Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

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.