Ghost of the Southern Cross

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  Tight in each other’s arms in the warmth of their bed Jacob and Elizabeth drifted away from the day, away from any thoughts of the sea and the wind, away from everything.

  Elizabeth awakened in the dark of late winter mornings sometimes spooned in sleep, Jacob’s strong chest against her back, his hands cupping her soft belly. Other times they woke sharing each other’s warmth back to back, Jacob reaching for Elizabeth’s hand and twining his and hers, warm in the cold air. They were two people lying, smiling, wanting to belong to each other for the rest of their lives.

  Their bedroom window framed a long stretch of water to where the sun’s first light splashed. Elizabeth walked to the landing and looked out from a house that seemed as high as the sky. The sun was so bright against her window she imagined going down to the sea’s edge and warming her hands by its fire flickering on the water.

  Mornings when the wind softly brushed its tangy tongue against the windowpane she opened the window, letting the sea’s breath permeate the house.

  “Men came from far away to live here, to own land and grow livin’ things from the soil, and have a net in the sea,” said Jacob. “This is our piece of land to have and to hold and our sea to harvest until kingdom come.”

  “Until death do us part,” she had replied.

  And my belly will grow hard with children. Elizabeth’s hands went to her flat belly. I hope.

  Spring came, its winds like a razor some days and soft as fur other days. It was heralded by sounds of hammer and maul against wood ringing over the still waters of the cove as fishermen repaired fishing stages. Others lifted nets into large iron pots hung over a fire. The strong odour of boiling tar and bark, used to preserve the nets, drifted to open windows. Curtains danced in the breeze like the veils of June brides.

  The season brought a brightness to the land above the jagged cliffs. Soft, wispy grasses stirred in gentle winds and bent to the ground as if the ghost of a pirate was tramping through, his heavy boots bending the grass as he passed on by to the lighthouse on Green Point where it was rumoured he lived. The seemingly barren point of land held patches of moss hiding berry treasures for winter jams and pies.

  Nature had found a way to bring its spring song to cliffs bared by winter’s burn. Out of scant soil blown into crevices, fragile-looking bluebells, buttercups, and dandelion flowers sprang up to dance in soft winds. Birds filled the air with trilling calls to mates as they sought cliff nooks and shrubs to nest in. The sky squeezed its mild spring rains on wild peas and hop clover and into hand-ploughed land. Soil was turned and seed sown for vegetables to be ready for a fine autumn harvest. Days grew bright and Elizabeth forgot the cold face of winter.

  Sometimes, on a dull morning, she fingered the gold band on her finger and gazed through the upstairs window to the smoky image of land across the waters and back to the wild cove where tongues of wind off the sea spread a briny scent over the seaside gardens. It mingled with the damp smell of the earth roused from winter’s sleep, its heart beating with life. Elizabeth’s vegetable gardens slanted up to the hills on both sides of the house. She dropped the eyes of cut potatoes in beds and turned the soil over them. She coaxed life out of the sparse soil and the ground miraculously responded to her touch. Jacob fertilized the gardens with animal manure, trenching each drill.

  Gardening reminded Elizabeth of spring in Foxtrap, when the scent of scythed grass drifted up from her father’s inland meadow. She remembered running barefoot across the ground, soft grass tickling her feet. Her father and her uncle ploughed their farmland, its rich, dark earth breathing under their feet, its soft belly laid open to receive seed.

  By autumn the ground delivered out of its great, pregnant belly lacy green ferns holding clusters of carrots as orange as a sunset forecasting a good day, potatoes as white as a new moon, and cabbages as green as new grass. Only the parsnips looked strange, ancient and knobbed, like aged fingers. Still, they sweetened stews and soups. After a day’s harvest Elizabeth’s mother stirred lemon crystals in a jug of water. Elizabeth remembered running up from the beach, her throat parched, and lifting a glass to draw in the smooth, velvety taste of the cool drink.

  Jacob had already gone down to his store loft one morning when Elizabeth woke, her stomach feeling full of bilge water. She reached for the pot under the bed and retched. The room whirled and she sat back down on the feather mattress, her mind caught in a terrible thought: I hope I don’t have influenza. Not now, when there’s so much work in the garden and soon on the stagehead.

  She tightened her lips in resolve. If bluebells can survive in the cracks of cliffs, I can survive anything! I will!

  Elizabeth came down the stairs one morning, turned the glass knob on the inside door, then unlatched the storm door. There came a flutter inside her like a little bird going to wing. She touched her belly, felt its hardness. She had been too young to notice her mother’s growing belly before Jamie was born. She had not heard anyone talk about the first signs of life. Now and then there had been talk about the first signs of birth—a neighbour murmuring behind her hand to her mother that so and so was sick, meaning she was in labour. No one had told her about the unexpected instant when the baby moved inside a woman’s body. Nothing could compare to that moment of awareness. Her body, like the earth in spring, was awakening to new life. It was her strange, unbelievable secret to be shared, for now, with only one other human being.

  Jacob, coming up the lane, took in her stunned look and knew that nothing else in the world could create such an expression. Elizabeth’s hands went to her belly. She whispered, “Our baby.”

  Jacob smiled, his eyes moistening. He reached to cup his hands over hers, his words tender. “A child of two hearts, yours and mine.”

  Jacob had decided not to go back to the iron ore mine. He would fish with George instead of his father, who wasn’t well.

  “I’ll be falling back on me father’s ways,” he told Elizabeth. “You married a miner but you’ll be living with a fisherman.”

  “And helping with the work of a fisherman,” she said as she sat cutting Jacob a suit of oil clothes from flour bag material to be waterproofed with two coats of linseed oil. She used an old pair of oilskins for a pattern, but the briny stench of fish offal ingrained in its cracks and seams nauseated her. She picked up the clothes and went out on the landing to work just as Alvina and Sarah Ann came up the lane.

  “Soon Jacob won’t have time to draw his breath,” Sarah Ann said.

  Elizabeth had cut out the new coveralls and was lifting the old jacket to make a pattern for the new one when she began to urge. She ran behind the shed and threw up.

  “That’s it,” Sarah Ann said when she came back. “Your belly is on for rising. I’ll get you some hard bread to suck on. That’ll help when you’re on the stagehead.”

  Elizabeth felt the colour rise in her face as she became aware of what her mother-in-law was saying. Soon everyone would know.

  18

  Jacob and George left most mornings, except on Sunday, to go far out into the bay before sunrise.

  Some mornings, when Elizabeth got out of bed and looked out, a grey sky appeared to have dropped around the house. She went downstairs and unlatched the door. Salty, damp wind breathing through thick fog and cold as the belly of a fish pressed against her face. Other times the easterly wind blew so fierce that when she opened the door it slammed shut against her face. Those mornings Jacob stayed on land and helped with the gardens.

  One clear morning in early June, Jacob eased out of bed and lifted the curtains to the window. It had blown hard during the night and the men had delayed their trip. Elizabeth lay in bed gazing at the clear view. In the distance the rim of ocean held the blazing sun burning its way above the sea. Its saffron glow spread across the bedroom wall like melted gold. The wind had blown itself out and now it was the finest kind of a morning.

  Soo
n skiffs and punts were sailing out of the cove under the watchful eyes of women standing at their windows. As the day warmed, windows were opened to sea breezes, lace curtains dancing in the breeze while the women went about their work, washing, mending, cooking, and baking, always with an eye on the bay, knowing that their men’s work would be their work as soon as the fishing boats came home.

  Often windows holding the sheen of evening light became dark lengths of glass in evening shadows before fishermen arrived home after fighting rough seas. Elizabeth, Alvina, Sarah Ann, and other women and children of the cove gazed out over the bay intent on spotting their men’s voyaging boats, hopefully low in the gunnels, their barked canvas sails full and billowing, coming home laden like a woman about to deliver. If they were late Elizabeth felt shaky as a fishing flake in a storm of wind.

  Jacob and George came home often with a load of codfish, tails flapping against each other, their gills showing a pink under-plate as they panted for water, black eyes staring, light fading. Elizabeth had once asked her father if fish cry. He had shrugged and told her, “If they do it’s not loud enough to get anyone’s sympathy.”

  William Kennedy, no longer strong and vibrant, hobbled down the hill to the stagehead where Jacob had pierced a tin can and set in it a light that outlined the figures like a phantom scene etched on the night. He watched his sons prong fish and throw them up on the stagehead. Then he hobbled back to his house satisfied to snuff his lamp. He dragged himself to bed and lay beside Sarah Ann to wait for tomorrow, hoping his health would not worsen.

  Under light glowing on the stagehead above a dark sea the couples worked hard, their faces weary. Alvina and Elizabeth filled a puncheon with buckets of clear spring water flowing by the side of the stage. Elizabeth’s hands slid into the cold water without her realizing its bite. The jolt surged through her whole body, settling like a pain in the pit of her stomach.

  Alvina took in her drawn, white face. “This is life as it is in the cove,” she said. “You’ll get used to it just as you’ll get used to the stench of fish blood on days when the sun is strong enough to burn your skin.”

  “Ump! You women’s too nish,” George said, grabbing a fish, thumb and finger in its eyes, and slapping it on the splitting table. He cut it across the throat and down its gut, straight to the tail. Biting wind veered into Elizabeth’s face and eyes as she gutted the steely cold cod. There was no shelter from it. Elizabeth’s mind often drifted away to other chores that needed to be done. They piled inside her head, making it heavier than her hands holding the dead weight of a codfish. She slid the fish to Alvina, who took it and banged its head against the side of the table. The body came off, cut clean, and the head slipped down a hole in the stagehead. Seagulls rose from cliffs and dropped to the water with maddening cries.

  Two swift strokes of Jacob’s knife and the sound bone was out, leaving the fish as flat as a maple leaf.

  “Cold enough to skin you, that it is,” Alvina told Elizabeth as they changed places.

  It was also cold in the stage when there was an upwind as they wheeled barrows of split white flesh over the long grey platforms into the ash-grey stage. They bulked the fish, piles and piles of it, sprinkles of salt raining down on each layer. Despite the cold, Elizabeth was sweating. She lifted a weary wrist to wipe her forehead. Lamplight, a misty halo around it, flickered on the stage walls like shadowy ghosts. She glanced at the light. A tiny flame could cut through the darkness of night. Only sleep could push away the weight of a day’s toil.

  Finally, Jacob dropped a pail on a rope down into the water, filled it, and drew it up to wash the stagehead. George put the boat on collar and came back to the stagehead in the flat. All across the cove, one by one, stages were emptied of people as lightened vessels were put on collar. Doors opened and closed as houses gathered tired fisherfolk.

  Elizabeth could hear the rumbling noise of the stage rails under the tramp of her and Jacob’s feet as they dragged themselves up the path, crossed the road, and trudged up the lane to the house. Elizabeth tended to water blisters that had formed on Jacob’s chafed palms, dressed them and the sores on his back. The sweat of hard work and salt spray were tough on a fisherman’s skin. Jacob never complained. One more time he’d made it home from the capricious ocean thankful not to have come home with a water haul—all water and no fish.

  Elizabeth’s voice was heavy. “Land is strong and steady beneath our feet. That’s why me father is a farmer. I fear the sea. It got power the land knows nothing about.”

  “I know,” Jacob admitted. “Once I let go of the land and go on the water in a flimsy craft I’m at the sea’s mercy. It teases me, rocks me, fights me, but it don’t swallow me.”

  “Not yet,” Elizabeth said.

  “The mines, too, take their victims,” Jacob reminded her. “When I’m out on the water, away from shore, and I looks in on the land, it becomes a different place. Houses and stages are dabs on the landscape, unfamiliar and mysterious. I see children spreadin’ fish on flakes, a man rakin’ his garden uphill, a mother wheelin’ a child, and I feels thankful to be a part of this earth, part of this place.”

  He stopped and smiled. “There’s nothing more wonderful than to stand in a boat miles from shore, draw in the crystal clear air as if it’s comin’ from a far land and a distant time, its winds sweepin’ the ocean. Often I watch the sun rise and blaze over the water until I’m caught in a glorious light. Other times when I don’t get home until after sunset and the moon’s a crescent reflecting earthshine from the sun, the sea and earth takes on a magical aura. Other times when there’s no moon our lamp’s light beams over the water, dancing like silver stars on the slate-black sea. Not a’tall like bein’ down in the mines.”

  Elizabeth listened, keeping silent.

  In bed she lay thinking about the weight of water on her husband’s nets and his struggle to harvest fish against tides and winds, sometimes in foul weather. She had chosen Jacob. He had chosen their way of life. She closed her eyes. Morning would come fast.

  Soon, Elizabeth and Alvina barrowed the salted fish bedded in the stage across to a dank cavern with a pebbled floor slanted toward the stage. Sunlight sometimes made rainbows in the trickle of water running down over the rocks. Here, with the sounds of waves crashing on the beach below them, the women washed fish in water cold as ice. An old sail against the mouth of the opening kept out wind and the rain.

  Once fish was washed it had to be cured. Day after day Elizabeth and Alvina loaded the hand barrow—a four-handle flat tray—with wet fish and bent their backs to tighten their hands on the handles. The barrow swayed under their tired hands as they lifted it. They faced the climb up the steep, rocky path to the road, where they tramped up Kennedy’s Hill, their heels bearing the weight of the barrow. Atop cliffs, extending to a brink more than a hundred feet above the sea, fish flakes spread out like tables covered in boughs and secured with fishing nets. Elizabeth and Alvina locked their legs as they leaned to spread wet, flattened fish.

  They carried barrow after barrow of the heavy fish to catch a mellow sun. If the sun grew too hot the fish had to be shaded; if it rained it had to be covered. At night it had to be bundled and wrapped tight against the chance that fish flies would leave eggs to turn to maggots. Most times the women were fortunate to have the white flesh turn golden under a warm sun and gentle winds. But there were times when fish had to be washed of maggots and spread to dry a second time.

  “You’re speckled like a codfish’s back,” Jacob teased when freckles sprang up over Elizabeth’s arms like summer flowers. Her breasts were filling, swelling, her belly rising. She loosened the strings on her apron, not caring who knew she was in bungalow.

  She kept herself busy and tried not to worry about Jacob out in rough weather. Her side window faced the meadow holding Charlie and Diana Kennedy’s house and a side garden across from the house where Jacob was born. Some nig
hts she looked up to see the warm light in Alvina’s window. Alvina, whose eyes weren’t as good as she would like, squinted to look back to the light in Elizabeth’s window. It made the women feel less lonely when the men were on the sea and late returning home.

  During the day Elizabeth often looked through the window up to where Alvina and Diana faced each other over a white picketed fence and chatted, taking moments to rest and commiserate on the day’s happenings. The women’s white aprons lifted in the wind. Beside them clothes on the line dipped and danced under the sun’s smile. Their work was long and tiring, moments of idleness sweet.

  From her upstairs window Elizabeth could see two grannies farther up in Lear’s Cove sitting outside their houses in ambient conversation. Curtains flapped against screened windows above their heads. Old women they were to Elizabeth. Sun lines traced paths through their faces and at the corners of their eyes, ingrained from lively looks piercing the distance out over the water for the dark shadows of their men’s boats coming home. Above the hill against the sky she made out the black, slanted roofs of houses built against the cliffs above Lear’s Cove. The women in those houses waited, too.

  Elizabeth walked up the hill to visit Alvina and Sarah Ann. A lone lilac tree was in full bloom outside the front of the house, its scent welcoming. Sarah Ann was out on her step bundling sprigs of flowers. When she saw Elizabeth she called, “I’m gatherin’ lilacs for me table. They’ll clear the house of the salt fish smell from dinner.”

  Elizabeth nodded. She went toward the door, stopping to turn and stare down into the throat of jutting black cliffs, and farther into the open mouth of the sea spitting tongues of foam. How can any woman have the nerve to raise children on those cliffs? she thought. Alvina will have to. My situation is not much better. She felt a fierce determination to protect her baby.

  By fall, in the stage a narrow path had formed between the layered walls of salted codfish. The hard edge of the flat, headless fish fanned out, hitching the clothes of cove children running through the stage. The briny smell of offal nipped between rocks under the stagehead spread through the air as the sun beat down, and the damp, raunchy smell of fish flesh was so strong Elizabeth could taste it. She was thinking it was spoiled, the lot of it.