Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  This unofficial service to the community only served to put a larger distance between us and our fellow communicants. We were privy to their secret disappointments, and they found that easier to accept if they thought of us as belonging to a slightly higher class of people than themselves, so the childen called me “teacher,” even though I was a pupil like themselves, and my parents were called Mister and Missus, never Uncle or Aunt like many others. No money ever changed hands, for none of us had coin, nor was there ever an offer of goods for little as we had, we had more than most. But if someone asked me or my parents to read or write a letter, we would usually find them unexpectedly at hand and willing to help if there was seaweed to be hauled, or caplin to be ditched into the garden.

  By the time I was fourteen years old, there was very little left for me to learn in the tiny Northside school and the Bishop suggested I go to school in town, to the Presentation sisters who had come over from Ireland to provide education to the girls of the colony. Bishop Fleming objected to having boys and girls in the same classroom because he felt it coarsened the girls. Even the smallest boys who worked in the fishery got a rum ration, and they often arrived for their lessons in a jolly and elevated mood that could quickly degenerate into lewd and obscene behavior, and since he couldn’t stop them claiming their tot of Jamaica, he felt the next best thing would be to remove the girls from their influence.

  As far as I was concerned, separating the boys from the girls in school only put off the day when the girls would have to learn to cope with the problem, but my real objection was to leaving home, not to leaving behind a group of rowdy lads. The idea of going to town frightened me. As it happened, circumstances contrived to keep me at home for several more years, and by coaxing my mother into getting a second cow, I managed to make myself indispensable around the house. My mother had to make the fish and had no time to tend to the cows, and even went so far as to say she didn’t want to since she had left all that behind in England, but at the same time she delighted in the increased variety that the butter and milk introduced into our very limited diet.

  Salt pork and doughboys, salt beef and doughboys, salt fish and doughboys or biscuit, all accompanied by the potatoes, cabbage and turnips my mother and I wrestled out of the ever expanding garden on the hill behind the Harbour, was the best we could manage through the winter, and even at that we were luckier than most. To have butter for the fish, and milk to put in the morning tea, even if that tea was made from dried clover or marsh plants, was a luxury she had long since given up hope of seeing ever again.

  The cows, I believe, lengthened my mothers life, forcing her to stay alive at least long enough to teach me how to milk, put by hay for the winter, and treat sore udders, not to mention how to churn butter and then wrap the pat in a fresh rhubarb leaf to set it, how to clean the pans so as to keep the liquid sweet and fresh in the root-cellar, and a dozen other skills that went far beyond mere milking. I was able to trade the milk and butter for an occasional fresh partridge or a haunch of the small caribou that roamed the interior of the island—almost hunted out now—and it meant that even when we had to hire on help to take Mothers place on the fish flakes, there was always some small, good thing to eat to coax a smile out of her right up to the day she passed out of this world and went to rest in the Bishop s cemetery until the morning of the Resurrection.

  I know that my mother believed that as soon as she was gone, I would fulfill the Bishop s desire that I become a teacher, but there were things that happened at the school that I never told her about. Several of the young masters were brutes with the whip, and one of them in particular delighted in inflicting pain on the weakest and stupidest of the boys, though he left the girls pretty much to their own devices. One little fellow— he was from a particularly indigent family—took the brunt of this man’s bottomless supply of anger, and something happened so that I felt compelled to go to the Bishop.

  There had been talk of incest in the family—though nobody would have ever breathed the word—and certainly the child was odd, though not retarded in the usual sense. He had yellow, rheumy eyes and his nose was always running down to his chin and onto his smock, but aside from being a rather unappetizing boy, he wasn’t so bad. The master, however, tormented him at every turn, making him kneel on pebbles for the slightest error and slapping him for “looking saucy.” His favourite trick was to walk behind the children and rap the backs of their necks with a metal-trimmed ruler, claiming that if they were concentrating on their work it wouldn’t hurt. That boy—Cajetan he was called—got so marked on the back of his neck that the scar tissue bunched and turned his head sideways, giving him an even more hangdog appearance.

  One day I forgot my sampler in the school house and when I went back for it, I saw the master through the window beating poor Cajetan’s bare bum with a ruler and rubbing the child over his knees in the most unholy way. I hammered at the door, though I don’t think it was locked, and by the time I got into the room there was nothing but the child, snot and tears soaking his front. The ruler was back on the desk, streaked with blood. The master must have gone out the window.

  That weekend, I coaxed Mother to let me go to town to bring the nuns some cranberry sauce she had made from berries I’d picked in the fall, and I managed to see the Bishop for a few minutes. I had never done such a bold thing in my life, and I was shaking like a leaf as I knocked on the door of his residence. I wasn’t the only petitioner waiting on him that day, though I was certainly the youngest, but the moment I entered the room he knew something was weighing on me, for like many great men he had the ability to give his undivided attention, so that five minutes in his presence produced a feeling of satisfaction such as an hour or more with a less attentive person might.

  “Keziah, my child, what is your trouble,” he asked, as I bent to kiss his ring. I hardly knew how to answer. I could not tell him exactly what I had seen for I hardly understood it myself. He held my hand for a moment, and when I did not reply he gently lifted a finger under my chin so that my eyes met his. “Have I ever done anything to cause you to distrust me?” he asked.

  “Oh no, Sir,” I whispered, and tears came into my eyes at the thought that I might have offended him.

  “Then you must trust me now, and tell me what is wrong,” he responded.

  “Its the master at the school, Sir. He is tormenting and beating the poor children so that they can hardly bear it.” The tears turned to a torrent, and I wept openly at my own confusion and helplessness. “I cannot bear it myself, for just to watch is a torture.” He looked grave and was silent for a moment.

  “Keziah, you understand, do you not, that corporal punishment is a necessary and integral part of harnessing the human passions?” I did not answer, but continued crying and began searching frantically for my handkerchief in the basket I had at my side. “You have heard the saying, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’?” he said less gently. With my handkerchief pressed to my face, I nodded. “Sometimes it is necessary to strike a child for his own good, and not to do so is a grave sin for it allows any weakness in the child’s nature to take hold and grow.”

  “Oh, but Sir, the master is not doing it for the children, he is doing it for himself. He takes pleasure in hurting the little boys and they are so terrified that they cannot possibly learn.” I scrubbed at my tears and determined to speak up on behalf of poor little Cajetan and the others.

  “This is a serious accusation you are making, and not one that can be easily supported or disproven.” The Bishop looked grim and angry now, but I did not feel he was angry at me. “If the masters and mistresses are to be of any use in the schools at all, they must be able to impose discipline where and when they feel it is necessary. You will discover that for yourself when you are a teacher with your own school.”

  “If being a teacher means I will have to break slates over the heads of my charges, or beat them until the blood runs down their legs, or terrify them so that the mere sight of me causes them to t
remble, then I would rather see the whole nation remain in ignorance sooner than turn into such a person.” If the Bishop was angry, I was beginning to feel some anger of my own. The Bishop sighed at my passionate outburst.

  “Keziah, it is possible that some individuals lose control of the classroom and consequently lose control of themselves, but most masters are good men, under-educated perhaps, but attempting to do a difficult job for very little reward. Possibly this man goes a little too far, but you cannot throw out the whole system because it occasionally fails.” He sighed again, and then gave me a rather sad smile. “We are old friends, you and I, and we should not be disagreeing in this way.” I blushed at this, for it was dreadful temerity in me to disagree with the Bishop in any way at all. “I will look into the matter, but I also ask that you think this matter through, for when you are a teacher, you will need not just a knowledge of the alphabet and numbers, but a knowledge of human nature. Sometimes a lesson must be delivered with a blow if it is to be properly learned.”

  At that I knelt at his feet and he put his hands on my head and gave me his blessing but I resolved there and then never to be a teacher. The brutal master was removed and went on to two other schools before leaving the island in disgrace, and the boy Cajetan was put into my charge by the next master. I did my best to treat him with kindness, and at my urging Mother was able to get a few shillings from the church to clothe him properly. Poor little Cajetan—I suppose his parents gave him a fancy name as it didn’t cost them anything. He shipped out of Petty Harbour as a catchee when he was eleven years old and I never heard of him again.

  I have often wondered since if I should have been more forthright with the Bishop, but I was only fourteen and regardless of what I’d seen under the flakes in the evenings, I could not comprehend what I had witnessed. Instead, I turned my face away from the profession I was being trained for, and resolved never to use violence against any living being if I could avoid it. It is the one regret of my life that I broke that resolve.

  June 22

  Splendid day. Five tables of ladies for tea. Went to check on Mumma after lunch and found her with wet cheeks. Washed her face as gently as I could, and combed and rebraided her hair. She seems so sad today. Felt a little sad myself. I have spent my life being the baby, and now Mumma is the baby but I won’tget to see her grow up.

  Kate came and cleaned me up in case Father Roche should come, as he has so frequently in recent days. It was very soothing and after, she sat with the wet cloth in her hand and told me about how things were doing in the kitchen. The window was open, but that Big Galoot, Dermot, had forgotten to put the screen in so a nipper got into the room and bit Kate on the eye which was soon swollen half shut. The mark was so red and looked so painful on her pale face that I felt quite angry with Dermot, even after he brought her a fresh basin of water with a little soda in it to bath the eye. She scolded him, as she said I could have been eaten by the flies if it had not been such a breezy day, but I am never bitten. Too savoury, Mr. Donovan used to say to tease me.

  Mother could never understand how it was that I could break out in blisters simply by looking at a bit of green fish, but I was apparently immune to fly bites. Father and Richard escaped them in early summer because they were on the water most of the time, but Mother had to stay with the fish on the flakes and she often finished her day dreadfully marked by the mosquitoes. The Bishop once jokingly called it the “Scourging at the Pillar” and said she should offer it up for the souls in Purgatory. She told Father later that when he said it, she wanted to answer that she’d do as well if she’d learned either to swear or to smoke, but came too late to do either and instead had to suffer the flies with nothing but a loop of oakum around her neck to drive them off.

  Richard seemed to suffer even more than Mother from the hordes of mosquitoes that made life so difficult in June and July. If he was chopping wood, he would often set up a small smudge fire to keep them away, and old Egypt would crowd up against the pot with his head in the thick of the smoke, only to emerge in desperation some time later with red and streaming eyes. Up on the hill, in the gardens, I had the advantage of a breeze of wind to keep the flies from settling too often, but I also had my own way of coping with them. Like Mother, I always had a hank of oakum at hand, but in sultry weather this was of little use.

  Caplin time was often the worst, for then the weather tended to be mauzy and the work could not be put off. At such times, the flies had to be ignored or no work would get done, so ignore them was what I did, though at times it was difficult. Regardless of the heat, I would bundle up with every extra bit of clothing I could find, more even than I might wear in winter, with the fringe of an old shawl dangling in my face to protect my eyes a little. Egypt would help me haul the caplin, which had to be turned into the earth before the maggots set in, and I’m afraid that good old dog suffered more than all the rest of us together.

  At such times, I would apply what Richard had dubbed ‘The Bishops Holy Water,’ which was water I collected from the pitcher plants in the bit of bog over past the river. During the smallpox outbreak, I had learned to gather this water in a little jug and strain it through a scrap of linen into a small bottle to apply to the eyes of the people who had the pox scabs on their faces. The Bishop feared that these poor sufferers would be left blind from the scarring on the eyes, and several times a day he would apply a few drops of this water from the handle of a spoon right into their eyes as a wash. Nobody in Petty Harbour was left blinded, so the application must have worked.

  I would carry this water in a bottle in my pocket, and when poor Egypt’s eyes and nose were a swollen mass of running sores from the flies, I would take a bit of well water and clean his face and then drop a bit of my precious “holy water” into his eyes, which were by then usually like two scarlet buttons in the black fur of his head. I would also drip a little over his poor swollen nose. He was generally very patient as I did this and seemed to know that it was for his own good, for he always sat quite still with his head in my lap. When I was done, I would drape a bit of brin sacking over his head and allow him to sleep for a short while before it was time to go down to the flakes and drag the gurry up to the garden as Mother took the fish from the splitting table for salting.

  I asked the Bishop once why God who loves us would have put such fierce little creatures on earth to torture us, and he said it was to remind us of the millions of sins that daily lacerate His heart, and to turn our minds from evil to good by showing us how the Lord suffers on our behalf. But why then would an innocent creature such as Egypt be so plagued? And why would Richard, who was always cheerful and obedient, suffer so much more than me? For though I seemed quiet and accepting on the surface, in my heart I was stubborn and stiff-necked and both the Lord and I knew it, even if the Bishop and my parents didn’t. I tolerated the mosquitoes because in my pride I wouldn’t let them beat me, and so I became immune to the bites of the little devils.

  I learned to milk cows by accident when I was eight. Mother had long wanted a cow and had finally got one, and we all watched with interest as she milked it the first few times, but then, quite unexpectedly, Mother got ill from a fish bone that penetrated the heel of her hand. The infection set in quickly, and aside from the fever and pain, there was a swelling so great that she was incapable of closing her fist and for ten days was unable to do anything about the cow. She was so weak that even had she been capable of milking with one hand, Father would have butchered the cow sooner than let her attempt it.

  The creature had to be milked twice a day, morning and night, and the first evening Father talked the matter over with Mother, it was clear he had to attempt to empty the poor animal’s udders before she became miserable. He was determindedly cheerful about it, not wanting her to worry, I suppose, but as he headed for the door he called “Come on along, youngsters,” and I could tell that he wasn’t looking forward to the experience and wanted us there for moral support.

  “Will you get as much milk
as Mama does?” asked Richard as we followed him up to the field, excited by the novelty of it.

  “You’ll be afloat in milk by the time I’m done,” he answered. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if a woman can do it, a man could do it better.” It was bravado, of course. Mother had forearms like a blacksmith when he married her, and although the muscles had wasted to some extent when she left off dairying for fishing, she was still stronger in the hands and arms than any normal man.

  “I have a riddle for you, young bucko,” said Father, and hastily added “and Keziah, you keep the answer to yourself,” for I knew immediately what the riddle was going to be and already had my mouth open to tell:

  Four stiff standers, four dilly danders

  Two lookers, two crookers and a wig wag.

  I helped as Father tied on the cow and laid down a handful of feed to quiet her, and she could sense that he was unsure of himself and kicked and moved about in a way we had never seen her do with Mother. Richard began gailing, because he’d figured out the riddle, which didn’t help. Nevertheless, Father did his best, soothed the animal down and tried milking as Mother had told him.

  After ten fruitless minutes, Father was shaking his aching wrists and threatening to make bully beef out of the cow. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get so much as a squirt. After a time, the poor cow became almost as anxious as Father was to get the process going, but even after much to-ing and fro-ing from field to house and back, and lengthy simple instructions, there was not so much as a drop of milk. Usually only a restless cow needs to be stalled to be milked, and this one had always let down easily in the middle of the field, but we moved her to a makeshift stall in a shed, for Father had not yet built her winter quarters, hoping it would help. It didn’t, and by then it was getting very dark indeed, and we were almost as agitated as the cow.

  Mother thought perhaps it was the clothes that caused the problem, for it was well known among milkmaids that if you changed the colour of your dress the volume of milk dropped until they got used to the new one, but Father said there was no way he was putting Mother’s smock over his trousers. It was Richard who said “Let Keziah try if the cow doesn’t like men,” so on went Mother’s smock and back we went to the shed. I was a big girl and my mother was a small woman, but I still had to gather the skirt in a bunch at my waist as I made my way up the path. I made Richard stay behind as I knew he would tease.