By Margery M. Cuyler
Just before dawn, the dark sky scowls through clouds hanging heavy over the harbor. The sun still hides under the horizon, and a cluster of men hunch their shoulders against the wind, greeting one another with a grunt and a quick upward tilt of the chin.
Their bodies are square and slow-moving and their bellies swell inside shapeless clothing. They wear black boots up to their knees, gear slung over their shoulders.
The men gaze at the rumbling sea, visible against the black sky only by its motion and the flecks of white on its surface. They are in no hurry. In the ancient language of men who make their living from the sea, their words are abbreviated yelps, lopped-off phrases punctuated by sharp intakes of breath. Their one-syllable grunts end in question marks, answered by shrugs, sighs. One shakes his head, tucks it in close to his shoulders, kicks at the ground. Another sticks his hands further into pockets and mutters. The question marks recede, the grunts become more decisive. One by one they turn from the water and head for their pickups.
“It might as well have been the Ice Age,” my husband Legaré said when he described the scene. He was to have gone out that morning with Meech to pull traps at the end of the lobster season. At 3:15 a.m., the headlights of Meech’s pickup traced an arc of white across our bedroom ceiling, and I heard Legaré close the front door behind him as he left the house. An hour later he slipped back into bed, but three early cups of strong coffee kept him from further sleep that night. He had expected to be out till noon.
“Usually Meech just drives right to his boat, but this morning he parked alongside the road on the other side of the harbor, where all the other fishermen were congregating to discuss the weather. They have a language all their own,” he said. “I couldn’t understand a single word.”
Heading back to our house, Meech said only, “Wind’s changed.”
Legaré waited, then asked, “So… do you think the change will bring better weather or worse?”
Meech shrugged. “Usually means one or the other.”
Over the course of the next few days, Meech and his son Chris, with the help of Legaré and another man, Arthur, pulled 240 traps. Legaré brought home a dozen lobsters for his work and we feasted for a week. After each lobster dinner I boiled the shells for a stock, the base of a delectable chowder. We have learned to make good use of everything that comes our way on the outer edge of Cape Breton Island.
Meech and some of the fishermen in these parts still use the wooden traps, though more and more of the younger men have converted to the wire ones. “Wire’s a lot lighter, that’s for sure,” one man told us. “But it’s wood wants to be handled. Just feels right is all.”
Legaré finds abandoned wood traps in the dump and washed up on the beaches. He brings them home and takes them apart to build furniture for us: beds, tables and fifteen or twenty chairs, each different. The silvery, sea-rubbed wooden slats and hoops create elegant and graceful lines, and the soft rounded edges make for comfortable sitting.
He gives chairs to people who have become friends. Cape Bretoners are generous: Murdock at the lumber yard gives us a cabbage and several zucchini when his garden overflows. Beatrice bakes us blueberry muffins. Bert brings us snow crab. We have chairs to give. A throne for Meech, a pipe-smoking haven for Thomas, a pretty porch chair for Beatrice, an angular Elizabethan-looking creation for Rose-Hannah, the “Doucet Two-set” for Gordy and Selma.
One of ours is short and squat; we call it the Winston Churchill. Another sits high off the ground, with rounded table tops at the arm, just right for a cup of tea and a plate of crackers with smoked mackerel. The wood has lived its life in the ocean, so the chairs are perfectly happy when left outdoors. Everything about them is right.
“You’ve given me an idea,” several of our Cape Breton friends have said. “Think I’ll try to make a chair or two over the winter.” But they don’t. It takes a great deal of work and patience to dismantle each trap, and it takes several traps to amass the right materials for a chair. Legaré has a talent for design that goes beyond just nailing together slats in a certain configuration. His chairs are works of art as well as being comfortable and sturdy. This is his particular gift, and he enjoys making them.
Sometimes we meet someone who tells us he went to our house when we weren’t there, to see the chairs. When they do finally meet Legaré they slap him on the shoulder. “Oh, you’re the chair man!” they say. And he nods and laughs and says that yes, he is.
—Margery M. Cuyler divides her time between Maine and Cape Breton along with her husband, Legaré. Her book of short stories, Counting Backward, was published in 2019 under the name M. Merrill Cuyler.