November 2019

By Jason Brown

Heading east, Outermark Island was the last mark before the open ocean and the first mark on a ship’s return. On some nights, the bridge lights of a tanker appeared rising over the swells off the island’s north point, but tonight the horizon was black except for the Machias Seal Island Light flashing ten miles west. Sitting by her bedroom window at her grandma’s house on the harbor, Emily knew that on Machias Seal someone lying awake would be able to see Gannet Light flashing eleven miles farther west on Grand Manan Island, and on Grand Manan someone could see, ten miles farther still, Quoddy Head Light in the State of Maine.
When she thought she saw phosphorescence in the water, Emily shuffled into her grandparents’ bedroom and stood in the dark waiting for one of them to wake.
“The weir,” she said when Grandpa sat up and hung his head.
Emily followed in his footsteps to the pier. He rowed the deeper dory past lobster boats bucking their mooring lines. Moonlight burned in all four windows of the store. Once inside the walls of the weir, she leaned over the side. Black. Her great-grandfather had kept a weir in the same spot and had twice filled seiners, but now, in 1978, a weir had become, as Emily’s mother liked to say, nothing but foolish.
She tapped the bottom to stir the fish. Nothing. She stamped. Sparks spread around the scattering fins; glittering trails rolled underwater toward shore.
Grandpa used rags soaked in kerosene and tied to the end of a stick. When he struck a match and lit the end of the torch, the sky, the harbor, the other boats moored around them, all disappeared behind a curtain of light thrown by the flames. Clumps of burning cloth dropped into the water as he held the torch over the gunwales. The herring swarmed like moths, their bony mouths gaping. With a quick swipe, she scooped them in the net and dumped them squirming into the bottom of the dory. After the fifth pass, the net came up empty and she could read his mind: the catch, not enough to cover the bottom of the dory, not worth getting out of bed for.
Then she spotted sticks floating in the water, four separate stubs pointed to the sky. The current turned them together. Four hooves. Emily raised the torch higher. Among the lobster boats standing as tall as ships in the shadows, there floated narrow legs, too many to count. Some of the sheep lay on their sides; their matted, wet wool like seaweed hanging from the ledges. Emily gasped and Grandpa stumbled over the slapping herring. His day-old beard scratched her cheek as he raised the torch higher: all around them legs pressed against the hulls of boats. As the flame dimmed, the shadows sank into the harbor, and the lines in Grandpa’s face deepened around his mouth and forehead. He dropped the torch into the water. Emily knew exactly who’d done this. Now he was in trouble, and so was she.

Jason Brown’s third collection of stories, A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, is forthcoming in December. Catch him at Longfellow Books on January 30, 2020.