So… I said about three hundred times that I would never write in the Strange Lovers universe again but… it’s @angeryginger‘s birthday so here’s… Jack Zimmermann’s backstory. Happy birthday babe all I wanted to do was sent this to you to beta.
The Zimmermanns are in large part based on my mother’s family, who were relatively rich anglophones (English, even), in a small Acadian fishing village around the same time. And the cherry tree is also real – and my great- grandfather apparently once caught my father, who was a teenager at the time, stealing cherries from it.
The Clumsy Lovers’ Set is my favourite set of fiddle tunes of all time. In same places it’s also known as the Sloppy Kissers’ or the Awkward Fuckers’.
Robert Zimmermann, who owned the wharf and the store and a truck and a car and a big house which overlooked the ocean upon which the sun set, was a rich man. He had a beautiful wife – possibly the most beautiful wife in the whole county, if not the province, said the fishermen when Zimmermann could not hear, and a single spoiled, fat son who refused to speak to anyone who was not his family, they said whether the boy was around or not. Les goddamn d’anglais. Living in relative opulence though it was wartime, and so many men were missing or dead or gone, and so many boats were too empty to go out, and so many women were scared and struggling and so many children could not even remember what their fathers’ faces looked like. They were Americans, and though the son had been born on Acadian soil in that house, and though Zimmermann learned French and his son grew speaking it, they would never be anything but Americans.
There was a tree before the Zimmermann house, and in the spring it blossomed pink and beautiful before it bore sweet cherries in the summer, which were coveted by the young people in the village, though none were brave enough to sneak onto the property to steal some. None save of course for Kent Parson.
The reality of the thing was that Kent Parson was not, he said, afraid of anything and so to him Robert Zimmermann’s cherry tree represented nothing more than a goal to achieve. And perhaps to most this sounded like some kind of lie that came from the infatigable pride which only the very poorest possessed, but Jack had heard enough stories about Parson and the things he did that he knew it was the truth.
Jack was twelve when his father caught Kent Parson climbing the cherry tree in the front yard after the sun went down one July evening. Kent, who was the same age and defiant, swore some gadelles he had certainly learned while sneaking around on the wharves, while Robert pulled him into the house with a tight hand on his collar. Jack watched and heard that part from his open bedroom window on the second floor though he did not go down to eavesdrop on the rest, knowing his father would not take kindly to that.
In fact his father did not take kindly to most things Jack did, though the other villagers didn’t know that. Jack was weak and shy and sickly and mostly wanted to read books which Jack’s mother Alicia indulged but which his father detested, as he wanted to begin grooming Jack to become a business-man too. To take over the store, eventually, though that seemed too far away to even think about. Robert wanted to open another store further up the coast near Digby but as it was didn’t have the manpower or resources to do it until the war ended.
In the morning Jack woke early so he could go pick cherries for his mother’s breakfast but found instead Kent Parson sitting at his kitchen table with his mouth stained red.
He stayed with them through the summer, and Jack never asked why or even went out of his way to speak with the boy though he gleaned from his mother’s gossip on the telephone with her sisters back in Boston that it was because Kent had been living in barns and on the sofas of whoever would take him and mostly eating day-old bread from the bakery and dried fish and crab apples and the clams he dug up from the bay during low tide and smoked over fires he made on the beach. And the more Robert loved Kent it seemed the Jack the more he hated his real son, as was proven in the fall, when Robert told them both that he was putting them to work on the wharf to clean and go down into the hulls of lobster boats, where they were small enough to fit into the pits where the fish was held, and throw them up to the fishermen and older boys waiting to load them into crates for Robert to sell to the States.
At times it felt like Jack was drowning in lobster and the smell would stay beneath his skin forever and his hands would never heal from the ways the lobsters’ juices would seep into his cracked and cut-open fingers and infect them. Salt felt like a weapon upon them, upon him. One of the ocean’s many.
But at least it shut his father up.
Of course it meant he could no longer go to school, as the season started in mid-November until May or June, and the preparation work began a month before. And then summer was for repairing boats and traps and digging for clams and diving for scallops and for some going up the coast and even to Cape Breton to fish the summer season there, where they had crab as well as lobster. Some fished tuna and herring, cod, mackerel. Some spent the summer in mink farms, some became draveurs, raftsmen driving logs down rivers, some went up to the Annapolis valley to find farmwork, some went even further, to the mines or to steel plants. There was money in all of it, though not always good money, and Boston was only a few hours’ boat ride away, so some said the villages along the French Shore suffered less than others as the war went on. At least in the Bay of Fundy they were more or less safe from the German U-Boats which sometimes came close to Halifax Harbour or even nearer, in Shelburne.
So Jack and Kent worked year-round from twelve-years-old on, and lived together almost as brothers, and it was Jack who found Kent when he began wandering again, and who taught him to read, a little, and, when Robert grew tired of Kent’s chaotic and often insubordinate nature, Jack who brought him to his favourite spots in the woods, who taught him to play hockey in the roads and on frozen ponds.
Alicia, when she was not busy with her quilting group and tea parties in Yarmouth and other such things, took it upon herself to teach them both how to play the piano, which Jack hated but Kent, somehow, excelled at. His fingers were nimble and his mind was clever and he learned quickly. So with something akin perhaps to jealousy Jack asked his mother for a fiddle and took it upon himself to learn. Robert had been angry when he found out and Jack had played louder. But the music was just another thing he and Kent could do together, now, and it seemed Kent knew which tunes Jack would play next without prior warning, and by the time they were sixteen they were playing in kitchens at parties and both knew some dance steps.
Kent spoke English, by virtue of having been born to a Yarmouth fisherman’s wife who died in childbirth, and though the language was something to be mocked and hated when it came from Jack’s mouth, from Kent the girls found it charming. As such Jack spoke to him mostly in French.
By then the war was over and they had each been given a place on a boat, a friend of Jack’s father who was old and needed much help, and whose crew had found other, better, newer boats. His name was Éphraim à Cyprien Bourque and in addition to his lobster license and his boat the Honorine-Marie, he was a bootlegger who made his own moonshine out of his back shed and who sold it to whoever could pay.
Jack’s first day at sea made him sick of it, so sick he could barely stand or look out at the rolling expanse, and somehow the only thing that helped was some moonshine Kent had bought from their captain the week previous. It made no sense but neither did the way Kent laughed when he brought the bottle to Jack’s lips, unmocking, perhaps relieved.
They were sixteen, and they were sailors, and maybe more or less than brothers, and musicians, and Kent had many friends and even girlfriends on occasion, and they brought home money with which Jack could buy more moonshine. Robert said nothing about it or about anything regarding Jack and Kent these days as he had finally opened his new store and though he made it clear he still wanted Jack by his side eventually perhaps, he and Kent had at some point begun to resent each other and so wouldn’t speak, though Kent had not yet left. It was something Jack didn’t understand and perhaps never would or wouldn’t try to. Alicia saw nothing and Éphraim only wanted his money. In any case Jack and Kent were some of the best workers he’d ever had on his boat, he said, despite how Kent picked fights with the boys on the others wharves at barn parties and sang too much before the sun rose at sea and Jack spoke too little always.
But Jack came to love the ocean, perhaps even more than he feared it. As powerless as it made him feel he thought sometimes he needed that, to be reminded of his smallness, his impotence – and anyway Kent always said he felt the opposite. Like if he could conquer the sea he could conquer anything.
In the first summer of the new decade Éphraim gave Jack the boat. They signed the proper papers and the license and just like that the Marie-Honorine was his. July 4th, 1950. Happy birthday, Kent. Eighteen years old. It was a surprise, to an extent – certainly they had both been wondering without saying aloud who they each thought would get it. Privately Jack thought both expected Kent.
“Es-tu paré,” Jack asked Kent the night before Dumping Day, when they would go out and lay their traps and coloured buoys with their new crewman, Norbert à Édouard à P’tit Joe Surette. They were sitting on the stern of the boat as it was an unseasonably warm night for November.
Are you ready.
“Pour n’importe-quoi,” Kent said, “pis pour toute.”
For anything and for everything.
Later he drank almost enough to mask the taste of Kent, and of salt, perpetual on their lips. A weapon, both.
He awoke blinded. He awoke alone. A month and a stay in the Yarmouth hospital later, with a lazy eye and a bottle in his bag, Jack stole his father’s keys and enough money for gas, three or four hot meals, at least two nights at a boarding house and a pair of work clothes and boots, and drove to Springhill in Cumberland County. There would always be money in coal.
