Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  Funny, the way the lightning hit. I can see the shadow of a black smudge on the wallpaper here in this room where it passed through. I’ll wager Father Roche said more than his prayers that night. We got off easy—there were boats on the collar turned bottom up in Blackhead, and a horse struck onThorburn Road. And of course that poor woman in town, on Colonial Street, burnt to a crisp in front of her husbands eyes when the kerosene lamp went up. She must have taken a direct hit. They say she was cooked like a rabbit—they couldn’t even move the body without a shovel for the flesh fell away from the bones and the bones from one another.

  I don’t recall ever seeing lightning like that before or since. There was once when I was a girl, but that was in the middle of the afternoon. Winny Weir—the one we always called Wormy Weir—thought the gunboats were shelling the harbour. I expect her family came here before the anti-settlement laws were revoked, and she’d been raised with the fear of being burned out by our own navy. It was exciting, the lightning. Mr. Donovan was gone to Harbour Grace to see about a new cow, and I wondered if he could see the lightning from there. It was so dark, even with all the lamps lit in the house for the supper, and then every once in a while there’d be a flash and the crash following it. I could hear the men in the dining room, counting together and laying bets on how many miles away it was.

  Mr. Reid was acting as croupier that night—who was the dinner for? Someone from the Calypso, the paymaster, I think, not someone from here. There was Mr. Alderdice, and Mr. Outerbndge, and half a dozen Harveys. I know Air. Greive was with them, for he brought me a case of aerated water for the Church Lad’s picnic the following week. When the lightning hit, every lamp in the house went out and we took the thunder in the dark. What a racket went up then.

  There were only thirteen for dinner because one of the party was a doctor who had been called away to a patient, and they asked me if there was another guest who could join them, to dissipate the evil omen attached to thirteen at the table. I told them Father Roche was upstairs in the side bedroom, the room Kate’s in now, but I doubted he’d co-operate though I didn’t say so. Mr. Reid went and spoke to him, and came away a little annoyed, I could tell. I suppose Father Roche was only following his conscience, and he probably knew by then that he was about to be raised up to vicar-general and didn’t want to do anything that could be talked about, but I have never thought it would do any harm to accommodate a bit of frivolous superstition.

  So I told them that I had two of Mr. Perlin’s Russian peddlers in the back linney, nice clean boys though they didn’t speak a word of English, this being their first time going with their packs around the bay, and they went and coaxed the two out to sit with them. I made sure they got a nice bit of chicken instead of the pork pie and ham the others were eating, and they sat like two little crows, watching the gentlemen enjoy themselves. I expect those two have their own shops on Water Street by now and will be gentlemen themselves before long. I was just bringing in the duff, and a beautiful egg custard with cream and bottled bakeapples I had put up myself, when the streak of electricity came in along the telephone wire and the whole house lifted up its skirts and settled back again with a bang.

  The entire place was pitch black, except for a bit of flame coming off a glass of brandy that was sitting on the mantlepiece. I could hear the maids screaming in the kitchen, and the two peddler boys saying their prayers, and then Mr. Reid saying in a calm, low voice “Did I hear a pin drop?” and the whole room went up in a shout of laughter. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly light the lamp, but somehow I had managed to hold onto the tray with the desserts, for it would have been a real mess if I had dropped that, and not another bite of sweet in the house except some fruit cake and a barrel of biscuits from Woods, which would have been a poor finish to a very good dinner.

  What with getting the oil lamps lit and dealing with the two girls with the vapours in the kitchen, I almost forgot about Father Roche. We had examined the damage downstairs—the lightning tore the moulding right off the wall and flung my engraving of “The Death of Nelson” across the room before it went out to the verandah and splintered two pillars—and the men were just sitting back down at the table when I heard the priest calling out for a light. Well, I ran up the stairs as quick as I could, given my size and age, and he was sitting in his chair next to the window with his breviary in his lap. I lit the oil lamp and we looked around the room, and there was the mirror on the floor, still intact, and the splintered frame on the wall.

  “You’ll be Pope before you’re done,” I said, thinking of his good luck and his ambition and forgetting for the moment that he would never admit to having either, and he frowned at me, but I could see he was very thoughtful and even a bit shaken by the whole thing.

  “I’ll have none of that superstitious nonsense attached to my name,” he said, and then told me I wasn’t to mention the incident downstairs. But I saw it in the paper the next morning, not in The Telegram but in The Herald, so he must have told someone himself for I mentioned it to no-one, mostly because of what I found when I went to my own room. The dinner was a great success, notwithstanding the lightning, but I suppose the lightning strike made the men more excitable than usual and they stayed on playing cards and drinking until close to two in the morning. By the time I saw the last of them off I was-the only one left awake in the house, Kate having walked Ettie Walsh home and stayed the night with her to calm her down.

  I could hear the two little Jews snoring in the back, and the future Pope sawing wood up above them, and the peace of God descended on the house like a prayer. Then I went into my own room and right in the middle of our bed, mine and Mr. Donovan’s, was a little tintype I had of the two of us, taken a year or two after we were married, and one side of it was blackened and burnt while the other was untouched. It was Mr. Donovan who was blackened out and I knew it was a token. I took the picture and bent it inward into two and then folded it again and pressed it flat under the heel of my shoe, and then I crept down to the kitchen and put the thing in the stove, poked it with a stick into a good bed of coals, and went back up to bed to wait for dawn, for I knew Mr. Donovan would be home as soon as ever he could make it.

  He was first off the train next morning, as cheerful and healthy as a man could be. He told me that a Harbour Grace woman by the name of Yetman had her house split in two by the lightning and her dog, which was chained onto the house, was killed. The cow he’d gone to look at was older than had been claimed and the stable wasn’t clean so he’d decided against buying her. We looked at the two verandah posts, which were chopped into splinters as cleanly as if it had been done with a knife, and traced the zig-zag mark on the coping back into the house, though the dining room and up into the bedrooms. I showed him “The Death of Nelson,” or what was left of it, and the mirror, and we looked at the hole along the telephone wire. He left me to deal with the minor damage and set out to repair the verandah before any more guests arrived. I never told him about the tintype, and he didn’t notice it was gone.

  There was a lot of talk and head-shaking over at the railway station about the dinner of the previous night, and speculation as to what might have happened if the two peddlers had not been at the table. I didn’t join in. I wished then I had the certainty of Father Roche that omens are nothing, not even the devils work. But I didn’t forget, and I watched my dearest husband with a keen and worried eye and was there to catch his head that day six weeks later when Father Roche was appointed to the Cathedral and my Mr. Donovan put his spoon down in the middle of his dinner and died in my arms.

  I had a lot more sympathy for Min after I lost my own husband. I tried not to make such a fuss as she did, for it wasn’t seemly in a woman my age to go around grieving so much in public, but it was hard. Later that winter I fell coming in from the barn with the milk, and broke my hip, and it never healed, but in some ways it was a good thing to have happened. Before, I would sit in the kitchen trying to peel potatoes or pluck partridges, and as soon
as my mind was free to think as it wanted to, I would feel this terrible pain, and I’d wonder where it came from. Afterwards, I could locate the pain in my hip, and some-times it was so great it stopped all thought.

  At first, after Mr. Donovan died, I tried to take on all the work of the farm and the hotel that he had done, but I wasn’t as young as I had been so at Kate’s bidding I hired the Big Galoot. He has never been half as good as Mr. Donovan, but he did fix me up with a special chair so that I could work in the kitchen without too much discomfort, and Kate seems to feel confident with him. Its she who will be giving the orders around here soon, so that’s important.

  There was a lot more for Kate to do once I was stuck in the chair, but I tried never to complain and I did almost as much sitting down as I had once done standing up. It gave Kate complete control of the barn and much of the house, which was good for her. I have been too large in her life, too quick to take responsibility off her shoulders, so she has never developed the resilience she needs to make it through life on her own. I will say nothing about the cat, but will let her solve the problem of the mouse on her own. It is past time she was allowed to suffer the consequences of living in this vale of tears without her mother trying to soften the blows that inevitably fall on those of us who have hearts.

  July 23

  Fine, sunny day. Mumma slept all morning and all afternoon, or pretended to. Ate nothing. Quiet day, only one gentleman for dinner, none for supper. Worked on the accounts. I looked in on Mumma as I was going to bed, and she was awake. I offered to say the rosary with her, and she gave a little shake of her head and whispered “Mot tonight.” Instead she had me go into her Labrador box and take out several things she wished to give to Lizzie. Hidden away at the very bottom was the mat hook she so treasured, and I asked if she’d like to put it with the other things, but she managed to tell me that she didn’t think Lizzie would be making many mats after school in Boston. She asked if I would like to have it, and I got very tearful for I know her father made it for her when she was a child. She also save me a small holy card with a quotation on it that she had used to mark her Bible, and said that when she died, I was to do whatever felt right to me and not to listen to Min or anyone else. She was quite drained by the effort and after taking a spoonful of milk to wet her lips, she closed her eyes again, but I suspect she is too exhausted to sleep. I have the feeling that she spent the whole day summoning up the strength to speak those few sentences to me.

  I have given my last scrap of advice to Kate—from now on, she will be making all the decisions herself. When Paddy died, everyone kept telling me not to make too many decisions right away, everyone except Sister Mary Magdalen O’Shaughnessy. While the men were at the funeral, the good sister came to sit with me and she gave me a gilt-edged card with a sentence written upon it: “The only way to begin a thing is to begin it immediately.” This was one of the mottoes of Nano Nagel, the Holy Foundress. Little Kate was near my knee at the time, and as I read the words, she ran her forefinger under the letters. Looking down at her pinched, white face, made paler and more fragile by the black clothing she had on, I determined to get her and her sisters out of mourning as soon as possible and into a healthier, happier life. I took those words to heart and made up my mind at that moment to sell the shop as soon as possible and to look for a property outside of town, away from the filth and stench and noise of St. Johns.

  It was Sister Mary Magdalen who suggested I consult with Mrs. Smyth, prompted perhaps by that poor woman’s own losses. Mrs. Smyth, with her husband, ran a sewing machine and organ shop several blocks east of our own place, and Paddy had had occasion to consult them with regard to some of our own small machines. Mr. Smyth had a genius for mechanical work but he was known to drink too freely, the result, no doubt, of having lost six beautiful daughters in little over two years. He doted on the one remaining child, a little girl, and for her sake he continued to work a relatively normal day, but it was his wife who really ran the business. As well as sewing machines, they carried a few select items of haberdashery, although it was generally claimed that they made most of their money off sewing machine needles, an essential item which needed constant replacing.

  I didn’t know if it was possible to make a living selling such a tiny item as sewing machine needles, and had no wish to try doing so myself, but Mrs. Smyth had business connections with every bootmaker, tanner and leather worker in the city, and many outside of it, and I thank the good Lord that I had her to guide me through the negotiations needed to sell off Paddys stock, place the apprentices in decent positions, and give up the lease on the premises. I believe that without her guidance, I might have fallen into the hands of a dishonest buyer and lost most of my money through sheer ignorance.

  Aside from steering me toward men who could give me honest appraisals for the contents of the shop—men Mr. Smyth could vouch for through the Mechanics’ Society— and then toward buyers for that stock, Mrs. Smyth encouraged me to begin immediately to plan for the long-term support and upkeep of my daughters. It was with considerable trepidation that I confessed to her my long-held dream of having a small farm, a place outside of town where I could hear myself think, where the stench of seal oil and fish did not permeate the air. Imagine my surprise, then, when she told me she thought it was a sensible and achievable goal.

  Looking back, I suppose it was my mother who was responsible for my rather pessimistic attitude towards farming in the colony. Mother, having been raised in a milder climate, constantly lamented what could not be grown in the thin soil of the hills surrounding Petty Harbour. Never having had the experience of tree-ripened pears or oranges grown under glass, I never missed them, yet I had without knowing it, become convinced that a garden, worked in conjunction with fishing rooms, was the most we could ever manage on the island. Experience had taught me that the weather was never so bad that potatoes and cabbages did not grow to at least a moderate size, and the cows we owned had never starved even in winter, yet I did not take this knowledge and apply it more broadly until I discussed my hopes and plans with Mrs. Smyth.

  In looking for a property suitable for farming, I turned naturally toward Kilbride and the Goulds, those two places having been settled by Petty Harbour families who could not find space to expand their family holdings in the contained area of the Harbour. Paddy had several cousins in Kilbride, and I had my own connections in the Goulds, for it had been the pattern for several generations for fishing families to move back into these areas and establish winter homes and summer gardens which they temporarily abandoned for the coast during the fishing season. As the market for fresh meat, vegetables and butter grew in St. Johns, some of these people gave up the fishery and relied only on sealing for quick infusions of cash. Several times I left the children with neighbours and walked out to look at properties in Kilbride, but either the land was uncleared and unsuitable for cattle, or the price too steep for my limited resources.

  I was in the last stages of selling off the stock in the shop, and had only three weeks to find alternate accommodation before the new tenant took possession of the premises, when I received a note from Mrs. Smyth asking me to step along for a word as soon as it was convenient. This was when she first told me that her husband had long owned property in the area later called Western Junction, and that he had heard of a small farm being offered for sale there. She had hesitated to bring it to my attention, there being no school and no relatives in the vicinity, and there being no real village, just a handful of farming families strung out along the road to Topsail. Mr. Smyth was traveling out that way by carriage the following day, and was willing to take me along for a look if I wished.

  I did indeed wish, and it was everything I could wish for. It took many years before I could look at the property Mr. Smyth indicated as for sale without feeling the tug at ray heart that I felt that first day. Compared to the large piece of land owned by the Smyths, or for that matter the land grants held by most of my neighbours, my own farm was small, and the m
eadows somewhat sloping, but compared to the garden in Petty Harbour it was Eden. It consisted of a small triangle of land, about seven acres, wedged between the path from Freshwater and the road to Topsail, with a one-storey, hip-roofed house, a number of outbuildings, several cleared meadows and a small patch of woods at the back. Across the main road, on the other side, the land dropped away to the Waterford River.

  “The only way to begin a thing is to begin it immediately,” I thought, and climbed down to walk over the area while Mr. Smyth conducted business with his tenant half a mile away. The house was empty and the fields had been neglected for a season, but the land had been worked carefully and the drainage looked good. Crossing the road, I climbed the short path down to the river. An osprey flew along the bank, between the shrubs and trees on either side of the water, and for the first time in many months I heard birdsong. Crouched by the side of the river, I could see water weeds and sticklebacks, and after my eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom of the foliage I could distinguish brown trout, waiting motionless in the stream for lunch to offer itself.

  In later years, I came to know the river quite well, and caught there not just brown trout but brook trout and occasionally salmon as well as eels. Up towards Neville s Pond there were muskrat holes, and in the fall there were usually ducks of various sorts, but it was the sticklebacks that caught my imagination that day. The Waterford seemed such a small, safe river, a river where a child could play and not be drowned. I imagined Johanna and Min and Kate paddling in this cool, green paradise, catching sticklebacks and pulling flowers to braid into their hair, and I wanted that small farm more than I had ever wanted anything else in my life.