When Jamie told his mother about Titanic she gave him a sad look. “It must have been an adventure to sail on such a fine ship, but what a terrible end to a fine beginning. Don’t you and Maggie be goin’ far in that boat you’re on for buildin’. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Jamie grinned. “Don’t you worry. Any boat I build is not goin’ to take me under.”
News of the 1912 tragedy spread along the Southern Shore, settling like a fog around seaside communities as updated newspaper accounts were passed around.
Jamie took pity on his uncle, stuck on his stool by the fire, and he often went to read to Johnny from newspapers he borrowed from Samuel Butler.
Sam, a man with a thick, grey beard and heavy eyebrows to match, kept all the reading material he bought. He stowed newspapers, gazettes, books—anything with words. He took a keen interest in news near and far, gathering it like a farmer his hay. The stories he could tell, all kinds that were happening every day in faraway places. Jamie got hungry thinking about them and, whenever he couldn’t hold himself back, he went down the road to Sam’s house.
Sam sometimes sat in his deceased wife’s rocking chair, pulling on his beard and ruminating. He was philosophical about Titanic. “Man’s foolhardiness is what sank the ship,” he said. “A captain can never be too confident. He needs to be aware always of the ghostly reach of a colossal iceberg, its massive cliff under the sea.”
Jamie learned from Sam that the minute Titanic hit the iceberg, awesome stories were made. An Irishman in St. John’s had been expecting his daughter. The night Titanic sank he dreamed Colleen was in the water. He awakened startled to see her standing before him dripping wet. Then she was gone like the blink of an eye.
Jamie imagined the Irish lass standing by a rail in Queenstown, Ireland. She looked out to sea and then back at the home she was leaving, her eyes large and deep-set, as if in shadows. She lifted her shoulders and turned her back, ready for a journey to a new life. Her last night closed in around her like a damp blanket as she stood on the deck of the tilting Titanic, shivering from the cold, and news that an unsinkable ship was sinking—taking her and her dreams.
Jamie and Maggie were reading a newspaper Jamie had borrowed from Sam when William turned to Jamie and asked, “If you had been on Titanic and had the chance to get into a lifeboat, would you have given a woman your place?” Then without waiting for Jamie to answer he looked at Maggie and asked, “Would you have let another woman go in your place?”
Startled by his question and unable to imagine herself on a sinking ship, Maggie took her time answering, her green eyes thoughtful. “It’s easy enough to say I would, knowin’ I don’t have to prove it. It might depend on another woman’s circumstance and mine.” She gave William an impish look. “If I’d gotten on the ship in Queenstown, during those four and a half days it would take to get to New York, I might have found my eye on an Irish boy. Two eyes on him and I might have gone wherever he went—into the lifeboat or into the sea.” She turned to Jamie. “If he’d looked like you, Jamie, me man, I’d’ve gone wherever he went.”
After he had listened to all the talk about Titanic, William spent a restless night. Turbulent dreams caught hold of him, smacking him awake. He lay thinking, For the love of God, I hope Jamie stays away from the icefields. If mighty ships can sink there’s less hope for smaller ships against icebergs and storms in a sea that shows no mercy.
He forgot his dreams once daylight broke abroad. Everything seemed safe. Jamie was home—for now.
16
William lifted a log onto the wood horse and Jamie kept it steady while his father sawed through the log and dropped it to the ground in lengths cut to fit the kitchen stove. He was setting another log in place when he noticed Jamie looking out over the water into the distance.
Jamie couldn’t help thinking about the majestic ship that had sailed into Atlantic waters unaware of a beautiful, mysterious leviathan veiled in the dark night, the ocean’s salty tongue on her icy body. Most captains of small and large ships were keenly aware of her, aware that only ten per cent of her showed above the surface. Beneath the water she was a solid, formidable threat that could not only wound a ship but destroy it. Jamie sensed the terror the captain and passengers must have felt standing on the decks of the wounded Titanic, silvery moonlight unable to cut through the darkness of the sea outside the periphery of the ship’s lights.
“What’s your mind holdin’ in, me son?” William asked.
“I think I’ll paint Titanic,” he answered.
William straightened up. “So you can. It’d be nothing at all for you to do.”
“I’ll get me boat built first.”
Jamie never saw a tree without visualizing its potential to become part of a boat or a house. He took his father’s horse and cart and went into the woods early one May morning. He was soon cutting trees, opening their sweet fresh scent. After tramping through thick brush he found what he’d hoped for. He came out of the woods with a log that had a good sweep for a stem. He sawed timbers and set the planed strips to dry in half-hearted sunshine, careful not to lay them under too-strong sunlight that would split the boards. He was happy as he slid into his chair at the table and lifted a cup of hot, bare-legged tea. His mother had made him a plate of toutons and covered them in molasses.
“You need a little sweetener this mornin’, Jamie, after all your work,” William said as he sat pouring tea from his cup into his saucer and slurping it. “Molasses makes you run uphill, and if you ever go to see your sister in Hibb’s Cove you’ll be going up a few hills.”
Jamie dug into his toutons, his mind on his boat. He looked at his father, his young face alive with anticipation. “I’ll be riding hills of waves once my boat is built.”
The boat would be patterned after one of his father’s models. He imagined her settling on the ocean as if she owned it and slicing through temperamental waters as swiftly as the steel blade of a knife. The boat would be big enough to voyage to Kelly’s Island to get a load of wood and rocks for the foundation of his and Maggie’s house. Maybe they would use the boat to take a jaunt over to Hibb’s Cove to see Elizabeth’s new home.
After breakfast Jamie rubbed his hand over a boat model his father had taken down off the wall. He turned it in his hands and nudged his mother. “See what I wrote on this side.”
She read the words: a tree must be set free to ride the waves.
Mary Jane gave her son an affectionate look, grateful to have one child still at home. “Sure, you got a way with words.”
William grunted. “Words and paint won’t feed him. I’ll tell you that.”
By late spring the punt was built, witch hazel laid in the stern for good luck. The boat didn’t look big from the sides, but when Maggie looked from the stern to the stem she imagined it full of children—a family load. Jamie took strips of oakum lying like fairy hair on the workbench. He pulled the oakum apart, its strong tarry smell on his hands as he rolled it and pressed it between the seams of his boat. The Old World permeation made him think of ancient ships, sailors, rum, and bilge water. He and his father filled its cracks and nailheads with putty and tar.
William’s rough hand slid over the underside of the boat, which he had helped Jamie plane smooth as an egg and hard like the belly of an expectant mother. In time it would mate with the sea, its belly growing heavy with a day’s catch.
The men rigged the boat with a sail and removed the shores holding her up. Cousins Noah and Thomas Bussey came to help haul the boat down to the beach. They watched the Mary Jane face the waves with a gentle roll before righting herself on the water.
Noah, the older cousin, shook his head. “Ah, me boy, you must’n be goin’ far in her. The sea is a tempting wench. Be mindful of her wiles. She’ll play with you, pull you to her until you’re under her skirts, twisted in them and smothered.”
“I’ll stay on top of her,” Jamie replied. “I’ll ride her like a master.”
“So do,” Noah said, slapping him on the back.
The cousins turned their backs to go up the lane and Jamie’s look followed them. He was thinking how lucky they were to have had a ticket on this March’s sealing voyage. He turned back to tending his boat. I’ll have one next year.
William was a farmer who loved to turn the soil to sow vegetables, but he also loved the feel of fish flopping about his feet as he sculled home with a fresh fish for supper. He and Jamie took time from farming to net codfish and salmon and salt them for the winter. By July they had enough codfish to fill a flake for drying. They caught so many fish one morning when the sea was rough that the boat almost swamped. Jamie was bailing as fast as his arm could swing. “It’s hard toil, this is,” he muttered.
“Cutting the spade through soil without rain to soften it is hard work, too,” William answered as he sculled the boat through the wild sea. “It’s hard on the spirit when the crop can’t make it to harvest. Still, a man can hold a piece of land. He’ll never own a piece of the ocean.”
* * * * *
Maggie leaned against the risings of the Mary Jane for her first ride. She listened to the rhythmic knock of Jamie’s oars against thole-pins, waves swimming along the boat like porpoises. White sparks flew against salty tongues of baffling winds licking her skin. They sailed to Kelly’s Island, where Jamie took a piggin, stuck in the boat’s gunnels for bailing, and waded into the water. He filled it with blue mussels. Maggie walked on the sandy beach gathering driftwood. Wild birds soared above the sea, dipping as Jamie made a fire and boiled the mussels. He and Maggie ate the succulent morsels while they watched birds settle on the diamond winks of blue water. Afterwards Maggie nestled against Jamie, closing her eyes. She didn’t feel the need for conversation. Silence had a gentle conversation all its own.
After they came ashore in Foxtrap, Maggie went down the lane and out of sight. William let out a laugh. “You got yourself a fine woman there, Jamie.” He whacked him on his back. “I saw you kiss her goodbye.” He leaned close with a twinkle in his eye. “You know you’re in love when you kiss a woman and it goes straight to your heart. If it goes down farther it may be lust, not love.”
Jamie blushed. Then, realizing his father was teasing him, he grinned. “Can’t it be both?”
William let out another laugh and slapped him again. “That’s me boy.”
Jamie set out to paint the ill-fated Titanic. He cut a piece of plywood. Then he took matchsticks and softened them into brushes with his teeth. He would use leftover house paint. A little white paint was left in the bottom of a can after Mary Jane painted the kitchen wall, some blue paint after she painted the pantry walls, and enough black paint after she painted the floorboards. If necessary he’d prick his finger for a bit of red in the flags.
The first time Maggie came to take a pattern off Elizabeth’s wedding undergarments for her own, Jamie didn’t see her until she touched his shoulder. His teeth were bearing down hard on a spent match, breaking its end into a fine brush as he leaned over a piece of board, his lips tight, his expressive, smoky eyes intense.
She ran her fingers through his thick curls and joked, “There you is, chewing on a match. Anyone would think there was no food in your mother’s cupboard.”
Jamie lifted his head slightly. He was too intent on what he was doing to answer. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forget the newspaper sketch he’d seen of Titanic off-balance, and then the drawing of her with her jaws raised in the air, people caught in her throat.
Maggie watched as he painted meticulously and sparingly, not wanting to waste a drop of paint.
“You’re paintin’ the ship cutting through the water,” she said. “I’d paint her goin’ down.”
Jamie looked up, his voice firm as he said, “I don’t want to paint her goin’ down like a drownin’ animal. I’m paintin’ her whole, majestic, as if she owns the ocean.”
Maggie didn’t voice what she was thinking: No one owns the ocean; it answers only to God.
A black Titanic took shape, bold and confident on a blue accommodating sea under a dark sky. Jamie painted her as if she still carried passengers with great expectations: children, parents, young lovers, people alone, rich and poor, the poor with only a few coins tucked in a valise, looking to fulfill dreams of finding a home in a new country. Other passengers were going to meet loved ones: a wife to meet her husband, children to meet a father, sweethearts to be united; all from different ranks in society. He imagined the steamer’s occupants, all enjoying a measure of comfort on the luxury ship, unaware that an iceberg could loom out of the waters like a ghost ship and turn their greatest adventure into a tragedy.
Jamie painted a man in the crow’s nest, the first person who would have seen the iceberg.
When he finished his painting, he hung it above the stove to dry.
His mother wiped her hands on her apron and looked up. “You’ve done some job, son. There she is, upright on the sea, moving along like she was meant to do. Still, I don’t want you goin’ out beyond the bay, maybe close to where Titanic sank.” She reached up and gave his ear a sharp nip.
He drew back, lifting an eyebrow. “Not that far. Never! Still, I suppose you’d rather I stayed in bed, the place where most everyone dies sooner or later.”
“Only because they’re sick,” she said. “It’s also where most people have their beginning.”
17
Jacob finished building a fine house for Elizabeth, an eight-room, two-storey dwelling. Below Kennedy’s Hill and in from the road, a gate opened to a lane going up to the house in a reach of land beneath sheltering hills. Just in from Cliff Path stood a storehouse built on large flat rocks beside the narrow road and a water well beside it. To each side of the house Jacob fenced land for a vegetable garden.
The new house was sheeted with wide pine boards that came from Jacob’s uncle, Samuel Taylor, after his storage shed on Taylor’s Hill in Ship Cove was torn down. To the side of the house facing Cliff Path was a porch entrance. Another door at the front of the house led into the hall and faced the sea. Around the corner, facing Jacob’s childhood home, Jacob had built a landing and a second porch, the storage area holding buckets of clear, cool water. Elizabeth made porch mats from ravelled-out brin bags for each doorway.
“A woman’s kitchen window usually frames the sea,” Jacob said, taking a jug from a row of jugs, gifts from the cove women, hanging along the kitchen shelves. He went to dip it into the bucket in the porch. “Ours don’t. It will be your choice to look out through the hall door facing the sea.”
He slipped his arm around Elizabeth’s waist and they walked through the kitchen and in through the hall, passing a room on their right and one on their left. They made their way up stairs covered in canvas fastened by brass rods across each of the fourteen steps.
Jacob nodded toward a room, its window facing the sea. “A bedroom for us and there’s three others to fill with children or company,” he said.
“Is that so?” Elizabeth murmured. She laid her head on Jacob’s shoulders as if it had become too heavy. She had started on a journey that was no longer her own, a haphazard one. She had ceased to belong only to herself with the freedom to make her own choices. Her life had merged with Jacob’s and together they would face tomorrow, next year, and whatever time and their own actions brought.
Through the upstairs window Elizabeth looked toward the beach, above it a row of weather-grey stageheads, their sprawling legs in rocks protruding up from the seabed. Wooden walkways led to stage rooms built to store bedded pickled fish. The stageheads held roughly made tables, hooped barrels, puncheons, and, during the fishing season, men, women, and children. Through a side bedroom window she viewed the steep, narrow road leading up to Cliff Path. Beside it Jacob’s father had built a
shed, one side shored up with rocks as it leaned against the rocky hills. The bottom part was used to store hay. A ladder led to a loft where William and George worked at fishnets during the winter, mending some that had been torn by sharks or eaten into by mice. At the bottom of Cliff Path a lane led to Petten’s store, the other to William’s store. The doorstep of its stage was a plank against cliff rock beside a two-storey shed, another loft on top.
Elizabeth walked under the shadow of netted, bough-covered flakes at the bottom of Kennedy’s Hill and along an oblong, partitioned building—a red, rectangular two-door chicken coop attached to a coal pen, which was fastened to an outhouse rimming the cliff. Elizabeth went in and leaned to look down a hole. She drew back, startled that the toilet holes were hanging over the cliff. Waste going down the holes dropped into the sea’s whirlpool flush.
In the calm of softly falling snow for two days and nights the cove lay in a dazzling white blanket, hills and cliffs in soft curves and rumps. Nothing moved. Sound was hushed, the sea distant and black, swirling snow swallowed as fast as it fell. Suddenly there came dark figures in long woollen coats lining up with shovels to cut through snowdrifts, leaving walls on both sides of the road. On they came, faces whitened, moving like sealers against pinnacles of ice.
Late January, snow that had settled on the cliffs was blown away by strong winds. Hailstones pelted windows facing the sea. Elizabeth imagined them as pieces of cliff the wind was tearing away and flinging at the house.
Each winter night Jacob lifted the large oval rock he had warmed in the oven and carried it up to their bed. They pressed their feet against it, snug under flannel sheets and woollen blankets. Wind raged against the house and lashed the windows, whimpering at times as if it were the ghost of a lone fisherman left on the sea in a small boat, a man with no hope of finding his way home.
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