Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  I suppose if I could lift my hands, I could say a rosary for the Bishop’s soul, but he probably doesn’t need rosaries. I’d have offered up a lifetime of rosaries for him already, if I’d thought for a moment that he really needed them. October 7th, he came, which is the feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, he told me later. I was too small to know at the time and besides we were all Anglicans then. The feast was to celebrate the defeat of the Turks at the battle of Lepanto, wherever that is. Maybe it’s in Carpasia—after all, he was Bishop of Carpasia, not really Bishop of Newfoundland.

  It was Bishop Fleming who taught me to say the rosary, and I have said it thousands and thousands of times since—the Joyful Mysteries for my father, who learned to be content with having just a daughter, the Sorrowful Mysteries for my mother who lost the only child she really loved, although she did her best to hide that from me, and the Glorious Mysteries which I said first for nobody in particular but that I now know were really for Mr. Donovan.

  The Bishop taught me my letters too. I’m sure he wanted me to be a school teacher, but he showed me too clearly the blessing of feeding people during his winter in Petty Harbour. A was an apple pie, and everything that follows does so because apple pie is good to eat. “C cut it”, he’d say, and using a bit of charred stick he’s draw the letter C on the side of the pail full of porridge, so I’d know I was to bring it to the Clearys on the Northside. L longed for it—that went to the Lees, on the Southside. M mourned for it. Morris, Southside. He drew me out the whole alphabet on oilcloth, and sewed it into a tiny book: “The Tragical Death of A, Apple Pie, Who was Cut in Pieces and Eaten by Twenty-six Gentlemen, With Whom all Little People Ought to be Very Well Acquainted”.

  By Christmas, I knew all the letters, even the ones like X and Z that had no names, so he began to teach me words other than names. There were no books, except his breviary and our Bible, so he taught me to read from the Bible and it is a habit I have retained all my life, though it is not a very Roman thing to do. “What do you want with that?” asked Paddy, when I put the Bible in with the linen to move to town with him after we were married. “They’ve got one in the church. The priest will read it to us if we need to know it.” Not that he went to church much. He’d make a show of going, stand in the back with the other men for a while, and then drift off out the door, to smoke his pipe and talk, or away to O’Neils for a drink of rum.

  Poor Paddy. Perhaps if I had loved him more he would have come to church with me, but he loved himself such a great deal that there wasn’t really room for anyone else to love him. Certainly our girls loved him, but he saw them as part of himself, like his hands or feet. I’m glad they were grown and gone, except Kate, of course, when I married Mr. Donovan. They couldn’t approve of anyone taking their father’s place. I could never bring myself to call Mr. Donovan by his first name, it being the same as Paddy’s, and I know they thought it was a delicacy in me, an unwillingness to use the holy name of Paddy Aylward on a man they thought was his inferior, but the truth is that it was the other way around. I loved my darling Mr. Donovan so much that I couldn’t bear to call him by a name that was ashes in my mouth.

  Did the Bishop know what he was doing when he married me off to Paddy Aylward? The Bishop was such a good man, and he had such faith in me, that he may have thought I would save Paddy’s soul and so he offered me up as a sacrifice. I’m afraid I let him down. It wasn’t such a bad marriage, I suppose. Paddy was sober when he had to be, and he never laid a finger on me in anger except the once. We raised three fine girls, and buried only one beautiful baby. He was a hard worker in life and he left me provided for after he died. Can anyone ask for more? Oh, yes, for there is more, and I got it eventually.

  I must ask Kate about the bacon. The partridges will be too dry without it. I tried to remind her yesterday, but she didn’t seem to be able to understand me. My head is so clear, now, that I’m sure I will be able to talk. I must remember, though, not to try to speak if she has a spoon in her hand or she will be sure to put food in my mouth. The sooner I learn to keep my mouth shut when there is a spoon, the sooner I will be with my sweet Mr. Donovan and my dearest Bishop.

  Now they stamp, now they champ, now they

  stand still.

  May 28

  Fine day. Attended mass at Topsail while Mrs. Walsh stayed with Mumma. Home in time to do the teas. Had to redo the pastry—the girl forgot to add vinegar to the cold water and it was dunchy. The place will go to ruin without Mumma. Her eyes never stop searching the ceiling. What is she looking for? Had a most unnerving visit from Monsignor Roche, who said he’d wanted to speak to me after mass. How was I to know? I know I am not an imposing figure like Mumma, but he makes me feel so small and insignificant that I want to crawl into the milk house and hide. When he calls, I wish we had just an ordinary parish priest, the kind who likes a short rosary and second helpings. We have the Newsboys on Wednesday. Last year they rode on the cows and almost drowned two hens in the river. Please God, Dermot will lend a hand.

  Father Roche was here and left without even a glass of port, for I heard the door slam behind him and I know Kate wouldn’t have forgotten to offer something. I am uneasy with a priest who doesn’t drink at least a little. He spoke to Kate as if she were deaf, asking about whether the doctor thought I’d recover and then quizzing her on how much I talked to her about the old days and my friendship with Bishop Fleming. He said if I recovered, he’d like to talk to me about it. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to remind Father Roche of the Stirling qualities of the man who first held the office he aspires to.

  Dear Bishop Fleming was such a blessing to the poor people here—so anxious for the fishermen and their families who had little or nothing. They came with nothing and after all their labours, they often had nothing but more mouths to feed at the end of a season. And the poor babies—not a cuff or a vamp, and sometimes not even a shirt to cover their poor bare bottoms. But such compassion the Bishop had, even for the improvident. Father Roche will need a bigger heart than those usually found in Placentia Bay men if he is to fill the Bishop’s shoes.

  My parents were more fortunate than most in the way they settled here, although some would say there is no such thing as good fortune unless you make it yourself. That is what my mother always said, and it is what I told Judge Prowse when he asked me to tell him of the circumstances surrounding my people’s settling here. I suppose it was really an accident of the weather. They came out heading for Upper Canada, but their ship ran into difficulty and took refuge in St. Johns Harbour, short of food, full of water, and half sinking. Mother had friends in the Garrison—coney kin, I believe—and insisted on disembarking while the ship was refitted, and during the stopover they decided to stay on and go over to Grates Cove where there were some distant relatives of Father. The cod fishery was looking pretty grim at the time, but sealing was a growing industry and during their stay the whelping ice came in, jamming between the point and Baccalieu Island, and my parents were instantly transformed into landsmen for the course of one week. The judge rubbed his hands in satisfaction when I told him that, and pencilled a little note in the book he always carried in his pocket.

  Father always teased Mother about that occasion, brief as it was, and said that if he ever gave up fishing he’d arrange to send her to the ice on one of the sealing vessels to support the family. Mother rarely did more than pull a face at this remark, but I could tell there was a mixture of pride and regret in her at the memory. Having been raised on a farm, she had more than a passing familiarity with the bloodier elements, and had learned as a young child to castrate pigs and kill chickens—her father had some form of palsy and considered her hand steadier than his own—and it was with her encouragement that Father went out on the ice that spring day at Grates Cove. Father was a great fish killer but he had never before killed a fur-bearing animal, and the sound of the whitecoats bawling—as like a human infant as one can imagine—unnerved him dreadfully. After he had taken the first fe
w pelts and towed them back to shore, Mother’s frustration at watching him do things in such a tentative and clumsy way led her to shed her coat and tuck her skirts up to show him how to dispatch an animal properly.

  It is hard, now, to imagine my mother, so small and contained in her person, taking on the butchery of sealing, but I suppose she saw shillings in the eyes of every seal on the ice and determined not to let them escape her hands if she could do anything about it. Father said she was wearing a bright red jacket that was stained with oil and blood within moments, but she told him he could buy her a dozen jackets with the money they would make at the sealing. She did the butchering and flensing and he towed the pelts back to shore, collecting not just hers but others that were left panned on the ice. The seals were so numerous that people simply killed them and piled the pelts up indiscriminately as the week went on, leaving them for whoever had the rope and the energy to tow them ashore. She was not the only woman to turn her hand to the seals—whole families were out, with kettles left cold on the stoves and babies left crying in their cribs.

  Father said that as the week wore on, he became more and more worried that the wind would turn and take them all out to sea, and he became reluctant to let Mother out of his sight. Once he turned to look back and could not see her and thought she had gone through a rent in the ice, but she was only hidden behind a hummock. Another time he lost sight: of her for only a moment and he was so exhausted that, in tracking back towards her, he followed a man in a red flannel shirt for two miles before realizing his error. Finally, he could take no more and insisted that they stop and be satisfied with what they had. That night, three women and a boy were lost and never seen again when the ice moved off unexpectedly.

  Father was all for settling in Grates Cove after that, but Mother was only seventeen and the place had little appeal for her, so after a time they went to have another look at St. John’s again. I believe it was her intention to open a small shop, making clothes and hats, but Father was still attached to the fishery, and besides he found the stench and noise of St. Johns disturbing to his constitution, so after a winter in town they moved on to Petty Harbour where he used the cash from the sealing bonanza to build a skiff and set up rooms. There was no road to town then, but there was an Indian path and since it was only ten miles from St. John’s it was not as isolated as Grates Cove. At Mother’s urging, they purchased a small cutover lot from a tilter who was moving on—at that time there were few land grants and no formal titles, just occupation, but the tilters had their own system for ascertaining ownership of land—and it was here they established Mother’s gardens.

  I think that my father never quite got used to the availability of wood in such quantities as we had near Petty Harbour. There were times when I saw him stop and gaze at a stand of spruce or fir and he would laugh aloud at the absurdity of being able to go and cut as much of it as he wanted without paying anyone a penny for the privilege. Men who had settled only a few years before he did complained bitterly that the woods around the harbour were chopped and burned to nothing, and if they couldn’t reach out their hand and cut a stick to put on the fire without getting out of their beds they were aggrieved, but for Father to travel five, ten, even twenty miles to find knees for his boats was nothing, and he often hauled our winter wood from fairly long distances.

  Whatever he could make, he did, and insisted Mother do the same. Despite the promise of a dozen red jackets, I never knew her to wear anything but homespun although she always had a way of making even the coarsest clothing look delicate. Com was so rare in those days that few could afford to purchase imported furniture or clothing, but most people got at least a few things from home. Such wasn’t the case with us. The table and two chairs we had—for we children used three-legged stools—were carved by my father during the long winter days when he would set a block of snow outside the small window near the stove to reflect light in so that he and Mother could work. He had no tools for turning legs but he carved them so perfectly that only the most discerning eye could tell the difference. My mother spun wool whenever she wasn’t busy with anything else—could do it in her sleep, she said.

  I believe the only things we had that were imported were a few dishes, the stove from Grandfather Bulley and our Argand lamp, and that last was used only on relatively rare occasions as Father was concerned that the oil would corrode the mechanism and leave us with no proper light in an emergency. Like most of the people in the Harbour, we rose with the sun, and went to bed with it as well. During winter, when the days were short, Mother and Father would often sit by the stove for a time late in the evening, using the dim light from the mica insert in the front of the stove to finish some small job, and Richard and I would listen to the quiet murmuring of their voices until we fell asleep or they climbed the loft to join us in bed. I occasionally heard them disagree—Mother wanting to raise more goats or plant more turnips than Father thought we could use, or Father wishing to hire on as a servant someone Mother felt was giddy or unreliable—but I never heard them raise their voices in anger, nor did I ever hear my mother weep for her lost hat-shop or her red jacket.

  June 2

  Fine, cool day. No change in Mumma. Wish Lizzie would visit.

  There’s a bluebottle at the window that keeps me restless. I hope Kate comes soon to deal with it. I have such a nervous mind today, and for once I am glad I can’t speak for almost anything could come out of my mouth and there are some things best forgotten. I’m glad I settled the matter of the grave when Mr. Donovan died, for that’s one worry off my mind. I’d have preferred to be buried in town, but we belong to Topsail parish and he liked the view out over the bay, so I chose a nice double plot well back from the gate so we would be away from the tramp and curiosity of casual passersby. We always liked our own company best. Pity we never had our own graveyard here at St. Ann’s, but I suppose with no church, and the hotel, it wasn’t really practical.

  That was a nice graveyard in Petty Harbour that the Bishop set up after the smallpox epidemic. Perhaps that is what Father Roche wishes to talk about. There was some problem at the time that I did not understand—a petition had gone from several of the Protestant families to Governor Prescott with the professed object of preventing the removal of the interred remains of some of their deceased friends from the chapel-yard to the new cemetery, but common sense prevailed. When the Bishop had first arrived the previous fall, there had been three deaths from the pox and the graveyard, which was in the middle of the town, was already a considerable threat to the health of the inhabitants. Some of the graves were within three and four yards of the doors of the houses, virtually on top of some of the wells, and it was necessary to make a more hygienic arrangement.

  One of the first things the Bishop did, once he was settled with his medicine chest in a small waste house near the church, was to locate a piece of land half a mile distant where there was sufficient soil to cover the bodies of the dead. Those most recently interred were quickly removed to this more suitable place, a process I recall watching with a somewhat morbid fascination, and then of course the Cadigan baby and his family quickly joined them. As the temperature continued to drop and the critically ill grew less threatened, the Bishop convinced the men to move as many more of the graves as they could identify. He then, at his own expense, purchased a piece of ground adjoining the old cemetery and, by blasting the rocks, reduced it to a level that allowed him to begin the construction of our fine little church. The dear man had the heart of a cleric but the eye and ambition of an architect.

  The Protestant petition was motivated, I suppose, by sectarianism from the outside, for the Bishop was on terms of the best friendship with ourselves and all our Protestant neighbours, and the suggestion that he was interrupting the repose of the mortal remains of our relatives was nonsense. Most of us did not have close relatives in the Harbour, having emigrated to the colony only relatively recently. The majority of the graves in the community, some of which were scattered between and e
ven under the houses—in any small ditch or hollow that afforded cover—were those of transient fishermen who had come out as servants or dieters. Unbaptized babies, of which there were a surprising number, were disposed of almost anywhere. In later years, on at least two occasions, I unearthed bones in my garden that I am quite certain belonged to humans.

  The little square of level ground that the Bishop had cut into the rock stood empty for several months through the winter while he waited for Governor Prescott to intervene with the Anglican clergy on his behalf, and as most work was stopped by illness and bad weather it afforded us children a fine new place for playing. There were hardly six square yards of flat ground in the entire district, so it was a great novelty for us to have somewhere we could run and gatch without fear of tumbling down a hillside or into the sea. Some of the boys played a game called tiddly, employing any sticks and stones they could find about the place—the rules of this game were and still are a mystery to me—but mostly we just used the space for running about.

  When the Catholics finally got a church, of course the Protestants had to have a new church too, but that made no odds to us. I preferred St. David’s to St. Andrew’s, perhaps because I knew the old church but never set foot in the new one. Our own had the superior bell, for St. Andrews bell came out of an old ship while ours was a gift of the Bishop of Hamburg, and it produced a fine, pretty sound that must have rung in the ears of Napoleon himself in his day. They say it came out of a pre-Reformation monastery.

  There was little division between the Catholics and the Protestants in Petty Harbour, other than a geographic one which was the result of when each group arrived rather than deliberate separation, but there was an awareness that the two groups were on two sides of a fence that was troublesome to cross over. It was a fence that the Bishop worked to remove and that Father Roche would build up again. I myself was made painfully aware of this barrier as I grew older, because of my special relationship with the Bishop.