Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  “Serve ya right, Ned Andrews! Rammed in too many fingers a powder, ya stunned arse! How's about you call out and I'll shoot—allows I'll make a better job of it.”

  Ned didn't seem to hear, he was studying the two teeth he'd picked up from the snow, “Too bad we can't figure out some way ta mitre 'em back in me head!”

  “Here—give em to me,” Mary shook what was left of the old priming out of the gun, rummaged through the gunny sack, found another scrap of greased cloth and in a minute had the muzzle packed with powder and teeth.

  She stuck the stock of the gun in the snow and wedged it in place with the bags so that it pointed cannon-like towards a spot just above the alder bushes. “Now,” she commanded, “Shout!”

  Ned yelled, “Mary loves Ned!” Twenty or so birds, wings pounding, rose into the sky. She fired and two birds fell to the ground like rocks.

  Mary let out a shout, and moving faster that she had all day, flung herself through the snow to the dead birds.

  “Fair exchange I'd say—two birds for two teeth,” she gloated and did a little dance, jumping up and down on her snowshoes.

  “Might seem fair to you, 'twarn't your teeth,” Ned gave her a reproachful look and tugged at her hand. “Come on, Mary maid, we'um both half perished with cold. There be an old tilt just inside them woods,” Ned nodded towards the few scrawny trees beyond the alders.

  “Last fall Josh daubed up a chimney out of rocks and mud so's we could have a fire.”

  “We're not going to eat them birds 'till everyone sees em!” Mary said as they clumped in the direction Ned had pointed.

  “I s'pose now you're gonna stuff 'em and hang 'em over our fireplace so's you can forever tell people how smart you are ta get two birds with my teeth,” Ned teased.

  Mary remembers that day as being one of the happiest of her life.

  When they reached the tilt they had to use the racquets as rakes to clear drifts away from the low door. They crawled in on hands and knees, lit a fire with wood stacked below the bunk, filled a dented bucket with snow and made tea. The tiny room became very smoky but it did warm up. They took off their heavy clothes and arranged sweaters, caps, cuffs and leggings around the fire on sticks. Mary thought the bread and roasted caplin was the best food she had ever eaten. When it was gone they made love on the hard slatted bunk surrounded by smoke and the stench of scorching wool.

  “And that, my maid, was how our first, him was your Grandfather Henry, got started—in Josh Vincent's tilt—always found that part easy Henry were bom nine month to the day after I shot them birds. Meg worked it out—said that's what come of me goin' around the place got up like a tinker. Betimes I use ta wonder if Meg knew where babies come from!” Mary says and then, brazen as brass, asks where Rachel and nuisance-face started the baby her great-granddaughter is carrying.

  “Never mind that, Nan,” the girl says.

  Love has been mentioned. Rachel wants very much to ask her great-grandmother about love: “That day, the time you was huntin', you said—said you loved him?” The girl turns away to poke at the fire.

  “I were thinkin' on that t'other night—queer old things comes into a person's head nighttime! First time I ever remembers hearin' talk of love were once when Jennie Andrews, Meg, Sarah and me was burnin' roots up in the potato garden. Old Jennie started ta tell us how much she and her husband, Ned and them's father, loved one 'nother. I thought it were the most outlandish thing I ever heard tell of.”

  “Back where Jennie growed up there'd be one night each spring before the fields were planted when they'd have big fires. Boys and young maids would pile up dead wood, roots and dry grass, after dark they'd set it alight, stay out all night playin' games and dancin' 'round the fires.”

  “This was first when I come to the Cape—before ever I thought of marryin' Ned. Meg was mortified, she kept tryin' to hush Jennie but the old woman wanted ta tell us. What used ta happen was half the unmarried girls'd be knocked up by morning, then all hands'd get married after the harvest. Accordin' to Jennie that was how she and Ned's father got together: T loved him from the minute I clapped eyes on en', she said. Stuck in me mind, that did.”

  “For meself I never seen no signs of love around where I come from, certainly not between me mother 'n father. Nor thought on it when I bedded down with Tim Toop—for all I enjoyed it much as he did.”

  “Once I started listenin' to Ned though, seemed love were the most common thing in the world. In all them stories he told there'd be princesses and beggar maids in love with some man. He'd turn out to be rich—a pirate king or a prince—and they would live happily ever after. Tha's how Ned's stories always ended—happily ever after.”

  “For all I shouted out that I loved Ned that day in the woods, 'twarn't something I ever thought about. Love and happily ever after were things in stories. Words! Words nobody but an Andrews would ever say out loud.” Mary pauses and Rachel waits, not daring to move for fear her great-grandmother will lose the thread of thought.

  “Summertimes'd be best. In summer I'd think 'twas only a matter of bidin' me time and we'd all be rich, never again know want. That's what 'happy ever after' was, far as I was concerned.”

  Seeing the sea for miles around the Cape foaming with caplin, having the men returning trip after trip from the fishing grounds, their boats loaded to the gunwales with cod, helping to gut, wash, salt and turn hundreds of quintals, watching the stacks of salted cod in Thomas Hutchings' store grow taller and taller—these things filled Mary with energy and hope. Surely such abundance, such industry would bring its reward!

  Then the fish would be carted away, the days would grow shorter and her fear would return. In the dead idleness of mid-winter she would become frantic. Cooped up in a dirt floored house with another baby on the way, watching the food supply go down, always down, seeing Ned's hands getting more and more crippled each year, listening to his tales about gold, watching the pinched winter faces of the youngsters, knowing another yaffle from the woodpile was going up in smoke, turned Mary into a black wrath.

  “Many's the winter we barely kept body and soul together. Yet they'd call me greedy when I'd try ta figure out some way ta make a bit of money. Only real money we ever seen them days was what the men brought home from the ice—and God knows that were little enough!”

  “Still and all, in between workin' and havin' youngsters, between shiftin' rocks, haulin' water and curin' fish, I stopped thinkin' it'd been a mistake ta marry Ned, stopped wantin' to be somewhere else. Lookin' back I can see clear as day that for almost fourteen year, all them years we was workin' like beasts, all them years I never stopped worryin' about havin' enough to eat—all that time I was livin' happily ever after. And I didn't even know it!”

  The old woman looks straight at the girl: “Ta tell ya the truth, maid I'd give anything ta be in that old house again—a nor'east gale blowin' outside and me snug in bed havin' a bit of fun with Ned.”

  “Weren't only the bed thing either,” Mary daubs at her eyes with the sleeve of her red dress. “Ned were all the time doin' things for me or showin' me somethin'. Most times 'twould be nothin' at all—a strange shaped tree, or seaweed curled 'round rocks—or just rocks! Ned could look at rocks by the hour!”

  “I minds once he got me up in the middle of the night—wrapped a quilt around me and took me down to the wharf. Late fall it was and cold as the devil but we lay on our backs and watched the northern lights—right overhead, like you could touch 'em, or they might touch you! Little coloured fingers going around and around in circles, red and purple and green twinin' in and out like a maypole dance I saw once in Christchurch—coloured ribbons goin' round and round over our heads. And you know, every time they started to fade Ned'd whistle 'em up again. Never saw the likes of it, like they were dancin' for him.”

  “Sometimes on a warm summer's night when all hands'd be abed, Ned and me'd go out around the point in boat. Just easin' in near the shoals, everythin' still and the moon shinin' on the water. Sometimes
he'd tell me things. Sometimes he'd sing—sea songs and old rhymes he learned in the streets when he were a boy. Had a nice voice Ned did.…” The old woman rocks and smiles, “Vinnie used ta say Ned were a fair miracle. He were that—a fair miracle!”

  Thinking Nan is going to cry, Rachel reaches out and takes her hand. “After you was married I s'pose ye got to be friends, you and great-grandfather's sister?”

  “That we didn't! For all they got more easy with me after I married, there wasn't one woman in the place I'da gone to for anythin'. After I started makin' up cures I found the difference. Wasn't something I looked to do, just come to me. Had a knack for mixin' up tonics, poultices for snow blindness and salve to cure sore hands—anythin' like that. 'Tis in the blood—you got it, too,” Mary tells her great-granddaughter.

  Over the years, tales of the old woman's healing skills have become legends along the shore. Rachel has heard of the time Mary sewed Young Joe Vincent's finger back on, of the many women Mary nursed through difficult births, of how her Nan can put away warts, cure scurvy, stop bleeding. The young woman has noted that there is more awe than love in these stories—which often end with a recounting of Mary's monumental rages, of her ambition and acquisitiveness.

  “My mother never was a woman you'd cuddle up to,” Rachel has heard her Aunt Tessa say, and she wonders if anyone but Ned ever loved Mary.

  “Bit by bit the women got used to me—but I can't say they got close ta me—not even Vinnie. No, maid, Vinnie'n me never got ta be friends, not 'til long years after. The truth is all hands thought I were greedy—covetous, Meg used to call it. Seemingly every trouble in the world started with greed and covetousness—accordin' to Meg 'twas what sent the devil down to hell. I s'pects me and him'd make a grand pair—seems to me, though, 'tis only natural to want stuff.”

  “Take that summer Frank Norris come to the Cape and started buildin' his house. I know now I weren't the only one envious! Green we was, all of us!”

  “Frank had coloured glass put in the front door and proper stairs built, had everythin' moved in before his wife and young Rose set foot in the place. Set the rooms out just so—rockers and chairs, lamps made out of glass and everythin' accordin' to.”

  “I can see us now, me and Meg and Sarah, helpin', the day Frank papered them bedroom walls, lovely stuff with roses all over. If I coulda' got that house by pushin' Frank Norris off the wharf I'da done it in a minute, hell or no hell.”

  “In the end 'twas all for nothin'. Never a peaceful night did he have in that house. His wife Ida turned out to be crazy as a loon—let goats in downstairs, locked herself upstairs, screeched and bawled and scraped paper off the walls 'til her fingernails bled. Years after, when she died, they burnt the place down—only thing to do. Young Rose Norris kept the four little squares of glass, two red and two blue. When she married Meg's Willie they built on the very same spot and that glass is the same what's in their door to this day.”

  “Apart from Ned there was only one person I could pass the time of day with. 'Twarn't nobody you'd guess. None of them ever guessed either!” Mary Bundle cackled as if she had played a wonderful trick on the people who had treated her so coolly.

  “You can mark this down—'tis nothing Vinnie woulda knowed about,” she says, considering how best to begin.

  Mary admitted that the Vincents had done more for her than anyone else. It was Sarah who had taken her and Fanny in when Thomas Hutchings wanted nothing to do with them, and it was Sarah who had first showed her how to make cures out of weeds and roots.

  Josh and Sarah Vincent were good people, but Mary maintained there was something strange about the way they treated their middle son, Peter.

  “Sarah was always talkin' about changelings and I wondered sometimes if Peter wasn't one of them. Different as night and day from the rest of the Vincents. People didn't take to Peter. He were about nine or ten when I come and I remembers noticin' how Sarah'd always be after him for somethin' he done—or didn't do. Scowlin' little bugger and fidgety as a blue-assed fly. Never settled. One minute he'd be there, gone the next—right in the middle of eatin' or doin' some job. Say all hands be hove to haulin' up a boat or nailin' down a roof—halfway through the job Peter'd vanish.”

  Josh and Sarah had four children. Charlie, the youngest and the first baby born on Cape Random, was sickly. More sooky than sickly, Mary said. “Spoiled by all hands just like his grandson nuisance-face,” she tells Rachel.

  Even Lavinia, when she started teaching the children, favoured Charlie. It was no wonder the boy learned to read so fast, much faster than Ned and Mary's three sons—Lavinia spent more time with Charlie than with all her other students put together.

  Young Joe, the oldest Vincent boy, was the face and eyes of his father. Joe had stowed away aboard the Tern, given Sarah a year of misery and she never said a cross word to him after. He came home, went fishing with Josh, and a few years later settled down with Meg and Ben's daughter Lizzie.

  Annie, the Vincent daughter, was what they called a “home girl.” Good around the house and never seen outdoors without someone's baby on her hip. After her father died, Annie surprised everyone by going on the water with Young Joe. And Sarah never said one word against it, although it should have been Peter who got the place in his father's boat. Dressed in oilskins, Annie had, and fished with her brother for years and years—until Ida Norris died. The day after the mad woman died, Annie Vincent put on a dress and married Frank Norris.

  After the great row on the day he chopped Young Joe's finger off, Peter became more and more aloof. The ugly bite the dog had made on his cheek did not help. When the youngsters teased him about the purple mark he began going off by himself. While he was still a boy he would go in the country, travel for weeks with a few cakes of hard tack, a piece of canvas and Thomas Hutchings' old gun.

  “Many's the winter 'twas fresh meat Peter brought home kept us from perishin'. He'd be gone for a month—sometimes more—then one day he'd open your door and toss in a leg of caribou, a brace of rabbits, a wild duck or goose. No matter to Sarah—she still favoured t'other three.”

  “When every mortal soul in the place knew Annie was sleepin' with Frank Norris—who had a wife, mad as a hatter but alive as you or me—Sarah would still be tormentin' Peter, prayin' for him to join the church like Annie, naggin' at him to cut his hair like Young Joe or learn to read as good as Charlie. And she were forever after him to tell her when he was comin' and goin'. I never done that with mine—never made chalk of one and cheese of t'other,” says Mary who has long since forgotten how little attention, good or bad, she bestowed upon her children.

  Through all these years Mary had hardly spoken to Peter Vincent. He was just a boy—one of the crowd that tagged after Lavinia Andrews—and Mary was a woman. Sometimes, when she was out searching the countryside for an ingredient to use in her cures, Mary would see him. They would nod to each other, no more, then go silently about their business. Until one day, years after the finger chopping incident, when she found Peter in the woods with a deep cut in his leg.

  It was the same year he started building a house. Without telling anyone his plans, all alone, the young man cobbled together some kind of foundation and uprights on the hill overlooking the Cape, an odd, mysterious structure looking as if it would be one room wide and three high—if he ever decided to add walls and a roof. Peter was a young man by then but he had no sweetheart, so everyone wondered why he was building a house. Or maybe it was a lighthouse or a lookout of some kind, or just a place to get away from his family.

  “Ever notice how people only asks questions about things they knows? Seems to me when people don't have one blessed idea about a thing, they're afraid of what they might find out. That's how it were with Peter Vincent's house. Anyone else'd be harrished with questions 'bout them big tall posts stuck up against the sky—but no one said a word to Peter—apart from Sarah, and I doubts even she ever come right out and asked. No one offered to help him either, for all everyone helped
his brother Joe when he'n Lizzie built their house.”

  The day Mary got to know Peter Vincent, his foot had gone down into a boghole and a pointed branch had scraped a deep cut up his leg. Mary told him to go on home and get the cut cleaned before it got infected but he shook his head. He had only just started out and wasn't going back until he'd made it around his six mile circuit, checking traps and rebaiting them with bits of seal meat. “Got somethin' to tie it up with?” he asked.

  Mary squatted down, rooted in her gunny-sack. She, too, had just started out so there was not much to choose from. She poured lukewarm tea over the cut and stopped the bleeding with moss.

  “I knows one or two things about you, Mary Bundle,” Peter said quietly.

  Mary was wrapping his leg in a bit of cloth ripped from her petticoat. She kept her face down, took her time knotting the ends of cotton carefully together, and hoped he could not tell how afraid she was.

  For years she had expected this. Every spring when ships started to come in to the Cape the same chilling thought had whispered through Mary's head—someday, someone will walk off some vessel demanding that she go back to face those magistrates Tim Toop had said were looking for her. A thousand times she had imagined Ned's face as he watched her being dragged away. She would be taken to St. John's, thrown in jail, whipped perhaps—the very thought made her sick—or transported back to England.

  The fear had not disappeared but in later years it had grown dim. Her new name, the births of her children, the circle of people who knew her, whom she knew, the work, and most of all, life with Ned, had made her feel safe.

  “More fool me,” she thought as she yanked at the strip of dingy cloth. “Must be soft, thinkin' there's a safe place for the likes of me.”

  Mary decided she would not say a word. Would not give Peter anything to hold over her. She rocked back on her haunches, looked the bearded young man in the eye and waited to hear what he wanted in exchange for silence.