Galore - Michael Crummey [14]
—What do you think, Daniel? Callum asked.
—He’s off he’s head is all.
James said, I’ll bet the fucker won’t row us home out of it either.
The stranger struck in then, hauling the line hand over hand, arms straining with the weight. The first pale glove of flesh let loose a pulse of oily ink as it broke the surface. —Fucking squid, James shouted. —He’s into the squid. The creatures kept coming out of the dark water, the air webbed with strings of black that fouled the clothes and faces of the men in the boat. Every line in the skiffs around them went over amid a bustle of shouting and it took time in the confusion for Callum to make sense of what was happening. The squid on the line were coming aboard in an endless march, already piling up past their ankles and it was impossible he could have hooked so many in one haul. Callum lifted one out of the bilgewater but they rose in a chain, one squid attached to the tail of the next. He looked back to the stranger and could see he’d dropped his line altogether and was bringing the squid in hand over hand in one continuous string, mouth to tail, mouth to tail, mouth to tail. He looked around at the other boats where men were jigging furiously although no one had managed to strike. Daniel had put out his own line and was having no luck either. Callum called to him and pointed. Eventually everyone stopped to watch Callum’s boat fill, the weight of the squid lowering the gunwales to the water.
Jabez Trim rowed in close and asked if he might have the chain when they were done and Callum cut it clean, handing it across the open water. —Don’t drop it for jesussake, Jabez said. When the second boat was full the squid were handed on to a third. By mid-afternoon every shallop and half-shallop and skiff in the flotilla was weighted and the crews blackened and fousty with ink. The chain came back to Callum and he tied it to the stern with two half-hitches before they began the slow row back to the Gut, keeping head-on to the waves to avoid swamping in the swell. Callum thought of his mother’s words to him before he left the house that morning and a chill passed through him to think she’d foreseen such a thing. He was struck by the sensation she’d made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head. They stopped to let other crews take their fill as they made their way home and by the time the last squid came over the gunwales every boat on the water had taken a full load aboard.
The coffin built to bury Michael Devine was whitewashed and fitted with rockers and used as the infant’s crib during the warm summer months. He was an uncommonly pleasant child after his baptism, never crying for more than hunger and sleeping through the night by his second month. He was known on the shore as Little Lazarus, the child rising each morning from his casket with a smile on his face, untroubled by dreams.
The albino stranger came to be known as Judah, a compromise between the competing stories of who it was in the Bible had been swallowed by a whale. Jabez Trim complained that Judah was a country in the Holy Lands and not a sensible thing to call a person but he abandoned the argument once it was clear the name had taken hold.
In the weeks after the chain of squid was brought ashore the cod reappeared in vast numbers and no one could keep ahead of the fish. They couldn’t remember a time when cod were as plentiful or so eager to be hauled aboard and everyone credited Judah’s presence for the change. Boats followed in the wake of Callum’s skiff, staying as close as they could to their good luck charm. The fish seemed to float along beneath Judah’s feet as if they were tied to the keel by a string.
Jabez Trim closed a Sunday service by reading the story of Jesus instructing fishermen to put their nets down where all day they’d come up empty, how they came away then with more fish than they could haul, and no one failed to think of Judah. By the end of the summer they were calling