Palmer hoped he’d proved himself a good man to employ. They’d gone below decks on the ship and seen the African. Nothing in the sea was quite as strange as that brown, bleeding man. But still Palmer had done as he was bid and put the fellow in a palliasse and hammocked him on deck and thence into the Dolly boat — the same boat, in fact, in which he and Skimmer were now waiting for the pilchards. The African had bled onto their boat. He’d marked their wood. Palmer couldn’t see the bloodstain in the dark. But it was there, and probably would still be there when Palmer Dolly was elsewhere, a mariner, the optimist at sea, the emigrant, the escapee, the freeman in the Yankee sun.
‘My money is we’ll land a decent catch,’ said Palmer. He stood and urinated off to leeward. He was in a rare and happy mood. ‘Now, there’s a bait’ll bring ’em in.’
‘My money is we’re only netting snow tonight,’ said Skimmer. He spat into the sea: the Devil’s brew of piss and phlegm and salt. He was not an optimist.
They didn’t have to take a Devil’s fish. It was gone midnight when the pilchards came. The snow had stopped, but there was now a storm of fish. The sea was drenched in fish. It was as if the water had lost its liquidness and was turning into solder. The pilchards winked and weaved their blue-green backs, their silver undersides, in teeming, wet stampedes. They trenched and ridged themselves between the deep-shore rollers. The solder boiled and swelled. Dozens of hake and some tunny fish, the smallest more than ten feet long, were at the pilchards’ tails, herding them, and gorging on the ones they broke loose from the shoals. The pilchards bunched and fled into the in-shore pools. They stripped their rhombic scales and ripped their soft bellies on granite scree below the Cradle Rock. They banked up amongst the cattle carcasses in the shallows off Dry Manston beach, where tunny could not reach. They butted at the shoreline with their sulking lower lips. They threw themselves onto the beach. There was no need for boats or fishermen or nets. The Dollys could have saved themselves the trip, and come down to the beach with lanterns. They could have bucketed the fish by hand and carted them away by donkey-load and only got their ankles wet.
The pilchards seethed and tumbled round the Dolly boat, attracted by the light, and panicked by the dolphinlike clicks and whistles that the Dollys made.
‘Tuck ’em in! Tuck ’em in! Tuck ’em in!’
They passed through the gateway of the net like one great metal eel, a half a mile in length, and twenty yards across. A giant could put a saddle on its back, and flank the shoal, and ride those pilchards like a horse. He’d not get wet. He’d not be ducked in Palmer’s piss or Skimmer’s phlegm. The shoal was solid tin.
The Dollys didn’t close their net for fifteen, twenty minutes. Each wrap and fold of sea turned pilchards on their sides in heavy, silvered arcs. It was a blessing pilchards make no sound. If they could voice their bafflement at nets, then theirs would be the saddest lament in the world. The Dollys were no longer cold, and missing bed. They were too busy to be cold. If they worked hard and luck was on their side, they’d make enough on this one night to see them through to spring. So long as there was not a glut.
But there was a glut, of course. Too many pilchards. And far too many boats. Everybody had full nets. The thirty families or so who’d put to sea that night and worked their stem down-coast from Wherrytown were overwhelmed with fish. They’d brought as many pilchards as they could on board in baskets. Now the gunnels of their boats were so low that one good wave would flood their decks. They had to let their nets fill up, then herd the nets along the coast into the shallows beyond the channel buoys and harbour lights at Wherrytown and wait for day.
By four thirty in the morning there were forty-three nets bunched up like massive lily pads. The untucked pilchards tumbled in the water, struggling for their passage east, doing what they could to escape the hake which had been netted too. Those few that had the strength to leap over the nets only fell amongst the captive pilchards of a neighbour’s net. The fishermen watched and waited in the melting darkness. A bumper catch. Not that that would do them any good. Mr Howells would shake his head and say, ‘The fatter the shoal, the thinner the shilling. We’ll not get rich from these.’ Not rich, perhaps. But it was satisfying to have netted such a tumult. When dawn came, then the fun would start. They’d need a hundred volunteers to bring the fish ashore.
‘We’ll put those Americans to work,’ said Henry Dolly. ‘We’ll break those jiggers’ backs with lifting fish.’ Again he shared a pipe with his two sons. It was all they had to keep them warm till daybreak. Monday would be fine and clear. There was no wind, and there were stars across the western, clearing sky. The paling and descending moon was touched with green. Good luck. Good weather. The seagulls didn’t mind the dark. They shrieked like Saracens at such an easy feast of fish.
Skimmer in the smaller boat had made a canvas bed and — God knows how he managed it — was fast asleep, despite the cold and gulls. Palmer Dolly sank his head into his coat and pushed his hands into his sleeves, like a teacup Mandarin. He was Midshipman Dolly on the midnight watch. Crewman Dolly. Palmer Dolly, captain of the Belle. Mr Dolly and his dollars! He was dreaming distantly, though he hadn’t got a landscape for America, or any idea how cruel the voyage there would be. He couldn’t guess the span of the Atlantic, nor how the ocean, far from land, would scarp and dip like wolds, the Belle a wind-tossed wooden hut amongst the water hills. He had no proper sense of anything excepting Home, and three boys to the bed, and nets and nets and nets.
‘Is that you, Palmer?’ someone called.
Palmer looked out of his coat. He tried an American accent. ‘What is it, then?’
One of the Dollys’ neighbours was standing at the bulwarks of his boat twenty yards away and was pointing into the teeming semicircle of the Dolly net.
‘What’s that you’ve caught?’
‘Too many bloody pilchers!’ He couldn’t get the accent’s chesty resonance.
‘No, that!’ The neighbour pointed again. And then threw a broken end of rope to mark the spot. ‘It in’t no pilchard, that’s for sure.’
Palmer couldn’t make it out. There was a dark spot in the nets. A piece of wood, perhaps. Some matted kelp. The carcass of a porpoise. A tunny with a heart attack, from too much food. It certainly wasn’t alive. It didn’t move. It didn’t absorb any of the little light there was.