The Whitefish Nets We Brought Back

Mending

We spent the rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday mending.

People who have not done it do not know what that means. A gill net is made of thin twine, and every mesh is a little diamond that has to be the right size or the fish swim through or go around.

When a net tears, you cut out the ragged edges and knit new twine in with a net needle, one knot at a time, mesh by mesh, until the hole closes. A bad hole can take an hour.

The third gang alone had more than forty holes in it.

We stretched the nets out on the deck and on the dock beside the tug in the bright sun. Toivo worked the lead line, splicing where the anchors had been cut off. Pete reset the float line where it had parted.

I did the twine. My fingers remembered. I sat on an overturned tote with Arne’s old net needle and a spool of twine, and I knitted until my hands cramped and then I shook them out and knitted some more.

People came by.

Old Solveig Lindquist, Arne’s aunt, who is 84 and walks with a cane, came down to the dock Thursday at noon with a pan of bars and a thermos of coffee. She did not say much. She sat on a bench and watched us work.

After a while she picked up a spare needle off the deck and started on a hole herself. Her hands were slower than mine but they did not miss a knot.

“I mended Arne’s grandfather’s nets,” she said. “Linen, back then. You young people have it easy.”

That was the only thing anybody laughed at all week.

She did not say one word about Lyle, and she is his aunt too. But when she left, she patted the cedar float where I had set it on the wheelhouse ledge, and she nodded at me once.

Some of the men from the other two fishing families came by in the afternoon. They did not talk much either. One brought us a spool of twine. Another took the bad end of a gang and mended it right there without asking.

Nobody said the name. Everybody knew it.

By Thursday at four, we had all four gangs mended, stacked in the boxes, and ready. We went out that evening while the sun was still high and reset every one of them on Arne’s numbers, with new anchors, new buoy lines, and new staffs.

Toivo set the last staff himself and stood looking at it a moment, the orange flag hanging still in the air.

“Let him come try again,” he said quietly.

I did not answer him. But I did not tell him not to say it, either.