* * * *
Luke and joe found Genevieve sobbing hysterically, her body shivering in shock. “Where’s Patience Elizabeth?” Luke asked.
“Je ne sais pas!” she cried.
“What?”
“I don’t know. French pirates took her to their ship.”
Luke gazed out across the waters, his eyes squinting against sunlight flashing off the sea. He turned back to Genevieve, dropping to his knees. “Yer not well enough to be pourin’ out yer grief like this.” He wrapped her clothes around her and held her tight, rocking her gently.
“’Tis a heartless thing to do,” Joe admitted. “The wench’ll come wit’ us to the cove before the pirates come back. I expect her to carry a barrow of fish. We’ll set the flake above the cliff and we’ll get some work outta her.”
“She’ll help, sure, when she can,” Luke promised.
Genevieve tried to pull away from Luke. “I’m not leaving the island. I have to stay and wait for my baby to be brought back.”
“The next time, you won’t be so lucky,” Luke warned. “It might not be your fellow Frenchmen who will come to the island. The English and Spaniards can do terrible things to a woman.” He stood up, lifting her with him, and holding her tight. She screamed and banged her arms and legs against him, her anguish like fire in his ears as he lugged her to the boat.
Exhausted and knowing she could do nothing to save her baby if she lost her own life, she settled quietly in the cuddy of the small boat the men had first saved her in. She closed her eyes and the soothing roll of the sea sent her away from the men into sleep.
The moon-like dish outside the house, up on the roof, connects with a square container inside her home. A man Elizabeth sees as a stranger, though she feels she should know him, presses a button on a long slim piece. Images of people and the sounds of their voices come into the room. A man slaps a woman. She hears her own screams, “Go away.” She is ignored. She puts her hand to her head. She feels invisible, as if she has no substance, as if her voice has no sound. The box has sounds and scenes kept after they have happened, boxed and let out with the press of a button to crowd a mind against the real thing. If a cow moos in a field, and if a maid sings as she milks it in the barn, these sights and sounds can be in the box and let out over and over with the touch of a button, even if the cow and the maid are dead. Elizabeth’s mind rewinds and plays an image of a man, his hands tightened into fists, his face angry. What is real is in the box . . .
Luke awakened Genevieve with a gentle pull on her sleeve. He lifted her from the boat back to the tilt. His look challenged any attempt by Joe to put Genevieve to work at once.
“She’ll be fit to get at the fish in a few days. But now she’ll rest,” Luke said.
* * * *
The day luke decided Genevieve was ready for work, he smiled wryly. “The old man would have yer guts fer garters, he would. I’ll have yer fer me oewn self.”
She stayed silent, not wanting his body near her. Whatever senses her body had stirred to when Nasook was alive were gone. Luke would not be able to prompt them.
Wind brushed tears from her eyes as she strove to help cure the fish, picking flies out of their wet, briny flesh in the hot air, all the while grieving for the loss of Nasook and their baby. She looked toward the ocean for signs of a ship, breathing a prayer of hope that her baby would be brought back to her. Across the water beyond Mamasheek she could make out a long smudge of land. Maybe it was where the French ship had taken her baby.
Grief and loss lay inside like a stone bearing down on her heart. She drew deep breaths past the heaviness as she tried to think of ways to rescue Patience Elizabeth.
Genevieve worked hard, the old man’s words always at her, driving her, cautioning her: “Fish is best dried when there’s a warm wind sweeping over it. Dampness will take the pickle outta the fish and turn it ragged. I don’t want the captain of our ship raging at us because of your poor handling of the catch.”
Her body felt heavy, as if she was trying to move a boulder as she struggled up a path so steep her toes almost touched the foreparts of her legs. She helped spread fish on the flake-scaffold early in the day, gathering it before the evening cooled. She endured the labour of days, helping cure the fish and standing outside the tilt boiling a hodgepodge of fish, wild peas, plants, and mussels for meals. She dropped into the dead rest of night, her back in pain, her heels and calves sore from the stretch. Her breasts grew heavy through the day. By evening they were stinging with pain. Every night she squeezed them out to keep the milk flowing in the hope Patience Elizabeth would be brought back to her. She could have borne anything if her baby was with her.
There were days when winds churned the sea into a cauldron of boiling spit, turning the boat in a fury that sent the men scurrying ashore without fish. On other August days, when the wind blew too hard for the boat to venture from the beach, Genevieve asked Luke to go inland with her. She feared being left alone with Joe.
With Luke, she explored the head of land she had been afraid to venture on when she was alone. In June she had dropped to her knees to the dainty scent of white blueberry flowers. By July the centres inside the lacy flowers were turning into white berries. “White, at first,” Luke told her. “Then they turn green, then red. Under a hot sun they shine like blue satin.”
“It’s a magical thing to have flowers become berries,” she said, reaching to pick berries already turned blue.
Genevieve spent hours gathering blueberries from the hills, dropping some of them into a birch pail. Handfuls filled her mouth, their scent mingling with the scent of sea winds. She gazed out into the ocean for signs of a ship going toward the small island where her baby was snatched. In time, the baby would have run with Genevieve and Nasook, catching fish, and gathering berries. Instead, she would be in the house of a stranger, growing familiar with strangers’ faces, loving the arms of another woman or—God forbid—fearing her hand.
One day she was sitting on a large beach rock, her head tilted back as warm winds stirred her hair, crystal clear water lapping at her naked, brown feet. She closed her eyes, drawing in the burnt smell of salt water tissing on a beach fire from a tin pan of mussels. She had opened her eyes to go to the mussels when she spotted a beautiful, full-faced red flower growing up through stones on the sandy beach. She stared in wonder. Then she remembered the girl buried in the sand. She imagined her carrying seeds in a handkerchief that had fallen from her dress, seeds meant to be set in the land where she was going, a seed now springing to life in a flower that danced in the breeze, a livelier marker than one of wood or stone.
Sea storms had dismantled the ship wrecked in the cove, launched its remains back into the ocean, except for the pieces of wood and contents that Genevieve and Nasook had salvaged. Luke told her that, when he and his father arrived in the cove, they had found a few rags and a cask of rum washed up on the beach.
Late one evening, Luke came from the woods, bringing partridgeberries. “There’s only a few red berries ripe yet,” he said, holding out his hand. She could almost like him when he was so tender. The flesh that had helped make him was another matter. Whenever Joe belittled her, she felt like making him a drop of goowithy tea. She tried to keep in mind that she would rather have him gone in the fall than to be buried in the ground here, his black ghost haunting the cove and her.
The day Genevieve vomited the berries she was eating off the hills, she knew that Nasook would have a son or another daughter. A quick downpour wet her face, chasing away her own hot, salty tears. She opened her eyes to a rainbow arching from the hills on one side of the cove to the hills on the other side. There was a promise in the rainbow, and that night she lay strangely peaceful. A new life was within her; she would not singe her days with the pain of sorrow.
She dropped into sleep, smiling for the first time since she lost Patience Elizabeth. She sl
ipped into the mind of Sarah Ann, a frown crossing her face. A fire erupts from an iron pan laid on the floorboard. It spreads through the house . . . Sarah Ann’s arms are full of her twin girls. A tablet of her words and the Holy Bible lie side by side. Her teeth reach to grab them both. She hesitates, knowing this is impossible. Her teeth lift her tablet, tighten on it.
Later, even though Joe, her husband, has never opened the Bible, not even to touch the living lock of his dead mother’s hair, he reproofs her: “You should have taken the Holy Bible.”
“Other people will preserve copies of the Bible,” Sarah Ann answers haughtily. “Maybe Hadassah’s book burned. That’s why she didn’t write the book of Esther. There are lots of Bibles but only one of my tablet. And deserving it is then. Trees give up their wood to shelter and to warm us, and they give up their skin to bear our words. I created my book of thought from them.” She rubs her fingers over the dotted arc on the page, where her teeth had held the tablet, and smiles.
“You’ll be struck dead for thinking your words are a match for God’s,” her husband insists.
“I think nothing of the kind,” Sarah Ann says, showing a snooty face. “He put the mind in me as He did in those who wrote the Bible.”
Genevieve awoke smiling.
Chapter 18
Leaving
It was getting deep into September and, on Captain Patten’s command, the crew of the Dark Wave had stayed longer than they had last year. The captain had discovered his men eating partridgeberries and he had ordered them to pick and stow ripe and half-turned berries in brin bags to take home. Joe had come back from the ship disgruntled. He made Genevieve pick a bag of berries each day for a week. At the end, her hands were raw, the skin around her broken fingernails hanging and bleeding. She trudged wearily from the hills, holding a large brin bag over her shoulder, soft berries bruising the bag in red spots, her hands and mouth stained with berry juice.
Luke and his father got busy filling their boat with cured fish and sculling it up to the Dark Wave.
Genevieve was looking out over the cliffs above the path to the tilt one evening when Luke came up behind her. She squinted at the blue haze across the sea, bewildered by directions, not sure of the path that brought her to this place. Luke pointed out into the ocean, “England is straight across,” he said, “and Ireland. France is over that way, too.”
“We could make it here, Genny, I know we could,” Luke said, “but Fardher is against it and the captain won’t allow it.”
Genevieve’s eyes pooled with tears. She turned her back to him. Leaving the berries sitting in a hump on the cliff, she hurried down to her place in the tilt. I won’t go back, she thought fiercely, not while my baby is missing.
* * * *
Genevieve slept, torn fingers held in her mouth. Grace looks out the airplane window, past tiny criss-cross lines twinkling like diamonds, a reflection off the window ledge on which her arm rests. She looks into the setting sun’s bold face and stares down at land ribboned in lakes and rivers. Smears of cloud move like black shadows, smoking and drifting above brown and green patches of land. An ocean bed looks as flat as slate. Suddenly there is a booming voice: “This is your captain speaking. We are experiencing some difficulty . . .” Grace’s ears are bursting. She is crying in pain . . . blood trickles into her eyes.
Grace imagines she is riding a beautiful white horse in a green meadow. A hand slaps the horse. It is galloping, rearing . . . She is falling, her foot caught in a stirrup . . . Blackness.
* * * *
“Laid up, you’re not!” a voice boomed against Genevieve’s ear, wiping the dream from her mind. She sat up in the early morning, a bitter draft of air hitting her face, a taste of bile in her mouth. Soon she was hurrying down to the beach, a cold wind breathing a warning through her bones. The men were looking at the sky.
“It’s to be an early fall for sure and the sorest winds by the signs of t’ings,” Joe predicted, looking at Luke. “I wouldn’t dare speak to the captain about yer staying here. I know he would have none of it. If you desert the ship, he’ll likely have yer hunted down and hanged when he comes on next year’s voyage. You’re on the return, and that’s the end of the matter.”
Luke’s young face took on a determined look. “I’m not going anywhere wit’out Genny.”
Joe lifted a bushy eyebrow toward Genevieve as he packed the last of the dried fish in barrels. “White women idn’t granted the right to deliver children to this land, any more than white men bes permitted to settle.” He grunted, his eye on Genevieve. She had kept mostly silent since her child had disappeared. She had not let on about the baby inside her. She plunked down the last bag of partridgeberries and Luke took them down to the boat. His face took on a contrary look as he settled it next to a cask of rendered liver in the boat.
Joe eyed Genevieve as she skirted the rock and sat down on its plateau, her knee propped up as it had often been while she held her baby in suckle. His lips curled in a smirk. “You’ve been saved from spawning the place wit’ half-breeds, and the sooner the savage breed dies out, the better,” he said.
Genevieve closed her eyes and murmured, as if to Nasook and his people, “The sea may swallow your footprints, the earth gather your bones to itself, grow grass and flowers over your place. But you were here and are, for there were love pacts made between fair and golden-brown skin. People will see you in a tone of flesh, a shape of face, a turn of the foot. Your laughter will echo against black-shadowed cliffs that once held your feet. I fancy I hear your stir in grass and winds, see the feathery motion of your canoe ride the sea. In wind and sea and earth, the breath you held lives on—in me.” She cradled her belly.
“Pshaw!” Joe scoffed as he passed her with a slap to her back. “You’ll be nuttier than a nut if we don’t get you off this island.”
* * * *
The next morning, Genevieve lay on a mat of branches in the lean-to, her eyes closed. She listened to the footsteps of the men going back and forth, fearful of their intent. Luke lifted the flap to the shelter and stood there awkwardly. “I’d like to cut logs fer a cabin, and pick some blackberry friable to chink it so we could stay here and be comfortable. Fardher has his oewn plan,” he said uncomfortably, his seal boot scrapping at the dirt. “You’ll come wit’ us. But the captain won’t take you unless you be a boy—Genny. The captain is willing to make passage fer another man to take the place of Isaac Dawe.”
“Isaac Dawe?” Genevieve lifted herself on an elbow.
“He fell off the harbour stage just behind Black Cove. He hit his head on a growler, turning himself into a corpse. There’s a fellar’s outfit from the shipwreck. You can wear it.” His grey eyes searched hers.
She gave him a cold look. “You said you found only rags at the shipwreck.”
He smiled. “There were a few other things. I didn’t give a full account. Never mind that. You’re comin’ wit’ us.”
Her thoughts went wild and she cried, “I can’t go without my baby! The pirates have to bring her back.”
“The French may keep her alive if they don’t know she’s mixed blood, but bringing her back . . .” Luke shook his head.
Genevieve knew she was trapped, though she did not want to go with those fishermen to a new land, to be a servant girl to some English mistress—leaving her heart behind.
Luke dropped a warning. “It’s up to you to make sure yer a fellar until we’re too far off land fer the captain to send yer back. ’Tis dangerous even then to let on that yer a woman. You wouldn’t want to have to defend yerself from these vile and dirty fishermen who cares not for a woman’s virtue. There’s still the worry of having a tackle twisted about yer neck—if yer not careful. We’ll call yer Jean-Paul and cut yer hair short.”
An hour later, Genevieve stood in a sailor’s moleskins taken from the shipwreck, her hair cut. “Jibbed!” she had
exclaimed after Luke took his splitting knife to her long, dark hair. When she saw her reflection in a still pool, it was a boy’s. She took a long look at herself, her head in a leather cap lined with wool, her neck naked and white beneath the shorn mop. A quick flash of her mother’s image startled her. She remembered her in a velvet toque with a full crown, a narrow brim and a peacock plume, her long braided hair tucked up inside it. She wanted to be near her mother, to breathe in the scent of her rosewater, to hear her voice. She would likely never see her again.
Genevieve turned, as if to take a last look at the place, mountain ash rising in the air beside the tilt like bunches of autumn flowers. She would miss the berries and flowers, and the stir of animal and bird life in mysterious flight or tread. She longed to stay in the wild home where Nasook’s Teehonee was created; she had hoped to get back to Mamasheek where her new baby had its start and wait for her daughter.
As Luke helped her into the teetering boat, she went reluctantly, plopping down on stacked bags of berries. Joe shook his head, giving her a keen look. “We’ll not be saving you ag’in, maid. Don’t throw yer chance away.”
Joe pulled on the sculling oar sticking out of the boat’s stern and pushed the craft, still partly grounded, into deeper water. When the boat turned out around a high cliff and Ochre Cleft Cove could no longer be seen, Genevieve felt as if a sword had been thrust into her heart.
With swift strokes the fisherman rowed the boat up around a long line of cliffs to the schooner. “Now don’t be sulky,” Luke cautioned, putting a finger under Genevieve’s chin. “’Tis the best we can do. And mind the captain, and not bring bad luck to yerself. This one has no regard fer religion. The only gods to move his soul and body bes the winds and tides.”
Maiden from the Sea Page 14