by Gary Collins
I tied the small fir tree to the same nails in the corner where Tobe had tied the juniper trees. I remembered telling him I hated juniper trees. Every Christmas after that, just to spite me, he would cut the biggest one he could fit in the corner.
I had the traditional meal of salt dried cod, well-watered, for my supper. Boiled with potatoes laced with butter, the golden codfish separating in wide flakes of flavour made my Christmas Eve feast. Jake was shareman with the Skipper, and he had made sure I was to be taken care of with fish and other staples in his absence. Skipper Guy had informed me of that. It meant little to me at the time. But now I stared at the tree, and for the first time, I wept with the joy of sharing Christmas with someone, even though they were absent.
February, the month of winter snow, came and proved its reputation with back-to-back blizzards from the northeast. The house creaked. The winds moaned dismally around the eaves and found seams only a winter wind can find. Snow piled up against the house and seeped into cracks. I added heavy quilts to my bed. I struggled to keep warm and seldom left the warmth of the kitchen stove. And through all of that bitter time my larder never lacked food. My woodbox was always filled. Jake, whom I had raised in hate, and who now might even be dead, had repaid me with love.
The shipping season was long since over, and no schooners came to our harbour. We received no news at all of the war. Then one day I noticed a look of dread on Eliza’s face I had not seen before. She was worried about Jake, I thought. No news is good news was meaningless to the one who waited. We still didn’t talk much, only in passing, usually at the well, but I sensed something was different about her.
Then came the day when Eliza was making her way through deep snow up the path to the lookout above the tickle. Nothing would keep her from going up there. I watched her struggling more than she usually did. Her lithe frame appeared thicker, and her coat seemed a tighter fit. Eliza was pregnant. That explained the uneasy look on her face. I was sure of it and just as sure she was carrying Jake’s child. I, who had not been a mother, would be a grandmother.
32
Time betrayed Eliza’s condition, and all too soon there was no hiding her pregnancy from anyone. She was the talk of the Place. Capelin time prevailed, when cod chased the baitfish right to the land and men fished with cod traps from dawn to dusk. The work was endless. Small plots of fertile ground had to be sewed and fertilized with capelin. With her growing belly, Eliza worked flake and garden like everyone else. The days of blistering summer heat came. The fishing slowed to handline and jigger, but the work of self-sustenance went on. And I watched the life inside Eliza’s womb grow.
The days of gossiping about her condition were over. Everyone knew she was with child. Everyone knew who the father was. Eliza told them it was Jake and that when he returned from the war they would marry. By now even the staunchest churchgoer seldom mentioned the sin of fornication. Even if such a person did, they were paid no mind. Everyone loved Jake. They always had. The only ones in the Place who hadn’t loved him were his father, who was dead, and me, his mother, who had just started living. And maybe it was too late for me.
One evening in late August, with dark on her shoulder, I saw Eliza stumble bowlegged back to the path from the lookout, clutching her belly, and I knew her time was near. As I watched, she disappeared into her parents’ house, and a moment later her father came bursting out and ran down the path in the direction of the midwife’s house. Sixteen years since she had brought my Jake into the world, Aunt Jane, still living alone, still spry, still with us, was still the go-to for everything medicinal. My Jake! I didn’t remember ever thinking about him that way before. The thought was a pleasant one.
Not long after, from my chair by the window, I saw Aunt Jane come blustering up the path with her bag of mystery swinging from her hand. Eliza’s father, clearly winded, couldn’t keep up with her. For the first time in a great many years I wanted to go to someone’s side. I wanted to be part of something again. But I stayed looking from my window with my lamp burning until dawn.
A few minutes after the day was broad upon the land, I watched Aunt Jane, her face beaming, walk triumphantly back to her home on the point. What a gift to the Place she was, I thought. On the heels of that, I wondered what her opinion was of me, who had not kept well the guard of the red-headed boy she had coaxed from my womb.
Eliza’s birthing had been hard, but two hours before our grey home island rose out of the sea into a new dawn, she had brought a new life into our world. It was a boy, and soon every house in the Place was abuzz with the news. Everyone knew it was Jake’s son. There was no doubt about it. Eliza’s son had a shock of red hair resembling his father’s.
The rumours began, of course, as they always did, about a young girl bearing a bastard child. But because Jake and Eliza were to marry, the wagging tongues were soon hushed, as they should be. I went for a turn of water from the well every day. It was all I needed for my daily needs. Even on Monday, washday, I only needed two turns of water. Eliza didn’t come to the well for water for a few days. Her mother fetched their turns of water. She never spoke to me, and I didn’t speak to her.
It was one of those late warm summer evenings when twilight lingers long that I saw Eliza making her way up the path to her lookout. She was carrying a bundle in her arms wrapped in a blanket. The Maid was taking her boy up to look out over the tickle and the wide sea beyond.
I walked up the path a ways, hoping to find the courage to keep on the path. But I only got as far as where the narrow path widened into a well-used trail. The way led past No Denial Rock, and I only needed a glimpse of it to stop me in my tracks. My head was suddenly filled with stark images of despair, shame, revulsion, and hate for the red-haired man. I grew giddy and fled weeping back along the path to home.
The warmth of summer was leaving. It was that time of year we called the liners, when gales of wind could come blowing up from any direction. The fishing slowed, but the work did not. There were vegetables to pull from the ground and firewood to be clove and stacked against a cold winter. The summer’s voyage of fish had to get to market. Culling time.
With every schooner that showed itself on the horizon, after all these years I still expected it to come sailing up our tickle and enter our harbour with Redjack the Culler lounging at the taffrail. Even though I knew the Skipper took his sharemen’s catch of dried cod to Greenspond in the trap skiff, and even though I knew the other fishermen in the Place dealt with a fairer merchant than the chandler, I still feared he would return.
A few pigs fattened with cod’s heads, fish offal, and capelin, were stuck by the swarthy fellow who was good with a dagger. Using vats of boiling water, the scant hair was scalded from their hides, and their meat, pink and succulent, carried by children, was shared around the Place. Schools of squid showed up on the squid-jigging grounds, and I thought of Jake. Tobe always took him squid jigging and relished the boy’s cries when the burning squid juice squirted in his eyes. Tobe loved forcing him to eat fried squid, too, knowing Jake couldn’t abide the taste of it. To my shame I did little to aid the boy in these matters.
Hooks baited with squid on trawl or handline was the game now. The fish had moved farther off shore and were harder to catch, but they were fatter, better-tasting fish, and were cured mostly for personal winter food.
What was likely the last of the season’s schooners had come and gone late one evening with the dark falling early. I had seen the punt row out to the tickle for the mailbag. The schooner had hardly shortened sail. We were truly isolated for several long months again. I hated the feeling and wished, as I always did, I could go away with the schooner.
The next morning I was cleaning up the few dishes from my breakfast when the door to my kitchen opened, and Eliza appeared with her boy cradled in her arms.
“Jake has been shot!” she cried out, and I fell back against the door jamb.
“Dead?” I asked, fearing her
reply.
“No! Dear God, no! Not dead. Not yet. Wounded, is all,” Eliza sobbed.
“How . . . where . . .” I stammered.
Eliza interrupted me. “A letter came in the mailbag last evening. From an officer of his regiment. He was shot in a place called Suvla Bay and is now recuperating in a hospital in Alexandria.”
Eliza’s boy whimpered. She pulled the blanket back to offer her son his dumb tit, and I saw the face of my grandson for the first time. My God, it was the same as looking at baby Jake! The puckered mouth, the same full eyes the colour of shallow sea water. The same flush of red hair. I forced my eyes away from his tender face.
“Where are Suvla Bay and Alexandria? And what else did it say?” I asked, unsure of my feelings just then.
“Suvla Bay is in Turkey, I think. Alexandria is in Egypt, that I know. That’s all it said. No more. Oh God! The schooner skipper told the b’ys who went out for the mailbag that the soldiers in the trenches over there are dying more from their wounds than from the bullets that wounded them. The letter was posted weeks ago, all kinds of foreign stamps on it. And Jake so young. He might already be dead!”
Eliza shuddered at the thought of it, and her legs grew so weak I thought she would collapse. I went to her side to steady her and with the contact felt the slight form of the baby, who had fallen asleep. I caught the sweet warm baby smell of him. The Maid quickly recovered, and I tore myself away.
“Maybe his youth will save him,” I said again. And still not knowing where that had come from or why I had said it, I continued. “You said yourself the letter was sent months ago. Probably got mislaid with all that’s happening over there. If Jake was dead we would have received official word by telegraph to St. John’s and the mail sent here.” I believed it myself.
“Oh! Oh my! I hadn’t thought about it that way, Becky. Maybe you’re right. Oh, how I wish Jake had not gone off to that bloody war!”
My mind was addled. A few minutes ago, before I had seen my grandson, I would have agreed with her. But the sight of the boy’s red hair had rattled me. Why couldn’t I get past the boy’s innocence? Both boys’ total innocence? I had no answers and wasn’t sure if I wanted any.
We were still standing in the doorway, and I could see Eliza’s arms were aching. It was not a feeling I had experienced much—I had seldom held my sleeping child. Put back and not kissed, Tobe had shouted at Jake. It was a cruel thing to say. Even more so when it was true. I hung my head in shame as if Eliza could read my thoughts.
“You can come into the kitchen, you know,” I said. She walked in and sat at the table. I closed the door and sat opposite her. She still held the baby. “There’s a blanket at the head of the daybed.” I motioned with my head. Eliza nodded, left the table, placed the boy on the daybed, and tucked him under the blanket before returning to her chair.
“Cuppa tea?” I ventured, not sure if I wanted her to accept. She said she would love a cup, and I went to the stove to prepare it.
“They’re after me to baptize the boy, you know,” she said to my back as I fetched cups from the floor cupboard, poured hot water over the live tea in the teapot, and settled it on the hot part of the stove to steep.
All of us who lived on the isolated coasts knew the importance of having a baby baptized soon after birth. The cemetery on the hill overlooking the west end of the tickle held many small graves. There was more illness to claim the young than there was the old. And God would not take an unbaptized child into His fold.
“Are you going to?” I asked.
“They won’t do it without me naming the boy. The baptismal must have a name, they said. And I won’t name him without Jake’s say,” Eliza replied with a tone that was final. “I call him Little Jake for now. Besides, my boy is perfectly healthy.”
The teapot burbled, and I removed it from the stove. I poured tea for both of us into cups I used for company. They hadn’t seen much use. We took sugar from an earthen crock sparingly. Sugar was expensive.
“There’s partridgeberry jam and fresh bread,” I offered.
“Not now,” she replied. It sounded like there would be more visits. I wasn’t good at this.
“Have you ever written Jake?” I queried. My voice sounded accusatory for some reason.
“Of course I have!” Eliza had sensed my tone.
“Does he know about the boy?”
“No. We were told not to write them of family problems. The soldiers have enough problems of their own to deal with, they said.”
“So, he doesn’t know he has a son?” I looked to the daybed, where Jake’s son was still sleeping.
“No, he doesn’t.”
I did some quick figuring. “He didn’t know you . . .”
“No, he didn’t. I didn’t know, either, when he left.” Eliza was embarrassed. “Oh God, how I love him!” The Maid burst into tears. And I wept with her.
33
Eliza didn’t come to my door every day that winter, but the wind and snow did. The older ones in the Place said they had never seen such a winter. I figured they had poor memories. To me, all the winters were bad. Six months of imprisonment on an island bereft of all life save for those who clung to it out of sheer necessity or pure stubbornness. I lived between stove and bed, and save for the outhouse and the well, I rarely venture outside. There was nowhere to go. Eliza still walked daily, when the weather permitted, to look over the sea for her lover.
Winter felt like it would never end. The Skipper brought me eider ducks hunted from gazes out on the points and turrs hunted from punts. I baked them until dark flesh separated from white bone in the oven, and I made gravy to pour over vegetables brought from the cellar. I ate alone. My needs were simple and few, and I lived well.
The long and hungry month of March came. Flour barrels required longer arms. The eyes of potatoes below the pound boards in the cellar turned seedy. And the blink from the approaching Arctic ice floes was suddenly bold on the north horizon.
The fishermen turned to hunting seals that came within reach of our island again and brought carcasses rich in fat and protein ashore and shared with all. It was the first meat I had eaten all winter, and though I was not a lover of seal meat, I relished the first roast I pulled from my oven. No one in the Place went to the seal hunt in the big ships that year. The cold weather lingered into spring. We had survived another winter, but for me, slow was the wait.
Eliza went up the path to the lookout more regularly with the warming evenings, and she often took her boy with her. The first of the schooners came by with supplies, news about the war, and our months-old mail. Things were not going good “over there.” Thousands of men had died. The British had retreated from Suvla Bay in Gallipoli during the winter.
And there was a letter for Eliza. It wasn’t what she had expected. The letter she had sent to the war office—to Jake—last fall had been returned. The envelope was covered with stamps of countries from Newfoundland to Egypt. Jake couldn’t be found. To Eliza it meant one thing. Jake was dead, and she was inconsolable. I felt betrayed. I had been sure that when Jake came home from the war I would be able to mend the garments I had torn. Strange thing was, though, I still couldn’t find the courage to thread the needle here at home.
The season of fishing started again, as it must. Nothing had changed with that. Nothing could change. Eliza still kept her lookout on the hill by day, and lamplight spilled from the twine loft window at night.
Then one dark evening when Eliza was walking to the twine loft holding Little Jake by the hand and trying to get him to walk, I nodded to her and she came near. The boy reached out for me, but I pretended not to notice.
“No schooner in this evening?” I asked, as I always did.
“No.” Eliza sighed a great sigh. The girl was suffering, and it showed on her pretty face. She looked older than her years. “I thought I saw a strange punt with a leg o’ mutton s
ail on her come up through the tickle. Didn’t see her in the harbour, though,” she said.
“Probably one of the fishermen from the backside of the island making a shortcut up through the tickle,” I said.
“Yes, must be,” she agreed. Eliza shrugged Little Jake higher on her shoulder. Walking away, she called back, “Good night, Becky.”
“Good night, Eliza,” I called back. I didn’t know why I hadn’t wished good night to Little Jake. Turning to my door, I was sure I saw a faint light in the harbour below. A wind had come up. Some fisherman was checking his boat moorings, I thought. I entered the house and closed the door. The snick of a door latch is loud in a room when you are alone.
At the table I worked for a while on a pair of socks I was knitting for Little Jake. I found the clack of the needles soothing at night. I didn’t tell Eliza I was knitting them. I wasn’t even sure how to go about giving them to my grandson. Ironically, the wool I was using was red. Redder than Little Jake’s hair. I couldn’t explain why I had chosen a colour I hated so much. It made no sense, yet I had chosen it.
There came a sudden loud knocking on my kitchen door. I was so startled I lost a stitch and stabbed a finger with one of the needles. No one ever knocked on doors in the Place. I didn’t know what to do. I was suddenly afraid. Who could it be? It wasn’t Eliza. She wouldn’t knock. No, it wasn’t Eliza—it was a man’s knock. I was sure of it.
The knock came again, and still I was unable to bring myself to answer it. In desperation, not knowing what else to do, I blew out the light. I had hardly moved a muscle since the first knock on my door. The needles and knitting were still in my hands. I heard a heavy shuffling of boots outside the door and gasped when I realized the sound was fading down the hill toward the harbour. I hadn’t even known I was holding my breath.