Maiden from the Sea

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  Genevieve went back to the lean-to, her body scented by Nasook’s flesh, her mind full of him, as if he had breathed himself into her.

  The next morning she awoke to a cold firepit. She painstakingly worked up her first fire with the flint and steel Nasook had left, using oakum tinder and dried seaweed. She tipped a puncheon to shelter the fire against wind and rain. She would move it if there was a change in wind. Above the fire, supported by shingled rocks, she laid two large round rocks. That night, she carried them to her bed wrapped in a sling of bark. They filled her bed with heat, and warmed her as she drifted asleep. Jude is lost . . . The wind took his sails and capsized his boat . . . Empty sea . . . Empty sky . . . Seabirds blown into empty spaces in cliff pockets . . . Caroline stands calling . . . the wind blowing her breath back against her nose in a smothering gust . . . lips stiff with cold and grief . . . a sea widow!

  Genevieve awakened, startled, but happy to be out of sleep, out of a bad dream.

  * * * *

  Days passed without a show of Nasook, and she wondered if he would come again. She yearned for his scent, and the feel of him. When she had taken him into her, it was as much for the scent as for the need to be close to another human being. His earthy smell had blown like a flame across her nose, the memory warming her mind even while her body shivered in the cold outside the lean-to. Day after day, she tried to keep the fire going to save herself from perishing.

  She was hardly awake one morning when she heard the hissing of the banked fire as rain spat on it, driven from a direction not sheltered by the puncheon. By the time she scravelled to the entrance of her tilt, her fireplace was a dark, wet place in the ground. Damp air slid against her skin, and pierced it, sending waves of cold through her body. Rain pelted down, splattering stones outside the tilt. The sun, a pale ball, sailed under a dark cloud and slipped out like a cold, flat disk. She wrapped herself in all her coverings and, from the opening of her shelter, watched the dark drift of birds, their ragged cries and hers a connecting cacophony.

  Other days when the fire almost died, she slivered birch rind into shavings and fed them to the fire. She gently stoked the embers, breathing against them until a warm, smoky breath arose, touching her face, comforting her as if it were the fingers of a living being. Her body kept remembering a feeling she could not forget and her look often wandered to the woods, but she didn’t dare venture from her place. After sitting silently day after day, not letting out her voice, not connecting it to other human voices, she felt wizened like a fig.

  * * * *

  Autumn days came, some courted by summer’s warmth, days of sunshine lapping the waters before cold shadows crept across the sea, blowing over the thinning forest. Grass and plants that had danced airily through the summer were now shrivelling into yellowish spidery legs folding in on themselves and collapsing. Leaves that had fallen from trees and settled in Genevieve’s path now made crisp sighs under her feet. A breeze lifted them and they scampered like little animals in the forest, startling her. The cutting sounds of the spruce partridge became familiar, its bill prying open tightly closed spruce and fir cones as the bird gathered seeds for its winter cache. Sadness spread through her like a dark stain as she looked at the bare trees. For winter, trees should be clothed and not au naturel, she thought ruefully. Still, they won’t feel the cold; they will be dead. It is I who will suffer.

  Toward November, she often looked up to the sight of birds on their way south for the winter. Clouds, like black smoke, rolled across grey sky. The air was sweet, the scent of vegetation pungent. She decided to spend all her time gathering food for winter. She was not going to die among the living flesh of fish and plants while she could ferret. She hoped she would never have to wring the neck of a bird for survival. She skirted cliffs and walked into a little valley rising haphazardly. She popped berry gems into her mouth. Orange rosehips drew her attention and she gathered what she could find. Here she could eat whenever she wanted, something she couldn’t do in France. The hills were jewelled with berries which she continued to hoard for the months ahead. She filled a goat’s bladder left by the fishermen with blue, black, and red berries and carried it back to the tilt. Sometimes she startled birds from their burrows among marshberries and fenberries strung on vines in hairlike grasses. Squawking murres rose and dipped down beside a lookout hill.

  She trekked through brambles to the cliffs, her ears perked at the slightest sounds. She dared hope that Nasook would come back and be with her. She watched shadows move in on the water like the shades of a mackerel’s back. Wind came like a heavy hand, twisting her breath with its smothering force. Snow swirled like feathers across the land until sea and sky became a dark, woven presence.

  Soon easterly winds swept all warmth from the cove. Snow became a deep, white rug draped over the hills, dressing bare and full trees and peaking on the tips of cliffs that lifted majestically into the air above a raging sea.

  Genevieve tried to remember the gentler cove, but all she could see was the cove’s cold face.

  She could only imagine what kind of winter would roll over this strange land and sea, threatening to extinguish her warmth. There came an emptiness creeping in with the cold silence of winter. She felt herself shrinking inside, as if she could disappear if caught in a strong wind. The lean-to was open to the wind’s moods. It could lift the flap of her shelter and fill the place with its frosty breath.

  Despite the blankets of furs in the lean-to’s bunk, she awoke in the morning, her nose sticking out of the furs, feeling the cold burn of a north wind. She would have to move to the cave, taking the cache of dried fish the fishermen had left, blue mussels, and the berries she had picked before winter snow buried the bushes.

  The cave was damp farther in, but dry toward the entrance, and it was easier to get a fire going there. She settled in front of it, feeling its warmth settling her shivers. The silence of the cave was a deafening presence ringing in her ears, a crystal clear stillness against the steady moan of the sea. She felt safe from biting winds in this strange isolation as she looked toward its opening hidden from the sea. She felt less safe after her first night. The new moon’s crescent pulled the tides toward the cave and silvery water trickled in. She shuddered, wondering if the place could flood while she was sleeping.

  The next day, she walked outside and looked toward cliffs where powdery snow had drifted, filling cragged pockets, leaving edges sticking up like black shadows through white. She wished then that she could become a hibernating bear, having no need for food, no need to move—always warm. The tiniest sounds of her own movement and the soft stir of her own breathing in her ears were scattered now and then by the tinkering noise of a piece of cliff breaking off and falling into the thundering waves of Ochre Cleft Cove.

  * * * *

  For days she stayed inside the cave, lying in a dream state, adrift in her mind until one day her body jolted her. The stir inside her belly was so gentle, she wasn’t quite sure if it was real. As days disappeared into nights and nights into days without her counting them, she noticed her belly becoming round and taut. Her breasts felt heavy, like polyps of hot water. Nature had tricked her into giving in to a wild urge and now she was . . . She tried to remember the word used in hushed tones in the Laurier household. “Enceinte!” she exclaimed in wonder. She touched her belly over and over, her eyes staring wide and apprehensive.

  It was almost too wonderful and too terrible at the same time. She knew little about babies before they left a woman’s body, or while they were being born. She knew little about what to do with them after they were born. It was too much to think about.

  One morning she heard the high, mournful cry of a whobby and followed the sound to the beach where the bird was picking at a starfish. She hadn’t wanted to kill the wild gull, but she needed nourishment for her baby. It was easy. A black net left by the fishermen was all it took. She slung it over the bird, tangli
ng it. Then she tightened the net, cringing as she killed the bird with a rock. She slit the bird with a knife she had found in the lean-to, letting the blood drain.

  The smell of heart and liver roasting over the fire revived her enough that she found the strength to heat a clay pot of water in which to scald the bird’s feathers and pluck them from the flesh. She felt lucky to have learned how to pluck birds while she lived in Madame Laurier’s house. She ate all the bird over the next three days, chewing the marrow out of the bones and cracking the skull to eat the milky paste of brain. Should I live until spring, she thought, I’ll have Nasook’s coins to barter with the fishermen who may come as foes. Should I not live, she thought ruefully, I shall leave a sign of me for someone to be curious about. Her mother had taught her how to shape her name. Now, she pressed stones she had gathered from the beach into the earth to form the letters of her name. Then she gathered small, white stones and traced a figure of herself—arms, legs, and body—creating her white shadow that, after she was gone, would remain solid and lasting in the shelter of the cave. She began a second figure: her baby. She curved the body and head into a semicircle.

  * * * *

  It was late one morning when she awoke coughing and fighting against what felt like an acrid-smelling hand pressed to her mouth. She jumped to the sound of fire crackling above the cave, its smoke drifting in. She grabbed her cold, damp kerchief and put it to her face. Often, her teeth had chattered painfully as she hurried to make a fire to still her shivers and to fill the air with warmth. Now, stifling smoke was drawing the breath out of her as caustic fumes filled the cave. Gulping air and coughing, she ran outside in panic. Fire was overtaking the place, and she was caught between a freezing sea and a smoke-fogged land. She couldn’t breathe! And then it began to rain. A sudden burst of flames hissed beside the cave before settling into smoke. Wind moved through it like a giant’s hand, spreading it, opening a patch of air.

  In the clearing, Genevieve could see the black silhouette of a ship moving through dark waters. She waved her arms frantically, wanting to be rescued from this island. Her arms stopped in midair as she spied a flag embossed with the familiar French insignia and a red flag imprinted with white bones angled like the Christian cross. She recalled how the sailors on the Tempest had feared seeing any ship flying a red flag, for it was a signal to the ship whose path it crossed that it would be shedding the blood of all the people aboard rather than taking prisoners. She trembled at the thought of one of those ships coming to the island. She trembled more when she thought that a woman would not fare well on a ship full of pirates who may have been at sea a long time. The ship continued moving far off, as if drawing itself away from a deed done.

  Only fringes of the forest had burned. Now trees were straggly and sooty. She fancied the shivering branch of a fir caught in the surprise of fire, imagined it bitten off and dropped to the ground like a flanker to bring fire to the grass. She smelled blueberries as they boiled into jam, left burning until they were black. The quick downpour of rain, thick and streaming, had put out the fire. A loud burst of thunder and sizzling lightning followed, sending Genevieve back inside the cave. As soon as the air cleared she hurried over the cliffs to the cove, relieved to find that the tilt was still there holding her stash of firewood. She carried some back to the cove.

  There were days when Genevieve didn’t come outside the cave. When she was coaxed out by a splash of sunshine through the cave’s roof, she often sat on a rock wondering: Will I live long enough to give life? Sometimes she believed she would. Other times, she imagined a bitter fate: slow starvation. Then she felt as if her heart was beating inside her head. “Quiet!” she’d murmur. “Get back down where you belong. I’m not going to be scared, not now when I have two hearts beating inside me.”

  Bitter winds and their frosty tongues lost their sting and mild winds blew in, melting the snowfalls. Warm sunshine dappling the waters brought the memory of summer. Genevieve walked atop the dizzying cliffs. Winds played with her hair, lifted it, floated it across her face, warming it with the heat of her breath. The winds whispered through dry leaves. She imagined that every word spoken stayed in the air. They never died. She wondered what sounds had been in the air around her. Had cries fallen into silence over the cragged cliffs? What intents had risen whole only to be broken as violently as ice sheets that badgered the shores? There were stories that would never get told. But she felt them around her like chitter-chatter in the wind.

  Clouds veiled the sun and Genevieve looked toward the now dark sea, then back to the stretch of burnt land. If wind had not fallen dead on the land, the fire might have leaped on its breath and followed the stream that cut through the cove. She’d like to cross the stream and go through the trees to see what was beyond the bank of black skeletal limbs. But that could lay danger to her life and the life of her child. Her small white hands cupped her belly, her fingertips meeting each other.

  “Ah, bébé,” she sighed softly. “Despite the fire, my imaginings are good. Patience, that will be your name, if you are a girl, for I am waiting patiently for you. Your stirring surges in me; your life brings back my will when there comes the urge to let go. You will live and grow—white or golden brown, who knows? You will be neither French nor English, Catholic nor Huguenot. You’ll be bush born so you’ll be a pur sang—a pure-blooded new-found-lander. Men will come from across the sea, and one will hold you to his body and give you seed. I can see you dividing until there’ll be generations in this cove, people calling to each other across the way, people never knowing about my life, never believing the mixture of blood that is in your veins.”

  Genevieve made slow steps back inside the cave and picked up her whistle. She tried to blow it. A faint sound broke through the silence of the cave. Her soft lips tightened on the whistle and the sound came stronger, a separate and lonely voice from hers. She leaned back against slated black rocks, suddenly very tired.

  Unaware of a shadow falling across the snow, she fell asleep dreaming.

  Chapter 5

  Nasook

  Genevieve stirred in sleep, eyelashes flittering on her cheeks as if straining to let her out of an unsettling dream. She was back in France, not as a servant, but as a noblewoman riding in a cabriolet along the bourg. She leaned back against the high seat of the hooded carriage and fingered the diamanté trim on the ruche of her thick, blue velvet gown as she rode home to a husband and family. Horses and their driver pulled her cabriolet along the cobbled streets while sounds of the grinding wheels beneath the carriage mingled with the noises of a busy street. The driver made a sudden lash at his horses and they leaped forward, causing Genevieve’s head to lurch. “The enemy is after us!” the driver shouted. “We have to get to a safe place.”

  The cabriolet staggered, a door swung open, and Genevieve felt herself falling headlong to a bed of cobbled stones. She lay there stunned, her neck stabbed with pain.

  “A safe place,” she murmured, reaching to rub her sore neck. Her eyes opened and her hands searched for the ruche around her neck. For a second, she was startled that the white, fluting lace on her gown wasn’t there—that she wasn’t wearing a beautiful gown. She was not the well-to-do French madame she had dreamed she was.

  She had awakened to her stark surroundings, her body trembling as if jabbed by a thousand needles. There was an unfamiliar darkness about the cave. Snow had stogged the crack and the light wasn’t getting through. The air was gathering around her like a damp garment under slanted walls that stretched above her face like the cover of a dead box. Suddenly light filtered through the opening to the cave as if something had scraped away snow piled against it. Next, she saw a dark form filling the entrance. She tightened inside herself in terror, thinking: A pirate, that’s what it must be, from the ship that set the cove aflame—he knows about the cave, knows about the gold coins. And now he will know about me.

  Her eyes widened, strained as if th
ey would pop from their sockets as the form moved to the inside of the cave. In an instant she relaxed. Nasook! Her mind spoke the name, but there was no sound. He entered, walking slowly on bear-paw snowshoes. His eyes, looking through the slits of bark, snow spectacles, met hers and they locked, while their faces stayed impassive. When he got close, he knelt down to where Genevieve lay and dropped two blankets of sealskins over her. Her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth opened in a weak cry. She had hoped for his coming, but days had emptied themselves of light and many nights had fallen seamless around her until she had lost faith. His hand touched hers, and at first the warm touch of another human being was like having a hunger satiated. Then, strengthened by anger, her pale, white hand came up and hit Nasook’s face. His eyebrows lifted like eagle feathers and he went back on his heels, his lips parting as if he was startled. His face settled and he didn’t speak.

  Genevieve’s hand flew to her mouth. What if Indians don’t allow women to strike them! What if Nasook hits me back with something stronger than a flat hand! The strain of her aloneness and fear of starvation were forgotten. An emotion she had experienced the first time she saw Nasook came as powerful as then—the fear that he would kill her!

  She looked at him, her tongue muted in fear. Then tears welled in her eyes, and she whispered, “Bébé.” Her body shivered as her hands slipped inside her fur skins to cup her swelling belly.