Permanent astonishment, p.26
Permanent Astonishment, page 26
“You,” he says, pointing at me, “and me.” Which is how, at age eleven, I become a fully accredited, professional, commercial fisherman.
We rise at three—a.m. Six days a week. That’s when, up in those parts, in early July, the first glint of daylight makes its appearance. Ablutions, breakfast—the gas tanks we’ve filled the evening before—the three-mile-long drive to the first net and, by four, we are working.
Dressed in frog-green rubber coveralls that come to my collarbone and hang off my shoulders by means of straps, knee-high Wellingtons covering my lower extremities, and semi-water-resistant white canvas gloves—the uniform of fishermen in northern Manitoba—I am sitting on a crate turned upside down at the middle of our vessel, this crimson canoe with a ten-horsepower outboard motor attached to its stern; but I am not idle. I am gutting fish after fish after fish that Dad keeps throwing into a second crate that sits at my feet, this one turned right side up. He throws them from the bow where he stands, bent over the gunwale, hauling in a net that hangs underwater for a good half-mile. Dressed like me, he stops at intervals to disentangle a fish from the webbing on the net with a hook. Of his own making, the handle of the implement is of birch from which pokes a nail he has hammered to a curve. The fish he then throws slime-covered, thrashing, and wriggling into said crate, from where I take them one after the other and after the other to dress them, my work table, propped on an aluminum washtub, a square piece of plywood with a square hole sawn into the centre. The hole is for the offal—the gills, the entrails, the scales, the blood. The fish I’ve just dressed, meanwhile, I rinse in the lake which, from where I sit, is within reach, and throw into a third crate. And a fourth and a fifth, their numbers amassing as the long day advances.
As for the net, after freeing it of fish entanglement, Dad squeezes it into a rope-like length to wring out the water so that he can wind it, lead weights and floaters included, into yet another crate that sits at his feet. All as he continues reeling that part of the net still in the water into the boat, extracting a fish, throwing it into my crate, dropping the net into his crate, reeling the net in, extracting, throwing, dropping…Free of motorized propulsion, the only sound our crimson canoe makes at this juncture is its sides being lapped at by waves so small they barely exist. In reaction, Dad and I rock almost imperceptibly. The offal we will feed at day’s end to the sled dogs, away out on their islet two miles from camp where, on summer respite from their winter labour, they wander untied.
When we finish with the net—or, rather, three nets tied end to end so that they make a kind of “super net”—I reclaim my seat at the stern in front of the motor, take out the oars that sit lengthwise along both gunwales, and start rowing backwards. Which gives Dad the movement he needs to reel the net back into the water on that spot if the catch has been generous. And if it hasn’t, I drive us to another a mile or two in whichever direction our instincts take us. Once arrived at this second spot, I stop my motor and, one more time, take out the oars and start rowing backwards. Accordingly, Dad reels the net into the water at our new location a yard at a time. Once finished, we move on to the next net, a mile or so to north or south or east or west.
Unfortunately, the ride is smooth and warm only on days when the weather is agreeable. Because when we are fishing for trout, which live in deep waters, and there is a wind, there is no shelter from it—read: no islands—the experience can be not only frightening but life-threatening. Try gutting five hundred fish the live-long day while you are rocking to waves the height of tents. And rocking and rocking and that Arctic wind—and God help you if it starts raining—lashes at your unprotected face as with pin-pricks and your body is chilled to the bone, well wrapped as it is even if it is summer. And your hands are freezing from sub-Arctic waters even through work gloves which are waterproof only in part. And this for ten hours non-stop.
Then there is pickerel. Yellow-bellied, black-backed, its dorsal fin lined with points as sharp as needles, it lives in shallow waters close to swamps where blackflies and mosquitoes breed in vast numbers, at least in early summer, and forests shield those insects from wind so that they can’t be blown away. Which gives them the freedom to feast on your face. And you can’t swat them away or scratch. Because, even if they’re gloved, your hands are covered with fish slime. Hell on Earth has no better description.
Fortunately, a) the blackflies are gone by mid-July, b) the greater chunk of our time is spent on open waters fishing for trout and whitefish, and, c) August, in particular, is known for its mildness.
* * *
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If the raising of the net and its harvest of fish takes half an hour and its re-setting about ten minutes, then it takes us forty minutes per “super net,” of which there are twenty. All of which translates into twelve to fourteen hours of work per day. Meaning to say that—and here’s the upside to the story—if it takes us from three in the morning to six in the evening six days a week for the two months of summer, then it means that I get to spend more time with this magnificent man, my dad, Joe Highway, in one month, than most boys, Moony-ass or otherwise, get to spend with theirs. In one lifetime.
For commercial fishermen, trout and pickerel tie for first place as money-makers, whitefish second, pike third. As for the suckers, mariah (a sort of catfish with whiskers, a fish I’ve seen in pictures), and grayling (which resembles a large sardine), they don’t sell. Rarely caught in any case, mostly because of their small populations, mariah and grayling are usually thrown back into the water alive and breathing. Suckers, on the other hand, are more common. If every fifth fish we catch, in deep water, is a trout, in shallow water, a pickerel, and every sixth fish in either depth a whitefish, all three cherished, then every seventh fish we catch, also, like whitefish, in water deep or shallow, is a sucker. A pest more than anything, the sucker is a fish that we feed to the dogs or, if we eat it at all, constitutes the lower end of our diet; like Klik or baloney, it is the poor man’s steak, to be eaten only when times are hard. And only when made into namee-steek (smoked fish).
It, for one thing, is toothless. All it has to prove its fishness, beside its fins, are rubbery lips on a rubbery face that make it look like a cartoon character. While the pike is sleek and can, at its largest, be four feet long and move like a bullet, the sucker has a dumpy little body that toodles along. At their longest, they reach ten inches. Compared to the pike, he is a midget, the runt of the family.
It is Saturday evening, the end of a long and arduous work week. We are exhausted. But tomorrow, thank God, is Sunday, our day off. I can, for one thing, play with Rene, who misses me (he tells me at night, as we still share a bed). When we pull up in our boats, Rene and Mom come down to the dock to help us pack our day’s catch in ice. (At least, Mom does; Rene just plays.) The fish house and ice house stand five feet apart just up from the dock. Both log cabins of Dad’s construction, the first is where we keep the fish packed in crushed ice in aluminum tubs until the Norseman comes to get them on Monday. In the second, we store the ice in blocks under piles of muskeg before, using picks, we chop it into small pieces and pour it over the fish to preserve them. The size of trunks (of the luggage variety) before they are chopped and poured on the fish, these blocks of ice were sawn from the lake by Dad and Swanson back in the spring, extracted with industrial-sized pincers, then dragged here by dogsled. Meant to last us the summer and therefore numbering twenty or thirty, these blocks of ice have taken their toll—they are huge, they are heavy, and they have been gathered, what’s more, at the height of bug season.
Now dressed with her floral-patterned granny smock stuffed into a pair of rubber pants and boots of the kind worn by male fishermen, Mom scandalizes pink the women from the two Dene families who live with us that summer and who, having never seen a woman dressed like a man, have come down to gawk.
“Koolth-sli,” opines Seagull’s Little Poop with a saliva-engorged esophagus, her snow-white hair practically rising an inch with shock. Does Mom care? No. She chisels in a crate a large chunk of ice, chopping it to shards and hand-sized slivers, then shovelling them onto layer after layer of fish that has been dressed by me all day that day. All man’s work. Now being packed in crates by Daniel—and Dad and Swanson and the crew in its entirety—they will soon be ready for storage and shipping by Norseman.
When all is done, Daniel and I, and sometimes Rene, who enjoys evening cruises on glass-smooth waters with his two older brothers, will drive to the islet two miles away where live the sled dogs to feed them their supper, the offal. And sometimes the heads of suckers that have been put aside for making namee-steek. Our homework accomplished, we glide home in a light infused with pink. And as we do Rene and I sing our loon cries to the droning of the motor being driven by Daniel, the loons in the distance answering in kind.
* * *
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A pot is boiling. We can hear it bubble. Just outside the main tent on Mom’s cooking fire does it sit, sputtering. And bubbling and steaming. Something is cooking, but what? Twenty sucker heads that Mom has washed with care, having salvaged them from the crate containing the fish guts and blood. As we fall asleep in the boys’ tent some ten feet away, Daniel, Rene, and I hear our parents in their tent, slurping and sucking and slurping and sucking. The absence of dialogue their ambient music, they are relishing every second of their Saturday-night date, every single drop of their evening snack: sucker heads boiled with salt and pepper and fresh-sliced onions. They slurp and suck one bone after the other after the other. In one hour, they slurp their way through the entire structure that comprises the head of nameepith, the clown-like sucker.
None much bigger than twenty-five-cent coins, the bones drip with wetness, with fish oil, with lovely humidity. Some shaped like boomerangs, some like ovals, some like triangles, and some like circles, Joe and Balazee Highway suck the bone called the frontal, the bone called the turbinal, the bone called the periorbital ring, the infraorbital ring, the maxillary, premaxillary, mandible, dentary bone, postympanic, suprascapular, operculum, tubercle, preopercle, interopercle, branchiostegal ray, olfactory bulb, pharynx, snout, upper jaw, gill cover, gill arch, cheek—which is scrumptious to the point of bringing tears to the eater—cartilaginous endocranium, palate, even a fragment of spinal cord, a spherical lens…they suck them all. And are deeply, deeply in love…
39
“The Christmas concert, the Christmas concert, please don’t cancel the Christmas concert,” I sing in silence as I make my way with ginger care down the hallway with a tray full of glass: thirty thermometers. Working alone when times are normal, the gentle Nurse Kratzen can’t manage it this time. She needs help. Desperately. Why? The times, most decidedly, are far from normal. In a word, one hundred and seventy of the two hundred students registered at the Guy Hill Indian Residential School—and thirty of the staff, who number fifty—are sick, bedridden, out like lights. A “floo epidemic,” Nurse Kratzen calls it which is why, as sole health-giver here in residence, she herself is barely alive from working sixteen hours a day. Even in her uniform of starched white hat with its two black stripes over the forehead and white dress, white shoes, and white sheer stockings, she looks bedraggled. So, as one of the fifteen boys and fifteen girls spared as yet from this dreadful virus, I, aged twelve, have been corralled like the others into service as all-round helper, as waiter, dishwasher, cook, orderly, nurse, doctor, whatever it takes to keep life going at Guy Hill School. Which is why I am carrying this tray with thirty thermometers just disinfected in boiling water from Nurse Hannah Kratzen’s infirmary on the third floor down the corridor past the Big Boys’ dormitory to the top of the stairs that lead down to the Small and Medium Boys’ dormitories where lie stricken some fifty young patients with temperatures rising to 105 degrees, says Nurse Kratzen. My mission? To make it down those two flights of stairs. There, at the bottom, Brother Lemoine, the only keeper left available, will receive my bounty and administer it. And a challenging act of balance it is—one wrong step and, like Humpty Dumpty, I fall down those stairs with thirty thermometers destroyed completely. “The Christmas concert, the Christmas concert, please don’t cancel the Christmas concert,” I sing in silence with my teeth gritted, just to help me keep my focus.
I love the Christmas concert. It is easily the highlight of my year every year here at this school. This year, I get to play “Sonatina in G” by Muzio Clementi on the piano in front of two hundred people. Grace of my teacher Sister St. Aramaa and her “lie-berry,” to which she has now given me free rein, I have been practicing. And practicing and practicing.
The fact that it takes both my hands to hold this tray makes my progress that much more perilous—I won’t be able to hold the stairway railing if I should stumble. The steps are the colour of Arctic terns’ eggs, grey-green stone with small black speckles. And polished to a sheen by the Norwegian janitor, Mr. Rasmussen, husband of the seamstress, Mrs. Rasmussen, they look slippery.
No one knows where this virus has come from. From the wind, the water in the taps, a wayward animal, a visiting parent? The answer is moot. All that is certain is that it started with Bobcat Mitaas, his elder brother, Gilbert, tells me in whispers. Older than me by two months so is now thirteen, Gilbert Mitaas of South Indian Lake, Manitoba, younger brother of Matilda Mitaas, the Cree piano player, sleeps this year in the bed next to mine in the Medium Boys’ dormitory. We, therefore, are privy to secrets in that island of time between lights out and “doe-doe,” as our keeper, Erik Laporte, who is also sick, calls sleep. It has been three days, in fact, since Gilbert Mitaas tells me that his little brother, Bobcat, who sleeps six beds from my brother, Rene, in the Small Boys’ dormitory, has caught some bug. His forehead is hot, says Gilbert Mitaas, he is sweating profusely, his bones are aching, his nose running a constant flow of liquid mucus, and he can’t stop coughing. Excused from school, he lies bedridden. A serious “floo,” has said Nurse Kratzen, one that borders on something she calls “ammonia.” Neither Gilbert Mitaas nor I have any idea what either is, especially ammonia, but they sound serious. All we know is that, if it worsens, Bobcat Mitaas will be taken to the hospital in The Pas or maybe in Winnipeg. Beds, however, are not available, not in The Pas, not in Winnipeg, as neither are doctors, nurses, or sisters, says Nurse Kratzen. The epidemic is universal, she says, the whole world has it. Except the remarkable, unbeatable, indefatigable Nurse Hannah Kratzen. And her young assistant, Tomson Highway.
Shortly after Bobcat Mitaas falls sick, it is discovered that Machaa-is Bacheese of Puck, Manitoba, too, falls victim and is bedridden—though this time not in the Small Boys’ dormitory, but a mere four beds from mine in the Medium Boys’. Same condition as Bobcat Mitaas, we learn from our keeper, Brother Lemoine. Then from my cousin, Virginia Highway of Beaver Lake, Saskatchewan, comes news, shared in our class of grade six students, that Chichilia Kipawm of Brochet has also taken ill. Exact same ailment as Bobcat Mitaas, says my cousin. Word gets around. Chichilia Kipawm is followed by Catherine Kitoochigan of The Pas, Cordelia Kamaa-magoos of Island Falls, Adelaide Flett of Nelson House, Maureen Gunpowder of Pelican Narrows, Charlotte Zipper of The Pas, and too many others. And that’s just the girls’ side of the school, where the numbers keep climbing from one day to the next and to the next, says my cousin, Virginia Highway.
On the boys’ side of these alarming statistics, Bobcat Mitaas and Machaa-is Bacheese are followed quickly by Caayoots Beksaka and Lady Beksaka, both of Brochet, Vernon Zipper of The Pas, Simeon Kamaa-magoos of Brochet, William Peeskwa and Jericho Quickly of South Indian Lake, Albie Owl of Granville Lake, Marty Mistat of Nelson House, Philbert Nigik of Pelican Narrows, and Rene Highway of Brochet, and so it goes. Like a cloud of flies just hit by a spray of insect repellent, boys and girls from grades one to eight keel over one after the other after the other (Guy Hill now teaches to the grade eight level). As the classrooms empty out as do the yards and the playrooms, the dormitories fill. Even the staff is not immune; teachers such as Sister Ann and Miss Crispy, keepers such as Norman Dubois, Butch Bouchard, and Sister Oo-hoo (recently arrived, we call her “Owl” because of her spectacles which are owlish; I never did learn her actual name); the laundress, Mrs. Dubois, her husband, the Dracula-like nightwatchman, Mr. Dubois, the cook, Darlene Sawchuk, the engineer, Mr. Van Dyke, his wife, Irene—all fall victim to the dreadful scourge. And as the numbers climb, those few students left healthy just keep working harder and longer thus rendering them—that is, us—as bedraggled as poor Nurse Kratzen.
Today, I am a nurse. I check temperatures, I dispense medicine, I soak squares of absorbent cotton in boiling water and apply them as compresses, all, of course, under the direction of the blue-veined and increasingly pale-of-complexion Chaariman nurse. I am one busy beaver but I choose to enjoy it. Grace of Joe and Balazee Highway’s trenchant philosophies on life and love, I like helping, I like being useful to others. Rene, for example, is parched and thirsty so I serve him water in his delirium; his temperature reads 104; I stroke his forehead and pray for him. Not rocket science, I know, but it makes me feel like “Doctor” Highway. Then I scoot down the hallway to the Medium Boys’ dormitory which is my real fiefdom today. Like the Small Boys’ dormitory, it, too, is almost full of “dying patients.” There I serve glasses of orange juice from a trolley wheeled in by Sister Tiny, the last nun living, I am sure of it. Then I scoot back over to the Small Boys’ dormitory—I scoot back and forth between the two sleeping quarters a lot these days—where I serve lunch, including to Rene, from pots the size of cauldrons—chicken noodle soup with roast beef sandwiches and milk and apples. Vitamins, says kind Nurse Kratzen, all good medicine. Such shifts in placement depend on the workload and who has taken sick and who has not. Needless to say, this workforce keeps diminishing in size, so that the few left standing are fading away from lack of sleep.
