Envious Moon(2)

But I never said these things to him. I knew how happy my report cards made him. I knew how pleased he was when my eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Loomis, called my parents to tell them that I was reading on a college level already. He told them that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and that college was within my sights if I kept working at it.

In 1984, I turned fourteen. This was in July and my father was on the Mavis and they were fishing a seam in a roiling sea at night. It was their fourth night in a row and they pulled sword after sword and even with the high seas, to a man they did not wish to be anywhere else. At the rate they were going, each crewman might walk away with five grand. My father and another fisherman were at the bait table. They stood across from each other and as the line unfurled from the spool they took squid off the table and baited them on the big hooks. It was repetitive and hard work as there was no slowing down the line. But my father was a good fisherman and he was especially good at slapping the bait up there and catching it solid. Later other fishermen would tell me he almost never wasted a single hook.

At one point the men on the other side of the deck doing the butchering called for help, and the man across from my father left. My father was all alone and normally this would not have mattered since he was certainly fast enough to keep up on his own. But in the roiling sea the boat lurched suddenly to port and my father was thrown forward with the squid in his hand. The hook meant for the squid drove through the part of his palm where the thumb met the forefinger. In the whip of the wind whatever cries he might have made were drowned out. He was swept into the black sea.

If he had not been hooked so solidly, they may never have found him. They pulled him out of the icy Atlantic like a fish.

That night men from the co-op came to the house and I woke when I heard my mother’s grief. It was a sound like no other. In the days that followed, everything slowed down. The house was always full of visitors and our small dining room table was covered with more food than we could ever eat. They held a wake at O’Brien’s Funeral Home, in the small upstairs room they used for the poor people. The fishermen and their wives all came to pay their respects, and the fishermen looked like men who had no business being inside. I stood in the corner, and no one paid any attention to me, which was good because I refused to take my eyes off my father’s body. My mother told me his soul would rise to heaven and I didn’t want to miss it. I thought it would look like candle smoke, floating toward the ceiling. Though I didn’t see anything. Later I figured it must have risen while he was still in the ocean.

After everyone had left, my mother kneeled in front of my father and said her good-byes. She wore black from head to toe and I remember that she had a run up one leg of her stockings. My mother spoke in Portuguese and she spoke in English and the words were meant for my father and not for me. But I knew, even at that young age I knew, that the words she spoke were words of love.

She spoke for a long while. And while she whispered to him she reached up and pushed her hands through his thick hair. She cupped his lifeless face in her hands. And that night, for the first time, I saw my parents as separate people. As Berta and as Rodrigo, a man and a woman who had loved one another. And I knew that the sea had taken my father. That the sea took many things. But that it could not take their love. Even after he was gone, the love remained. It was in the upstairs room of the funeral home that night. And for as long as I stayed in the small bungalow, it was in that house. I saw it in my mother’s eyes.

After the funeral, I told my mother I was a man now and she didn’t laugh at me. I said I would go to sea, and she said, “There will be plenty of time for that.”

We went on. In the years that followed I grew tall and strong like my father. I had his curly hair and his big brown eyes. I hung around the docks and got to know the boats and the men. In the summers, I took what work I could to prove myself. I learned how to tie leaders and how to make lobster traps. And when I turned sixteen, against my mother’s objections and the objections of my teachers, I left school. Two of my teachers even came to the house to try to talk to my mother and me. They said I was making a huge mistake. That in two years if I kept studying that lots of colleges would be interested in me. My mother agreed with them but I said, we don’t have any money. Keep your grades up, Anthony, they said, and the money will be there. They said it like the money would just appear out of nowhere. I told them I needed to fish. But that I would work on my G.E.D. when I was home and we would see what happened. Berta didn’t talk to me for a few days and I took a job on a boat that jigged for cod. She acted as if by leaving school a part of me had died, which I suppose now it had.

Six months later I would join a swordboat. It was as close to my father as I would ever come.





During the season, I worked as often as I could. I crewed on the Lorrie Anne, a good boat for the fleet. I worked like a dog when at sea and at home I had a little change in my pocket. I lived with my mother still but Victor had come to a breaking point with his own father and had managed to get his own place, a studio apartment on Main Street. It was above a seasonal clam shack and in the summer the smell of fried food filtered through his windows all day. But he had a good landing on the wooden staircase in the back and on warm days we could sit out there in beach chairs and smoke cigarettes and look across the road to the harbor and the men working on the wharves. Victor got a job at O’Brien’s Funeral Home, which was an odd job until you realized that the only things around here were death and fishing. Victor had never wanted to fish and I figured he was afraid of the sea and I never said anything about it. Many men were afraid of the sea and there was much to be afraid of. Victor was short and stocky, built like a fire hydrant. He had a new mustache in those days that he was always combing. I gave him a hard time about it but he said I was just jealous because I couldn’t grow one. Which was true. Even today, my face is almost as smooth as a baby’s.