Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  Next morning, when Rachel wants to return to the subject of the Indian on the beach, Mary says she has no idea who he was or where he came from.

  “Thomas and Dolph Way found the Indian's body. Then there was a great fuss about where to bury him,” she tells the girl. “Meg said he were a heathen—leastways we s'posed he were heathen—so 'twould be wrong to put him in what she called consecrated ground—whatever that means. But Thomas were set on the savage bein' buried out on the point with all the rest. I didn't care one way or t'other. In the end Thomas got his way—like always—Fanny and the Indian was buried alongside one another. Young Char cut words into two wood markers.”

  “I never seen no marker for either one of em.”

  “No girl, been gone for years and years—under the sand or under the sea. What difference does it make in the end?” Mary sighs with great sadness. Then, brightening, she says, “I s'pose now when I dies they'll say I was a heathen and bury me outside the churchyard!”

  “Go on, Nan! You knows right well they won't—you'll have the biggest funeral the shore ever seen!”

  “No more than I should!” Mary says and spends a good hour reminding Rachel of what must be done when she dies. When she is sure the girl understands how each detail of her funeral must be arranged, Mary tells her to write down what happened after Thomas Hutchings left the Cape.

  “Can't say I was sorry when Thomas left,” Mary says. “He never told us nothin' but 'twas understood he were goin' back to St. John's to some old life he'd left behind. Before he went I asked for his money tin but when he passed it over to me 'twas empty—not a shillin' in it! I did get this understanding with him, though—'bout me and Vinnie keepin' on with his job—sendin' the tally of fish and orders into Caleb Gosse and keep the wharf fixed up, stuff like that. 'Twas only right after what he done to Fanny—and the bit of money we'd get from Caleb Gosse'd help with the baby he was leavin' behind.”

  “You'd think the way Meg carried on we'd all perish and blow away without Thomas Hutchings but I tell you 'twasn't like that at all. The person missed most that spring was Ned—was like the heart was gone out of the place. Isaac was dead too, of course—and Josh Vincent—Josh died the fall before, with the same sickness took our Moses and left Pash Andrews blind.”

  The first part of that summer had been terrible. Fish was plentiful but there were not enough hands to bring it ashore. Mary drove everyone so hard that no one had a civil word for her. Her own three boys would run away and hide in the woods to get a bit of rest. But Jane's new husband, Dolph Way, was a big help and in July a new family named Gill settled on the Cape.

  “They was always a good, hardworkin' crowd, the Gills. Brose was a grand hand with the fish. Still, when fall started to close in, I was not satisfied in me mind we'd get safe through winter.”

  She had been sick with fear—used to go down to the store and count the barrels of flour, the caplin, salt fish and vegetables, and then count the people who had to be fed.

  “'Twas the same every year, no matter how hard we worked, we barely made it through the winter—but that winter was worse because we had less fish to trade with Gosse. I'd lie awake nighttime tryin' to figure some way we could make money above what we got for the fish.”

  Mary had tried remembering the ways she'd seen people earn money in St. John's and in Christchurch. But none of the things she remembered would work on the Cape, where everyone made what they needed, where everything was patched and mended until it fell apart. People on the Cape did not buy lumber or splits, everyone cut their own, they did not buy pots or kettles, there was one of each in every house, heavy black objects that lasted for generations. Everyone grew their own vegetables, made their own bread and soap and candles, rendered out their own oil. Mary would fall asleep naming things they had to buy from Caleb Gosse—salt, needles, molasses, flour, flannel, nails—but never anything they could make on the Cape.

  One night she sat up in bed. Barrels! She could see the Tern with a hundred empty barrels lashed down on deck. Alex Brennan would drop a few off at each place the ship stopped, then pick them up in the fall filled with berries, caplin, pickled herring. Each year three or four barrels were kept back to hold their own berries, the salted cabbage, the trout and salmon.

  “I worked it out we could make our own barrels! Don't think I closed me eyes the rest of that night for thinkin' about it. Seemed good sense—'twould save bringin' barrels in—and why shouldn't Gosse pay us for 'em same as he paid someone in St. John's? Would mean he'd have more space for gear and salt on each vessel 'comin down the coast.”

  At first light Mary went next door to ask Ben Andrews if he knew anything about making barrels. Her brother-in-law had never seen a barrel made, but said he'd study it. He immediately began drawing little pictures, which was the way Ben always worked. The following day he pried a barrel apart and laid out the staves, measured them and worked out how they had been put together.

  “I allow we could make barrels if we can get the wood dried for the staves and cut small birch for the hoops. We'd split them and soak 'em in sea water same as I did for the rungs of that chair I made,” Ben told Mary. “But then you knows how far we got to go to get decent wood, and I'm not real sure the tools I got could do such a job.”

  “Ben never had much spunk in him—'tho I must say he could do anything he set his hand to on land. I told him a man who could make boats could make barrels—kept after him day in, day out 'til he went down to the store and started working' on some dry wood Thomas had pushed out under the loft.

  “You know, by spring Ben had a watertight barrel! He was good like that, once you set him to it he'd keep tryin' till he got a thing right. You mark that down, my maid—'twas Mary Bundle started them makin' barrels along this coast.”

  When they got into barrel making Mary would go down to the store each morning before anyone was stirring. She'd count the barrels finished the day before, sweep up the shavings, sort out the right number of staves and arrange the hoops so that Ben and the older boys who helped him would have everything to hand.

  Meg heard her leaving the house while it was still dark, and one day scolded her for roaming around in the middle of the night.

  “Only two things bed's good for, and since I'm not doin' either of 'em I might just as well be up and about,” Mary snapped.

  She liked being alone in the store in the cool pre-dawn. “I used to think, them mornings, plan out me day,” she told Rachel.

  Since no one now lived in the store the fire was allowed to die each night. Mary had pushed Thomas Hutchings' few belongings up against the bunk where he had slept to make room for woodhorses, tools, staves, drying lumber and the old puncheons Ben used to shape the wet hoops around. For the first time the store was just that, a storage space and workroom, the smells of cooking and living all gone, only the clean smell of wood, netting, oakum and rope remained. It was quiet there in the mornings, just the soft swish of sea washing in below the floor and the muted rattle stones make when the sea recedes.

  “We had almost fifty barrels that first year Ben was at it—and that was with Meg forever draggin' him off work to go at something else. When Alex Brennan come down I told him what I wanted and he was satisfied to bring it up to old skinflint Gosse. I figured we could make twice fifty if we got things planned proper.”

  “We was gettin' along! I could see that, anyone with eyes in their heads coulda seen it. The second summer after Thomas left we done better with the fish—and that fall we all had goats, sheep and hens, and only the Norris family didn't have a pig. We women all done our own cardin' and spinnin', grew vegetables, and of course we had the fish, and sea birds was plentiful them times.”

  Just as Meg and Sarah had never grown tired of reciting Bible verses, so Mary never stopped tallying things up. How much did they have stored away? How much did they have to trade?

  But there was never enough to satisfy her. She was always thinking ahead, always planning, not just for next winter, but for
the one after. She would never give herself nor anyone else a minute's rest, would go for days without speaking to a soul, then fly into a rage at the sight of a misplaced tool, a child skipping rocks, or an adult gazing out to sea.

  “Every minute ye wastes in summer is a spoonful of food you're without in winter!” she repeated so often that the children would whisper it to one another when they saw her coming.

  The youngsters grew sullen, muttering against her heavy hand. Her own sons most of all: “Mudder'll have our backs broke afore we're half growed,” Henry, George and Alfred would complain and hide when they heard Mary's voice or saw her shadow.

  It was a common sight in those times to see Mary Bundle stalking about the place, shouting orders at rocks and bushes behind which she knew her sons were crouching. She had become the overseer of the place. Without any inclination to cajole or charm, without any authority to command, she had only brutish determination to bend their will to hers.

  “All hands went by what I said in them days. They might grumble and complain behind me back, but to me face they done what I wanted—they had good sense,” she told Rachel with pride.

  The second spring after Thomas left was a long, wet season. The coast was continually shrouded in mist, damp seeped into the houses, clothes and bedding smelled fousty and the feel of sunshine was all but forgotten. The caplin came, were spread on flakes to dry, and then turned maggoty, fit only for dog food. This was a huge loss, since barrels of dried caplin could mean the difference between survival and starvation at the end of a long winter.

  Mary decreed that more caplin would have to be caught and spread. Everyone kept watch for the flick of silver and the familiar black shadows just below the surface of the water. Day after day passed, when the sun finally broke through the mist they concluded that the small fish had struck off.

  Then one morning Mary looked out from the store and saw a ripple on the water, saw small silver crescents on the beach. Snatching a casting net off the wall she raced from house to house, banging on doors, calling: “Caplin, caplin, caplin in!”

  She had just lifted her hand from the door of Meg's and Ben's house when it opened and Meg stood on the step looking at her with grim disapproval.

  “Don't you even know what day this is, Mary Bundle?”

  Her sister-in-law's face and the sound of Charlie Vincent's voice made Mary realize why no one was about. It was Sunday, the day for service, the day when everyone sat on chairs and benches in Meg's kitchen to pray and sing hymns. Every Sunday, apart from the warmest days of summer when they held services inside the roofless walls of their church, all hands gathered like this—but Mary never went and never remembered.

  Meg tried to make her son Willie take turns reading out, but it was almost always Charlie Vincent who did it. That morning they were working their way through the book of Matthew, Mary could hear every word clear as a bell, “…every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or child, or lands for my sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.…”

  Mary remembers still the numbing effect the words had on her, remembers wondering what a strange religion they had that encouraged men to abandon their families. Before she even opened her mouth she had a premonition of defeat, an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation which she ignored.

  “Caplin's in, Meg girl! Leave off this foolish rigmarole and come on down—might be the last sign well have of 'em this year!”

  “No one in here will cast for caplin this day—we're not going to break the Sabbath for you, Mary Bundle. You might think you owns our bodies but I can tell ya, you don't have no claim on our souls!”

  Meg looked down at her from what seemed to be a great height, very much as she'd done the night so many years before when she'd turfed Mary out of Ned's bed.

  “Ya stunned bitch, we'll likely all starve next winter 'cause of you!” Mary had screeched.

  Meg remained icily calm. “The Lord will provide for his own, now I'll take no more of your brassen tongue,” she said and closed the door.

  “Stunned bugger—where was the Lord last time we starved?” Mary howled at the door. She thought of barging in to drag out her own crew. Instead, she gave the door a childish kick and stalked off down to the landwash.

  On the beach Mary pulled off her boots and wool socks, knotted her skirt up around her waist and waded into the icy cold water with a casting net.

  She worked for am hour or more, enjoying the way she could whirl the net out over the moving shoals of fish that swirled around her, revelling in the pile of silver bodies she was collecting above the water line, remembering how she and Tessa used to fish in the Watt with the little underwater net. Hypnotized by the shining water and circling fish she forgot her anger, completely forgot the people up in Meg's house.

  “Cold of May, heat of June, send me fishes of the moon,” she chanted. Then, suddenly as they had appeared, the caplin vanished.

  The harvested fish now had to be salted and spread out to dry. When Mary turned to estimate how long this tedious job would take she saw a figure bending over the great silver mound, picking fish up one by one, gathering them in her arms as if they were flowers. Mary thought she was seeing some spectre, the spirit of all the murdered fish, a woman with waist-length hair, stringy grey hair, grey face, and tattered grey clothing to which glittering fish scales clung. The creature moved without a sound, carrying each armful of fish up to the flakes, carefully spreading them in the pale sunshine, returning to gather more from the pile.

  “Frightened the life out of me, it did, 'til I saw 'twas Frank Norris's wife, Ida. It was the way she moved sort of lop-sided that made me realize who 'twas,” Mary tells Rachel.

  For the first time since the day she arrived on the Cape, Mary saw the mad woman close up. The doll-like face was faded to a flaky grey, like old chalk. The blue eyes did not focus and the once pretty mouth hung slightly open. Ida's dead foot made strange patterns in the wet sand as she dragged it back and forth between the flake and the pile of caplin.

  They worked in silence until the beach was bare and caplin lay row upon neat row on the flake. About five barrels, Mary calculated with satisfaction. She turned to tell the apparition this but Ida was gone—vanished as completely as the caplin scull.

  Later, when the worshippers came pouring out of Meg's door and down to the landwash, they allowed, a bit shamefacedly, that Mary had done a good morning's work. Although she was in fine humour by then, Mary was not to be placated by their compliments. “The better the day, the better the deed!” she shouted and marched away without mentioning Ida.

  “In late years I thought about Ida Norris, maybe she wasn't pretendin' after all. I seen other women go strange like her—Rowena that time she heard Samuel Blackwood's schooner'd gone to the bottom with two of her sons on board, and Jean Loveys after her little girl were lost in the woods—maybe such sickness is real.”

  “Anyhow, I never saw Ida Norris again after that day, not 'til the day she died, and that was a good spell. Just before she died she started doin' them foolish things again, same as she done when Annie and Frank were goin' at it, puttin' salt in sugar, pissin' in the water bucket, them kinds of things. Then, one day she died. Just died in her sleep like a baby.”

  By the end of January both Mary and Rachel were finding it difficult to get around. The girl because of her increasing girth and Mary because of sleepless nights and daytime spells of dizziness that washed over her like dark waves.

  “Don't dare tell your mother I'm not well, or Calvin either, none of them. I plans ta leave this world me own way, not with that crowd up here pickin' at me!”

  “But Nan we got ta do somethin'—maybe it can be cured, maybe Aunt Tessa or Mamma knows.…”

  “Stop mewin' or I'll send you off,” Mary said sharply. “'Tis old age, girl—not a thing in this world ta be done about it!”

  After that, Rachel began making the hot drink she gave her grandmother stronger,
mixing ground-up lily root with herbs so the old woman would sleep at night.

  twelve

  “Thomas Hutchings was gone three, four year—no I thinks it was three—write down three,” Mary directs Rachel.

  The old woman has a sense of urgency, is trying to hide from the girl how little help the lily root is, beginning to think she will not be able to hold on until the baby is born. But she is determined to get all of her story written into Lavinia's book.

  “Everything were strange the day Thomas Hutchings come back—I kept feeling it were all set out, learned off beforehand like them recitations people gives Christmastime. I often wondered if there were one grain of truth in anything Thomas told us that day. Regards him and Vinnie, I can only go by what she told me years and years after.”

  “So we can't write it down then 'cause you don't know,” Rachel is disappointed.

  Mary cackles, “Oh I knows all right, well as anyone could—and yes, girl, we'll write it down. Vinnie was flick enough to write down all that stuff about me'n Ned, wasn't she?”

  Brighter than Rachel has seen her for weeks, Mary recalls the time just before Lavinia's death when the two old women spent hours talking about early times on the Cape.

  “One day we was rhymin' off every ship ever come into the Cape—the Tern, the Molly Rose, the Seahorse, the Charlotte Gosse, and so on—remembering how the youngsters'd go around bawlin' out ‘Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!’ So's all hands would be down on the wharf waitin'. When we finished namin' off all the ships we could think of I asked Vinnie right out what she remembered about the day the Seahorse brought Thomas Hutchings back to the Cape.”

  “Everything, she said—the colour of the sky, the two crackie dogs runnin' around the wharf, the hole in her sock and the raw spot on her heel, the smell from the landwash where someone was barkin' nets, the fancy stitch in Meg's knitted shawl, the way Pash held both Lizzie's babies 'tho other people kept offering to take them—everything. Vinnie was like Ned that way—everything ever happened to her was stored away so's if she had a mind to tell about 'twas like you been there.”