“Ooh, jeezes, here he goes,” groaned Gert.
“Ah, you’ll find out,” he wagered, a mock shiver crimping his face. “I tell you, she’s not nice, cocky, working them plants in the wintertime, not when you got your hands in icy water, freezing your blood up to your elbows. Cut off your arm then, and it wouldn’t bleed—I’m not joking!” he countered the skeptical looks darting his way. “Ask the wife. I sliced open me hand one day and not a stain a blood come out—whiter than the fish, the cut was. No wonder the wife got sick, cooped up on pieces of cardboard all winter long and breeding gout.”
“Hey!?”
“That’s right—bits of cardboard. Gets so cold they puts bits of cardboard under your feet to help keep them warm. You try standing for hours in a pair of rubber boots on a concrete floor with a bit of cardboard tucked underneath. Fine thing it was when she did get sick, brother, for another winter would’ve killed her.”
“Cripes, if it was cold that breeded gout, we’d all be crumped up like accordions,” said Gert.
“I never said was the cold that breeded gout. It’s the hot water they puts out that breeds gout,” said the old-timer. “Ye-es—hot water! They fills up barrels with hot water and puts them right besides ye on the floor to dip your hands in when they’re too cold to hold on to a knife. That’s what breeds gout—dipping your hands in hot water when they’s freezing. Even youngsters knows not to put their hands in hot water when they’re freezing. Cold water you puts aching hands into, a good drop of cold water.”
“How come your missus didn’t know, then?”
“She knows. Everybody knows. Even them that’s putting the water there knows. They just wants you working faster, is all, and they don’t give a tinker’s shit how they does it. Even when your hands is so gnarled up they can’t keep a knitting needle straight, they’re still coaxing you to dip them in hot water. And you does it, too. I knows because I done it meself, enough times, and now here I got gout along with arthritis. Ye can have your plants, I say. I’ll stick with the flakes, cocky.”
“Well, my son, if that’s your calling, stick with it,” said Gert, “because there’s always them that’ll bide by the old, no matter what good comes along. But I dare say there’s a few of us won’t mind a real paycheque to buy the odd spud and leave off the gardening, because I can’t stand gardening, I can’t. Worth a couple of knobs never having to haul a weed agin.”
“Hope they does better with the liners than Am’s doing, then,” said Suze. “He’s after warning everybody that they takes too much expense to make a profit. But the government’s going right on ahead, building more of them, and bigger plants, and not knowing how it’s all going to work out. I says they ought to keep the salt fish markets up, I do. No need to put it all in the one basket.”
“And that’s what they’re doing then, cocky, all in the one basket,” said the old-timer. “I hears them on the radio every morning, coaxing everybody off the flakes and into the plants.”
“Won’t have to coax me much,” said one of the nursing mothers inside the stage, “because I can’t wait for next summer, I can’t, get off them jeezes flakes.”
“Me either. Get out from under Mother,” said Joycie Anne, a dark look at Gert. “What’s you going to do, then, Mother, you got nobody to boss about?”
“Watch your gob. I might still be boss yet. Just because you’re mod-er-nized don’t mean you’re not ordered about. All right, back at it,” she sang out as the rain feathered off, “before ye all starts rusting. Addie, hold on there a minute. What’s you doing with the fish? Full of spit, them ones you been piling in the faggot.”
Adelaide heartened as Suze, as she’d done dozens of times these past summers, stood before her, facing Gert.
“Someone’s spitting on them, then,” said Suze, “because we been working side by side all morning, and all we’re doing is firking off spit and flies.”
Gert’s brow arched disbelievingly. “How do you explain all the spit in that last faggot, then—and that’s where she’s been piling hers, in that last faggot.”
“Middle faggot,” said Suze. “We been piling ours in the middle faggot. Check out the old geezer. It’s him piling the last faggot. Must be his fingers are too crumped up to hold a stick. Come on, Addie, our turn to get wood for tea.” The mere squaring of Suze’s shoulders as she marched off defied any further objection, and Adelaide, ducking beneath a cantankerous look from Gert, hastened after her.
“Tongue like a logan, that got,” said Suze. She looked back toward the faggots and broke into a grin. “Look, look at her, going after the old fellow. Not spitey now, is she, she got put straight.”
“Foghorn,” said Adelaide without looking back.
Suze grasped her arm. “Hurry on, we best get out of her sight, because for sure we got her gander up now. Gawd, I can’t wait for next summer, I can’t, when they gets the plant built and we haven’t got she harping down our throats everyday. Brrr, I can’t stand that woman, I can’t. And now you owes me a favour, Addie,” said Suze, coming to an abrupt stop. Her grey eyes glistened like wet rocks. “I wants you to be the baby’s godmother. He’s not here yet—or she, whatever it is,” she added with a quick grin, laying a hand on her belly at Adelaide’s puzzled look. “March. I’m expecting in March. I’m sure it’s a boy; feels just like Benji did when I was carrying him. I even got his name picked out, Stewie, after Am’s poor old father, God comfort him. Now, say yes. Say yes!” she implored as Adelaide’s gaze fell to the wayside.
“Well, I-I just haven’t done that before,” said Adelaide.
“Silly thing, it’s not something you learns, just wear a dress and stand up in church, is all.”
“I knows that much, Suze.” Adelaide shuffled uncomfortably. Lord, how can you refuse somebody who’s always taking your part—whyever she kept doing it. Aside from a few nods and cursory comments, Adelaide was as distant to Suze as she ever was; just accepting, was all, of the girl’s persistent presence beside her. And undoubtedly Suze’s squarish form made for a good screen between her and the others, for despite her working the flakes for three summers now, and never mind the fact that the house she slept and ate in was overrun with youngsters, Adelaide had never gotten used to being amongst a crowd, forever wanting the comfort of quiet, of aloneness, that sense of a perfect fit she felt only when qualled in a corner with a book, or sitting by herself on a church pew.
“Oh, all right,” she said, and pushing away a hug of thanks from Suze, she started gathering wood chips for the fire, raising her eyes to the church steeple just over the way. It looked as doom and gloomy as she felt on this grey morning. Not since her mother took her out of school had she been back. It were as though she had failed it somehow, had become part of the ordinary, her reddened, bone-bitten hands unfit to fold before those lovely gilded figures adorning the altar. Yet its memory still flourished, for in gazing at the doors, imagining herself stepping through, she felt again the cool freshness of that huge ornate room, that hush and the warmth it invoked within her as if it were only yesterday she sat, swinging her legs from the front pew.
But as spring skidded on the heels of winter, and she stood at the font on the day of the christening, with Suze and her new baby boy, Stewie, and her eldest, Benji, clamouring for a closer look, and a host of others crowding around her, she gazed with a sense of detachment at the altar. It appeared smaller with all these parishioners jammed into the pews before it. And that hush that usually reigned beneath those heightened ceilings echoed now with whispers and coughs and rustling. Her chest tightened as all around her faded, revealing a child sitting alone at the front pew, swinging her legs. And as the whispering and rustling and coughing receded, it felt to Adelaide that she was standing at the end of time, looking back to a moment when she had been consumed with hope, with peace, glorying in the blue of her eyes and the blue of the Lord’s robe, her carefully written scrolls held up for His approval, her mind full of dreams of far-distant shores. She’d forbidden her d
reams since those early days on the flakes, and without their daily feeding, they had starved, the coloured robes fading into memory, the figures becoming wooden.
Dreams! she now thought a mite scornfully as Suze’s youngster screamed at the coldness of the christening waters dribbling over its crown, what place for dreams on those long, wind-mauled days of fish, flies, and spit, of the repetitiveness of housework dulling one’s senses? And what exactly was a missionary anyway, but one who fed youngsters as she was already doing? And wouldn’t there be lots more flies in hot lands, and lots more screaming babies as Suze’s was now screaming? Surely they’d be screaming all the harder if they were a starving lot and without the ocean’s wind to temper the heat. A sad smile touched her lips.
She begged off the church dinner following the christening. And after allowing Suze to persuade her, instead, to attend the dance Eb Rice was having later that evening in the new addition he was building onto his house, she hurried off home. Miraculously, the house was empty, her mother and the rest of the brood still back at the church. Yet, oddly, as she wandered about, she found no fit in its rare moment of quiet.
Growing impatient with herself, she took out her one good dress, grateful for something to occupy herself, and laying the flatirons on the stove to heat, dribbled water onto the green silky bodice so’s to more easily press it for the dance that evening. Beacons, she thought, lifting the curtain and staring through the evening’s fading light at the church steeple, that’s what those dreams had been, beacons, coaxing her through those hurried mornings as she rushed around getting everyone and herself fed and washed and dressed and out the door for school. Over the seas, indeed. Some chance of crossing the seas when moving a hundred miles to the nearest town was near impossible—unless you had a nice aunt living there, like Leah Jacobs did. That little fact she overheard a dozen times at the overly crowded dance that evening.
Standing against the plywood wall, fighting back tobacco smoke and the scrooping of a badly tuned fiddle, she eavesdropped out of boredom on Leah Jacobs, just back from spending a winter at her aunt’s in Corner Brook, and telling her tales of drudgery incurred whilst scrubbing floors and making beds and emptying chamber pots in a cheap boarding house. Nope, thought Adelaide, ignoring the saucy, flirting grin of Rubert, Gert’s brother’s eldest, as he ogled at her through the flicking skirts and ties of Suze and Ambrose and the rest of the square dancers, there’s no magic in a town simply because it’s a town, not even if you did have a nice aunt living there on some nice street. Money is what it takes to get anywhere, or education, or—as Gert said on the flakes one morning—three legs; always easier to get about if you got three legs and wore trousers.
Rubert had breached her side of the room and was now reaching past her for a glass of brew on the windowsill next to where she stood, his broad, vein-fissured hand deliberately grazing her breasts. His grin, she noted, now that he was up close, was drunken. Striking his hand aside, she ignored his hoot of laughter and marched off, her look of distaste catching the narrowed, critical eyes of Joycie-Anne and two of her cousins, standing, gawking nearby.
Cursing Suze for talking her into coming, she sashayed across the room, exaggerating the swing of her hips, then grinned as the window mirrored back to her Joycie-Anne’s scathing look scratching her back. Leah was now dancing, her tales of woe vanquished as she trotted, eyes flashing merrily, after her partner. She’d not leave again, Adelaide mused; she’d be married next year and settled down next to her mother, working in the plant and having babies, that’s what Leah Jacobs would be doing, and she, Adelaide, alongside her, if Rubert had his way, she thought, rebuffing his plying grin as he once more made his way toward her.
Then Suze was singing out to her, and somebody, not Rubert, was grabbing her arm, dragging her, without asking, amidst the dancers, and she dully allowed him—to escape Rubert—to swing her into a dance, awkwardly stumbling over both their feet, thinking, bah, dreams. Foolishness; all dreams were foolishness, and she the more foolish for having had them. And prayers, too. And with the growing cynicism that comes when a soul reaches an unalterable conclusion that the four corners of the world are no wider than the house in which one lives, and the king no mightier than self, she tried to make her feet turn in the right directions for the dancer who was now swinging her around dizzily, her eyes burning from smoke, and her head aching from the tiresomeness of repeated thought.
Small wonder, then, the force with which her heart pounded when the Sunday before her first day at the new fish plant, she opened her door to the dark-faced young man standing on her stoop, wearing a finely cut suit, and with no funeral, wedding, or christening taking place for miles around.
CHAPTER SIX
THE EMISSARY
TRULY AN EMISSARY, she thought, an apostle sent by God to bridge that gap between Ragged Rock and the world overseas. And given that she believed him divine, her first impression was the strength registered in the thick of his lips, his skin, the gleam of his tar-black hair, and beneath that darkened ridge of his brows, the never-ending darkness of his eyes sinking into hers. She held out her hand as if to touch him, and he immediately grasped it with his, leaving merely the tips of her fingers showing, and they a ghostly white against the hairy blackness of his. And, oh, the warmth of his skin! Below the clasped hands she took in the sharp edge of his finely pressed trousers, and—and her heart sank along with her gaze onto a pair of well-worn rubber boots peeking out from the length of his well-pressed pant legs.
Lord, what was this?
Pulling back her hand, she stood, noting his fingers curling in the way of all fishermen who hand-lined day after day, and his legs bowed at the knees from fighting for balance in a rocky boat, and his shoulders starting to hunch from reining in jiggers and anchors. She sighed, her hand to her hip. A creature honed by the wind and sea was what he was, fitted only for that which took him from his door to his boat. As though following her thoughts, his eyes dropped and his shoulders hunched a little further; yet his voice, though low, was steady as he raised his eyes back to hers, and in the most sombre of tones, invited her for a boat ride to Cooney Arm.
“Cooney Arm,” she repeated, drawing down her mouth as though speaking the name of some dirty relative. She’d been up and down the shore a few times, a dance here, picnic there, but Cooney Arm with its handful of blood relatives, the scattered sheep, and the odd rhubarb patch was never a place she cared to visit. “Isn’t that where Bear Falls is?” she asked, dawdling for time. “Winter nights, when it’s still, we can hear it,” she added as he merely nodded. “I don’t like boats. Just a second.” A whine from one of the toddlers had mushroomed into a scream. Shutting the door, she turned back into the kitchen. Ivy was dragging the eldest toddler into his room for a nap, the other was sitting on the floor, turning red from holding his breath, and the boys, Johnnie and Alf (or the buggers, as she preferred calling them) were on their knees, barrelling across the kitchen.
“What’d ye do to him?” she cried, darting to the toddler and whacking his back, her hands sticking to a gob of molasses on his nightshirt. “Bloody hell, ye little bastards—they done something to him,” she yelled as her mother hurried into the kitchen, the newest addition but a ripple amongst the folds of cloth pushed up over a swollen breast.
“There,” and Adelaide sighed with relief as the youngster caught his breath. “Janie—Janie, you going to wash him?” she sang out over another scream.
Janie hopped down from the washstand where she’d been kneeling and snapped, “I already washed him once!”
“Then wash him agin—and this time change his clothes,” she snapped back. Ignoring her sister’s sharp rebuttal and the youngster’s screaming and the newest member’s starting up a wail as Florry fled the room, berating Johnnie and Eli, Adelaide lifted her sweater off the back of a chair and, without word of farewell, walked out the door.
His voice was clear and soft when he spoke, and he smelled clean—of soap. And he lived only with a mot
her, no youngsters. For that reason alone she agreed to go visit Cooney Arm. She walked the muddied road with him, skirting an ornery baa-aa-ing ram and wincing at the plink, plink, plink of a dozen different axes splitting their way through piles of firewood that rose like giant yellow beehives beside each doorway in Ragged Rock.
“This way,” she said, leading him off the path and cutting across a weed-choked garden to where the flakes had once stood. In keeping with the governing fathers’ instructions, the merchants had, indeed, burned the flakes, making room for the new fish plant and the new government wharf built alongside it. Dismal, the plant looked, with its long, low roof and little porthole windows dotted along its wooden sides. And not a whole lot different from the flakes, thought Adelaide, noting how half of it extended out over the water on stilts. Bobbing and creaking alongside the wharf was a fifty-foot longliner, its winches and anchors all brownish with a rust that had bled profusely over time, streaking the scaling, yellowed paint covering its forecastle and smokestack.
“The new longliner,” she said with a hint of humour. “Ever fish on one?” she asked as he peered more closely at the automated shooting machine that sent a hundred feet of line with dozens of baited hooks interspersed along it out into the sea. He quickly shook his head, sizing up the vertical winch that would automatically haul back the line, leaving the fishermen the tedious job of unhooking the three to four thousand pounds of fish it would catch daily, and then rebaiting the hooks before shooting it back out into the water again.
“Not my way of fishing,” he staunchly replied. “I’d rather be the master of my own boat. Good thing for women, though, I suppose—the plant and everything. Lot better than working on the flakes in the rain and all. And the money, for sure they’ll like that, making more money.” He turned to her, settling into a smile. “Guess there’ll be lots of fancy dresses and hats being bought with all that money rolling in.”
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