Cod Read Free Page A

laugh.
    They are good at hauling up fish. But this is something different. Instead of throwing the cod on the deck and quickly baiting and recasting for the next, they have to gently remove the hook and try not to hurt the animal. Then they lay it out on a board and measure it in centimeters. A tool with a trigger mechanism is used to insert an inch-long needle in the meaty part next to the forward dorsal fin and snap into place a plastic thread with a numbered tag on the end. This they are not very good at.
    Sam unhooks a fish, and it jerks out of his hands and crashes to the deck. “Oh, sorry,” he says to the cod in the same tender little voice he uses at home with his aging beagle. The tagging gun is not working well, so Sam takes it apart and rebuilds it. Taking things apart and fixing them is part of a fisherman’s skills. But the gun still doesn’t work well. Sometimes they have to stick a fish three or four times to get a tag in. This is proof of what a tough survivor the cod is. A salmon would never survive this handling. But when they finally drop the codfish in the sea slowly, head first, to revive it, it instantly swims for its home on the bottom. To a cod, ocean floors mean safety. That is why they were rendered commercially extinct by bottom draggers.
    Trying to insert the tag in one cod, the men stick and poke it so many times that it dies. That makes no one sad, because they are hungry. Bernard kneels over a portable Sterno stove at the stern. He uses his thick fishing knife to dice fatback and salt beef and peel and slice potatoes. He soaks pieces of hardtack and sautés it all in the pork fat with some sliced onion. Then he fillets the cod in four knife strokes per side, skins the fillets with two more, and before throwing the carcass over, opens it up, sees it is a female, and removes the roe. Holding it by a gill over the gunwale, he makes two quick cuts and rips out the throat piece, “the cod tongue,” before dropping the body in the sea.
    As Bernard stirs his pot, Sam records tag numbers and fish lengths with his pencil, while at the bow Leonard silently hauls up one young cod after another with his fast-moving gloved forefingers. “Leonard’s having all the fun,” Bernard says in mock grumpiness.
    Bernard dumps the food on a big baking sheet, which they put on a plank across one of the holds, and they stand in the hold where the catch should have been and with plastic forks start eating toward the center. The dish, called Fishermen’s Brewis, is monochromatic, with off-white pork fat and off-white potatoes and occasional darker pieces of salt beef. What stands out is the stark whiteness of the thick flakes of fresh cod. This is the meal they grew up on, and, as often happens when old friends are eating their childhood food, they start reminiscing.
    There were no sports for these men to talk about, no high school teams; they aren’t even hockey fans. As children, they went fishing with their fathers every morning just before daybreak. They would come to shore midday and go to school—until the first black cloud passed overhead and they had to run down to the harbor, to the racks, called fish flakes, where the salt cod were drying, and turn them over skin side up so they would be protected if it rained.
    Instead of sports, they talk about fishing, about how cold it used to be. It is not that the weather has changed. But back then, there had been no lightweight microfibers to hold in body heat, nothing to help the fingers reeling in line dripping with icy water. All this in a season with little sun, or even daylight, for warmth. The fishing was good into January, but when, in 1957, unemployment compensation was made available for fishermen after December 15, that became the last fishing day until spring. Years later the date was moved to November 15.
    But they remember fishing into the winter. “Christ,” says Bernard, “out there handlining in