The Place by Gary Collins

Author:Gary Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: newfoundland;book;outport;resettlement
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2019-10-01T13:45:13+00:00

17

With the money he earned from the seal hunt, Jake invested as shareman with Guy and his crew. He was openly seeing the Maid and had suddenly become a very knowledgeable and respected fisherman. He was doing well, and I should have been proud of him but was not.

Then a fisherman working the Offer Ground near where Tobe had disappeared pulled from the bottom and brought ashore Tobe’s trousers, with braces still attached. I knew they were Tobe’s the moment I saw them on the wharf. I knew the stitch I had made on the buttons of the braces. In the tortured recesses of my mind I pictured Jake cutting the braces, which I envisioned had become entangled in a thole-pin after Tobe’s supposed fall over the punt’s gunnel while taking a leak. And with a deviousness I hadn’t known I possessed, I concocted a dire plan to punish the innocent for the deeds of the guilty.

Bending over the trousers splayed across the wharf lungers, and with my back to the onlookers, I waited for the right moment. The trousers were covered in slub, mud, and crawling creatures pulled from the depths of the Offer Ground. With my scissors, I cut one of the braces!

“Tobe was murdered!” I shouted like a banshee in a gale. “He might’ve fallen over the punt’s gunnels, all right. But I say he was saved be his braces hooked in a t’ole-pin. He would have made it, too, save fer someone cuttin’ the braces and sendin’ him to certain drownin’. He couldn’t swim a stroke.”

“You are out of yer mind, woman!” Skipper Guy shouted at me. The crowd voiced their agreement without exception.

“Then how can you explain his cut braces? Cut cleaner than a crab or a shark could do it, they are. Come and see fer yourself!”

“Aww, yer jest fishin’ fer fat cod with lean bait. Dere’s many creatures livin’ in the sea as could shear a man’s braces clean as a pair of scissors could do.” I wondered why Skipper Guy hadn’t mentioned a knife, to which he was accustomed, but rather to scissors, to which he was not. For a moment I thought my ruse had been discovered and that I had tipped my hand.

“Tell me one creature in the water that you know could cut clean as a pair of . . . as a sharp knife!” I caught myself in time.

“Aww, ’ow the ’ell do I know, woman? I just know there is. I know, too, that Tobe’s goan over the side of his punt had nothin’ to do with Jake. The boy is innocent.”

“Well, I’m taking charge of Tobe’s trousers. I’ll keep ’em fer a kinda memory of ’un.” They all stared at me, knowing full well I didn’t give a damn about Tobe’s memory. I lugged the soggy trousers up the path and slung them in the porch corner behind the woodbox, where the sea lice crawled out and eventually died. The breeks remained there, untouched, until the day came when I secretly gave them to a constable making his way to Greenspond.

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