Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

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.”

JULY ARRIVED for Fort Niles. It was now the middle of the summer of 1976. It wasn’t as exciting a month as it might have been.

The Bicentennial passed on Fort Niles without any outstanding revelry. Ruth thought she lived in the only place in America that wasn’t getting its act together for a decent celebration. Her dad even went out to haul that day, although, out of some patriotic stirring, he gave Robin Pommeroy the day off. Ruth spent the holiday with Mrs. Pommeroy and her two sisters. Mrs. Pommeroy had tried to sew costumes for them all. She wanted the four of them to dress up as Colonial dames and march in the town parade, but she’d managed to finish only Ruth’s costume by the morning of the Fourth, and Ruth refused to dress up alone. So Mrs. Pommeroy put the costume on Opal, and baby Eddie immediately vomited all over it.

“The dress looks more authentic now,” Ruth said.

“He was eating pudding this morning,” Opal said, shrugging. “Pudding always makes Eddie barf.”

There was a short parade up Main Street, but there were more people in the parade than there were people to watch it. Senator Simon Addams recited the Gettysburg Address from memory, but he always recited the Gettysburg Address from memory, given any opportunity. Robin Pommeroy set off some cheap fireworks sent to him by his brother Chester. He burned his hand so severely that he would be unable to go fishing for two weeks. This made Ruth’s father angry enough to fire Robin and hire a new sternman, Duke Cobb’s ten-year-old grandson, who was skinny and weak as a third-grade girl and, unhelpfully, scared of lobsters. But the kid came cheap.

“You could’ve hired me, ” Ruth told her father. She sulked about it for a while, but she didn’t really mean it, and he knew that.