The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

Author:Annie Dillard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780061809743
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THREE YEARS AFTER HE threw away Deary’s letter, Pete was overnighting on his boat offshore. He wore red sea boots. Eating hot dogs from a can made him hungry for old-fashioned work. He was manning a square-rigger rounding the Horn. When he saw that a given South Sea wave would overcome the ship, he jumped to the yardarm and hooked one leg over it and water poured from his boot. He saw green water scrape the deck and drown the ship. Then it moved off, heavy as land. His ship hit and entered one sea after another and rose streaming. Like his parents, Pete was a reader. He knew more about Cape Horn than about Boston.

On watch Pete ignored cold hands. Why not ignore every other feeling that dropped his way, instead of biting and getting hooked? Long ago when he was a boy he tried to talk himself out of hating his father. It worked for a while, until the years’ silences piled up.

Now he was frying in crumbs. Helplessly he imagined those two there in Maine doing what. He did not hate them. Observing, he saw that hatred is rare. Envy and begrudging wreck a man first. Other people lived in peace without knotting their brains. Pete’s boat partner was Sooner Roy’s son. In a bigger boat they could fish Georges Bank in winter and the Gulf of Maine. The hauls were heavy offshore, halibut and swordfish, as well as those winter waters’ unending cod. Till that big boat materialized, they handlined near shore for turbot and witch flounder, for haddock, redfish, whiting, pollock, and striped bass. They used trash bluefish, sliced squid, and dogfish to bait bass.

Pete & Co. also owned a mackerel seine and averaged decent hauls. If only decency sufficed. Every few decades, on one ocean or another, someone lucked into a bank-buying, hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars’ haul of mackerel or herring or something. It could be that Greenlanders made the mighty haul off Baffin Island, or purse seiners made it in salmon three thousand miles away in Haro Strait. It could be that the sum in dollars had swelled to a lie. That haul nevertheless set the benchmark for everyone forever. Their neighbor’s son Heaton Vorse saw a boat unload 138,000 pounds of halibut. Any great haul anywhere, however, in any fishing port’s imagination happened recently and nearby. Pete heard of catches that sank boats to the gunwales. One guy, somewhere, once, would not trim the load that was sinking him, refused to toss out fish at fifty cents apiece. He saw he would sink before he could dock. He limped to the buyer boat and got himself and his boat winched aboard in a net. The buyer boatmen dumped fish from his hold to theirs, and lowered him and his empty boat away. When they heard about it, others in the fleet considered that saving the fisherman’s haul was unfair.

Pete multiplied possible pounds by possible price per species next year. Mackerel could yield $6,000 in one haul.

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