Chapter 1
A Lonely Sound

William Pender was a working man living in St. John's in the winter of 1904- 1905. He was a cooper, or barrel maker. Every place you looked in those days, you saw barrels, casks and drums. They stood by shop doors, full of goods from other places, like apples and flour and pork.

Barrels lined wharves on the waterfront too, full of goods Newfoundland sent over the sea. Those barrels had salt fish in them, or pickled herring, or salmon, or seal oil, or cod liver oil.

There were thousands of barrels all over the place. A cooper's sweat and labour had gone into every one of them.

When William was small, he watched his grandfather make barrels. His grandfather looked like a giant. So did his father. And now he was just like both of those men. But they had not seen the trade dying. He was the first one to know the ringing of a cooper's hammer was getting to be a lonely sound.

For five months he had been out of work. Some blamed the strike the coopers had before Christmas. But William knew the strike only went to show what was happening. It never caused the unemployment.

Being out of work gave him time to think. Time to see what was going on. You couldn't see it when you worked hard every day. Then all a cooper thought about was making good barrels.

He saw himself as master of his craft; Why shouldn't he? A cooper started as a lad of ten or eleven. He apprenticed five years. Five years of hard orders and low pay. Then he had a cooper's skills.

So he did come to think of himself as a master. He was master of all the tools hanging on the wall. His hand had worn a mark in the haft of his broad axe. His adze, his shaves and his planes did what he told them. He knew how to coax every wooden stave to bend just right. He knew how to shave the wood, and how to heat it over the little cresset fire in his grate.

He heated and bended and steamed and beat that wood until it fit his dream. The smoke got deep in his skin the same way it got in the staves. He always had the picture of a perfect barrel in his mind. He used his hands to make the raw wood turn into what he had in mind.

Between him and the wood, he was the master. But outside the circle of his own cresset fire, what then? The cooperage owner was master then. And over him was the big master of it all—the merchant who paid for the barrels.