Galore - Michael Crummey [130]
Eli felt himself pulled upright in his seat as the man went on, each new accusation ringing like a bell in the steeple. —Who among you gets their due from their labor? Coaker asked. —Do you receive your own when you have to work like a dog, eat like a pig, and be treated like a serf?
—No, Eli called out.
—No, Coaker confirmed. —You do not. Do you receive your own when your taxes pay for five splendid colleges in St. John’s while your so-called schools lack teachers and books and equipment?
—No, Eli answered and others with him. Coaker threw out questions until half the men in the pews were shouting the same response. He stopped to pace a few moments, letting them stew. —I’ve signed up a thousand men across Notre Dame Bay and more joining us every day, he announced. —Men who were never taught to do a sum or read a word or ask for anything more than what was given them. But they are done with the world of ignorance and pauperism they were born into. Suum Cuique, Coaker said. —Let each man have his own. This is our motto in the Fishermen’s Protective Union, one thousand strong and growing by the day. And I ask you now. Who here has the fortitude to join us?
—I do, Eli said, out of his seat with a hand raised high. He was ripe for it, the new life Violet prophesied for him, he felt ready to be born again.
Coaker asked those who wished to join to stay behind and a handful were still in the pews after the church emptied out, Val Woundy, Azariah Trim and his nephew Joshua, Doubting Thomas Trass. Coaker had one more night in Paradise Deep and they made plans to meet him again the next evening. —There’s much to be done, he told them.
—Do you have a bed? Eli asked.
—I was about to ask if I might impose on someone.
—We’ve got room if you don’t mind the walk.
Coaker said, A walk is just what I was wanting.
The three of them set out for the Gut, Eli and Val Woundy and the union man. It was almost an hour over the Tolt from the old church and Coaker talked the entire time, fish prices and overseas markets, competition and quality control, co-op stores and cash money in place of truck. The moon rising to light their way. Standards, Coaker harped on, standards and modernization. The fishery a shambles of dark-age technology and economics that had to be dragged into the modern world. Pricing had to be standardized, inspection and culling standardized, a minimum wage for labor legislated, compulsory schooling for all instituted, the quality of the cured product had to be standardized.
—Mr. Coaker, Val Woundy said, you aren’t about to standardize the bloody weather.
—Perhaps not the weather. But why should we be dependent solely on the sun to cure the fish?
Val glared at him as if Coaker’s lunacy was about to be confirmed.
—You mean dryers, Eli said.
—I mean let’s question everything about how we operate. Where there are problems, we look for solutions.
—Hot-air dryers, Eli said. —Set them up in a warehouse. It could rain every day in August and it wouldn’t make a peck of difference.
Coaker raised a hand. —Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
—I heard you was a farmer, Val said.
—Lay off him, Val, Eli warned but Coaker only smiled. Born on the southside of St. John’s, he told them. Worked as a fish handler in Town as a boy, organized a two-day strike for equal wages when he learned a competitor paid more for the same job. Skipped school to listen to political speeches in the Legislature. —Shambler was your man for Paradise District, he said.
—He was, God rest him.
—He got plenty of that in the House, Coaker said.
Hired to run a merchant store in Pike’s Arm when he was only sixteen, buying the operation outright at twenty. The bank crash buried the store and he purchased an island, set about farming it. Coakerville, he called the place. Taught himself the job of telegraph operator and worked at it through the winters to keep the farm from folding. Years of isolation to read and think, to pick apart the engine driving the country’s corkscrew of toil