Mary adjusted the bandana around her face, washed her hands in the pan on the oven door, and cursed the futile efforts ahead of her as she glanced around at the eleven remaining people spread out in the kitchen and the pantry. Would the doctor be able to help any of them?
She touched her mother’s brow, and her emotions suddenly pushed through. “Mom, I wish you’d tell me what to do. I wish you could hang on. Please wake up. Please show me. You’ve helped so many here in this house over the last forty years, and yet it comes to this. Why did you have to try to help those men from the boat? Why did Da bring them here? God help me. I can’t do this anymore.” Mary’s whispered pleas were broken by her mother’s cough. The gurgling sound she heard from her mother made Mary gasp. She knew her mother would be the twelfth person carried out of their home since the three strangers were first brought in. The tears she wanted to shed for Da could come later, and she forced her emotions under control. Mary was going to do her best, but she knew her best wasn’t good enough, just like her mother’s hadn’t been. She was still going to try.
From her perch atop the old wooden fence, Mary Rourke glanced around before swinging her right leg over the last rung. Her dark wool stockings hitched on a weathered knot as she worked her faded blue skirts to sit on the rail. Moments later, she jumped the few feet to the pasture below. Not very ladylike. Mary, however, didn’t feel like a lady today. As a matter of fact, she didn’t feel like a lady most days.
The tall hay had been crushed over the winter, leaving a tangled network of dried grass to grab and tug on the toes and laces of her worn brown leather moccasins as she trudged through Alice’s Garden toward town.
Alice’s Garden was a beautiful, five-acre, fenced meadow on top of the ridge, fronting on the trail to North Harbour. Mary never knew who Alice was but suspected she had been some long-dead relative. There was an old, abandoned, rundown barn at the back corner of the grounds near where Mary left the woods. Sometimes a barn owl high in the rafters would bid her hello from inside, but today there was silence.
Mary liked to go beyond the trail, deeper into the woods, the less-travelled places where she felt more adventurous, providing the excitement that was sadly missing in her otherwise mundane, task-filled days. She liked to be alone, and it was out here that she did her deepest thinking. She was used to her own company, and it suited her just fine.
If her father, David Rourke, were still here, this acreage would have been mowed. Instead, the land was left to the elements with only Mary’s tracks to interfere with the beauty of spring’s perfectly sculpted and wild landscape. The woods would easily swallow any sign of her movements. However, her intrusion would stand out in the meadow until the next storm—almost as if she had disturbed the first fall of snow.
By going into the woods and pushing the physical boundaries that chained her existence, Mary felt more alive. Her walks gave her time to think—not about what she needed to do to survive—just think. Atop her mind were thoughts of Da. Today would have been his birthday, and for Mary the loss was almost physical, as if a heavy shackle weighted her heart as she tried to picture what he would be like today, and what the day would be like with him in it. Two birthdays without him, and it didn’t get any easier.
The ache of loneliness, coupled with some unknown internal force that she couldn’t quite figure out, was driving her farther and farther into the woods for longer periods of time. As one day stretched unremarkably into the next and the next, inner peace was becoming more elusive. The walk today, as with every other, was to try and clear her head and find what she was desperately seeking, as if by magic an answer would appear in the deep recesses of the forest. Then again, she hardly knew what the questions were, so finding the answers was difficult.
At twenty-eight she was a spinster. Most of her friends were married and raising youngsters by now. Not Mary. Maybe that’s what was missing—the chaos that came with children and the busyness of married life. Or perhaps the secret looks between wives and husbands that put the smiles on the ladies in town.
With two other Marys in the community, everyone called her Mary Ro—short for Rourke. Mary John and Mary Will had names symbolizing a belonging of sorts. Mary John was two years younger than she and had married John Dalton several years prior. Mary Will was her age and had married Will Power almost nine years ago. Mary Ro would have been “Mary Peter” if things had worked out as she thought they would a number of years back. The fact was, she belonged to no one.
As she marched through the meadow, over-accentuating her steps to keep from falling, she thought about Peter Nolan. Her Peter. At least he was her Peter before he went to sea. However, he came back as somebody else’s Peter—Martha Walker’s Peter! From England, no less!
It hurt terribly at first, and people in town avoided her gaze for a while when rumours spread of his return with his betrothed. In a small town, rumours were easy. It was the pity she saw in their faces that was hard.
When he came to see her, to beg her forgiveness, she was angry and more hurt than she’d ever been. For the first time their words were heated, and she threw him out, not willing to listen. Her heart was shattered irreparably, or so she believed. If it was possible to fracture your soul, she had done it that day.
Her parents had been furious at Peter and refused to let her go to him when she calmed down. As she thought of all his letters, she realized that they had been very loving at first, but then they seemed to become more distant and impersonal. At the time, she blamed the change on their separation and anything but a new love.
Peter moved to St. John’s and married within the week. She hadn’t seen him since. Mary heard they had a little boy—probably several children by now. Although she had very little news about him since leaving that fateful, earth-turned-upside-down day, the ache never went away.
Unable to see him or talk to him, she chose instead to let time take care of the hurt and loneliness. That plan had failed miserably. She was lonelier now than she had been those ten years ago, with nothing to fill that void except long walks and, of course, her books.
Mary Ro: a girl past her prime. Her chance of becoming somebody else’s Mary was now long gone. That made Mary sad, but she wasn’t the first spinster in the town and probably wouldn’t be the last. It was still possible to be courted by a widower with small children to be reared, but Mary wasn’t set on her life going in that direction either. Although she had a few men come around in the last couple of years, most thought her to be too independent. She had not really been open to seeing anybody since Peter left, and her time had run its course. She had secluded herself from everyone in the community.
In recent times, she had thought the townsfolk liked it that way because she was a stark reminder of the terrible loss they had suffered. At other times, she knew this not to be true because the community tried to rally around her. Like over the past winter, when she found five horseloads of dried wood by the barn. She couldn’t refuse it because she needed it to survive. Not that she could have anyway because, as if by magic, it had been there when she came back from a walk.
The girls she went to school with in John’s Pond had long married with lives of their own, most of them moving to other communities or busy with family life where she didn’t fit in. Her brother Brian lived close by and tried his best for her, but she made it difficult. She insisted on her own independence, especially as her brother had a wife and young children of his own to feed.
Stumbling in the web of dried grasses, Mary chided herself for not paying attention and quickened her pace up the hillside toward home. The quiet calmness that blanketed the land slowly pulled back as she neared the top of the meadow. Masts from the schooners in the harbour came into view—she counted twelve—the harbour was nearly full to capacity. Gulls circled and screamed in anticipation of what was to come, and Mary began to hear their cries and the busy sounds of the wharf penetrating the tranquility, even from this dist
ance.
Spring storms and pack ice off shore had kept the single- and double-masted vessels closer to the harbour with day trips and small catches of cod. Tomorrow would be the first trip of the year to the Grand Banks.
From the crest of the hill, John’s Pond spread out before her on a canvas of spring colours. The grass was browned and yellow in many places, but countless shades of green were starting to show where the meadows had been mowed the year before. The deep green mantle would overtake all the other colours with a few days of sun; it would creep into the mud caused by foot traffic around houses and barns and blend into the landscape until the hay began to grow. Then the daisies, dandelions, buttercups, and bluebells would take over, splashing the meadows with whites, purples, yellows, and blues. The view overlooking the expanse of the town was spectacular: depending on the time of day, Mary loved coming to this very spot, sometimes just to marvel at the busyness or quietude.
The town got its name from two sources: John Linehan, the first settler in the area in the 1700s, and the narrow, half-mile-long pool of water that stretched lengthwise between the beach and shoreline. At high tide the salt water flowed through at one end, technically an estuary, but when the tide was low, the beach raggedly framed a formed pond. Townsmen had built a wooden bridge across the gut to give access during high tide, but many found it shorter to use the strand, especially when wearing their long rubber boots since the water wasn’t too deep.
The town of John’s Pond stretched along the edge of St. Mary’s Bay, with houses rimming both sides of the pond and hemming the coastline. The beach was lined with weathered flakes for drying fish, stages for storing it, and small wooden slipways; the far side of the pond had fenced meadows—two and three deep—right to the edge of the woods.
The lone community wharf jutting out into the bay was crowded with crewmen and skippers loading stores for their first big cod fishing trip of the season. The worn grey wooden beams and planks, bleached by sun and salt water, buoyed the weight of the community on the blue, glass-calm sea.
Although some fish would be eaten or dried for home use, most of this first catch would be traded with merchants for long-awaited summer bulk provisions of flour, sugar, salt, and molasses. If the journey was fruitful, the catch would be salted for sale to agents in St. John’s and destined for the markets of Boston and New York. The fishery kept most of the communities from starving in the winter. It was vital to their survival in one way or another, either through trade for provisions or fish for the tables.
As her eyes scanned the area, she momentarily settled on the centrepiece of the community—the church with its white steeple standing straight and tall above the felted roofs of the two-storey houses that dotted the shores of the pond and the bay. The church served for Catholic gatherings when the parish priest came through every month or two and as a meeting place during the weeks when there were things for the menfolk of the town to talk about.
Farther south, the new schoolhouse stood empty for the summer, as evidenced by the young boys and girls skirting here and there among the fishermen, trawl tubs, and brine barrels, and adding to the muddle on the wharf.
The old building where she had gone to school had been destroyed four years before. It had outlived its usefulness. A new one had been built to make room for the growing population. Her paternal grandfather had been instrumental in establishing the initial school by creating two classrooms in a house left vacant after the owner died.
Mary’s mother, Dorothy, more commonly called Dot, was eighteen years old when she met Mary’s father. He was twenty and had broken his leg in a fall on a schooner in St. John’s. Da was brought to the Riverhead Hospital for treatment, where her mother worked as a nurse. They were married less than a year later and moved to John’s Pond two months before Mary’s eldest sister was born.
Her mother had helped Da learn to read and write and was a big part of their education growing up, keeping Brian, who took after their father with his light hair and big stature, in school long past when most boys his age had quit to go fishing. She had insisted her girls continue their education in Mount Carmel to complete grades ten and eleven at the larger school. None of her other six classmates had to go—their parents had been content with their daughters having a grade nine education. Her mother, an educated woman herself, had insisted she finish high school—although it was of little use to her now. Mary boarded with an older, childless couple in Mount Carmel. Mr. and Mrs. Dinn had been good to her. Mary came home for Christmas and during the summer. Da always came for her. He rowed across the bay as far as the Tickles and walked the four miles from there to Mount Carmel. She almost missed Christmas the first year in grade ten because of a winter storm when ice was prematurely forming on the bay. But Da had made it. Da always made it for her.
When her parents married and moved to John’s Pond, her mother continued nursing and also became the midwife. Over the years, her mother had taught Mary much of the nursing practice, beginning when she was only twelve. She always said that Mary was the only one of her children with a mind for medicine. Her mother wished that she, herself, had better skills when things went wrong.
After the unhappy events of last winter, Mary discontinued her nursing practice. She wasn’t good enough to save all of them, and she was not willing to disappoint anyone else—and that included herself. The last year had been difficult, to say the least.
The community was big. There were almost sixty houses in John’s Pond, and maybe 400 residents. Barns and stables in several shades of cracked red paint on grey weathered boards scattered throughout the meadows beyond the mostly dull, white-coloured houses. The fishing stages lay half empty of bounty on the seashore, waiting to be filled with stacks of dried cod. Smaller skiffs and punts had been hauled up, their owners on the wharf getting ready to sign on with the schooners.
Northward, the Linehan Lobster Cannery, another lifeline for the residents, lay empty and still. In September, when the schooners were on the Labrador and skiffs launched once again, its production line would restart. Mary worked there during the spring fishery from April to June and would be one of the many female workers employed at the cannery from late July to mid-September. Mary usually worked in the boiler area where the lobsters were cooked. It was hot there, but generally it meant she finished earlier than the workers farther along the production line who sealed the meat in the cans. Mary was employed there for more than ten years since returning from school in Mount Carmel.
While the men were on the water, their women worked hard all day at the cannery before going home to tend to the houses, stables, and gardens. Sometimes the cannery attracted migrant workers from around the bay—mostly men who were unable to get a berth on one of the schooners or had no fishing enterprise themselves. Occasionally, their women came, too—and older children if they were of working age, as young as thirteen or fourteen. During the break when the cannery was closed, many returned home to their families to start or tend their own gardens. When the cannery reopened, the workers would return and finish out the season.
Mary needed the money and was especially grateful for the job on the canning line. With the passing of her parents the year before in February 1891, Mary struggled to meet the upkeep requirements of the big two-storey saltbox house that they had left her. Her heart seemed to skip a beat each time she thought of them.
Diphtheria had hit with a vengeance, infecting the people of John’s Pond and the surrounding communities, taking her parents in its wake. Thinking of how sick her parents had been, Mary almost wept, but held it in, allowing only a few tears to escape.
The disease wracked the community in the early spring of 1891, when a cure had finally been discovered. The remoteness of the area and the vast numbers of communities only accessible by water on the island of Newfoundland prevented a timely arrival by the doctor. Some said John’s Pond had been lucky. At least they fared better than North Harbour, which saw many m
ore instances of the disease. The sick in John’s Pond were brought to Mary’s house, where her mother normally tended to patients. In the neighbouring community of North Harbour, it was more spread out with no central place for the sick to be treated. Entire families were almost wiped out there.
The Ryans in particular were hard hit. Mr. Peter and Mrs. Helena Ryan had to care for their children, only to lose many of them over several days. Members of the community built coffins and handed them in through the window to the poor man. One by one, Mr. Peter placed five of his children in separate pine boxes, nailed them shut, and applied tar to the seams before passing them back outside for quick burial. The doctor arrived in time to save some of the younger children by using a procedure to “open their throats,” but it was too late for the rest of the Ryans. With the need being greater in North Harbour, the doctor stayed there to tend the sick. By the time he crossed the Point to John’s Pond, it was too late for her parents, but he managed to save some of the others under her care.
When Mary thought of the Ryans, she realized that although she had lost her parents, she was lucky to still have her brother Brian and his family residing in the community. Refusing his offer to live with them, Mary chose to stay in her family home. It was up to her to make that choice work.
More than a decade before, her three older sisters had gone to Boston to work and hadn’t been back. Although they wrote often and sent her packages, Mary was sure, with the death of her parents, they would never return.
That was life here. Children grew up and married in the community or moved to St. John’s, or even Boston for work; eventually they married, having families of their own. Some girls she went to school with had wed into neighbouring communities after meeting a beau in the cannery and had never returned. Some met their husbands when they went to keep house for relatives on Colinet Island; some ventured as far away as Admiral’s Beach or Branch when distant relatives needed help with children and chores. Most of the men who were born here stayed and built homes and married local, allowing the community to flourish. However, for the girls from John’s Pond, the world beyond the seashore seemed like an abyss, claiming those who ventured into the void.
Being Mary Ro Page 2