Galore - Michael Crummey [129]
Eli watched Violet walk across the garden and pass Mary Tryphena’s empty house before he stood from his chair and set it carefully beside the table. He went upstairs and lay in his son’s bed and he didn’t budge before it was time to go out on the water the next morning.
In the middle of August word of a visitor passed along the shore. Eli heard of him from the other men on his fishing crew while they rowed out to the cod trap. A fellow named Crocker or Croker was calling a meeting of fishermen at the old Episcopalian church. Out of Notre Dame Bay, some said, though others claimed he was born and bred in St. John’s, the son of a carpenter. Lost a merchant store in the bank crash and spent most of the years since running a farm on some island near Herring Neck. —A farm, Lord Jesus, Val Woundy said. The man had to be some sort of lunatic to persevere at the venture so long. He was supposed to have beaten his wife often enough to drive her away to St. John’s with their only child in tow. A union he’d come to speak to them about, that and his plans to reform the country’s fishery. From all reports Mr. Crocker or Cooker or Creaker—closet townie, failed merchant, crackpot farmer—had never caught a fish in his life. He’d worn the leather off his shoes gathering men in stores and church halls and kitchens across the northeast of the island. —Son of a carpenter, Val Woundy said, and fancies himself the fishermen’s messiah.
It promised to be an entertaining evening and Eli’s crew showed up at his house to drag him along, thinking the diversion might do him some good. Most of the men were away fishing on the Labrador which ensured a modest turnout, twenty or thirty scattered through the pews in the late-evening light. The hush in the damp church just enough to tamp down the undercurrent of ridicule they’d brought with them. At one minute past the appointed hour Thomas Trass suggested it was all a joke and no such man as Mr. Cracker ever lived.
The door to the vestibule opened then and he came up the center aisle without looking left or right, leaning his weight on a cane. He turned below the pulpit to face them. —Thank you all for coming, he said. He was thickset though he carried the weight like a working man. Face falling into flesh and a trim little moustache, a receding hairline that made him appear older than his years. —My name, he said, is William Coaker.
He had the rhythm and demeanor of a preacher, the same bluff assurance. He began with an overview of the sad facts of a fisherman’s life, the deplorable conditions they lived and worked in, the parasites in St. John’s who bled them dry. A sycophantic tone to the presentation that made the men restless, the grievances so familiar they could have rhymed them off in their sleep. But Coaker paused at the end of the list, breeding anticipation with his silence, and they all leaned slightly forward in their pews. —You people, he said finally. He pointed with his sausage fingers. Grovelers, he called them. They were living the same miserable lives their fathers lived and their fathers’ fathers before them. The wealth of the nation made on their backs and every one of them content to beg at Levi Sellers’ door. They were backward and illiterate and happy to leave their children no hope of a better life.
A ripple of indignation stirred the room but there was enough truth in the harangue to keep them quiet. They knew nothing, Coaker told them. Not where their fish was sold or the price it sells for, not the cost of provisions they were paid with. They wouldn’t even know how to go about asking. A decade into the twentieth century and they caught and sold their fish the way it was caught and sold when Napoleon ruled Europe. —And what is your excuse for this sorry state? Coaker asked. —That there’s no changing the way things are because they’ve always been this way. The notion was so distasteful to him that it looked for a moment as if Coaker might spit. It was the only form