The Sally M

THE SALLY M
by Clevis O. Laverty

The wind, reduced to an unimportant breeze, drifted wearily across the pier. It curled around the barrels of decomposing bait, huddling under the open shelter at the west end. It saturated itself with the putrefied odor of thousands of rotting red fish, and then permeated the rest of the pier.

As the sun burst into full view from behind Goat Island, the lobstermen, in boots and oilskins, arrived at the pier. Oblivious to the gagging smell that oozed from each barrel, and without confusion, they selected their barrels of bait, and end-rolled them to the edge of the pier for easy loading. Forty or fifty lobstermen provided eighty or ninety barrels of bait for their forty or fifty boats without any apparent haste, yet in an hour only the sea gulls remained on the pier.

The Sally M chugged in from her night moorings and tied up at the pier. Although it lacked only a few minutes of high tide, the lobster boat floated a good fifteen feet below the pier floor. The sole occupant of the craft, after securing her fore and aft, clomped clumsily and surely up the ladder on the piling. Finding his two barrels of bait, he attached grapple and line to one, and lowered it over the side into the Sally M with a hand winch. Then the other followed, cleverly guided into place beside the first on the bottom of the boat. This lobsterman was ready to start his day’s work.

The man descended the ladder with deliberate steps, dropped heavily into the boat, left one barrel aft, and slid the other forward under the half roof of the open wheelhouse. Wiping his hand across his red, leathery face, the man squinted at the sun, peered around at the now empty harbor and cast off. He opened the throttle and with a tip of his cap to the circling sea gulls who belabored him with angry raucous circles from overhead, he steered the Sally M to the east’ard into the channel.

The Sally M was not a big boat, eighteen or twenty feet long. She was not a new boat, twelve or fifteen years old. She represented a woman’s dream of a comfortable home without the specter of failure haunting her, a boy’s dream of a good education which would promise him a future without barrels of bait, early rising, frozen fingers, sunburnt face, and unpredictable weather. To the man, there was no dream, just day to day drudgery. If the weather was good, he fished, and wished he was somewhere else. If a storm blew up, he stayed ashore, and cursed the weather that prevented him from fishing.

Up and down the coast of Maine, gruff-voiced fishermen will tell you that a boat has a personality. The Sally M, like the fallen, high-born lady with dirty skirts, seemed to have none; she just was, and she didn’t care. Perhaps the daily baptism of maggoty red fish had dismayed her, maybe the clomp of sea-stained boots injured her fine feelings. Did the daily struggle with choppy seas close to the rocks, and out guessing the reefs frighten her, and break her spirit. No, she just didn’t care. But perhaps she did once, perhaps there was a day when dead, dry hermit crabs didn’t lie around her deck a dew feet from the snail shells they had pre-empted. Did she, at times lying hove to at her moorings, remember days when scratches in her paint were not allowed to remain like festering wounds? Was she so far beyond care that gleaming brass work was no longer even a memory? Why didn’t she care?

People often develop personalities from those with whom they associate. Perhaps it was so with the Sally M. Still, other lobster boats skipped lightly over the cold Atlantic with clean, white paint gleaming in the golden rays of a friendly sun. They strained eagerly into crisp nor’easters, proudly displaying shining brass and washed decks. Many barrels of decomposing red fish had been slid into their hulls, yet they remained uncontaminated by them.

The man shaded his eyes from the sun just passing its zenith, signaling to him the middle of the day. Dropping the bait he held, back into the barrel, he wiped his palms on scale and brine encrusted pant legs, and unwrapped a huge sandwich from the basket at his elbow. Half-chewed bites were noisily followed by copious draughts from a battered and scarred thermos bottle. He cast a baleful glance at his haul; two bushels of lobsters are certainly not a big catch, but he seemed satisfied. Baiting the trap that lay on his deck, he dumped it over the side, and the Sally M headed listlessly for home and anchorage.

The round, yellow sun was still high in the pale blue sky when the Sally M made her way into the still empty harbor and tied up to the floating lobster pound where the man would sell his haul. This haul and other hauls from which a woman dreamed of a pleasant home. and a boy of an adequate education.

“In kinda early fer a nice day like this, ain’tcha Jake?” asked the pound owner. “Wassamatter, ain’t they runnin’?”

“They are runnin’ pretty good, Seth, but I got enuf fer the week’s groceries.”