Much of the prawn fishing was done in these colder months and he emptied the prawns into the drum and they flicked and clicked and there was no rhyme or reason to why some of the pots had prawns and some none. He knew this very well, that there were no averages, no laws with fishing. He could imagine the prawns nibbling, testing, weighing the pot. Something had to make them want to go in, they had to be encouraged; but once they were in, that was that. They were stuck with the decision.
Hold rebaited the pots that needed it with the scad and herring they had salted down and then he set the boat and played the string back out into the water and there was the comfortable rhythm of the engine and the splash of the creels rhythmically hitting the water.
He went cursorily through the drum and picked out the smallest prawns and threw them over the side, and wondered how they felt for that moment in the totally foreign element of the air; then he lifted some buckets of seawater and filled the drum and banged on the lid. He didn’t believe in the unnecessary suffering of things and saw no purpose to letting the prawns suffocate blithely in the air. That was a very strong thing in Hold: his belief that a thing should not die nor be hurt without purpose. For this reason he didn’t take the lobsters that were only just of size, knowing how slowly they grew, nor did he shoot things that were scarce, the hares and doves, which he seemed to remember seeing all the time as a child but rarely saw now. Though he fished and shot, this was for a purpose, and that he was engineer of the hurt inevitable he felt with great responsibility, and that was a great driving force in him. It gave him a respect for life and for the right of things to exist. He felt we had come too far from this.
He played the strings out and then went on to the lobster pots that he had put out for the first time this season. In the first pot there was a big lobster and there was no reason for it on the fresh bait, and in the other pots, their spines stuck with weed and debris, were spider crabs, strangely early and again, for this, without reason to be there. He unloaded the lobster from the pot and put it in a tub, and then took out the spider crabs, their conkery shells crusted with acorn barnacles. He wondered whether the spider crabs being early was from some disturbance, perhaps flushed by the scallop dredgers out at sea, or some sign of unusual warming water. “Ah,” thought Hold. “There just aren’t any rules. Just the rule that the sea will keep surprising you.”
In the kitchen, the boy helped the women throw the spices into the pot and then watched them take the deformed pieces of duck out from the water and shred off the meat, putting the offal to one side on a plate. The boy stared at it with a kind of enamored disgust. “For your mama,” they said. “It will help keep her strong after the baby.”
The boy helped throw the dried fruit into the soup, then they poured in the cups of rich black blood and then gradually the flour, and the boy watched as the soup slowly thickened.
Still there was an illusion of Christmas with the smells that had reached the sleeping room. Grzegorz looked down at the little red ribbon on the child’s wrist. It was unnerving him. He thought it made the baby look as if it wore a price tag, as if somehow he was for sale. Part of him wanted to rip it away, to tear away the idea that there could be anything like an evil eye out there to be protected from. But he didn’t feel he could defy superstition for one moment. It had been built into him too long ago. “It’s not being watched. It’s being kept down,” he thought. “I’ll have to try and make a little more now. We can save more. We can get out of here to a place of our own.”
When the couple came back to the kitchen and saw the boy on the chair helping the women with the soup, Grzegorz almost choked with this cloth of thanks that seemed to cough up out of him from somewhere. He was filled with this great sense that they would make it, that they would get through all of this and be happy soon. That this was just a stop on the way. He reached for his wife’s hand and held it, and for a moment just in this small gesture there was all this renewed hope.
One of the older women handed a plate to his wife and there was something almost religious about the act, as if of some great donation. She looked down at the duck offal.
“It’ll keep you strong,” said the woman. Grzegorz saw the great pride in the woman’s face.
The wave of hope broke and smashed over the stones of the facts. “I’m still in Poland,” thought Grzegorz. Again, the boat of his emotions tipped in the waves. “We can’t move on while there is all of this, we can’t become anything new.” He looked at all the Polish products around the place, sitting in the cooking smells, the familiarity of the sounds. He looked desperately out of the window at the wall opposite with the big graffiti, “Polish out,” but he didn’t register it any more. He wanted to feel better at this incredible time.
“This is where we are now,” he thought. “And we have to move on. Here. Poland has nothing for us.” He wanted so much to change things and to bring all these new things to his life. He was very desperate for that. “I just need a chance,” he thought. He watched his wife eat up the small offal with her fingers, holding their tiny new son. Someone needs to give me a chance.
As he headed back in, Hold took five or six of the fish and laid them on the gunwale. They were medium-sized fish and he held them down on the gunwale and descaled them with the back of the knife, working in little jerking strokes. Then he moved the descaled fish to a board on the gunwale and took off the flesh, working from the head down along the spine then slipping out the rib bones from the severed flanks and putting the fillets into a box. It was a rhythmic and calm process and he moved easily with the boat as it headed in and he could feel the course of the boat just with his body. He had taken bass and codling in the net and it was the bass he filleted.
When he had taken the fillets, he cut out the intestines into a pile. Then he cut off the translucent meat and the flaps of foily skin and cut the heads from the thick spines and threw all of that into one of the bait tubs for the pots. The bass had big heads for their size and this was good bait and lasted a long time in the pots in the water. He did this with a kind of mechanism and it was part of him to invent little rituals and to give himself small lectures.
Above him, a string of gulls had come on, and he flicked off the rich pile of intestines from the gunwale and the gulls dropped into the water after the sinking guts. In amongst the bright-white adults, some of the gulls still had the juvenile plumage they would have until some summers further on. Hold had noticed how the younger gulls had rich brown eyes, with something almost mammalian in them, but that the older gulls’ eyes were cold, yellow, as if something had gone out of them. Some of the adult gulls were so close he could see clearly the red spot on their beak that the chicks would tap to make them regurgitate food, and while he did not care for the yellow eyes, he liked this mechanism in them.
He hauled a bucket of water and washed the scales and the rust-like blood down off the gunwale and cleaned the cutting board and his knife then washed the blood and scales off his hands with the seawater, which was the best way. He could feel a chop starting in the sea that would mean the weather getting up in the next few days, the sea here filling with the beginnings of an energy nascent hundreds of miles away. Some Bahamian storm or seeming emotional reaction to change in pressure days away from here. He could feel that there was great power and swell in the sea, though it was calm out on the water, and the lifting of the waves at the shore had the power of a prowling animal about it, and some male thing, like someone who hopes someone will fight them.