Chapter 11
The Story of a Barrel

As he walked past the dockyard William saw no one. He missed the other coopers working around him. There was Cantwell, and Linegar, and Mullaly and Brown... There were plenty of small cooperages with just a father and one or two sons. But William was used to his own berth in Cousens' big shop. The men were a team. Each man knew how many casks the firm had promised the merchants. There was always a goal.

The men knew secrets. They knew how many staves it took to make any kind of barrel. They knew how many drops of seal oil a tight barrel would hold. They knew the exact volume of salt fish the longshoremen could press into the slack barrels. They called the barrels by name. There were common drums, half drums, whole drums, long donkeys, short donkeys and butts.

How many bundles of birch hoops had William untied? The hoops came from Topsail and other outports. He knew there were 32 in a bundle. They were not tied with rope. They were tied with soft var or fir branches. Hoop makers walked in swamps to collect the branches. They knew wood that grew in a swamp was soft. William had untied so many bundles he could still smell the var resin on his hands.

William rebuilt old barrels too. Cousens bought old margarine tubs from local factories. William re-beat the tubs and made sure the heads and staves were tight. Then Cousens re-sold the tubs to Bowrings, Job Brothers and Baine Johnston. The merchants put oil in them and sold them to soap factories.

But William's real pride lay in making barrels from start to finish.

He had tried to tell his son John about making barrels over the years. But it wasn't John who cared. It was his daughter, Alice Maud. She'd sit up in bed and listen any time he had a mind to tell her. By now he could listen, and the little girl would tell him how to make a barrel.

"What happens first?" he'd ask her.

She sat against her pillow hugging her stuffed seal. "First you get the staves ready. You make them skinny at the ends and fat in the middle."

"What with?"

"Your special axe."

He told her it was called a broad axe. He told her about smoothing the edges of the staves with a draw knife. He showed her with a knife and a bar of chocolate how he cut the edges on a slant. He told her that was called bevelling the edges.