“When a ship disappears into the ocean, its young men gathered like fish in a net by the sea, and church bells ring out to announce the calamity, farmers in their fields take off their caps and women in their kitchens bow their heads. They have all felt a loss in one way or another through the years. All Saints graveyard carries the ending to many earthly lives. In its hallowed ground lies the calligraphy of bones until the resurrection unites soul and body. It is the same for those sleeping in the ocean.”
The minister quoted the Bible, his voice rising loftily: “They that go down in ships . . . do business in great waters. These see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep.” The minister lifted his palms. “For He commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves thereof. He shackled the sea by His might. He maketh the storm calm, so that the waves thereof are still.” He paused and then continued as if triumphant: “Then they are glad because they be quiet. So He bringeth them until their desired haven.”
The minister’s voice came against Maggie’s ears like an ocean swell. She wanted to tell him that home was Jamie’s desired haven; heaven could wait.
Amid intermittent sobs from distressed parishioners the minister carried on, lowering his voice. “There is peace for souls in the valley of trouble. Storms rage but God’s love is a shelter. The sealers died in the sea they loved with its sounds washing over them, sounds like the waters that once cradled them in their mother’s body. Their souls have found rebirth in an eternal home.”
The minister named the men missing from each place: “Captain George Clarke will be missed from Brigus, and Paradise, where his family resides, James Kelly, Noah and Thomas Sparkes from Brigus. . . . Then, from this place, there were Noah, Thomas. . . .”
Maggie pressed her fingers against her ears. She didn’t want to hear Jamie’s name listed with the dead.
When the minister was finished he reached his hand out over the congregation as if to bless them, his lofty ascension of words funnelling up into the heavens: “The death of saints is precious in the sight of the Lord. . . .”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” William said to a woman sitting beside him with her husband and two sons. He stepped over the feet in his way and hurried down the aisle and out the door. He rushed down the road, his body shaking with sobs. He turned up the corner of the graveyard and over the hill down to his empty house. Someone had hung a black ribbon on his door. He went inside and up the stairs to the bedroom where his church suit hung. It was a suit he had worn with joy at his own wedding. He had meant to wear it at Jamie’s. It would be his burial garb. Soon, he wished. Soon.
The service ended with the doxology, the congregation raising mournful voices in singing, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. . . .”
The minister caught Maggie’s hand at the door. His voice was solemn. “You are not alone. Whole families are swimming through the seas of sorrow.”
She imagined them all in an icy ocean swimming for dear life.
“So much crying, people washing their throats with their eyes and no evidence of a tragedy,” one woman mumbled as she left the church. “I’ve never seen the like of that in all me born days.” She had to be caught from falling over the steps.
The minister shook his head. “Grief can coil inside a person and then let go unexpectedly. Her grandson was on the Southern Cross.”
Maggie hurried down the steps to go back to Liddie’s. She began to shake, her teeth chattering against each other. When she got to her aunt’s she climbed the stairs to her room, where she dropped to the floor and curled into a ball. She’d think of their times together, their last time going out in Jamie’s new boat, the sail billowing in a lazy breeze. The boat had rocked through water steered by tides and wind. Jamie had rested the oars across each other like folded arms and bent to kiss Maggie, his eyes bright, his lips hard against hers full and yielding. Her soft body and the hardness of his body came together. “We have to wait,” she had cautioned him. She had drawn back, her lips wet from his. There had been such a longing in his eyes. Now she felt defiant. She shouldn’t have waited to express their love. The minister would tell her she was sinful. Human! That’s what she was.
Hours later she rose to her feet and plodded to William’s house. She went past him up the stairs to Jamie’s room and stood there, her body weighted like lead. Her hand touched a shirt lying on the foot of his bed. She held it to her face drawing in Jamie’s smell and whatever breath he had left in the room.
After a while she went downstairs and, without a word to William, put the kettle to boil. She had no sooner poured the strained tea into William’s cup and set it in front of him when a knock sounded on the porch door. The door was opened gingerly by William’s neighbour, an Irish woman who lived at the far end of the road in a two-room cottage. The woman crossed the floor and hurried to stand in front of him. In a sorrowing voice she said, “Ah, there you be drinking a cup of tea all alone.” Her lashes wavered above grey eyes.
William gave her a chary look and took a long drink of tea. He then raised puffed eyelids, his face sour. “A cup of tea is a measure of hospitality a man gives himself,” he said. “You’re not someone I clap eyes on every day, Merna. What wave washed you up?”
“’Tis mindin’ me own business I am on a usual day. That takes up me time, me a poor mortal. I had to come. Oh my! Me mind’s knocked astray with the latest news. The young fellar gone and I wantin’ to offer my condolences. Sure, ’tis the least I could do.”
William frowned, but she kept on. “‘Oh yoo-u don’t mean it,’ I said to someone. ‘Sure, it can’t be. All these lovely young men gone to a watery grave.’ But ’tis true for sure. I can see it is. I minds the time I said to Jamie, ‘Your mudder won’t allow you to go to the ice, you, her babby, with all the punishment the hunt gives the fellars who go. She’ll be wanting you home stacking firewood and filling the coal bucket.’ That’s what I said.”
Jamie’s framed picture stood on a shelf above her. A groan lumbered up her throat. “Ah, Jamie Maley. I loved the sight of the young Maley, so I did.”
The woman took the picture in her hands and tilted her head. “Ah! The boy was lovely, so he was. It’s terrible. So it is. And I there with a christening dress made of proper Irish cloth. I would have loaned it for his first child, so I would have, me with no children.”
Maggie came out from the pantry and the woman shook her head. “Take heed to yerself, dear girl, and don’t be burdened with nursing a snap of a man gone for all time. Mindin’ grief brings no solace.”
Maggie shook away the woman’s words and asked, “Would you mind a cup of tea?”
“I’d be foine with a cup of tay to mimpse,” she said with a dip of her head.
Maggie poured her tea and Merna sat cradling the cup in her palms and murmuring, “Sure, we’ve all lost someone, so we have. My oh my but it’s pitiful, the sight of poor Margaret Jane Bussey down the road, tears streakin’ her thin face, calling, ‘My sons, my sons,’ and she after losin’ one son in an accident and another shoved off a train in a lovers’ spat and killed. I always said there’d be no good come from havin’ the train.”
She bit into a raisin biscuit Maggie had placed on a plate. “Be glad they didn’t bring young Jamie home, dear girl. You’d not want to cooble his cold, decayed face. Hold the memory of him warm, his grey eyes alight, and lips parted with that roguish grin. So do.”
Unable to bear the woman’s chatter Maggie went outside. She folded her arms and leaned on a rail. A snow mist drifted up from the ocean. The breath of the land’s lost souls. She turned as Merna called goodbye to William and closed the door behind her.
“Straighten up, me maid,” she admonished Maggie. “You’ll be down in a crump time enough. So you will.”
“So I will, then,” she answered, staying where she was.
The woman went out the lane and William cam
e outside muttering, “The old biddy is fishing for gossip to shovel into the ears of anyone wanting to listen.”
“So she is, then,” Maggie mocked, her smile thin.
50
Joe finished sharpening a garden tool. Then he went to see William. He found him sitting at his table, elbows down, fists under his chin. He didn’t speak.
“Mr. Corbett of Otterbury must be in some tear,” Joe said trying to break William’s silence. “His oldest son Patrick was on the SS Newfoundland and a younger one—I can’t mind his name—is on the Southern Cross. Ah! I remember now. Joseph was his name. Patrick was brought home a monument of ice.”
“There is no God,” William said quietly.
Caroline, coming into his kitchen with a crock of stew, was blunt. “Other fathers’ sons have been dying since the world begun. Why does it take the death of your own son to wipe God out of existence?”
Joe added, “God didn’t overload the ship.”
William buried his head in his hands and Caroline reached her arm around his shoulders. “There got to be a power greater than us, a power that gave birth to everything. It’s all too vast for mortals to understand. The Bible asks, ‘Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?’ Trust in yourself to handle anything life brings.”
Caroline’s words stuck in William’s ears like bees after she’d gone home. He didn’t want to hear them. He was sick of life going on.
The next morning he hauled himself from his makeshift bed by the stove and went outside. The terrible silence that came with loss was broken by crows ku-cacking, their harsh cries renting the air. William restrained himself from getting his gun and sending black feathers flying. Instead he hit the side of the rock wall by his shed, his body in a cold tremor. As the day wore away William went around stunned as if someone had hit him with a mallet. Jamie had been like a seed he’d set in the soil for a future harvest. His life was to have gone on in him and his children on Maley land. Jamie’s drowning was likely quick. Drowning in the pain of losing him would never be over.
On May 11 the Halifax Chronicle contained disturbing news from Charlottetown, news that made its way to Foxtrap. It stated that on Sunday morning, May 10, a lobster fisherman found a body thought to be a Newfoundland fisherman floating on an ice cake a half-mile from land. He had no way to cut the body loose; it drifted out to sea.
“It could have been Jamie!” Maggie said when a young farmer brought the news. She dug her fists into the dough she was mixing, turning it, folding it, slapping it, tears clouding her eyes until she couldn’t see. She imagined Jamie splayed out across an ice pan he’d managed to drag himself aboard only to freeze to death. She wouldn’t care how she got him back. To be able to bury him close by would have brought some comfort. She willed her mind back to her dough and finished kneading it. Then she wrapped it with cloths to keep it warm for rising.
She tried not to think of Jamie adrift on an ice pan as she rounded her bread into buns and settled them against each other in pans to rise. Her heart lurched against the image as she later pulled the baked bread from the oven, the heat smarting her eyes. Her young cousins watched her and waited to hold out their hands for a steaming slice of buttered bread.
“We love you,” Melanie said, her blue eyes shining.
“And not just because you make us bread,” Bea added solemnly.
The community built a memorial in All Saints graveyard to bear the names of the sealing victims. Families gathered for a memorial service.
After it ended Maggie stood among other mourners by the tall stone pillar. William joined her, his mouth tight, eyes dry. Jamie’s name on stone sent a shock through him. He traced it with thin, shaky fingers. “Jamie should have had his place in the heart of the earth beside his mother,” he said.
A neighbour passed and tipped his hat. “I say, it’s a pleasant day, what. A nice one to be above ground.”
William gave the man a surly look. “More pleasant than it deserves to be with all those men gone and the ocean licking its chops.”
Caroline, coming behind, tapped William on the back. He turned to meet her troubled look. “Perhaps we should have asked the parson to bless the Southern Cross so it need’n show up on the water, a ghost ship holdin’ the spirit of dead sealers to haunt fishermen goin’ about their work.”
“Go away with yer,” William said. It wasn’t something he was going to worry about. He was already haunted and he would be for the rest of his life.
When Maggie closed her eyes that night she visualized stinging cold liquid washing over the Southern Cross like acid eating into Jamie’s bones, globs of the smothering water filling his mouth and nostrils. His last thought had to be of her, their last kiss, his lips slipping over hers, a kiss that must have awakened his body as it had hers.
Sometimes she broke free from troubling dreams and came to the surface. She rose up in bed, her mouth opening and closing as if gulping water. Other times she woke with a scream.
Liddie’s voice rushed against her ear. “Hush! Whatever Jamie suffered he’s not sufferin’ now. Imaginin’ his end will do you no good. You need to think on the time you had him and not on the time you lost him. You need to carry on with your life.”
“There is no future without Jamie,” she said flatly.
“There’s a letter for you,” Liddie said passing her an envelope.
Maggie slit it open. Inside she unfolded a single sheet of paper.
A stranger had written in an unsteady hand
I, too, have lost part of myself in two boys who will never give me grandsons. They are in the deep with your Jamie. When I learned of your loss from Elizabeth Emma, who would have been your sister-in-law, I decided to write you. We free ourselves from pain by not concentrating on it and by doing something good for someone else. I’m not into the emotions of religion but I know that God is with us in our darkest hour when we can’t see the stars and moon. He is with us on our darkest day when we can’t see the sun for clouds and when we can’t see the rainbow after rain.
A stain had blotted the word “rainbow” as if a tear had fallen.
God is with you and so am I in thoughts and prayers. I remain a companion in hope of a future bearing a moon to make you a silver path to romance, the sun to give you the fragrance of flowers, and enough rain to make a rainbow of promise.
The letter was unsigned.
Maggie whispered, “Hope, for me, is like a light in a blind man’s hand. It may be there but I can’t see it.” Still, she read the letter over and over wondering if there could be a rainbow in her tears.
Maggie looked at Jamie’s photograph on William’s kitchen wall. It showed him straight-backed in a suit, his look purposeful, his face strong and healthy. He could have become a sealing captain in time. He had the mind for it, always keen on boats large and small. His own small punt would never have looked aged as long as he could repair a rotting plank and fix a nick in the risings.
She walked down the path to where his boat was pulled up on the beach. William must have turned it upright.
“We could take a scull in the boat.” She hadn’t heard William come up behind her as she bent to rub her hand along the gunnels. She straightened up and shook her head. She went on past him. When she looked back he was standing still, his arms slack by his side. The common thread holding them together was breaking.
William had held an expectation that Jamie and Maggie would give him grandchildren. Now he grieved for what could have been. The loss of Mary Jane’s warmth in his bed still brought cold shivers around his heart. He lumbered up the path and stood by Mary Jane’s apple tree. It leaned toward the whitewashed fence that separated his land from Joe’s. The trees had begun to leaf out and the memory of apple scent wafted across his nose. He slid his body down to the stoop, where he sat with his head in his hands. He got up and pulled a rickety barrel chair out
from his doorstep and scooped away last year’s tree leaves settled in its corners.
Spring, a time for new life, had become a season of death.
51
The perfumed scent of spring breathed through the ground, its sweetness permeating the air. Sweet young shoots pushed aside ragged, coarse grass and skeletal grey branches of trees were infused with the rich growth of pleated green leaves. Residents stirred to the task of preparing their gardens and boats. Farmers and fishermen along the shore began their work with heavy hearts. Not only had they lost part of their family; they had lost good, strong workers.
Then, overnight, ice swept in choking the bay and shifting into peaks and pinnacles as if wind and currents had made enough headstones for every sealer ever lost from the place. A sad reminder! William sat around the blazing fire in the grate pushing away thoughts of a glacial ocean holding his only son.
Maggie remembered the minister saying it would help everyone in their sorrow if they prayed for others. She prayed hard for herself and all the people she knew who had ever lost loved ones and the tide of grief went out. When she finished her prayer sorrow rolled back and dashed against her heart like a mighty wave. Jamie was gone and there was no way she could sneak around her grief. She dragged herself to the window at her aunt’s place and looked out. A neighbour waved as she went past the house on her way to the Quilting Bee. “Come on,” she beckoned, her mouth silently forming the words. Maggie turned away to face the room, sodden, it seemed, with her despair.
“You ought to come to the Quilting Bee,” Minnie Marshall had urged when she had passed her on the road a week earlier. “We’re making quilts for all the families on the shore who lost a sealer. Our project is called The Sealer’s Patch.”
She had nodded half-heartedly. “I’ll try to be there.”
She pushed herself to get ready, slipping on her long-sleeved white blouse and over it a dark paisley gimp, all the while wondering what she’d do if someone let out a laugh as if the world were fine and joyous. She hauled on her coat and shoes, closed the door behind her, and hurried along the path, branches reaching out and hooking her stockinged legs. She pulled free and went on, deaf to the stir of leaves, rustling branches, and birds singing. A season bursting with new life and fresh breath could only bring a mockery to her grief. Jamie should be here sauntering up the path to grab her and fill her mouth with his kisses.
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 23