“Pshaw!” she said. “I suppose Ida on the shore was meant to have eighteen, her insides stripped out by the time it was all done.”
Elizabeth had made allowance for the baby growing inside her first by loosening her corsets. Then she laid them aside to free her belly growing full and hard like unripe fruit. This time was different, her body larger than before.
“I want my body back,” she whimpered as she struggled to slide out of a cushioned chair. Jacob pulled her to her feet and her hands circled the globe of her belly.
Jacob smiled. “You’re holding a world we created in your hands.”
She nodded. Soon she would touch a fuzzy soft cheek and look into eyes as clear as a summer day or as warm as newly turned earth. That was worth everything!
One day as Elizabeth knelt to gather a yaffle of fish drying on the flake Alvina gave her a critical look. “You’re swellin’ something awful and it’s past your time. We need to get the midwife.”
“There’s work to be done,” Elizabeth answered noticing their boat coming into the cove, gunnels low. The women finished layering fish in piles on the flake and covering them. Then they laid aside their brin aprons. They hurried to the stagehead where they grabbed their barbels to cover their cotton dresses.
The sun beat hard on the women as they stood at the table. Jacob sent Jane to fetch a jug of cold water flowing down the hill from a narrow stream. Elizabeth took a gulp and Jane wiped the sweat from her mother’s brow with a hand cooled from holding the metal jug. Elizabeth’s mind drifted, her voice trailed in answer to a question. She was hardly able to keep up. The afternoon wore away and Elizabeth’s hands grew heavy; dark spots clouded her eyes. Water pooled in the hollow of her neck and dried to a salty stain. Then, just as her hand slipped inside the split gut of the last cod, pain grabbed her stomach and dug in twisting her insides, squeezing hard. Her clear, wide eyes grew gibbous under tears. A moan slipped through her tight lips and her body bent away from the fish she was clutching.
Jacob turned at the sound, startled by the sight of Elizabeth’s drawn face, her lips pale. He urged Elsie, “Run and get Aunt Ida Lear.”
Children running along the stagehead stopped and stared as Elizabeth, moaning through gritted teeth, turned away from the table and started a painful trek from the stage up the steep hill to the house, Jane beside her running to open the gate. It swung wide and she trudged up the rough path of stones to get inside, to find her bed, and let the pain take her wherever God saw fit.
The midwife came with castor oil. She took a long look at Elizabeth’s stomach and her lips stretched in a thin line. “This baby knows what’s good for it. It’s gettin’ out while the going’s good, not amid the ruction castor oil can cause.”
A baby boy was born without a sound. Before Elizabeth could catch her breath another pain ripped through her. She squeezed her eyes tight.
“Another baby,” the midwife said grimly.
Elizabeth heard a weak cry.
Two babies! How can there be only one cry? The deep silence that came with the birth of the first child filled the air like a dark fog and Elizabeth knew that death had entered the room. Its cold sweep lodged in her heart. “My babies,” she whispered.
“One son is gone,” the midwife said wiping beads of sweat from Elizabeth’s anguished face. “The other son is holding on.” Her voice came calm and soothing from far away: “Here, take this drink of crowberry juice for afterpains.”
Elizabeth was hardly aware as the midwife washed her face and body, and changed her clothes and bedding. She slipped into exhaustion and slept.
Alvina sat beside her bed, her face settled like stone. A lifeless baby lay in the crook of one arm and a gasping blue-faced baby lay in the other.
“What will be the name of the little one already gone?” the midwife asked Elizabeth as soon as she opened her eyes. She stared as the midwife took the still baby from Alvina and placed him beside Elizabeth. She squeezed her lids tight, her voice wet with emotion and defiance. “God can name him seeing He didn’t give him breath so I could call him mine.”
The midwife hesitated. Then she asked, “Do you have a name for the other little one? Reverend Tucker can baptize him just in case.”
“His name is Victor,” she said though there was no one in her family with that name. She wanted him to be a victor.
The midwife brought him to her. “The child is weak in his breathin’. He may not have strength for the breast. I’ve wrapped him in flannel sheets toasty warm from the heat of the stove.”
Elizabeth took him gently, her heart already in mourning for the child lying motionless beside her. Victor’s tiny heart quivered in his chest as she bared her breast and urged it to his mouth. The nipple opened like a flowering bud under his gentle tug. Translucent fluid dewed the nipple as his tiny blue lips let go. “Hold on, little one,” she urged.
For the next three days she squirted milk into the little mouth. The cloudy fluid leaked out. His little body wasn’t strong enough to swallow. She whispered “Victor” over and over, believing until the last minute he would live up to his name. He lived for three days and the chill that seeped into his little body also found her heart. She couldn’t cry, not that day and not the next. I should have known that when death creeps in to take one child it won’t stop there.
Jacob took a large, white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped her eyes. He kissed each eyelid tenderly and then he cradled her quivering body. “Try to think of what we have and not of what we’ve lost,” he said. “I hope that’s possible.”
She stirred from a listless emptiness taking over her body and murmured, “I hope so, too.” Then she drifted away.
She was awakened by children’s voices. “We want to see the blue baby.”
Elizabeth turned to see two of the cove children standing by her bed. She nodded toward the basket by the window. They tiptoed across. One of them gingerly lifted a white cloth and stared. “He’s a lot blue ’round his lips, not so much his face,” one of the girls whispered.
The other bent closer. “He’s iceberg blue. I thought he’d be blue like the blue cloud he was floating on before the stork brought him here. He’s not movin’.”
“That’s what dead means,” the other child said.
“Pappa said he’s gone back ter heaven.”
“He’s still here.”
“That’s his body. When he went to heaven he left it behind. He don’t need a body in heaven. He’ll have a soul to live in.”
One of the children turned from the babies and pointed to a portrait hanging across the hall. A porky-faced woman in a black lace dress, her fat hand under her dimpled chin, looked sideways, her eyes bulging under heavy lids. A long white veil started at the front of her head and trailed down her back.
“That must be someone from long ago,” the child said.
“It’s Queen Victoria, don’t you know?” the other child answered.
The girl rolled her head. “Hmm. Do you know her?”
“No, but we’ve got the same paintin’ in our attic.”
“She looks like she’s got nothin’ ter do but think about tomorrow.”
“She don’t have to think about it now. She’s dead and buried.”
They turned to the sound of hammering outside. Jacob was making the infants’ coffin.
Elizabeth clutched the bedclothes and nodded to the girls. “Go home now. Go on and tell your mothers to keep you from comin’ here while I’m abed. You can’t be walkin’ in on a sick mother with her heart torn.”
They hurried away whispering behind their hands.
Elizabeth closed her eyes. Her teeth began to rattle against each other as the hope she’d had for one of her babies fell into a whirlpool of anguish. She pressed her hands against her ears to shut out the hammering.
Al
vina met the children coming down the stairs and tut-tutted with a shake of her finger as she ushered them through the hall. They scampered out the front door to where Jacob stood planing wood for a square, pine coffin, tears streaming down his face.
There was hardly a sound from the bedroom. Elizabeth’s wispy breathing rose slightly when she thought of her babies having to be taken away to a grave in over Hibb’s Cove hills. She felt far away as if muffled in stillness. There came a creak on the stair landing and Elsie hurried in, her breathing quick and heavy. She put her lips to Elizabeth’s pale cheek, her words strong, her eyes fierce. “You’ll get better, Ma. Jane and me’ll help.” She tucked the bedclothes around her mother’s swollen body. A flood broke and a sob ripped up Elizabeth’s throat alarming her young daughter.
Alvina rushed upstairs and into the room. Elsie’s voice was plaintive. “I was trying to make Mamma better.”
Alvina didn’t look at the young girl. Her words were to Elizabeth. “Hush, dear woman. We have to spend our thoughts on livin’, not crying for what we’ve lost. There’s no mendin’ death.”
Alvina took the children up the narrow, dusty road to her place. She placed a wall of pancakes on their plates and flooded them with blueberry syrup. “Eat,” she admonished them.
When the children trudged back home their anxious looks met their father’s forced smile as he finished the coffin. Jacob eased an arm across his forehead. He knew he could not protect the children from the truth that death carries off the young as well as the old.
Elizabeth tried to smile at her living children, the younger ones wanting to get close. All she could think of was how she would miss the joy of watching her twin boys unfold into growing children spilling laughter and delight.
Alvina came to her bedside. She reached down and took Elizabeth’s limp hand. “I won’t feel so alone now,” she said. “You know what I’ve gone through losing Nellie Rita, how I felt.” Her lips trembled. “How I still feel.”
Elizabeth nodded and Alvina added, “When things get rough we women have to set our teeth and carry on. George was right when he told me I have to keep my pain inside.” She picked up Victor and brought him to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth lifted him knowing, for the first time, what dead weight meant. The little head lay like a stone against her arm sending a terrible pain through her heart. Her eyes closed and she whispered, “It’s bad enough that death ferrets inside a mother’s body and takes the life of her son before he draws breath, double the injury when it stands by his twin’s cradle hesitatin’ long enough to allow a mother to hope and while that hope is alive takes the child. Even God seems to have stood aside to let death take its course.”
Alvina chided her, “Now, now. Melancholy has you in its grip, else you wouldn’t speak this way. Low-mindedness can come like a fierce animal, grab you, and knock you down. It’ll gnaw at you until you’re too weak to get up.” Her eyes flooded. “I’ve had to fight it.”
She hastened to bring little James to Elizabeth’s side. He huddled against his mother sobbing as if he knew that something had gone wrong while he’d been kept away from her.
“I’ve been able to square me shoulders and take the blows of losing me mother and brother,” Elizabeth told Jacob after he came upstairs. “This time is different.”
The bedroom curtains had been pulled back from the window and she stared at the iceberg in the bay standing firm above a turbulent seascape. “I’ve always thought of a woman as an iceberg.”
“Cold?” he said knitting his dark eyebrows. “That’s not you.”
“No, regal and strong with many sides and shades in the ten per cent showing above water. I didn’t think of the tides nibblin’ away at her below the sea line. It takes a lot to roll her over, break her. But it can be done. The loss of me babies has done it.” She shivered. Despair rolled in like a fog and wouldn’t burn off, not even with the touch of little James’s face against hers. She had lost something and she couldn’t get it back.
A shock ran up her arm when she touched Victor and his brother in their coffin. They lay pure like a first fall of snow. She whispered, “My porcelain babies.”
When Jacob came into the room after the burial, she looked up, her voice strained. “Is there no name for parents who lose their children?”
“No word that can describe such a loss,” Jacob answered softly.
He laid a tray of food on the bed and reached to smooth her cheek. “You have to go on for us,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
Elizabeth turned her back to Jacob at night and when her body healed and his body sprang to life against her she pulled away folding her arms and legs against her empty belly. “How can a woman know that when she carries life she may be makin’ sorrow, a sorrow that will fill her body until it is burstin’ at the seams?” she asked.
Jacob didn’t answer. His need subsided in sleep.
For months they slept back to back.
Elizabeth’s encompassing love for her living children had been broken into by her yearning for the babies taken from her. James, sensing a loss in his mother’s affection, became fretful and demanding and she felt like a cow driving away her weaned calf.
After the children were in bed she often curled up on the settle wondering, Did I do something to harm you? Maybe I forgot that carryin’ you was the most important thing I was doin’. Did I forget you as I crowded me mind with tasks in the stage, bendin’ against you in my body as I lifted a barrow of fish? She clasped her trembling hands over her soft, empty belly as if to feel the familiar movement. Under her hands there was nothing.
Sometimes she stayed up late sewing and knitting. She heard the easing of her husband’s body out of bed and his call from the top of the stairs, gentle and coaxing, “Liz, come to bed.”
She went on unheeding him until her eyes felt heavy and then she crept up the stairs and slipped into bed at her husband’s back. If he turned she held her arms in front of her like a locked gate, its key lost at the bottom of a deep well.
The weight of her sorrow shifted as she began to see the loss on Jacob’s face, the loss of his sons and his wife. Her heart softened toward him. Gradually her body stirred to his. They held each other afterwards, his face in her neck, his lips on her racing pulse. He drifted into sleep while she lay staring into the darkness wondering if she had once again offered her body up to loss and sorrow.
One night she put the children to bed and went downstairs only to hear a plaintive voice: “Mamma, I wants a drink.”
Elizabeth climbed the stairs losing strength with each move. Jane, who had been given a drink before she went to bed, looked at her with wide eyes. She took only a sip. Then she asked, “Why did me brothers die?”
Elsie said, “What she wants to know is if we’re goin’ to die and be put in the ground.”
Elizabeth realized then that the children were not only grieving their brothers. They were fearing what could happen to them.
“Not today,” she assured them. “You lassies’ll likely live to be a ripe old age.”
“I hope so,” Jane said cuddling into her sister.
Elizabeth smiled and drew the sheets around her daughters tucking them snugly.
She came downstairs and willed herself to sit out on the front step and draw in deep breaths. Cool sea air settled her like laudanum. She stepped back into the hall, a sense of well-being returning.
A tremor went through Elizabeth’s body when she knew another child was coming.
Jacob said nothing but one night she found him kneeling by their bed, his shoulders shaking. There was no sound. He leaned heavily on the bed and lifted himself up, his face drenched in tears.
“Jacob!” His name tore away from her throat like a cry.
“I just want us to have a healthy baby,” he said.
Elizabeth laid her face
against his. “God did not give you a stone for your pillow like He gave your Bible namesake.”
The grief that had settled inside her as heavy as wet sand lightened with the birth of George Clayton on Candlemas Day, 1923. He was a child who would grow up trying to keep in a laugh, his cheeks filling and then his lips letting go in a burst of laughter at something said that he thought was funny.
59
“We’ll have our cup of tea and go to bed,” William told Alvina.
She gave him a vexed look. “You had your tea, Skipper.”
“Uh?”
“Your cup of tea and a slice of lassy loaf. You’ve done with it.”
His face seemed drawn and anxious. “Now Sarah Ann, you’ve muddled me.”
Alvina tightened her lips. Calling me Sarah Ann, now, is he? He’s on for goin’ clear out of his mind. She led him up the stairs to his bedroom and pulled down his sheets. “Get yourself out of your day clothes and haul yourself to bed,” she said.
He mumbled as she went to close his door, “Me mind is wearin’ away. Memories all gone.”
“I’ll check on you before me and George settles into bed,” Alvina said.
William gave no indication that he’d heard her.
It was nigh on midnight when Jacob and Elizabeth pulled the bedclothes over them and turned in bed to each other. A familiar sound cut through the deep silence. First there was the creak of the gate at the bottom of the path as it was unlatched and opened and then heavy steps coming up the lane, steps they recognized as those of Jacob’s father. They listened as he reached the landing. Jacob made to get up expecting to hear the latch lift and the door open. Instead there was silence. The next night they heard the same sound with a different step. This time the latch was lifted and the door opened. George came into the porch and called out.
Jacob grabbed the lamp and hurried downstairs.
“Pap is gone,” George said, his voice heavy, “gone to be with little Nellie and Ma.”
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 27