Ghost of the Southern Cross

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  For the next year she drank from the cup every day. When Bea, one of her cousins, knocked it on the floor and broke it, the look on the little girl’s face stopped Maggie from getting angry.

  The memory of her mother holding the cup could never fade.

  10

  Maggie had known that sooner or later she’d bump into Elizabeth Maley, and maybe Olivia and others who had played on the beach. But it was Jamie she saw first. It was the first time she’d laid eyes on him all grown up. He passed her going into Eli Butler’s shop. His smoky grey eyes met hers and his strong, firm mouth opened into an easy smile as he stepped back. “You’ve got the look of the people around here, though I can’t place you,” he said.

  “Jamie?”

  “Maggie?”

  They laughed in unison and when Maggie pushed open the door he was behind her.

  “Now then, aren’t you the tall one! I heard you were about, come back from your Uncle Henry’s all grown up. Elizabeth wondered on times whether she should go see you. But it was so long ago. . . .”

  “A very long time ago,” she said. She felt the dread from that time and knew why she had kept her distance. Coming to terms with painful memories overshadowed those happy, carefree times.

  “I don’t like to think of those times,” she said, turning away and looking around the small store. A strong odour from dried fish and oakum, mingling with the smell of a round cheese parcelled in waxed cheesecloth, was overpowering.

  The shopkeeper came out of the storage room and called to Jamie. “I heard you’re trying to get on a sealing ship.”

  “I’ve been wanting to,” he said. “Seasoned men get first chance, but my time’ll come.”

  “Don’t be in a rush, dear boy. That ocean is not too tame this time of year. Dangerous times, it is, to be on the water, ice like dragons’ teeth.”

  “Never you mind,” Jamie said. “There’s adventure and I’m wanting that.”

  Maggie turned from listening to Jamie, her lips tightening against a smile when she heard a customer say, under her breath, “I’m wondering if your wife is about. There’s an article I’m keen for. Your wife knows what I mean, if you’ll be kind enough to fetch her.”

  “Indeed, I’ll get the wife,” the shopkeeper answered, the colour in his florid face deepening.

  The customer gave him a quick nod and turned her back to Jamie and Maggie.

  Eli Butler’s shop in Foxtrap carried almost everything a family could need or want, including a hair tonic peddled by J. J. Gozine, a Jew living on Bell Island. He claimed it could grow hair on a rock, though he hadn’t been up to proving it.

  Eli also carried unmentionables known as “open fireplaces.” A lady would come in, look around, and, if there was another customer in the shop, quietly ask for an open fireplace. Eli’s wife would reach behind the counter and pick up a box from which she lifted the article. It wouldn’t be good for a merchant to be seen holding, in his big hands, underdrawers with a waistband and two legs on a string: open-forked drawers, a wonderful piece of clothing. It meant that a woman could straddle outside and let her water run in a stream discreetly, pick up sticks for a fire, and breastfeed a baby—all at the same time.

  The shopkeeper cleared his throat and called, “Chelsea, dear, a young missus is looking for a certain article.”

  A small woman who was filling a barrel in the storage area hurried out, pulling her shawl tight around her shoulders. She looked around as if to make sure there were no children about.

  “Get out of the way, Eli,” she said. “I’ll handle women’s business.”

  Her husband stayed put and she raised her eyebrows. “Eli!”

  He got the message and hurried to other business.

  Chelsea shook her head. “As long as women have tongues, men have ears and eyes when it comes to delicate matters.”

  The woman at the counter made her request in a low voice: “I’ll have a pair of fireplaces.”

  “Sure you will,” Chelsea said. “I’ll get them.” She looked the woman up and down. “A size large, I expect.”

  Maggie piped up, “I’ll have a pair while you’re at it—a size small.” She gave Jamie a quick look and added, “For me aunt.”

  When Chelsea was finished with her other customer, Maggie passed her a dollar her uncle had given her when she left Bareneed.

  Jamie bought a bag of nails. He lifted an eyebrow as he held the door for Maggie on the way out. “Keeping warm, I suppose,” he said, nodding toward the purchase in her basket.

  Maggie’s words rang in Jamie’s ears as they parted. “Now James Maley, I’ll be thankin’ you to keep your mind on your nails and the wood you’re likely to hammer them in.”

  Jamie wondered why women’s underwear were called fireplaces. An open fireplace was for putting a poker in to stir a fire, one that could get quite hot. Underwear was a less suggestive name. He’d like to hear what his father had to say about fireplaces; he wasn’t brazen enough to ask.

  Jamie told Elizabeth he had met up with Maggie at Eli Butler’s shop.

  “I’d love to see her,” was all Elizabeth got out before Jamie, on impulse, said, “We could have her for supper.”

  Their mother smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Jamie, the next time you run into Maggie, ask her to drop by one night for supper.”

  William was out by the woodpile when Maggie came over the hill a week later. It began to rain and she started running to get shelter. William put out his hand. “Stop yourself there. You’re runnin’ so fast the freckles’s bouncin’ off your nose.”

  Elizabeth stood on the doorstep. She leaned forward, her eyes squinting. “There’s a little bit of yourself in there from years back. But the size of you! You’re up there like a steeple. Sure, you’ve changed.”

  Maggie let out a self-conscious laugh. “So’s yourself. I’d pass you as a stranger, I would.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “All that time you’ve been gone and not a word.”

  “You did show up in me thoughts now and then,” Maggie said. “I was lookin’ forward to gettin’ back home.”

  Elizabeth took her hand. “Is yer on for stayin’, then?”

  “I’m hopin’ to. I’m lookin’ after Aunt Liddie’s family in the Bight for now, but I want to get back to Pappa’s house.”

  William gave her a quick look but didn’t say anything.

  Maggie thought there was concern or something else in his look. He has to know about my stepmother. She eyed Jamie coming up the path. “Look at Jamie,” she said, turning to Elizabeth. “Sure, he’s all grown and fine-lookin’, to be sure.”

  William winked at her, thinking, Before long that boy of mine’ll have his feet worn flat goin’ to see her.

  At supper Maggie hooked her small finger around one end of the chicken wishbone and Elizabeth hooked hers around the other end.

  “Pull when I say. Not before!” William said.

  The girls looked at each other and grinned.

  “Now,” he said and the girls pulled.

  The bone snapped, and Maggie rolled her eyes as Elizabeth held up the shortest piece, declaring, “I’ll be married first.”

  Jamie let out a chuckle and Maggie glanced his way.

  He faced her, his look purposeful. “I’ll be hoping for a berth on a sealing ship this year in the hopes of saving money to get married some day.”

  “Berth or no berth, who’s up to marrying the likes of you?” Elizabeth retorted.

  Jamie looked at Maggie and winked. He laughed when she looked away. Jamie loved the look of the girl, her smile, her walk, the way she spoke.

  William Maley eyed his two children. He’d soon be without them. He and Mary Jane would be left alone in their house by the apple trees. Elizabeth had already gone for walks with some young gaffers from Lon
g Pond, bringing a dark cloud to his face. He hoped Jamie would stay close by.

  “My son’s a fine lad,” Mary Jane told Maggie as she lifted a bedsheet and spread it on the clothesline. She squeezed a clothes peg open and pinned it. “Young Jamie is old William on the spot. Sure, you won’t likely tell them apart if the old fellar lives long enough and Jamie catches up. He’ll be bald like his father’s gettin’.”

  Not with that thick head of honey-brown hair, Maggie thought as she said goodbye.

  She glanced toward the house she once lived in. She didn’t know then that her stepmother’s son would claim the house, and she wouldn’t care. It was no longer a home. It was just a house, its windows a reminder of her stepmother’s evil eyes looking out at her.

  Never a home after Pappa left, she thought with a shudder. I’ll bide where I am for a while.

  Mary Jane tried to discourage Jamie from making plans to go on a sealing voyage. She told her son, “We’ve got enough land to plough and enough sea from our door to give us plenty of food.”

  “As long as it’s only us,” he answered, “but I’ll be having a family to take care of and I need money laid by to build me own house.”

  His mother tilted her head to one side to look at him. “Maggie is moon-eyed over you. You won’t leave to go live away from this place, will you?”

  “I’ll stay and bring a woman here. I won’t go away. I won’t,” he promised.

  That October, Mary Jane noticed that, when Maggie came to gather a basket of apples from the tree, Jamie pretended not to see her wide grin and the perky nose in her brown berry face. She filled her basket and then she stuffed the two big pockets in her dress. She dropped a big penny into Jamie’s hand. He held it against his palm, fancying that it was her skin his fingers were touching. She looked at him as she dug her teeth into an apple. Her lips looked soft and moist as her small white teeth closed over a chunk of the apple.

  “Off you go,” William said. “Let Jamie get about his work.”

  Maggie gave Jamie a quick look and hurried toward the gate. She turned the block of wood keeping the gate closed. The gate swung open and she pranced up the hill without a backward glance.

  “As wild as a loon by the brazen looks of her,” William said. “Still, she’s restful on the eyes, me son. Sure, she is.”

  “If by wild you means she skips about showin’ a bit of life, that’s a good thing. A day’s work comes easy to someone with so much life.”

  The night Jamie left home to walk to Middle Bight, his father called, “Don’t give her too many kisses. You’ll fry your lips.”

  The sea strummed the beach, its music drawing Maggie and Jamie together under the moon’s silver gaze. They slid down on the warm sand along the shore. By the way Maggie’s lips pursed to his, Jamie figured she was ready to be courted.

  She pulled away, her eyes holding a distant, tender look. “I never forgot the time on the beach when I laid my shoes on a rock and waded out into the water. Your cousin, Thomas, called me a ragamuffin and ran off with me shoes. You chased him, but not before he threw the shoes into the water. You brought them back dripping wet. I remember you buckling them on my feet.”

  “I never forgot you,” he said softly.

  She smiled. “I could never forget you.”

  11

  Mary Jane was turning the feather bedding in Jamie’s room when she saw her son trudging down the narrow path past the graveyard with its tipsy-turvy headstones. Her heart lurched like a berg turning over in icy waters until she realized that his step was heavy. Jamie had not secured his berth on a sealing vessel. Please, God, don’t let him go to the ice, ever. Save him! She watched as he picked up an alder branch and pulled it along the pickets of the graveyard fence as if he had nothing else to do, as if he were going nowhere.

  Last year Jamie had seen sealers go out the road on their way to meet up with other men going on a sealing vessel. He had come home long-faced.

  Mary Jane told him, “Your father makes a bit of money selling eels and frankum to the St. John’s crowd. They clamber for the fresh taste of tree gum. It appeals to their palates and sweetens their breath after they’ve eaten your father’s eels. There’s all kinds of ways to make money besides seal hunting.”

  Jamie’s face was sullen as he unlatched the door and came inside. He admitted that he had been turned away and sent home. A sealer with no experience had bumped him. “It was likely someone in with the captain,” he said, his voice bitter.

  He’d get the experienced boys from Foxtrap to speak for him next year. He had several cousins who had gone to the ice. Adrian, a distant cousin, went only once. He didn’t get the chance to go again after he’d complained about having to drink rusty tea. Any sealer who complained while on the ship risked losing his share of the voyage. Adrian got his share but not another ticket. Jamie had hoped to get Adrian’s ticket. Someone had beaten him to it.

  Jamie gave his mother a determined look. “I’m still goin’ to the seal hunt the first chance I gets.”

  Mary Jane didn’t look up from where she’d started shining the stovetop. “Mind you don’t, now. Grief is already sewn in the linings of more than one heart in this place.”

  He shook his head. “You wouldn’t let the wind blow on me if you could help it. Harm can find a mark anywhere. I’m goin’ sealin’ as soon as I gets a ticket.”

  She looked up. “You won’t want Maggie handy to you when you comes home stinkin’ of seals and blubber. There’ll be nothing else to do with your clothes but burn ’em. A good scrubbin’ down with steel wool is what you’ll need yourself. The merchant will have his money and the rich and fancy ladies of St. John’s will have their lips painted from the scented oil of baby seals. They’ll have soap for their baths but you’ll have little for your toil.”

  “I’ll be goin’ yet, and nothin’ll stop me,” Jamie mumbled.

  “I know that, me boy,” Mary Jane conceded.

  He grinned and threw his arm around her shoulder. “Take heart, Mamma. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”

  Even though he didn’t know it, he was right.

  * * * * *

  Winter overriding spring finally lost its strength and the place opened up to warm days and soft evenings. Spring grass crept up through rich, dark earth in baby green newness. The soft air came alive with the songs of birds flittering among the bushes. Maggie and Jamie spent evenings beside a stream, up from the beach, listening to the tickle of the water over rocks while they made plans. Daydreaming they were, seeing only a rainbow above calm, blue waters of the bay.

  Maggie did not tell Jamie about a dream that had repeated itself night after night for a full week. She was lying in bed staring up at the sky, in it a pattern of illuminated stars forming a cross, the width of it angled against the length. One after another the stars fell on her, finding a place all over her body, icy stars imbedding themselves in her skin. The sky went black. She woke shivering, a dread inside her that took a while to be swallowed by sleep.

  12

  Elizabeth had been delighted to see Maggie all grown up and courting her brother. She was seeing a young man herself, despite her father’s disapproval.

  After a walk along the beach, Tim kissed Elizabeth at the gate and made a swift departure for fear William would fire a shot above his head and he’d been running for his life.

  William stood by the kitchen window and watched his daughter fasten the gate and walk toward the house. “She’s only a child,” he said, “with not a clue about the wiles of men.”

  Mary Jane put down her needlework. “She’s a woman! She won’t learn how to handle men if you don’t let her.”

  “By the time she learns she’ll have done things she might not be able to undo,” William said. He had tried to scare Elizabeth into staying home. One night he rigged a sheet between the apple trees to ma
ke her believe a ghost roamed the place. Another night she came home after her father and mother had gone to bed. Her experience with William’s tricks had taught her to be cautious. She crept up the stairs, smiling as she ducked to avoid the bag of nails her father had hung from the ceiling. He could forget it! She was on to him.

  “Silly man, you is!” Mary Jane said. “No one in his right mind would hang a bag of nails above the stairs. If Elizabeth bangs in it, all it’ll do is wake us up.”

  “Then we’ll know what ungodly hour she comes home,” William retorted.

  “A little after ten, most times,” Mary Jane said.

  “He’s got the old Irish trait,” Mary Jane told Elizabeth after one of his shenanigans. “He seems to forget that Maggie, Jamie’s coosie, is much the same age as yourself.”

  Soon after, Elizabeth told her mother, “Store owner Caleb Butler on Bell Island wants a woman to do light housework and run some errands. I’m eighteen now.”

  “You’re getting out from under your father, that’s what you’re doing,” Mary Jane said.

  Elizabeth gave her father an impish look. “You can save your bag of nails for when I haves a man who wants to build me a house. He’ll need a few nails to keep the boards together.”

  “Ump!” William said.

  Elizabeth eased out of her family’s life by boarding the passenger vessel for Bell Island. Her mother’s last words reverberated in her ears as she got off the ferry. “Never give a man more than you’re willin’ to lose. You could pay for it the rest of your life.”

  Caleb Taylor had offered Elizabeth a job, though she hadn’t known why at the time.

  One day she asked Caleb if he ever went seal hunting. A strange look crossed his face. “Agards er me shootin’ ere seal, it’ll stay in the sea,” he said.

  Caleb’s wife told Elizabeth, “Caleb never picks up a gun, not after what happened.”

  Caleb came back into the room and she stopped. “What’re you two gatchin’ about?”