Some Hellish by Nicholas Herring

Author:Nicholas Herring
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773102566
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2022-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

The emergency call had come over the radio around quarter to five in the morning. Leverett and Lowell MacNeil were the first to reach the M&M, just a forlorn shadow of incurvation bobbing among the waves, the man on the deck a gyrating wheel of spittle and sweat. The joggle of madness and the clouds so low you could touch them. Behind them the great darkness. Linen out to dry on the line. To see Gerry so distraught had made Leverett shake. Gerry’s face red, his body throbbing. A whole man reduced to a spasm of flesh, howling and blubbering, a suture come undone in a pot of boiling water. Leverett had never seen a person in such a state of agony. He thought the man must be high on drugs or something. Other boats began to arrive at the scene, casting their spotlights to the waters.

When they got back to the wharf, Leverett told Lowell to stay on the deck of their boat and to keep busy, make sure the bait and ice didn’t spoil, and Leverett tried to be of service as best he could. He stopped each rig as it came down to the wharf and told every fisherman, every cork, what was what. He thought that to keep the lines of communication clear and concise was paramount. Strange tales had a habit of taking root in such situations, and when they did, people tended to set out in asinine directions, chasing their own shadows. By nine a.m., reporters from the television and newspapers had arrived.

Gerry spent a few hours under a warm blanket in the back of an ambulance down at the wharf. He pleaded with the paramedics, two classmates from Montague, to let him stay so that he could apologize to Herring when they brought him in. Gerry had required a heavy dose of sedatives to calm him, and whenever he woke up, the paramedics gave him water to drink.

By afternoon, the fishermen who had joined the search decided that, due to the storm front, they had to try attending to their traps. A few hundred pounds, at the very least, just to break even. Most of them felt terrible doing so, but what could they do? Their faces could not hide how upsetting the whole thing was. The helicopter from CFB Greenwood decided to call it, as well, and headed back to Charlottetown to refuel. The ceiling was just too low. Cape Mercy, the coast guard cutter out of Souris, operated by Corporal Garfield McHerron, put in a few more hours of searching, before it tied up at the wharf and took fuel from the tanks. From the start, McHerron thought the situation was hopeless, but he had kept this to himself. The volunteers from the My Bonnie River fire department, six men split between two inflatable outboards, agreed that the waves were too much for them and came in for the night. To the gulls high up, the waters hadn’t been so animated in a long time.

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