As the old folks would say
Page 13
“I am that,” scowled Oberjaun, “and I’m here to teach you a lesson about fairies.”
“Well, have it out of ye,” laughs Abie, thinking it was one of the short Mullownys from across the ridge having a game. “I’m all ears, and I don’t have that much wood to cut, anyway.”
“I’ll give ye one last chance, Abie Dutton. Will you change your errant ways and believe in fairies, so that you can give them the respect they deserve?”
(Under the terms of the Twelfth Compendium, this question must first be asked before any further action is taken.)
At which point, of course, Abie doubles up on the stump, and was a good while laughing. Then he grins a wicked grin, his eyes twinkling. You had to give the short Mullownys as good as they sent.
“Sure, if you’re a fairy, turn me into a frog or something.”
“No, I can’t do that,” Oberjaun replied seriously. “I’m not allowed. But I have been given authority to cast a spell. So don’t say I didn’t warn ye.”4
So saying, Oberjaun mounted a giant fairy cap, danced a number of steps, said something in a very strange Irish dialect while waving his wand in Abie’s direction, then bowed solemnly before hopping down from the fairy cap and disappearing. Abie clapped his hands vigorously in applause, then reverted back to doubling over with laughter, his usual response to anything remotely related to fairies.
He was still laughing as he went to lift his axe to be on his way. But the axe wouldn’t budge, and when Abie peered close, it was actually frozen to the ground.
“But it’s August,” Abie thought. “How can it be frozen . . . ?”
So he grabbed the axe by the haft, and after three or four big yanks, it came free, because of course, fairy tricks are only temporary, and are only meant to torment and irritate, and are not meant to have any kind of permanent result.
Then when he went to cut down a tree, a great big birch, the axe wouldn’t cut. No matter how hard he swung, or how deep he took a breath, or how strong he gripped the haft, the blade just touched the tree and barely scratched the bark.
“I’m tired,” said Abie. “That’s what it is. I shouldn’t have done all those lancers last night at the dance, not getting to bed until four o’clock . . .” And he thought no more about it and went to gather up some old dry branches to take home for firewood. But the branches seemed to have taken root in the ground again, and it was only by tugging with all his might that he could get one free, and he was pretty beat out by the time he got home.
And that’s how it went for Abie as the fairy spell settled over him day by day. He went picking blueberries, and every single berry turned white before his eyes, and he returned home without a single berry in his pail. He went squidding in the punt with his Uncle Martin, and every single squid he caught squirted down his throat, just like in the song, and he had to give up and go ashore, much to the disgust of his Uncle Martin, because squids were fifty cents a hundred and Uncle Martin was planning on loading the boat with his new big dip net.
Day in and day out, as the year went by, no matter what he turned his hand to do, Abie was haunted by the spell. In October he ran out a few lines of trawl, but every time he hauled there was nothing but sculpins on the hooks, and he left the trawl in the water and tied up the boat to the wharf. At the first Christmas party in Uncle Jim Casey’s kitchen, he took up the accordion to play a tune, and the yard filled up with moose and caribou bellowing and stomping, and they had to ask him to stop while they drove all the animals away.
He had to give up playing hockey on Waver’s Pond because every time he shot the puck at the other goal, the puck would curve away and miss, bounce off a rock on the side of the pond, and shoot past him on the way back to go in his own goal, and his team would lose by a big score every time. When the spring came and he had to fence the pasture, the harder he hit the stakes, the more they came up out of the ground.
It was only after he began to see really strange things at night that Abie began to realize that he was in trouble, that maybe the fairies had something to do with it after all. Coming home from the kitchen racket at Aunt Rosie Clanning’s at three o’clock in the morning, the pile of lobster pots by Hap Reardon’s stage turned into a killer whale that began to follow him home, walking on six big legs. A bunch of maiden rays flying over the wharf called to him, asking him if he enjoyed the time at Aunt Rosie’s, and a whole slew of big harbour seals, each with his own fiddle, were playing ’er up on the head of the wharf, while a whole bunch of fish danced and swung their partners.
That’s when he panicked. The sweat was pouring off him as he ran home to wake his mother, who of course knew from the beginning what was going on, and immediately sent him to wake his Aunt Sarah, who would tell him what to do.
Aunt Sarah, dressed in her nightgown with her rollers in her hair, wasted no time in admonishing him.
“I told you, my dear, I told you . . .” she said, shaking her head sorrowfully. “Now what you have to do is go back to that same spot, while it’s still dark, sit on the same ‘whiten’ with your axe laid down exactly as it was the day you met the fairy. You bow your head, close your eyes, and say as loud as you can, ‘I believes in fairies, I believes in fairies . . .’ ten times, right slow. The fairies will hear you, because this time of night they’re walking their circles, and they will come and lift the spell.”
Well, that was all Abie needed to hear.
He grabbed his axe and walked as fast as he could to the grove where he had first seen Oberjaun, followed by the killer whale on his six big legs and the flying maiden rays. He laid his axe by the same spruce stump, then sat on the same “whiten” exactly as Aunt Sarah had commanded. Closing his eyes really tight, he began “I believes in fairies” in a very contrite tone.
Of course the fairies had been watching him come, and were so glad to see a human, especially a human like Abie, to be so repentant, that they converged from all parts of the island in a circle around him, with Queen Raguna again occupying the place of honour on a huge fairy cap to his right. When Abie had finished the tenth “I believes in fairies,” she directed Oberjaun to assume a commanding position on the foremost fairy cap and lift the spell, which he did very quickly with a short incantation and only two waves of the magic wand, which of course is all that is necessary when a human is truly repentant.
Just like that the spell was lifted, the whale and the maiden rays disappeared, and Abie felt very relieved. He shook hands with Oberjaun and some closer fairies, bowed respectfully to Queen Raguna, picked up his axe, and headed home, whistling happily all the way.
And how did things work out after, now that the fairies were his friends? Well, my son. The next year he filled the boat with squids every trip, caught the biggest kind of fish on his trawl, and played that accordion so good everybody in the outport shook their heads in wonder. And as for the hockey the next winter, he scored that many goals on the pond that a scout came down from one of them big teams in Canada and brought him up to Toronto somewhere and he got on a fourth string and saw every game they played that year from the box.
So. Did Abie believe in fairies after that? Well, I suppose he did.
1 Since the relegation of fairies to folklore, fairy caps have been renamed mushrooms and are used mainly now for eating. See also toadstools.
2 The Burin Peninsula fairy circle was not invited since that debacle over the Supreme Council’s decision to ban the changing of animals in stables for fun, a notorious form of mischief that was instituted in County Clare in the early 1800s and was never sanctioned by the great majority of fairies. The Supreme Council felt it imposed too great a hardship on poor families. The Burin Peninsula Circle has refused to this day to honour the ban.
3 Fairies never deal in odd numbers and always count by twos. This is believed to ensure good health and prosperity, and is particularly good for wing strengthening in cold weather.
A SOCIAL VISIT
The car I had at the time was a little blue Viva, which, as those with the least inkling of interest in automobile history would know, was a very, very small car. I mention this fact because the size of the vehicle is central to the story. It was a pretty little car, it had all the features of a toy racer, and I had fallen in love with it the first time I saw it on the lot.
In retrospect, I should have left it there.
Its English manufacturers, no doubt still seeing all of the colonies in the same latitude, had designed an automobile for little old ladies in Florida which they then decided to mail to the merciless young drivers of Newfoundland.
They had never seen a Newfoundland road of the time, much less driven over one, and had totally unprepared the Viva’s fragile construction for the unexplored pothole terrain that passed for our Newfoundland road system of the time. Within weeks I had to replace parts that I had never heard of, much less pronounce with a Conception Bay accent.
My love affair with the little blue Viva ended just six months after purchase, and I traded it in on a much more solidly constructed Chevy product. This latter adaptation of a mini Russian tank treated the potholes with true mainland contempt, but needed the resources of two Arab emirates pumping daily just to keep it idling.
I never had much luck with cars.
That is the sad side of the story of the little blue Viva; but there were brighter moments, and the brightest, or at least the funniest, happened one day during March, St. Paddy’s Day, in fact, and it happened right in my own driveway, which was what we were now calling that part of the yard just inside the gate. It was parked there while I killed some time waiting for the dance to begin at the Velvet Horn Club, which wouldn’t be until ten o’clock.
You wouldn’t have had to kill time like that ten years before, I’ll guarantee you that. Then, dances started around eight o’clock. You pretty well had to walk everywhere you went, and that would sometimes mean an hour to the farthest communities. Before you set out you would need to spend a considerable amount of time washing the contours of your body with a very small cloth from an even smaller pan of water.
However, modern technology in the form of shower heads and automobiles had resolved these more primitive problems and provided us with immensely more time to waste and, by a strange quirk of social evolution, less time to dance at the same time.
However, we Newfoundlanders are an extraordinarily adaptable people, and have never refused the benefits of modernization, which in my case included a technological disaster for a car and nice new fancy labels on the same old black rum.
So there I was, sitting in the comfort of my parents’ living room, celebrating the holiday in a leisurely sort of way. I had just finished clearing away the last of the snow from Sheila’s Brush and was drinking hot black rum with sugar, pretending to stare at a black-and-white television so I wouldn’t be staring at my very attractive neighbour who was sitting on the other end of the sofa.
We were roughly the same age, and years of visiting with her parents—who were friends of my parents—had fostered a mutual fondness which I continued to misinterpret as I grew older. Everybody else, including her, considered our being together as simple friendship, but in my case it was becoming serious temptation.
I mean, friendship was an appropriate word when she was eleven years old, missing front teeth, and throwing snowballs. At nineteen, outrageously good-looking from head to toe, and sitting just feet away on the same sofa, she was now, and could definitely become—as the old people would say—“cause for confession.” Fortunately, I was mercifully rescued from the dangers of temptation by a thunderous stamping of feet and a roaring “Happy St. Patrick’s Day to ye . . .” from the direction of the back porch—I’m sorry, the rear entrance.
* * * *
The reverberations along the canvas floor and through the warmth of the kitchen wood stove conveyed an image of something huge and powerful about to clomp into the kitchen, like an overweight Clydesdale or a very confused bull moose. I immediately had visions of Belle, the monstrous sheepish horse which my stepfather had bought the summer before, who insisted on coming straight into the kitchen if you weren’t standing on cue on the doorstep with her daily ration of homemade bread and molasses.
Since I knew Belle was securely tethered in her stall contentedly munching oats—and since she had never been known to express good wishes to anybody in any language—the only other creature that I knew capable of making such a racket was Tiny Morton.
Tiny’s real name was William Joseph Morton. He had been nicknamed Tiny in accordance with that transplanted, perverse Irish tradition which sought to draw attention to something by denoting its exact opposite. Tiny, by repute—nobody had ever weighed him, even at birth (they couldn’t find a scale that could take the weight)—was three hundred and eighty-five pounds, and didn’t extend upward so much as outward toward every known point of the compass, giving the onlooker the impression of a colossal molasses vat on tree trunks.
When you count the layers of clothes that his generation wore to keep warm and cover it all with a thick Arctic parka which had been sent by his son from Greenland, you can imagine that he had extreme difficulty navigating the narrow Newfoundland outport doors of the time.
Now I must declare at the beginning that one had absolutely nothing to fear from Tiny Morton, on St. Patrick’s Day, or any other time, for that matter. Like most really big men, he seemed accepting of his size and strength, and he had never been known to lift a hand to anyone.
Tiny was your big old Newfoundland dog.
No doubt he could bark if he wanted to, but he was never known to. He just lived his life doing his work in his slow, easy way, rearing his family and minding his own business. Like most men of his generation, he worked hard at fish and woods and gardens, drank only on festive occasions, and moved among his neighbours quietly.
Except at times like St. Patrick’s Day.
Then outport custom permitted him to leave his diminutive wife at home and “coast,” as they used to describe it, from house to house, visiting and drinking and doing what today they call socializing. He could drink a puncheon, but he could hold his liquor, and he never got out of the way.
As a general rule with most outport men, what was in sober came out drunk. Which in most cases meant that you were sometimes surprised when a normally well-behaved gentleman of the community acted totally out of character and got on with a lot of stuff everybody would just as soon forget immediately thereafter. Like the time George Madden, the outport’s really big merchant and a veritable pillar of the church—and a normally quiet, serious man—drank a full bottle of Saint Pierre rum, wrapped a big brin bag around his waist as a grass skirt—over his topcoat—held a mop behind his head to simulate hair, then stood on the coffee table and tried to emulate a hula dancer he once saw perform in New York—while the accordion was playing a step dance for Jimmy O’Toole, in front of a whole kitchen full of Christmas visitors.
In Tiny’s case, it happened in reverse. The more he drank, the more cheerful he became. The normally surly look would disappear, his entire visage would soften, and he would become increasingly infused with an intense desire to enjoy himself.
Then, he would sing.
Not that people wanted him to, or asked him to, or encouraged him, like they would, say, Tom O’Reilly or Hannah O’Toole—they had voices like nightingales.
Those who had been unfortunate enough to have heard Tiny sing before fervently prayed that he would never sing again. But sing he would. He really loved to sing, and when he was drinking he desperately wanted to
sing. The problem was that, for all the tea in China, he couldn’t.
He didn’t have a note to call his own.
When he did sing, in deference to his person and size, people respectfully listened, and the gathering tried as best they could to weather his contribution to the moment without losing their hearing—or their sanity—in the process.
Women crossed their arms and sat in patience, gently rocking to and fro, every now and then stroking their foreheads in silent prayer, while the men bowed their heads and muttered feigned encouragement, all the while exchanging anxious glances for fear that he would actually finish the song.
Thankfully, owing to his poor memory, the effects of the alcohol, and the length of the ballad in question, he rarely did. The older people said he used to do a tolerable job with “Johnny on the Reef” when he was younger, with its thirty-two verses and chorus after every verse and all that, but that was before my time.
There was no musical accompaniment to help him on—or drown him out, as the case might be. The accordion, like the violin, was only used for dancing, and the guitar, so prevalent today, had not yet caught on in Newfoundland homes.
Not that it would make any difference, since it would tax the combined talents of a roomful of European composers to follow the unpredictable cadences, abrupt time changes, and outright bellowing which constituted Tiny’s rendering of any of his oft-sung repertoire.
When he was drunk, he loved to sing, but the stark fact remained that he couldn’t. Yet, much to the despair of any hapless person unfortunate enough to be caught within kitchen space throughout the performance, he fervently insisted on doing so.
* * * *
So here he was, the full of our back porch, well on from tumblers of black rum he had just downed at Simon Flynn’s, and bellowing like the siren of a coastal boat lost in the fog in Placentia Bay.