Stern Men

9

THE SECOND Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war took place between 1928 and 1930. It was a pathetic war, not worth discussing.

The third Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war was an ugly, short, four-month affair that raged in 1946 and had a greater effect on some islanders than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This war prevented the island men from fishing in a year that saw the largest total catch of lobsters known in the fisheries of Maine: six thousand licensed fishermen took in a record nineteen million pounds of lobster that year. But the men on Fort Niles and Courne Haven missed the bounty because they were too busy fighting.

The fourth Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war began in the mid- 1950s. The cause of this war was not clearly defined. There was no single instigation, no one angry event that lit the fuse. So how did it begin? With pushing. With slow, typical, everyday pushing.

According to the laws of Maine, any man with a lobstering license may put a trap anywhere in Maine waters. That’s what the laws say. The reality is different. Certain families fish certain territories because they have always done so; certain areas belong to certain islands because they always have; certain waterways are under the control of certain people because they always have been. The ocean, though not marked by fences and deeds, is strictly marked by traditions, and it would serve a novice well to pay attention to those traditions.

The barriers, though invisible, are real, and they are constantly being tested. It is the nature of man to try to extend his property, and lobstermen are no exception. They push. They see what they can get away with. They shove and bump the boundaries whenever they can, trying to move each empire a foot here, a foot there.

Maybe Mr. Cobb has always stopped his line of traps at the mouth of a certain inlet. But what would happen if, one day, Mr. Cobb decided to set a few traps a few dozen feet farther in, to a spot where Mr. Thomas has traditionally fished? What harm could there be in a few dozen feet? Maybe the move would go unnoticed. Mr. Thomas isn’t as diligent as he once was, thinks Mr. Cobb. Perhaps Mr. Thomas has been ill or has had a bad year or has lost his wife and isn’t paying as close attention as he used to, and maybe-just maybe-the push will go unnoticed.

And it may. Mr. Thomas might not feel the crunch. Or, for whatever reasons, he may not care enough to challenge Mr. Cobb. Then again, maybe he will care. Maybe he’ll be immensely annoyed. Maybe Mr. Thomas will send a message of dissatisfaction. Maybe when Mr. Cobb goes to pull his traps the next week, he’ll find that Mr. Thomas has tied a half-hitch knot in the middle of each line, as a warning. Maybe Mr. Thomas and Mr. Cobb are neighbors who’ve never had any conflict in the past. Maybe they’re married to sisters. Maybe they’re good friends. Those harmless knots are Mr. Thomas’s way of saying, “I see what you’re trying to do here, friend, and I ask you to please back the hell out of my territory while I still have patience with you.”

And perhaps Mr. Cobb will back away, and that will be the end of it. Or perhaps he won’t. Who knows what reasons he may have for persisting? Perhaps Mr. Cobb is resentful that Mr. Thomas feels entitled to such a big piece of the ocean in the first place, when Mr. Thomas isn’t even that gifted a fisherman. And maybe Mr. Cobb is angry because of a rumor he heard that Mr. Thomas is keeping illegal short lobsters, or maybe Mr. Thomas’s son has looked in a lecherous manner at Mr. Cobb’s attractive thirteen-year-old daughter on more than one occasion. Perhaps Mr. Cobb has had troubles of his own at home and needs more money. Perhaps Mr. Cobb’s grandfather once laid claim to that same inlet, and Mr. Cobb is taking back what he believes rightfully belongs to his family.

So next week he sets his traps in Mr. Thomas’s territory again, only now he doesn’t think of it as Mr. Thomas’s territory but as free ocean and his own property as a free American man. And he’s a little pissed off, to tell you the truth, at that greedy bastard Thomas for tying knots in a man’s fishing lines, for Christ’s sake, when all a man is trying to do is make a goddamn living. What the hell was that supposed to mean, tying knots in his lines? If Mr. Thomas has a problem, why doesn’t he talk about it like a man? And by now Mr. Cobb doesn’t care if Mr. Thomas tries cutting his traps away, either. Let him cut! The hell with it! Let him try. He’ll clobber the bastard.

And when Mr. Thomas finds his neighbor’s pot buoys floating in his territory again, he has to make a choice. Cut the traps away? Mr. Thomas wonders how serious Cobb is. Who are Cobb’s friends and allies? Can Thomas afford to lose traps if Cobb retaliates by cutting them? Is it such great territory, after all? Worth fighting for? Did any Cobb ever have a legitimate claim to it? Is Cobb being malicious or is he ignorant?

There are so many reasons that can lead a man to set traps accidentally in another man’s area. Did these traps happen to drift there in a storm? Is Cobb a young hothead? Should a man protest every affront? Must a man be on constant guard against his neighbors? On the other hand, should a man sit in silence while some greedy bastard eats from his dinner plate, for Christ’s sake? Should a man be deprived of his means for making a living? What if Cobb decides to take over the whole area? What if Cobb pushes Thomas into someone else’s traps and causes more trouble for Thomas? Must a man spend hours of his every working day making such decisions?

In fact, he must.

If he is a lobsterman, he must make these decisions every day. It’s the way of the business. And over the years, a lobsterman develops a policy, a reputation. If he’s fishing for a living, fishing to feed his family, he cannot afford to be passive, and in time he’ll come to be known as either a pusher or a cutter. It’s hard to avoid becoming one or the other. He must fight to extend his territory by pushing another man’s trap line, or he must fight to defend his territory by cutting away the traps of anyone who pushes in on his.

Both pusher and cutter are derogatory terms. Nobody wants to be called either one, but nearly every lobsterman is one or the other. Or both. In general, pushers are young men, and cutters are older. Pushers have few traps in their fleet; cutters have many. Pushers have little to lose; cutters have everything to defend. The tension between pushers and cutters is constant, even within a single community, even within a single family.

On Fort Niles Island, Angus Addams was the most famous resident cutter. He cut away anybody and everybody who came near him, and he boasted about it. He said, of his cousins and neighbors, “They’ve been pushing my fanny around for fifty years, and I’ve cut away every last one of those bastards.” As a rule, Angus cut without warning. He didn’t waste time tying friendly warning knots in the lines of a fisherman who, ignorantly or accidentally, may have strayed into his domain. He didn’t care who the errant fisherman was or what his motives were. Angus Addams cut away with rage and consistency, cursing as he sawed through the wet, seaweed-slick rope, cursing those who were trying to take what was rightfully his. He was a good fisherman; he knew he was constantly being followed and watched by lesser men who wanted a piece of what he had. For the love of Christ, he wasn’t going to hand it to them.

Angus Addams had even cut away Ruth’s father, Stan Thomas, who was his best friend in the world. Stan Thomas was not much of a pusher, but he had once set traps past Jatty Rock, where the only buoys that ever bobbed were the yellow-and-green-striped buoys of Angus Addams. Stan observed that Angus hadn’t laid a trap there for months and thought he’d give it a try. He didn’t think Angus would notice. But Angus noticed. And Angus cut away every last trap in the line of his best friend, pulled up the severed red-and-blue Thomas buoys, tied them together with a yard of rope, and quit fishing for the day, he was so goddamn mad. He set out to find Stan Thomas. He motored all over the inlets and islands in and out of Worthy Channel until he saw the Miss Ruthie floating ahead, surrounded with seagulls greedy for the bait. Angus sped up to the boat. Stan Thomas stopped his work and looked over at his friend.

“Something wrong, Angus?” Stan asked.

Angus Addams threw the severed buoys onto Stan’s deck without saying a word. He threw the buoys down with a triumphant gesture, as if they were the severed heads of his worldly enemies. Stan looked at the buoys impassively.

“Something wrong, Angus?” he repeated.

“You push me again,” Angus said, “the next thing I’ll cut is your goddamn throat.”

That was Angus’s standard threat. Stan Thomas had heard it a dozen times, sometimes directed to a malefactor and sometimes in the gleeful retelling of a story over beers and cribbage. But Angus had never before directed it at Stan. The two men, the two best friends, looked at each other. Their boats bobbed below them.

“You owe me for twelve traps,” Stan Thomas said. “Those were brand-new. I could tell you to sit down and make me twelve brand-new traps, but you can give me twelve of your old ones, and we’ll forget about it.”

“You can jump up my ass.”

“You haven’t set any traps there all spring,” Stan said.

“Don’t you fucking think you have any play with me because we have a goddamn history, Stan.”

Angus Addams was purple around his neck, but Stan Thomas stared him down without showing any anger. “If you were anyone else,” Stan said, “I’d punch you in the teeth right now for the way you’re talking to me.”

“Don’t give me no special goddamn treatment.”

“That’s right. You didn’t give me any.”

“That’s right. And I won’t ever give you none, neither, so keep your goddamn traps the hell away from my ass.”

And he pulled his boat away, giving Stan Thomas the finger as he sped off. Stan and Angus did not speak to each other for nearly eight months. And that encounter was between good friends, between two men who ate dinner together several nights a week, between two neighbors, between a teacher and his protégé. That was an encounter between two men who did not believe that the other was working day and night to destroy him, which was what the men of Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island happen to believe of each other. Correctly, for the most part.

It’s a dicey business. And it was that sort of pushing and cutting that brought about the fourth lobster war, back in the late 1950s. Who started it? Hard to say. Hostility was in the air. There were men back from Korea who wanted to take up fishing again and found that their territory had been eaten away. There were, in the spring of 1957, several young men who had just come of age and had bought their own boats. They were trying to find a place for themselves. The fishing had been good the year before, so everyone had enough money to buy more traps and bigger boats with bigger engines, and the fishermen were pressing against one another.

There was some cutting on both sides; there was some pushing. Curses were shouted over the bows of some boats. And, over the course of several months, the rancor grew more intense. Angus Addams got tired of cutting away Courne Haven traps in his territory, so he started messing with the enemy in more imaginative ways. He took all his household garbage aboard, and when he found alien traps in his way, he’d pull them up and stuff them with garbage. Once, he stuffed an old pillow into someone’s trap so that no lobsters could get in, and he wasted one entire afternoon driving nails through a trap; it ended up looking like a spiked instrument of torture. Angus had another trick; he’d stuff someone’s straying trap with rocks and throw it back into the sea. It was a lot of work, that trick. He had to load the rocks on his own boat, with sacks and a wheelbarrow, which took a lot of time. But Angus considered it time well spent. He liked to think of the Courne Haven bastard straining and struggling to pull up a trap, only to find it full of rubble.

Angus got a big kick out of these games until the day he pulled up one of his own traps and found in it a child’s doll, with a rusty pair of scissors stuck in its chest. That was an alarming, violent message to pull from the sea. Angus Addams’s sternman shrieked like a girl when he saw it. The doll horrified even Angus. Its blond hair was wet and slathered across its face, which was cracked china. The doll’s stiff lips formed a shocked O. A crab had found its way into the trap and was clinging to the doll’s dress.

“What the fuck is this?” Angus shouted. He pulled the stabbed doll from his trap and yanked out the scissors. “What the fuck is this, some kind of fucking threat?”

He brought the doll back to Fort Niles and showed it around, thrusting it into people’s faces in a manner that was pretty damned unsettling. The people on Fort Niles were generally dismissive of Angus Addams’s rages, but this time they paid attention. There was something about the savagery of the stabbed doll that angered everyone. A doll? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Garbage and nails were one thing, but a murdered doll? If someone on Courne Haven had a problem with Angus, why couldn’t that person say it to his face? And whose doll was it? It probably belonged to some fisherman’s poor daughter. What kind of a man would stab his little girl’s doll, just to make a point? And what exactly was the point?

Those people over on Courne Haven were animals.

The next morning, many of the Fort Niles lobstermen gathered at the dock much earlier than usual. It was more than an hour before sunrise, still dark. There were stars in the sky, and the moon was low and dim. The men set off toward Courne Haven in a small fleet. Their engines threw up a huge, stinking cloud of diesel fumes. They didn’t have a particular intent, but they motored with determination over to Courne Haven and stopped their boats right outside the harbor. There were twelve of them, the fishermen of Fort Niles, a small blockade. Nobody spoke. A few of the men smoked cigarettes.

After about a half hour, they could see activity on the Courne Haven dock. The Courne Haven men coming down to begin their day of fishing looked out to the sea and saw the line of boats. They gathered in a small group on the dock and kept looking at the boats. Some of the men were drinking from thermoses of coffee, and wisps of steam rose among them. The group grew larger as more men came down to start their day of fishing and found the huddle on the dock.

Some of the men pointed. Some of them smoked cigarettes, too. After about fifteen minutes, it was clear they didn’t know what to do about the blockade. No one made a move toward his boat. They all shuffled around, talking to each other. Across the water, the Fort Niles men in their boats could hear the watery distillations of Courne Haven conversation. Sometimes a cough or a laugh would carry clearly. The laughter was killing Angus Addams.

“Fucking pussies,” he said, but only a few in the blockade could hear him, because he muttered it under his breath.

“What’s that?” said the man in the boat beside him, Angus’s cousin Barney.

“What’s so funny?” asked Angus. “I’ll show them funny.”

“I don’t think they’re laughing at us,” said Barney. “I think they’re just laughing.”

“I’ll show them funny.”

Angus Addams went to his helm and gunned his motor, powering his boat forward, right into the Courne Haven harbor. He sped among the boats, smacking up a mean wake in his path, then slowed down near the dock. It was low tide, and his boat was far, far below the gathered Courne Haven fishermen. They moved to the edge of the dock to look down at Angus Addams. None of the other Fort Niles fishermen had followed him; they hung back at the mouth of the harbor. No one knew what to do.

“YOU PEOPLE LIKE PLAYING WITH DOLLS?” Angus Addams bellowed. His friends in their boats could hear him clear across the water. He held up and shook the murdered doll. One of the Courne Haven men said something that made his friends laugh.

“COME ON DOWN HERE!” Angus shouted. “COME ON DOWN AND SAY THAT!”

“What’d he say?” Barney Addams asked Don Pommeroy. “Did you hear what that guy said?”

Don Pommeroy shrugged.

Just then, a big man walked down the path to the dock and the fishermen parted to make way for him. He was tall and wide and wasn’t wearing a hat on his gleaming head of blond hair. He had some ropes, neatly coiled, over his shoulder, and was carrying a tin lunchbox. The laughter on the Courne Haven dock stopped. Angus Addams said nothing; that is, nothing that his friends could hear.

The blond man, not looking at Angus, climbed down from the dock, his lunchbox tucked under his arm, and stepped into a rowboat. He released it from its post and began to row. His stroke was beautiful to behold: a long pull followed by a quick, muscular snap. In very little time, he reached his boat and climbed aboard. By now, the men at the mouth of the harbor could see that this was Ned Wishnell, a true high-line fisherman and the current patriarch of the Wishnell dynasty. They looked at his boat with envy. It was twenty-five feet long, immaculate, white, with a clean blue stripe all around it. Ned Wishnell started it up and headed out of the harbor.

“Where the hell’s he going?” said Barney Addams.

Don Pommeroy shrugged again.

Ned Wishnell came right at them, right toward their blockade, as if it weren’t there. The Fort Niles fishermen looked at each other warily, wondering whether they were supposed to stop this man. It didn’t seem right to let him pass, but Angus Addams wasn’t with them to give instructions. They watched, paralyzed, as Ned Wishnell sailed right through, passing between Don Pommeroy and Duke Cobb without looking left or right. The Fort Niles boats bobbed in his wake. Don had to grab his rail, or he would have fallen over. The men watched as Ned Wishnell sped off, smaller and smaller as he went out to sea.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Barney apparently still expected an answer.

“I think he’s going fishing,” said Don Pommeroy.

“Hell of a note,” said Barney. He squinted out at the ocean. “Didn’t he see us?”

“Course he seen us.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“What the hell did you think he’d say?”

“I don’t know. Something like, ‘Hey, fellas! What’s going on?’ ”

“Shut up, Barney.”

“I don’t see why I should,” said Barney Addams, but he did.

Ned Wishnell’s impudence utterly dissolved any menace the Fort Niles men may have presented, so the rest of the Courne Haven fishermen, one at a time, climbed down their dock, got into their boats, and set out for a day of lobstering. Like their neighbor Ned, they passed through the Fort Niles blockade without looking to the left or right. Angus Addams screamed at them for a while, but this embarrassed the rest of the Fort Niles men, who, one at a time, turned around and headed home. Angus was the last to go. He was, as Barney reported later, “sweating bullets, cursing stars, sewing buttonholes, and everything else.” Angus was outraged at being deserted by his friends, furious that what could have been a pretty decent blockade had turned comic and useless.

This might have been the end of the fourth Fort Niles-Courne Haven lobster war, right there. If the incidents that morning had closed the quarrel, in fact, it wouldn’t even have been remembered as a lobster war; rather, just another in the long series of disputes and confrontations. As the summer went on, the pushing and cutting continued, but sporadically. For the most part, it was Angus Addams doing the cutting, and the men on both islands were used to that. Angus Addams held on to what was his like a bull terrier. For everyone else, new boundaries were set. Some territory got shifted; some new fishermen took over old areas; some old fishermen cut back on their workload; some fishermen home from the war resumed their profession. Everything settled down to a normal, tense peace.

For a few weeks.

At the end of April, Angus Addams happened to go to Rockland to sell his lobsters at the same time as Don Pommeroy. Don, a bachelor, was a known fool. He was the softer brother of Ira Pommeroy, the scowling, hard-knuckled husband of Rhonda Pommeroy, the father of Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and so on. Angus Addams didn’t think much of either of the Pommeroys, but he ended up spending a night drinking with Don at the Wayside Hotel, because it was too rough and too dark to head back home, and he was bored. Angus might have preferred to drink alone in his hotel room, but that’s not how things ended up. The men met at the wholesaler’s place, and Don said, “Let’s have a refresher, Angus,” and Angus agreed.

There were some men from Courne Haven at the Wayside that night. Fred Burden the fiddler was there with his brother-in-law, Carl Cobb. Because it was a night of windy, icy rain, and because the Courne Haven men and the Fort Niles men were the only ones at the bar, they found themselves in conversation. It wasn’t unfriendly conversation. In fact, it began when Fred Burden ordered a drink sent down to Angus Addams.

“That’s to keep your strength up,” Fred called over, “after a long day of cutting away our traps.”

It was a hostile opening line, so Angus Addams called back, “You’d better send me the whole bottle, then. I cut away a hell of a lot more than one drink’s worth today.”

This was hostile, too, but it didn’t lead to fighting. It led to laughing all around. The men had all had enough drinks to be jovial but not enough to start fighting. Fred Burden and Carl Cobb moved down the bar to sit next to their neighbors from Fort Niles. Of course they knew one another. They clapped each other on the back, ordered up some more beers and whiskeys, talked about their new boats and the new wholesaler and the newest trap design. They talked about the new fishing limitations the state was imposing, and what idiots the new wardens were. They had absolutely everything in common, so there was a lot to talk about.

Carl Cobb had been stationed in Germany during the Korean War, and he took out his wallet and showed off some German money. Everyone looked at Angus Addams’s stump, where he’d lost his finger in the winch, and made him tell the story about kicking his finger overboard and searing the wound with his cigar. Fred Burden told the other men that the summer tourists on Courne Haven had decided the island was too rowdy and had pooled their money to hire a policeman for the months of July and August. The policeman was a red-headed teenager from Bangor, and he’d been beaten up three times in his first week on the island. The summer people had even got the kid a police car, which the stupid kid had flipped over in a high-speed chase across the island, trying to catch a guy with no license plate on his car.

“A high-speed chase!” Fred Burden said. “On an island four miles long! For Christ’s sake, how far was the guy gonna go? Damn kid could’ve killed somebody.”

As it was, Fred Burden went on, the dazed young policeman was dragged out of his wrecked car and beaten up again, this time by a neighbor, furious at finding a police car overturned in his garden. After three weeks, the young policeman went home to Bangor. The police car was still on the island. One of the Wishnells bought it and fixed it up for his kid to drive around. The summer tourists were enraged, but Henry Burden and everyone else told them that if they didn’t like it on Courne Haven, they should go back to Boston, where they could have all the policemen they wanted.

Don Pommeroy said that was one good thing about Fort Niles-no summer tourists. The Ellis family owned damn near the whole island, and they wanted it all to themselves.

“That’s one good thing about Courne Haven, though,” Fred Burden said. “No Ellis family.”

Everyone laughed. That was a good point.

Angus Addams told about the old days on Fort Niles, when the granite industry was still thriving. They’d had a policeman back then, and he was the perfect cop for an island. He was an Addams, first of all, so he knew everybody, and he knew how things operated. He left the islanders alone and mostly made sure the Italians didn’t cause too much trouble. Roy Addams was his name; he’d been hired by the Ellis family to keep order. The Ellises didn’t care what old Roy did as long as nobody was getting murdered or robbed. He had a squad car-a big Packard sedan, with wooden panels-but he never drove it. Roy had his own theory of policing. He’d sit in his house, listening to the radio, and if anything happened on the island, everyone would know where to find him. Once he heard about a crime, he’d go have a talk with the perpetrator. That was a good island policeman, Angus said. Fred and his brother-in-law agreed.

“There wasn’t even a jail,” Angus said. “You got in trouble, you had to sit in old Roy’s living room for a while.”

“That sounds about right,” Fred said. “That’s how it should be with police on an island.”

“If there’s going to be any police at all, that is,” said Angus.

“That’s right. If.”

Angus then told the joke about the polar bear kid who wants to know if there’s any koala blood in his family, and Fred Burden said that reminded him of the one about the three Eskimos in the bakery. And Don Pommeroy told the one about the Japanese guy and the iceberg, but he screwed it up, so Angus Addams had to tell it right. Carl Cobb said he’d heard it a different way, and he gave his whole version, and it was practically the same. That was a waste of time. Don contributed the joke about the Catholic lady and the talking frog, but he wrecked it pretty bad, too.

Angus Addams went off to the bathroom, and when he came back, Don Pommeroy and Fred Burden were arguing. They were really going at it. Someone had said something. Someone had started something. It sure hadn’t taken long. Angus Addams went over to figure out what the fight was about.

“There’s no way,” Fred Burden was saying, his face red and his lips spitting when he talked. “No way you could! He’d kill you!”

“I’m just saying I could,” Don Pommeroy said, slowly and with dignity. “I’m not saying it would be easy. I’m just saying I could do it.”

“What’s he talking about?” Angus asked Carl.

“Don bet Fred Burden a hundred bucks he could beat up a five-foot monkey in a fight,” Carl said.

“What?”

“You’d get creamed!” Fred was shouting now. “You’d get creamed by a five-foot monkey!”

“I’m a good fighter,” Don said.

Angus rolled his eyes and sat down. He felt sorry for Fred Burden. Fred Burden was from Courne Haven, but he didn’t deserve to get into a stupid conversation like this with a known fool like Don Pommeroy.

“Have you ever seen a goddamn monkey?” Fred demanded. “The way a monkey is built? A five-foot monkey would have a six-foot arm span. You know how strong a monkey is? You couldn’t beat up a two-foot monkey. You’d get demolished!”

“But he wouldn’t know how to fight,” Don said. “That’s where my advantage is. I know how to fight.”

“Now that’s stupid. We’re assuming he’d know how to fight.”

“No we ain’t.”

“Then what are we talking about? How can we talk about fighting a five-foot monkey if the monkey can’t even fight?”

“I’m just saying I could beat one if he could fight.” Don was speaking very calmly. He was the prince of logic. “If a five-foot monkey could fight, I could beat him.”

“What about the teeth?” Carl Cobb asked, genuinely interested now.

“Shut up, Carl,” said his brother-in-law Fred.

“That’s a good question,” Don said, and nodded sagely. “The monkey wouldn’t be allowed to use his teeth.”

“Then he wouldn’t be fighting!” Fred shouted. “That’s how a monkey would fight! By biting!”

“No biting allowed,” Don said, and his verdict was final.

“He would be boxing? Is that it?” Fred Burden demanded. “You’re saying you could beat a five-foot monkey in a boxing match?”

“Exactly,” said Don.

“But a monkey wouldn’t know how to box,” Carl Cobb observed, frowning.

Don nodded with composed satisfaction. “Exactly,” he said, “why I would win.”

This left Fred Burden with no choice but to punch Don out, so he did. Angus Addams said later he’d have done it himself if Don had said another goddamn word about boxing a five-foot monkey, but Fred was the first who couldn’t take it any more, so he laid one across Don’s ear. Carl Cobb looked so surprised that it really annoyed Angus, so Angus punched Carl. Then Fred punched Angus. Carl punched Angus, too, but not hard. Don came up off the floor and threw himself, bent over and howling, right into Fred’s gut, sending Fred tumbling backward into some empty barstools, which clattered and wavered and fell.

The two men-Fred and Don-set to rolling on the floor of the bar. They had somehow got laid up against each other head to foot and foot to head, which was not an effective posture for fighting. They looked like a large clumsy starfish-all arms and legs. Fred Burden was on top, and he dug his boot tip into the floor and spun himself and Don in a circle, trying to get a grip.

Carl and Angus had stopped fighting. They hadn’t had that strong an interest in it, anyway. Each had got in a punch, and that took care of that. Now they stood beside each other, backs to the bar, watching their friends on the floor.

“Get ’em, Fred!” Carl hooted, and shot a sheepish look at Angus.

Angus shrugged. He didn’t particularly care if Don Pommeroy got beat up. He deserved it, the idiot. A five-foot monkey. For Christ’s sake.

Fred Burden set his teeth into Don’s shin and clamped. Don howled at the injustice, “No biting! No biting!” He was outraged, it seemed, because he’d made that rule perfectly clear with regard to the monkey fight. Angus Addams, standing at the bar, watched the awkward scramble on the floor for a while and then sighed, turned around, and asked the bartender if he could settle the tab. The bartender, a small, slight man with an anxious expression, was holding a baseball bat that was half his height.

“You don’t need that,” Angus said, nodding at the bat.

The bartender looked relieved and slid the bat back under the bar. “Should I call the police?”

“You don’t need to worry. It’s no big deal, buddy. Just let ’em fight it out.”

“What are they fighting about?” the bartender asked.

“Ah, they’re old friends,” Angus said, and the bartender smiled with relief, as if that explained everything. Angus settled his bill and walked past the men (who were wrestling and grunting on the floor) to go upstairs and get some sleep.

“Where you going?” Don Pommeroy, on the floor, shrieked after Angus as he was leaving. “Where the hell you going?”

Angus had walked out on the fight because he thought it was nothing, but it turned out to be something after all.

Fred Burden was a tenacious bastard, and Don was as stubborn as he was stupid, and neither man let up on the other. The fight went on for a good ten minutes after Angus went to bed. The way Carl Cobb described it, Fred and Don were “two dogs in a field,” biting, kicking, punching. Don tried to break a few bottles over Fred’s head, and Fred broke a few of Don’s fingers so fiercely, you could hear them snap. The bartender, a not very bright man who had been told by Angus not to worry about the fight, didn’t.

Even when Fred was sitting on top of Don’s chest, fistfuls of hair in his hands, pounding Don’s head into the floor, the bartender did not intervene. Fred pounded until Don was unconscious, then sat back, heaving. The bartender was polishing an ashtray with his towel when Carl said, “Maybe you should call somebody.” The bartender looked over the bar and saw that Don was not moving and that his face was mashed up. Fred was bloody, too, and one of his arms was hanging in a funny way. The bartender called the police.

Angus Addams didn’t hear about any of this until the next morning, when he got up for breakfast and prepared to head back to Fort Niles. He learned that Don Pommeroy was in the hospital, and that things didn’t look good. He hadn’t woken up, Angus heard. He had some “internal damage,” and the rumor was that a lung was punctured.

“Son of a bitch,” Angus said, deeply impressed.

He’d never thought the fight would turn into something so serious. The police had questions for Angus, but they let him go. They were still holding Fred Burden, but he was so beat up himself that he hadn’t yet been charged with anything. The police weren’t sure what to do, because the bartender-their one sober, reliable witnes-insisted that the two men were old friends who were only kidding around.

Angus arrived at the island late in the afternoon, and went looking for Don’s brother Ira, but Ira had already heard the news. He’d received a telephone call from the Rockland police, informing him that his brother had been beaten into a coma by a Courne Haven fisherman in a bar. Ira went wild. He stormed around, flexing and unflexing his muscles and waving his fists in the air and shouting. His wife, Rhonda, tried to calm him down, but he wouldn’t hear her. He was going to take a shotgun over to Courne Haven and “cause some trouble.” He was going to “show somebody.” He was going to “teach them a thing or two.” He got together with some of his friends and worked them up into a serious froth. Nobody ended up taking any shotguns on board, but the tense peace that existed between the two islands was shattered, and the fourth Courne Haven lobster war was under way.

The daily details of this war are not significant; it was a typical lobster war. There was fighting, cutting, pushing, vandalism, theft, aggression, accusation, paranoia, intimidation, terror, cowardice, and threats. There was virtually no commerce. It’s hard enough to make a living at fishing, but it’s harder still when the fisherman has to spend his days defending his property or attacking the property of another man.

Ruth’s father, with little fuss and no hesitation, took his traps out of the water, just as his father had done during the first Courne Haven- Fort Niles lobster war, back in 1903. He took his boat out of the water and stored it in his front yard. “I don’t get involved in these things,” he told his neighbors. “I don’t care who did what to who.” Stan Thomas had it all figured out. By sitting out the war, he would lose less money than his neighbors. He knew it wouldn’t last forever.

The war lasted seven months. Stan Thomas used the time to fix up his boat, build new traps, tar his lines, paint his buoys. While his neighbors fought steadily and drove themselves and each other back into poverty, he polished his business apparatus to sparkling perfection. Sure, they took over his fishing territory, but he knew they’d burn themselves out and that he’d be able to take it all back-and more. They would be beaten. In the meantime, he fixed his gear and made every piece of brass and every barrel gorgeous. His brand-new wife, Mary, helped a great deal, and painted up his buoys very prettily. They had no trouble with money; the house had long been paid for, and Mary was wonderfully frugal. She’d lived her whole life in a room that was ten feet square and had never owned a thing. She expected nothing, asked for nothing. She could make a hearty stew out of a carrot and a chicken bone. She planted a garden, sewed patches into her husband’s clothing, darned his socks. She was used to this kind of work. Not all that much difference between darning wool socks and pairing and matching silk stockings.

Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas tried, gently, to persuade her husband to take a job at Ellis House and not go back to lobstering, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want to be near any of those assholes, he told her. “You could work in the stables,” she said, “and you’d never see them.” But he didn’t want to shovel the shit of the horses of any of those assholes, either. So she let it drop. It had been a quiet fantasy of Mary’s, that her husband and the Ellises would grow to love one another, and that she would be welcomed back at Ellis House. Not as a servant but as a member of the family. Maybe Vera Ellis would come to admire Stan. Maybe Vera would invite Stan and Mary for luncheons. Maybe Vera would pour Stan a cup of tea and say, “I’m so happy Mary married such a resourceful gentleman.”

One night in bed in her new home with her new husband, Mary started, in the meekest way, to hint at this fantasy. “Maybe we could go to visit Miss Vera…” she began, but her husband interrupted her with the information that he would eat his own feces before he would visit Vera Ellis.

“Oh,” said Mary.

So she let it go. She put all her resourcefulness toward helping her husband through the dry months of the lobster war, and, in return, she received small, precious acknowledgments of her worth. He liked to sit in the living room and watch her sew curtains. The house was immaculate, and he found endearing her attempts at decoration. Mary set wildflowers on the windowsill in water glasses. She polished his tools. That was the most adorable thing.

“Come here,” he’d tell her at the end of the day, and he’d pat his knee.

Mary would go over and sit on his lap. He’d open his arms. “Come in here,” he’d say, and she’d fold up against him. When she dressed prettily, or styled her hair in a nice way, he called her Mint, because she looked freshly minted, shiny as a new coin.

“Come here, Mint,” he’d say.

Or, while watching her iron his shirts, he’d say, “Nice work there, Mint.”

They spent every day, all day, together, because he was not going out to sea. There was a feeling in their house that they were working together toward a common goal, and that they were a team, untainted by sordid quarrels of the rest of the world. The Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war raged around them, corroding everybody but them. They were Mr. and Mrs. Stan Thomas. They needed, Mary believed, only each other. They made their home stronger while the homes of others shook.

It was-those seven war months-the happiest time of their marriage. Those seven war months gave Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas a soaring joy, a sense that she had made the unquestionably right decision in leaving Vera Ellis to marry Stan. She had a true sense of worth. She was well accustomed to working, but was not at all accustomed to working for her own future, for her own benefit. She had a husband, and he loved her. She was essential to him. He told her so.

“You’re a great kid, Mint.”

After seven months of daily care, Stan Thomas’s fishing gear was a paragon. He wanted to rub his hands together like a millionaire when he looked over his gear and his boat. He wanted to laugh like a tyrant as he watched his friends and neighbors fight themselves into ruin.

Fight it out, he silently urged the others. Go ahead. Fight it out.

The longer the others fought, the weaker they would become. All the better for Stan Thomas when, finally, he would put his boat back in the water. He willed the war to go on, but in November of 1957 the fourth Courne Haven-Fort Niles lobster war ended. Lobster wars tend to die down in the winters. Many fishermen stop working in November under the best of circumstances, because the weather is too rough. With fewer fishermen out there, the chance of confrontation eventually grows lower. The war might have run itself out because of the weather. Both islands might have sunk into their winter slumbers, and when spring came, the old disputes might have been dropped. But that’s not how it happened in 1957.

On November 8, a young man from Courne Haven Island, by the name of Jim Burden, set out for a day of lobster fishing. He had meant to fuel up his boat first thing in the morning, but before he could get to the pumps, he found a stranger’s buoys, painted a hideous, garish green, bobbing among his traps. They were the buoys of Ira Pommeroy, from Fort Niles Island. Jim recognized them immediately. And he knew who Ira Pommeroy was. Ira Pommeroy, wife of Rhonda, father of Webster and Conway and John and so on, was the brother of Don Pommeroy. Who was in a hospital in Rockland, learning how to walk again, an ability he had lost after being beaten by Fred Burden. Who was Jim Burden’s father.

Ira Pommeroy had been harassing Fred Burden and young Jim for months, and Jim had had enough of it. Jim Burden had set these traps right off the north coast of Courne Haven only the day before. They were so near Courne Haven that Jim could practically see them from his house. They were in a place where a Fort Niles fisherman had no business. To set those rogue traps, Ira Pommeroy must have come over in the middle of the night. What would drive a man to do that? Didn’t the man ever sleep?

It should be noted that the buoys Ira Pommeroy had set on Jim’s little shoreline were dummies. There were no traps at the end of those lines; there were cement blocks. Ira Pommeroy’s plan was not to take Jim Burden’s lobsters. The plan was to drive Jim Burden nuts, and it worked. Jim, a mild-mannered nineteen-year-old who’d been pretty much intimidated by this lobster war, lost every shred of meekness in an instant and went after Ira Pommeroy. Jim was in a hot rage. He didn’t usually curse, but as he sped his boat over the waves, he said under his breath things like “Damn it, damn it, damn it. Damn him!”

He got to Fort Niles and set out to look for Ira Pommeroy’s boat. He didn’t know for sure whether he’d recognize it, but he was damn sure set on finding it. He more or less knew his way around the waters near Fort Niles, but he still had a few close calls with rocky ledges he couldn’t spot from behind the throttle. And he wasn’t paying all that much attention to the bottom or to landmarks that would help get him back home. He wasn’t thinking about getting back home. He was looking for any boat belonging to a Fort Niles fisherman.

He scanned the horizon for flocks of seagulls and followed the seagulls to the lobster boats. Whenever he found a boat, he would zoom right up to it, slow down, and peer at it, trying to see who was aboard. He didn’t say anything to the fishermen, and they didn’t say anything to him. They stopped their work and looked at him. What’s that kid up to? What the hell is the matter with that kid’s face? He’s purple, for Christ’s sake.

Jim Burden didn’t say a word. He zoomed off, searching for Ira Pommeroy. He hadn’t planned exactly what he was going to do once he found him, but his thoughts were somewhere along the lines of murder.

Unluckily for Jim Burden, he didn’t think to look for Ira Pommeroy’s boat in the Fort Niles harbor, which is where it sat, bobbing quietly. Ira Pommeroy had taken the day off. He was exhausted from a night spent dropping cement blocks near Courne Haven, and he’d slept in until eight in the morning. While Jim Burden was speeding around the Atlantic looking for Ira, Ira was in bed with his wife, Rhonda, making another son.

Jim Burden went way out. He went much farther out to sea than any lobster boat needs to go. He went past all the pot buoys of any kind. He followed what he thought was a flock of seagulls far, far out to sea, but the seagulls, as he came nearer, vanished. They dissolved into the sky like sugar in hot water. Jim Burden slowed his boat down and looked around. Where was he? He could see Fort Niles Island shimmering in the distance, a pale gray apparition. His anger was now frustration, and even that was beginning to wane, replaced with something like anxiety. The weather was getting bad. The sea was high. The sky was whipped with fast, black clouds, which had come up quickly. Jim wasn’t sure at all where he was.

“Damn it,” Jim Burden said. “Damn him.”

And then he ran out of gas.

“Damn it,” he said again, and this time he meant it.

He tried to start up the engine, but there was no doing so. No going anywhere. It hadn’t occurred to him that this could happen. He hadn’t thought about the gas tank.

“Oh, boy,” said nineteen-year-old Jim Burden.

He was now afraid as well as embarrassed. Some fisherman he was. Paying his gas tank no mind. How stupid could you get? Jim got on the radio and put out a staticky call for help. “Help,” he said, “I’m out of gas.” He wasn’t sure if there was a more nautical way to say this. He didn’t know all that much about boating, really. This was the first year he’d been out to haul by himself. He’d worked for years as a sternman for his father, so he thought he knew all about the ocean, but now he realized he’d been a mere passenger before. His dad had taken care of everything, while he’d just done the muscle work in the back of the boat. He hadn’t been paying attention all those years, and now he was alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

“Help!” he said into the radio again. Then he remembered the word. “Mayday!” he said. “Mayday!”

The first voice to get back to him was that of Ned Wishnell, and it made young Jim wince. Ned Wishnell was the best fisherman in Maine, people said. Something like this would never happen to Ned Wishnell, to any Wishnell. Jim had been hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that he could get through this without Ned Wishnell’s finding out.

“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice cracked.

“This is the Mighty J,” Jim replied. He thought it would make him sound more adult to name his boat. But he was immediately embarrassed by the name. The Mighty J! Yeah, right.

“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice came again.

“This is Jimmy,” Jim said. “I’m out of gas. Sorry.”

“Where are you, son?”

“I… uh… don’t know.” He hated to say it, hated to admit it. To Ned Wishnell, of all people!

“Didn’t make that out, Jimmy.”

“I don’t know!” Jim shouted it now. Humiliating. “I don’t know where I am!”

There was silence. Then an unintelligible gargle.

“Didn’t make that out, Ned,” Jim said. He was trying to sound like the older man, imitating his cadence. Trying to maintain some dignity.

“You see any landmarks?” Ned asked.

“Fort Niles is, um, maybe two miles to the west,” Jimmy said, but as he said it, he realized he could no longer see that distant island. A fog had come up, and it was growing as dark as evening, although it was only ten in the morning. He didn’t know which way he was pointing.

“Drop your anchor. Stay put,” Ned Wishnell said, and signed off.

Ned found the kid. It took him several hours, but he found Jimmy. He had notified the other fishermen, and they’d all been looking for Jimmy. Even some fishermen from Fort Niles went out to look for Jim Burden. It was terrible weather. On a normal day, everyone would have headed in because of the weather, but they all stayed out, looking for young Jimmy. Even Angus Addams went out looking for Jim Burden. It was the right thing to do. The kid was only nineteen, and he was lost.

But it was Ned Wishnell who found him. How, nobody knew. But the guy was a Wishnell-a gifted fisherman, a hero on the water-so nobody was surprised that he found a small boat in the fog in the big ocean without the faintest clue about where to look. Everyone was accustomed to nautical miracles from Wishnells.

By the time Ned got to the Mighty J, the weather was really rough, and Jim Burden had been pulled-despite his little anchor-far away from where he’d sent his call for help. Not that Jim knew where he’d been in the first place. He heard Ned Wishnell’s boat before he could see it. He heard the motor through the fog.

“Help!” he shouted. “Mayday!”

Ned circled him and emerged out of the fog in that huge, gleaming boat of his, with that handsome, manly face of his. Ned was angry. He was angry and silent. His day of fishing had been ruined. Jim Burden could see the anger immediately, and it shrank his guts. Ned Wishnell pulled his boat up right beside the Mighty J. It had begun to rain. It was warm for Maine in November, which meant that it was miserable and freezing and wet. The wind blew the rain sideways. In his gloves, Jim’s hands were chapped and scarlet, but Ned Wishnell wasn’t wearing gloves. He wasn’t wearing a hat. Seeing this, Jim quickly took off his hat and dropped it at his feet. He immediately regretted this decision as the freezing rain pinged his scalp.

“Hi,” he said, lamely.

Ned tossed a line over to Jim and said, “Latch on.” His voice was tight with irritation.

Jim tied the boats together-his small, cheap boat up against that Wishnell beauty. The Mighty J bounced, silent and useless, as Ned’s boat chugged and chugged in a competent idle.

“You sure it’s the gas run out?” Ned asked.

“Pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?” Disgusted.

Jim did not reply.

“It’s not another kind of engine trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” Jim said. But his voice had no authority. He knew he’d lost any right to sound knowledgeable.

Ned looked grim. “You don’t know if your boat has run out of gas.”

“I’m-I’m not sure.”

“I’ll take a look,” Ned said.

He leaned over his rail to pull the Mighty J closer, to get it side by side with his boat. He used his fishing gaff to yank Jim’s boat, and he did it with a jerky motion. He was really annoyed. He was usually gorgeously smooth with boats. Jim also leaned over to pull the boats closer. The boats bounced and bounced in the rough sea. They separated and smashed together. Ned put one booted foot on his rail and made a move to swing himself over to the Mighty J. It was a stupid move. It was a very stupid move for a high-line sailor like Ned Wishnell. But Ned was annoyed and was being careless. And something happened. The wind blew, a wave rose, a foot slipped, a hand lost its grip. Something happened.

Ned Wishnell was in the water.

Jim stared down at the man, and his first reaction was almost amusement. Ned Wishnell was in the water! It was the damnedest thing. Like seeing a nun naked. Would you look at that? Ned was soaked from the drop, and when he popped out of the water, he gasped, and his mouth made an unimpressive, weak little circle. Ned looked up at Jim Burden with panic, an expression wholly incongruous on a Wishnell. Ned Wishnell looked desperate, stricken. And this gave Jim Burden a moment to enjoy a second reaction, which was pride. Ned Wishnell needed Jim Burden’s help. Now wasn’t that a hell of a note?

Would you look at that?

Jim’s reactions were fleeting, but they prevented him from taking the lightning-fast action that might have saved Ned Wishnell’s life. If he’d grabbed a gaff and thrust it down to Ned immediately, if he’d reached down to save Ned even as the man was falling in, things might have been different. But Jim stood there for that quick moment of amusement and pride-and a swell came and knocked the two boats together. Smashed them together, with a force that almost threw Jim off his feet. Between the two boats was Ned Wishnell, of course, and when the boats separated after the collision, he was gone. He had sunk.

He must have been badly banged up. He was wearing long boots, and they had probably filled up with water, and he couldn’t swim. Whatever had happened, Ned Wishnell was gone.

That was the end of the fourth Fort Niles-Courne Haven lobster war. That pretty much did it. Losing Ned Wishnell was tragic for both islands. The reaction on Fort Niles and Courne Haven was almost like the nationwide reaction a few years later, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. A shocked citizenry faced an impossibility come true-and everyone felt changed by (perhaps even a little complicit in) the death. There was a sense on both islands that something was fundamentally wrong if this could happen, if the fight went so far that a man like Ned Wishnell died because of it.

It is not certain that the death of another fisherman could have stirred this feeling. Ned Wishnell was the patriarch of a dynasty that had seemed inviolable. He hadn’t been participating in this lobster war. Not that he’d taken his gear out of the water, as Stan Thomas had done, but Ned Wishnell had always been above this kind of conflict, like Switzerland. What need did he have to push or cut? He knew where the lobsters were. Other fishermen tried to follow him around, tried to learn his secrets, but Ned didn’t care. He didn’t try to chase them off. He barely noticed them. They could never make the catches he made. He was intimidated by nobody. He had no malice. He could afford not to have any.

The fact that Ned Wishnell had drowned while trying to help a boy who’d been sucked into this war struck everyone as ugly. It horrified even Ira Pommeroy, who had basically been responsible for the tragedy. Ira started drinking hard, much harder than usual, and it was then that he turned from a regular drunk into a serious drunk. A few weeks after the drowning of Ned Wishnell, Ira Pommeroy asked his wife, Rhonda, to help him write a letter of condolence to Mrs. Ned Wishnell. But there was no way to reach the Widow Wishnell. She was no longer on Courne Haven Island. She had disappeared.

She wasn’t from there to begin with. Like all Wishnells, Ned had married a beauty from away. Mrs. Ned Wishnell was a ginger-haired, leggy, intelligent girl from a prominent Northeastern family that had always summered at Kennebunkport, Maine. She was nothing like the wives of the other fishermen; that was for sure. Her name was Allison, and she’d met Ned when she was sailing with her family up the Maine coast. She’d seen this man in his fishing boat and been captivated by his looks, by his fascinating silence, by his competence. She encouraged her parents to follow his boat into the harbor at Courne Haven, and she approached him with great boldness. He excited her a good deal; he made her tremble. He was nothing like the men she knew, and she married him-to her family’s astonishment-within weeks. She’d been crazy about the man, but there was nothing to keep her on Courne Haven Island after her husband drowned. She was mortified by the war, by the drowning.

The beautiful Allison Wishnell learned the details of her husband’s death, and looked around her and wondered what the hell she was doing on this rock in the middle of the ocean. It was a ghastly feeling. It was like waking up in a stranger’s dirty bed after a night of drinking. It was like waking up in jail in a foreign land. How had she got here? She looked around at her neighbors and decided they were animals. And what was this house, this fish-smelling house, in which she was living? And why was there only one store on the island, a store that sold nothing but dusty canned goods? And what was with this appalling weather? Whose idea was that?

Mrs. Ned Wishnell was very young, just over twenty, when her husband drowned. Immediately after the funeral, she went back to her parents. She dropped her married name. She became Allison Cavanaugh again and enrolled in Smith College, where she studied art history and never told anybody that she had been a lobster fisherman’s wife. She left it all behind. She even left her son behind on the island. There didn’t seem to be much negotiating involved in that decision, and even less trauma. People said Mrs. Ned Wishnell had never been all that attached to her boy anyway; that something about her child frightened her. The Wishnells on Courne Haven made a strong case that the baby should remain with the family, and that was that. She gave him up.

The boy was to be raised by his uncle, a young man who had just come out of the seminary, a young man who had ambitions to be a traveling minister for all the obscure Maine islands. The uncle’s name was Toby. Pastor Toby Wishnell. He was the youngest brother of Ned Wishnell, and just as handsome, although in a more delicate way. Toby Wishnell was the first Wishnell not to be a fisherman. The baby-Ned Wishnell’s little boy-would be his charge. The baby’s name was Owney, and he was just one year old.

If Owney Wishnell missed his mother when she left, he didn’t show it. If Owney Wishnell missed his drowned father, he didn’t show that, either. He was a big, blond, quiet baby. He caused no one any trouble, except when he was taken out of the bath. Then he’d scream and fight, and his strength was a wonder. The only thing Owney Wishnell wanted, it seemed, was to be in the water all the time.

A few weeks after Ned Wishnell was buried, when it became evident that the lobster war was over, Stan Thomas put his boat back into the water and started fishing with supremacy. He fished with a single-mindedness that would soon earn him the nickname Greedy Number Two (the natural successor to Angus Addams, who had long been known as Greedy Number One). His little period of domesticity with his wife was over. Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas was clearly no longer his partner. His partner was whatever teenage boy was slaving away as his sternman.

Stan came home to Mary late every afternoon exhausted and absorbed. He kept a journal of each fishing day so that he could chart the abundance of lobsters in each area of the ocean. He spent long nights with maps and calculators, and he did not include Mary in this work.

“What are you doing?” she’d ask. “What are you working on?”

“Fishing,” he’d say.

To Stan Thomas, any work related to fishing was itself the act of fishing, even if it took place on dry land. And since his wife was not a fisherman, her views were of no service to him. He stopped calling her over to his lap, and she would not have dared to climb there uninvited. It was a bleak time in her life. Mary was beginning to realize something about her husband that was not pleasant. During the lobster war, when he’d pulled his boat and gear out of the water, she’d interpreted his acts as those of a man of virtue. Her husband was staying out of the war, she thought, because he was a peaceful man. She had gravely misunderstood, and it was now becoming clear to her. He had stayed out of the war to protect his interests and to make a killing when the war was over and he could start fishing again. And now that he was making a killing, he could scarcely stop gloating for a minute.

He spent his evenings transcribing the notes he had taken on his boat into ledgers full of long, complicated figures. The records were meticulous and dated back for years. Some evenings, he would page backward through his ledgers and muse over exceptionally great batches of lobsters in days gone by. He would talk to his ledgers. “I wish it could be October all year round,” he would tell the columns of figures.

Some nights, he’d talk to his calculator as he worked. He’d say, “I hear you, I hear you.” Or “Quit teasing!”

In December, Mary told her husband she was pregnant.

“Way to go, Mint,” he said, but he wasn’t as excited as she hoped he’d be.

Mary secretly sent a letter to Vera Ellis, telling her of the pregnancy, but she got no response. That devastated her; she cried and cried. The only person, in fact, who was at all interested in Mary’s pregnancy was her neighbor Rhonda Pommeroy, who, as usual, was pregnant herself.

“I’ll probably have a boy,” Rhonda said, tipsily.

Rhonda was drunk, as usual. Drunk in a charming way, as usual, as though she were a young girl and this was the first alcohol she had ever tasted. Drunk like wheee! “I’ll probably have another boy, Mary, so you have to have a girl. Did you feel it when you got pregnant?”

“I don’t think so,” Mary said.

“I feel it every time. It’s like click! And this one’s a boy. I can always tell. And yours is going to be a girl. I’ll bet it’s a girl! How about that? When she grows up, she can marry one of my boys! And we can be related! ” Rhonda nudged Mary so hard, she almost knocked her over.

“We’re already related,” Mary said. “Through Len and Kitty.”

“You’re going to like having a baby,” Rhonda said. “It’s the funnest thing.”

But it wasn’t the funnest thing, not for Mary. She got stuck on the island for the delivery, and it was a living nightmare. Her husband couldn’t take the screaming and all the women around, so he went fishing and left her to deliver the baby without his help. It was a cruel act on many levels. There had been bad storms all week, and none of the other men on the island had dared to put out their boats. On this day, Stan and his terrified sternman set out alone. He’d prefer to risk his life, it seemed, than help his wife or even listen to her pain. He’d been expecting a boy, but he was polite enough to conceal his disappointment when he came home from fishing and met his little girl. He didn’t get to hold her at first, because Senator Simon Addams was there, hogging the baby.

“Oh, isn’t she the dearest little baby?” Simon said, again and again, as the women laughed at his tenderness.

“What should we name her?” Mary asked her husband, quietly. “Do you like the name Ruth?”

“I don’t care what you name her,” Stan Thomas said, of his daughter, who was only an hour old. “Name her whatever you like, Mint.”

“Do you want to hold her?” Mary asked.

“I have to wash up,” he said. “I smell like a bait bag.”