The Seiners by Anastasia Marie Cassella

By Anastasia Marie Cassella

What has Johnny Cavelli gotten himself into? His peaceful, quiet Granite Island in Maine has become a battle zone for greed. When Johnny calls Uncle Vittorio for some help he did not know that this help came with a price; a hefty price at that. Learn how Johnny achieves control of Granite Island. Learn how Johnny fails to see the concept of asking bigger, badder men to help resolve some issues he's having with Frank Miller. Granite Island will never be the same peaceful, quiet island in Maine ever again.

5-Stars: Having been born on Beals Island Maine, I love to support Maine Authors. I found Anastasia’s fiction novel titled ‘Seiners’ very interesting. Her book is intentionally written in true Downeast Maine dialect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312528239

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The Seiners

By Anastasia Marie Cassella

Self-Published Through Lulu

North Carolina, USA

Copyright 2023

ISBN:  978-1-312-5284-0

E-Book ISBN: 978-1-312-52823-9

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the author/publisher, except for a brief quote or description for a book review. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

While the author has provided accurate telephone numbers, address, and email address at the time of publication. Neither the author nor the publisher assumes responsibility for errors or changes that occur after publication and does not assume any responsibility for any other author or third-party websites or their content (book reviews, etc.).

CONTENTS IN THIS BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE-GRADUATION DAY

CHAPTER TWO-THE RESCUE

CHAPTER THREE-GUISEPPE

CHAPTER FOUR-MACHIAS, MAINE AND GRANITE ISLAND

CHAPTER FIVE-THE NEWS

CHAPTER SIX-NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED

CHAPTER SEVEN-THE SOPHIE

CHAPTER EIGHT-THE SEININ’ CREW

CHAPTER NINE-A LEGEND IS BORN

CHAPTER TEN-SOPHIE’S FIRST SEASON

CHAPTER ELEVEN-SOPHIE’S HOMECOMING

CHAPTER TWELVE-THE COMMITMENT

CHAPTER THIRTEEN-JOHNNY’S RISE TO FAME

CHAPTER FOURTEEN-MATRIMONY

CHAPTER FIFTEEN-BOSTON

CHAPTER SIXTEEN-GOOD TIMES

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN-DAWN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN-TRIP TO THE BIG CITY

CHAPTER NINETEEN-GIL FORD & THE GANG

CHAPTER TWENTY-THE RESCUE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE-RETURN TO THE ISLAND

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO-CLAIRE’S ENGAGEMENT

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE-CLAIRE AND ABEL

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR-GIL AND GLADYS

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE-FRAN MILLER RETURNS

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX-UNCLE VITTORIO

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN-EASTERN FISHERIES

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT-THE ‘BIG BOYS’ WANT A FAVOR

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE-JOHNNY PLOTS

CHAPTER THIRTY-REVENGE

About The Author

Anastasia, the author, is disabled. Her disabilities include ADHD, Bi-Polar I, Depression, Anxiety, Complex PTSD, Arthritis, Bursitis, DDD, IBS, and Agoraphobia. She also has some bone degeneration in her neck. She also has fibromyalgia.

She has won Editor’s Choice Awards on five or more of her pieces of poetry when she entered them into contests.

DEDICATION

This book is dedication to my father: Michael Edward Cassella, Sr. If he had lived, he would be proud to see this in print!

It is my pleasure to produce my father’s book (a Father’s Day gift to him). He tried so hard to finish and publish this story, before he died.

Some history: My father told me; he started writing this story when he was in Connecticut in the 1970’s. When I was as young as six, he would tell me this story, while writing it. I have read it again and again. I hope that you will too!

It was my father’s wish to become a writer and escape being a tailor. A fine tailor he was too! He worked hard to support his family and to keep his home. I publish this in honor of my father. This story took him a long time to write. My work to produce his story, honors him in his death. He passed away, suddenly in 1986 at age 52. God rest his soul!

A special thank you to my mother for allowing me to accomplish this in honor of my father!

PROLOGUE

Heavy seas had announced the incoming gale the previous afternoon and the Maria, no matter how sea worthy, would have had to hole up in the lee of an island or tried to make it back across the treacherous reach. Panic clutched him.  If they’d stayed in a cover overnight, they’d have radioed for someone to come let him know so he wouldn’t worry.  He hadn’t heard a word.

Throwing on some clothes, he picked up his boots and skinned down the ladder to the room below.  A huge bed dominated this room.  When Johnny’s mother had been alive, she’d lived in this room with his father.  She’d borne Tony here, and later Johnny.  She’d lain in this bed sick and tired for almost a year before she finally called them all in, kissed them goodbye and died with dignity in her own bed, her own house, with her man and her sons around her.  There was a sweet smile on her face as she closed her eyes and turned her head on the pillow as though she was going to take a nap.

After her death Tony had moved down from the loft so that Johnny could have seclusion for his studies. Sleeping with his father, the two could get up early and quietly to go to work without waking Johnny, who was usually up until midnight with his studies.

Johnny crabbed past the bed thinking sadly of his mother, who’d been all good things to him, and in a moment’s panic realized that if his father and Tony were gone, he was alone.  The only other room was the kitchen, and he crossed quickly to the coat rack.

He grabbed his oil coat from a nail behind the door, and his so ‘wester cap and plunked it onto the back of his head. He pulled open the inside door and pushed the storm door open against the wind which billowed into the house, blowing down the tide calendar and scattering a stack of bills and papers from the top of the tall cupboard across the room. He stepped out into the howling blast of the wind and let the door shut to with a slam. The latch clicked, but he turned the wooden button to hold it even more securely.

The wind buffeted him as he headed down the footpath toward the road below.  The head-high alders waved and sighed in the wind, and the rain drove against his oil coat, hat, and boots in a steady drumming.

As he reached the road, he saw Lem Small’s pickup coming and waved it down. There were three of the women who worked at Lem’s clam shed piled in with Lem in the cab of the truck.  He jumped into the cluttered bed of the truck and thumped on the roof.  Lem started ahead again.  Johnny crouched as close as he could to the cab, but it was no help against the drenching downpour.

The truck bumped through the most thickly settled part of town, and allowed itself near Eastern Fisheries pier as it negotiated a right turn toward the clam shed.  Johnny thumped on the cab and, as the truck stopped, landed running, and waved a gesture of thanks over his shoulder as he ran for the buyers shack at the head of the pier.

He pushed through the door along with a gust of wet wind that rattled the big calendar on the wall.  He pushed the door closed with difficulty and turned his back against it.  Frank Miller, fat hands holding down the riffled papers on his desk, greeted Johnny as the young man entered.

Hello Johnny, bitch of a day.

Yessuh, heard anything from my pa or Tony?

No. See the boat’s out.

Went yesterday mornin;’ shoulda been back last night.

Miller’s eyebrows went up and looked out the window at the choppy water meaningfully, Where they gone?

Johnny looked at the fat man, "Where they gone?

They’ve gone to haul the trawls.  Where’d ya think?"

Shame, I’m all done buying this week. They musta gone early.  I posted ‘NO FISH’ bout nine o’clock yesterday mornin’ musta been.

Nine o’clock! What fisherman goes out that late? You mean they out in this for nothing?

Fraid so. He saw the look in the boy’s eyes and looked away. I’m sorry Johnny, got to do as they tell me in the office.

Got all they want?

Got all they want.

That’s the trouble ‘round here. Johnny’s voice was rising.  They buy from ya till they get what they want, then ta hell with ya.  What’s a fisherman supposed ta do?  Sit around waitin’ on you damn guys ta feel like buyin’?

CHAPTER ONE

                      GRADUATION DAY

Unlike the dependable daytime summer gales that made frequent landfall on this remote section of the Maine coast with clear blue skies and inky blue waters smashing themselves to frothy beer-foam white on the granite ledges, this storm came in the black night with roaring winds and a tear-hell-out-of-everything rain.

First light came late this morning.  Old fishermen rolled in their blankets and unconsciously reset their mental alarm clocks.  There’d be no fishing today.

Johnny Cavelli awoke slowly, listened to the wind a moment, and then snuggled deeper into his body-warmed quilt.  On his soft mattress under the eaves of the tiny house, his face was only a foot or two below the slope of the spruce plank roof.  He had slept in this homely loft for most of his nineteen years; since he had been able to toddle up the rugged rustic stairs of two-by-sixes and odd planks.  Every rough axe hewn rafter, and every splintery, dried-out board that formed the roof was as familiar to him as his own body. It was in fact a part of him.

He lay quietly for several minutes listening to the southwest wind driven rain pelting the shingled roof over head.  Turning his head on the thick feather pillow, he gazed across at the single small window set in the far wall of the tiny attic.  The rain seemed to be trying to bust the window, sending sheets of water down the wavy glass in uneven patterns.  The heavier gusts of wind at odd spaced intervals buffeted the building, causing the weathered structure to creak and groan like an old three mast vessel fighting heavy seas.

Although the house was sound and weather tight, the tremendous force of the gale found tiny chinks and cracks here and there, so that there was a barely perceptible current of moving air in the loft.  The breeze caused Johnny’s new graduation suit, on its wooden hanger, to swing rhythmically from the nail in the rafter at the center of the roof.

Johnny smiled with pride when he thought of the black suit.  The first one he’d ever owned.  Today, his nineteenth birthday, he’d wear that suit to his high school graduation.  That was something to be proud of. A young man getting a high school education on this remote island, where most of the boys left school in the sixth grade to follow in their father’s footsteps as lobster fishermen, seiners, or clam diggers, which was about equal to Abraham Lincoln’s struggle from log cabin to the White House.  But he had done it.

What had gone into the acquisition of that suit; the long clam tides, and digging from ebb to flood on the sharp reef.  The clams were scarce there on that strip of gravelly clay, but you had to dig amongst the boulders; a strip here and a strip there.  But it was the only place within lugging distance of the clam buyer’s shed, and he had no boat to get to the surrounding islands where the clams were more plentiful and then haul them back to the buyer. The way tides shifted ahead almost an hour a day, it had taken a lot of planning to get schoolwork done and still make the tide.

One thing about being this far north was in his favor though: It got light early and dark late in summers.  Digging with a headlight was alright, but batteries for the lights were only good for a couple of tides and cost almost as much to buy as you could earn.  At four dollars a bushel, the going price of clams this summer of 1955, you were better off getting your sleep at night than trying to make a profit at that price.

Johnny sat up, pushing aside the quilt and hunching his shoulders at the damp, chilly air.  He swung both feet onto the cold floor and stood, stretching his six-foot frame so that his head almost touched the peak of the roof.

Wrapping the quilt over his shoulders, he crossed to the clouded window.  The house, or more properly described, tarpaper shack, stood on a high granite ledge.  This ledge was in fact the highest point on Granite Island. From this vantage point, Johnny had an unobstructed view of what had been his whole world for nineteen years.  He’d seldom traveled more than eighty miles from home, and that had only been on rare trips to Bangor.

Granite Village, named for the island, was a collection of varied architectures, consisting of weather-beaten tarpaper fishermen’s homes interspersed with huge old mansion type relics from the days when old sea captains have made their fortunes in slave trading, rum running, and even legitimate coastal hauling of lumber.  Some of the larger homes boasted beflowered lawns and well-kept shrubbery, while their neighbors displayed junk cars and all stilt outhouses.  Along the shore, everywhere an outcropping of rock ledge made a natural breakwater, or the coastline dipped inland to create a quiet cover, were rickety homemade piers with tiny shacks clinging precariously to them.  It was in these little shacks that lobster fishermen ‘paired up their old traps’ or built their new ones and drank their beer or booze, and spun yarns when the spit-crackling winter winds blew down the reach. Winter cold made the vapor fly and froze the boats into their moorings, so the coast guard’s eighty-three-footer had to steam in and bust the ice before the expanding white mass crushed the little wooden boats of the fishing fleet.

The social status of everyone on the island could be determined by their homes as seen from Johnny’s window in the little building where it crouched there on the ledge, holding on against the wind and rain. The smallest houses belonged to the clam diggers; they’d never had anything and their fathers hadn’t, and their sons surely wouldn’t.  The neat, small, well painted houses with the one or two-year-old cars and pickups in the driveway belonged to the lobstermen. These were the ones who could tell you from year to year what they’d earn.  They were the steadies:  Hard work, damn hard work; big investment in gear, damn big investment in gear; and small but steady incomes, year in and year out.  They showed small but steady growth as the years went by, so that every once in a while one was able to get his boy up in the business or to team up with some others and maybe build a lobster pound so that they could hoard up a whole mess of lobsters until an upturn in the market, unless red tide or some other disease, or a bad storm, or something didn’t wipe them out so that they spent the rest of their lives getting out from under. The best houses though, belonged to the gamblers; for what was a seiner but a gambler?

The seiner mortgaged everything he owned, borrowed on friendship, promised percentages of his catch, and if slavery weren’t outlawed, would have sold his wife, kids, and mother-in-law for enough to gear up and run west’rd after the tiny elusive herring that could make you rich, or ruin you in three short months of summer.  Still, the big secret the seiner knew was that five bad seasons could be wiped out with one good one.

Like the horseplayer, the more he lost the more he gambled.  The only difference being that a horseplayer would always lose and the seiner would win once in a while.  Not often, but enough to wipe the slate clean and start again.  That elusive big catch dangled just beyond the fingertips. There’s a legend among the seiners along the coast of Maine that the best credit references a man can have is herring scales on his clothes when he goes to a bank, creditor, or a new car lot.  It’s true.

Scattered among the houses stood three large churches, each built in an almost triangular relation to one another.  They were well-kept and sparkled whitely, spires reaching high above the homes of their parishioners.  One, the Baptist church by the cemetery, boasted a huge clock in its towering belfry, which had been known to strike as many as twenty-seven times on a particularly cold Maine winter night.

These massive tributes to the Almighty, along with the fact that there were no movie halls, dancing places, or beer joints on the island gave evidence to the strong religious fervor of the older people who controlled the vote of the town. Some of the younger fishermen, and even a few of the older ones, however, did noticeably wobble when returning from their little workshops in the backyards and on the piers.  Cars returning form Machias, the nearest town that boasted a state liquor store, after the weekly grocery trip, was more often than not unloaded twice. First, in broad daylight, with boxes of groceries from the supermarket, and again later in the dead of night with brown paper bags that emitted a glassy clink as they were stealthily sneaked into workshops, attics, and garages.

To the eastward from the loft window stretched fourteen other islands of various sizes, all uninhabited.  They were, for the most part heavily wooded, and it was here that the men of Granite Island hunted the deer and sea birds in the fall of the year.  Here also were kept small camps from which they tended their lobster traps in the summer and fall.

Looking south, the Gulf of Maine, that vast, deep, beautiful graveyard of fishermen, stretched in the unbroken splendor of the Atlantic Ocean.

To the westward, but not visible from Johnny’s window, stretched the Western bay.  It held as many or more islands, but fewer deer, although the bare rocky islands to the seaward side of the bay were a favorite spot for hunting the myriad seabirds that called the island home.  In the spring, grassy Smith’s Island, devoid of trees, was the nesting place of the seagulls.  The islanders made regular tips there to collect the speckled eggs from their grassy nests in the weeds while the irate gulls, in the hundreds, soared overhead in an umbrella of screaming, white-feathered indignity at the spoilers that ravaged their unborn young.

Johnny studied the anchorage in the cover in the eastern bay, mentally ticking off the names of the owners of the boats dancing on their moorings.

With a sick feeling of sudden fear, he saw that the buoy of the Maria’s mooring was bobbing bare in the frothing seas.  His father and Tony were still out.

He looked to seaward, but the rain-filled gloom closed the distances.  There was no sign of the Maria.

His brother, Tony, and his father had gone out early the previous day to haul and reset the trawls, hoping for at least one good set.  Johnny heard his father’s deep voice as he spoke Italian to Tony. 

Johnny’s different than you and me Tony.  He’s going to amount to something someday. He’s got brains. Next week he graduates from high school.  We’re going to get him something nice, a watch, a nice wristwatch. 

The old man’s voice was deep with emotions.

Someday Johnny’ll be a big lawyer, maybe a doctor, just like his mama wanted.  You know that I promised her before she died.  She, knowing it was all over said ‘Guiseppe, you make Johnny go to school. He’s smart and someday he’ll be rich.’ Well, we got him through high school, now next year we’ll work hard and Johnny’ll go to college.

That’s for sure, Pop.  Johnny ain’t gonna be no fisherman can we help it.  Tony’s deep booming voice with its down east accent was in strange contrast to his father’s warm southern Italian voice.

We’ll get him a watch alright. The best solid gold wristwatch they got in Machias, and then we’ll get him the best education that friggin’ ocean can supply.

Guiseppe switched to his adopted language.  Okay, here’s what we can do. Next week we set trawl out by Spruce Island.  Maybe do pretty good.  Whatever we get the day before graduation, that’s Johnny’s watch; we come in early, take the truck and go to Machias, buy the watch and be back by night time.

Good enough, Pop, we’ll do it.  One set just for Johnny’s graduation present.

Johnny had been choked with emotion to think these two rugged fishermen of the same blood, but far different in every way from him, would put that kind of hard work into getting him a graduation present.  After all they’d done over the years working to feed and clothe him so that he could get an education, and then committing themselves to at least four years of even greater expense to put him through college.

Then yesterday, one day before his graduation, they’d gone out at first light.  Johnny’s sense of guilt couldn’t let him lay there in his warm bed, especially with small craft warnings forecast for late afternoon.

He scrambled from the loft in Levi’s, a wool shirt and stocking feet, hip boots in hand.  I’m going with ya today.

Not very bad, Tony behind his father was halfway out the door.  Today and tomorrow’s big days fer you, you got the dance tonight.

I don’t want to go to no dance.  I’m going with ya.

Johnny’s father heard and came back in, And how about Claire?  You promised to take her to the dance. You gonna stand her up?

I’ll stop by and tell her I got to work.  She won’t mind.

Tony glared at him. Not very bad, she won’t she been chasin’ ya all year to go ta this dance.  You promised and you ain’t gonna disappoint her. Tony stared him down.  You’re goin’ ta school today. It’s only for an hour, but you ain’t missed a day all year.  You finish up like you’re supposed ta.  We’re comin’ in early today anyway; we got to go to Machias for some parts.

Eyes sheepish, downcast, Johnny knew there’d be no arguing against both of them.  Separately he could usually get ‘round either; together they shored each other like stakes in a weir.  What time you be back from Machias?

Real late, don’t wait up.  That is if you get back from the dance before dawn.  Tony and Guiseppe both laughed, waved their hands farewell, and stepped out into the early morning sunshine.

Only now, after checking the