Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  All those years in town had dulled my perception of the weather, and I was not really aware that this was a particularly dry year, and that the eight shillings a barrel that were being offered for potatoes was a relatively high price because of scarcity. The Waterford was normally a bigger river than it seemed, but by the time I realized that, most of my fears for the children had subsided to a relatively normal level. By the time we were driving back to town, I had made up my mind. 1 did not speak of my decision with Mr. Smyth, partly because I was somewhat shy of the man but also because I wished to let his wife do the negotiating for me. I had learned the hard way that a man might say anything in his cups, and I was afraid that if the owner knew how determined I was to buy the place it would suddenly be priced out of my reach.

  I did not even look for another property while Mrs. Smyth and the lawyer who was looking after Paddys will made the arrangements for me to buy Byrne s farm. I have to smile when I think of that name—I was determined that it would be Mrs. Aylward’s Farm within the year, and yet it never was, though seven years later when I married again it was immediately referred to by all and sundry as Donovan’s Farm. It’s a good thing a woman is not raised to have too great an attachment to her name. As far as Mr. Donovan was concerned, it was my farm, but as far as the rest of the world went, it was his and that suited me well enough. Perhaps if he had had children, he might have wanted it for them, but that was something that he put behind him when he married me.

  Those were the longest three weeks of my life. I kept packing up the household, selling everything I felt would be of little or no use in the country, and tried not to think what I would do if the sale fell through. I said little about it to the children, which I believe now was a mistake. One morning, a woman came to look at the kitchen dresser and she asked the price of Paddys concertina, which I had stowed away in the lower shelves and forgotten about. I was about to let her have it for nothing when Johanna came in from school and burst into tears at the sight of it. I realized then that I had been so relieved to have my own life back again that I had forgotten that my girls had lost their father and were about to lose the only home they had ever known. I took the concertina back and stowed it in one of the barrels I was packing dishes in, and gave the disappointed woman the dresser at a bargain price.

  After that I spoke a little to the children about the farm I hoped we would be getting, but they had never been on a farm and didn’t really know what one was. When the papers were finally signed, I engaged a man with a cart and prepared to take them with some of our belongings out to Western Junction to see their new home. I had hoped Judith might come along, but she had made herself surprisingly scarce since Paddys death, and I was unable to locate her in time. The girls were excited on the way out, but when we got there, they sat in the cart and looked around in puzzlement.

  “Mama, where is the sea?” Johanna asked, and Min and Kate craned their necks around as if searching for their lost father.

  “The sea is where it always is,” I answered, pointing across country towards Petty Harbour.

  “But why can’t we see it?” I could hear something like panic in Johanna’s voice. It was as if the sun were suddenly absent from the sky, or the grass had disappeared from beneath her feet.

  “Come and see the river,” I said to them, and began by lifting Kate out of the cart. “There are sticklebacks in it, and trout.” The two older girls reluctantly jumped down and followed us across the road and down the bank to the river.

  When I first came to Western Junction, it was like going to a place I’d known all my life, though I’d never been there before. It never occurred to me that my children wouldn’t feel the same way. They hated the farm, they were afraid of the cows, the silence at night worried them, and they claimed that the noise of the crows and other birds at dawn gave them a headache in the morning. Min said the air was tasteless, and she longed for the stink of the harbour and the bite of soot on her tongue. In time, they became resigned to life in the country, and after the railway came and we opened the hotel they even began to enjoy it, but Kate was the only one who ever learned to love it.

  That first day we did not stay over, but just unpacked the cart and went back to town, to sleep on a pile of mats and blankets on the floor of the almost empty shop. The stove was gone, so it was a sorry supper we made of it, but Mrs. Smyth walked down with her little girl and invited us to come and have breakfast with them the next morning. Little Anna had brought each of the girls a tiny sewing box, put out by the Singer Company as an advertisement for their machines, and my poor bereaved children hugged these to their chests and cried themselves to sleep.

  As for me, I dreamed all night of potatoes at eight shillings a barrel and foolishly convinced myself that life at Western Junction would be like Petty Harbour without: the fish and without the sea. I did not stop to think how lonely it would be for a woman with three small children. I only knew that I would not have to put up with Paddy, or even Paddys cousins. The fact that the sea, which had been central to my life and the lives of my children, was now at least ten miles away in almost any direction, was a blessing that I had not had the imagination to hope for, nor did I have the sense to realize that: you can miss something that you hate. There were times, in the years to come, that I missed Paddy and I missed the sea, but I never admitted it to anyone, least of all the children, and in time the longing went away forever.

  August 4

  Fine day but air is heavy. War declared. Dermot will be exempt because of his turned eye, and Min’s little fellow is too small. Thank God we run to girls in this family.

  The train made an unscheduled stop today. It left a package that Mr. Reid sent out from Johanna, a beautiful pink and blue blanket, woven from such soft, light stuff it is hard to believe it can be so warm. Kate says it is goat hair, but no goat I ever owned had wool like this. Kate has taken the heavy feather quilt off and replaced it with this beautiful blanket, though I think it is much too good to use. I confess, it is a relief for the quilt pressed down on me and made my already heavy limbs feel even more leaden, but I am so chilled, even with the sun streaming in, that I need a good warm cover. I cannot imagine where Johanna found such wonderful stuff.

  There are movers and stayers in this world, and she was always a mover. When we went trouting, Johanna was willing to stop in one place for no more than ten or fifteen minutes before going on, up or downstream, to a better spot. Kate was a stayer, like me, rooted to the carefully chosen rill, convinced that eventual success was inevitable if one was stoical enough. Min was sometimes one, then the other. She often trailed after Johanna, but not without long, lingering looks back over her shoulder, at other times biding with us while sighing in the direction Johanna had taken.

  We all got the same number of trout in the long run, I believe. To each his own, Mr. Donovan used to say. Johanna wanted a proper pole, but Min was satisfied with any stick, as long as it had a line, a hook and a bit of blackened cork. And a worm. Mr. Reid has shown me the remarkable flies he uses, and they are very pretty, but any trout would prefer a worm, I think. I certainly would if I were a trout.

  Johanna has to be on the move. She was very patient for the first few years we lived here, and helped me as much as any grown woman could, but I could see it wasn’t enough for her. When the note came from Mrs. Sands, with another attached from Mother Fowler, asking if I would be willing to let Johanna go to a family in town who needed a nursemaid, I suspected she had instigated the request herself, but what odds if she did. She was never argumentative or defiant, always a good daughter even if she did twist and maneuver to get her own way.

  I hated to see her go to town, into service, but as she and Mrs. Sands told me, it wasn’t as if she was a regular maid, more a nursemaid and companion for the children, and Mrs. Pedersen treated her like one of her own. She came home every second week for two days, and always brought some small thing for the other girls, and often something good to eat for me. I was always interested in fo
od, and seeing that Johanna was with a Danish family, I often questioned her about the meals for I was sure they had to be quite different than those we had at home, but it turned out that Mrs. Pedersen was really Irish, only her husband was Danish.

  In the fall, Johanna brought me sugar and a box of glass crocks so I could make up jams and jellies for the Pedersens. They sent them in a cart, and had to have the full crocks collected later when the snow was down, which seemed a lot of trouble. “It’s only jam, after all,” I said to Johanna, but she assured me that it wasn’t only jam. It was jam with enough sugar, and no stems or twigs, and the crocks were clean and sealed with wax so they didn’t go moldy.

  “I’m learning a great deal more than you might think, Mama,” she told me, and I’ve no doubt she was. She imitated Mrs. Pedersen in dress as well as she could, and she no longer made fun of my fussy ways in the kitchen. Instead, she quizzed me on every manner of household practice, and I have to say that some of her questions went unanswered because I simply did things the way my mother had taught me, without ever wondering why.

  She once brought me a menu—I still have it somewhere— of a dinner party the Pedersens gave for a visiting merchant, and it wasn’t so very unusual in nature as it was in variety and quantity. They served not just boiled mutton, but grouse pie, smoked Bath chop and roasted fowl, while any one would have done for a normal meal. Pudding was figged duff, gooseberry tart with clotted cream, and tipsy parson, followed by apples and Stilton. What apples—Sops of Wine and Pomme Gris from Quebec. I’m sure the names alone made the apples taste better. Oh, and Palestine soup. She brought me some of the roots in the spring, and I was able to grow the Jerusalem artichokes for myself.

  It was that soup that got me started in the hotel business some years later. Mr. Donovan put his head into the kitchen door one morning and said that three gentlemen from the railway were out inspecting the line, and could I give them some dinner as they were famished. I told him I couldn’t get any meat ready in time to give it to visitors and he laughed and said they told him soup and bread would do, for they were fainting with hunger. So soup and bread it was, though I had to pound the roots with a caulking mallet while they were still hot, which is not the best way. But with our own cream and three egg yolks and a grating of fresh nutmeg the Palestine soup was probably as good as Mrs. Pedersen’s had been. I was fortunate enough to have a little cheddar cheese on hand, to make golden buck.

  They drank the remains of the beer from the golden buck, and several more bottles as well, to wash down, the soup and coddled eggs, and considering I had only half an hour to put it together I felt I had done pretty well by them. It was Mr. Reid, and two of the railway governors, and they were looking at the proposed new line. Mr. Reid stopped after, to try and pay for the meal, the foolish man, and asked me if I’d be interested in providing meals for people on the railway. He said it would be mostly summer work for special excursions, with only a few customers in the winter, and that he could provide me with a line of credit to lay in extra provisions. I told him he would have to discuss it with Mr. Donovan, at which he laughed and admitted they had already discussed it, and that it was Mr. Donovan who had suggested they try what they called my “decidedly excellent food.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. From the day I met Mr. Donovan, I had done nothing but criticize Ann Fitzpatrick’s cooking, and when the railway went: in I swore the whole lot of them would die of starvation if they continued eating at her house. In my mind, I planned menus and put additions on the house and once when Mr. Donovan stayed over at Sophie Maher’s in Brigus Junction, I tormented him for days with questions about how the hotel was laid out.

  That first time I went to St. Johns with Mr. Donovan, so he could speak to Mrs. Smyth about wintering in the old tilt on back of their property, he asked me about doing some work in exchange for meals through the winter. He said if I would give him his dinner three days a week, he would cut all the wood I needed. I knew the men working on the road had been taking their meals at Mrs. Fitzpatricks, and I asked why he didn’t go there for his meals. He said he couldn’t exist on a diet of burned potatoes and vinegar pie. The woman’s house was tidy and moderately clean, but she must have damaged her tongue as an infant because she couldn’t tell the difference between sweet milk and sour, and even with a fork she detected no difference between overcooked carrots and undercooked parsnips.

  I tried my best to smother my smile, for there’s no merit in delighting at someone else’s failings, but he saw it and smiled back at me, and said “So it’s settled, then. Monday, Wednesday and Friday at eleven,” and before I could tell him no, that I didn’t want men in the house, he had turned and was out the door. And then he was back again, fishing in his pocket, and handed me a small, flat bit of tin with a bent wire and an S stamped into it. “A present from Mr. Smyth. It’s for threading needles,” he added as he saw the puzzled look on my face. “In case the glasses aren’t enough.”

  So all through the fall he came for his dinner, and I never had to say anything about the wood because it was always done, and so were a lot of other small chores that he needn’t have bothered with, and he always said thank-you for the meal and made some appreciative comment about my cooking, which made me try a bit harder. I’d put a bit of ginger in the turnip, or add some vinegar and caraway to the buttered cabbage, or if it was nothing better than boiled rounders, I’d see that the potatoes were beaten with cream and a handful of dried chives, and I’d add extra raisins to the duff. The girls said nothing, though they seemed to like him well enough.

  That Christmas, Johanna came home for the first week in January, and I don’t know if it was her townie ways or if it was just her age, but she and Min decided to go jannying over to the Walshs’, and they dug out a lot of Paddy’s old clothes that I hadn’t thought about in years. Paddy was a fairly small man, but Johanna was big like me and the clothes fit convincingly on her, especially when she took a hank of old horsehair from a worn cushion and fashioned herself a mustache and a scraggly beard which she fixed on with flour paste after she blackened her jaw. We did Mm up in some old things of mine, worn finery that was not suitable in the country, and with a bit more of the horsehair stuffed down her blouse and a veil over her face, she looked at least ten years older than she was. At the last minute, Johanna uncovered Paddys old concertina and brought it along to make a racket suitable to a mummer.

  Off they went, down the road, and I thought no more about them since it was a green Christmas and the Walshs were no more than a mile away. There was rarely any trouble in a small community like ours with hardly a dozen families. I was working a new mat for Johanna’s room in town, a pretty flower pattern with greens and pinks, and I settled down by the stove to wait until they got back.

  It must have been close to midnight by the time I heard the door, and it wasn’t just Min and Johanna, but Mr. Donovan too. Mm had been crying and Johanna’s disguise was gone and her face washed clean. Mr. Donovan hushed me as I tried to ask what had happened. “Let them go on to bed,” he said, “I’ll tell you all about it. You can ask them in the morning.” He helped them out of their coats and things, which he piled on the settle, and shooed them out of the room before he pushed me back into my chair.

  “Tell me right now,” I said, “or I will…” I didn’t finish because whatever I said I was going to do, I knew I would only cry.

  “They’re all right, I swear to God,” he told me, and pulled one of the three-legged stools close to my knee. “I was over at the Walshs’ when they arrived, and they fooled everybody for at least ten minutes. Mm was gatching around like a grand lady, and Johanna played the concertina. There’s no fiddlers around here with a concertina, so we were all baffled as to who they were. Then another crowd turned up, three fellows dressed in sailors’ garb, black oil skins and sou’westers, but with nothing to disguise their faces but a bit of soot. They were looking for food, but more than that they were looking for drink.”

  “Oh,
God help us and save us,” I moaned. Mummering is often used as an excuse to work off some grievance, and when liquor is involved, it often turns rough. It was also unusual for strangers to turn up in such an out-of-the way place.

  “Hush,” he said. “I’m telling it all. They aren’t hurt.” He stopped for a moment as if to sort out his thoughts. “Mr. Walsh was not inclined to be co-operative, not knowing who they were and all, and there was a different air about them than there had been to Min and Johanna, though we still hadn’t identified them either. He gave them a glass of beer and some cake, and just ignored their suggestions that he break out the grog. I gave him a look to let him know that if he wanted them out, he could count on me. Then they began to dance, one of them playing Johanna’s concertina, and one fellow, the skipper by my guess, grabbed Johanna and pulled her out onto the floor. It all seemed like a bit of fun, but I think he must have realized she was a girl, for in the press in the kitchen he made an attempt to get his hand into her clothes.”

  “Oh, sweet, gentle Joseph,” I whispered, and put my head down in my apron.

  “That’s all it was, really, just fumbling at her jacket,” said Mr. Donovan. “He was wearing trigger mitts and Johanna said that when she couldn’t pry the one hand away from her buttons, she pulled the hand that was holding hers in the dancing up to her mouth and made to bite him. She said she didn’t want to be unmasked, but she wanted to make him stop.”

  “I should think so,” I whispered indignantly. “What on earth was the girl up to, trying to deal with such a thing herself. She should have screeched out for help right away.”

  “Well, no doubt you’re right, but you know what young women are like. They think they can do everything for themselves.” Then he gave me a funny look, and added, “Some older ones do, too.”