Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  Then, having kissed David Saul, hugging him until he squirms away and goes racing into the garden, she pours tea.

  “Newfoundland is no place to raise children—no future here—I shouldn't have tried to get you to come home,” Selina grimly sets a tea pot on the table and settles down opposite Lav.

  Watching David Saul jump gleefully up and down in the rain-pool that always collects in the mossy part of Selina's yard, the statement seems so foolish that the women look at each other and laugh.

  “It wasn't your doing—I wanted to come,” Lav says, knowing this is true.

  “I'm worried sick about Ned and them, girl. Remember he got that big loan to have his boat covered with fibreglass? I doubt he's even payin' his interest—last year was worse than the year before and this year they're not gettin' anything.”

  According to Selina, predictions of doom have been slithering down the coast for months: television commentators, talk show hosts and government experts advising drastic reductions in fish quotas, travellers telling apocafyptic tales about fishermen who caught 675,000 pounds of cod two years ago and have managed to catch only four fish this year.

  “For all that, people along the coast are buyin' gear, overhaulin' boats—gettin' ready for the summer's fishery same as always. What else can they do?”

  “Nothing,” Lav answers, though she knows the question is rhetorical. She taps on the window, but David Saul pays no heed. He is crouched down, hands on knees, eyes closed, ready to leap skyward out of the shallow pool. “He's soaked to the skin—I should make him come in.”

  Selina nods but neither of the women move. They are held in thrall by the boy's pleasure, by his round, impish face, by the rainbow of spray and light that surrounds him each time his knee-rubbers splash into the luminous green water.

  “ Still, I'm some glad to have ye two here,” Selina reaches across the table to pat Lav's hand. “And who knows—the crowd in St. John's keeps tellin' us everythin's all right. Ned says last week the government gave foreign draggers a quota of 100,000 tonnes of cod inside our 200 mile zone—I can't see them doin' that if they were going to shut us down, can you?”

  Knowing that she once had some connection with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Selina looks to the younger woman for reassurance Lav cannot give. They lapse into silence, enjoying each other's company, the tea and the sight of David Saul's happiness.

  Usually patronized by only a handful of regulars, the Cat is packed full the next night. People who never come near the place are there: Frank Parsons, the school principal; Levi Vincent, the church lay-reader; Connie Fifield the social worker and two nurses from the clinic—most of Davisporte—all staring at the big screen, waiting for Timothy Drew's announcement.

  Ned's wife, Doris, comes in after the program has started. Looking as if she's been crying, she slips into the chair Alf has vacated, whispering: “I shouldn't have left the house—but misery loves company and the older boys'll keep an eye on Stevie.”

  Someone says “Hush!” as the obligatory scenes flash across the screen: Newfoundland and Canadian flags flutter over government buildings, nets overflowing with cod are hauled into boats that threaten to swamp under the huge weight. Then comes Timothy Drew—smiling, urbane, nodding at television cameras as he strides through Torbay airport.

  Lav catches a glimpse of Wayne Drover in the background, then loses him in a moment of confusion, a protest of some kind outside the airport. The cameras hesitate, swing back to the Minister before Lav can identify the shouting people or read their slogans. She smiles, picturing Wayne trying to drag his mother, or perhaps Mark Rodway, out of camera range.

  Doris sees the smile. “Must be hard for someone from away to see why we're all so worked up,” she says.

  Lav shakes her head. She knows Ned's wife is frantic but can think of nothing that will comfort her.

  Selina has told Lav that six years before, when their oldest boy finished school, Ned had built a bigger boat and that he's been improving it ever since. Now Cleary and John both fish with their father but Cleary is talking about getting his own boat. Doris is trying to discourage him, says she and Ned already owe over half a million dollars and that's enough debt for one family.

  Ned was one of the men who had started out for St. John's at six that morning, vowing to confront the Minister of Fisheries. To Lav the men had seemed innocent, happy as children as they squashed into the mini-van, holding packets of sandwiches and tins of Pepsi.

  “Whatever the old bugger says, he's gonna say it to our faces!” Ned shouted. But Bruce Blackwood, the van owner, had promised the wives there would be no violence.

  There is complete silence in the Cat. Women and men lean forward, faces lifted towards the giant screen as Timothy Drew, ensconced behind a row of microphones, declares the cod fishery over—commands them, by midnight tomorrow, to remove all fishing nets and gear from the sea—as enraged fishermen try to pound their way into the Plaza Room—as doors are slammed shut and security guards move into place.

  A kind of groan goes through the room as Bruce Blackwood, swinging a chair against the bolted door, fills the screen. A woman begins to cry, a man is saying, “Jesus! Jesus!” but softly. Policemen march down the hotel hallway, surround the fishermen, grab their arms, hammerlocking their necks with billy clubs, prying them, away from the door behind which the minister, still unruffled, touches the knot of his tie, tells reporters he does not frighten easily.

  “We're ruined,” Doris says. “Ned's forty-five—been fishin' near thirty year. Up at four every mornin' from April to November—up and headed out to sea every day of his life—what'll he do if he can't go on the water?” She is crying, gripping the edge of the table, trying to control herself. Alf brings her a drink but she shakes her head, pushes herself to her feet and leaves.

  No one else moves or speaks. Even when Alf switches off the television they continue to stare at the white screen as if expecting some message—God perhaps, telling them what to do.

  “On the house,” Alf walks around the room distributing beer.

  Levi Vincent puts the bottle back on the tray: “I don't think so, old man—not tonight,” he says. Then he gets up and walks across the room to the big map of Newfoundland.

  A tall, lanky man Levi hunches forward, squinting at the map. Everyone is watching him.

  Then, just as if he were reading out the lesson in church, he begins to recite a litany of lost men and lost ships: “Flora May, foundered off Cape Chidley with Samuel Gill, Charlie Fifield, David Gill and Oram Pond. Watersprite burnt at the front, all hands lost. The Challenge sunk off Labrador with 300 quintals light salted cod, also crew. The Seahorse went to the bottom with Eli Vincent, Alfred Kean, Job Parsons, and three Blackwood men on board. The Netty Tizzard broke up in gale-force winds off Cape St. Francis, drowned were Ephraim Green, Stanley Andrews, Matt Gullage and Joshua Burry. The Florizel lost north of Cappahayden with 94 men, women and children including Bill Walters, Edward Greening, Clarence Moulton, George Crocker.…”

  Levi keeps on, reaming off every man and vessel he can remember. Hundreds. Boats lying on the bottom for a hundred years, boats he's only heard of from his father and grandfather. He has no special order, calls out the names of people drowned seven years before when the Blue Pathway iced up and rolled over, ahead of those lost on the Caribou, the crew of the Ocean Ranger before sealers lost in the Newfoundland disaster.

  There are so many: some were fathers, uncles, cousins, brothers or sons of people seated around the room. Even to Lav the names sound familiar. She wonders why no one has ever listed the names on a monument, chiselled them into a wall of black marble, or hacked them into a rock in this land of rocks.

  Lav wants to leave, longs to get away from the airless room, from the feeling of doom, but feels she must stay, must sit with these silent, unhappy people listening to this endless roll-call of drowned men: “…Jim Fisher, George Tuff, Mike Holloway, Isaac Norris.…”

  Finally, though, she can
stand it no longer. She rushes out into the drizzling rain, stands in the muddy parking lot taking great breaths of air, wondering where she has left her car.

  “A person would be mad to go to such a place!” her mother had said and her mother had been right.

  At seven the next morning Alf walks into the house, sober as a judge, for he never can get drunk when he most wants to. Lav is sitting with Selina and David Saul eating breakfast. She has been up all night, has packed, unpacked and packed again. Four suitcases stand in line beside the kitchen couch.

  Alf leans with his back against the door and stares first at the suitcases, then at the boy and finally at Lav. “So,” he says, “Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Believe that, I suppose—believe that if you run fast enough and far enough you'll touch the Happy Isles? In Ontario perhaps—or California?”

  Lav shakes her head. She knows there are no Happy Isles but cannot bring herself to say so. She would like to take his hand, to lead him to his underground lair, to sleep, to make love, to lie in bed and forget about work, about fish, about striving and seeking.

  Time is suspended, nothing in the kitchen moves, the silence seems to go on forever.

  Lav tries to think of some quotation but all that comes to mind are the lines: “She is a woman, therefore may be wooed. She is Lavinia, therefore must be lov'd.” But that Lavinia was not wooed but raped, not loved but mutilated—her hands had been hacked off and her tongue cut out. Lav shudders, pondering on violence and the bard, wondering who had named the first Lavinia Andrews.

  Finally, Alf pushes himself away from the door, “The men are followin' Drew's orders, haulin' in their cod traps. I'm on my way down to watch—you three should come—the boy especially. It's history—somethin' he'll be able to tell his grandchildren—the day the great moratorium started, the day Newfoundlanders had to stop being fishermen.”

  Although he is not yet four, David Saul understands an invitation. He begins to squirm down out of his chair, but Lav pushes him back.

  Selina shakes her head. “No, no thanks—I haven't got the heart for it—neither should you. You'd be better off sittin' down for a cup of coffee and a decent breakfast.”

  Before his mother has finished speaking, Alf is gone, closing the door softly behind him, not even saying goodbye to Lav and David Saul.

  Selina dips a piece of toast into her egg and pops it into the child's inouth. Without looking at Lav, she says “He wasn't always like this, you know.”

  “What was he like, then?” Lav has the feeling that Selina has somehow read her thoughts, has seen her momentary longing to lie down with Alf.

  “He was a good boy—carefree but a good student. First when he and Shirley were married I thought they'd make a go of it.”

  Probing carefully, Lav learns that Alf 's wife, unaccountably, for she had no relatives aboard the oil rig, fell into a kind of black despair when the Ocean Ranger went down. That, just a few months after the disaster she left Davisporte, taking Rachel Jane with her. There was never any explanation, not even when the child was sent home a year later.

  “Shirley was a Coish, one of the crowd from down Happy Adventure way,” Selina says. She has taken David Saul on her lap, is jogging him up and down, “This is the way the poor man goes…” she chants. “I wouldn't say no to another cup of tea,” she tells Lav.

  Pouring Selina's tea Lav considers how much her relationship with the older woman has changed since they first met. On each trip back she has taken over more and more of the housework, while Selina spends more time visiting or playing games with David Saul.

  It's time David Saul and I found a place of our own, Lav thinks. Then, catching herself wondering if the old house in the back yard can be made habitable, she knows that she will not be leaving Davisporte.

  Had she ever really intended to? What kind of person is she, anyway? A grown woman, a mother, who doesn't even know her own mind—her mother had never dithered, had always known what she wanted, had gotten it. As always, comparisons with Charlotte depress Lav.

  “So Alf's wife was Shirley Coish?” she asks—as much to postpone self-analysis as to hasten Selina's return to the story.

  “That's right, she and Alf went to Memorial together—all the Coish family went to university. They're a highstrung crowd. Always were. Good people—lots of educated people in that family—but nervy.” Lav is by this time familiar with Selina's narrative style and can see examples of nerviness leap to mind.

  After a minute's consideration Selina brushes these distractions aside: “Still and all, I can't see her goin' off like that without a word to anyone—not even her own mother! What I thought then and what I still thinks,” the woman lowers her voice, walks across the kitchen and stares down the hallway to make sure Rachel Jane's bedroom door is still shut.

  “What I thinks is Shirley was in love with Vern Soper,” Selina returns to the table, absently smoothing the flower print cloth with her hands, remembering, arranging life so that it becomes story.

  “I used to see them betimes, holidays when Vern was home from trade school and later when he was workin' shifts on the rigs. They'd be walkin' up and down the landwash. I never thought anything about it at the time. Vern played guitar and he was teachin' Rachel Jane to play. The girl'd usually be with them—trailin' along—I used to think it was Rachel Jane had the crush on him—used to tease her about it.”

  It is the kind of story Lav has always delighted in. She spreads peanut butter on David Saul's toast and listens to the endless threads ravelling out in all directions.

  Shirley had relatives here in Davisporte. Her brother had accosted Alf, accused him, unjustly, Selina says, of being hard on Shirley. Vern Soper, too, had relatives—and a girlfriend—a girlfriend he had been going to marry. And the girlfriend later had a baby, a little girl Vern's mother had taken to raise. The baby had been born four months after the Ocean Ranger was lost. The same week Shirley and Rachel Jane took off for parts unknown.

  “Parts unknown,” Selina sighs and repeats the phrase, “must be the permanent address of Newfoundlanders.”

  Shirley has never returned, but Rachel Jane's been coming and going since she was fourteen.

  “Was that when he started drinking, when his wife left?” Lav asks. She knows, wonders if Selina knows that someday soon she and Alf will sleep together. It is just a matter of time, something she has been considering since that day on the Cape.

  Selina is non-committal about the origins of her son's drinking, “Worse—I think it got worse after Shirley left,” she says. In all her stories, all her explanations of family relationships, she has yet to mention Alf's twin brother, the son who killed himself.

  “I s'pose I should be grateful—I got the two boys living here in Davisporte—got to see my grandchildren grow up. Rachel Jane's talkin' about takin' off again. I got Reverend Dawe to speak to the poor foolish creature but she never paid him no mind—wants to be a singer. Wants her own television show! But Rachel Jane'll always come back—Nan knew that, that's why she left the girl her brooch. Rachel Jane's like you, never content away.”

  Selina pauses, glances from the suitcases to Lav, “Why don't you put them things away? I'm going to wash David Saul, then we'll dodge over to see how Doris is.”

  Two weeks later, seated behind the wheel of her five-hundred dollar car, across the rusting doors of which she has amateurishly lettered the words Cod Peace, Rachel Jane leaves.

  “She'll be back before Christmas—mark my words,” Selina says as, surrounded by three disreputable foolish friends, by guitars and luggage, some of which is tied to title car roof with bright bungee cords, Rachel Jane drives off, calling back promises to phone as soon as she reaches Toronto.

  As they walk towards the house Selina suggests that Lav might help out up at the motel: “With Rachel Jane gone, they're short handed and busier that they've been in years.”

  This is true. Amazingly, unexpectedly, the Cat is full every night. As the fish vanish, schools of government
officials, hired consultants, social scientists and journalists appear along the coast. Everyone in Davisporte is astonished at this influx of bizarre people—people who ask endless, intrusive questions. People who cannot explain exactly what they do for a living, yet seem to earn vast amounts of money.

  At first Lav is reluctant to encounter these people. Suppose former colleagues turn up? Suppose Wayne Drover and his glow boys walk in and find Dr. Andrews tending bar?

  Eventually curiosity overcomes. She begins working at the Cat two days a week, eavesdropping on the reporters and academics. Listening as they arrange to rent boats, to take pictures of unemployed fishermen gazing out to sea, to interview teen-agers on their job prospects. Hearing one say he is about to give displaced fish plant workers a series of workshops on managing a small business and another ask Doris if the level of violence has increased in her family—Lav is enraged.

  But, “The novelty'll soon wear off—they'll be gone before the first snow,” Alf tells her. In the meantime he has installed a fax machine and begun, for the first time in years, to serve breakfast at the Cat.

  He is right. Sensing this is a story without resolution, the media people leave first. As the days shorten, officials begin to long for offices, academics for campuses. By October the fax is silent. There is not an expert to be found in Davisporte.

  In November banks put attachments on the property of seven fishermen. They claim Ned's house, car and boat. Ned, Doris and their three sons decide they will go to British Columbia where Doris has a cousin fishing. They pile what belongings they have been able to smuggle out before the house was padlocked into Lav's station wagon. The cousin says things are tight in B.C., too, but he can find a place on his boat for Cleary, the oldest boy.

  Ned is cheerful to the end, still arguing with Alf that he'd done the only thing he could do. “What choice did I have—keep on hand-linin' and starve? Got to say I was pure dreadin' that meetin' with the bank manager—but he turned out to be decent enough—said he understood, said his own people in P.E.I. went bankrupt in the 30s. So that's it—worst part's behind us.”