The Devil's Larder

61

OUR SALTED COD has dried and shrivelled through the winter to half its netted weight and a quarter of its thickness. We well remember how we caught it on a line, the three of us, my brothers and I. It needed three to play it in to the boat, though three was hardly enough (for we were tired by then) to lift it in the keep net onto the deck. That fish was strong. We even wished our eldest brother hadn’t gone away to God knows where to drink himself insane and difficult. A fourth set of hands — even his — might have made the cod a little more obliging. It felt as if we’d brought a squall on board. We’d caught a storm. Even once we’d split the catch open with our knives and hauled its innards out, our boat still rocked and heaved, though there was hardly any swell that night. Its end was intimate and slow. This fish, we knew without expressing it, was one we’d have to keep for ourselves, not sell.

Now the day has come to cut our cod down from the rafters of the drying room where, safe from draughts and cats, it has been companion to our overalls and waterproofs since summer. We hope that it will feed us for a week or two. The prospect isn’t pleasing, though. A fisherman would sooner not eat fish. It brings bad luck. But we have no choice except to take it down for food. Our boat was washed up in the gale last week and holed. There’ll be no more fishing for us, and no income, until the fixing plate we’ve ordered from the engineers is delivered by truck. And that won’t be before the spring has opened up the roads. The snow is deep and treacherous this year. It is my job to haul the biggest pot out of the workshed and roll it through the snow to the drying room. I have to scrape out shards of time-toughened pitch. It’s the pot we use each spring for caulking the seams of our hull and sealing decks. A salted cod this size needs soaking in deep water for a day or two before it’s ready for the kitchen. You’d need a chainsaw to cut it now. So I lift the fish free from its hook and cradle it in both my arms, as stiff and lifeless as a leather bag. One brother is enough. It hardly weighs. I put it, head down, in the empty pot next to the hot stovepipes, throw in some handfuls of coarse salt and then turn on the hose until all of the cod, except for its protruding tail, is under water. I stir it in. I lick my hands to check the balance of the water. It tastes as salty as the sea. The cod will have the chance to quiver, swell, resalinate, before we trouble it again.

WE SHOULD HAVE been more vigilant and checked the progress of the fish each night. The timing of such things is critical. The water and the salt restored the cod more rapidly than we’d expected. That’s our excuse. ‘Excuses never fed a man,’ my father used to say. Our two-week meal doubled its weight and quadrupled its thickness behind our backs. We had only a moment’s warning. The three of us were on the slipway, pulling up the kelp for fuel, when we heard the splintering and looked up to see the birch door on the drying room fly back and wedge itself in the snow. Our efforts had revivified the cod, as they’d been meant to. But it did not intend to help us through the hungry weeks ahead. It had the strength to clear the pot, as agile as a salmon, and flap into the open air.

We might have caught it had we been a little closer. But by the time we’d reached the foot of the slope up to our house, the fish, mouth gaping, was halfway to the sea. Good luck was on its side. The tide was in, the hill was steep and slippery. Without the snow the cod might well have torn itself to pieces on the bushes and rocks. The snow, though, was a perfect slide, a wet and speeding cousin to the waves.

We tried to cut our salt cod off by running down onto the beach and wading in. If only we could catch its tail. If only we could lift it in our arms before it reached sea deep enough to float. But once a fish smells the ocean it gathers strength, it quickens. It doesn’t need the water even. It can swim in air.

Three brothers, then. A fourth one missing, no address. We’re standing on the shoreline in our boots, our boat well holed, the roads impassable, our prospects famishing. We hope to see a final sign of our salt cod, far off. A tail perhaps. A fin. We only spot outlying plumes of surf, a half-encountered squall too distant to be frightening, and then the furrows of an ever-grateful sea.

It is, we say, the perfect meal.