He chuckled, and her face relaxed. Then they both burst into laughter.
After the train had long gone, taking Elizabeth, William stood on his doorstep looking across the waters separating him and his little girl. “I hope Jacob can make you laugh at your own words,” he whispered into the cold air, “and that he can spell you a happy long life.”
That night Mary Jane lay in bed, her loosened grey hair, still soft and silky, spread across her pillow. She drifted to the time when she had married Edward Kennedy. Now her daughter was gone off, married to a Kennedy, relating them on both sides.
She kept busy the day after Elizabeth left for Hibb’s Cove. She had to, telling herself, It’s the way of the world, children leavin’ home. She straightened up from the mattress she was fluffing in Elizabeth’s room and glanced out the bedroom window. Jamie and Maggie were coming down the hill holding hands and swinging their arms. They tripped over lumps of snow in their path and pitched forward. They threw their heads back and laughed merrily. Mary Jane could see that they were at ease with each other. She had been like that with Edward. That kind of completion was so strong and yet so fragile. They’re full of life now, bless ’em. They never think of the hourglass drainin’, time peterin’, every day spent meanin’ fewer days left.
“Smile at each other and laugh often,” Mary Jane told them when they came inside.
She had better get to work and bleach some flour and sugar bags for pillowcases and bedsheets for Maggie, as she had done for Elizabeth. She would embroider flowers on the pillowcases so that when winter winds howled and the land holding flower seeds lay in storage, the bright flowers would lie under the young lovers’ heads, catching their eyes now and then. She planned to embroider Maggie and Jamie’s names on the wide hem of the pillowcases. She knew Maggie’s young face would flush to know her mother-in-law could foresee her and Jamie between the sheets, loving each other, holding each other in sleep. It was what Mary Jane cherished most about her and William’s time together. She had been amused to overhear William tell Jamie, “Now son, the main difference between men and women is that they have bumps in different places. How these bumps are handled will make all the difference in how you get on in married life.”
Jamie had looked at him, his face reddening with embarrassment.
Mary Jane shook her head against her musings and went downstairs. She touched Jamie’s face on a snapshot he had taken in St. John’s. He told her about the large box on a tripod and how the photographer had poked his head under a black cloth. He saw a flash like lightning from the black, hooded camera and then the photographer pulled back from under the cloth and smiled. “You’ve been snapped,” he said. “Come back for the photograph next month.”
Mary Jane murmured, “A flash of light and there you were, your likeness set. Something to behold. When you’re in your grave you’ll still be there, the young face and eyes of you.”
Jamie had come inside in time to hear her add, “You’ll never grow old.” He gave her a startled look.
She shook her head. “Oh—my! I mean on the snap. It will always keep you this age.”
13
The train rumbled, jerked, lapped the miles to Brigus Junction while Elizabeth lay with her head on Jacob’s shoulder. In her mind she composed the notice of their marriage for the social events of the Southern Shore newspaper: Jacob Taylor Kennedy (of William James Kennedy and Sarah Ann nee Taylor) married Elizabeth Emma Maley (of William James Maley and Mary Jane Maley née Bussey, formerly Kennedy) Jan. 3, 1912 at Foxtrap. The Right Reverend E. Petten performed the wedding ceremony. . . . She would post it for the next week’s news.
Elizabeth fell asleep and woke to the lonely whoo-ooo of the train as it rushed toward the station, and then rough braking as the locomotive screeched and slowed. It pulled into Brigus Junction and stopped. She quickly came to life as cold air entered the coach. She pulled her heavy woollen coat around her against a cold wind drifting through the train car. She slipped her hand inside Jacob’s arm and he squeezed it tight. He lifted an eyebrow. “Happy?” he asked.
She nodded and he reached to cup her other hand lying in a fist on her lap.
“For better or worse,” he said. “I’m hoping for better. By being together we’ll half whatever worse comes.”
She and Jacob stepped down from the train to a waiting horse and sleigh. The driver from Port de Grave greeted them and helped lift their luggage onto the sleigh before clearing a seat behind him for the couple to sit. He drove down through the Dock, over Bareneed Hills, down Happy Jack’s Hill.
Port de Grave stretched above the sea like a knuckled and bent finger. Along the finger stood houses, cottages, and fishing stages. The sleigh bumped over hardened snow along the rugged edges of the jagged highland. Below them the sea thrashed about, flinging itself against the cliffs, white spray rising and falling.
They rode past Pond Road to the cove and up under a fish flake roofing the road halfway up Porter’s Hill. Rails bordering the edge of cliffs stood askew like a drunken man. The horse’s nostrils flared, its hot breath steaming against cold air as it climbed the steep hill to Cliff Path. While it stopped for a spell Elizabeth refrained from looking to the edge of the road, for fear the skidding sleigh would slide over and down into the dark sea below. The driver urged the horse across and down Cliff Path and along the foot, then up Kennedy’s Hill beside Jacob’s home. The sea breathed through the air an exhalation of a dark ghost whose heavy, salty breath had journeyed through eons from the mouth of the earth’s beginning. It touched Elizabeth’s face, its mystery enveloping her.
Fleeces of snow stretched across headlands rising above the cove like colossal beasts, their rugged backs holding ochre-red sheds, barns, square and rectangled yellow and white houses, fish flakes, and outhouses looking as if they could easily be lifted away by a strong wind.
Fishing stages jutted out from small beaches necklining the cove like the rugged throat of an old man.
“This place in winter is not the best,” Jacob said with a warning glance. “But you’ll adjust. We’ll spend the night at Ma’s and then tomorrow we’ll start gettin’ the house in order.”
Elizabeth’s mind dragged details to the surface. Jacob had told her about Sarah Ann, born of Jacob Taylor in Ship Cove on December 28, 1853 . . . married William Kennedy on January 23, 1879, at St. Luke’s Church when she was twenty-six . . . could read and write . . . a great hand with the needle and fancy work, especially in her after years . . . a strict Church of England member . . . tall and a fair size, though not fat . . . long legs which came in handy.
At the sound of sleigh bells Sarah Ann opened the front door. She took in the length and breadth of Elizabeth as she alighted. “Goodness!” she said. “Will she be able to work?”
On the train Jacob had remarked that a fisherman’s wife needed legs on her like longers to have the strength to climb the steep Kennedy Hill from the stage, and strong arms to bear the handles of a wheelbarrow holding soaking wet fish.
Now Elizabeth cringed at her mother-in-law’s words. They think their sons have to answer to them on the qualifications of a wife.
“I can do whatever Jacob requires of me,” Elizabeth answered primly. She followed the woman inside. Then a bit of her father crept to the surface and she added, “As long as he does what I require of him.”
Jacob’s brother, George, leaned back on his chair, pulling on his braces. They snapped and he came forward, his face lifted. “Who’s you, a’tall?”
Elizabeth answered, “I thought you knew me. I’m Jake’s wife.”
“I know of you, me maid,” George said. “Come on in and bide.”
A young woman leaning on the baluster of the stairs stepped away and came through the hall.
“’Tis Vine, there,” William called. “She’s George’s woman.”
Alvina was short and soft-faced with an e
asy smile, though a sour look crossed her face at the sight of a slim bride. “Not hardy, that one!” she said under her breath.
“Have a bite,” Sarah Ann urged. “There’s pea soup and doughboys on the stove and none the better for having to wait.”
* * * * *
That night Elizabeth held Jacob’s hand as they climbed the stairs to their bedroom. She was unsure how she would handle seeing Jacob in nothing but his small clothes. Perhaps she’d put out the lamplight before then. She moved to turn down the counterpane and flannelette sheets. She drew back when she saw an apple-pie bed. Someone had made the bed with the sheets folded short so that it was impossible to stretch the length of the mattress.
“At least there’s no rice or pickled fish,” Jacob said just before he saw movement at the foot of the bed.
Elizabeth screamed as a mouse scurried to the floor. Jacob’s shoe dropped the fleeing mouse dead in its tracks.
“Wait until I get the chance,” Jacob promised. “I’ll give George a bedtime story.”
George, in the next room, wrapped his arm around Alvina and whispered, “That’s the most we’ll be hearin’ out of that room tonight.”
“You’re the funny one,” she answered, pushing away his hand.
“Now, now,” he coaxed. “Don’t be trying to get over me time.”
That night Elizabeth dreamed she saw a field of flowers tight in their bulbs, suddenly bursting open with children, their arms and legs like white petals, faces round and cheery. Cliffs were nowhere in sight. But there were clouds, heavy and black, an ominous presence bearing down.
14
The next morning Elizabeth woke to the sound of the sea below the cliffs taking in great gulps of breath and whooshing it out repeatedly as it beat against the towering cliffs siding small patches of beach. She slid away from Jacob, got up, and stood at the window, its pane crusted by salted sea air.
The house of Jacob and George’s grandfather had been built on a 200-foot cliff, a lofty distance straight up from the sea, the dwelling a cliffhanger in raging winds. The brothers and their sisters were born in the little saltbox house that always held the sound of the sea, the music of the wind, and the serenade of birds, or—as Sarah Ann told it—the ruction of the sea, the tantrums of the wind, and the crackle of wild seabirds.
Some days a northeasterly wind beat at the house like a bare-knuckled boxer bent on knocking the building down over the cliff. There the sea waited with a ferocious, frothing mouth and bared black teeth. Other days wind blew through open windows like hefty arms hooked through a window on one side of the house, through to the other side, as if trying to lift the house and let it sail out and down to a boiling sea. The house stayed strong. Its front porch, opposite the cliff, hugged the dusty narrow road at the top of a hill that levelled off to a small meadow and on to more cliffs and more homes built on their edge.
George, the oldest son, had helped his father replace his old house and the weathered fence along the cliff eaten into by sea-salted winds. A whitewashed picket fence now bordered its edge and went back toward a knob of hill where it was fastened. George gave the new house a fresh start with a wife. Alvina often complained about the chute under the fence, which was used to empty the slop pail. George had promised to hook a fishing net over it but he never did. “Two generations have been raised mere feet from the cliff without incident,” he told her. “Children have two eyes in their heads, don’t they?”
Jacob followed Elizabeth to the window. She gave him a sympathetic look. “So this is where you were born, on a cliff so close to the edge a sneeze could knock you over. Foxtrap is a tamer place.”
Jacob slipped his arm across her back and squeezed her shoulder. “Ah, but I’m not there.”
After breakfast they walked down the hill and up a bank of land to the framed house Jacob was building in the shelter of high, cragged hills. “Up from the beach and in from the cliffs,” Jacob said with satisfaction.
Elizabeth drew in the scent of new wood. Then she took in the sight of fish flakes standing at the edge of the cliffs, one down from William’s house and another on the outreaching cliff.
“The flakes are bare now,” Jacob said. “They’ll be loaded down come summer.”
“And I suppose I’ll be expected to stand atop the flakes on the cliffs and spread fish to the edge and not a fence to catch me if I trip.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Jacob promised.
He looked toward the Kennedy fishing stage fitted haphazardly into the cliff, its square, dapple-grey skull holding openings like black, sightless eyes. Strong winds swept over the water, gathering its salty mist as it beat into the cove. Water lashed the head of the stage jutting out over the beach.
Jacob pointed to The Hunter, an eighteen-foot punt. “Ours is the last one out, sitting like a tongue in the mouth of the cove. See it?”
Elizabeth followed his gaze to the anchored boat with a sail tight to its aft mast like a man along for a lazy ride. She nodded and turned away, lonely for her home in Foxtrap and her real family. Jacob had to be enough to keep her here—Jacob and the life she was bound to live in sickness and in health.
And in loss! The words leaped up before she could stop them.
“You built our house in a graveyard,” she said as she made her way to the back of the house.
“Not in—outside of.” Jacob gave her a wry smile. “The headstones were here before we were and they’ll likely be here after we’re gone. The livin’ should live beside the dead to remind us that we’re sojourners on earth.”
“I’m sure there’s reminders,” Elizabeth said. A sensation, like cold fingers, pressed the small of her back.
When night fell she looked up at the stars twinkling above a dark sea heavy with an aloneness that stretched from the cove straight across the bay to the dim lights of Foxtrap.
The shadows of the dark cliffs haunted her sleep.
15
Jamie heard a rush of footsteps and a voice calling: “Titanic has sunk! It hit an iceberg.”
He lifted his head from where he was leaning to plane the side of a boat model. He stared at Lavinia, his young cousin, her small face flushed from running. “Go on! Who dreamed that?” he asked.
“Well, it’s true then,” Lavinia told him. “I heard it as I was passin’ Rideout’s lumberyard. The men sittin’ on the rock wall outside were all abroad with the news. A newspaper was passed around with accounts of what happened. She hit an iceberg on the fourteenth of April and sank on the fifteenth.”
Jamie laid aside his boat model and walked down the road. Men were marling about, taking each other’s comments with a spit of tobacco and a headshake and adding their penny’s worth.
One skipper, off a fishing schooner, umped, “Thought it was mightier than an iceberg. Sure now, that’s how much its captain knew about sea mountains.”
“What did it think it was gonna do a’tall, stare it down,” another man said, spewing a mouthful of tobacco into a bank of corned snow.
A sea captain from a Labrador voyage narrowed his eyes and gazed out into the bay. He shook his head. “Only the sun can stare it down.”
On and on went the conversation. The men talked about the ship’s passengers caught in the hold like a net load of fish, and others cast into the sea, flapping about like fish tails.
“And how many were saved?” Jamie asked.
“No one knows yet, me son,” the old skipper said. “She was a great ship.”
The truth of the grave news took hold of Jamie from the top of his head to the tips of his toes and he ran down the rough path to the shed beside the beach. Red-faced and gasping for breath, he stopped when he reached the shed. His father was outside making an eel trap. He looked up. “You’re all in a tear. For what, me lad?”
Jamie leaned, his palms on his knees, and got his breath
. He swallowed, settled himself, and spilled his news. “The ship that wasn’t supposed to sink has sunk!”
William straightened up. “What ship might that be?”
“Titanic is her name. I read about her in the newspapers while she was being built. I remember tellin’ yer all about her.”
His father stood up and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “Aw, not a’tall. That ship can’t be gone. Sure, ’twas said God couldn’t sink her.”
Jamie shook his head. “Well, He made something that could, and it did.”
“That’s little to do with us,” William said, though he felt a shiver. He turned to pick up his work.
Jamie continued, “She sank off our shores and a load of people gone to the bottom with her.”
William dropped his trap, shaded his eyes, and looked out to sea, riveting his gaze along Kelly’s Island and across the far stretch of blue waters as if he was expecting to see debris and corpses.
“Not that close,” Jamie said. “According to reports in the newspaper, Titanic sank about 372 miles from St. John’s on the best kind of a moonlit night, the sea smooth as water in a jug. The ship scattered passengers who hadn’t made it to lifeboats—all fallin’ from great heights to the calm sea spotted with pans of ice. There was hardly a chance of survivin’.”
William was reminded of when he was a child and an ice pan had drifted in over Foxtrap beach carrying the body of a young man, his legs trailing the water. He appeared to have struggled against the steel cold net of sea closing in on him and had stretched across the pan, both arms above his head, his face like a porcelain dish, his hands like carved stone—like Johnny might have been had he not been shot and saved by Caleb. Grown-ups had raced to the beach and waded into the icy water to bring the man to shore. They lifted him, a cold junk, his clothes stiff like garments pinned on a clothesline in the dead of winter. The victim was buried in All Saints graveyard, a wooden cross above his grave. For a long time after, William often glanced toward the ocean, his mind uneasy.
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