* * * *
The rough and grumpy-looking Captain Patten, a boil on the tip of his sunburned nose, looked Genevieve over as Joe explained. “This young fellar goes be the name of Jean-Paul. We found him coming outta the woods, been on a shipwreck he had. He hove into the woods afraid a savage would scalp him. ’Tis work you’ll get out of him fer sure. He helped us wit’ the fish.”
“’Tis French he is and better to leave him be until he gets his footin’s after his play wit’ the sea in which all souls was lost, but he.”
“Oui.” Genevieve nodded solemnly.
The captain nodded and then he turned his eye on sailors who were busy at the stern hauling up a large mooring block to the large, black ship. He let out a grunt, and then a yowl at a seaman handling the jib hank. Then he disappeared down a ladder.
Genevieve was moving toward the taffrail when her boots slipped on the wet deck. Her head hit a plank as she went down. A piercing bawl shot out of her. She crumbled onto the deck. Luke ran to lift her. She closed her eyes, pretending to be unaware.
“Leave him there on the deck until he comes around,” a voice ordered. “’Tis business to be done here.”
Genevieve stayed still for a while, her lids loose enough to watch for her chance to leave the ship. She could tell from the sailors’ conversation when the ship was well out from land. In the darkening night she crept past sleeping men with her face to the back of men on the rigs. She imagined what would happen if Joe and Luke caught sight of her going over the ship. There would be a shout of dismay from Luke and an answer from Joe: “That takes care of the trollop. She’s as good as dead in the water. The captain would’ve slung her over anyway if he’d discovered a maid hiding in a sailor’s garb.”
Genevieve fell into the sea, arms spread like a bird’s wings to slow her descent. Her first fall more than a year before was replayed: water overtaking her body, filling her mouth and nostrils and backing up her breath until she was ready to explode. This time there were no fishermen to rescue her. This time, though, she could swim. Nasook had made sure of that, and now his spirit gave her impetus. Despite the cold sucking at her flesh and piercing her bones, she swam toward land, toward the chance of finding Patience Elizabeth.
Voices called to her, urging her on. She swam toward them, hurrying away from the splash behind her.
epilogue
Strange arms are hauling on her, their voices insistent: “Are you awake? I made you some tea.”
Some tea, some tea, some tea. The words come like a flat rock skipping over water. They hit hard against her ears.
Annoyed, she answers, “I wasn’t asleep. I was swimming.” Then she slips beneath cold waves. She rises with the tide to the surface.
A voice is calling in the wind: “Elizabeth!” The voice is insistent. Another voice is calling in the gurgle of the sea: “Genny.” She cannot answer, for her body is cold, her mouth filled with water. Patience Elizabeth, her mind whispers, Patience Elizabeth, where are you?
“We almost had her,” a voice repeats as she sinks deeper.
Her mouth forms names she cannot speak. They seem to be strung across her mind on a line. She unpins Genevieve and the name falls away, then Patience and it falls away, then Bridget, Sarah, Caroline, Sarah Ann, Mary Jane, Shanawdithit, Elizabeth Emma, Grace . . . She unpins Elizabeth, and when she does, it slips inside her head.
“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” A voice is calling the name and she tries to answer.
Arms are pulling her up on the beach. “We have her, I think,” a voice says hesitantly.
Her eyes open and she is inside a white square with just a rectangle of brown to one side, as if the gods have shrunk the world, bringing the sky down in a flat cover above her head with a long dish of light. A dark-haired woman is standing beside her. She looks familiar and yet she is a stranger. The brown rectangle opens and a man in a white jacket comes inside the white box. He nods at the woman. “You can wait in my office.” The woman gets up. She looks back at the girl as she goes out.
A room, her mind says aloud. And a dark door opening to let other people in.
A woman in a white uniform comes with pills and a glass of water, followed by a man in a white jacket. “You’ve been away from us for a while,” the woman says, tightening her lips before adding, “but now you’re back.”
The girl in the bed stirs, rubs her hand down her belly. She closes her eyes. Her energy drains in her words: “Who are you?”
She opens her eyes again. This must be heaven, she thinks. No! It can’t be heaven. The place is not made of gold and it doesn’t have a gold street. But why am I lying down on white sheets in a strange make of a bed?
“Where is it I’m—at?” she asks haltingly, her tongue feeling thick.
“You’re in the Health Sciences Hospital,” the strange man in white answers. “I am your doctor. Ms. Kennedy is your nurse.”
“Hospital, doctor, nurse?” She sits up, trying to find meaning in the words. A voice in her head speaks: “Turn, Elizabeth, turn.”
She turns to face a mirror on the wall. “Elizabeth!” She says the name as she sees the image in the mirror, not at all like herself looking down in ponds of the cove. Her hair is short and jibbed, not long and flowing, caressing, comforting. Her eyes are the same: wounded-looking, her full lips open and longing. The doctor’s and the nurse’s eyes meet. The nurse hurries to pass the girl a glass of water. She holds out two white pills. “Here, swallow these.”
The girl accepts them between her lips, lets them slip on her tongue.
“You need to swallow them,” Nurse Kennedy says patiently.
The girl gulps as if to let the pills go down. After the nurse and doctor leave, she spits the cruddy pills into her hand, wraps them in a tissue, and throws the tissue into the garbage. She peels the gold tinfoil from a chocolate coin she takes from her housecoat pocket and sucks on it as she stares at a sketch of a man and a child on the wall. Her eyes draw it to her like the sun draws water. Her mind reads the words under the sketch: “The last Beothuk males.” Her thoughts shout, I can read more than my name!
“Nasook,” she whispers, pulling in her breath, drawing him into her mind against a loneliness bleeding her life.
The nurse finds her bent over, her body shuddering with sobs. “Dear, dear now, if you carry on like this you’ll lose your baby.”
The girl believes that the nurse is not telling her the truth when she remarks, “It’s shocking enough that you fell asleep in your bathtub and slipped under water. Why are you crying?”
She stops crying and closes her eyes. She does not answer the nurse’s query. Her mind is speaking. She doesn’t know if the nurse can hear her. I must save Genevieve—bring her to shore.
Elizabeth finds Genevieve walking on the sand with a new baby, his head on her shoulder. “Magaragois—my son,” Elizabeth whispers. “He has Nasook’s eyes.”
She runs after Genevieve. She does not turn. Elizabeth sees a birch cup lying in the sand. She picks it up. A hand is putting it to her lips. She opens her eyes to her own hand on a glass and feels the gulp of a pill going down her throat.
* * * *
Dr. Luke looks up from his paper and straight at the dark-haired woman sitting in front of his desk. Then he bends to read aloud what he has written. “Elizabeth’s thoughts, her dreams, and her reality are like three strands in a motley braided mat; each strand has a different width, depth, and texture that seem to separate. Her body, soul, and spirit also seem to separate, making her at odds with her perception of herself. Some of her dreams appear to be out-of-body and out-of-time experiences.”
The doctor stops reading. He leans back in his chair, a pen over his earlobe, and speaks to the worried-looking mother. “She sniffs the lilacs you bring in here from your garden and calls them by an archaic pronunciation: ‘laylocks.’ Puzzling, too,
is her obsession with the extinct Beothuk race. You said she is drawn to the Green Point lighthouse out from Ochre Cleft Cove. There is evidence of Beothuk living in the area centuries ago. If her sympathy is with them, we don’t know what can happen while she is suffering from tal dium vitae—that is to say, a feeling that life is worrisome here in the present.”
The woman answers: “Life is worrisome as long as her child is gone. She lost her aboriginal husband tragically. That threw her life in a spin. When she met Pierre Gardou, things seemed to go well at first. He was a charmer. Then he became increasingly violent. As she shrank from him, he got worse, keeping tabs on every move she made and spreading rumours about her. He left her unconscious in a bathtub of cold water after hitting her in the head and setting fire to the house. She might have burned to death had she not regained consciousness and stayed in the tub until firemen got to her. The baby couldn’t be found. Police believe that Gardou set the fire, hit Elizabeth, and then dragged her unconscious to the bathtub, which he filled with water. He then took the child and fled. He was out on parole when it happened.”
Dr. Luke shakes his head. “I would hope your daughter is meliorating, but I cannot say. It’s important that she get well so she can have a healthy baby. We’ll do our best for her. Maybe the child will be free of the illness. I wish her mens sana in corpore sano.”
“Meaning?” the woman asks, sounding annoyed. Her hand goes to her forehead.
The doctor looks apologetic. “Excuse my Latin. I wish your daughter a sound mind in a sound body.”
“She was a gifted child from an early age, always interested in the arts, and in history,” the woman explains. She added with a furrowed brow, “We can’t change the past. I know she would like to bring back her older sister.”
“Her older sister?” The doctor raises an eyebrow.
“Yes, Grace moved to England with a boyfriend who was as old as her father. Joe persuaded her to marry him over there. When he phoned to tell us she’d died in a plane crash, we promised to come to the funeral. ‘Funeraaaaal! There is no funeral,’ he yelled. ‘She’s already been cremated.’ We received an odd call at the time from a woman who said she had been Grace’s friend. She insisted that Grace had fallen from a horse and died, and she didn’t think it was an accident. My daughter’s tragic end caused me to have a breakdown. Elizabeth was twelve at the time. I had to leave her alone while I was in the hospital. When I was well enough to return home, I found her suffering—first from endogenous depression. I would speak to her and it was as if she wasn’t there. But then she flew out of herself—became very spirited. I’ve told her in the past, ‘You cannot dance through spring and summer, flinging your joy around like flower petals. You cannot drop your head like a withered leaf in autumn and then go into winter howling like a tormented wind. You must be steady through all the seasons. Shush!’ I’ve urged against her exuberance. ‘Shush!’ I’ve answered to her cries. ‘You are not a boat that a mad sea can torment with tides and winds. Even a boat has to hold steady or be lost.’ This time she has been lost for the longest time. You might say she has been lost through all the four seasons. I thought she’d stay well last time. She was into water colouring and art designing, and she loved her part as a girl named Genevieve in a French play put off at the LSPU Hall.”
“Her mind seeks a peaceful and steady place in which to reside, that no ready anodyne can give her, I’m afraid,” the doctor answers. “It is not as simple as telling someone to be a certain way. Your daughter is caught in the vicissitude of life: a condition of constant change.” His pencil cracks in his hand. “This pencil was created by man. A human brain is not. It is very complex. Your daughter may have been born imprinted with scenes of past lives—just quick catches of them as if her ancestors’ lives were so tragic and unsettled that pieces of them were permanently imprinted in genetic material.” He adds hurriedly, “We don’t know that, of course . . . We do realize that, from our aging bodies, human nature renews itself in our newborn. There is the ever-connecting chain of human existence from the beginning of time, a recycling in body and, perhaps, in memory—memory that lies dormant in most people.”
A nurse rushes into the office, annoyed. “Doctor, Elizabeth’s marked up her bedsheets again. Before, when she marked them, I found her crying and mumbling that, try as she would, she could not keep her writing from being washed off by the rain. Then she began biting into the sheets and saying she was making marks in birch. What’s all this talk of birch rind?”
“It’s a nature book. She made it from birch sheets and trimmed it with gold for an Irish friend,” her mother answers quickly, adding just as quickly, “though I’m not sure she has an Irish friend.”
The doctor’s face is grave. He sighs. “We have medication that may keep her from running away from the present and slipping into the past. It is strong medicine, but we must do what we can to stop her from reacting to the turmoil in her life. One character has surfaced now, but there may be more struggling to live in her consciousness. I heard her say the names: Patience Elizabeth, Bridget, Sarah Ann, Mary Jane . . .”
The mother’s mouth drops open with a quick draw of breath. She stands up and moves in front of the doctor.
He looks up quickly: “What is it?”
“Those are some of the names on the headstones in the old graveyard behind my grandmother Elizabeth Emma’s house.”
The doctor looks at her with a shake of his head. “Just as I suspected.” He writes as a sideline to his notes: “We can anchor Elizabeth’s body, but she will find a way to go beyond it. The mind has no boundaries. It is a traveller. Just as some people visit countries, Elizabeth visits centuries.”
* * * *
Night steals in and pulls a blanket of sleep over the patient. In its comforting blackness, she sleeps so serenely that there is no sign that a strange illness ever followed her and slipped inside. She is like an angel on a cloud, her arms outstretched across the white bedsheets. Her open eyes are motionless, emotionless. She lies limp like a rag doll until . . . There comes a stir inside her, a strange awakening.
She sits up. She must find Patience Elizabeth . . . A black sky becomes a grey distance. Out of it a golden crystal rises against the dark panorama. White crystals follow, tumble. They explode into a sea of blue crystal. A beautiful forest moves in front of white clouds feathering a robin-egg blue sky above the gentle, crystal ocean.
Genevieve follows the changing seasons of the forest moving rapidly: the white of winter, the bloom of spring, the green of summer, autumn’s ochre cast. The forest slowly splits and on a rimrose cliff rising up out of a deep ocean, a majestic, white horse prances, its pink nostrils lifted, its mane flowing. She feels compelled to leap on the horse’s back and grab his white wings springing out. The wings mount the air and the cliff drops down into the deep—the forest moves back together. Genevieve is flying over the ocean toward familiar land, back to find her daughter . . .
Voices bubble against her ears. A harsh voice calls, “Elizabeth!”
Another voice is louder. “Wedumite!”
Acknowledgements
My publisher, Flanker Press: Garry, Margo, and Jerry Cranford for publishing and promoting my work with enthusiasm, their dedicated team, editor Annamarie Beckel, a fine writer, and book jacket designer Adam Freake, whose intriguing cover opens the novel.
Also, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council for a seed grant.
To my readers, whose lives I am a part of through the gift of reading and ruminating. I am inspired by you to begin a sequel to Catherine Snow. Thank you for letting my words into your heart. (Also, in progress: The Ghost of the Southern Cross.)
About the author
Nellie P. Strowbridge is one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most beloved and prolific authors. She is the winner of provincial and national awards and has been published nationally and internationally. Her work is capsu
led in the National Archives as Newfoundland’s winner in Canada’s Stamp of Approval Award for a letter written to Canada 2117.
Strowbridge, a former columnist and editorial writer, an essayist and an award-winning poet, is a seventeen-time winner in the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Awards. She has been Writer in the Library, a mentor to young writers, an adjudicator in the Provincial Arts and Letters Awards, an assessor on the Newfoundland and Labrador Grants Committee, and a judge on the Newfoundland and Labrador Alliance Book Awards. She has held school workshops in Canada and Ireland, and also hosted a Seminar/Gabfest for International Women’s Day in Cobh, Ireland, where she was Writer-in-Residence. The Canadian Embassy in Dublin also sponsored a reading and reception.
The author is a member of the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets (Newfoundland and Nova Scotia Representative 2009), and Page One.
Previous books: Widdershins: Stories of a Fisherman’s Daughter; Doors Held Ajar (tri-authored with Isabel Brown and Peggy Krachun); Shadows of the Heart; Dancing on Ochre Sands (shortlisted for the Newfoundland and Labrador E. J. Pratt Award, 2005, and long-listed for the ReLit Award); Far From Home: Dr. Grenfell’s Little Orphan (a bestseller, shortlisted for the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award 2006); The Gift of Christmas (reviewed by the Aurora as a Newfoundland and Labrador classic); The Newfoundland Tongue (a bestseller); and Catherine Snow (a bestseller).
sources researched
Assiniwi, Bernard. The Beothuk Saga. Translated by Wayne Grady. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000. (Includes a lexicon of the Beothuk language, which is based on the lexicon provided by Ou-bee, who was held captive in England ca. 1760.)
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