I’ll never forget the look on Cuddihy’s face when he found out how much of his medicine Paddy had managed to choke down. By this time Paddy had been half unconscious for four days, and it was less than a week more before he died. “Kidney failure” was what Cuddihy put on the death certificate, but Mr. McMurdo told Judith and half the town that it was mercury poisoning and that Cuddihy should have been prosecuted.
I got the priest in to Paddy before he went, but I doubt he could have made much of a confession as he hardly knew what was what, but at least he got the last rites, and I made sure he got a proper funeral, with all the societies in their uniforms and capes and sashes and the Fort William Volunteer Fire Department all done up in red and green and their banner draped over the coffin. I sat home with the girls, and Mrs. Smyth and Judith and some of the other women came to be with me, and afterwards the men came from the graveyard and stopped on their way to the tavern and offered their condolences. Mr. Smyth was very kind and said he would be happy to help me with selling the machines in the shop, and Mr. McMurdo brought a bag full of barley sugar for the children. Dr. Cuddihy was at the church, I was told, but he didn’t stop to see me after and he didn’t go to the tavern but bought a bottle and went straight back to his surgery, they said. 1 never laid eyes on the man again in my life.
I didn’t see too much of Judith either, after Paddy died. It seemed as if she was avoiding me, and it troubled me a good deal. I saw her going through the back way one morning when I was packing up, and called her in to have a cup of tea. She stopped, but with reluctance.
“I can’t visit, Keziah,” she said. “I’ve got a hobble, one you’d rather not know about, and it can’t wait.” By that I understood she was helping to take contraband off one of the ships in the harbour.
“Judith, the excise men are going to force you off the wharves if they catch you again, they’re just looking for an excuse.” She’d been into it with the customs office more than once.
“Let them try,” she said with a laugh, just like her old self. “God’s vengeance on the lot of them. May the dogs lap their blood when they die, and the ground sink beneath their graves.” The Irish take their curses very seriously, so I clicked my tongue at her.
“Don’t go ill-wishing them, Judith, they’re only doing their jobs. And you won’t get away with it forever.”
“You’re the one to be talking. There’s some think they can get away with murder around here.” She flung the words at me and turned on her heel and was gone.
It worried me, Judith misunderstanding me that way, just when I needed her friendship more than ever. I was only thinking of what was best for her. She wasn’t smuggling for the money, I’m certain of that—she just had a scunner against every tidewaiter that ever drew breath on this earth.
“Married in black, you’ll wish yourself back,” was the old rhyme. I had been married in black, after the Bishop’s funeral, and here I was in black again, with three fatherless children to care for. I can’t say I didn’t worry, but after all the long days of Paddy’s illness, and the bad temper and moodiness, and even worse the pathetic look of him trying to hold a spoon or climb the stairs, it was a relief to have it over. Poor Paddy, in his good days he used to go into the fish sheds on the harbour and he’d hook a half-kintal weight onto his little finger and then he’d take a pencil, and with the same hand he’d write “Talamh an ‘Eisc” on the beams over his head. He said that meant “The Land of The Fish” in Irish, and it was what they called Newfoundland where he came from. By the end he couldn’t lift the pencil alone.
It took just six weeks for Paddy to die, the longest weeks I’ve ever suffered through, longer even than these weeks I’m living now. The shop was going to wrack and ruin, with the apprentices saucing the customers and the journeymen just waiting to steal the place out from under me, and finally I could just shut the doors on it and get ready to sell up.
It might have been true, what I told Judith. Maybe Paddy did catch the clap from a trollop. The girls always liked Paddy. Once I was down at Ayre’s, looking at a bit of lace for Johanna, and Paddy went by on the sidewalk, bouncing on his heels the way he always did and looking like a golden angel in the sun, with a joke or a compliment for every woman he passed. The girl in the shop stopped and looked out the window at him, and this small sigh escaped her. “Now, he’s the lovely fellow, isn’t he,” she said to me. So I just thanked her, and that’s when she realized that he was my husband and she blushed and dropped the scissors. When I got home I found she’d cut me an extra yard of lace by mistake, but I didn’t bring it back for fear of getting her into trouble.
Donovan’s Station
August 30, 1914
Dear Johanna,
Min was out yesterday to see Mumma and to celebrate little Jim’s birthday, and she suggested I write to you, for I have been very worried about the business lately. Even before she became so ill, we had all three discussed the necessity for making some changes, for Mumma was finding it difficult to keep up her end of things. She is now eighty-four and everyone agrees that until this stroke she was a wonder, but since she broke her hip she has been finding the volume of work to be almost too much, and I don’t hesitate for a moment to admit that I have never had her stamina.
We had talked over the possibility of moving into the small house again, and leaving the hotel to a manager. Mr. Samuel Neal of Manuels, who is married to one of the Walsh girls, has been enquiring about buying the hotel, but of course it is not for sale. He might, however, consider taking on the management, and with me next door to keep an eye on things and do the accounts I think we could maintain control. To be blunt, I have never been good at anything but the dairy and I would very much like to get back to my cows. At the moment, Dermot is caring for them and he is very good about it but he is a little heavy handed and knows it. It is not a comfortable situation for us or for the cows.
As you are in the business yourself you will understand when I tell you that things are not as they once were. When Mumma took on the station, she had only to look after the railway men and occasional travellers. The Society dinners and picnics that followed are an enormous amount of work but they are seasonal and we always had a chance to recover from them during the winter. Now, however, there is not just the railway but also passing trade and in the evenings we have almost as many automobiles as buggies in the yard. It is often midnight or later before we can close the doors. Mumma might have managed a roadhouse as she has the strength of personality, but I am neither capable nor willing to do so.
And while we are on the subject of Mununa, I have to tell you that I am very worried about her also. Father Roche has been coming by every few days, and Johanna I daren’t say this to Min for she won’t hear a word against any cleric, but I believe he is tormenting Mumma in her last days. He stays talking to her for an hour at a time and when he leaves she is agitated and restless. She has been rambling on about Papa for the last few days, in a very distressing way. At first I thought she meant Mr. Donovan, for she rarely spoke of Papa, but she didn’t ever call Mr. Donovan ‘Paddy’ and it is Paddy that is on her mind.
I do not remember Papa at all, except that he was rather noisy and he laughed a good deal. I still have the mechanical chicken he gave me for my second birthday —I let Lizzie play with it and she broke the spring—and I recall that he would stand me on his boots and dance around the room, but sometimes I believe I don’t really remember these things at all but only that you told me about them. Mumma said once that when we moved here, we left Papa’s ghost back in the city. Well, I believe he has finally found his way to us, for the house feels full of her memories of him.
Dermot says Father Roche is out to damage Bishop Fleming’s memory and that I should refuse to allow him to see Mumma again. I wish I could, but he is a very powerful man and if he were to decide to work against us, we would certainly lose all the Catholic Societies which are the backbone of the business.
If you are writing to Min, please do not men
tion my feelings about Father Roche. I am glad you are having Lizzie next year, for Min is very taken up with little Jimmy and now that her stepbrothers are gone, it is rather lonely for the poor child. I know you have offered to pay her school fees but if things work out with Mr. Neal I hope to contribute something out of my share of the profits. If Lizzie is to go to school with well-to-do girls, she must not be ashamed of her clothes, and I have no doubt that she will take advantage of the education she is being offered. When she entered Grade One at school, she was the only child in the class who could successfully add fifteen shillings to six shillings to make one pound one shilling. She will be a credit to us all.
If anything of significance happens here, I will send a cable to let you know but we realize that you will not be able to get away. I cannot tell you how it helps to be able to write openly to you about what is on my mind. Min is a great support but rather rigid in her ways at times. I may need your help in another matter in the coming months, but I know I can count on you as Min will listen to you when she will not listen to “baby sister”.
I was about to write that you will be in my prayers, but the truth is that I am so tired these days, I most often fall asleep without saying them. I remain, however, your loving and devoted sister,
Kate
August 30
Fine, blowy day. Kaiser William was on the track again and the engineer refused to stop, because of his name. Mr. Walsh says he will go to court over it. Mr. Reid offered to buy the carcass and sell it off to raise money for the new regiment. Mrs. Walsh has been in tears all day, says she wanted to change his name to Prince of Wales but wasn’t sure how to go about it. Mumma worse. Doctor says it won’t be long now.
I believe I have taken a turn for the worse, as the doctor was here. I thought it was just a dream, for I am so confused these days, but I can see the bottle of medicine on the table so I know he must have been here. I will not take it. I thought I could not move my limbs again, but when I finally made myself try to lift first my finger and then my hand, they both moved, but thinking about doing it wore me out and I have no wish to try again.
There is no cure but death for what is wrong with me, and medicine more often makes things worse, as it did for Paddy. I am quite ready to go, I think, though there was something I had on my mind to do that now escapes me. Everything is such a muddle in my head—my brain is moithered. Kate was reading me a letter from Johanna and I thought it was from the Bishop s sister who is dead and forgotten this long while. She was a dear little woman, not at all like my own Johanna but very capable nevertheless. How I laughed when she told me about the time the Bishop stopped in the middle of one of his sermons when she was coughing her way through, the mass, and bawled out,”Johanna, go home out of it!”
Kate says she has sent for the parish priest, but for some reason it is Father Roche who is coming again instead. I cannot take to that man—he is too ambitious and too political, with none of dear Bishop Fleming’s warmth or generosity. They say he is a sick man himself, almost as sick as Bishop Howley, and may not live to be consecrated. I don’t know why the vicar-general would come all the way from St. Johns to bring the sacraments to an old woman when the parish priest is available. I wish it was Father Walsh I was to make my last confession to, for there is something I have forgotten and I know Father Roche will try to hurry me along, for even when I know exactly what I want to say, I am hardly able to string two words together to speak them aloud.
I’m very glad Father Roche was not my confessor after I married Mr. Donovan, for I don’t think he would have laughed as Father Walsh did when I told him my first great sin.
Before Mr. Donovan came to Western Junction, I had read in the papers about the relief portraits of the Bishop done by the Irishman Hogan, and made a special trip into town to see them. Mrs. Smyth was busy with the shop and couldn’t come up over the hill with me, so I went to the Cathedral by myself, and went in, and there was one portrait of him blessing Bishop Scallan as he died, and in the other he has his hand on the head of a child. They were both very nice, but they did not make me sad which I had somehow hoped they would. Then I went up to the altar rail to say a prayer for the dear Bishop s soul, for his crypt is beneath, and under the altar was The Redeemer in Death, and oh, I could hardly breathe, it was so beautiful, and I wept at that poor white figure, like a man frozen in the snow, so young and perfect.
The first time I saw Mr. Donovan, my beautiful new husband, in his natural state, so pale and handsome with his strong, long limbs, I wept, just as I had in the Cathedral. I did not confess my pleasure to Father Walsh, for as a married woman I had a right to that, though after those dreadful years with Paddy I had long ceased to expect it or even long for it. But I thought that to kiss my dear husband’s feet and think of Our Redeemer was wrong. My only difficulty was in determining exactly what kind of a sin I had committed, for it was not exactly against the Second Commandment regarding the Lord’s name, nor was it the third Deadly Sin of lust, nor was it obstinacy in transgression—the fifth sin against the Holy Ghost—and it was certainly none of the Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance. But a sin I was sure it was, and so I confessed it.
I do not know why Father Walsh should find it so funny that I thought my Mr. Donovan had the feet of the Dead Christ, but I was quite content that my penance was to go home and love my “fortunate” husband ‘til death should part us. Looking back now, I suppose it was not exactly the kind of sin he was used to hearing, nor perhaps the kind of remark the women of the parish might make about their husbands.
Oh, I didn’t know where to look after I came out of the confessional and there were the three Norman girls with their mouths open, staring at me like sheep, and the fits of giggles still coming at intervals from behind the door of the priest’s section. I have heard Mrs. Norman use her husband’s name in conjunction with that of the Redeemer on many occasions and on none of them was she praising him. Still, I would not have cared to raise the matter with Father Roche, for he has such a rigid opinion on so many things, and if he were to smile it might crack his face as if it were already on a marble tablet next to Bishop Scallan and Bishop Fleming.
Ned Roche is here. He came into the room, with Kate creeping in after him, and looked down at me and asked “Are you making your soul?” “Yes,” I said, “and are you making yours?” I did not mean to say it, but seeing that cold, arrogant face made it slip out. I do not know what came over me. I was right about him having no sense of humour. Kate tried not to laugh but I could see it was a struggle. Then he left me to examine my conscience and came back after supper.
I make light of Father Roche s visit, but I cannot catch my breath and I have a sense of dread that I have not felt in many years. He instructed me on the Devotions for Confessions and reminded me that as well as the Deadly Sins and Contrary Virtues, and the other personal transgressions against God and man, there are also nine ways of being accessory to another’s sin. He gave me a meaningful look then, and Kate, who had come in at the door, turned white and pulled away as if she would hide behind the wallpaper if she could. Whatever he has on his mind, I do not know, but it is most disturbing.
There is something I have forgotten that is very important, something I meant to include in my confession. I am so confused. I believe it has something to do with Paddy, but I cannot recall what it was. I wish some other priest had come, so that I could ask to be helped with this, but Father Roche is not easy to speak to even for someone who has an obedient tongue. I have made my confession and been anointed, but it has brought me very little relief My agitation grows every moment, and though Father Roche said I must excite in my breast heartfelt sorrow for all sins, even those I have forgotten, I do not believe that I can be assured of redemption unless I can name the sin. It is on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot quite form the words.
September 2
Cold, wet day. Mumma was quite strong last evening when Father Roche annointed her—she told him clearly in front of Father Walsh that B
ishop Fleming was no saint, but was better than a saint for he was just an extraordinarily good man—but she is slipping away today. She murmurs constantly about Papa.
Where have I put the shroud? I won’t be waked in one of those nasty brown robes. I have had my plain linen shroud ready since Mr. Donovan died, washed and starched and ironed once a year since on the day of his death. I’m sure I must have told Kate where it is—in the bottom of the old Labrador box with that tin chicken she wore the paint off, and Johanna’s christening dress, and my few precious bits and pieces. Did I give Mr. Conroy the deed to the farm?
But I must remind Kate about the shroud. I have the most horrible feeling, thinking about that—being laid for everyone to look at, like the Irish do. She will draw it over my face, I am sure.
I laid Paddy out in the shop, for I didn’t want him upstairs with all those men traipsing in and out, and there was no space below except the kitchen. How did I get him down there? It’s such a blur. It wasn’t the apprentices that helped me, for they were all out getting drunk. I believe it must have been Judith. “The only difference between a wake and a wedding is that there’s one less drunk at a wake,” she said.
What a wake it was. I put a big stone on top of the salt meat to firm it up, and cooked up a huge pot of potatoes and cabbage and carrots from the garden in Petty Harbour. A group of the firefighters volunteered to sit up with him through the night so I could tend to the children, and it was worth the price of the tobacco and pipes to get a few hours sleep. One of the men fell asleep and they painted his face with green boot polish and he didn’t discover it ‘til he got home and his wife gave a shriek at the sight of him, thought he’d caught the plague or something. Lord, what a racket they made. Paddy loved a good, rowdy wake. “There’s no fun around here,” he’d say. “Nobody’s dying!” Well, they had a bit of fun that night, though I think the only jig Paddy danced was when Judith was helping me take him down over the stairs.
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