The next day they stood on the porch landing looking out to sea. Jacob said, “The sea is dangerous on its own but when it and the weather join forces man is a leaf without a tree. Still, we can’t forget that the sea, a graveyard for many, is also a generous giver of life.”
Elizabeth turned away. She resented the sea for what it had taken and for what it might take. On late spring nights she stood on the landing outside her porch door and listened to a resonance rising from the deep, dark belly of the ocean. During a calm night when a full moon rubbed its tongue along the sea’s dark back its skin lay like a sleeping body.
She felt its deadly silence, its metallic taste in the air as wind brushed her face.
Elizabeth picked her words carefully in a letter to Maggie. She rewrote parts of it.
. . . it’s important not to keep the past in front of you as if you have the means to change it. You can’t dwell on me brother’s death. You have to remember his life. Visit me dear old father often if you can. You share the same heartache.
In fond memories of you,
Elizabeth Emma
Elizabeth lifted her cup of tea cradling it with both hands, her gaze wandering to the large headstones outside her kitchen window like grey ghosts, letters on the stones like eyes peering in. Its truth cut through her mind: “As you are now so once was I. . . .” The refrain would come often as she sat having breakfast alone and Jacob gone on the water.
46
A tightly corked bottle bobbing in the water! That’s what was seen. Who’s to say it’s not Jamie’s message sent to me? Maggie drifted into sleep thinking about this possibility. In a dream she caught sight of a bottle in the sea amid fields of ice like diamonds sparkling in the sun. The stoppered bottle neck rose above the water and danced to the dulcet sounds of lapping waves holding carey chicks and ice partridges. Waves muscled the bottle toward the beach, the lip of a tide nudging it ashore. It lay like an exhausted body dying in the sun. A child picked it up, held it in mid-air as other children watched a dead whale on the beach, driven in by a storm. Gulls swooped down for a pick. The child threw the bottle at a gull. It smashed against a cliff and pieces of paper floated into the air like feathers and drifted down on the sea. She ran into the water to gather the pieces.
Maggie woke, her body in a sweat. She lay digging her feet into the feather mattress imagining another possibility. The bottle rolled against Paddy’s Beach. She pulled the cork and unrolled a sheet of paper from the bottle. “Dear Maggie, My hands are trembling from the cold but my heart is warm with thoughts of you. We’ve cleared the last patch of seals from the ice, leaving a field of carcasses for sea creatures wanting a ready supper. I’m coming home. There’s a storm brewing and there’s worry talk all around. I’m not joining in.” He would feel a lurch of the ship and then he would add, “If perchance I don’t survive the voyage I will live in the air you breathe, on the land you walk, and in the sea you sail. I will live on in you.” He’d sign his name and push the paper into the bottle and press the cork into the neck.
She curled around herself. Daydreaming was all she was doing, waking the dead that couldn’t be waked.
There was a creak in the house, a stir of wind at the window, and for an instant she thought Jamie had come. The wind swept in like a bird, ascended as if with a mighty rush of its wings. Leaves outside her window lifted and rose, dropping gently as the wind passed. She gasped, “Jamie’s ghost! There has to be a sign of him somewhere.”
She crept downstairs to sit by a window facing the ocean. She wondered what Olivia would do when she got the news of Zachary’s drowning, and Emily when she heard that her brothers were lost. Carefree children on a beach we were once, never thinking beyond the next day, never expecting misfortune.
She grabbed her woollen coat from a hook and pulled it on. She left the house and hurried along the road rushing to get to the beach where she and the other children had spent the early years of their childhood. Heavy snow swirled like a veil around her as she ran squishing wet snow under her feet. She stumbled across the beach tripping in rocks. Finally she stopped and stood trembling in winds strong enough to buckle her knees and take her breath. Their fierceness reddened her numbed face. Still she stayed taking in the sweeping chaos of seafoam, kelp, stones, and seashells swept ashore. It was not easy to forget the sea’s tantrums, its dark moods and killing ways. Not easy to forget that Jamie and other sealers lay cradled in its wild belly beyond the reach of those who loved them. She lifted her head to where the old house stood abandoned by her stepmother’s family, its windows now boarded up as if blinded.
The snow cleared, the sky brightened, and the sea grew quiet. Sunlight twinkled like stars on the sea’s shiny blue coat.
“Wish upon the stars of the sea,” Jamie had told Maggie, promising, “We’ll be together as husband and wife come fall.”
Wind came in a gentle brush against her neck. She turned startled as if Jamie had touched her with his lips.
47
“My brothers!” Emily screamed when she heard her mistress say that the Southern Cross was lost.
“Your brothers?” Abigail stopped still. “I didn’t know.” Then she charged her: “Off with your apron and hurry to get the truth.”
Emily went out the door still wearing her apron, a dust mop in her hand held out as she ran stumbling and catching herself. She rushed down the street to where other people waited. The wharf swarmed with people whose solemn faces bore the heaviness of a shocking truth: the Southern Cross, carrying her brothers, was lost. Her father was home alone waiting for sons who would never return.
When Emily got back from the wharf Lily was sitting on the deep window leaf, its casement wide open in the oak-panelled drawing room. She had a pensive look as if she was still wondering why her mamma hadn’t come to get her. Now her pappa wouldn’t come for her either. He was gone forever on the Southern Cross. She’d soon forget all of them.
Emily had overheard the peddler and the merchant talking about Lily and had been shocked to learn her identity. She had struggled with her secret but no longer. If she took the orphan back home, who would care for her? At least she was growing up in a family who would feed her out of its many fancy serving dishes, a lot more than comes in use in the run of a day in many outport homes. The peddler did her a favour. He would think that, too, as he went about bringing yards of bright cloth, soaps and buttons, and dishes to homes around the bay. It was just as well to let the secret bide. I have other things to think about. I have two brothers who will never come home.
She started up the stairs, her eyes moist. An epitaph she’d seen on graves in All Saints graveyard dug its engraving pen through her thoughts:
all, all are gone, the good, the fair
all lost in life’s sweet bloom;
their graves out in the ocean drear
god willed to be their tomb.
A black net of grief lay over families from St. John’s to Conception Bay South and Conception Bay North. Bloodlines twined like the perennial trailing vines of morning glories. Descendants of Butlers, Walshes, Kennedys, Porters, Conways could all lay claim to losing a part of their family on the Newfoundland and the Southern Cross. Few of them were more than six generations apart, making it a communal loss. Hearts and minds from far and wide were hung on hooks of grief tangled on the same trawl line.
Wherever relatives and neighbours of the victims gathered, beside rock walls of sheds, outside post offices, or inside railway stations, they all carried the same mesmerized look as they listened to stories that connected the living to the lost.
It was a stormy winter night when Mathilda Roach saw Charlie’s ghost pass her and go into their bedroom. Another sealer’s wife woke to see her husband standing soaking wet at the foot of their bed. Josie Maidment scrubbed her hands raw on her washboard while her plaintive voice could be heard: “Philip, Philip went to sea. Som
eone bring him back to me.” She sang the same words over and over as she hung her clothes to dry. She didn’t seem to notice that her clotheslines were heavy with sopping clothes not wrung out. Another widow went around the yard calling, “Poor, poor I. What will I do?” She lifted her apron and slapped it down. She did this over and over until her arms dropped with tiredness. She ran back inside her house and sprawled back on a chair pushed under her. She moaned and cried, “I loved the junk of a man.” Her neighbours agreed he had been kind to her, hardly letting her bring in a stick of wood when he was around, flouring the fish for dinner while she heated the pan and rendered scruncheons. He didn’t mind turning his hand to a dirty dish either. He was as good as a maid. “Surely God had better things to do than take my man,” she murmured over and over.
One father told his daughter grieving for her lover he didn’t care for, “Get yourself to rights and stop this—” His voice skidded to a stop as his wife gave him a withering look. He jutted his chin defiantly and the word he wanted to say stretched through the air like a hiss. “Nonsense!”
Mona Rideout had been promised to Jack Smith and they had their future planned. But on a cold morning after hearing her father’s words she slipped out of bed and took a steady and purposeful walk out over the beach. She kept on going into the ocean, her face a mask. Those who saw her said she was sleepwalking. She had to be. The water would have knifed every pore. She walked out as if she felt nothing, as if she heard nothing as people ran calling to her. Little bergs of ice swirled around her dark skirts as she went deeper. She slipped beneath the water, her dark hair streaming like a school of caplin just as a fisherman ran to grab her. He was too late to save her life. The parson was called to her bedside. “A sinful thing!” he said. “Only the devil calls one to such a deed.”
Her mother’s voice rose in her defence: “It was the grief that wrung her heart and she drownin’ in love for him. She wasn’t goin’ out to die; she was goin’ out to be closer to him.” Her voice cracked.
The parson admitted, “Sometimes grief is so demanding and impulse so strong a tide that there is no logic in a person’s behaviour. For that reason she shall have her place in consecrated ground.”
In one house a mother had a premature child born at seven months without help. She and her children couldn’t eat for poverty. Weak from childbirth and hunger she became desperate. The mother pulled a blanket over the baby’s face and turned away from her frantic movements. When there was no stir she lifted the blanket and looked into the peaceful face. “Go with God where there is no pain. I had you inside me for a few months; God will have you for eternity.” When a neighbour said, “You lost your baby,” she answered: “She’s not lost. She’s in heaven.”
The sire of a son and grandson who were lost on the sealing ship suffered a stroke when he heard the news. He saw the Southern Cross coming every evening. “Make haste!” he’d call. “Go to the boat and bring home Eddie and Wilson.”
These were other stories: some confirmed, some denied.
Beyond the east coast a family scattered here and there had lost a sealer and mourned alone.
Olivia was like them. She grieved alone in a house she now shared with her grandparents. She was unable to discuss her loss with anyone, knowing she would have little sympathy from those who judged her for leaving Zachary. If only they knew.
48
Woodsmoke drifting out of chimneys along the Southern Shore trailed in the wind like flags of distress. Joe sat in William’s house and wiped sweat from his forehead as if the strain of bad news had exerted him more than a day’s hard labour.
“The loss of the Southern Cross and the loss of life on the Newfoundland makes this our greatest sealing disaster on record,” Joe said, “though it’s been told that the worst disaster was in the spring of 1838 when a fleet of fourteen vessels went to the icefields and got caught in an ice tornado. They disappeared takin’ over three hundred sealers. Now here we is, then, with the deaths of two hundred and fifty-four sealers from the Newfoundland and the Southern Cross, counting a sealer killed on the Bonaventure and a stowaway aboard the Southern Cross.”
William didn’t answer and after a while Joe left and strode down the road and up a ladder to a shed loft where men had gathered knitting twine into nets. The men were speculating on the cause of the Southern Cross’s disappearance. There were rumours from sealers who had sailed on the ship the year before that the pound boards were rotten. Other people blamed Captain Clarke, accusing him of testing fate, gambling his life and his men’s lives for the glory of reaching port first. They believed that the captain had forced his heavily laden ship through the storm into heavy rollers. The strain of the ship pushing against head-on winds with a large amount of unused coal and a heavy load of seal pelts slugging back and forth may have broken the rotten bulkhead causing the seals to fall into the forecastle, smothering the sealers. The vessel would have rocked and heaved causing a hard list from which the Southern Cross could not recover.
The next day Joe read in a St. John’s newspaper that mariners believed other factors contributed to the sinking of the Southern Cross. The ship had a low-mounted engine. High bulwarks and pelts floating like cork in an inch and a half of fat may have blocked the water holes. Deck boards made of oak would have become waterlogged. The rush of air going backwards may have blown the hatches off the ship. Once the hatches were off and the ship plunged forward the heavy seas boarded the ship pushing her nose under. Her heavily laden body would have slipped under high seas and disappeared.
Sitting on a keg at the end of the Foxtrap wharf, Eli Reid played his fiddle, its mournful dirge like a wail out over the sea as if he was still waiting for news of the sealers.
“Put up the fiddle,” a fisherman said, laying his hand on his shoulder. “Your woman’s got the soup simmerin’.”
Eli dropped his head over his fiddle and wept silently. He had been absorbing his bad thoughts of his brother’s loss in his music and now there were only the breaking sounds of the sea reminding him that there was no solace.
Southern winds swept in chasing away the harshness of earlier spring days. Water trickled off house eaves, chimed against nails sticking out of boards, and laughed as it ran through the throat of streams let loose. It was easy to wonder how the sun could beam down, wind caress the land, and the world look so bright. Didn’t nature notice that strong young men who had once turned the soil, set a boat on the water, lifted a child to a cheek, put an arm around a sweetheart, wife, or mother, were absent, their silence loud inside the mourners’ hearts?
Though the etched images of sealers’ foot and body prints in ice had been eaten by black water, images of frozen sealers from the SS Newfoundland remained in the dark archives of people’s memory and in newspaper photographs.
There were no images of sealers from the Southern Cross.
49
James Butler, sexton of the Church of England on Church Road, used his one arm to pull on the rope in the belfry of the church with all his might. The deep sounds knelled through the place, an echoing sadness swinging wide. People stopped what they were doing and listened, knowing that the Southern Cross was officially lost.
Church bells had sent out their dolorous dong for victims of the Newfoundland, those brought home and those left to the sea. Now they tolled for sealers lost on the Southern Cross. They kept on tolling through April as memorial services were held in each community that had lost sealers. Ships in St. John’s harbour kept flags half-mast.
Families of missing sealers of Foxtrap and neighbouring communities frapsed themselves in black attire and, to the resounding ring of church bells, came by horse and wagon and mare’s shanks. They kept a stiff upper lip as they made their way past headstones and along the footpath to the door of the little white church. Inside there was not a single coffin, not a single body to look on as evidence of the tragedy.
Heads turn
ed but only for a moment as Olivia swept in wearing a long, black velvet dress under a shoulder cloak, her waist pinched tight, a little purse to the side. Her coiffured blonde hair was swept off her neck revealing soft white skin, her eyebrows arched over swollen eyes under a netted black hat. She slipped into her stepfather’s pew toward the back, one he and her mother had left empty after she left for Boston.
William entered the church like someone lumbering with a ball and chain around his ankles. He was wearing his weekday clothes and clutching a woods cap in his hand as if he was about to haul it over his head and be gone. Mary Jane would be ashamed of her life for a husband who went to church in such a getup.
Relatives of the missing sealers scuffed down the church aisle on leaden legs to sit and rise in accordance with the service. Hymns were sung but they could not push aside thoughts pounding in the minds of mourners that the sealers should be coming down the aisle in their new scroopy boots and dropping a coin in the offering plate in thanks to God for bringing them home safe and sound.
Reverend Petten began his sermon. “On a clear night, when The Dipper is sprinkling the sky with the seven brightest stars of its constellation, the Southern Cross, a ship proudly named for a southern constellation, lies beyond starlight and moonlight, akin to a greater and more powerful ship—Titanic. It is for its silence that the Southern Cross will be remembered as it lies deep in the belly of the ocean holding the secrets of its last voyage. Titanic, in a rush to make a transatlantic speed record, ignored the risk of a silent white threat. The Southern Cross ignored the forces of nature in trying to get ahead of its fellows in reaching St. John’s. It took one hundred and seventy-three men and perhaps a stowaway, leaving widows and orphans and sweethearts. We have to look for a lesson here for our own lives.
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 22