Closer by Sea

by Perry Chafe

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

From the writer and producer of the hit TV shows Republic of Doyle and Son of a Critch, a poignant coming-of-age debut novel about the mysterious disappearance of a young girl and the fragility of childhood bonds, set against the backdrop of a small island community adapting to an ever-changing landscape.

In 1991, on a small, isolated island off the coast of Newfoundland, twelve-year-old Pierce Jacobs struggles to come to terms with the death of his father. It’s been three years since his dad, a fisherman, disappeared in the cold, unforgiving Atlantic, his body never recovered. Pierce is determined to save enough money to fix his father’s old boat and take it out to sea. But life on the island is quiet and hard. The local fishing industry is on the brink of collapse, threatening to take an ages-old way of life with it. The community is hit even harder when a young teen named Anna Tessier goes missing.

With the help of his three friends, Pierce sets out to find Anna, with whom he shared an unusual but special bond. They soon cross paths with Solomon Vickers, a mysterious, hermetic fisherman who may have something to do with the missing girl. Their search brings them into contact with unrelenting bullies, magnificent sea creatures, fierce storms, and glacial giants. But most of all, it brings them closer to the brutal reality of both the natural and the modern world.

Part coming-of-age story, part literary mystery, and part suspense thriller, Closer by Sea is a page-turning, poignant, and powerful novel about family, friendship, and community set at a pivotal time in modern Newfoundland history. It is an homage to a people and a place, and above all it captures that delicate and tender moment when the wonder of childhood innocence gives way to the harsh awakening of adult experience.

Release date: May 23, 2023

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 272

Sample

Chapter One

ONE
From the sloping incline behind my house, I would watch the boats steam through the narrows atop my dad’s grounded, overturned thirty-foot trap skiff. It was the early summer of 1991, and the boat had been lying in our back garden for three years. The white paint covering the overlapping spruce planks that ran the length of his boat was peeling badly and some rot was settling in. The vessel had braved the extreme weather conditions that came with life on and around an island in the cold North Atlantic, but it was no longer getting the attention needed to ensure its continued survival. Even my name, which I had etched into the planks with my knife, was beginning to disappear. PIERCE. It was my great-grandfather’s name too, an old name for a now twelve-year-old boy.

“It has character,” my mother said. “You’ll grow into it. One day.”

The truth is, I liked being the only Pierce on our small island. And somehow, being the only one gave me a reprieve from the often unflattering nicknames given to distinguish those with the same first names.

The boat took up a good deal of space in our garden. Before it was parked there, we grew potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and turnips, or whatever the soil would allow. But we hadn’t planted anything in a long while, a combination of waning interest and declining necessity since it was just the two of us now, me and my mother, in our small two-story, saltbox-style clapboard house. It was my grandfather’s house. And his father’s before him. We could trace our family back some two hundred years, like most families on Perigo Island. And we were all tethered to the fishery.

Looking through the scratched lenses of a worn pair of binoculars, I would check the horizon every few minutes. During the summer months, the boats would leave our harbor early in the morning, just before sunrise, and would return hours later, hopefully with a load of fish. Cod to be precise. Though only twelve, I had become very good at being able to guess how much fish a boat was carrying given how it was riding on the ocean. You wanted to see a boat riding low, with the water almost up to the gunwale near the top edge of the boat. That translated into at least a couple of thousand pounds of fish. A fine day’s catch. On the contrary, a boat riding high on the waves usually meant a few hundred pounds; sometimes it meant no fish at all. We were currently on a string of days without anyone landing a good haul.

In our world, cod was king. Though it was a relatively short season, running from June to September, this fishery guaranteed our very survival. For us, it was a family-based industry with everyone involved one way or the other, either catching the fish with lines and nets or processing the haul in our local plant. In school, we were told that Newfoundland cod was exported all over the world, to markets in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. It was funny to think that fish taken from our waters would end up in places we could only ever dream of visiting.

Since my father’s disappearance, I had developed a strong dislike of the ocean, an affliction that often proved problematic, considering I spent most of my childhood surrounded by it. During particularly bad storms, I would lie awake and listen to the pounding waves crash into the shoreline not far from my bedroom window. The salt spray would coat not only our front door but also every car, bike, or piece of metal we owned, reducing everything to piles of rust. Salt also weathered the paint on our clapboard house and made it difficult to grow any root vegetables in the front garden. But such was life in the cold North Atlantic on a small island only sixteen miles long and half as wide. It was named by Portuguese fishermen and means “danger,” perhaps a reference to the difficulty that fishermen had navigating the currents around it. Perigo was only a thirty-minute ferry ride to the larger island of Newfoundland, but it might as well have been a million miles away.

Through the lens, I could see the corner of our small school. It was there that we first learned that the very ground we were standing on was composed of limestone, granite, and volcanic rock, some of the oldest on the planet. These lessons conjured images of molten lava spewing up from the depths, which did little to alleviate my distrust of the ocean. We were also told that we had subarctic terrain, which explained the bogs and barrens that were a prominent feature of Perigo’s landscape. There was only one wooded area left on the island, a small stand of spruce and fir trees, the rest having been cut down over generations for lumber and firewood. All this meant was that it was easy to get around on our trikes. These three-wheeled, all-terrain fun machines skipped across the land with ease, their only limitation being the jagged cliffs that fenced the island in.

From the top of my dad’s boat, I could also see the heavily tarred flat roof of our fish plant, which processed thousands of pounds of fish a day, impressive for a community of under 1,500 residents, most of whom either worked the plant or fished cod for a living. The rest braved the ferry run, day in and day out, for work across the way. After unloading their catch on the north side, the boats would steam across the way and tie up at either the south side or at the very end of the harbor. A small breakwater protected the entrance to the harbor from large waves. This man-made barrier ran from the north to the south side with a wide enough opening in the middle to allow boats to safely pass through but too wide to jump across, as proven by Billy Maddox in the summer of ’85. His failed attempt earned him a nickname he would carry with him for the rest of his life: Just Short.

The breakwater and adjoining fish plant were always a beehive of activity during the summer months. There was even money to be made for a bunch of twelve-year-olds with sharp knives.

As I swept back over the horizon, adjusting the large focusing knob, I spotted what I’d been waiting for—boats steaming toward the harbor. They were riding fairly low in the water. They had fish. I slipped on my rubber boots, picked up my white plastic pail, and ran my thumb across the blade of my knife, checking the sharpness before inserting it in the sheath that hung from a loop on my belt. My dad had given me the knife, which I had promptly inscribed with my name on the wooden handle.

I ran down the gravel lane of my house, took a hard right, and headed up toward the fish plant. As I neared my destination, I could hear the unmistakable put-put of a single-cylinder make-and-break engine. The name was in reference to the motor’s ignition system, which made a spark before breaking once a certain speed was reached. One fisherman, however, said the name had more to do with the fact that you could make something to fix those engines whenever they broke down. Before their invention, people like my great-grandfather had to row to the fishing grounds. “Back then, the men around here had arms like legs,” my father used to say. The image always made me smile.

I rounded a bend in the road that took me within fifty feet of the ocean and found myself running parallel to one of the boats that was about to cross through the breakwater and into the harbor. Jacob Maloney, a man who knew the fishing grounds like the cracks in his leathery hands, was at the rudder, while his son, Bobby, was up at the bow, uncoiling rope in preparation for docking. They were now within earshot.

“Can I have your tongues?” I shouted at Jacob.

Jacob looked across at me. We were almost eye level now; I was on land and they were on the water. He nodded yes.

The deal was done. Just like that.

I made my way past dozens of kids of varying ages, also armed with knives and buckets, waiting since sunup for a chance to make some money. The cod tongue, which was actually a muscle on the neck of the fish, was considered a delicacy, and as such, a kid could make a good dollar selling them. Ross Coles and his cronies, whom we unaffectionately referred to as the Arseholes, were also waiting on the wharf. Ross Coles and the Arseholes. It had a nice, rhythmic ring to it, reminiscent of the bands on the covers of my dad’s old records. I’d sometimes catch him and my mother waltzing to a song in the kitchen on a Saturday evening after supper. He’d pretend to tip an imaginary hat to me as he dipped my mom in my direction.

Ross was tall with blond, stringy hair and an athletic build. He was also two years older, though just one grade ahead. He and his friends were a constant source of aggravation. But Ross stood out from all the other bullies. He was not only the ringleader but the very worst person I knew.

I arrived at the wharf just as Jacob and Bobby were tying up their boat. As fishermen began to unload their catch, forklift drivers from the plant dropped off large polyurethane fish coolers, or fish boxes as we called them, next to the splitting tables used to gut and clean the fish. The fishermen would drop the gutted fish into these boxes four feet high by four feet wide, which would be brought into the plant. Once inside, plant workers like my mother would clean, fillet, and trim the fish by removing scales and scrap parts before boxing and bagging them for shipment off the island.

A familiar voice lofted past my ears. “I guess you’re better than the rest of us.”

I turned around to find my longtime friend and associate, Thomas Dwyer, sitting on his overturned bucket, sharpening his knife on a small rectangular stone.

“Work smarter, not harder,” I fired back.

Thomas smiled. His wiry red hair was a perfect match for the color of his face. Hence his nickname, Riblet, in reference to a pork rib cured in brine, which gives it a pinkish-red hue. Salt pork and beef were a staple for all of us on the island, part of the Sunday meal known as a Jiggs dinner, which also included boiled potatoes, turnips, carrots, and cabbage. The meat came in four-pound white plastic tubs that, when empty, were ideal for our work on the wharf.

“Where’s Bennie?” I asked as I surveyed the area. He was the third associate in our cod tongue enterprise.

“Not a clue. All I know is it’s your turn,” Thomas said as he motioned to Jacob’s boat. This was all part of the quid pro quo of getting cod tongues. Some fishermen would let you have them, but you had to earn each and every one by helping unload the fish from their boat.

“You think it’s my turn?” I said, looking down at the load below us.

“Bennie’s not here and I unloaded yesterday.” Thomas handed me the fish prong—a long wooden pole with a metal hook fashioned to the end.

I always hesitated at this part. It’s not that I was lazy; I just didn’t like being in a boat on the ocean, even if it was tied to the dock. Just being on the wharf made me queasy. It’s why I watched for the boats from my backyard every morning, so I didn’t have to sit on the wharf. Of course, I would never tell Thomas any of this, so I began my one-handed descent down the ladder, using my other hand to grasp the prong, which was at least a foot longer than I was.

At the bottom, I got myself to the middle of the boat and removed the gangboards covering the midship room, or fishing room as we called it, where the day’s catch was stored. Jacob and his son climbed out and made their way to the splitting tables with knives in hand. I was spot on, it was half-full, roughly eight hundred pounds of fish. Some were twenty pounders, which added a degree of difficulty to the work.

“You gonna throw them up here or are you gonna give ’em all a goodbye kiss first? Hurry up already!” Thomas shouted.

“Arse!” I shouted back.

I started the tedious task of pronging up the fish. I was taller than my friends, possessing what Thomas called “arms that were way too long for my body.” He wasn’t wrong in his observation, but his delivery could have been a tad softer. I stuck the metal hook at the end of the long shaft into the head of a fish. It always made an eerie popping sound. We were careful not to stick it into the body, as we’d been told by Wes Bartlett, the plant’s foreman, in no uncertain terms that it damaged the fillet and would affect the quality and thus the price.

“If I sees one of yee crowd driving a prong into anything but the fish’s head, I’ll boot you in the hole and send you home out of it,” Wes would often say, glaring down at us with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his sixty-year-old mouth.

Once I had the fish on the end of the prong, I’d catapult them overhead with one sweeping motion. As soon as the fish hit the concrete above, Thomas would remove the tongue by turning the fish over, grasping it by the head with one hand, and cutting slits along the sides of the exposed neck with the other. He’d then stick his finger underneath the tongue and make cuts to the back and the front. It took just a few seconds to perform the task. They would fetch a good price, a dollar a pound, a decent wage for three twelve-year-olds in 1991. Later, we would figure out it was even more profitable to sell them by the dozen, which worked out to be less than a pound. “Economies of scale,” Bennie called it. Thomas referred to it as “more money for less tongue.”

As I continued to prong up the fish, another boat out in the harbor caught my eye. Steaming past on a twenty-foot fiberglass boat was Solomon Vickers. Solomon had lived in our community for only six months, having arrived early in the New Year. When we first saw him head through the narrows, Solomon was aboard a smaller inflatable boat. It looked like it was made of black rubber. We’d never seen one in our waters before. One of the fishermen called it a Zodiac. We knew very little about the stern-looking man who kept to himself on the far end of the island. The little we did know we deduced from observation. Solomon was in his mid-sixties, tall with a full head of silver hair that was long enough for a small ponytail, but we never saw him indulge in such a style. We also knew that he lived alone, with no wife or children to speak of. As they tend to do, rumors filled in the missing pieces. Some heard he was on the lam, hiding out from the law. Others said he was some kind of artist who liked to paint fish and smoke dope, ideas likely born from his long hair and hand-rolled cigarettes.

His boat came within a few feet of the one I was standing in. Just in front of him on the gangboards was a matte black tarp held down at each corner by a large stone. A gust of wind lifted a corner, exposing something that caught my eye. Small bones, laid out in rows. Solomon caught my gaze. His dead eyes were cold like the fish at the bottom of the boat. He sailed past the plant and headed to the end of the harbor where some of the fishing stages were located. Like most fishermen on the island, Solomon stored his fishing gear in this shedlike structure built at the water’s edge.

I finished unloading the boat and carefully climbed the ladder. Once on dry land, I thought about telling Thomas what I’d just seen. What was old Solomon doing with bones in his boat, and what kind of bones were they? I took out my knife and joined Thomas, who was on one knee in the middle of the pile of cod covered in what we called the gurry or the sludge of fish guts. Cutting out tongues is a messy business, but Thomas had a way of making it even messier.

“Not bad, not great either, but not bad,” Thomas proclaimed. It had been a rough summer for the fishermen on our island. Rumor had it that it was rough everywhere else too.

“It’ll pick up. It always does,” I said.

Off in the distance, Bennie Nayak barreled down the steep road to the fish plant, bucket and knife in hand, zigzagging between kids and small mounds of fish. Finally, he jumped over a pile of netting and stuck the landing right in front of us like an Olympic gymnast.

“Sorry, me and Mom were late getting back from the ferry,” Bennie said as he ran his hand through his thick black hair before starting in on the fish.

“Unacceptable.” Thomas shook his fiery red head in disapproval.

“Like I can’t catch up with you two.” And he could do so easily. Bennie was the smallest of us but by far the fastest. He was like a surgeon with that knife, which was no surprise given his father was a doctor. A steady hand ran in the family.

“In your dreams you’re faster than us. And speaking of dreams, I had that one again last night about your sister,” Thomas quipped.

“So you’re even dreaming about rejection now.” Bennie’s fast comebacks were one of the things he was known for.

“That’s no way to talk to your future brother-in-law,” Thomas said.

All three of us got into the rhythm with our knives, making short work of the remaining fish.

“Hey, there was a cop car on the ferry,” Bennie said. All of our knives went still. He had our attention.

“Someone robbing crab apples out of old Gerard O’Byrne’s trees again?” Thomas asked.

“That was you,” I said. I knew because I had stripped the old man’s tree of the fruit with him.

Bennie shook his head. “Nothing to do with that. I heard Mom talking with the officer. A girl’s gone missing on the south side.”

“Missing? Who?” I asked.

“Anna Tessier.”

The name landed heavily. “I know her,” I said.

“Everyone knows her,” Thomas replied. “There’s not a soul on this island we don’t know.”

“Think she ran away?” Bennie asked.

“She did once before. No one disappears around here,” Thomas said, and then saw the look on my face. “Sorry, you know what I mean.”

Thomas was looking out at a new boat coming in when something hit him in the back of the neck, sending him face-first to the ground and knocking over his bucket of tongues.

“What the hell was that?” Thomas asked as Bennie and I helped him to his feet, crushing some of the tongues in the process.

Lying on the ground next to our buckets was a sculpin, a spiny, prehistoric-looking fish. A bottom feeder.

“You’re bleeding,” Bennie said.

Thomas felt the back of his neck, his fingers coming up red. Its sharp spines had pierced his skin.

It was then that we heard the laughter. We turned to see Ross being congratulated on his marksmanship by two other boys. Pete “Rounder” Parsons and Jody Buckle. Rounder, who was almost as wide as he was tall, had earned the nickname when he stood too close to a globe one day in geography class, which led to someone remarking that Pete was rounder than the blue orb. Jody Buckle, in contrast, was tall and skinny. He was speed incarnate with a knife. He was fast, some say as fast as Bennie, which would be a showdown for the ages, like the quick draws from the Wild West.

“Ugly attracts ugly, Riblet!” Ross shouted from thirty feet away. He waited for a response, something saucy enough to warrant throwing Thomas over the wharf, but Thomas remained mute. Ross and the Arseholes soon tired and walked off toward the incoming boats.

“You okay, Thomas?” I asked once they were far enough away. I rarely said his name, but it felt necessary this time.

“I hate those guys.”

We gathered up our tongues and threw the ones we stepped on into the ocean, where the gulls fought over them. They too had a pecking order, the larger ones bullying the smaller ones. We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon collecting tongues from other boats. Eventually, Thomas came around to his old self, and was laughing and joking as usual.

I, however, remained quiet. I couldn’t stop thinking about Anna Tessier.