not at all to the babble of conversation; she had heard it all before in a hundred variations, and understood Uriah's drift. She sat thinking of the time when she had been a little girl, of her grandfather's long gray beard, and of a big black book with curious printing he used to read in. She thought, too, of the time when she had first seen Uriah, as her father's boat passed close to his in the ships' channel between Big and Little Outpost, and how he came soon after to court her on Sundays. She had been proud to be courted by the best fisherman on the whole coast; then Uriah was daring and a wonder in a boat, now he had become mean and cautious and seldom ventured on the sea.

Near her were two of her daughters, Ruth and Tamar, girls still in their teens drafted into this forced labour. The herring must not go soft or spoil, though men and women wore themselves out. They chattered and giggled to themselves and cast eyes at David, the new ragged sharesman, who, working like a trojan, sat with downcast glance listening to all and saying never a word. His shoulders ached, his hands bled from deep cracks, for all the week before he had fished with squid bait, but he squatted on his heels near the herring pile, working furiously and disdaining a seat as if he were a man of iron.

Fanny, the potato girl, and Gershom Born, the blond Viking, kept up a continual banter. Gershom was obscene in his remarks when he was sure Uriah and his wife were not listening. Fanny slept in the loft with the sharesmen, since there was no other place to sleep, and Gershom was often the companion of her bed. In fact, Fanny refused none of the great sharesmen, though Gershom was her favourite, her only proviso being that they washed themselves and put on a clean shirt before coming to her. Fanny was pretty, of moderate height and stoutly built; she had yellow hair, blue eyes, and a kindly, placid face. As she threw back to Gershom Born some chat none too proper, her white teeth flashed in a pleasant smile. David looked shyly at her with wonder. As yet he knew nothing of women except Jennie Run-over and the trollops she had kept in her house on Outpost. He kept on glancing at Fanny out of the corners of his slitty eyes and found pleasure in her beauty. Tamar caught his sidelong glances and nudged Ruth and giggled.

Fanny was certainly a fine creature, but her morals were those of the birds. She came from Big Outpost to hoe Uriah's cabbages and potatoes, since the men had no time to work about gardens. Moreover, gardening was distinctly woman's work. All day long she hoed and weeded and gave a hand at night in the fish house, as did all the island women when a run of fish came. She trudged home from the fields in the late afternoon, hoe over her shoulder, whistling blithely. Before supper she always went to the beach, stripped and washed herself--little cared she if the men peeked--and put on a clean shirt and a fresh dress of blue and white in tiny checks. Her dresses, scrupulously washed and ironed, were kept in her father's sea chest in the loft by her bed. In the midst of all the dirt, stench, and disorder, she had an instinct, well-nigh a passion, for tidiness. In another setting she might have borne herself with the greatest lady in the land. She was great-hearted and could never refuse a strong fisherman half-crazed with lonely passion. When the women talked to her and said: "A little of dat's all right maybe when you'se young, but if you keeps on you'se'll never git a man," she used to reply, "We was made for de good of mens, an' mens is going to have me." If Uriah and his wife, she thought, cared so much for morals, why had they put her and Leah Levy to sleep in the loft with the sharesmen?

Sure enough, she never got a man, but she bore three daughters that grew into stout lasses, knowing no more than Fanny who were their fathers. In after years Gershom used to say, "I t'ink de pretty one wid de yaller hair mus' be mine, but de dark ugly one favours Noble Morash." Fanny saved her pennies and looked after herself, and when she was too old to work bought a little white cottage in Liscomb. When she was very old and felt herself at the point of death, she sent for her three daughters, but they refused to come. They had all married and were ashamed of their mother. One morning the neighbours found her dead on her clean-valanced couch, even in death smiling bravely upon a world that had taken her all and paid nothing in return.

But that is going far ahead of this story, for the Fanny who bickered with Gershom Born that night in the fish house was only a wild, gay girl of eighteen. She wore, like the others, oilskins spattered with herring blood, and a sou'wester to protect her yellow hair.

The stench, a strange mixture of odours from gurry tubs, ancient fish heads, lobster shells, wetted salt, and gore-drenched floor, almost intolerable to a stranger, was hardly noticed by these tough Rockbounders. Smells, noxious or pleasant, are like everything else relative--there is a fine nuance from a delicate perfume to an ugly stench--and matters of habit and custom. Indeed, the crafty old king, unconscious of the noisome odours, was thinking, as his knife flashed in and out and his facile thumb gouged the bellies of herrings:

"De rent's comin' due dis quarter on my house in Liscomb. Dat'll make more money to go in de bank. What's dat fool woman mean by wantin' a backhouse off de kitchen? She mus' be crazy! Does she want to stink up de whole place? Dey don't need no backhouse, anyhow. Why can't dey go on de beach like us?"

Casper, at the salting table, a great-shouldered giant like Joseph, kept seizing a split herring in each hand and pushing them together through the salt pile till their bellies were crammed with salt. Then he laid the fish in piles, and when the piles were about to topple, he grabbed the salt-stuffed herrings and packed them in a puncheon.

"Quick, Dave, my boy, more salt," he cried, wishing to show his authority. "Quick now, look alive; we ain't got all night."

Casper was the oldest of the Jung boys, but Joseph was the natural leader, a driver, the joy of his father, though for some strange reason Uriah loved Martin, the youngest boy, best of all. David, at Casper's call, stuck his knife in a strip of studding, darted for the salt bin, and emerged in a moment with a bushel basket heaped with salt, which he carried swiftly across the room and dumped on the salting table. Then he was back at his place in a flash, splitting, flashing his knife in and out, gouging out entrails with thumb and fingers, his back and shoulders well-nigh numb with fatigue. No one gibbed more herring than David that night. He would work till he dropped dead, he resolved, before a Rockbound Jung should see he was tired.

Uriah did not like Casper for a number of reasons. In the first place, Casper had never married, while Joseph and Martin had buxom wives both present splitting fish, who had borne them several children. Moreover, Casper argued with the king, and worse than that, he had lost money for him. Ten years earlier Casper had had one grand adventure: he had gone West with the harvesters. Uriah perhaps resented the fact that Casper had dared to leave his kingdom, or dared to prefer any other place to Rockbound, more than the loss of his money. In the West, some crafty real estate man had shown the grasping Casper how to treble his money quickly. It was such a sure thing that Casper had written to Uriah to send him a thousand dollars, meaning to pay the old man well and keep a snug commission for himself. Then land went flat, Casper lost everything, and in a year or two straggled home by hard stages. Before his departure, he had kept the money box, but on his return he had found Joseph ensconced as banker. In his heart he feared and hated the sea and dreaded rough foggy mornings near the Rock; he was a farmer by instinct, happiest when he drove his slow yoke of oxen afield to bring in the hay, or to haul a load of sea dung from the beaches. In spite of Uriah's jibes, his boat was always the last off the launch of a morning, and the first in, if a wind breezed up or fog shut out the islands. He could read and write and knew more of the outside world than any man on Rockbound. By nature, however, he was envious and argumentative, and in recent years had developed, through reading the Old Testament, a curious anti-religious tendency that angered Uriah, whose heart was set on acquiring all the money he could on earth, and insuring a crown of glory in heaven. As Casper stood under the yellow glow of his swinging lantern, his hands flying to and fro as he pushed salt into the bellies of herrings, he was thinking:

"If I had e'er a wife and kids, I wouldn't have dat Ole Testament round de house. It's full o' tales o' concubines and kept women and old whorin' stories. Why, if e'er a child o' mine brung home a book wid stories like dat in it, I'd burn de book and whip de child."

Strangely enough, Uriah, as if conscious of Casper's thought, stood off on a theological tack. He often got the boys stirred up over a religious discussion toward eleven of a heavy evening.

"Ain't Egypt to de east'ard o' de Promised Land, Casper?"

"Dat it is, Fader, from de maps in de books," replied Casper readily but inaccurately, wondering what his father was driving at. Casper did not know that Uriah's wife had been reading to him the night before of the captivity of the Children of Israel.

"I t'ought so."

"Why you t'ought so, Fader?"

"'Cause I does," said Uriah, wishing to prolong the mystery and get full credit for having thought out this particular bit of exegesis. "'Cause I does, from meditatin' on de captivity o' de Children o' Israel."

"An' what might ye o' bin t'inkin', an' what's it got to do wid Egypt bein' to be east'ard o' de Promised Land?"

"Well, don't de good Book say de Children o' Israel went down into Egypt, an' don't we say go down to de east'ard to Marmot and up to de west'ard to Liscomb?"

"Dat up an' down don't mean nuttin'," muttered Casper.

"It do, it do," shrilled Uriah.

"De folks on de Outposts, dey says up to de east'ard and down to de west'ard. Don't dey, Gershom?"

Gershom, deep in an undertoned amorous conversation with Fanny and unaware of the general drift of the argument, bellowed in his booming voice:

"Us Outposters says down to de bottom o' de sea."

Then he laughed his great laugh to think how cleverly he had avoided partisanship, for he liked neither Uriah nor Casper, and went on telling Fanny one of his adventures at Jennie Run-over's.

"De Outposters is wrong about eberyt'ing," shouted Uriah. "Dey don't know how to work. Why, me an' my brudder Simeon, when we was young mens . . ." and then, suddenly recalling that the argument was theological, reverted to his down-east theory, "Us here on Rockbound says down to de east'ard, jus' like de good Book says."

"Dat up an' down's child's talk," retorted Casper stubbornly.

Noble Morash, the gaunt, iron-gray sharesman, stood erect, split his fish viciously, and looked about him with scorn and hatred. His heart was black with hate that night. He hated Gershom with his gay boisterous laugh and booming voice because he was monopolizing Fanny, and because Gershom was Fanny's favourite. Too seldom he himself got Fanny's favours. He hated the hoary Uriah, who goaded him to work without end, Joseph, spit of his father, and the apple-faced Casper who gumbled at the salting table. He despised the women because they made him matter of jest. He hated David Jung, the new sharesman, because he was Uriah's kinsman, and because in the boat that day he had dared to laugh when the oar bobbed out and caught him between the eyes. "I'll take it out on dat young bugger," he thought viciously. Both his eyes were blackened, his nose swollen to twice its normal size, and his evil temper was not sweetened by the fact that Ruth nudged Tamar and giggled whenever she glanced his way.

David, in obedience to a swift-flung order, stepped out into the darkness to fetch buckets of water to replenish Joseph's washing tubs. Noble Morash slipped out after him, barged against him in the darkness, and upset him and his buckets over a tub of rotten gurry. David groaned with pain and anger as the edge of the tub caught him in the ribs, but by the time he had picked himself up and found a stick, Noble Morash was back at his splitting table gibbing herring, with a gleam of sardonic pleasure in his sinister eyes. David dared not start a fight in the fish house, so he filled his buckets with water, carried them in, and emptied them in the washing tubs with never a word. But he thought, "I'll bide my time, Noble Morash. Ye'll pay for that push. I can't lick ye yet, but wait till I gits feed up an' set."

A few mornings later, when Noble Morash pushed off his boat in the dark and tried to hoist his sail, the halliards kept slipping through his hands, and when day broke he found they had been greased from end to end with the rottenest fish gurry, as his nostrils had made him suspect on the first encounter. But it was not until a year and a half later that David met his mortal foe, one twilight, at the head of the launch, and engaged in deadly combat to pay off a long score of cumulative insults. Had the ubiquitous Uriah not caught sight of them as they rolled in a death grapple under the logs of the launch, he would have been short a sharesman on Rockbound, and that probably a gaunt and black one.

Snip, snip went the fishing knives, splash fell the flung entrails into the tubs, the swaying lanterns flickered wearily, eyes drooped and backs sagged. It was midnight, though no one dared look at watch or clock, and still huge piles of herring gleamed on the floor. Even now some were soft and had to be flung aside. Uriah would not work on the Lord's Day if anyone told him the Lord's Day was come. There must be no talk of time.

"Speak us a piece, Gershom, speak us one ye made yur own self," cried Joseph.

This was long before Gershom had made the ballad on Joseph in which he referred to him as mud-rat Joe; that was the outcome of a quarrel not yet born. Gershom was a great teller of tales and a famous maker of ballads. Nothing loath, he began now in his great voice to speak one he had made against Israel Slaughenwhite, at the instigation of his cousin Dennis Born, who had been publicly insulted by Israel. Gershom boasted that this ballad had become so popular with the Outposters that it had driven Israel off the island.

"O 'Lord above!' poor Israel cried,

As he humbly knelt at Sophie's side,

'O Lord! look down and hear my prayers,

And cut off Gabe and all his heirs;

And save the land old Jake has given

To Tim and me and Liza Jim.'

Again he prayed to His Majesty,

'Oh, keep me safe on life's rough sea,

And keep my loving Sophie pure,

And guard her from the tempter's lure.'

But a pair of horns for a marriage dot,

Was the only answer Israel got.

Again he prayed, he prayed in vain,

He prayed like one who prays for rain,

He prayed and prayed till his knees were sore,

He prayed till he vowed he'd pray no more.

He vowed that he no more would pray,

Till Gabe and Jake was took away,

And the land give back to him and Tim,

And a deed of the house to Liza Jim.

And then he'd pray with all his might,

To the Lord who doeth all things right,

But until his heavenly prayer was heard,

In prayer no more he'd utter a word."

Uriah shook his head gravely, but enjoyed the slander just the same.

"It's a gif', it's a gif," said the old king, his open left eye twinkling. "Now, Gershom boy, if ye could only gib fish as good as ye kin make verses, ye'd be a great sharesman."

Gershom laughed his great laugh. "I keeps my end up. I don't try to pull an' haul my heart out like dat new David boy. I enjoys life, I does," and he winked amorously at Fanny.

David listened to the ballad open mouthed. He knew all about the Slaughenwhites and their fight with Dennis Born and had heard the ballad chanted by the fishermen, but it became a new thing in the mouth of the maker. It was astonishing to him that anyone should have such learning and be able to string words together so that they bobbed in time like the net corks on a gentle sea. Young Gershom got his brains and gift from his father, old Gershom Born, philosopher, wise man, and keeper of the Barren Island Light.

"Young Gershom'll be a mighty man an' a wise one, too," thought David. "I'se'll stick close to him." He remembered now that the folks on the Outposts said of old Gershom, "He's nigh crazy, but wise. He sits out on de cliffs an' talks to de sea an' de moonlight." Wise man, yes, he was! To him he owed his foothold on Rockbound.

It was long after midnight, yet no one spoke of time. Joseph and Noble Morash still lugged in barrows of herring, and dumped them in slithering piles. Uriah told the story of the footless nigger that haunted the field below Rockbound Light, of the unseen force that had three times pushed him off the path into the tall timothy, and when these tales failed to hold their interest, tried to involve them in an argument about the advantages of Rockbound as compared with the main. But no one responded; even the blond Viking, Gershom Born, flagged. Joseph still ran from salt bin to washing tubs, but he was silent as he ran.

Then, in the midst of all this disorder and weariness of work without end, when the flickering lanterns cast but a sickly light on the oilskin-clad, blood-bespattered figures bent with fatigue and glittered feebly on knives that flashed in and out and on the hateful piles of fish that seemed never to diminish, in the midst of all the dirt and confusion and stench, with an accompaniment of the northeast night wind that hummed about the eaves and the rhythmic mutter of the surf that alone was tireless, Fanny, the potato girl, despised and rejected by the women of Rockbound, Fanny, who slept in the loft with the sharesmen and who had the morals of the birds, lifted up her voice and sang in a sweet, clear treble:

"'There's a land that is fairer than day,

And by faith we can see it afar;

For the Father waits over the way

To prepare us a dwelling place there.'"

One by one the tired islanders joined in:

"In the sweet," sang Fanny.

"In the sweet," boomed Gershom Born's great bass.

"By and by," rang alto and soprano.

"By and by," answered bass and tenor.

"We shall meet on that beautiful shore."

All were in accord now and forgetting their weariness, except Noble Morash, who scowled darkly about, and Casper, who thought, "I don't want to meet on no beautiful shore." Like John on the isle of Patmos, he sighed for a place where there should be no sea.

David was too shy to sing at first, though he knew both tune and words of the familiar hymn, but bending his head to escape observation he made the words with his lips and swayed his head in time with the others. But when Fanny came to:

"'To our bountiful Father above,

We will render a tribute of praise,

For the glorious gift of His love,

And the blessings that hallow our days'"--

David, with an eye upon Ruth and Tamar, who might laugh at him, joined in more boldly. As he sang he felt rested and refreshed. Through to the end they carried the hymn, and then repeated it over and over.

Some time after two, Uriah threw down his splitting knife. "Put de res' in pickle. It mus' be gettin' on fur midnight; me nor my fader before me ne'er worked on de Lord's Day, an' I won't begin now. Put de res' in pickle an' all hands to bed, says I."

Off they staggered, except David, who was ordered to remain and help the tireless Joseph scoop heaps of unsplit herring into pickle tubs. That last labour over, he, too, staggered along the pathway to his house, where he threw himself on the kitchen couch and pulled sacking over head and feet. For a moment, as he lay there, he regretted that he had left the Outposts, a place of poverty but comparative ease, for this hell of driving work; in the next moment he was in a sleep like death.