Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  Gosse's new vessel was a beauty. The great four-master came billowing in towards the Cape like a white cloud on the water. There was a sigh of disappointment wheal, well back from the sunkers, she struck sail and lowered her anchor.

  “Can't say as I blames him—ya wouldn't want to take a chance groundin' the likes of that,” Ben said.

  As they watched, a small skiff with a man at each oar was lowered over the side and held fast while two boxes were eased down on ropes. Then a man carrying something in his arms climbed down into the skiff.

  “Might be Joe and Frank comin' home,” Lizzie guessed. Since her little girl's death she had given birth to twin boys, had a miscarriage and was now pregnant again.

  Brose Gill shook his head, “They'd not get free passage on a vessel like that—and I doubts Frank or your Joe'd be parted with sealin' money just to sail home.”

  “Young Joe's too close to do such a thing, not while he got feet under him to walk,” Sarah chuckled. Then, as if realizing what she had said, a queer look came over her face, “Them boxes—them boxes looks almost like coffins.”

  “It's Joe, I knows it is,” Lizzie whispered and crumpled in a dead faint. Meg knelt and pulled her daughter's head into her lap but no one else stirred or looked away from the small boat rising and falling as it came towards them.

  When the skiff got close they could see that the passenger was Thomas Hutchings, that he was holding what seemed to be a baby in the crook of one arm and had the other arm around the waist of a small boy.

  “What's this, then—Thomas Hutchings with a new family?” Mary said and Lavinia, who had been standing right next to her, slipped back to stand behind the Gill family at the edge of the crowd.

  The boat nudged against the wharf. Thomas stood, looked up and passed the baby to the first person he saw—Annie Vincent. She took the infant and, clearly not thinking of her brothers, asked only, “Is Frank Norris in one of them boxes?”

  Thomas shook his head. Someone held out a hand to help him and the boy climbed onto the wharf while the men at the oars made the skiff fast. Ben and Dolph along with Brose Gill came forward and caught the ropes that were tied around the coffins—for now everyone could see they were coffins—plain and unpainted but with the distinctive narrowing at one end. In silence they watched the boxes being eased up over the edge of the wharf, the ropes tossed back to the men in the skiff, watched the men nod to Thomas, then pull away and begin rowing back towards the vessel.

  “A person always took care of himself, Thomas Hutchings were—kept his shirts washed and his beard neat—that day, though, he looked like the dog's dinner—glum and red eyed, like he hadn't slept for days. I knowed what it's like being stuck down in the hold of a ship with a baby and might have pitied him, hadn't been for rememberin' how he'd tried to keep me and Fanny from stayin' ashore when I come to the Cape.”

  Thomas Hutchings stood on the edge of the wharf, staring at the assembled people. He seemed dazed and uncertain. He had no bags or boxes, just a small parcel in one hand and a scrawny boy holding fast to the other. He stood staring at the Cape people for the longest time, then he walked over to Sarah Vincent and kissed her on the cheek. As soon as he kissed her, Sarah began to cry.

  “My two,” she said and Thomas nodded.

  He let go of the child's hand and held onto the sobbing woman, resting his chin on her head so that it looked to those watching as if Sarah was keeping him up.

  By the time Thomas turned to them, the Andrews family had gathered around Ben and Meg, who had gotten Lizzie to her feet and were supporting her between them. Mary's three sons stood beside Meg's Willie. Pash, holding one of Lizzie's twins in each arm and with young Toma clinging to her skirt, had moved to her father's side. Jane and her husband Dolph Way, and even Mary, had clustered close as they could get around Lizzie. Only Lavinia was missing.

  “I'm sorry. Lizzie it's Joe—your Joe and Peter, both of them. I had to bring them home.”

  No one said anything. The people on the wharf seemed to draw together, forming a tight circle around the man and the two coffins.

  “I had to bring them home,” Thomas repeated. He paused, swallowed, looked out over their heads as if hoping someone would come down the path—Ned perhaps or Lavinia.

  Then he told them the story he had prepared on the way down. About the night on the ice floes, how Joe twisted his ankle and Peter dropped behind to help him drag the seal carcasses back to the ship. How, in the blinding snow, the brothers had gotten lost, how, holding onto each other through the icy night, they tried to keep walking. How at the end neither of them could move—how they stood, arms around one another, and died.

  It was what they would want to hear. Maybe it was even true. When he finished, half the people around him were crying.

  “They was brave men, both of them, good men too,” Ben Andrews said softly and then there was a long silence.

  Not even Meg seemed to know what to do next. Everyone just stood there, stunned. After a long while Mary Bundle asked who the two youngsters were and Thomas gave a start as though he'd forgotten all about the little boy and the baby.

  They were Peter's. Peter's and Emma's children, Thomas said. He told them that Peter Vincent and Emma Andrews had been married for two years.

  Meg closed her eyes, “Emma's dead too, then,” she said.

  “No, no Emma's not dead,” he assured them. Yet he had no ready explanation for why Meg's daughter had not returned with her children. “She had things to settle up in St. John's,” he said lamely.

  “You mean to tell me, our Emma let you bring home her two small youngsters and her dead husband—and stayed in St. John's herself!” Ben was incredulous.

  “She'll likely be aboard the next vessel—probably with Alex Brennan when he brings the Tern down,” Thomas told him. Then he pushed the boy forward, said he was Benny Vincent, named after his grandfather, said the baby was a girl but he didn't know what Emma had named her.

  By then Meg had the baby in her arms: “Poor innocent little mortal!” She kissed her granddaughter on the forehead and announced the child would be called Comfort.

  “And that's how your grandmother got such an outlandish name,” Mary tells Rachel.

  She finds it hard to explain the strangeness of that long-ago day: “It was all wrong, girl. Unnatural, every minute of it. I kept expectin' someone to call Thomas Hutchings a liar but no one ever did—not ever.”

  The most terrible thing Mary remembers was that they could smell the bodies. When the first shock had swept over them they were all aware of the smell of putrefaction seeping from the two boxes.

  It was Charlie Vincent who took charge. “Maybe,” Mary says thoughtfully, “it was then Meg decided to give Char the money she'd been savin' for Willie's education.”

  The boy did a good job. Stepping forward, he asked them all to bow their heads. “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. No torment shall touch them nor death have dominion over them,” Charlie recited, his young voice cracking. At the end he added a special prayer for his two brothers. Then the men and older boys lifted the two caskets up, and, under Charlie's direction, carried Joe and Peter back up the hill to where the new church was being built.

  “The others followed along, just like always when someone takes the lead. So 'twas Char Vincent, without anyone sayin' a word about it, who shifted the graveyard from down by the sea—what was never a decent place anyway—to up behind the church. And we haven't had a burial on the point from that day to this.”

  Not quite everyone followed. Thomas Hutchings, Mary and Lavinia, these three were left standing alone on the stagehead. It came to Mary then that no one had asked Thomas anything about himself, where he had been these past years, how he had come to be on the Gosse vessel, not a thing! Nor had anyone but her seemed to think it strange that the man seemed to have forgotten his own son Toma. Thomas hadn't asked if the child he'd left behind was alive or dead, hadn't noticed the wiry little boy holding tight to Pash's s
kirt.

  As Mary watched, Thomas passed Lavinia the brown paper package—which she took without saying one word. “I had me mouth open to ask him a thing or two when Lavinia gives me this spitey look, not like herself at all, and says, saucy as a black: ‘Go home now, Mary Bundle, Thomas and me got things to say to each other.’ And with that, Vinnie takes his arm and turns him around, same as if they was an old married couple. I tell you, maid, I was that flabbergasted ya coulda knocked me over with a feather!”

  Lavinia had resolved in that instant that Mary was not to get Thomas, nor would he leave the Cape again—not if she had anything to do with it. Without any idea how this was to be accomplished, Lavinia Andrews slipped her arm into Thomas's—a gesture of possessiveness she had imagined so often that it seemed familiar.

  Thomas hesitated and for a terrible moment Lavinia thought that he would pull away, return to the ship, sail back to wherever he'd come from. She glanced over her shoulder, relieved to see that the ship had gone, was already out of sight. Then Thomas turned and they walked down the beach together, leaving Mary alone on the wharf.

  He didn't say a word, and Lavinia did not dare speak, or even look sideways at him. No thought of Joe and Peter dead in their coffins crossed Lavinia's mind—but the shadow of death, of its inevitibility may have added to the reckless exuberance she felt. She was giddy, light-headed with happiness from the solid reality of him standing there, the feel of his arm beneath her hand, from the boldness of what she was doing, from the impossibility of retreating from it.

  When they reached the tall rock, the one people called God's Finger, they slid down, just as Lavinia had that first day on the Cape, with their backs against its black surface. She glanced at Thomas's face. He looked ill, bone weary, perplexed.

  They sat, shoulders touching, watching the sea advance and retreat. Lavinia was thinking about the time on Turr Island when she and Thomas had hunted for eggs together. How long ago that day now seemed—how many nights since has she lain awake regretting her silence that day, regretting that they had not talked, had not made love!

  Today must not be like the day on Turr Island. She has imagined, oh many times, how it would be if they ever met again. Has promised herself she would tell him she loves him. Promised to make him laugh, to beguile him with stories the way Ned had done, to make him love her.

  Reality was different, she thought, sitting miserably on the damp sand trying to imagine how one would tell a man such things. It was important to use the right words, words that would not offend him, words he would remember always. She must say the first words. “Say the first words,” she urged herself, “just say the first words and the others will come!” But she could not think of the first words and the silence between them went on and on.

  Lavinia selected one piece of the driftwood that littered the beach, told herself she would speak before the incoming tide covered it. Her moment of bravado had long passed. She picked nervously at the string on the package Thomas had given her, knowing it contained her journal, wondered if he had read it at all. She tried to remember how much of herself she had given away in the book. If only Thomas would say something—some of the words she had put into his mouth a thousand times in daydreams.

  Not a woman in the place wasn't smarter than her! Meg or Sarah or Annie, even Lizzie, and certainly Mary—would know exactly what to say—what to do. But she hadn't wanted that, had not wanted a man you must push and tug at all the time—hadn't want to be like Mary Bundle. Lavinia felt tears burning behind her eyes. Wasn't there anything he had to say to her after all this time?

  “Speak! Say something!” Lavinia commanded silently and watched the tide lap against the eel-shaped piece of wood. The next wave would cover it. She had jumped up, walked over, snatched up the driftwood and flung with all her strength.

  “I'd rather you was in one of them coffins, Thomas Hutchings, than see you latched onto Mary Bundle!” she screeched as the grey shape hit the water.

  From behind her, she heard his indrawn breath—then laughter. Then she felt his arms around her waist. Surprised, she turned inside the circle, leaning back to see his face. She recalled how she used to wish he would laugh, used to imagine how different it would make him look—it did. She began to laugh too, out of pure happiness and relief that the silence had ended. When they stopped laughing they were kneeling in the wet sand, the sea licking in around them. Thomas pulled her toward the rock and they sat with their arms around each other.

  “Oh, my love, what patience you're going to need! I'm such a stupid man, only now learning things men like Ned are born knowing,” Thomas's voice was so low she could barely hear. But his words seemed like her own and without thinking she began to talk, telling him all the things she wanted him to know.

  Lavinia spoke for a long time, ending up telling of the promises she had made to herself about what she would say if he ever returned, “…and just now, when I saw you on the wharf alongside Mary Bundle, I knew if there was a shilling in it for her she'd have you in bed before nightfall…” she stopped.

  Thomas took her left hand and lay it beside his, palm upward in her lap, “See those?” he asked, “Those hands tell me there's no fear of my latching onto Mary Bundle—they tell me something quite different.”

  They did not look at each other but watched his finger trace an imaginary line, first on Lavinia's palm and then on his own. “It's been there all the time, written on our hands but we've been too stupid to read it—written out that I'll marry Lavinia Andrews and live happily forever after—forever after, Lavinia, like in Ned's tales.”

  Three days before she died, Lavinia, propped up on pillows in the bed she and Thomas had shared for thirty-two years, ended her story there.

  “Pure as the driven snow, Vinnie made it sound,” Mary tells the girl who is writing in Lavinia's book. “But I knows better—knows more about that day than she give me credit for.”

  When Thomas and Lavinia turned their backs on her, Mary had watched them for only a few minutes.

  “Imagine,” she thought, “the likes of Vinnie Andrews orderin' me home like I was a youngster!”

  Muttering indignantly, Mary had looked around but there was no one to complain to. So she walked slowly up the hill and back towards the neck, pondering on what Thomas's return might mean to the Cape, and to her.

  Beside the half-enclosed church, people stood around watching the men and boys take turns digging into the rocky soil. Mary stood nearby and wondered about the men in the coffins, about what had really happened to them. Perhaps Peter had tried to save his brother—he had, after all, once saved her. She listened to Sarah and Lizzie's sobbing, heard Meg's comforting words, gave her son George a good smack across the head when she saw him sneaking away without taking his turn at the grave digging.

  But she had been detached from the sorrow, preoccupied with the knowledge that Thomas Hutchings' return meant she would no longer be in charge of the tally, not be the one to get the few shillings Gosse sent down each fall, would no longer negotiate with Ben about repairs to the store and wharf, nor work with Vinnie making out lists of what would be needed each spring. All her plans for the place would now come to nothing—she would no longer be the one in charge.

  Mary had no doubt how it would be. Thomas had left without a by-your-leave and returned the same way. He would be welcomed back as The Skipper—the person Meg, Ben and Sarah have always turned to, the one with the final say about everything.

  “I made up me mind then and there I wasn't goin' to just give in to him. It might do me no good, all the same I vowed that next morning I was goin' to face up to Thomas Hutchings, tell him I could be boss well as him, say he was no more than the rest of us now.”

  For all this resolve Mary had been anxious as she walked towards the store at dawn the next day. Despite her defiance of Thomas she had always been nervous of the man, never easy in his presence. From the day she set foot on the Cape he had treated her like a half-witted, willful child. She tried to fig
ht off her dejection, reminding herself that she had sometimes gotten the better of Thomas Hutchings. Hadn't she made him marry Fanny, made him give her his job when he left. But he had felt guilty then—this time she could think of nothing to bargain with.

  As Mary pushed the door of the store open and stepped into its cool, dark silence she had still been searching her mind for something that might give her some leverage with Thomas. She would lose this, too, lose access to the store in the morning, lose that quiet time when she planned out her day, counted the barrels and enjoyed the clean wood smells.

  Apart from a few red embers in the grate there was no sign of Thomas. Maybe he had not slept here after all.

  Moving silently towards the bunk he had always used as a bed, Mary almost fell onto quilts piled on the floor. She bent forward, staring down at Thomas Hutchings and Lavinia Andrews asleep in each others' arms.

  They slept as children might, deep, breathing quietly, their faces innocent. Mary studied them. They looked young, unfamiliar—like the sea creatures in Ned's old yarns, mermaids and gods who lived in caves beneath the ocean. She took several steps back, eased herself down onto the carpenter's bench and sat gazing at the lovers while the room slowly brightened. Ribbons of dust-filtered light picked up the pale blue shadow of lashes on the woman's cheek, the copper gleam of her seaweed hair, cast green reflections on the man's hand cupped under the naked breast, shone vivid as jewels on the scraps of coloured cloth, reds, greens and yellows glowing from the pieced quilt.

  “Sittin' there I felt old—old as the hills, older than I feels now—hopeless and bone weary. I got up and left the store, quiet as I could,” Mary tells Rachel.

  She had walked down the beach, climbed the bank and, skirting the houses, come to the narrow place called the Neck, all without really noticing where she was.