“I thought me brother had no nature,” Joe told Mary Jane after Elizabeth was born. When Jamie was born he said the same thing.
William had stared in wonder when Mary Jane gave birth to Elizabeth and again when Jamie was born. “I had a hand in their makin’. Fancy that,” he told Mary Jane.
She smiled. “Children are the fruit of our lives.”
He gave her a rascally grin. “Just be thankful they’re not vegetables.”
The young children took Mary Jane’s mind off Rebecca, who had left home to marry Matthew Greenslade. Edward John and Fannie didn’t take to their younger half-brother and half-sister. They often taunted her.
“We’re our mother’s first children,” Fannie said. “You don’t belong to us.”
Elizabeth gave her a defiant look. “Me and Jamie’s our pappa’s only children, so there. You don’t belong to our father.” She stuck out her tongue and ran across the field.
Elizabeth often sat on her father’s knee, the rockers on the chair creaking on the pine floor, while fire crackled in the small kitchen stove and sunlight beamed in through the window. “You almost didn’t get born,” her father said. “I was a bachelor. A deep-dyed one, some would say. If it hadn’t been for the widda, Mary Jane, I wouldn’t’ve had a woman and the joy of me own two youngsters.”
Sometimes he wheeled Elizabeth and Jamie in his wheelbarrow around the yard shouting and laughing until night fell.
“Why does the moon grow so big when it’s comin’ over the hills?” Elizabeth asked her father.
He always had quick answers. “The sky’s so big the moon looks small. The hills’s so small the moon looks big.”
Elizabeth played behind the large wooden chair her father sat in when her mother had the rocker. She ran her finger up her father’s legs when he was asleep, startling him awake to utter, “Ump, ump. There must be a mouse about.”
Jamie toddled toward him raising his arms and throwing his head back in glee.
William’s house was no longer an abode for a bachelor. It now held the heart of a family.
7
One summer day Mary Jane lifted her head from where she stood leaning in over the washtub scrubbing William’s overalls over the roped glass board. There were shouts of delight from children playing on the beach whenever they discovered a piece of coloured glass among sea urchins and starfish. She straightened her back, lifting a hand with drifts of soapy water, and pushed back a loose strand of hair.
“Children are collectors,” Mary Jane said. “Their work is as important to them as ours is to us.”
“Until they come looking for somethin’ to eat,” William grumbled.
“They never for a moment think of growing up and becoming us,” Mary Jane replied. “To them we work too hard and have nothing to look forward to. Some of them won’t grow up, or if they do they won’t live a long life.” She was thinking of Rebecca, who had grown up and married Matthew Greenslade, only to die a year later in childbirth. Mary Jane had hidden her sorrow deep inside her while she cared for her other children. She couldn’t unburden herself to William. He would never understand the loss of a child.
She turned, startled at the sound of a scream, then caught her breath in relief at seeing Elizabeth and Jamie chasing each other on the beach. Elizabeth had been mopish after her friend Maggie Taylor was sent away to Bareneed. Distance and time had eased the loss. She had settled down with other friends: Olivia, Emily, and Laura.
Gina, Olivia’s younger half-sister, usually joined the children on the beach. Today it was her turn to fill the water barrel. She had hurried along swinging her hoop and buckets on the way to the well under the hill. On bright days sunlight showed her face leaning in, her image fluctuating as she dropped the empty bucket down, settling whole as she drew the bucket of water back up. She always filled her buckets to the brim to lessen her trips. This time, as her young arms strained to lift the bucket over the lip of the well, it tipped and water splashed over the ground. She leaned to lower her second bucket into the well and slipped on wet grass. She had been warned that a water sprite was in the ocean waiting to take small children, never that there was one in the well waiting to cover her mouth with a cold, wet hand.
Down she went, head over heels, gulping moist air as her fingers spread out, her hands reaching to grasp the slimy, slippery rocks with wood lice clinging to them. Her fingers slipped past them and her head went under water, cold, stinging, and stunning, breaking around her head.
Johanna, Gina’s mother, hadn’t paid attention to the scream. “What’s taking that girl so long with the water?” she muttered as she wiped her hands on her apron. “Gone off, she is, then, and I kept idle waitin’. I’ve a mind to whip her behind.” She hurried outside and down toward the well.
The squall of cries coming from the direction of the well stopped everyone within earshot. The mother making her children’s beds, the woman with her hands in a pan of dough, the children on the beach, and a fisherman mending nets on a grassy knob near the beach all heard the cries of anguish and rushed to Johanna pointing down the well.
Only the fisherman had the presence of mind to pull Johanna away and look down to see Gina curled under water, her eyes in a blank stare.
“Sweet, modest, and such a dear smile.” That was said at the wake.
“It’s such a pity she can’t hear you,” Johanna said, her eyes puffed and red.
Elizabeth couldn’t talk to Olivia about what had happened. At night she lay on the floor by the stove’s chimney hole and listened to her mother and Aunt Caroline below. They were loose in their talk when the children were gone to bed. Asleep, they thought. They were saying something about Gina’s father, who was Olivia’s stepfather, something that made no sense. Her mother and aunt were having what Reverend Petten might call unrestrained gossip, a sin in God’s ear. She tried to forget what she’d heard and hadn’t understood.
Elizabeth dreamed about Gina, dreamed she was looking down into the well where the little girl had fallen. She saw the reflection of her own shocked face distorted by the water the child was kicking to find a footing. “Catch hold of the bucket and I’ll haul you up,” she called. Then everything went quiet. Someone touched Elizabeth’s back. She turned to see Maggie. “You can’t save Gina,” she said. “God is taking care of her forevermore.”
She woke thinking of her friend gone away. One day she would see Maggie Taylor again. She was sure of it.
Elizabeth didn’t want to look at Gina in her coffin, but her father urged her on. “It’ll teach you to have an eye. Death lurks in the strangest places, not always on the sea.”
She crept forward and gazed on the marble face, its domed lids forever hiding big blue eyes, the colour of marsh irises. The mouth was frozen in an expression Elizabeth had never seen. She let out a gasp and drew back. The gritty scent of death, dark and dense, drew the air out of her nostrils and she felt herself falling. Her father caught her as she fainted.
The next morning, Elizabeth and Jamie turned their spoons over and over in their bowls of porridge as if they had lost their appetite. Mary Jane watched them, sorry for children to be pressed hard by the death of another child.
“If I die, don’t put me out in the ground for worms to get me body,” Elizabeth said, her lips trembling.
“No, we’ll pickle you and keep you in a pork barrel,” her father joked. Then he looked at the other children. “That goes for you, too.”
Mary Jane hastened to tell the children, “Your father is being his foolish self.”
William took a slurp from his cup of tea and set it back down in its saucer. He gave the children a serious look. “Now you’ve seen that life is not forever. You got to do everything you can to keep it as long as you can.” He gazed out over the ocean. “Neither the sea nor the land is ever satisfied.”
“I know that,” Mary
Jane said, her face solemn. “Neither the sea nor the earth gets enough.”
After Gina’s drowning, the children on the beach became more aware that if calm water in a well can kill, then ocean waves are to be feared even more. They didn’t want to end up like Gina, cold as a beach rock in winter and buried in a grave forever.
The waft of fresh bread drew the children up from the beach to Mary Jane’s house. They pressed in against the table eyeing steaming loaves of bread. Mary Jane carefully cut into the crust of one loaf and slipped the sharp knife in a slow, gentle thrust through the soft belly. The children, their eyes still etched in sorrow, wet their lips and held out their hands, the scent of salt water on them. Mary Jane spread molasses over each slice. It ran over the hot bread, and the children caught it with their tongues before it could spill over the edges.
“Aunt Mary Jane, you makes the best slice of lassy loaf,” Olivia said, licking the sweet dark traces of molasses from her lips. “Maggie and Gina used to think that, too.”
Mary Jane smiled. That girl is as sweet as molasses and soft as butter on a warm day. She had watched Jabe, Olivia’s stepfather, at the funeral, silent and apart. There’s something about him . . . something unpleasant . . . something worse.
After the girls left her house, skipping and hopping back down to the beach, Mary Jane murmured to William, “They’re all part of this place, part of each other, and the same story through near and distant relatives. Some day each of them will go apart from each other.”
William nodded. “Like Maggie. The poor mite.”
“Yes,” said Mary Jane, her look distant. “They’ll all come back into the story, all except Gina.”
Laura, Olivia’s younger cousin, scuffed along the path down to the beach in Gina’s shoes, a rag in each toe so they would fit. Elizabeth was emptying sand from her shoe when Laura sat down beside her. She reached out and took Elizabeth’s hand.
Elizabeth smiled when she asked, “Do you think Gina minds me havin’ her shoes?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “For sure she don’t. In heaven she’ll have new ones.”
Laura let out a sigh of relief. Her thin face relaxed, but her big blue eyes kept their strained, empty look. It would be a long time before anyone would learn part of her story—never all of it.
Jamie loved the sea, the way it was always changing, alive with seething emotions that drew his eyes to its many faces, its sun-dappled look one day and its icy dark stare the next. Spring brought ice pans covering the face of the bay. Jamie had learned how to spring away from a wavering thin ice cake to the safety of a large, steadier one.
Joe watched his nephew’s daring behaviour and called as Jamie jumped ashore and ran up the lane, “You’re at it ag’in, you young rascal, jumping ice pans.”
“Don’t be doin’ it. It’s dangerous,” Caroline added as she stood on the door stoop.
“I’m practising for a berth on a sealer.”
“’Tis a long time before you get on a ship. You’re but an alder shoot, and it’s hardship enough on the sealing ships,” Joe called.
Jamie shrugged. “I don’t mind. Me cousins will get me a berth some day.”
Joe shook his head. “It won’t be your father, fer sure. He knows the danger, and your Uncle Johnny knows it for sure. Johnny’s got a game leg because of the sea. He can’t walk as far as the smoke from the chimney.”
Jamie shrugged. “That’s far on a windy day when the wind’s in its favour.”
“I s’pose it is, then.” A sad look crossed his face. “Johnny can’t walk no matter how much wind is behind him.”
“How did Johnny get that way?” Mary Jane asked William one night as they lay in bed. William stirred beside her and turned his back, not wanting her to know his part in it. “Johnny don’t want anyone to speak about that terrible time,” he said, his voice wobbly.
Mary Jane reached her hand to the small of his back. A tremor went through it. She understood. When people talk about a tragedy they want to forget, it becomes part of a new day, a day that needs to make its own memories. Her memory of Edward’s death and her sorrow over her daughter’s passing surfaced. She tossed and turned, trying to push away thoughts she couldn’t dislodge. Finally she drifted into sleep and woke the next morning to the sounds of the children calling to each other. She promised herself she wouldn’t think about things she couldn’t change.
Jamie had watched his father trap eels in Paddy’s Pond. He lifted a twig basket from the cool shade of the pond’s lily pads and overhanging greenery, joyful as he felt the weight of the basket, and eyed an eel stretching languidly. William told Jamie, “The eel slithers through warm water, always exploring. Then one day it sees a contraption made from rope and twigs. Its tongue reaches out and its body follows. It slides inside and curls as if asleep, not knowin’ that its weight has pulled the opening shut. It’s caught. There’s all kinds of traps in the world for all creatures.” He looked toward the bay.
William turned back, opened the trap, and grabbed the undulating eel. He banged it against a rock, killing it. Then he rolled it in the sand so it wouldn’t be too slippery to skin.
Jamie tried to keep his father’s pace as he hurried up from the pond to the shed. He squeezed his eyes shut as William lifted the eel up by the tail, cut the skin around the body, and pulled it over the head. The fins went with it. Jamie followed his father to the house and inside the kitchen, where William sliced the eel in two parts. He placed the pieces in the pot and covered them with cold water mixed with milk, salt, pepper, and a teaspoon of vinegar. While the pot boiled he sang,
“Summer is a prosperous time,
Full of food on which to dine,
Paddy’s eels, the finest kind.”
Jamie showed more interest in fashioning wooden boats from raw wood than in catching eels. Like his father, he had a natural hand for carving models for boats. He had nailed several half-models to the porch wall. When Jamie was small William had taught him how to shape and plane them smooth. Some day Jamie hoped to fashion a boat after his models, a boat with cod pounds. He planned on catching so much fish the pound hatches would barely hold down each load.
* * * * *
“The beach is livid with caplin,” William called one late June morning as he sat repairing a cast net with needle and twine.
“Alive,” Mary Jane answered back.
“No, livid,” William insisted. “If you were trampled over, you’d be livid, too.”
Elizabeth ran toward the beach, her eyes wide with excitement. She watched her father’s arm lift and the balls of his seine catch sunlight as the casting net swung out over a black cloud. William dropped the load of flickering fish on the beach and Mary Jane slipped a bucket under the swarm of silver-belly caplin, and then another: two buckets of caplin to salt for the winter. William drew in another net full of fish to fertilize Mary Jane’s kitchen garden.
Elizabeth, her bare legs spattered with spawn clinging to her legs like wet cornmeal, reached to grab a caplin swimming ashore. She slipped and fell face down in the shallow water. She stood up, spitting out salt water and spawn. Her mother grabbed her hand and took her up the path beside Paddy’s Pond, where she drew a bucket of fresh water and threw it over her.
Elizabeth’s dark hair matted on her head as water streamed down, her blue dress clinging to sun-browned legs.
William glanced their way as he passed them with a pan of caplin to be fried for supper. “Ah, you’ve been baptized, me maid,” he called, never thinking that one day the word would take on new meaning for Elizabeth.
Elizabeth sat at the table and unzipped the fried caplin, parting its sides and flicking the wispy backbone into a dish. She remembered how Maggie had loved to wade into the water and squeal as she tried to hold a writhing caplin in her hand. She wondered how she was doing and when she’d be back.
&nb
sp; 8
Jamie got braver in jumping spring ice as the years went by. He and his cousin Noah played games of hop and rock, dipping the pans, their blue shadows riffling as the pans flopped water under their feet. When Jamie lost his balance and fell in, Noah helped him back up onto a pan. He lay there shivering and spitting out briny water. They were done for the day.
“Get on in here, you stun mortals,” Mary Jane called as they hurried up the path. “You’ll drown yourselves for fun, and who’ll pay in grief and misery? Not you! You’ll be dead. It’ll be those left behind. That’s who!”
William scowled as the boys dried themselves by the fire. “I tell you now, lads. Don’t be goin’ on the ice. There’s cracked and broken pans everywhere, and snow fluffed over a pan like a shadow, making the pan look bigger. You step on the snow and you’ll disappear. You won’t even find the bottom of the ocean for your bed.”
Noah shrugged. “All the young fellars jumped pans in your day, the same as now.”
“You’re right, for sure,” William said. “Even the young maids had a turn. Becky, our older sister, tried to follow Joe and me one mornin’. She took a careful step on one ice pan to straddle the bigger one we were on. We jumped up and down making our end of the pan flop under water. We laughed at her screams but cried when she lost her balance. We managed to pull her out from under the ice. It was a close call. Mam scolded us: ‘I’d kill you all if you went on the ice and got drowned or lost.’ She burst out laughing at her silly words. Then she began to cry.”
William always gave Jamie a dark look when he asked him about Johnny.
Now Elizabeth turned from the pan of dishes she was washing and asked, “What made Uncle Johnny blind and cripple?”
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 5