Maiden from the Sea

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  “You make noise when Teehonee bathe birth blood from skin.”

  Genevieve sniffled, trying to halt her tears. She smiled at Nasook holding their baby. “Our meseeliguet is as pretty as early spring flowers.”

  Teehonee and Nasook looked at her as if they were grateful to hear the Beothuk word on a white woman’s tongue as if it belonged there—as if there was hope that it would be carried through the stream of words finding their way past many sunsets.

  Teehonee sat down beside Genevieve with a cup of crushed flower petals rubbed in oil. As the woman’s soft hands kneaded her face, their earthy scent and warmth permeated Genevieve’s senses. She felt warm and relaxed. She did not care that she was naked, her breasts heavy with milk, her empty belly bulging like a gibbous moon. The rest of her body showed nothing but skin over bones. A skeleton in my skin . . . A skeleton in the closet. She jumped as if rattled by the words her mind had thrown at her.

  Teehonee shook her head as she kneaded Genevieve’s body. “A-enamin!” she exclaimed for a second time.

  Thin person, Genevieve remembered.

  “Bibidegemedic,” a soft, musical voice was saying. Genevieve looked at the cup of spring cranberries held in Badisut’s hand. She took a handful and ate them, one by one, before reaching for the rest. The woman seemed satisfied that she had emptied her birch cup.

  Nasook left the mamateek and when he came back, his eyes were sad and wary. “I saw dee-cradou—very large boat—big ejahbtook—sails—pass cove for big harbour,” he said. “Fishermen who left you soon be back in lean-to and look for you. I not take you to them. They save you and child. They kill me for mixing our blood.”

  “I will stay with you,” she assured him. “You gave me seed that might have been spilled in the wind. Your life answered to the life in my body.” She didn’t know much about the human body, but she knew that a woman carried part of the life that made her a mother. Both of them had made Patience Elizabeth, Nasook’s Teehonee.

  She fell asleep and a dream carried her along an endless shore spread with ochre netting that ensnared her. Indian children untangled her, their shouts of laughter mingling with the unfamiliar sounds their tongues made. She felt compelled to keep moving, her voice carrying no sound to her ears. The Indians were urging her to go away. They were keeping little Teehonee. The Indian children were running after her, saying maw-the-awtheu and pushing a little wooden doll into her arms. Her baby was left behind with the Red Indians. She awoke relieved that she could rest with the scent of her child and the friendly faces of the people around her.

  Powdered eggs, and puddick stuffed with seaweed and fish were all pushed against her mouth and kept there until she opened her lips. “Grow strong for little Teehonee,” Nasook urged.

  * * * *

  Nasook set about building his own mamateek, cutting alders and curving them over each other and fastening them in a cone over the ground. He covered the shelter of alders with birchbark and animal sinew, chinching them with layers of moss and blackberry heath. Inside the new home, he laid a ring of smooth round stones to hold a fire. The Indian women left Genevieve alone with Nasook except for each morning and evening, when they came and lifted the flap on the mamateek and smiled at the baby. If Nasook nodded, they would run in quickly, a spattering of words meeting Genevieve’s smile. Sometimes they came with Indian bread: a mixture of eggs, deer fat, and seal scruncheons dried in the sun.

  Nasook collected food and some of the clothes Genevieve had left in the cave. When she was well enough, they spent mornings around the shores fishing for urchins and smelts. Patience Elizabeth lay in the nape sack attached to a summer cassock. Teehonee had made the caribou skin, scraped clean of its hairs, for Genevieve. She no longer felt alone. She had a family. That thought was as sweet as the bright red berries she had picked in June from light green tongues held up like candles. The tiny berries had burst under her teeth, sweet and with a molasses flavour.

  The molasses kisses are out, Elizabeth, berries of the lily of the valley. Genevieve heard the words from inside her head. She smiled without knowing why.

  Chapter 12

  Return of the Fisherman

  The dark wave, the English ship that had taken Luke and his father back to Ireland from the new-found land, had returned late spring, after being battered by stiff winds. Now it lay anchored a way up the shore to Ship Cove. The two fishermen had rowed their punt down to Ochre Cleft Cove. The sea, high and dashing, and an easterly wind turned them away from the cove and toward rocks beside the oblique mouth of a cave they didn’t know existed. Luke scanned the land, hoping for a glimpse of the girl they had left to fend for her life in nothing more than a tilt.

  The wind pitched, the waves settled, and the men swung the boat away, steadying its bow toward the cove. They both wondered what had become of Genevieve, though neither of them spoke a word. When they ventured up the hill to the tilt they found evidence of a fire and scallop shells Genevieve had used for plates.

  Luke was the first to mention her. “I wonder what happened to the girl we sove?” He looked around wistfully.

  His father grunted. “Good timing for the young maiden that we was out jigging fish and found her in time to pound the water out of her.”

  Bad timing, Luke thought, that I had to leave before I got to know the girl. He remembered her frightened eyes opening to his curious ones, and now he imagined that they had wanted to invite him into a new world he would like to explore. In the beginning, he had wondered where Genny had come from. Now he wondered where she had gone.

  * * * *

  Summer had come and witherod was alive with white blossoms. Berry bushes were on the turn to sweet blackberries. Nasook, with his companions, Amet and Whooch, had gone on a fishing journey, gone in the night, taking harpoons and nets. They would return after daybreak.

  Genevieve got up in the morning and stripped herself of the soft hairless doeskin she’d been given for nights with Nasook. She pulled on the blue dress she’d taken from the dead girl in the shipwreck and slipped her summer cassock over it. Settling Patience Elizabeth in its nape sack, she hurried through the forest, along the pathway that Nasook had shown her. On the cliff above the cove, she stood straight and tall. She stayed for a spell, feeling as if she were a figurehead on a ship moving through time. The blue dress flared out in the wind, swaying like kelp in water. She laid her baby in the shelter of a large rock and sat beside her. A familiar lullaby parted her lips and she sang over and over: “Dormez-vous, dormez-vous . . .” Patience Elizabeth slipped into sleep while soft wind stirred the air and, as if it were a magical wand, blew apart airy globes of knitted stars from dandelion seed; they floated into the baby’s dark eyelashes. “Even your eyes are crowned by stars,” Genevieve said tenderly. “You are my star, my sun and moon, my day when it is night; you are the beginning of the rest of my life.”

  Nothing can come to shrivel our happiness. Nothing, she vowed.

  She was walking toward the cave when she heard voices along the shore. She slipped among trees and crouched, listening to the paddling of a boat and familiar voices.

  “She must’ve drowned,” a gruff voice said, “or starved if she wandered off. She should’ve stayed here.”

  Genevieve recognized Luke’s sober response. “She could have gone off the cliff.” Her suspicion that Nasook had killed the fishermen had been an idle fear. She crept away, back to Nasook and her new life in the Indian settlement. Amet and Whooch treated her with silent looks as if they were unsure of her place in their tribe, but they showed baby Teehonee glad looks. They sometimes crooked a finger under her chin as if to make her smile.

  Genevieve knew where blackberries grew out on the point and one day she went to see if they had ripened. She carried the wind’s long song in her ears as she dug into soft blackberry heath. The zesty scent of sea-licked berries drifted across her face. Then she heard a voice.
Her ears picked up her name on a familiar tongue: “Genny!”

  She turned to see Luke coming across the cliffs, his face pale. Likely from passing winter under a pale, dull sun, she thought. He pulled her against his heavy guernsey, the smell of sweat and damp wool stifling.

  “I dreamed of you, Genny, and I was sorry fer leaving yer. The shame made the winter go longer than usual. I couldn’t get you outta me mind. I vowed that if I got back I’d never leave wit’out yer. I’m staying here.”

  Patience Elizabeth stirred and a soft sound came from Genevieve’s nape sack, startling the young fisherman. His eyes widened. “But what’s this—a child? Where’d it come from?”

  She lifted her head in a proud defiance of what his notion would be of her. “I lay for this bébé and I gave birth to her.”

  “Lay? Fer what man?”

  “I lay for my own longing and curiosity. I could have lain in France for men, old and ornery, and brusque men who would prod my body for their own intentions. I chose this laying, and out of it came this child. Her name is Patience Elizabeth.”

  Joe came up behind his son and spat his words, “’Tis got the look of the Red Devils. They sent a savage to sow seed in a white woman for fear they’ll all be swept into the earth.”

  Luke offered a feeble explanation. “Perchance he saw her bathe in the stream and it became a pleasant t’ought that took him to her.”

  Joe lifted his hand to Luke. “Don’t try to mash wit’ that girl, me son.”

  The young fisherman gave his father a determined look. “I’m staying when the season’s ended. I’ll build us a strong shelter if she’ll agree.”

  Joe sneered. “And the child? Sure, ’tis nothin’ but a half-breed.”

  “’Tis a child.”

  “And with half a soul—a savage half soul.”

  “Ump.” Luke turned up his nose. “I doubt Indians have souls.”

  “Why do you doubt it?” Genevieve asked. “Is it that they speak in words you have not learned, and have darker skin than you?” Her eyes widened in anger.

  Luke sounded sheepish. “Well, when they can’t speak their minds to you, and you don’t know their feelings, you think that.”

  “If you think Indians don’t have souls, you’ll be worse off than they are; if you kill them, you’ll lose your soul.”

  “But look what the tawny-looking creature done to you, took your flesh, faulted it wit’ his, and now this child—”

  “Got half a soul, I suppose,” she answered, swinging her dark hair away from her face. “This child’s soul will feel compassion for humans and all other creatures.”

  The old man came up from behind. “Touch it, Luke, and Indians’ll be down on you and arrow you like they’d kill a seal. ’Tis nothin’ more than a whore’s afterbirth—that baby,” he shouted. “Someone should kill all the cock Indians and feed their carcasses to the gulls.”

  Genevieve’s eyes narrowed. A memory flashed through her mind. She had come into her mother’s room as her mother stepped from the wooden tub in which she was bathing. She had stood staring, but not at her mother’s nakedness. Something else held her eyes. Her mother turned, and Genevieve saw deep scars down her soft, white flanks and toward the mound of dark hair between her thighs. It was as if her skin had been chafed, causing sores to break and fester, leaving ugly stripes. She cringed at the sight of her beautiful mother’s body bearing such terrible marks.

  “Mère!” she had cried, covering her face with her hands. She had turned and left the room, leaving her mother rushing to hide her body. Years later she had learned the truth about her mother’s scars. An old servant had described Genevieve’s mother, when she was young, as having the dainty and perfect face of a doll. Monsieur Laurier had caught her with a young English migrant outside the walls of his maison. He became enraged and immediately ordered his blacksmith to make up a metal contraption. He had the young woman fitted with it. It was heavy and hung on her small hips—ill-fitting. When she began to gain weight, the belt tightened. The metal rusted.

  The old servant’s voice was sad, her chin dropping into the folds of her neck. “I found her whimpering in the cold one night, her swollen body marked by the awful contraption the Monsieur had placed on her. I went to him—fearful. He told me sternly that he had belted her to preserve her chastity.

  “My lips felt numb and my face stiffened from the fear of what he might do to me. ‘You can’t hold the key to her chastity, sir,’ I had pleaded. Perhaps he wanted your mother for himself and he was keeping her for that purpose. But when he saw her swollen belly he knew he was too late. I told him about the pus seeping from her skin and the master appeared to regret his action. He freed your mother and had your father banished. Arrowroot dressings dried the pus, healing the sores. You,” the old one said, her lids hanging over her old eyes and covering her lashes in heavy wrinkles, “were what saved her.”

  “Me!” Genevieve had whispered, tears filling her eyes.

  “You were growing inside her. She lived to give you birth.”

  Just as my baby kept me alive, she thought.

  Luke gazed up and down Genevieve’s body. If she was a pure maiden when we pulled her from the sea, she’s not anymore, he thought. She’s been randying with an Indian. I can’t begrudge her this one deed. I’ve learned wild times with women.

  “I courted girls in France,” he said, “when I was in port two years ago. Some of these girls in meal houses wanted adventure. They learned English, hoping it’d help them get to England. But the cook wouldn’t let ’em speak anyt’ing but French. She kept a brank for saucy maids. I never lost me heart there.” He winked. “Sure, I kept it for you. You’re thin, but I can fatten you.”

  His father grunted, “Yes, move her belly to meet her breasts just as the Indian did.” He turned to Genevieve. “Give the young one to the Indians. If they don’t want it, the earth will. We’ll have you.” He laughed. “The savages’ll give your body to the gods and make jewellery from your bones.”

  Genevieve drew back from their words and their smell. They both stank after sailing across the seas for weeks. On landing from the schooner they must have stopped to do nothing but eat and sleep before coming down to the cove. She should have been more careful; she should not have shown herself. The father was looking at her. Too keen, she thought.

  There was an abrupt movement and the old fisherman knocked her back against the cliffs. He leaned hard against her, and Patience Elizabeth, in Genevieve’s nape sack, was pushed aside and forward. The nape string tightened around Genevieve’s neck. The baby squalled on her mother’s shoulder as Genevieve fought, cringing at the thought of having the old man’s member inside her body.

  Then Luke was beating his father. “You won’t do that and shame me mudder waiting for your arms around her. You used her flesh, stretched and tired, carrying me and me brudders. You won’t wipe her memory away wit’ a dandy maid I spell for me oewn self.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can do wit’ this strumpet,” he snarled, reaching for his gun. “Red savages sent the young Indian to entice the maid from her own company. If our women breed wit’ the natives, a savage race will overrun us. It’s to be stopped.”

  As quick as a blink, an attacker was on the old man. Nasook had jumped from a small bank behind and above them. He reached with one hand and grabbed the old man by the throat until he was gasping for breath. With the other hand he seized Joe’s gun, stepped back, and pointed it. He hesitated at first, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with this heavy, long arm. He had watched from the forest as white men had sent smoke out of it with a bang that had startled birds and blown eagles out of the sky. They had fallen quickly, wings motionless. But the look of fear on the old man’s face triggered Nasook to action. He hit him as hard as he could with the stock of the gun. Joe groaned and rolled away from Genevieve. Behind Nasook, Genevieve
caught a glimpse of Luke with a raised gun. Nasook turned quickly and knocked it out of his hand.

  Genevieve held Patience Elizabeth to her breast and started running into a wind that felt like a coarse cloth scrubbing her face raw. Nasook ran after her. Her heart beat wildly as she ran, frightened that Nasook would fall under the spell of the gun.

  Chapter 13

  The Cave

  “No time to run to beach. We go to cave,” Nasook called after her. “I can set it so no one follows us.” They were soon inside the cave that Genevieve now felt estranged from, a place where she would not want to spend another winter. The thought brought a taste of bile as she watched Nasook dig into a wall at a turn in the cave. Sheets of slate fell around them and suddenly there was a hole.

  Nasook kept digging until the opening was large enough for them to crawl through. Genevieve had not ventured far into the cave, not beyond the light that came down through the crack in the floor above her head. Now she settled Patience Elizabeth securely in her nape sack. Then she twisted her way through the narrow tunnel and climbed down. Nasook followed, turning back to settle slate back against the tunnel, hoping that if the fishermen discovered the cave, they would not notice a disturbance in the wall. Patience Elizabeth’s cry echoed through the tunnel as if it were coming from the bowels of the earth. Genevieve cringed as blackness shrouded them. She let out a gasp at the cold, dark, enveloping presence of the cavern. She stumbled and her hands flew away from each other in fright. They touched slimy rock. She felt a dark liquid enemy running toward her feet, running to drown her! She stood in horror. The ocean sounded in her ears like a roaring beast about to pounce. Now she was stumbling into darkness and slipping, sometimes crawling through the slimy belly, unable to take time to hush her baby’s cries. Her heart pounded as if it were being beaten against by the fear that she and her baby were going toward their own grave, and that it was just ahead. Death hadn’t claimed her the first time. It had waited, and now it was coming after her and Patience Elizabeth. Her whole body chilled in fear.