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Maiden from the Sea

Page 12

by Nellie P. Strowbridge


  Sometimes Genevieve thought it strange that Nasook was sleeping beside her, cupping her as if she were a horn of tea simmering for his lips. She had lain close beside the chambermaid in France on their narrow straw bed, but it was not the same as a flesh-hold where one beating heart quickened another in pleasure. Only Genevieve’s and the chambermaid’s words had connected, words having a common bond in their plaint against the treatment of workers. “There must be a world where a person can move farther than the tip of her nose before finding herself in someone’s control,” Genevieve had whined. Sometimes the girls had stolen fruit from the mistress’s larder so they would not be hungry enough to eat leftover scraps that Monsieur Laurier had drooled and coughed over. Now she was free, but the threat of being left alone hovered like a ghost.

  “I was so lonely without you,” Genevieve whispered against Nasook’s ear.

  “You were never alone in this land,” Nasook answered softly. “I saw you in season of falling leaves, then in season of dead leaves when I come to you. I think of you in season of snow and cold and then in season of borning leaves. In season of abundance we be together. We be through five Beothuk seasons. You come to cove in moon of changing colours. We come together in moon of dried grass. In freezing moon, I afraid to come near. In moon of longest night, I longed to be near you. In cold moon, I caught appawet—seals—and brought you aschautch—meat. In moon when ice cracks with cold, I afraid for you. I glad when windy moon and frosty moon died and moon of returning birds come. We together in moon of berry flowers, when our baby come and when seabirds lay eggs. We together in moon of new birds and now we in berry fruit moon. We stay together.”

  Nasook’s arms tightened around her. “You never without me,” he added in a strong, determined voice.

  Genevieve nodded, but she felt sadness crawl along the soles of her feet and up her legs to her belly. She trembled, knowing that this place she knew as hers and Nasook’s had been lived on before by people who had disappeared into a place from which they could not be freed. She wondered how many footprints had pressed the land and who else would come, this time to affect her place, her hold on freedom. She pointed to a mysterious beast out from the beach, its long back motionless, a lumpy shadow on the water.

  “Si kane’s u,” Nasook said just as the whale’s flukes sent spray into the air. Above the whale, gulls paddled the air. All seemed peaceful as the sun slipped down the sky and spread itself into a golden path across the waves. Behind layers of clouds, streams of pastel blue and orange hues flared into translucent pink. Genevieve stayed fixed on the majestic show, breathing in a beauty that reaffirmed her belief in a world beyond her own.

  The next day she knelt on the beach to gather stones: light and dark, speckled, and pied. She began to mark good days with white stones and bad days with dark stones. When fourteen sunsets had passed, she looked at her circle of stones and saw only one dark one, a dark stone for the day she lifted a birch cup of tea to her lips and Nasook knocked it out of her hand before she could take a sip. She had jumped up and backed away, fearing a darkness in Nasook’s temperament that would threaten her. She faced the quick flash of his piercing, dark eyes.

  He was frightened! That was it, he told her. When he’d come ashore from gathering codfish and noticed some goowithy leaves by the fire, he had been afraid she’d drunk buterweyeh, a tea made from the goowithy bush. “You could die from leaves!” She clung to him in fright, wondering what other plants stirring in the breeze or flouncing in a strong wind could steal her life.

  The sea was brimming early one morning just as the sun rose over the lip of ocean. Genevieve sat holding Patience Elizabeth and watching the incandescent glow on water from a shoal of herring underneath. Nasook ran into the water shouting excitedly as he scunned his net over dark shadows. Soon silver fish danced above waves as Nasook pulled his haul ashore and emptied it. Silver food alive in the sand, she thought, is better than gold that has no trade. Herring were only some of the sea’s treasures they could catch and cure for the winter: salmon, flatfish, cod, squid. Fish and the island’s berries were the only food they would need. She knew, though, that as winter winds and snow smoked around the small island, frosting and bending trees into a shiver, her family would need a warm dwelling. She would help Nasook build a log house deep in the grove of sheltering trees and away from the sight of ships chancing on the island. My family is going to be safe, she promised herself.

  Genevieve strolled back from the beach one day and walked up the side of a narrow trail. An anthill stirred under her naked feet and ants ran up her legs. She danced away screaming. Nasook turned from where he was kneeling. He laughed as he went back to digging sods at the edge of the grove. She followed his look to the handful of gold coins on the ground, coins from the cave. “Someone will come look for these,” Nasook said grimly. “They not find them.” She glanced quickly out to sea, then back to where the coins lay. She looked at her Indian spouse and felt her leggings where she kept some of the coins she had found in the shipwreck. She wanted to place them in his hand, to see his smile. But she didn’t. He knew she had them, she was sure, but he didn’t say anything. He twisted a rod into the ground until he had made a deep hole. Inside a stick he had hollowed out, he placed gold coins, one on top of the other. Then he pushed the stick into the ground, covering it with the sods he had removed. He looked across to a smaller island a little ways away to site his treasure spot with a landmark.

  Afterwards, Genevieve stood gazing out to sea, searching, but hoping for no sign of ships specking the bay. She turned to watch her baby rocking back and forth in her skin-lined hammock, the wind a ghostly hand. Genevieve had given her a pierced skin tit filled with spring partridgeberries to suck. The berries were soft, their juice sweetened by frost that had passed over them while they had overlain through the winter. Patience Elizabeth was a golden child. Her face bore the soft colour of sunshine under a thatch of dark hair, reminding Genevieve of her mother, just the shadow of her mien. Her mother’s flesh had been made over through her and now through her child. Nasook, too, was in Patience Elizabeth’s face, in her open black eyes. Some day, Genevieve thought, the cove we have left will be filled with people: mine and Nasook’s. The thought sent tremors from her head to her toes.

  The baby began crying and cranking her feet toward her belly. “Berry juice may be upsetting,” Nasook surmised. He made a spruce drink over a small fire inside a pile of stones deep in the grove. He waited for it to cool before he let Teehonee suck its wetness off his finger. She screwed her face into a sour look at the taste. Then, in the atmosphere of summer’s quiet dance of grass and flowers, she slipped into a peaceful sleep. Genevieve left her in the hammock. Then she picked her way through the grove opening to a pond where lilies, their green skirts spread on dancing waves, poked up tight little heads. Their burst of golden flowers had already been shed, petals floating away, leaving nobs. She waded into the shallow pond, time after time, to grab goose grass. She laid a pile of it in the sun to dry for toiletry. Just as she slipped into the water to reach for a lily leaf, warm hands touched her back. She leaped like a fish, falling back against Nasook’s hard body, her laugh as clear as a curlew’s call as she remembered the first time he had surprised her in the pond. Then, the opening heads of lilies had fallen apart in yellow drifts around the warm, fluid flow of two young bodies flutter kicking through the pond’s calm waters.

  The sun’s rays shone across the water in silver slants as the lovers strolled away from the pond and through the grove. Later, when Nasook went down to the beach to cover their fish for the night, Genevieve walked to the open cliffs, intent on watching the sunset. As the evening closed out the day, the golden afterglow of a radiant sunset splashed across the bay to the faint lines of the horizon. Genevieve felt as if she were standing on the edge of a day and the beginning of night in a way that had nothing to do with time and the actual folding of a day.

  She looked d
own, startled at the sight of a Great Auk waddling along the lagoon, a grey, downy hatchling following it. Her body shifted; she teetered and lost her footing. Alder bushes stung her face as her feet slid down a crevice in the cliff. Her lips parted and a scream, pinched between her heart and her throat, was let out in a stark gasp, cutting into her ears like a knife as her leg hit a sharp rock. She was jerked into a spin as her sleeve hooked on an edge of cliff. A strong wind slipped under her, lifted her as a tall woman, her face tanned and high-cheeked, rose above the cliff, long dark hair flowing around her head. One hand clasped Genevieve’s hand, jerking her up to the safety of a ledge above her. In an instant, she knew the woman was Elizabeth—from her dreams—even though the soft sigh in her ears was only from a gentle wind brushing hair from her face.

  Back in the grove, Genevieve filled a gash in her leg with frankum from a spruce tree. The blood was stanched and she decided not to tell Nasook about the fall that had pushed her into the hands of someone she could only name as a ghost. She pulled on her leggings to hide the cut and hurried to Patience Elizabeth, who now lay crying in the hammock. She slipped her breast into the sucking lips of the hungry baby and fed her until her tiny body relaxed.

  The next morning Genevieve laid Patience Elizabeth back in the swinging hammock while she went a little ways off in a dell to pick a posy of bluebells and misty-white flowers. She meant to tickle Patience Elizabeth’s nose and let her draw in the sweet scent, but the baby was asleep. She laid the posy on a rock and went to help Nasook spread the fish in the sun. When she came back, the flowers had shrivelled, and were etched like squashed spiders on the rock.

  From where she stooped to pick more flowers, Genevieve did not see a ship pass not far from Mamasheek—a pirate ship sailing under false colours. Beside a solid white flag, a swallow-tailed, red pennon lifted on the wind. Nasook, on the triangular beach, could not see men come ashore on the island side that held a small colony of Great Auks every spring. He did not know that French pirates had been to the island before he and Genevieve had arrived. They had made a killing of the birds they called gar-fou, draining the eggs of their large yolks and scattering the shells.

  Nasook had left the beach by the time a small boat was lowered from the pirate ship. The sound of two men rowing ashore could not be heard above the splash of waves on the beach. Nor did Nasook hear the rustle of empty seashells under the intruders’ feet.

  Genevieve did not hear their exclamations of astonishment at finding Nasook’s canoe. As they came closer, she heard nothing more than a stir, as if a bird had dropped down into goowithy bushes. It was enough to alert her. She crouched and listened, wanting to go to Patience Elizabeth, but not wanting to lead an enemy to her safe place in the hammock. She heard the swift tramping of feet and the rustle of bushes as Nasook ran past her, not looking to where she was crouched as if to hope she would stay hidden. She heard his hurried whisper, “Mudeet—bad—man. I try put spear through bogodoret—heart—but he wothamashee—run.”

  She turned to see a man lying on the ground, wiggling like a wounded insect, a spear through his belly, while another tall, white man ran after Nasook. He had been slowed by bushes and jutting rocks, but he was getting close to where Genevieve crouched. Her horror widened like a circle of water from a flat stone skimming it as she watched Nasook running toward the cliff she had fallen from, the cleft hidden from a distance. She should have told him about it. She tried to call now, to warn him, but her voice felt tangled like a fish in a net.

  She was running, her feet like stones she tried to haul into motion. Her heart thumped like a drum, beating an ominous warning. Turning sharply, she saw the intruder gaining on them. She could almost see herself flying away from the man behind her, away from the pain of his knife in her flesh, away from the knife of his organ in her in-between place.

  Nasook tripped and she reached to grab him. There was no sound on her tongue, no sounds from him as she fell with him, arms reaching like useless wings. They tumbled silently in a rapid, jagged motion toward the mouth of a mad sea foaming over dark growlers. Words tumbled through Genevieve’s mind. The dark ocean depths will finish what was started when I fell from the ship. There will be no struggle as before.

  The two bodies smacked the water. Nasook struck it as if he were hitting the earth. Genevieve fell against the soft pillow of his stomach, her arms folding around his body.

  Above them came the shrill cry of a kestrel: “Killy! Killy!” The young cliff hawk hovered, then descended.

  Chapter 16

  Tragedy

  Genevieve lay anchored inside a dark, heavy blob, as if she had disappeared under a covering she could not name, curled up in a feeling she couldn’t recognize, herself a space she could not fill or anchor her mind to, adrift without landmarks. She had broken into two parts: a mind and a body she could not bring together. Her body lay in the place beneath her without recognition. Soft hoods quivered under her fingers. Lids lifted as sunlight slipped under dark lashes lifting to show images Genevieve had no concept of: a place so large outside herself—the vault of sky, white floats, and ball of light. A stir she could not name moved over an ocean she could not recognize.

  She was a stranger to herself without the concept of what that meant. Her fingers moved to touch the naked balls that let in the world. Her head jerked back in pain, her eyes watering. She let the skins fall over the darting balls, let her hands gently roam the geography of her face. Words she seemed to be hearing for the first time tracked through her mind like footprints in fresh soil: “The earth without form . . . void . . . darkness upon the deep . . . Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water . . . Let there be light. Let dry land appear . . . Let . . . Let . . .”

  She did not know what it meant to breathe, life existing: sinful, good, wild-natured—human.

  It was the first day of her life as far as she knew, and her first feelings in that day. She swallowed and her dry lips stuck together; her insides growled at themselves. She felt a heaviness in her, a need to push. She felt the warm gush of a stream from inside her, an unfamiliar flow. She moved off a substance she did not recognize and got to her feet, almost keeling over with dizziness as she looked down at herself, a strange container. A similar one lay on the landwash. Her container went off with her to a liquid she could not name, lapping over the beach, and when her mouth met the sea, it burned the thirst deeper inside her. She spat out the brine. A sound called her to a stream and she cupped her hands under it as it pooled, some of it laughing over stones on merry tiptoes. She felt it trickle down inside her—and smiled.

  She tripped on a rock and almost fell, her voice a surprise: “Mon Dieu!” She sank down on the ground and drifted away from herself as if she didn’t exist.

  The scream “Genny” meant nothing. Her eyebrows furrowed at the noise in her ears, but that was all. Luke found her wet and bleeding beside a stream. He put his hand to a browsel on her forehead. She winced.

  “We didn’t know you was here,” Luke exclaimed. “We went fishing and we got caught in a fog drifting ashore here. Sure, we Irish call this isle of Avalon Tik-na-n-og.”

  She met Luke’s puzzled look without expression. Then she was making sounds Luke did not recognize.

  Luke turned to call after his father walking up the beach. “She’s mumbling. I can’t pick out what she’s prating about.”

  “For all I know it could be old Irish. I tell yer, she’s nuttin’ but trouble.” Joe grunted.

  Luke took up for her. “’Tis the crack on her head she must’ve got falling from the cliff that makes her forget us. Swelling in her head brings strange words.” Genevieve’s lids slid shut and Luke exclaimed, “There she is—gone dead to us!”

  “Swooned, she is,” Joe said, kneeling to pull Genevieve’s lids open. “She’ll come around.”

  “We’ve got to take her wit’ us,” Luke said in a taut voice.

  �
�Not fer sure, we won’t—and she helpless,” Joe shot back. “If she was any good to work . . . the captain of the Dark Wave is not wantin’ us to be slaving over some maid instead of bringin’ in fish. He’d think nuttin’ of makin’ us food fer fish.”

  Luke met his father’s callous look, unflinching. “I’ll find her shelter and settle her. Then we’ll get back to the cove and work on fish. I’m comin’ back after the fishin’ tomorra.”

  “I don’t know why you’d want to. What can you do wit’ this woman and her child?”

  “She’s a woman and she needs me. ’Tis no more than I oughta do—and care fer her half-breed.”

  “You can’t raise a savage,” Joe cautioned him. “Sure, the French is death on that kind, and they’s on the warpat’, the same as always.”

  “I will learn to be the baby’s fardher and protect her,” Luke said resolutely.

  The old man raised a heavy eyebrow, his lips curled in scorn. “After having an Indian body in hers, you don’t know what kinda spirit he left inside the wench, a curse to shrivel your member. And look what he done to me.”

  “Made a browsel on your head,” Luke said, “You was shook, but you didn’t get as much as a skin wound.”

  “I could’ve had a hole in me head if the savage’d known how to use a musket.”

  “You would have used Genny,” Luke said angrily. He slipped his arms under Genevieve, lifting the light body. Her head fell against his chest. He held her tight and started to follow footmarks inland, hurrying toward the sound of a harsh, pitiful cry.

  Genevieve’s eyes flew open as her ears picked up her baby’s wail. Everything came flying at her—a whirlpool of words and images righting themselves inside her head, bringing her body and mind together, anchoring her.

 

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