“Is that your story or the truth?” she had asked, wanting it to be a story.
“It is what you believe it to be,” he had answered, cradling her against his shoulder. Now she opened her hand and smiled at the piece of green glass on her palm, like the piece she had given Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had brought Maggie a white angora tam when she knew she was leaving. Maggie lifted it to wave goodbye to Elizabeth and her brother, Jamie, who stood a distance from the stagehead. Then she held it against her heart, soft and warm like a kitten.
“You like her—you do,” Elizabeth teased her brother as the boat sailed away.
Jamie wouldn’t tell Elizabeth what had happened days ago. Maggie had come up the path twirling a buttercup between her fingers.
“Do you like butter?” she had asked him.
“Uh!”
She had pushed the buttercup under his chin. “Yup, you do. Its yellow shadow is bright on your skin.”
“You could have just asked me,” he had said, giving her a shy smile.
“And why would I do that?” She had let out a tinkling laugh.
Now he gave his sister a scornful look. “She’s a girl. I don’t want to play with girls unless they’re tomboys like you.”
“Wave, Jamie,” Elizabeth said. She lifted her brother’s arm and his hand flew into the air.
At that moment, something passed from Jamie to Maggie, something unexplainable. She felt the pull of his dark, grey eyes.
Maggie settled into her uncle’s rocking boat, grabbing the gunnels to steady herself. As the boat moved out into the ocean, she turned to the sound of a voice calling goodbye. Elizabeth was running from rock to rock, her arms waving like wings. Hurrying along the beach were other children lifting their hands and waving. She made out the faces of Emily, Laura, Olivia, and Zachary. Soon they became tiny specks. She’d likely never see any of them again. Tears streamed down her face. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, something she hadn’t done for a long time.
Elizabeth kept a constant look at the boat until it became a tiny spot on the vast ocean. It disappeared from sight and she followed Jamie as he turned and ran up the path.
She sat on the porch landing holding Betsy, her doll. “I’ve lost my best friend,” she told Betsy, who didn’t look at all sympathetic. She dropped the doll and ran inside.
She sniffled to her mother, “Maggie’s gone away, gone to Bareneed.”
“Proper thing! Thanks be to God!” Mary Jane exclaimed. “I’ve often wondered what was to become of the child.” Mary Jane had thought Maggie to be far away in thought even while she and Elizabeth played cobbyhouse with pieces of pottery and shale. She had sometimes given her a slice of lassy loaf and a cuddle, and Maggie had responded with a bright smile before darting away. Maybe she would finally have a safe place in Bareneed. The outport was a short distance from Hibb’s Cove, the place where Edward Kennedy, Mary Jane’s first husband, had once lived.
Mary Jane glanced through the window. In the distance, away from the noises of people and wild and domestic creatures, ships seemed to move across the ocean in peaceful silence as if on a mysterious voyage. Taking people away from the earth itself, it seemed. Maggie was like a sapling pulled out of the ground, its roots shivering. Hopefully she would be transplanted in a good place. Mary Jane turned back to kneading a pan of dough.
Elizabeth pinched a piece of the dough. Jamie was right behind her for his share. The two children ran outside chewing dough like taffy before swallowing it.
William smiled from the doorway of his shed at the sound of small footsteps. He watched the two children with amusement. “Any more than one pinch of dough and your bellies will blow up like a cow’s udder,” he told them.
They looked at him, both lifting a finger at the same time. Elizabeth said, “We had one pinch, Pappa. That’s all.”
5
Maggie’s head felt as heavy as a rock. She turned to look toward the ocean opening up, held, it seemed, by the curved arms of the sky.
“Do you have any money?” her uncle asked.
“No.” Then her face brightened. She loosened the string on a bag she carried. “In here I have a sand dollar.”
“A seashell is worth nothing,” he said.
“It’s worth something to me,” she answered. “I gave it to me mamma before she took sick.”
Her uncle looked at her. “Never mind,” he assured her. “We have plenty of food and shelter, everything a little girl needs.” Then he turned away.
Her lips trembled. A little girl needs a mamma and pappa.
They sailed into Bareneed, where little boats bobbed on gentle waters like nesting birds. The sun was strong and warm like a generous smile, though it was October. In a valley, away from cleft hills, lay meadows sheltered from easterly winds that often swept the highlands. Peaked houses, built on uneven land, shaded in bright colours, gave the place a tumbled look. Half-grown boys hung around the beach firing off homemade guns. They let out a whoop each time a crow or a gull fell out of the sky.
Henry shook his head. “One less crow is always good. It’s fair shocking the racket a crow can make. It got eyes like Satan and a bawl so loud you’d think it was being pinched to death.”
Afraid that a stray shot might hit someone he told the boys, “Scurry on home.”
They darted away with their guns tucked under their arms. Two small boys jumped into a flat hauled up on the beach while two older boys tried to dislodge it. It scraped over small stones and gravel as they pushed it into the water. The older boys jumped aboard and one of them grabbed the oar, pushed it through the score, and started to scull out into the bay. The other boys tipped their hands in the cold water and let it fly into the face of the boy sculling the boat, their laughter like a flat rock skipping water.
Brazen like boys at home, Maggie thought.
Maggie’s uncle shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of them young fellars. They’s up from Hibb’s Cove, sure they is. Young Jacob Kennedy, the one sculling, is the only sensible one among ’em. But never mind.”
Henry nodded toward a small house beside a narrow lane. “We’ll go up and you can meet your Aunt Louise.”
Louise was standing in the doorway rubbing her hands down a white apron.
“I wouldn’t have come,” Maggie said, “but I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, you being family and all.” She gave her aunt a strained look.
Louise lifted a hand to her hair, which was parted in the middle and pulled straight back from the sides and coiled at her poll. She straightened a pin and smiled at Maggie, her brown eyes warm.
“Dear child,” she said, “it’s not about feelings. Your uncle asked for you out of duty, and you’ll make yourself useful with all the goings-on in this place. It’s not to the queen’s palace you’ve come, but we’re comfortable most of the year. The easterlies bring the wild winds with their chill, but it’s probably no worse than what you’ve suffered.” Her look took in Maggie’s ragged dress and the yellowing bruises on her legs. “We could shorten your name to Mag.”
“No,” Maggie answered firmly. “I need the full name my mother intended.”
Her aunt shook her head. “It’s hard to keep a full name when everyone’s in such a hurry to get out their words. They shorten words wherever they can. In this place there’s no trees to break the strength of strong winds; gusts sometimes takes words out of our mouths.”
Maggie buttoned her lips. The wind wasn’t going to get her words. She followed her aunt inside and went to a settle, where she huddled with her thumb in her mouth. Her aunt took the bag she’d laid beside her and went upstairs.
“Your thumb don’t want to be in your mouth,” Henry told her. “Sure, ’tis dark in there and wet and your teeth looks like headstones. Your tongue’ll pin your poor thumb to the roof of your mouth unti
l it’s frightened ter death.”
Maggie’s eyes widened.
“Now then,” he added, his voice ominous. He bent down until his tobacco breath swirled around her like steam from a swamp, “If you keep sucking your thumb it’ll break off and go down into your belly. If you want it back, you’ll have to yuck it up.” He raised an eyebrow. “Then there’s the matter of gettin’ it back on your hand.”
Maggie let her hand drop and her mouth open. She stared at him in horror.
“See,” he said, nodding toward her hand. “Your poor thumb looks white and shrivelled. It’s already started to let go of your hand.”
“I only do it when I’m scared,” she whispered. “I won’t do it anymore.” She hid her thumb in the palm of her hand, her fingers folding over it.
He smiled and stood up. “That’s a good girl.”
When Henry went outside she reached into her pocket and found the smooth, round stone Elizabeth had given her. She closed her hand around it.
Her aunt came back down and set food on the table. She glanced at her husband. “There’s no flesh on that child.” She turned to Maggie and asked, “Don’t you have a mind for food?”
Maggie tried to keep her body steady but it held a tremor. She hoped her aunt wouldn’t notice the shiver in her dress as she answered, “It’s my nature, Aunt Louise.”
“Nature or not, there’s no need to be as thin as a whipping post. Come and eat, then.”
Maggie slipped into a chair at the small wooden table, her fists in her lap. Her stomach had always felt too tight to let food in while she was sitting at the table facing her stepmother.
Her aunt and uncle dug into their meal of lobscouse while Maggie looked down at her empty plate.
Louise looked up. “Take hold. Spoon yourself a plate of food from the bowl. There’ll be no tending on yer.”
Maggie reached then to take a scarce amount, afraid of a slap on her fingers.
Henry, taking in her timid reach, grabbed the spoon and filled her plate. “There you is, then. A full stomach encourages mind and body.”
After they had eaten, her aunt slid a small stool toward her. “Get on this and wash the dishes. Scrape every fingernail full for the pigs. Don’t lose a whit.”
She did as she was told and then she was hurried along upstairs to a room with a small bed under a window framing the sea. She slept better than she had expected and without one dream that she could remember. After breakfast she helped wash the dishes and tidy the pantry. Then she sat on the kitchen floor, her slim, bare feet under the warmth of the sun shining like a golden shaft through the large window. Dust motes danced in the sunlight like tiny fairies. Heat from the fire in the hearth brought a tincture of red to her cheeks. After a while she got up and wandered outside, her aunt’s voice following her, warning, “Not too near the water, mind you, and not too far up on the hill.”
In the valley she felt she was breathing in the earth’s breath, but on top of Bareneed Hills she took the breath of the sea into her lungs, its strong, salty scent assailing her nostrils. Bareneed Hills was rightly named, a place that poked its bare knuckles up into the sky, taking on wind and rain, summer’s warmth, and winter’s chill. She looked down to Port de Grave, not Portagrave as her stepmother called it. Houses and other buildings nestled beside hills in from winding roads; others stood on grey cliffs. Boats rocked in the bay.
Maggie could see the remnants of a stone building that her uncle later explained was a jail where both the guilty and innocent had been housed a long time ago.
Maggie often woke to the thump of paddles against thole-pins as boats sluiced through water and then the scraping of a boat against the beach as it was pulled up over sand and beach stones and she would think, Pappa is home. Then she would curl around herself and cry, remembering that she was far from home and her father would never again lift her for a cuddle against his arm.
“The sea,” he had told her, “is always travelling, coming to shore, running back out and coming back in. Sometimes it prowls the shoreline like a cat with a bird in its mouth coming to lay its victim at our doorstep. Sometimes it’s the body of a fish or a fisherman.”
She looked through the window and followed the sea to its curved line against the grey sky, followed its sprites swimming one after the other, white foam carried on dark water. Even if her father’s boat had been taken by the sea, she could imagine her father swimming toward her alive.
One morning she left the house and climbed the stairs of her uncle’s shed. Through the window she saw a long jut of land dipped, like a finger, in icy water. The window framed it like a picture, a lonely picture, its point deserted.
Her uncle came up behind her. “That’s Salmon Cove,” he said. “The place looks uninviting on a rainy day or when it’s shadowed in snow. On sunny days with snow sparkling under a bright sun it looks like a quiet, welcoming spot, though it’s not,” he added tersely.
“Why not, Uncle?” she asked.
“You be the curious one, for sure. But it’s all better left to rest. Those stories never get told right. Go on, now, off to help your aunt.”
Maggie had little trouble falling asleep each night after helping her aunt with the day’s work and having a little play outdoors. She had her own candle to light her way upstairs, with a warning from her aunt to spare it or be without. She snuffed it as soon as she was in bed, not wanting to have to climb the stairs in the dark. She liked the little bed built tight against the slanted ceiling in the roof and the little window that sometimes framed the moon.
She often slipped out of bed and stared through the window at a full moon hanging low, melting into a silver path across the ocean. She imagined scooping up handfuls of silver water. She spoke to her father as if he could hear her. “You and I can see the moon at the same time no matter where we is. Only Mamma’s gone for good.”
She turned from the window, then back as something caught her eye. A light was wavering across the water, straight across to where a red rock jutted out from the land. A mysterious light, not originating from land or from a boat. She must ask her uncle about it.
She was soon asleep and dreaming that she lived in a family of brothers and sisters. She felt the heat from her sisters’ bodies as the little ones curled around her like soft pillows keeping her feet warm. Sometimes her hand strayed outside the quilt and she woke in the darkness to find she was alone. She pulled her hand back under the covers to warm it under her ribs.
She tried not to think about her stepmother sending her away. “Try to mind her, Maggie,” her father had said. “I married her too quick, not knowing she’s lemon and pepper, hard to take, her tongue like a cat-o’-nine-tails.”
She had looked at him puzzled. She knew that cats could have nine lives, but she’d never seen a cat with nine tails. It was hard to understand adults. Now she knew what a cat-o’-nine-tails was. Uncle had one hanging in his shed. “A souvenir of worse days,” he told her. “A good many men got a lick from that one.” He leaned closer. “More than a lick. The dark spots are blood. But it wasn’t as bad as getting hanged.”
Her aunt, coming out to the shed to fill a jar with molasses from a stowed keg, told him, “Don’t be gettin’ the child’s innocent mind on things too hard for her to understand.”
“’Tis her learnin’ about life,” he said. “It’s only right for her to know that a woman from around here was convicted and hanged after her husband disappeared.”
Her aunt filled her molasses jar and went back up to the house.
“Who’s the woman sitting at the window next door?” Maggie asked.
Her uncle crinkled his brow and lifted his cap off his head. He squinted his eyes. “That’s Bridget. It was her mother who was hanged.”
“I’ve never met anyone whose mother was hanged,” Maggie whispered. “But my father disappeared, too. I’d like t
o go see her.”
“It’s best if you didn’t. It’s not too often she shows her face out around the place since she come back from bein’ away. She can’t take the talk and all.”
“I’d like a look at her, then.”
“She looks the same as anyone else, though she carries heavy memories. I’m sure she wouldn’t turn down havin’ her name in your prayers.”
* * * * *
Maggie was sitting on a rock wall swinging her legs and looking out to sea when she caught a glimpse of a tall woman crossing the lane on her way to the outhouse, her grey hair plaited and looped.
“Hello,” the woman said in a soft, pleasant voice. “You’re the little girl come to stay with your uncle.”
“I know about your story,” Maggie said.
“Every life has a story,” Bridget answered with a frail smile.
Maggie shrugged. “Mine’s not very interesting.”
“It will be,” Bridget promised. “You want to go home, don’t you? Everyone likes to go home to where they belong.” Her look went beyond Maggie to Salmon Cove. “I went away once.”
“Was it for very long?” Maggie asked.
Her answer was brisk. “Long enough. This is where I belong.”
Maggie’s lips formed a pout, her eyes stormy. “It’s not where I belong.”
“Then go home.”
“I will, some day.”
That evening she stood by the rail on her uncle’s bridge and watched high tide pull a sheet of water over the foot of the beach. She looked toward the sea, to the dance of sun sparkles, and gritted her teeth. I should be home in Foxtrap. She wondered then if her father had come back and if the children still played on the beach and if there would ever come a time when she could sit on the beach with them, especially Elizabeth. She stayed until night blackened the place. Then she drew in the sharp, salty air and sighed before turning her back on the sea.
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 3