Strange Fits of Passion Read Online Free PDF Page A

stayin' here. You got to be hard, or you won't survive.
    Now, the lobstermen, most of 'em, they'll haul their boats just afore Christmas, 'n' they won't put their pots back in till the end of March or so. Willis, for example, he drives a truck for a haulage company in January and February. Then in March he'll start gettin' his gear in shape. Some of the men, though, they don't pull their boats till January. Jack don't, usually. Well, he's got a difficult home situation, don't he? His wife, Rebecca, had what we call the blues real bad. Some of the women, they get them in the winter. It's a dreary thing—they can't stand the water when it's gray for days on end, and they start to go a bit melancholy on you, cryin' all the time, or they cut off all their hair, till it gets spring, and then they're OK. But Rebecca, she was melancholy summer or winter, a trial to Jack, though if you want to know the truth, maybe he's not the sort of man she ought to have married. Jack keeps to himself, he does, pretty quiet. Maybe a bit disappointed in life too, if you want to know. He had himself two years at the University of Maine, don't you know, more'n twenty years ago that was, on a track scholarship, but his father got both his arms broke on a shrimp boat and the family run out of money, so Jack come home to take care of his father. He took over the lobsterin' and married Rebecca. He did his best with the kids. He's got two, nineteen and fifteen their ages are, I think; decent kids. The boy, he's in Boston at school there now. Northeastern, I think it is. Jack's puttin' him through.
    But anyway, Jack, he'll go out in a thaw or when it's not blowin'. Works on his pots the rest of the time at the fish house over to the point. That's where he keeps his boat—the
Rebecca Strout.
They name 'em for their wives. Well, at least on this part of the coast they do. Elsewheres they name 'em for their sons, don't you know. That's where she was, by the way, over to the point. Mary Amesbury, I mean. You've seen the cottage?
    You understand that when they do go out, summer or winter, the water's still so cold a man can't last ten minutes in it. That's what happened to Billy Strout—Julia's husband, Jack's cousin, don't you know. Got his foot caught in a tangle of pot warp, and he went over. Not uncommon, sorry to say. It was November, if I remember correctly. They say he went from the cold afore he went from the drownin'. The medical people up to Machias, they can tell when they get the body. Sometimes we don't ever get the body, but Billy, he washed up over to Swale's Island. We knew, of course, the day it happened. It's a disturbin' sight, I'll tell you, someone findin' the boat, unmanned, the motor still goin', movin' in slow circles. That's how you know. Course, Billy was a drinker, part Indian from his mother, don't you know, so that may have been the problem right there.
    I can't allow as Julia was all that sorry to lose him, tell you the truth. Don't write that, either.
    Anyway, the town.
    About four hundred people, give or take a few. The young ones in their early twenties, they go off, some come back, live at home a few months, go off again, hard to keep track, till they lose heart and settle down here for good, or go off for good. We've sent four boys to Vietnam, and we've lost two. Their names is on the town memorial over there. Most of the boys, they're already lobstermen and feedin' families by the time they get the call—and a lot of 'em don't go. We got some patriots in town, but most folks don't think the war has much to do with us up here.
    The town was first settled in the seventeen hundreds by the French over from Nova Scotia, which is why we have a French name, like Calais or Petit Manan further south. During the War for Independence, the town was mostly British, I'm sorry to say, so that after the war, they tried to get rid of anything foreign and rename the place Hilary, but it never caught on. There are some families