Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  He kisses Selina, assures her they will be alright, “Look, Mother, I been buildin' boats all me life, built me own house, plumbing, wiring, everything—must be something I can make a livin' at.” Refusing the roll of bills Alf tries to push into his pocket, Ned climbs into the wagon, “Keep an eye on things—thanks for lettin' us have the wagon—we'll be back with a Cadillac for ya when our ship comes in,” he winks at Lav.

  “Anything's better than staying here like beggars,” Doris says, she and her mother-in-law cling to each other and weep.

  Young Stevie announces that he is not going, he wants to stay and live with Nan and David Saul.

  For a few minutes they consider it, Selina says she'd be happy to keep the boy, “At least until the school year's over.”

  But Ned will not hear of such a thing. “We're a family,” he says, “and we're all stickin' together!”

  Eventually they drive off, with half of Davisporte waving goodbye as the overloaded wagon passes out of sight.

  This leave-taking undoes Selina. She sees it quite differently from Raichel Jane's departure. “They're gone,” she says, “they'll never be back—not ever.”

  “Wasn't for you and David Saul I'd be out of my mind!” she tells Lav and a few days later suggests Lav take ownership of the old house in exchange for the station wagon, “You've been eyein' that house ever since the first time you came. Besides, you got just as much right to it as any living creature.”

  Later Selina will sign a paper, one Lav is sure has no legal validity, saying the old house is now hers. But she and her son never live there. They stay on in Selina's solid, two storey bungalow, a temporary arrangement which over the years becomes permanent.

  At first Lav uses the old house as a retreat, a place where she can be alone to reread the journal, to review her life, to try and decide if she will stay or go. But quickly, more quickly than she would have thought possible, other interests, other occupations take over. She stops dreaming of salmon, forgets to brood and lets her hair go completely grey.

  Lav, who had not expected to enjoy motherhood, and indeed had been slightly bored with David Saul as a baby, becomes more and more absorbed in the child as he grows and begins to ask questions. When she discovers he will tell her exactly what he thinks, she is captivated. Not having known enough children to realize that this is an attribute of the young, Lav is sure she has given birth to a perfectly honest creature, the answer to all her dreams. The woman, now clearly middle aged, and the talkative little boy spend hours together every day.

  David Saul is a bright, inquisitive child but, unlike Lav, all his questions have to do with nature: Why don't worms have legs? What makes flowers different colours? Would a Chinese dog understand a Newfoundland dog?

  During her son's first years in school Lav frequently finds herself waiting at the window, watching for the moment he will turn in to the lane. The instant she sees him she knows what kind of day he's had, knows if he is happy, if he carries a load of homework on his thin shoulders, if he has something special to tell her about. She can even tell if his feet are wet, can actually feel the softness of his flannel-lined jeans or the freezing coldness of his snow-crusted mitts.

  This sensitivity is so spontaneous that it does not frighten her. She was sure, is still sure, that her son feels it too. As proof of this she remembers the bright day he brought her home handfuls of tiny blue forget-me-nots, pulled by their roots from someone's garden.

  “They're for you,” the child said, “because you were sad all day.” And she had been! Mourning all day because as they watch him leave for school Selina had said: “They grow up, you know, Lav—grow up and grow away from us. He'll never stay—you got to be ready for that.”

  During these years Lav learns many things from Selina: how to pickle caplin, to knit, to hook mats, to make jam and make a garden. From Alf she learns how to keep a set of books, two sets in fact, how to brew beer, drive nails. He teaches her to trout, in distant, swift-flowing rivers in summer and through pond ice in winter. With her son she learns to skate, to snow-shoe, to watch Hockey Night in Canada without being bored.

  When all around her people feel pressured to leave the coast, Lav is perversely, completely, content to stay. She can see, of course, that roads are deteriorating, that repairs are no longer made to the water and telephone systems, that every year more and more houses are boarded up, that more and more young people leave as soon as they finish school. She knows that Davisporte, like a hundred other small places around the coast, is doomed—for although they dare not utter the word “resettlement,” government policy is to relocate everyone, if not to Upper Canada, then to those towns they have designated as “economically advantaged communities.”

  None of this disturbs Lav's happiness.

  Despite the sight of Ned's empty house and the continued absence of Rachel Jane, Alf and Selina also seem content. They get regular letters from Doris—she is taking in babies, Ned has found part-time work in a factory and John is going to university. From Rachel Jane come occasional post cards, scrawled lines that say nothing except she is in a certain city: Toronto, New York, Vancouver, San Francisco.

  The idea that Charlotte might sometime go to a night-club and hear Rachel Jane, without ever knowing who the singer is, bemuses Lav. She mentions the possibility to Alf who thinks it unlikely that his daughter will make it into a night-club, “Unless she's got rid of the crowd she left here with,” he says.

  Yet on one occasion Lav and Selina do see the girl on television. There, in a back-up chorus behind some star, is Rachel Jane Andrews—blue and red lights flashing across her white face, thin hips gyrating inside black leather. Selina sniffs and wonders what has become of the brooch.

  Alf rarely speaks of his daughter. Sometimes Lav thinks he has forgotten her. Sometimes she thinks he has forgotten he ever had another family, forgets that David Saul is not his son and she is not his wife.

  As Selina points out, anyone seeing them together would think Alf was David Saul's father, but the boy's cheerful disposition, his need to please and placate is like Ned's. Lav can certainly see nothing of Wayne Drover in the boy—and he does look like Alf, the same dark skin, the black hair, the same hawk-like nose.

  “Them two are black Andrews,” Selina tells Lav. “Now you and your father were red Andrews—the families are all mixed up, of course.” Selina avoids saying that Lav and Alf are at least third cousins, that they have several ancestors in common, including, if Lavinia's journal is to be believed, a Red Indian.

  In the summer Lav often goes out to the Cape, usually alone. She has set herself to uncover all the old headstones that remain. After carefully digging sand from around them she writes the inscriptions into Lavinia's journal. In the new graveyard she cuts the grass and paints the iron fence surrounding her father's grave and the graves of her grandparents.

  One year Lav and Selina dig over and replant Doris's old garden behind the still padlocked house. They have a huge crop of potatoes and cabbage and the next year branch out into lettuce, carrot and brussel sprouts. When David Saul is in grade three, Lav joins a group of women who take turns volunteering at the little library and peddling everything from fudge to gift wrap to raise money for the school. Until the clinic closes she fills in as nurse's aide.

  Rarely now does the shadow of a future somewhere else cross Lav's mind. When it does she makes a weak effort to brace herself and David Saul for the inevitable: “Some day we may have to leave Davisporte,” she tells him. “Someday you'll have to go anyway—when you're ready for university.”

  And always, the boy stares at her wordlessly, shakes his head, and Lav gives up. She cannot imagine what his future might be, what he might become. David Saul himself is only interested in going into the woods, in trouting and skating with his friends, in cars and trucks. At the age of nine he is already driving Alf 's truck back and forth the lane.

  A designer, perhaps, or naturalist, or an engineer? Surely not! Nothing seems right or hopeful enough,
nothing wonder-filled enough for her son. She remembers her step-father Saul and how he had encouraged her to be a scientist in that long-ago time when it seemed science could save the world. What can save the world now? The problem is too confusing.

  But, Lav tells herself, there is time yet, lots of time—as Selina says, all the time in the world—to consider David Saul's future—the boy is not even ten. She remembers Zinnie, decides that next year she will write to her friend for advice.

  epilogue

  It is tempting to leave Lav in the still comfortable present. To abandon her here, happily, stubbornly, unconcerned f or the future. But wisely or unwisely we are committed to that unknown terrain—are, like her, ruled by curiosity.

  Lav has many years yet to live, many things to become—a teacher, goat herder, a midwife, sometimes healer, a hoarder of flour, sugar and tinned goods. She will paint—become an artist. She will save small glass jars in which to collect colour: house paint, marine paint, enamel and fluorescent paint. Whenever she sees someone painting Lav will present herself, holding a bottle which will be filled without question. In time she does not even have to ask for the paint, people bring it to her.

  “What a grand colour!” a woman will say, admiring her freshly painted door, 'I'll drain off the rest for Vinnie,” for by then everyone but Alf has forgotten her other name.

  Lav will practice her art on any surface, on cardboard, glass, plywood, on the doors of wrecked cars and refrigerators. She creates garish sea creatures, the like of which no one along the shore has ever seen.

  In summertime she embarrasses her son by lining these pictures up for strangers. Arranging them against the fence with a For Sale sign. None are ever sold.

  Eventually Alf hangs the paintings along the walls of the bar, nailing them up on top of the fishing net, crowding them in around the varnished lobster, the shipwreck map and bowling plaques. Local wits say that in the Cat it takes fewer drinks to reach that state of inebriation where the walls pulsate and the floor begins to swing.

  Lav will find much happiness bringing these weird fish into being. Can fall into a trance stroking points of fluorescent light on long looped tentacles. Can stand, head thrown back, painting, singing gospel hymns, learned from Selina:

  The tumult and the shouting dies:

  The captains and the kings depart:

  Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

  An humble and a contrite heart.

  So Lavinia Andrews, whose heart becomes less and less humble, less and less contrite each year, sings as she swirls iridescent auroras around strange serpentine bodies. When every inch of the Cat's walls are filled she will begin painting smaller pieces, devising fish-like door stops, fire screens, window shutters and headboards for beds.

  When she can no longer give her creations away she stacks them, layer upon layer, filling the rooms of the old house where Thomas and Lavinia had once lived, the kitchen where Rachel died. Sometimes, standing in the cool rooms that still smell of sea and brine, Lav can hear them talking about her work, pondering upon the marvellous creatures that have invaded the space they once occupied.

  Eventually David Saul will become a teen-ager. He will stop confiding in his mother. The brightness that had seemed to surround him as a child will grow dim.

  As she gets older Lav will spend more and more time outdoors: whole summers roaming the Cape, walking up and down the empty beaches where caplin no longer come, off which a few herring are still sometimes hooked. She will hike for miles through the burnt-over woods behind Davisporte. This area, called “in back,” had been ceded years ago to woods companies now moved to the forests of Russia or South America. The living trees are gone, all that remains is a litter of dead limbs, rotting stumps pointing skyward. From time to time these catch fire, burning deep into the earth, smouldering underground for months.

  Still, things grow. The earth, as Zinnie said, will survive. Each spring pink mallow with fairy cheese centres, pale purple bell-flowers escaped from old gardens, aspen and alder bushes cover the ground. In autumn the silver-white ghost trees tower over a carpet of colour, red-leaved blueberries, wine-coloured marsh berries, red partridge berries with holly-green leaves.

  In winter Lav will paint, read—or brood. Sometimes she will huddle in the Cat with Alf, drinking. Sometimes join Selina and her cronies in a game of forty-fives, in discussions of wars and pestilence, rumours of which sweep down the coast like winter gales.

  Like gales, these rumours are always different, always the same. The most persistent is that a multinational company based in New York, in Zurich or Hong Kong has finally agreed upon some monstrous plan: the entire island becoming a launching site for missiles, a place to dump garbage, a place to play war games, a target on which to practice low-level bombing—or just an empty rock establishing America's right to the surrounding ocean.

  But Lav will have no time for such talk. By then she will have become a mechanic, an improviser, a scavenger who brings home bits of wood, bricks, wire, sheets of plastic, broken machinery, worn tires and a host of other things abandoned in marshes and old dumps.

  Shortages are commonplace, she has learned to mix mashed potatoes with the flour in her bread dough, to pick up faltering television signals by stringing wires around the roof, to grow onion, celery and pale lettuce in the kitchen window, to make a tonic from kelp, wine from dandelion flowers, shoes from seal skin. She can enjoy jam without sugar, clothes without style and months without visitors.

  Lav will find that she is not unhappy with any of this, not with the disintegrating highway, the absence of newspapers, the empty Cape to which no ships come. It occurs to her that one should not escape so easily, that her contentment is utterly selfish, that she will pay.

  And she will.

  The dark age will come, one day her son will leave, one day her lover will die. Wildly, despairingly miserable she will retreat into a small, silent world. During this sad, wasted time she will do nothing but sit on the front steps and stare at the street. She will frighten children—now very few for only the old, the hunted and the maimed live along this coast. The children run from Lav's mad face and fierce eyes.

  During these months she will go only once into the lane, to snatch up a rod and chase some official as he steps down from a government helicopter.

  Selina will live on and she will force Lav to live. They become old women together. “Don't you dare die on me, Vinnie Andrews!” Selina screams and makes Lav eat.

  Then one day, from God knows where, Rachel Jane appears. A skeleton walking up the lane holding a little girl by the hand. Rachel Jane takes immediately to bed. But the child, called Soshiska by her mother but quickly rechristened Sissy by Selina, sits herself down on the step beside Lav and begins to ask questions.

  After the little girl's arrival Lav will slowly become sane—or almost sane—she will still hear voices and sometimes forget to eat, will still hold long conversations with Alf, with her mother, with Rachel and Mary Bundle. She begins getting up early again. Taking her cup of tea and one of David Saul's old picture books out front on fine mornings, she will sit and read to the child—to anyone who happens by.

  Many years later, standing beside her father's grave, Lav will gaze across the Cape and see caplin roll up on the sand—the first person in decades to witness such a sight. She will call out to Sissy, who is clipping grass on Selina's grave. The two women, the old one hobbling, the young one running, will hurry down the beach towards the line of silver.

  Things come back, Lav thinks, things do come back! Caplin first, then cod, then people. Watching Sissy gather up the little fish she will remember what Zinnie had once said about the world being a better place without people—Lav has never felt that way.

  One morning shortly after this, the old woman will do something she has been thinking about for a long, long time. She will go into the old house and find Lavinia's journal. Walking all alone she will slowly cross the marsh, carry the book out to the Cape. Sitting in the weak sp
ring sunshine, with her back against the black rock she will open the ledger and begin to write.

  She will write, “It is spring and in the great pit at the centre of the sacred hill afire burns as it has for a thousand springs…”

  Lavinia Andrews,

  Cape Random, June 2024.

  acknowledgements

  First I want to thank the readers of Random Passage, especially the real Lavinia, whose wish to know more about the Cape people encouraged me to write this book.

  Of course I want to thank George, without whose knowledge of computers I would never have finished.

  I would like to acknowledge the help of Fran Innes, Gerry Rubia, Jennifer Morgan and other members of The Newfoundland Writers' Guild who read sections of earlier drafts.

  I am especially thankful for the critiques of Joan Clark, Helen Porter and Greg Morgan. These greatly improve what I thought was my final manuscript.

  I am grateful to people who took time to give me tours of Department of Fisheries and Oceans buildings in St. John's and Ottawa.

  The following is a very incomplete list of books by writers, living and dead, to whom I am deeply indebted:

  The History of Newfoundland by Prouse;

  Dictionary of Newfoundland English by Story, Kirwin and Widdowson;

  Politics In Newfoundland by S.J.R. Noel;

  The Islands of Bonavista Bay by John Feltham;

  Sketches of Labrador Life by Lydia Campbell;

  The Decay of Trade by David Alexander;

  Newfoundland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by Hiller and Neary;

  More Than 50% by Hilda Murray;

  The Beothucks and Red Indians by James P. Howley;

  ''Complaints is many and various” by R.G. Moyles;

  On Sloping Ground by Aubrey M. Tizzard;

  Women of Labrador by Elizabeth Goudie;