Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston

Author:Wayne Johnston [Johnston, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780552999243
Publisher: Black Swan
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

ONE OF HIS duties at the lab was to grade fish from plants around the island A, B, or C, and this involved tasting endless samples of boiled fish, usually cod.

This is how he was engaged when our school had “What Does Your Father Do?” Day when I was twelve, and each of us spent a day on the job with our fathers.

My father and several others sat at a table for the whole day tasting fish, using spit buckets the way television actors making food commercials do. Between tastes, they gargled palate-cleansing water, which they likewise spat into the buckets. A woman circulated constantly, refilling their glasses, a jug of water in each hand. In a little kitchen just off the lab, a small assembly line of men and women wearing plastic caps bent over boilers, prepared the fish, took paper plates from the stacks inside the door and put on each plate one square inch of fish, which were then conveyed to the tasters by a procession of servers.

When the plates were put in front of them, the tasters first rubbed a morsel of the cod between their thumbs and index fingers. Then they smelled it, bending their heads to the plates. Finally they tasted it and silently recorded their grades on a kind of scorecard. These were to be averaged to determine the grade of the fish. That was how it was supposed to work.

A big, bald, red-faced man whose lab coat could barely contain his bulging arms kept spoiling the taste tests by protesting out loud each time what he deemed to be a bad batch of fish came his way. “Jesus, honourable God,” he said, spewing fish into his bucket.

This upset everyone because it meant that this batch of fish would have to be tested again, that it would go back with the as-yet-untasted batches and at some random point be put in front of them. My father said they should put the red-faced man at the end of the line and then his reactions would not affect the grades the others gave the fish, but the man running the tests said it didn’t matter what order they used, for any outward displays of like or dislike might confuse their judgment of the fish that followed.

“I don’t like fish no matter what grade it is,” the red-faced man said. “I just don’t like fish. I shouldn’t have to taste it if I don’t like it.”

“Everyone has to take their turn,” the manager said, explaining that if he did not take his, the others would be assigned an extra day of fish tasting every couple of months.

“Is this how any man should have to spend his days?” the red-faced man said, turning his rheumy gaze on me. “Two days every month,” he said, as if on the verge of tears, “two days every month.”

My father would come home from days spent in this manner not actually having eaten anything but unable to stand the sight or

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