The Place

by Gary Collins

  All of my carefully orchestrated ideas after I had been raped—my seduction of Toby, and my tolerance of his insatiable sexual hunger—had been in vain. Jake’s red hair had ruined it all. But I had to maintain the lie I had built my marriage house upon. If I told the truth, it would collapse like a pile of sand at high tide.

  Toby’s scorn was plain to see. He only glanced at the boy and would never hold him. We argued constantly. Toby no longer called me by his affectionate nickname for me, Becky. When he did speak to me, it was You. When he referred to me, it was the wife, Beck, or she. I called him Tobe. The rows were always about the same thing—Toby’s doubt that he was the father of “that red-headed bastard.”

  My parents were regular witnesses to our quarrels and never took sides. My mother never said so, but for some reason I believe she sided with Toby. But my father loved Jake right from the first. He showed no signs or gave any indication that he even cared who was Jake’s father. Pop simply loved Jake for who he was—his first grandson. For him it was enough.

  But for Tobe, to simply admit the baby with the red hair was his son would never do. And with all of my deceit toward him notwithstanding, I understood him. But for the very life of me and my child upon this island, my foundation of lies must not crumble.

  One day our row was so heated I thought he would strike me down. “No man will ever lay a hand on me,” I cried at him. In my fear at being struck I almost admitted Jake’s parentage. Instead I said, “If you ever do, I will stick you like a butchered pig in autumn.” I meant it.

  “The only redhead on the coast, far as I know, is that goddamn fish culler, Redjack. ’Twas he who had ’is way with ya wa’n’t it?”

  “You are insane, Tobe. I only know Redjack by name,” I lied. “Heard it cussed from twine loft to stage all over the harbour. Never seen him. Wouldn’t know him if he walked through that door. Jake’s red hair is nothing more than a twist of nature. Aunt Jane says so.”

  “Oh, I knows all too well wot that ol’ fool goes on about. Seen it all afore, she says. I don’t know where in ’ell she seen it all afore. Never seen her leave this goddamn island. And not one red-headed chil’ around to back up her pack o’ lies. I don’t believe any of it. I was tricked into weddin’ a harlot! Jezebel!” Toby was staring at me, his eyes challenging me.

  “You’ve a narrow mind, Tobe. Accusing your own wife of such a godforsaken thing! Aunt Jane is right. There is no accounting for the ways of nature. You knows full well that Charles and Emma, down the cove path—both with hair the colour of blackest night—have a girl child with locks of gold. And Charles does not dispute his parentage. What is the difference?” I demanded.

  “I . . . I don’t know. I only know with redheads ’tis altogether . . . er . . . not the same.”

  Tobe didn’t know how to explain the difference. I saw my advantage and built on it. “’Tis like a short child born of tall parents. How do you allow for that? Or a black-eyed girl born from parents with blue eyes? ’Tis no allowance nor explanation for it. ’Tis the same thing with Jake. His hair colour is just a fluke of nature.”

  Tobe had quieted down some. Then Jake, who was roused from his sleep on the daybed by the stove by our shouting, clambered down from the couch, tottered to my side, clawed at my skirts, and cried, “M—m—mamma. M—m—mamma.”

  “Stun as a goddamn crackie!” Tobe said to me without looking down at Jake. “Can’t even talk right. Stun like all redheads. My blood ent in ’im.” He stormed out of the house.

  14

  Then the only one who had any affection for Jake became deathly ill. One day when the wind wasn’t blowing and the sea was unusually calm, my father made his ponderous way up from the wharf, clutching his stomach and moaning in dire pain. His abdomen was extended tight as a keg, and he was doubled over like a punt’s forward timber.

  I went flying down the path for Aunt Jane. Her dog heard me running and began barking. He was standing guard on his mistress’s land with no chain around his neck. Aunt Jane was out the door as quick as a woman half her age. She ordered her dog to Stand yer ground, Sport. The dog whined but did as he was told.

  My father’s condition worsened. Aunt Jane asked him if he had been to the outhouse. He shook his head. She diagnosed a blocked bowel and suggested he drink cod-liver oil slowly to free him up. Pop drank the viscous, stinky oil, which was drawn right out of the fermenting cod-oil barrel on his wharf. His pain worsened along with the swelling. He looked like a woman six months gone and was in excruciating pain. I had never seen anyone so sick. Sicker than I was with Jake’s birthing. He was in so much pain he couldn’t sit or lie. He just stumbled around the kitchen all bent over, rubbing his stomach, moaning pitifully.

  Aunt Jane prescribed a heavy dose of baking soda in warm water to be swallowed quickly. It would break up the gas that she was sure was causing most of the swelling. But the cod oil and the baking soda only increased his pain, and he cried out in abject misery. Pop’s usually lean stomach was distended so tight he couldn’t stand the touch of his shirt. His tight belly was severely swollen and as shiny as glass.

  “I am in ’ellish pain, maid,” he moaned to my mother, who followed his every step around the room. “Me insides feels like they’re gonna bust. I wants to vomit, but like a pony, I am unable to.”

  “He will have to see a doctor,” Aunt Jane said to the men gathered around, concern plain on their faces. Everyone in the Place loved Pop.

  “The closest doctor is in Bonavist’,” said one. He was right. The only doctor we knew about was in Bonavista.

  “Dere’s not a draft of wind,” said another. “’Twill be a twenty-five-mile row, and dere’s a starm o’ wind comin’.”

  “More like twenty-eight miles be my reckonin’,” claimed another. He was looking out the window. The ocean was placid and as glassy as Pop’s exposed belly. It was as if some unseen thing had sucked the very life out of the air. The offer islands and islets loomed into the sky like castles, and though they were seven miles distant, they looked only a ball shot away. It was a mirage that preceded a bad blow, usually from the northeast, and the men wise to the way of things knew it.

  “Better get started soon, then,” Aunt Jane advised. “Take a grub box, a keg of water, and a quilt or two.” The men nodded as one and left the kitchen to ready a four-oared punt for the long row to Bonavista.

  The men had no more than gone when Pop staggered out, as if he was waiting for them not to see what he knew was coming. “Fetch the slop pail. I’m goan to t’row up me innards! ’Twill not be pretty.” His warning came too late. Pop moaned, “Oh my God, I’m gonna die!” He urged and retched like a gull that had swallowed a sound bone. His stomach convulsed, and out of his mouth came torrents of liquid feces, like a barrel of squid juice forced through a punt’s scull hole on a running wave. The effort drained his strength, and he fell on his knees. He was throwing up a mixture of brown bile, cod-liver oil, and then a stream of bright red blood. Pop’s stomach had ruptured. The smell was rancid and stuck to my nostrils. He dropped face forward in his own vomit, and still clutching his stomach, he curled into the fetal position and abruptly died.

  The house was in chaos. My mother knelt on the floor in her husband’s vomit and screamed inconsolably. Aunt Jane drew her to her breast and cooed to her. I cried for the gentle man who loved my son, Please don’t leave me. Someone ran out the door to spread the news of his death. When Mother’s cries subsided to sobbing and the room grew relatively quiet, a lone gunshot rang out from the lookout above our house. I looked toward the sound, puzzled.

  “’Tis the b’ys callin’ the punt back,” Aunt Jane said.

  I bawled like a child. Aunt Jane’s statement made Pop’s death all the more real. Final. I had never felt so alone. Alone with an indifferent mother, a husband who hated me, and my child. Then there was me, fighting not to bestow the sins of the father upon the child.

  Mother w
ilted in the wake of my father’s passing. She no longer kept the house spotless. She no longer ordered me to do anything. My mother went through the motions of life and nothing more. Not enough food to keep a swallow alive passed her lips. I insisted that she eat more, but she paid no attention. Weight melted from her bones. Her clothes were falling from her thin frame. Lines were etched in her face where there had been none, and during every waking hour she kept Pop’s hat wedged in her hands. Nothing I could say to her would make her let it go.

  One night I crept into her room, just to see, and sure enough, with her back to the wall and her face to the black window, Pop’s hat was still in her grasp. I didn’t keep on to her about the hat after that. I did call Aunt Jane, though. She came with what she called her “bag of possible.” It contained bottles of medication known only to her. No one knew where she got them. She rarely left the island, but she was always scouring the island woods in search of what she called her God-grown remedies. Some of them worked. She prescribed cherry-bark tea for my mother’s appetite, which she refused to drink. I snuck the herb into her tea, but she threw it away. Aunt Jane said my mother was willing herself dead. She, of course, had seen it all afore.

  Three months after we buried Pop, we laid my mother down in the ground beside him. I couldn’t afford a headstone for either of them. Tobe fashioned a marker from a piece of lumber and drove it in the ground at the head of their graves.

  15

  It was a time of great change, they said, the twentieth century. I read it in the weeks-old papers that were brought by schooners. Places were getting something called electricity, lighting up houses without kerosene oil. The people in the city of St. John’s were laying beach rocks on their roads. Cobblestones, they called them. We had beaches all over the place with pommelly rocks like that. Pobblestones, we called them. That St. John’s crowd had to be different in everything.

  One paper quoted that Newfoundland now had 65,000 workers and 41,000 of that number were involved in the fishery—21,443 of them were women employed directly with the fishery. I laughed at the word “employed.” They might as well take forty women off that list, for damn sure. There were that many girls and women in our Place who never received one copper for all their toil in the fishery. There was one change, though, that directly affected our Place. It was the Free Trade Salt Fish Agreement signed between our government and the Americans. In exchange for allowing the Yanks to purchase bait fish from us, they also agreed to buy salt dried cod.

  For a couple of years, then, the fishermen could sell all the squid, herring, and capelin they could catch. The merchants and the chandlers flourished. We were busier, but our lot didn’t improve. The close of every season still found our account in the red. As red as Jake’s hair.

  Tobe abused him daily with his harsh tongue. I suspected he abused him with his hands, too, but he denied that he gave “the red-headed bastard” any more than a clip over his ear now and then. It was a common thing for fathers to spank a wayward boy every now and then, but no one beat their children like I figured Tobe was doing. When I asked Jake, he said no, his father never touched him. I knew by the bruises he frequently carried that he was lying. Jake was too afraid of his father to tell me the truth.

  And though I drew the line at physical abuse, I was not a good mother to my son. He grew more and more to look like the man who raped me. Jake’s hair was a constant reminder of my molestation. The animosity I bore toward Jake grew, too. I couldn’t understand the vicious feelings I carried for my son any more than that his hair reminded me of Redjack.

  Jake worked like a slave for the man he called his father. He had no choice but to work. Boys were put in the punt at a young age and encouraged to work almost before they could walk. But Jake worked with the added daily drudgery of verbal abuse. Even the other men around the Place admonished Tobe on the way he cursed his son. Tobe cursed back at them to mind their own goddamn business, and one by one they did, until the only friend he had left in the Place was the red-headed son he despised. I had lost my friends, too. No one talked to me anymore, and to our door no visitors came.

  The arguments between Tobe and me were plainly heard by anyone passing by our door. The constant fights alienated us from the others, and in time I became embittered and aloof from all in the Place. Tobe and I had become too much at odds with each other to notice that our neighbours were not our friends anymore. In a way we had accepted our way of life as normal without realizing we were anything but.

  I watched Jake climb out of the punt in the evenings after a hard day’s fishing with the man he called Pop on the Offer Ground. Six miles sail away, the grounds were, and with contrary or no wind at all, hours of hard rowing. I lanced the boils we called waterpups on his small hands with care, and I witnessed the cuts on his tender flesh that I knew Tobe had made when he lanced them with the cruel tip of a trawl hook.

  Jake didn’t grow tall like Tobe, not even to my height. It was another reason for Tobe to curse the boy he knew was not his. And the more Tobe hated Jake because of his appearance, forever drawing that hated image into my head, the more I despised my own son. Tobe tried to force Jake to eat fried squid, which he knew was the only food Jake couldn’t stomach. He cursed him when he refused to eat. He cursed him about everything—because he couldn’t utter a word without stuttering, because of his size, his looks, his short legs, and especially his red hair. I noticed bruises on my son’s shoulders and arms and almost anywhere his clothes could hide them, bruises that Jake could but would not explain. I let it all go.

  The years passed. Jake learned the fishing racket well, the hardest way possible, from a man who barely tolerated his presence. Tobe became all the more bitter against the boy who was looking more like Redjack the Culler as he aged. Yet Jake never once said one word against the man he called Pop.

  Then, late one evening, Tobe and Jake didn’t return from the Offer Ground with the other men. Figuring they had struck a bit of fish—for sure Tobe wouldn’t let the others know—and were delayed because of a late catch, I waited for their punt to round Harbour Rock. Dark came and the punt didn’t come. Still I waited. Long after dark I decided to raise the alarm and walked to the next house on the path, where I stepped in without knocking. They were at supper and were surprised it was me who swung open their door.

  “Jake and Tobe have not come back from fishin’,” I announced to the supper table without showing any emotion. I felt none.

  “They was on the sout’er part of Offer Ground when we left to sail in,” said Guy. Guy was the best and most respected fisherman in the Place. Everyone called him the Skipper. “Did you walk down to the wharf? They might still be puttin’ away a bit o’ fish.”

  “I don’t go down to the wharf after dark. If they was in harbour they’d be up for supper, fish or no fish.”

  I left the Skipper’s kitchen without saying more and walked home. I heard their feet on the path down over the hill soon after and saw the flutter of yellow lantern light skitter across my window. The light reached my door ahead of them when they returned. The Skipper entered. One of the men who carried a lantern stood in the open door. Its light blended with the lamplight from my kitchen.

  “Their punt is not tied to Tobe’s wharf nor anywhere else in harbour,” Guy reported. “We’ll row out the tickle as far as the point. Fire off a few guns. They might be on their way in. You never know.”

  The men left and I closed the door behind them. It wasn’t long before I heard the booming sound of their muskets. If I had been up on the lookout like most of the others in the Place, I would have seen the stab of flame from the long rifle barrels. But I remained inside my door. Some of the women walked up the hill to the church and rang the bell. I never went to church. I could hear the bell tolling, but it didn’t bring Tobe and Jake in from the black ocean. The gunfire stopped shortly. Powder was hard to come by.

  The Skipper dropped by the house on his way back from the night sea
rch. “We left an extra lantern on the stagehead, just in case.” He didn’t sound hopeful.

  “I’ll keep their grub on the hob,” I said and closed the door behind him. I climbed the stairs to bed, taking the lamp from the kitchen with me.

  All the punts left before daylight to search for Jake and Tobe. The women walked to the lookout, wringing their hands in worry. I sat to the table and drank switchel tea—tea without sugar. Before noon I heard the clamour outside on the path. The women were coming back from the lookout, and they were excited. My door was still closed and they didn’t come in, but I heard their voices, which were intended for me.

  “The b’ys is comin’ back! Roundin’ Mineral Point, they are! Looks like Jake is in Tobe’s punt be ’isself.” They went on down the path toward the wharf.

  The women were right. Tobe was not in the punt. Jake was at the tiller, proud as you please, steering Tobe’s punt up-harbour as if he owned it. Jake told everyone that Tobe had spilled into the sea while taking a leak from the after part of the punt. They all believed him. But I did not. Tobe’s body was never seen again. Jake moved out of the house and fashioned a place for himself in Tobe’s twine loft.

  16

  Skipper guy took Jake under his wing after that, and the change in the boy was remarkable. He still stuttered badly, and there were a few in the Place who made fun of his speech, but it never stopped Jake from getting ahead in life. He took over everything that Tobe owned pertaining to the fishing, but I told him in no uncertain terms the house was mine—words from my father’s own mouth—and would never be his.

  I still left a loaf of bread in the porch for him, though. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe somewhere deep inside I did care for my son. If there was such a feeling in me, I seldom visited it. But Jake couldn’t resist the bread.