Maiden from the Sea

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  “Do you know where you be, who you be?” a voice was asking.

  Her voice was a whine: “Patience Elizabeth?”

  Luke followed the baby’s cry to the grove and the shelter Nasook had built beside a hammock holding the hungry baby.

  Luke laid Genevieve inside the shelter on a fur-covered bough bedding. Then he covered her with a seal skin bundled beside the bed. He went to lift the crying baby from the hammock. “Here’s yer child, Genny,” Luke said quietly, tenderness in his young face as he placed the squirming baby into her arms. Genevieve said nothing as she lifted the baby to her breast. She pulled the fur covers around them both as Patience Elizabeth searched for her breast and found it. She gulped greedily. Luke hurried away to light a fire.

  Joe came through the bushes carrying a gutted fish. “We may as well eat here,” he grunted, scrounging around until he found a suitable stick to prong the fish and roast it over the fire.

  Genevieve’s strange, empty world had been washed away with her baby’s cry, and now she was back to the baby. She held her against the warmth of her neck as chills spread through her body.

  “Come and have a bite,” Luke called from where he was sitting by the fire. Genevieve didn’t move until the baby had finished feeding and was settled in sleep. When she went to get up, she felt as if she were all broken. Luke came and put his arms around her. He lifted her and she went reluctantly, not feeling hungry. She sat on a flat slate by the fire and ate a little of the fish Luke offered her. Minutes later, she felt as if a rat was burrowing through her stomach. Luke went among the trees with a knife. He came back holding something in his hand, explaining, “A cramp knot. I cut it from a tree. Hold it tight and pain will go out in the knot.”

  She eyed the stick with skepticism, but as she held it, there came comfort in clasping it tight and letting her pain out.

  “I will tend to yer, Genny,” Luke promised, noticing how her eyes were as warm as candlelight. He came close as if to put his face to hers. Her eyes turned cold and she pushed him back as if his body was a dagger coming to wound her. He went, his face showing shame that she had mistook his efforts to look for injuries.

  “Nasook!” she cried, as the realization hit her that he was gone. “Gausep!” She used the Beothuk word for “he’s dead” in the rush of her sorrow. “You have to help me. I have to find Nasook and bury him,” she begged Luke.

  She knew what Nasook would say. “You don’t have to care about burying haddabothik—body. Red Man’s soul higher than ground, higher than eagle in flight, higher than sky. Save your life for body you still in. Mother Earth knows how to gather our clay to her body.”

  Luke looked at her, his mouth tightening. “I am sorry fer yer trouble. We found the Indian before we found you. We dug a place for him, but we left him uncovered on the notion that . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Notion?” She looked at him steady-eyed.

  He drew a deep breath and rushed on. “On the notion we’d have to bury two people.”

  She looked toward Patience Elizabeth. Her eyes were closed under creamy, soft lids fringed with golden lashes. She would let her sleep while they went to find Nasook.

  Joe had already gone to the beach. He was gutting some of his fish from the anchored punt when Genevieve and Luke got there. Gulls circled his head, some brazen enough to pitch on the boat for the entrails being slung overboard.

  Luke placed his arm around Genevieve and helped her to the side of the beach. She went fearfully. Luke stooped to remove spruce branches he had laid over the body in the grave. Then he jumped back up to hold Genevieve as she took sight of the corpse, part of an arm eaten away by birds. Her body made stuttering sobs as she swayed against Luke at the sight of Nasook looking unfamiliar: cold and still, the face marked and swollen. She looked into his open eyes, trying to see her image reflected there. But there was no light behind the orbs. They were dark—sightless. It was his soul that must live—must hold her now. She wished she knew where it was. The sky and earth told her nothing. The gurgling stream nearby that had brought them so much joy became the sound of something choking on itself. Nature was ugly and cruel to have mated Nasook with death. She dropped to her knees to reach down and touch the hands that had caressed her: opening treasures of pleasure inside her. Now they were hard, wrinkled, and unfamiliar. This body, in its death mask, had little likeness to Nasook.

  “Please! We must cover him,” she told Luke, shuddering. She looked up a ways from the beach at fir tree branches stirring in the breeze. The wind drew back, and the limbs seemed poised, waiting. “I’d rather his beaten body be covered with soft branches, its incense sweet.”

  Genevieve remembered the time after Nasook had lined their bed with branches under skins. He had touched her lips, his brown fingers scented with fir, the sticky run of sap on her lips.

  Luke hurried to break off several branches. He brought them to the grave, spreading them over Nasook. “We should bury him the Christian way,” Luke said solemnly.

  Genevieve protested. “No, he did not know our ways. It is the Great Spirit who holds him now. I will evoke the blessings of the munnes.”

  Luke shrugged.

  Genevieve, sweating from weakness, held birchbark that Luke brought her and placed it over the branches covering Nasook. She found a feather of the apponath beside a broken egg and stuck it in his hair. Once Luke had filled the grave with earth, Genevieve circled it with her cache of happy, sad, and mixed stones.

  “Let your spirit go to the munnes,” she murmured. “Your flesh will live on in our child and longer. Your journey will continue through the making of Teehonee and her child’s children.”

  Joe was urging Luke back to the punt. He hesitated before giving in to the pull of his father’s stern voice, going backwards on his heels, keeping Genevieve in sight. Then, as he turned toward his father, he called over his shoulder, “I’ll be back tomorra, Genny.”

  Genevieve didn’t answer. The black fog of loss was descending on her thicker than any night. The only star in her dark night was Teehonee, the star Nasook had left her.

  Back in the shelter of the grove, Genevieve heated stones by the fire and dropped them into a birchbark container of water. She dipped a rag into the warm water and washed the baby. All the while, Patience Elizabeth’s clear, bright eyes stared at Genevieve’s, clouded with tears. She dried her baby’s body. Then she wrapped her snugly before laying her back in the hammock. Her own welts and bruises shocked her so much that she could hardly bear the sight as she gingerly ran the rag over them.

  Patience Elizabeth would help her through deep nights and lonely days, keep her sane as she faced the dangers surrounding them on a tiny island surrounded by the sea and its roving pirates. She hoped that the fishermen’s fire had not caught the notice of an enemy.

  Chapter 17

  The Theft

  Genevieve awoke late the next morning, her body knocked akilter. Her baby’s laughter came like a ripple of water in a brook, bringing Genevieve a rush of memory. Elizabeth had come like a wind to save her. She knew that now, though she could not gather the image; only the knowledge was there.

  Genevieve gathered starflowers the next day and strewed them over Nasook’s grave. His silence came like a thousand demons screaming through her head. Now she spoke just to hear herself above the demons. She spoke to the birds and the sky, to the Blessed Virgin and her Son, and to Father God­—Nasook’s Great Spirit. Her tongue carried the words back into her own ears, back inside her own head for company. She spoke words Nasook had used and explained. Using his words brought his voice back to her. She imagined each word floating through the air and falling on a beach and English or French fishermen picking them up like pieces of seashell, looking at them, then putting them together in a word puzzle they could not understand. She hoped that both English and French people would come to know the meaning of Beothuk
, and that they would help save the Red Indians.

  By late afternoon, when Genevieve came back to the grove, sweat was pearling on her forehead. Exhausted, she lay in her shelter curled around Patience Elizabeth’s soft, sleeping body. My mind holds Nasook and, from the fruit of my life and his, he will live in his Teehonee, she thought, adding fiercely, Inside this fruit that we have grown together is the heart of more fruit.

  She awakened to the sound of music pulling her up from a strange place. Her eyes opened to the sight of Luke, one hand on a flute he had made from the collarbone of a bird; the other hand was carelessly hooked into a garter of his cross-gartered trousers.

  The music brightened the evening like a candle.

  Luke put his hand into a cloth bag at his waist and took it out in a fist. He opened his hand to show tiny eggs, as white as snow, in his brown palm. “Maidenhair teaberries,” he said, smiling. “I got them in an overhanging bush beside a bog. They’ll make yer mout’ feel fresh.”

  Genevieve let them fall into her hand. Gingerly, she lifted one to her mouth. Her eyes widened in pleasure. She ate every one of the berries.

  Luke grinned. “The berries can be useful in case there’s more Indian babe in yer. They can make it leave yer body before the bastard takes a draw of air.”

  “What!” she gasped, feeling as if the sullen sky was pressing down on her. She wanted whatever she could claim of Nasook. She put her finger down her throat and urged up the berries. She spat them on the ground. Then she fell to the earth, her mouth sour, her arms and legs curled around her belly. She didn’t bother to say goodbye to Luke, who rushed off to get back to the cove he’d left.

  * * * *

  Genevieve smiled at Patience Elizabeth in her arms, her eyes shining and her bare arms and legs dancing in the air. Sometimes she stayed still, her head perked and her lips in a posy as if she was listening for a familiar voice.

  “Dear meseeliguet,” Genevieve murmured, “your papa’s flesh lives in his Teehonee. I must find a way to keep words that show your beginning, and the Red Man who helped you come from inside me. I grabbed his arm as he went over the edge, shadowing him as he flew on the wind. His body fell against a wall of water. My body hit his in a harsh slap­—and then nothing. I lost everything that was in my head: all the words, all the people, and all the places and days. I even lost you. I don’t know why I fell away from myself into darkness, and became part of it. Then a presence of light ran over my eyelids. I lifted them to meet a blinding hot eye in a blue covering I had no memory of. I was a stranger to myself, and I was not attached to the earth as are trees and grass. I was free. I saw birds, also free, but I did not remember what these sky creatures were. I lay on land stretched beside a moving place that I had forgotten was the sea. My mind had gone away on me. It was you who brought it back. My mind also brought back my dreams. There is Elizabeth.”

  Genevieve fell silent. Elizabeth? Why did I say that name? It came then, the dream she’d had that morning. Elizabeth is holding a plastic red feather pen in her hand, sent in the mail with the first lesson of her writing course from the Newspaper Institute of America.

  “There is no need for this,” Elizabeth’s mother murmurs. “’Tis hard on your head, this thinking. Writing memories won’t get you far in the world.”

  “Living is not only about now,” Elizabeth answers. “We begin life each day from where we are, but our minds take us back to where we have been, and forward to where we are going. Our lives—and lives spent—are patches in a growing quilt covering the timescape. We place headstones above the ground because it matters that we were here.”

  The wind runs across Elizabeth’s nose as if it is the breath of a living past whispering a genetic memory. She sits writing in sunshine as the wind stirs in her a feeling of time and place. She writes about a time—long ago . . .

  In the stillness of a summer day she walks toward a gulch where cliffs reach up from the seabed. She stands at the tip of granite, red-aproned cliffs, feeling their steadiness in the midst of a seething sea. Warm wind, moistened by the sea’s spit, soothes her face. In the wind she catches whispers. She listens. Voices slip inside her from women whose hands never made a page listen, never held a quill of ink to a piece of bark or paper: Elizabeth Emma . . . Sarah Ann . . . Bridget . . . Caroline . . . Mary Jane . . . Shanawdithit. Only when my words are lost will I be dead.

  Genevieve shook away her dream and began rocking her baby fiercely. Her voice floated in a song, something the English called a lullaby, the French called berceuse, and the Red Man . . . She tried to find the Beothuk word, but it wouldn’t come. The winds were off playing with it. They brought it to her and then snatched it back. “It went before I could say it,” she told Nasook’s child.

  She thought of the times in Ochre Cleft Cove when she had skittered over loose rocks down the side of a scarp against dark cliffs, its ingrained white lines like a string of frankum stretched and tangled. These lines were the cryptic writings of an earth’s story that could not be washed blank, a story that would be told some day.

  * * * *

  The next day was hot and Genevieve took Patience Elizabeth and went to Nasook’s reddening box. She mixed ochre with cold water and painted her face as a tribute to Nasook. Then she made the sign of the cross, wanting him to be blessed under her faith as well as under his own. She rubbed Patience Elizabeth’s face and body with a paste of red ochre and oil to keep her cool. She turned from the baby to the sight of a ship. She lifted her hand as if to cover it and measure its distance. It looked harmless, riding gently on the sea. She wouldn’t be fooled. She grabbed the baby, swaddling her as she went running into a thick grove, hoping the small island would hold her secret. As the ship came across the head of the island and anchored, she watched as a small boat was launched. Her heart tripped in her throat as two men boarded it and rowed into the triangular cove. She listened to the scraping noise of gravel as the men dragged the boat upon the beach. She couldn’t see them from where she was hiding once they were ashore.

  She was intent on listening for the tread of the intruder from the beach when a hand grabbed her from behind. She heard her own piercing screams as she, with her baby clutched to her breast, was dragged over the ground by her hair. Needles of pain peppered her head as if every strand was being pulled from her scalp. Patience Elizabeth let out sharp cries as if sensing her mother’s terror.

  Genevieve caught a side glimpse of the trespasser, a barnacled-faced man, eyes as small as a mole’s and a nose longer than a Tartar’s, his hair tangled around his lower face like seaweed. She tripped over a rock and her hand went out to stop her fall. The man snatched the baby from her arms as if she were a bundle of sticks. “The child is stained red. The Red Man can’t be far from the bitch,” he muttered.

  A second intruder was soon in front of Genevieve. She cringed at the sight of the burly, ruddy-faced man, his nose like a stewed tomato. “The blood of an innocent child can cure what ails a man; we have a sick captain,” he said cruelly. “To kill an Indian baby without a soul is no crime.”

  “Non!” she screamed.

  “Non!” the other man mocked. A rough finger touched her soft, full lips. “Tut!”

  She had forgotten that her face was painted in red ochre. Now she clasped her hands in front. “Je suis français,” she murmured to their astonishment. “I have gold. Give me back my bébé.”

  “Gold?” the men said in unison.

  “Yes.” She reached a hand down her leg toward the coins she had laced into the skin of her summer leggings, each in a separate enclosure so they wouldn’t jingle. She unlaced the hem above her calf while the men stared. She passed a large gold coin to the man holding Patience Elizabeth.

  He shifted the whimpering baby in his arms and took the coin, peering at it with dark, greedy eyes. “I’m no shroff,” he said to the other trespasser, “but I think this coin is rare.
It’s a Rose Noble 10s gold piece coined in 1465. See the rose in a sun on one side.”

  The ruddy-faced pirate grabbed the coin and laughed. He looked at Genevieve. “We’ll take more, if you have them.” He grabbed her by the throat. “Where’d you get it?”

  She gave him a steady look as if she was telling the whole truth. “It came from a shipwreck. The sea left it on the beach. There are no more.” She was telling her truth: there were no more coins for thieves.

  “We’re done here,” said the mole-eyed pirate. “We’ll get back to the ship before English pirates come to rob us. We’ll take the child.”

  The other pirate dropped his hand from Genevieve’s throat and pushed the coin down in a little bougette at his side.

  Genevieve dropped to her knees, her body gone limp. “You can’t take the bébé. My French blood is in her. She does have a soul.”

  The captor grinned, pulling on a nest of hair under his chin. “I was jesting about hurting your bébé for a cure. The captain of our ship has lost his child to the grief of his young madame who won’t speak a word because of it. The captain, staggering drunk on the deck of his ship, fell on the boy. There’s not many babies to be found anywhere in this island colony—what with all men and few women.”

  “You’ll not have my bébé,” she screamed, reaching to grab Patience Elizabeth.

  The pirate went back on his heels and let out a taunt. “I didn’t think it was in you. You’re weak-looking—haven’t been taken care of.”

  “I had a fall,” she answered. “I gave you the coin; now give me my bébé.”

  The pirate turned to his companion with a stern order: “Pin her arms, Jacques, for there’s life in her, despite her weakness.”

  Jacques’s rough arms wrapped around Genevieve as Patience Elizabeth’s captor ran toward the boat with the screaming baby. Once he was in the craft, Jacques let Genevieve go and ran to catch the craft already afloat. Genevieve ran into the water, her hands reaching toward her baby, stretching in pain—and want.