The Place

by Gary Collins

  My God! What is this? Jack fell more than sat on the bed, as though his legs had been pulled from underneath him. Lifting the envelope, which had clearly been put there for his eyes only, he felt the smoothness of the silk that bound it. He didn’t touch the garters. The stocking was tied with a cabin-door knot, but the right knot had been tied wrong. All seamen knew it as the knot a fabled captain used to catch a thief who had been stealing from his private cabin.

  Jack fingered the items tied in the silken knot. The lock of burnished hair still carried the scent of Emiline. With that sweet smell of innocence burning into his brain, he collapsed on the bed and with the letter in his hand. Jack cried for the first time since learning about the tragic deaths of his family.

  His name, bold on the envelope, had been written by a woman’s hand. What the hell was this? He picked up the bundle, loosened the knot, and pulled a letter from the envelope. Staring at the broken seal for a few seconds, he knew Sophie had read the letter.

  Dear Jack . . .

  Without knowing the rest of its contents, but with a terrible feeling of foreboding, he dropped the letter on the coarse counterpane. What in God’s name was this? Jack had never received a letter in his life. He didn’t know one woman who would post one to him. Unless . . . oh, sweet Christ!

  Jack picked up the letter and read it through in disbelief. It was from the girl he had met in the logging camps. Jack looked at the loosened cabin-door knot. Caught! Just like the captain had caught the thief. He read the letter again. It was badly written, and there wasn’t much substance to it. But the words tore Jack apart.

  I ave a son be you. Knowed twas yours soonsever es I seed im, cause ov is red air. You’m the onliest man wit red air I ever seed er done it wit. Feller I’m goan ta marry tinks tis is, on account ov is mudder tol im she ad a brudder wit red air who drowned at sea afore e wus barn. Still nall I knows tis yourn.

  It was signed “gurl wit da yallar air.”

  That slut of misery! Spiteful bitch! She didn’t even know what she had done. He hadn’t told her he was married and had a child. She had essentially murdered his wife and daughter! And she was going to marry a man she had obviously “done it with” since—and maybe before—Jack, and her future husband had red hair in his genes. Neither of Jack’s parents had red hair, but his great-grandfather did. And Jack was told he was the image of his great-grandfather. That whore with the yellow hair! She had destroyed their lives.

  To Sophie, of course, all she could see was that her husband had betrayed her. Oh God! He knew now it was true. Sophie had murdered his daughter and taken her own life out of spite. To punish him. She had killed them both in a sickening act of revenge against him. Revenge was only sweet if witnessed, experienced. It was the pure reasoning behind it.

  Jack was not weeping now. He was filled with rage. Against the girl with the yellow hair. Against she who had taken from him a love so deep it mired his heart. He threw the stocking back on the bed and put the lock of his daughter’s hair in his shirt pocket. Jack crushed the envelope and letter in his hand and stood to his feet.

  Sophie must have thought that someone else would be with Jack when he found the letter. That everyone would find out why she had done what she had. Revenge and punishment. Well, by Christ, Sophie was right about one thing. There would be revenge! But his alone. And only she—vengeful bitch!—who had carried the secret to the bottom of Muddy Cove, and he, who had discovered the letter, would ever know the truth.

  Crossing the floor to the dresser, Jack held the envelope and letter above the lamp’s chimney until it caught fire. He gripped it between his fingertips until it was consumed and was too hot to hold. He watched the ash flutter to the clean board floor. Leaving the room with lamp in hand, he didn’t look back. The floor wasn’t spotless now, by Christ. Beside the bed on the floor was a black spot smeared with his boot print.

  “Vengeful bitch!’ he cried as he stomped down the stairs. Setting the lamp on the kitchen table, he paced the floor. We could have talked it out, he was thinking. I would have left, if that was what it took. But to kill Emiline! It is unthinkable! Senseless!

  Jack stopped pacing and sat at the table to stare out the window into the inky blackness of night. She will have her revenge, he decided. With the death of my child I will pay for the sin of adultery. But at every opportunity I get, other women will pay for her crime.

  30

  Doomed now to a life of misery, Jack hated women more and more as the bitter years went by. Becky was not the first girl Redjack raped, but she was the prettiest. There were a few others. Some of them had merely protested at first and had enjoyed his violent act. Some of them were love-starved wives craving for something extra. Jack hated them all. Not one of them reported him to the authorities. No one would have believed them, anyway. To most people the word “rape” coming from a woman’s lips was dirtier than the act itself.

  He didn’t know or care if his sexual exploits had increased his progeny until he heard about the red-headed boy whose mother had accused him of drowning his father on the Offer Ground. Jack knew who it was and wondered if Becky was as pretty as she used to be. And her boy, who everyone thought was fatherless, wasn’t. Redjack the hated Culler was the boy’s father. And as father of a young boy, Jack felt he was entitled, seeing as how his mother was a mere woman who had no right to entitlement, and he, as the boy’s true father, was entitled to everything the boy owned. The only question for Jack was how to approach it.

  He saw his son once at the seal hunt. Jake was his name. A name almost like his true father’s, Jack was thinking when he met him. Maybe his mother had enjoyed their little episode on No Denial Rock after all and had called her son Jake to resemble her first lover. Like looking in a mirror, it was. Jake saw it as quickly as Jack did. Jack was sure he did.

  Jake was working as “dog” for the top gunner on the SS Stephano. Jack had suffered the walk from the old SS Newfoundland, which was jammed in ice, and after their skipper, the son of the Stephano’s captain, had sent them to the Stephano to hunt seals. The Old Man will take care of you, the Son had said.

  The Old Man had taken care of them, all right. Wouldn’t even allow the Newfoundland’s sealers time for a mug-up aboard his new fancy ship before ordering them over the side again, with a gale of wind and snow already coming down. Ordered them away to hunt an elusive patch of harp seals and to find their way back to their own ship, by God, storm be damned.

  Tuff, the Master Watch of the Newfoundland’s sealers, was a hardened sealer who had experienced disaster at the hunt before. Yet he didn’t have guts enough to talk back to Old Man Kean and led the men of the Newfoundland away like pigs before thunder. He had led them away from safety and into a white blizzard.

  Jack remembered looking back and seeing the boy he knew was his son staring after him. And he saw all too clear the Stephano, all her crew safely aboard, her stack spewing black smoke into a lowering sky. Her stokers were all warm and dry below her decks, shovelling coal into her blazing furnace. Jack saw her top rigging with snow swirling around it.

  Seventy-eight men of the SS Newfoundland died. But Redjack was not one of them. Jack had something more than an innate will to survive. When he left the red-headed boy on the ice below the Stephano, Jack had seen something else. Jack saw hatred in his son’s eyes. That look hardened Jack’s resolve. That and his plan to return and claim all that his son owned, and also the woman he had raped, Jake’s mother.

  Jack waited until the Stephano was lost in the shroud of falling snow. It only took a couple of minutes. Then he followed the others into the blizzard and the tragedy that would forever stain the pages of Newfoundland history.

  The wind howled as only night wind across fields of ice can. It was a terrible, desolate sound, and with no ship looking for them, it soon became the sound surrounding the damned, a dirge over the forsaken. Men died the first night. They died of cold and pure misery. Jac
k stared at the grey, sluggish dawn. All the snow in the skies had been blown somewhere else. The northeast wind shifted around to the much colder northwest, as it always did. The Great White Plain on which they stood heaved and swelled, hissed and groaned, creaked and cracked.

  The temperature plummeted. And in the full light of day, men too far gone to make the leap fell through deadly crevices in the ice, were pulled out by their sealing brothers, and died encrusted in an icy cocoon. Bitter, unfeeling night came again, still with no one searching for them. More men died. Men, dead tired, dazed from fatigue, hunger, and thirst, their eyes as heavy with ice as the need for sleep, went down to a clean white bed and never awakened.

  Jack was huddled in the centre of the men in his watch. There was shelter and meagre warmth there. They had been shuffling on their feet all night. Keep on the move. That was the ticket to survival in that hell. Jack removed hardtack from the fingers of a man curled in the fetal position like a sleeping baby. He removed the coat of a man who looked done for and forced it over his own. After a while, he felt warmer. Jack felt no remorse.

  The fleet came looking for them on the morning of the third day, and with the black figures of rescue plain to see on the undulating floe of ice and with the sun beaming down upon them, still men died. Jack staggered aboard a rescue ship on his own feet. He drank tea laced with rum, ate his fill, stood at the rail, and watched the windlass creak as it lifted the dead sealers, frozen together, over the side. For Jack, whose heart had hardened into a temperament that rarely showed pity or empathy, what grieved him most concerning the whole ordeal on the ice was not getting paid one copper for it.

  Two days after they were brought ashore, the dead were all housed in a makeshift morgue. The ailing were taken care of, and those still on their feet stood outside the company warehouse just up from the slovenly docks. They were told that due to a failed hunt they were expected to pay for their kip. Pay for their kip, by Christ! For hardtack bread that could break a man’s teeth, moldy beans, dried cod, salt enough to burn a man’s lips, lumpy bread, tasteless butter, and switchel tea.

  Jack and the others who survived the Newfoundland sealing disaster left for home on a schooner the day after, their names scrawled in red on the company ledgers. Jack had no intention of paying a cent. The widows of those who were left to die on the ice would get the bill for their husbands’ kip by schooner mail.

  That summer, a war started in Europe, which directly involved the British Empire. News of it was slow arriving around the coast of Newfoundland. By midsummer of 1914, men old and young were rallying to the cause. Jack had no intention of fighting anyone’s battles but his own. He continued working for the chandler as culler of fish. Then one day he learned the young man with the red hair, who had been acquitted of drowning his father on the Offer Ground, had joined up and had been shipped “over there” to fight a war no one understood.

  In the year that followed, word trickled back that for many Newfoundlanders the trenches they had dug and from which they were ordered to fight had become their graves. The first Christmas in which the powers that be had predicted an end to the war had long passed. Now the pundits were saying the Hun had gone to ground, had dug in its heels in the Fatherland, and the war to oust them out would go on for years. Many of the soldiers would never come home. Jake, foolish young bugger, would probably be one of them. All the better for what Jack had in mind.

  31

  Becky

  That fall, after Jake left to go to war, was the coldest, most blustery one I could remember. For days, if the wind wasn’t cold and wet blowing in from the sea, it was cold and raw blowing out of the frozen bays. Jake had put firewood in the shed next to the house and in the kitchen for me. As long as I kept the old Comfort stove fired up, it was warm enough. The rest of the house upstairs and down was as cold as an empty twine loft. Except for the kitchen window, ice formed on every pane and had to be breathed on and scraped to see out. And the floors were icy cold. Colder than Jake’s twine loft, for sure, where from time to time I saw smoke rising from the funnel, and sometimes at night lamplight beamed from its lone window.

  It was Jake’s girlfriend who still kept the place looking lived in. I saw her go there a few times. I saw her walk up the trail to the headland of an evening, too, as if keeping watch over the tickle below. I never spoke to her, though, and she didn’t speak to me. No one did.

  I was a stranger among those who, if given a chance, would all be my friends. Snow fell early and stayed. I swept the stoop as clear as I could with the broom. I didn’t own a shovel. The path to the well was used by people from several houses, kept open by the tramp of laden feet, and packed solid by the splashing of brown water from overfilled buckets. It was on that path that I came face to face with Eliza, Jake’s girlfriend, one bitterly cold day in mid-December.

  I was returning from the well with my head down, a wooden bucket on either side of the square hoop causing me to stumble over the slippery path. Eliza was walking toward the well with empty buckets across her own hoop. She had her head down, too, huddled against the cold, and didn’t see me. Our two hoops collided, and most of the water splashed out of my buckets.

  “Why don’t you watch were yer walkin’?” I began in anger. I looked up and saw who it was. Eliza was laughing. It made me all the angrier. “’Tis nothing funny about it, as I can see. Me dress is soaked and will freeze afore I get back to the house.”

  “Forgive me, Mrs.—I mean Rebecca—er . . .” She wasn’t sure how to address me.

  “Me name is Rebecca, and most everyone in the Place calls me Becky, as ye well knows. And I don’t like to be laughed at.”

  “Oh . . . I mean . . . well, I wasn’t laughing at you, Becky, so much as laughing at the situation.”

  “Laughing at me or the situation, ’tis six o’ one and half a dozen of the other.” I stooped for the buckets again and made my way back to the well.

  “I’m sorry I laughed. I will try to explain,” said Eliza. She picked up the long pole with a smaller bucket nailed to its end. After removing the wellhouse’s cover, she dropped the bucket down into the well. The water, all of ten feet below, looked black and smelled rank. She drew it up and poured it into my bucket.

  “I am quite capable of drawin’ me own water,” I said.

  “I know you are, Becky. It’s just that this is like déjà vu to me.”

  “What did you say?” Everyone in the Place knew Eliza read books her father brought home to her every time he sailed to St. John’s. Sometimes she used strange words. She wasn’t snotty about it, though. I didn’t really know her, but I liked the Maid.

  “Oh, sorry! What I meant was our banging our hoops together on the path . . . well . . . it happened to me before. It was when I first spoke to . . . Jake.” Eliza looked shy all of a sudden when she spoke my son’s name, but she continued. “I was coming from the well with the hoops, like you were just now, and I didn’t see him coming up the path lugging a load of firewood on his shoulders. The wood went flying and the water went spilling when we banged into each other.”

  “You like Jake, don’t you?” I asked her directly.

  She answered right away. “Yes, I do. Well, more than that. I love Jake.” For an instant, by the look in Eliza’s eyes, I was sure she was going to ask, Don’t you? I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. The saddest thing about that was I wasn’t sure if I did or not. Not so long ago I would have said no, I didn’t love my son, but now my feelings were changing.

  “Have you heard from him?” Eliza’s question sounded hopeful. I was about to tell her that he would not be writing to me, but then, I didn’t know how much she knew about the relationship I had with my son, so I just told her that no, I hadn’t heard anything.

  “I wrote to him,” she said. “No letter from him, though. Not yet. The war slows everything down, I s’pose. I longs for the mailbag to come ashore. Hates it, too. So many soldiers are dying
over there. And Jake is so young.” Her face looked so sad, it was as if she had already received a letter bearing bad news.

  “Maybe his youth will save him,” I replied, hardly knowing what I had said or why I had said it. It was what I was feeling, though. And right then, standing on slippery ice in the freezing cold, by the well where Jake’s girlfriend had been the first person to draw water for me, I longed for my son’s return. And because I did, I suddenly feared that he would not.

  We walked home with our turn of water. Eliza went on down the path over the hill to her house, and I watched her small form slipping and sliding. The buckets splashed water, making the path even slipperier as she went. That night, for the first time, I blew my breath across my bedroom window and scraped a hole in the frost and peered out. Eliza had a lamp burning in Jake’s twine loft, and I was glad she had. It was a sign that at least one of us was sure of her love.

  Christmas Eve morning was just another day for me. I was washing the few dishes from my breakfast when I heard a scraping sound just outside my door. It was followed by a light tapping. The door opened, and Eliza stood there. Her face was aglow with life, the cold air, and Christmas spirit.

  “I’ve brung you a Christmas tree,” she said gleefully.

  “Oh, I wasn’t going to bother with a tree. I never did like the juniper trees poor Tobe brought home.”

  “I don’t like juniper trees, either. I’ve brung you a fir tree. Only small, it is, but the sweet smell of it makes up for its size. ’Tisn’t much, but seeing as how I can’t get a gift to Jake, it’s my gift to you, Jake’s mother.” Eliza was bubbling over as she pushed the door open wide. And there upon the frozen ground, white with snow, its pin-boughs tinged with frost, was the prettiest little green tree I had ever seen.

  “Gotta go!” Eliza shouted, already running down the path. And I knew she had rushed away before I could deny her wonderful gift. It never came to me to exchange one with her. I had nothing to give her, anyway. I never exchanged Christmas gifts, not anymore. Tobe and I had stopped exchanging Christmas gifts since Jake was born.