“I will tell you a story,” she said softly. She laced her hands under Patience Elizabeth’s head and held her straight out so she could take in her tiny face, now framed by thick, dark hair. “A time so long ago, so long ago that only Father God remembers, Mother Earth was holding an island inside her. The island held a secret cave of ice and water and the beginning of living things like a mother holds a baby in her body. The sun, moon, and stars made days and nights above the waters. No one knows how long it was before Mother Earth gave birth to her new being. It popped up bare and wet and wrinkled like a newborn baby. Birds crossing the ocean from warmer places stepped down for a rest on a new-found land, and white bears and other animals crossed ice pans filling the sea. I also crossed the sea, and here we are, resting in our new home.”
Patience Elizabeth’s warm eyes held on to the movement of her mother’s lips until the end of the story, and then her lids slid down over her eyes and she slept.
Genevieve placed the baby in the shade. Then she lifted her clothes, waded into the salt water, and reached to yank blue mussels from dark, protruding rocks. When she had gathered a dozen mussels and pouched them in her dress, she waddled ashore. She cracked the shells and laid the meat on a flat rock. The golden eye of the sun, beaming down, warmed the mussels. She ate the tough flesh, all the while squinting at shadows of soaring gulls silhouetted on the waves. As the day cooled and waned, the gulls settled, cradled in waves like silver lamps in the light of the setting sun. Night swooped down like a black devil’s breath blowing out the lamps. A faery wind stirred the vegetation. Another night for Genevieve to be alone with her child, and a strange creature somewhere on the island, a creature she hoped hadn’t seen her. It was enough that she was hemmed by water that could carry an enemy ashore as she waited for Nasook’s return.
Through the next night, she lay awake beside her sleeping baby. She tossed about, her thoughts as busy as scurrying ants. The moon’s white light came like a presence, its tender eye beaming down on her, imprinting dark cliffs with shadows, and dappling the dark sea. Genevieve imagined herself crawling along its wavy, silver ladder to the heavens where the curé, the parish priest in France, had claimed God to be. Nights when she didn’t see the moon, when darkness became a smothering feel against her face, she wondered if it had burned itself out. Her heart lifted when it came again, even if only as a sliver of itself.
One night she slept, her knees drawn up to cuddle Patience Elizabeth against her body. She soon tumbled into a dream. Elizabeth is walking up wide wooden stairs into a large room. She stares at a carved statue of a young woman posed in an upright glass box, her straight hair black, her face brown, painted eyes expressionless, unable to convey the things the real woman saw. “Shanawdithit,” she whispers. The room is full of shelves holding wooden knitting needles, flints, bone necklaces, a Great Auk rib cage . . . A young male lies in a glass case, ochre-darkened skin hardened like leather around his body; his head and knees are drawn toward his chest, himself a cradle. Arrows and flints lie beside him. In a small glass cage lies the skeleton of a little boy, leathery skin drawn over his bones like that of his elder, beside him a wooden doll and moccasins made from the hide of caribou shanks, vamps, cuffs and soles neatly sewn. The lasting image of the man and boy: eyes sunk into holes, ribs like the skeleton of a boat being built for the beginning of a voyage. The Indians’ sunken ribs show an end to their unfinished voyage.
Genevieve awoke calling Nasook. Her anguished voice woke the baby. Mother and daughter filled the night with cries. They blended with the moaning sea. A bit of moon, like a hard, white rock, rubbed against the last moments of the lonely night. Morning slipped up past the now thin show of moon. Genevieve and Patience Elizabeth slept until the sun cut through the sky like a ball of fire. Not far from it, the morning star blinked brightly. It would be a warm, friendly day.
Genevieve nursed Patience Elizabeth, promising herself that when the baby was old enough to understand, she would tell her the story of the brown hand of the Red Man and the white hand of the white girl holding each other and swinging their joy into the air in dance. I will tell her over and over that the brown boy and white girl slipped together as if they were one person. After many suns and moons a little bébé was born.
“Who was the bébé?” Patience Elizabeth will ask, her eyes flashing with mischief, wanting her Beothuk name on her mother’s tongue.
Genevieve will smile and say, “Teehonee.”
Chapter 15
A Silver Harvest
Genevieve busied herself gathering berries in the grove and driftwood along the beach. One day she was paddling in shoal water, gathering mussels, when a great eagle, its eyes fierce, swooped down on a baby duck swimming in the lagoon. The eagle’s talons held fast to the duck, its wings flapping helplessly, as the eagle lifted it into the air and flew away. The danger of a predator from the sky drove Genevieve, sand and stones skittering under her feet, to make sure her baby was safe in her hammock. She let out a relieved sigh at finding her asleep, her little chest rising and falling in a gentle rhythm.
She sat watching the evening sun settle like an amber eye under the wrinkled white forehead of cloud. Then it began to pull back its light and settle down behind the hills, leaving a rosy glow that lessened with every moment until it was gone. She let out a long wail that woke the baby. She hurried to lift a breast to Patience Elizabeth’s mouth. The baby breathed a soft sigh before latching on.
In the morning, Genevieve stood on the rectangular beach of the small island, bordered by the temperamental sea. She watched as it butted the rocks, its waves exploding into white flames, and then dropping into a white froth. Her lips trembled. Nasook has gone and left me and our bébé. I’m sure of it. He has found his own people alive, having escaped their enemy. He won’t be back.
She decided to move closer to the shelter of tall spruce trees inland. There she made a shelter of branches, hoping for only the stir of birds to startle her and the scurry of mice and other little creatures running through grass to remind her that there were more living creatures on the island than she knew about. She cried silently through the day, stopping sometimes to smile through her tears at her daughter’s little face holding a clear, untroubled look.
Genevieve shivered as the black aloneness of another night rose up around her. A dry wind breathed through the air like a dark ghost, its presence a fearful shadow of an evil spirit Nasook called skookum.
Morning came with fog rolling like clouds across the water. Her heart seemed to rise in her throat, swell with hope. If Nasook was coming back, it would be in fog. She was bathing Patience Elizabeth in a little brook when she stood up to the sound of a paddle dipping into water. In a panic, she grabbed her daughter and ran to hide. She watched from a grove of trees as a figure came across the beach. Her heart sang when she heard the sound of her Beothuk name, “Wedumite!” Then she saw Nasook coming silently through the fog, looming up out of it like a god.
She jumped up, breathing a sigh of thankfulness that he had come back to her and his Teehonee. “I could not come before,” he panted. “White man in boat with long arm and loud noise—death in the noise.” He dropped tools, clothing, and a sack of food on the ground. “Something here.” He patted a pocket in his leggings. “I found it lost under canoe on beach.” He pulled out Teehonee’s Indian birch doll his mother had made for her. He placed it, warm from his body, beside the baby. Then he took Patience Elizabeth into his arms and ran the tip of his long finger down her round cheek. She cooed and he said, “You my meseeliguet.” A tear rolled down his cheek. He put the baby’s hand against his face, wetting it with that one tear.
He drew in a deep breath, looked at Genevieve, and smiled. “Tomorrow,” he promised, “if clouds go off water, we go swim.”
Genevieve could not leave her question hanging in the air between them. “Did you find your family?” she asked.
“Newin!
” He shook his head and got up abruptly. He stared into the fog, dense and deep like the sadness Genevieve saw in his dark eyes.
That night they lay awake, their limp bodies spooned in silence, sorrow a dark fog holding them together, their baby cupped in Genevieve’s arms.
Morning rose out of the night, with the sun drawing water in a long, thin veil. Then the sun broke through a blanket of grey sky, scattering diamonds across the water. The sea’s voice—its tinkling chords, soft, wavering, rushing—coaxed Genevieve’s feet to life. While the baby slept in skins on the sand, she chased Nasook through the water out from the beach. Her hair cascaded, thick and heavy, curtaining her face. As wind breezed across it, gentle wisps danced on her forehead. The young lovers screeched with laughter as an unexpected shower of rain fell like curtains around them. Genevieve went farther from the shore, dropping her face to the waves. She had learned to trust the water enough to lie on it and float. Under the crystal clear, buoyant water she watched a flowering anemone nearby. It became a brown blob shaping itself thin and deep, then thick over the water. Under the water, other anemones undulated like garden flowers in a gentle wind. She turned her head often, listening for sounds from Patience Elizabeth—from Teehonee.
As if he was trying not to dwell on his missing family, Nasook got busy catching codfish swimming among yellow kelp. A wolf fish lurked nearby. Nasook caught it lying on the bottom on its side. He smiled when Genevieve let out a screech as small, eel-like saltwater fish with brown backs and yellow bellies wrapped their thin bodies around her legs.
She slipped out of the sea, water streaming down her body like jewels in sunlight. She lay on the beach, the hot sun licking her skin dry. After Nasook had cleaned and salted some of his fish, he settled beside her. They watched their daughter, listened to her coo happily as if there were no dangers anywhere in their world. They had settled their shelter up from the beach by a side of cliff that shielded them from being seen by an oarsman rowing from the cove they had left. Genevieve tried not to think that their place could be invaded any time by agreeable or hostile sailors. Deep in the ground in the grove, Nasook risked lighting a fire to cook the fish, holding a soaked garment above the fire to trap smoke so it would not rise above the trees of their little island.
On days when easterly winds stung their faces, Genevieve stayed near Patience Elizabeth in the shelter of the grove. She often spent time thrumming canvas Nasook had salvaged from the shipwreck. He showed her how to wear a hole through an auk bone and sharpen it into a needle by rubbing it against rocks. Sometimes she walked out from the grove to see Nasook down on the beach making a hitch on his aduth to hook under the tail of an odjet. She imagined the lobster tightening its tail on the harpoon and the happy fisherman pulling it up with a yelp.
One day when fog was on the land, Nasook made a huge fire to warm rocks and clothes dampened by the mist, and to cook the lobsters he had caught. Genevieve closed her eyes with the taste of lobster on her tongue and the memory of meaty, succulent mussels they had picked off rocks and cooked in the grove on a foggy day. She opened her eyes as a pleasant scent brushed her nose. Nasook’s brown hand held a happy-faced flower. “Not just sniff,” he coaxed. “Demasduit good to eat.”
Her lips parted around the flower and her tongue brought its soft petals inside her mouth. Then Nasook’s smiling eyes were pulling laughter from her and he was down on her, his mouth on hers, his tongue stirring the velvet petals. She sat up, remembering the baby.
Her eyes were drawn to a scene beyond the beach: long shadows of small saltwater fish, so many of them that the water was striped. Fish were flapping themselves out of the water and onto the beach and back out. “Look!” she yelled.
“Shamoth,” Nasook told her, looking toward the shoreline. “White men call them capelin.” Some capelin lay on the beach. “Males,” explained Nasook, “press each side of female and spawn slips out to sand.”
Patience Elizabeth was sleeping, and Genevieve left her to hurry through the thicket to the beach where capelin rolled back with the tide like little animals frolicking, their white bellies silver-etching the waves.
Genevieve and Nasook ran out into the water, grabbing the prismatic bodies, muscular backs curling like grey-green waves. Capelin squirmed and splashed, some of them slipping out of their hands. Those Genevieve caught, she threw far enough ashore so they would not flick back out into the water. Nasook slung out a weighted net and meshed the splashing bodies of little fish. There would be lots of capelin to smoke and salt.
The fishers sat on a large, flat rock to catch their breath, spawn and sand clinging to their bare legs like wet cornmeal. Above them a flock of birds flew through the air like a shoal of capelin through water. Gulls screeched overhead.
Nasook soon had a fire going in from the beach. He ran to a small meadow beside a narrow path where he found blackberry moss. He threw it in the fire to flavour the fish. He held two small fish impaled on a stick over the fire, hoping that fog off the land would hide the smoke. The silvery and iridescent hues of the capelin faded to a crisp, brown sheath, their eyes like knots. Soon Genevieve’s white fingers and Nasook’s brown ones were heading the fish and unzipping them, the white flesh a tasty treat.
Genevieve licked her lips and laughed. “Only a wispy backbone bides to tell this capelin’s tale.”
“We dry lots fish in sun,” promised Nasook.
“And cache them for later,” Genevieve added hopefully. She did not say what she was thinking. But her eyes often scanned the waters for a sign of movement bigger than a bird resting in the hollow of a wave or a mammal breaching the waters. She watched for anything that moved beyond Mamasheek. They had taken a chance in lighting the fire, caution thrown to the wind at finding such a catch and wanting a feed of the cooked fish.
Heavy salt crystals were like tiny dull stones in Nasook’s hands as he covered a layer of capelin he’d laid head to tail on birch rind. Genevieve smiled, remembering Nasook telling her how he had seen a basket of salt on a fishermen’s boat. From where he was hiding, the salt had looked like magic ice crystals. They didn’t melt. After he saw the men spray their fish with salt, he stole some and sprinkled it on his catch. When he tasted the salty cod, it was so briny he threw the fish away instead of washing it as Genevieve had done when she first tasted salted flesh. Nasook had gone back to learn the fishermen’s secrets. At first he was puzzled. Why put salt on the fish and then wash it off? Now he knew the preserving power of salt.
“Delood!” Nasook urged when he was finished salting the fish. She followed him to the canoe. She climbed in, holding her sleeping baby, and Nasook paddled out across the lapping waters, keeping close to the shore. The boat marked the water, a broken pattern merging into a new one. The baby slept through the rocking. “I show you po-pa-dish,” Nasook promised.
They rounded the back of the island and pulled in to the lower end of a small hidden beach. Nasook pointed. “Look! Apponath!” Genevieve’s eyes rounded in wonder and fear at being so close to the large black bird paddling in the water. A live capelin arched, struggling in the bird’s great curved beak as it came ashore. It wobbled over the land on flat, webbed feet, its legs close to its rump. The Great Auk showed tiny wings, a long white belly, and black paddle wings.
Nasook explained: “Apponath mostly gone from island by now. Maybe big bird sick, wing hurt. We wait for birds to lay their big eggs. We take some, leave some growing warm under birds’ bodies, wait for little birds grow big and lay eggs. One bird lay only one egg. It white with brown marks, and as long as hand and half as round.”
Genevieve wasn’t listening. She was staring. It was the Great Auk she must have mistaken for a gnome. Back-on, it was black, and, in the evening light, with only a glimpse, she had let her imagination overcome her.
When the canoe came ashore at their own beach, Genevieve reached for a piece of grey stick she used to stir the fire. She drew a
likeness in the sand of the apponath. She drew it as long as her arms stretched to their limit, wishing she could paint its belly as white as a cloud on a sunny day and its back and wings as black as night.
“If you come eye to eye with big bird, don’t fear,” Nasook said. “It only bite if you try catch it.” He explained that a flock of birds covered the rocks on the other side of the island during late spring. Disturbing their nests might drive them into the sea, since they could not fly away from predators. Nasook added, “White men want walking big bird in their bellies, feathers for pillows, and oil for lamps. Soon apponath be gone—all gone.”
Genevieve told him about the night she thought she saw a gnome. His response took her by surprise. He began to chuckle and then he burst into hearty laughter, tears rolling down his cheeks. She looked at him, astonished at seeing him laugh so heartily. She began to laugh and their laughter mingled and rang out like a joyful sound. He pulled her to him, his salty tears wetting her cheek. Then he drew back, his countenance changing. He began to cry, his body jerking as sobs ripped through his body.
“Shush!” she said. “Don’t cry.”
“I have to,” he said, “for all the sorrow. My people all gone.”
She felt his sorrow fill her then as if it were her own people who had disappeared. They held each other until Patience Elizabeth caught their attention, reminding them that they were a family.
Maiden from the Sea Page 11