her knees, pulled her filleting knife out of her rubber boot, and hauled a pan of fillets off the conveyor belt rumbling along in front of her. Slapping an ice-cold fish from the pan onto the piece of acrylic that marked her workplace, she slit the V-bone from the fillet, trimmed the tail, and hacked apart the flesh too soft or bruised, then flicked each section into a pan designated for different grading. One of the belts rumbling out of the holding room at the back of the plant started a low moaning that quickly accelerated into a shrill screech, sending her clamping her hands over her ears as the sound shivered through her teeth.
“Shut it down, shut it down!’ hollered somebody. ‘Sweet Jesus, shut it down!” The demonic sound subsided, and Adelaide let go her breath with relief. Four weeks! Four weeks she’d been standing here, and never had her nerves been more jagged. Hell is what this plant was, bloody hell with its ten stations to each side of the conveyer belt, and another belt rumbling behind her with another twenty stations, making for forty stations and forty women, arguing, cackling, and shrieking over the belts rattling along its pans of fish from the filleters to the skinners to the trimmers (of which she was one), and then on to the packers where it was wrapped in five-, ten-, twenty-pound boxes and nailed shut and jammed into freezers, steel plates clanging, doors slamming, steam hissing from the web of pipes snaking barely a foot over the tallest head. And despite its being the loudest, the station closest to the skinners and the holding door was the one she chose to work at, sparing herself the added aggravation of having to shout back at Suze or Gert or her mother or a dozen others all working around her, bellowing to each other over the ruckus of the machinery.
Most mornings she worked three hours steady, up to break time, without a word, without looking up. Yet, hellish as it was, she rested assured she’d never have to scrape another maggoty fish, for not even a mosquito ventured into this low, oblong cell of harsh overhead lights, of walls shaking from the clanging, vibrating generators, of air putrid with gut and gurry, and fishermen out-shouting each other over the clanging of the motors and winches as they tied up at the wharf in their longliners and skiffs and motorboats and punts, unloading their thousands of pounds of fish into the holding station.
Yet, despite the growing complaints of those working around her for more air, longer tea breaks, and a place to sit and have lunch, she liked it just fine to stand straight-backed, not hunched; to have her world reduced to a piece of acrylic with a light beneath it and five pans in an arc around it; to have her daily wardrobe consist of an oversized rubber apron dragging past her knees and a hairnet that rendered her and the rest of them—men and women alike—to caricatures of old women. What need to expend five minutes of caressing the yellowy petals of a buttercup, of gazing through the honeyed haze of the sun, of feeling last evening’s raindrops slide coolly down one’s cheek—of what use was anything when most of daylight’s hours were spent standing imbecilic amongst the maniac roar of machinery, hacking apart flesh already eating itself?
Marry the fisherman in the fancy suit? Humph. Not as if she didn’t think of it. Divine were those visions of grass and finches and clean, running waters. And she gorged herself upon reliving the sweetness of lazing beside the falls, her cheeks cooling to its mist, and the grass cushioning her bed, and the breeze lifting and fondling her hair with fern-scented combs. But to conjure the meadow without Sylvanus Now was like conjuring the brook without the falls, for dark was his figure upon that mantle of grass and wildflowers, and his presence, no matter how much he held himself behind her, was as commandeering as the foaming white waters plunging down the hillside.
Loneliness is what he evoked
“Shut it down, shut it down!’ hollered somebody. ‘Sweet Jesus, shut it down!” The demonic sound subsided, and Adelaide let go her breath with relief. Four weeks! Four weeks she’d been standing here, and never had her nerves been more jagged. Hell is what this plant was, bloody hell with its ten stations to each side of the conveyer belt, and another belt rumbling behind her with another twenty stations, making for forty stations and forty women, arguing, cackling, and shrieking over the belts rattling along its pans of fish from the filleters to the skinners to the trimmers (of which she was one), and then on to the packers where it was wrapped in five-, ten-, twenty-pound boxes and nailed shut and jammed into freezers, steel plates clanging, doors slamming, steam hissing from the web of pipes snaking barely a foot over the tallest head. And despite its being the loudest, the station closest to the skinners and the holding door was the one she chose to work at, sparing herself the added aggravation of having to shout back at Suze or Gert or her mother or a dozen others all working around her, bellowing to each other over the ruckus of the machinery.
Most mornings she worked three hours steady, up to break time, without a word, without looking up. Yet, hellish as it was, she rested assured she’d never have to scrape another maggoty fish, for not even a mosquito ventured into this low, oblong cell of harsh overhead lights, of walls shaking from the clanging, vibrating generators, of air putrid with gut and gurry, and fishermen out-shouting each other over the clanging of the motors and winches as they tied up at the wharf in their longliners and skiffs and motorboats and punts, unloading their thousands of pounds of fish into the holding station.
Yet, despite the growing complaints of those working around her for more air, longer tea breaks, and a place to sit and have lunch, she liked it just fine to stand straight-backed, not hunched; to have her world reduced to a piece of acrylic with a light beneath it and five pans in an arc around it; to have her daily wardrobe consist of an oversized rubber apron dragging past her knees and a hairnet that rendered her and the rest of them—men and women alike—to caricatures of old women. What need to expend five minutes of caressing the yellowy petals of a buttercup, of gazing through the honeyed haze of the sun, of feeling last evening’s raindrops slide coolly down one’s cheek—of what use was anything when most of daylight’s hours were spent standing imbecilic amongst the maniac roar of machinery, hacking apart flesh already eating itself?
Marry the fisherman in the fancy suit? Humph. Not as if she didn’t think of it. Divine were those visions of grass and finches and clean, running waters. And she gorged herself upon reliving the sweetness of lazing beside the falls, her cheeks cooling to its mist, and the grass cushioning her bed, and the breeze lifting and fondling her hair with fern-scented combs. But to conjure the meadow without Sylvanus Now was like conjuring the brook without the falls, for dark was his figure upon that mantle of grass and wildflowers, and his presence, no matter how much he held himself behind her, was as commandeering as the foaming white waters plunging down the hillside.
Loneliness is what he evoked
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