The Crackie Read online

  By Gary Collins

  The Crackie

  The Last Beothuk

  Desperation

  A Time That Was

  Left to Die

  The Gale of 1929

  A Day on the Ridge

  Mattie Mitchell

  Where Eagles Lie Fallen

  Soulis Joe’s Lost Mine

  What Colour is the Ocean?

  The Last Farewell

  Cabot Island

  Flanker Press Limited

  St. John’s

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Collins, Gary, 1949-, author

  The crackie : a novel / Garry Collins.

  Issued also in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77117-700-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77117-701-6

  (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77117-702-3 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77117-703-0

  (PDF)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.O4647C73 2018 C813’.6 C2018-904926-X

  C2018-904927-8

  —————————————————————————————— ————————————————————

  © 2018 by Gary Collins

  All Rights Reserved. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well. For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Printed in Canada

  Cover Design by Graham Blair

  Flanker Press Ltd.

  PO Box 2522, Station C

  St. John’s, NL

  Canada

  Telephone: (709) 739-4477 Fax: (709) 739-4420 Toll-free: 1-866-739-4420

  www.flankerpress.com

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  We acknowledge the [financial] support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l’appui [financier] du gouvernement du Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  For my son, Clint,

  who has forded well his own tickle

  And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion.

  — Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations

  1

  “Jig, you red-headed bastard. Jig!” The man growled expletives out of tobacco-stained lips, his anger directed at the seven-year-old boy seated on the forward thwart of their leaky punt.

  “I-I c-can’t, P-pop! M-me hands is sore w-with the wa-wa-waterpups!” young Jake stammered in protest.

  The harsh fishing line ran grey and wet through his boil-infested hands as it moved up and down with the rhythm of the sea. Jake’s wrists—where the harsh cloth of his oilskin jumper, too big for him, worn thin and tattered, chafed against his white flesh—were blistered and sore and made him wince with every move he made. The Worcester wool wrapped around each wrist, which was supposed to prevent the dreaded waterpups, was soaked with his blood. The boy’s reply only added to his father’s fury.

  Young Jake was seated in the bow, turned sideways with his hands over the gunnels of the small punt, which had only twelve inches of freeboard and moved with each motion of the ageless swells on the Offer Ground. The air was fresh and clean, as clean as the infinite water all around and, save for one hopeful seagull swimming around the punt, was as lifeless as the baited hooks fishing below. The grey morning sea lifted them up and over mountainous hills and slid them gently down into deep water canyons. Despite the heavy swell, there was little wind. Their island home, grey and bleak across the undulating five miles of sea which separated them, was stolen from view for a long moment before the ocean hills gave it back again.

  They were anchored to a killick secured with a long hemp line over the protruding end of the boat’s pointed stem and were handlining for codfish in the fishing roads off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. They were not doing well, with only a dozen or so good-sized cod to show for the first hours of the morning’s fishing.

  “I told you to lance the buggerin’ boils, b’y! Use the tip of your trawl hook and squeeze the damn pus out, for Gawd’s sake. And stop your damn whinin’ and stutterin’,” Jake’s father cursed, all the while running the wet line up and down through his own fingers, which were wrapped in protective, homemade woollen “nippers” to prevent the chafes and sores from the constant jigging. Jake wore no nippers on his small fingers.

  “The real crackie you are, by Jeezus. The bloody tide runnin’ out the bay like a river and we’ve nothin’ yet to show for the marnin’s fishin’. The pound boards not covered nor stained. ’Tis jest as well for me to be out in punt be meself. You’re one useless son of a bitch, like all redheads. A mongrel, you are. Bloodless and breedless. Make no wonder ya stutters. A bastard, if I could only prove it. The son of a bitch who had a dozen dogs stuck to her, I ’lows. A real crackie.”

  Jake glared at his father, his hatred blazing from a pair of squinted blue eyes, his soft mouth pinched and saying nothing. He knew what a crackie was. Knew it by rote. Heard it every day, bursting like bile out of his father’s thin lips.

  Hung from the risings of the punt, just below the gunnels were several large hooks already baited with squid. Hitching his fishing line to a thole-pin, Jake reached for one of the hooks. The pieces of squid skivvered on the hooks were covered with black, putrid squid juice. The squid had been jigged up in the back cove in the dark of last evening, and with the morning’s sun burning their tender, opaque flesh, they were rotting. The boy’s reach revealed the extent of the sores on both wrists. Jake winced as the sleeves of the coat, a discard from a much larger person, chafed again at his sores. Pulling the bait from the hook, he was about to throw the piece of squid overboard when his father roared at him again.

  “Throw it back in the bait tub, for Chrissake. Do you think we come out here to be feedin’ the gawddamn gulls? And hurry up with the lancin’! Your line is dead in the water. You might as well be fishin’ with a gawddamn killick. ’Tis squid fer yer supper. You can mark that down.”

  Jake’s father rarely spoke without cursing. The brunt of his abuse, physical as well as verbal, seemed to single out his son, and usually it took in the boy’s speech problem and almost always his shock of red hair. Jake was the only one in the village with red hair—both of his parents had hair as black as coal. He was the only redhead anywhere around.

  Jake’s mother frequently fried squid in the pan with pork fat until it was tasteless and as tough as seal leather, and Jake hated it. Try as he might, when he swallowed the boneless flesh, he could not get past the smell of squid bait fermenting in the punt’s bait box—nor the amused smirk on his father’s face when, while jigging the squid, the boy was covered with the stinking squid ink which burned his eyes like fire.

&
nbsp; Bending over with his back to his father, Jake brought the tip of the hook to his left hand. With his right hand he tried to puncture the raised boil, which was stretched tight and glassy. It was swollen red and extremely tender to the touch. The hook was blunt, and it failed to penetrate the skin. Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes when he felt the punt savagely lurch sideways, and he turned in surprise just as his father grabbed him by the shoulder, yanked the hook from his right hand, and pushed it into the biggest sore on Jake’s hand. Yellow pus mixed with pale-coloured blood poured out. The boy screamed. Wrenching away from his father’s grip, he jumped into the eyes of the boat, curled up on the narrow cuddy seat, and sobbed while nursing his ruptured hand. The punt rocked back and forth with the commotion.

  Jake’s father ignored the boy’s pain. Seemingly revelling in his son’s agony, he roared in what sounded akin to glee: “That’s the way ’tis done, you stun son of a bitch! Now let the rest of the waterpups or I’ll do it for you, and be quick about it. The wind’s blowin’ out the bay along with the bloody tide. Pull up your damn line and slip the stem knot so’s I can haul in the gawddamn killick.”

  With that, he threw the hook, still dripping with blood, toward Jake. The boy grabbed it and bent over, lancing one of the remaining boils and letting out a wail. He pretended to prick the others in the same manner. His father retreated to the stern of the punt, taking the slack killick line with him, and vigorously pulled hand over hand. The homemade wooden anchor filled with rocks came up from the bottom, and he heaved it in over the side of the punt. Jake drew the cuffs of his coat down over his bleeding hands and began hauling in his fishing line just as the punt, released from her hook, turned broadside with the outgoing tide and the stiff morning breeze.

  Jake’s father took the small mast lying across the thwarts and planted it in a hole bored in the forward section of the punt’s keel. Then he hoisted a single sail, which was many times mended, brown and tattered, a lone sheet made fast to the after thole-pin on the starboard side. The punt, heeling to the rising breeze, headed for land and home, which was rising and falling on the horizon. The pain in Jake’s hand had subsided, and he was enjoying the sail home when his father started berating him again.

  “Get the gawddamn cutthroat, for Chrissake! And haul the puddicks out of the bloody fish! And save the buggerin’ livers, too!”

  Jake bent to his appointed task, his head below the gunnels where the stench of the punt’s bilge nauseated him. He said nothing while his father continued his tirade.

  “There’s not a buggerin’ cent to be made fishin’, by Gawd. Thanks to you! ’Tis a red line through me name again this year by the bloody merchands, by Gawd. With every ounce of salt for the makin’ of the buggerin’ fish, every dust of mouldy flour, and every stitch of twine along with the hemp which binds ’em, all bound in red upon their gawddamn page. The only thing the bleedin’ merchant doesn’t own is the rocks in the goddamn killick! Miserly bastards, all of ’em.”

  Jake ignored him as he flung entrails over the side and threw livers into a filthy pail. His torn fingers burned when they came in contact with the cod-liver oil. Gulls volplaned above and swooped down, crying for the offal before it sank.

  They came in on the starboard tack under a high, rugged shore laced with spindrift and were carried by a stiff wind on the punt’s port quarter. Shoals were breaking, and the humped swells broke under the ragged cliffs, upon which the white, tilted stones of their ancestors peered down.

  The sheet was let go, and the small sail quivered when the wind spilled out of it. Jake’s father then lowered and furled it around the mast, which he retrieved and laid down once more across the thwarts. He never wound the sail tight as the other fishermen did, and he never kept her tidy, like the others in the place did. It was well-known that Jake’s father’s punt could be identified even in the dark—by the smell of her. They took up the oars slung by the thole-pins, and father and son rowed into the shelter of the cove below the few austere houses and stages growing on stilts which were fastened to the cliffs. They approached one such stage, the punt’s gunnel chafing against the lower stagehead rungs as it nudged against the wharf. The tide had gone and had taken most of the water out of the cove, and the top of the stagehead was well above them.

  “If you hadn’t a been so damn useless, we could’ve got in afore the friggin’ tide turned. The gawddamn tide is always out! Climb up with the damn painter, for Chrissake. Do I have to tell you everything, do every bloody thing for meself? Damn your useless red head!”

  The ebb tide made the work of throwing the few fish they had high above their heads harder, and Jake’s old man’s temper flared again.

  “Pass down the bloody prong, and not tines first, either,” he blared after the boy as he went scrambling up the stagehead.

  Jake soon appeared at the lip of the stagehead, and with the sharp, two-tined prong in hand, he looked down at his father and wondered what would happen if he threw it down tines first.

  2

  Jake was born on the eve of the twentieth century in a tiny outport on one of the small, isolated islands on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, swelling the community to eighty-eight souls. The new year and era were heralded in by a few explosive gunshots from the fishermen’s muzzleloaders. Powder and shot were hard to come by. Jake’s father did not partake in the celebrations—neither the new year nor the new birth.

  On that dark but starry December night of 1899, a few minutes before twelve, judging by the windup clock on the papered wall of their upstairs bedroom, Jake’s mother gave birth to a son whose hair was as red as blood. The plump, pleasant face of the midwife held the only welcoming smile in the room as she cleaned the boy in warm brown water drawn from the island’s well before placing the boy, warmly wrapped and uttering his first cries, into Jake’s mother’s arms. Tick-tock was the only sound. The midwife didn’t mention to the mother, who was drained of strength and sweating in the cold room, that her son looked many months older than a newborn. Not that it mattered to the mother, for by the time the wailing infant was placed into her arms, the last minutes of the nineteenth century had flown by. Tick-tock. Jake’s birthdate was noted as a few minutes past twelve, dating his birth in the new century. Tick-tock.

  The midwife had cut the cord which bound mother and child, tied a crude knot in the silky rope which would forever protrude a bit from the boy’s belly, and lowered the newborn down to the swollen breasts of his mother, where, when he found the nipple of life, he greedily suckled. His mother looked him over, and seeing his shock of red hair, her eyes opened wide for an instant in apparent surprise, but she didn’t utter a sound. Tick-tock. Then the sweet surcease from the misery of birthing which only women know overwhelmed her. Closing her eyes, she faded away from the pain. Her red-haired son sucked loudly at her left breast, and she winced once without opening her eyes.

  A lamp with a short, blackened chimney guttered for light on a chair besides the bed. Apart from the bed itself, it was the only piece of furniture in the room. The glass bottom of the lamp contained only a little oil, causing its light to flicker. Through a rectangular hole no more than six inches long—without a grille—and cut rough in the board floor by a wall below a many-paned window, a wan light issued up from the kitchen directly below. Tick-tock, continued the uneven sound.

  If anyone were to look out the window, they would see the starshine on the nearby sea, flecked now and then by cresting waves which marched toward the land, clad with night, broaching here and there above the snow-packed surface. Other lights could be seen as well, dull, yellow, and steady in the upstairs windows of other houses. They shone forth upon new snow which had just stopped falling. Woodsmoke rose from a few black metal funnels thrusting upward from snow-covered roofs. The funnels sticking through the roofs of other houses were like small tree stumps reaching out of snowbanks, leaving no trail of smoke.

  The harbour itself, tuc
ked behind the point of a tickle between other islands, was calm and still, reflecting the heavens from its winter waters. It was a beautiful night. The newborn, wrinkled and demanding, wailed. No one looked out the window to watch the night silently blend with the rote of the sea. Jake’s birth was lauded only by the ill-tuned clock on the wall. Tick-tock.

  ————

  The years went by hard for young Jake. It was now the year of 1909, and he was a nine-year-old fisherman. The only change in his life was Jake’s father’s disposition toward his red-headed son, which had worsened. By now Jake’s hands were as calloused as the dried tails of the dogfish which were nailed to the stage door. His father used them to hone his knives.

  His life was one of never-ending drudgery. Jake’s eyes had that unique quality rare among the very young. They looked older and wiser by many years. Jake rarely smiled and usually looked serious, almost to the point of sternness. His stammer had not improved, and the only person in the village he talked to at any length was a girl his own age who worked for a family a few doors down from her own. In service, they called it. Though she could clearly see her own house from the window of her employers, she was rarely permitted to go home. She was an indentured child and was referred to as the Maid. The coin which changed hands between her parents and her employer never crossed the palms of the Maid. There was one other young girl in the village who worked for others, but she was older, all of fourteen.

  The Maid’s parents’ house was different from all the others in the village. It didn’t have a second storey, it was always clean and neat-looking, and was encompassed by a low picket fence which stood out from among the others with a thin coat of white paint. Jake saw the Maid every day, lugging the slop bucket out of the house and dumping its greasy contents over the cliff into the ocean, lugging armloads of firewood into the house, lowering the spread under the clothesline so she could reach high enough to pin the clothes on. The Maid simply draped the heavier clothing over the line. Then she poked the spread almost upright under the bent line, pushing the clothes well above the ground to dry in the wind.