The Seiners

by James B. Connolly

“But that’s nothing. I’ve seen the gang with Tom O’Donnell standing watch by the halyards for days with axes when he was making a passage.”

Minnie Arkell filled another glass of champagne for Clancy, and Clancy didn’t give the fizz too much time to melt away either.

“These men are the real things,” she said, but Clancy, for fear we were getting too much credit, broke in, “Not us seiners. It’s the winter fishermen––trawlers and hand-liners––that are the real things. Of course, we lose men now and then seining, but it’s in winter up on the shoal water 167 on the Banks that––there’s where you have some seas to buck against,” and he went on to tell of a battle with a gale on a winter’s night on the Grand Banks. Clancy could tell a story as well as anybody I ever met. He could make the blood jump to your heart, or the tears to your eyes––or he could chill you till the blood froze. When he got through you could hear them all breathing––men and women both, like people who had just run a race. “Two hundred and odd men sailing out of Gloucester,” he said, “went down that night. There weren’t too many came safe out of that blow. The father of this boy here was lost––the Mary Buckley warn’t it, Joe?––named for your mother?”

“And my father, too, was lost soon after,” said Minnie Arkell, and the glance she gave me melted a lot of prejudice I had felt for her. That was the good human side to her.

“No better man ever sailed out of Gloucester, Mrs. Miner,” said Clancy.

She flushed up. “Thank you, Tommie, for that, though I know he was a reckless man.” And, she might have added, he left some of his recklessness in the blood of the Arkells.

The skipper told them a lot about sea life that night. Some of the stories he told, though long known in Gloucester, they took to be yarns at first. 168 They could not believe that men went through such things and lived. And then the skipper had such an easy way of telling them. After a man has been through a lot of unusual things––had them years behind him and almost forgotten them––I suppose they don’t surprise him any more.

The skipper looked well that night. When he warmed up and his eyes took on a fresh shine and his mouth softened like a woman’s, I tell you he was a winner. I could not help comparing him with the steam-yacht owner, who was a good-looking man, too, but in a different way. Both of them, to look at, were of the same size. Both had their clothes made by tailors who knew their business and took pains with the fitting, though it was easy to fit men like Clancy and the skipper, such fine level shoulders and flat broad backs they had. Now the skipper, as I say, when he warmed up began to look something like what he ought––like he did when walking the quarter and the vessel going out to sea. Only then it would be in a blue flannel shirt open at the throat and in jack-boots. But now, in the cabin of that yacht, dressed as he was in black clothes like anybody else and in good-fitting shoes, you had to take a second look at him to get his measure. The yachtsman thought that he and the skipper were of about the same size, and barring that the skipper’s shoulders were a shade 169 wider there wasn’t so much difference to look at. But there was a difference, just the same. The yachtsman weighed a hundred and seventy-five pounds. He asked what Maurice weighed. “Oh, about the same,” said Maurice. But I and Clancy knew that he weighed a hundred and ninety-five, and Minnie Arkell, who knew too, finally had to tell it, and then they all took another look at the two men and could see where the difference lay. There was no padding to Maurice, and when you put your hand where his shoulders and back muscles ought to be you found something there.

When we were leaving that night, Mrs. Miner stopped Maurice on the gangway to say, “And when they have the fishermen’s race this fall, you must sail the Johnnie Duncan, Maurice, as you’ve never sailed a vessel yet. With you on the quarter and Clancy to the wheel she ought to do great things.”

“Oh, we’ll race her as well as we know how if we’re around, but Tom O’Donnell and Wesley Marrs and Tommie Ohlsen and Sam Hollis and the rest––they’ll have something to say about it, I’m afraid.”