Jamie’s cry, “The scoundrel!” woke him. It was pitch black. He heard the shifting of the horse in her stall, imagined her lifting her head to the sound of him getting up from his straw bed. He left the barn, closing the door and sliding the latch in place. He hesitated before going into the house. A cold silence swept toward him as he opened the porch door and entered the kitchen. He spied his father sitting beside a lit lamp. The naked pate of his head looked alien in the lamplight, his eyes shadowed like caves. The fire had gone out and William sat with Mary Jane’s quilt around his shoulders. He had the look of a man who had lost everything.
William croaked, “I thought you had left me, too.”
“I won’t leave you,” Jamie said, believing it at that moment. He passed his father and forced himself to go upstairs to his room. A wave of hunger for his mother’s cooking assailed him. He longed for the warm breath of her baked bread and the aroma of meat covered in thick gravy along with new potatoes and cabbage. He remembered her small, worn hands reaching up to pick an apple from the tree, straining to grab one after another. He’d never forget the scent of sugar and cinnamon caramelizing inside her apple tarts and its sweet juice bursting up through the crusts.
He swallowed hard and looked toward his window facing the bay. I won’t forget you, Mamma, the way you lived, the good you did. You’d forgive me for gettin’ a berth and goin’ to the seal hunt next year. You thought sealin’ was dangerous, but here you is gone at sixty. Livin’ is dangerous.
From where he was sawing wood William’s head jerked up at the sound of laughter pealing out like a song on a clear day. He’d forgotten how a house could fill with laughter, how it could burst with energy as Maggie’s feet danced up and down the stairs like a bird in swift flight. He remembered how easy it was for a woman to bring a man to life. Mary Jane had done that to him, a bachelor, and added life through a pair of children. Now here he was again with a young woman in his house soon to be married to his son. He was hoping they’d give him grandchildren to fawn over.
Maggie and Jamie took the train to St. John’s. Places appeared to gallop past, keeping Maggie’s eyes busy as she sat by the window. Once off the train she took in the look of the place. St. John’s was like a hooked rug of colourful architecture against a background of hills hung on a blue wall of sky. She and Jamie eyed electric streetcars with wonder as they strolled down cobbled Water Street. Tall stone and brick buildings held black windows of mystery. Foreigners and locals swarmed the sides of the street, strange tongues and laughter a cacophony. A sign outside a shop read
read your fortune today for tomorrow
—only twenty-five cents.
Maggie turned to Jamie, lifting her chin as if to defy an objection. “I’ll have me fortune told, so I will.” She put her hand on the black wooden door and Jamie, willing to indulge her, pushed it open. Its heavy hinges creaked, startling them. They went in to the tinkling of a silver bell. The boxed entrance was lit by a candle in a black sconce; its golden light splashed the tin shield behind it. They hurried up narrow, planked stairs away from the candlelight to the blackness at the top of the stairs. Maggie grabbed Jamie’s arm. “What if this is Satan’s workshop and the woman is a bad spirit?”
Jamie let out a hearty laugh, his eyes alive with anticipation. “Go on with you! It’s all in fun.”
Maggie pulled him back. “If she tells us somethin’ awful about the future it’ll play on me mind.”
A heavy-set woman stepped from behind a thick dark curtain in misty lamplight. The woman’s face was trenched, hair grey and wispy around it. She wore a variegated scarf across her forehead. It hung down on one side to her neck. She introduced herself as Madam Tuscan.
“Come! Sit down,” she urged, her smile engaging. They stepped inside and Maggie dropped to a chair and held out one hand quickly. She closed her eyes as if it was going to hurt.
“Don’t be nervous, dear girl,” the woman said, leaning forward. “Fortune favours the brave. You’ve got a fairly smooth hand.” She looked intently. “There’s going to be a loss—a deep loss, not only for you but for many people.”
“And I suppose you knows what it is,” Jamie said lightly.
“You’ll be marrying a man whose surname is Christopher,” the fortune teller said.
“Indeed I won’t, then,” Maggie snapped. She pulled her hand away and stood up. “This is my man and he’s a Maley.”
“There’s not many with that name in this country,” the fortune teller said. Her brows crinkled. “There’s trouble and sorrow brewing off land and none can tell how great its sweep will be.”
Jamie gave the fortune teller a skeptical look. “We came for a good fortune to be told. You’re a misfortune teller. Only God knows the future and He’s not tellin’. I won’t be mistrustful of voyages in the sea.” He tossed a few coins on the table and grabbed Maggie by the arm. “You shouldn’t be wantin’ to know the future,” he said. “We make our own.” He squeezed her arm as they made their way down the steps. “We missed our senses in coming here. If the fortune teller had foreknowledge she’d know I’m not a Christopher. It’s easy to read her future. She’s growin’ old fast, her face so wrinkled a mosquito could crawl into a furrow and smother before it got its belly full.”
They came outside laughing.
Maggie turned quickly at the sight of Emily Penny from Foxtrap, all neat and crisp in a dark cotton dress and starched white apron. She’d heard that Emily had been given a position by a St. John’s merchant. “I haven’t seen you for a long time,” Maggie exclaimed.
“Nor I you, and here you is, you and Jamie all grown up.” She eyed Jamie from head to toe with a smirk.
“Hello, yourself,” Jamie said.
She wasn’t finished. “I remember once when you threw a rock in a puddle of water and splashed me.”
“A long time ago,” he said. “We’ll be seeing you.” He hurried Maggie along.
A few months before, Emily had climbed on the horse wagon of a Foxtrap trader going to St. John’s. She sat atop a sack of potatoes beside crates of salted dry fish until the trader stopped at the waterfront where a merchant spied Emily and offered her a position.
Emily turned back to look at Maggie and Jamie going down the street. A dark cloud crossed her face.
23
Despite the fortune teller’s prediction, Jamie was determined to get a ticket on a sealing vessel. Edward John had gone to the icefields twice while he lived at home. Mary Jane had tried to coax him away from his plans, confiding, “William’s got money laid away.” When she saw that he couldn’t be persuaded to stay home, she knitted a shiften of woollen drawers and blanketed them with red flannel to keep the wool away from his skin. After he came home from the ice front she had stayed awake night after night with him while he cried from pain in his legs and hips.
William had cursed the captain of the SS Newfoundland, cursed the ship, and the dangerous ice that had killed or maimed many of Newfoundland’s crop of strong young men in their war against poverty.
“If I tell you what it’s like out there, do you think you’d want to go?” Edward John asked Jamie.
“I will!” Jamie answered.
He had listened to Edward John and other sealers’ stories about the adventure of the seal hunt as they sat around fires in sheds and on docks during long winter nights. They appeared undaunted by the deathly cold sweep of March winds and ice raftered by wind and currents, ice pans unpredictably separating, leaving space between sealers and the icefields.
“The ocean bed’s strewn with the bodies of ships and people who didn’t make it to port,” Edward John told Jamie. “Sealers were lost when ice jams cracked wooden schooners into matchsticks. Other sealers were lost in the sudden sweep of blizzards that had many ways to kill. Of the first fifty wooden steamships to go to the ice beginning in 1863, forty-one ships were lost at se
a.” He shook his head. “The ocean surface is like a graveyard in winter, ice sticking into the air like blank headstones, a memorial to the sealers who died on icefields—a thousand or more unnamed.”
Jamie didn’t tell anyone that he was having bad dreams. He had a repeat dream of running down a road to get on a sealing ship, the road stretching longer and longer the faster he ran. It gave way under his feet and he woke shivering, his bedclothes on the floor. One night he dreamed he was on a vessel that was listing; someone’s hand was on his face smothering him.
His father cautioned him. “If you get a berth on a schooner goin’ to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, stick with experienced sealers. Don’t be goin’ off on your own to try to prove yourself a great sealer. You’re not goin’ to the icefields where there is solid whiteness. You’ll be goin’ on ice that is loose and threatening. You’ll need to be quick and nimble not to fall between the pans where the deep blue waits to pull you under. Keep your gaff and mind your step. A sealin’ voyage can turn a boy into a man, a man into a corpse. If God wills it you’ll be successful in gettin’ yourself back home as good as when you left.”
William knew he could caution his son but he couldn’t tell him what to do. Other years Jamie had gone out to the turn in the lane and watched sealers leave, excitement filling the air as they laughed, pushed, and shoved each other. Voices of fathers left behind rang out, “Here’s to bumper crops and bloody decks.”
William set his mouth, mindful that this was the long and hungry month of March. Sometimes it became a march of death and April a month of mourning.
24
I got a berth on the Southern Cross for a voyage to the icefields. Jamie’s words sang through his head. He’d gone to the St. John’s waterfront with his cousins determined to get a berth. Once he got confirmation he couldn’t wait to get home. When the driver’s horse and dray got to his lane he jumped off and ran up the slope and down the hill calling, “I got me berth!”
Jamie found William standing at the wood horse and lifting his hatchet to come down on a junk of wood. The hatchet and wood fell to the ground as William, seeing his son’s grin, hurried to slap him on the back. “I can’t be keeping you back,” he said, his face working through mixed emotions.
William picked up his hatchet without saying another word, nodding as Jamie told him he was going to Joe’s place to ask for the use of his Labrador box.
When Jamie was little he had pressed his forehead against the palings of the picket fence outside his grandfather James’s house. He eyed the old fellow and called, “What is it you’re doin’, Grandda?”
The man lifted his head from a length of wood in his hands. He placed it on the wood horse to saw and turned to his grandson. “I’m repairing a board in me Labrador box.”
“What’s it for?” he asked.
The old fellow answered, “It’s to the Labrador your Uncle Joe will be goin’ with this box.”
“Won’t you be goin’, Grandda?”
James shook his grey head. “The work is for the young and strong, lad. I had me day with the crowd when I was younger. I even had me time with the seal hunt.”
The old man got a faraway look in his eyes. “Nothing is ever the kind of adventure you hope for.” He straightened his back and pushed his hand against it. “You’ll find out fer yourself.”
“I’ll have a good kind of adventure,” Jamie said in a strong, determined voice.
He smiled, remembering the old grandda as he ran over to Caroline’s. He opened the gate and hurried up to the house. Johnny, hearing the door open and Jamie’s light step, lifted his head. “Have you brought the young colleen with yer?”
“Not this time,” he answered.
The first time Jamie took Maggie to meet Johnny, sitting on his stool by the fire, the sightless man reached his hand into the air. “Give here your hand, me lass, and tell me somethin’ so I can get a speakin’ likeness of you.”
Maggie looked into his eyes, still pools in a small face with enough expression to make up for what his eyes lacked. She reached to grasp his hand, her long, shapely fingers touching his. She held his hand between her soft ones. “Jamie told me about you,” she said.
Johnny pulled down his mouth. “Did he now? I can tell you somethin’ about him. He’s lost his heart to you. Don’t you be losin’ him on a ship.”
“I won’t if I can help it,” she had promised.
Johnny added, as if to himself, “That Atlantic Ocean is a graveyard, the deepest and longest and widest graveyard there is—more dead people in it than live people on it.”
Jamie had shrugged away his uncle’s warnings not to go.
Now his uncle said in a resigned voice, “Ah, I know why you’re here. You’ve come for the Labrador box.”
Jamie grinned, forgetting that his uncle couldn’t see him. “I’ll have the box to hold some food and a few belongings if it can be spared.”
“It will have to be spared for such a one as yourself, though your aunt will be reluctant to let it go. The box means the world to her.”
Jamie knew that the box had been promised to James Butler, his cousin, who had drowned while casting for caplin. James had a fashion of holding the balls of his casting net between his teeth and throwing it overboard whenever he saw a dark swarm of caplin. One day he went headlong over his boat with the caplin seine.
Caroline called from the pantry, “I’ll spare the Labrador box this time. Come back with it and not in it.”
Jamie hurried to squeeze his aunt. “I’ll bring back the box, I promise.” He winked. “Sure, I’ll have to, or be haunted.”
Jamie hauled the pine box home on small wooden wheels Joe had attached to it. He packed his canvas knapsack containing hard bread, a bag of rolled oats, and a jar of molasses. William had corked a pint of rum. “In case you’re on the ice too long and needs to warm your blood.”
Later that day Caroline and Joe showed up. Caroline was holding hot buns in a cloth. She passed them to Jamie, saying, “Now, me boy, if your mam was here she’d do some fussing over you. She’d have molasses toutons in your armpits if you had no room in your box. Seein’ she’s not here to look out to you I’ll do the best I can.”
Joe passed him medical supplies Caroline had gathered: friar’s balsam, a salve of sulphate of zinc for curing sores and cuts, and black gauze to attach to his headgear to protect his eyes against the crystal light of the icefields.
Joe warned, “You have to be prepared. Experienced sealers know well enough to protect themselves against ice blindness and sunburns on their lips and face.”
“Don’t be staying on the ice alone,” Caroline added. “You could find yourself sailing away on an ice pan and it too stormy for anyone to launch a rescue.”
Jamie gave her a steady look. “I know that.”
Joe nodded. “I know you do,” he said, “but knowin’ is not enough. Sealers like you knowed it and where’s they? Sunk in the deep for the fish to have for a spring meal and the women on land gone mad from the pain of never more layin’ eyes on ’em, their ghosts haunting their dreams. We don’t want the likes of that with you and your cousins.”
That night when Jamie went upstairs he hesitated at the open door to his father’s room. He thought of his mother dead a little more than a year. Her colourful wedding shawl, as soft as cobwebs, lay on a pile of clothes folded on a nightstand. He went in and picked it up. He smiled as dried rose petals floated like blossoms in a summer wind and scattered to the plaited mat on the floor. His mother had hated to see a flower die and its petals disappear. She gathered flowers and pressed their petals between cardboard covers. When they dried as light as a butterfly’s wing she placed them between the pages of books. Sometimes she used rose petals to make rosewater for her morning wash. Jamie pressed the shawl against his nose drawing in the gentle scent. He remembered his mother walking in t
he shawl, its fringes dancing off her heels as she hurried up the road to a wedding, a christening, and other outings. He held a faint, long-ago memory of her taking it away from her shoulders and wrapping him in it as she sang him a lullaby. He folded it, intending to take it downstairs and place it in the Labrador box for good luck. Instead, he lifted it to his face again. Then he laid it back on the nightstand. He would leave it at home away from the blubbery smell of seals. Maggie could wear it after they were married. He spoke aloud to his dead mother. “I’ll come back to Pappa, truly I will, Mam. The old fellar don’t have a spirit in him since you left. I’ll lighten him up when I comes home with me share and stories of the ice.”
Maybe he’d go sealing again next year if Maggie got with child. A baby would bring a spark back to his father. He couldn’t leave his father alone, not with his mother just gone and Elizabeth not long gone across the bay. In time Maggie would have her own home. Jamie had promised her that, telling her that in the interior of Kelly’s Island there were long-standing trees called snags to be dragged from the grove and brought back in boat for their new house. He could almost smell the new wood and see sawdust fall like gold specks as he sawed through a tree trunk.
The next morning Jamie donned flannel-lined, knitted drawers. Over the drawers he wore moleskin trousers, and a red flannel shirt under a guernsey his mother had knit. It would hug his body under his fustian jacket throughout the voyage. He pulled on heavy woollen socks and vamps casing them, his feet in leather boots. When he came downstairs William looked at him and then turned to the open box. “Make sure you got all you needs for your voyage. Don’t be wantin’.”
William helped him drive steel slivers a quarter-inch deep, three in each heel of his boots to keep him from slipping on the ice and falling into the open ocean between pans. “Your legs are young and strong but it takes concentration to jump from pan to pan on floating ice, some of it soft and honeycombed.”
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 13