When the Orange Lodge was no longer available meetings were held in people’s homes. Fishermen whose fists reached to drag in fishnets during the week now raised their hands, fingers open like sunrays. Jacob was at Harry Petten’s house when he fell to the floor speaking in an unknown tongue. Thereafter speaking in tongues became part of his private prayer, emptying him of pent-up fears as he yielded to the loose flow of unknown words. He had found a place in his faith that gave him strength.
Soon prayers were held in the “upper room” of twine and haylofts as fishermen mended the lacy squares of nets strewn across the floor and seded hooks on trawls to be coiled in fish tubs. Converts found time to stop work while in their gardens or on a fish stage late in the night, all alone, to connect with a power they had previously taken for granted. Out on the water Jacob thought of God’s greatness and burst out in sounds without the form of a familiar language. Willis Lear hung his cap on a garden post and knelt down to pray by a rock at the side of a hill. Women in their kitchens felt the after-effects of the prayer services and began singing until joy bubbled up and burst out in words of an unknown tongue. A curious child pulled on his mother’s apron strings. She fell to her knees and held him tight while the sweet flow of tears baptized the child’s cheeks.
“Terribly wonderful . . . people slain on the floor . . . wonderfully terrible. . . .”
That was the consensus of the converts who had the hope of The Rapture any day now, a hope that helped push back the certainty of death.
On Easter Sunday, 1926, the Missioners opened the doors of a little Pentecostal church they had built beside Ship Cove pond.
Men at The Tell who never went to church watched the Missioners hurry up the road a little earlier than the Church of Englanders.
“Mind now they don’t get the smell of baccy on their clothes,” Ethan Newell jibed.
The men turned to see Elizabeth go by, sprightly in her paisley dress, a flower in her navy straw summer’s hat. Her face opened in a smile, her eyes bright as she acknowledged the men.
Once she’d passed, Ethan said, “She’s the worldly one.”
“Not a’tall,” Silas Bishop said. “Jacob won’t have Elizabeth dress frumpy. I heard him say that God made flowers bright and beautiful and women should wear the same colours.”
Willis Lear went by and someone called, “We heard you got saved.”
“Jesus is comin’ in a cloud to rapture the saved,” Willis answered. “You better get ready or you’ll be left behind.”
Silas looked up, his eyes squinted. “There’s no cloud today.”
“Jesus can bring his own cloud,” Willis said.
Willis went on and the men shook their heads.
Silas said, “Accordin’ to me young fellar who went to the Bethesda mission the Missioners do the Jericho March: walkin’ around the church over and over. The next thing the altar is lined with people prayin’ in unknown tongues.”
Wilson Bishop from Pick Eyes shook his head. “It can’t be French or Beothuk. They wouldn’t know that.”
“I never heard tell of people speaking without knowin’ what they’re saying,” Silas said.
“They believe God knows what they’re saying, that it’s His language,” Ned Morgan told him.
Silas scratched his head. “Makes sense. It must be Hebrew or somethin’. God’s a Jew, iddin He?”
Richard leaned on his knees and looked up. “Not that I know fer.”
“Foreigners off the European ships in St. John’s have been goin’ to the mission and hearin’ their own language just like in Bible days,” Wilson said.
Alf Petten, a new convert passing by, stopped at overhearing the men. “Sacrilegious, the whole lot of yers. God wouldn’t hold with your kinda talk. Not a’tall He wouldn’t. It’s the Holy Ghost and don’t make fun of it.”
Silas scoffed, “I knowed you believe in ghosts, but a Holy Ghost?”
“Other ghosts can haunt you. The Holy Ghost’ll make you feel light and the world look new and fresh,” Alf said and went on up the road as if he had springs in his feet.
Ethel Porter attended the mission to disrupt the service. Instead she was drawn in by the spirit as the singing vibrated through the small building. She rushed to the altar praying for forgiveness. She left the mission exclaiming, “I feel so light I could float away.”
When Silas heard about Ethel’s change of heart he had a chuckle. “There’s no doubt Ethel is gettin’ ready to fly. The whole lot of converts is moulting like birds casting off their earthly flesh for spiritual bodies. Getting ready for The Rapture, me son.”
Esau Porter shook his head. “I don’t see their wings yet.”
The mission became a place for converts to unburden themselves of sins and claim forgiveness, a refuge for fishermen from the tensions they carried while facing a ferocious sea. It was a sanctuary for a mother burdened by the cares of a family and the worry of her man on the sea.
Flora Bowering, a young woman, her face round and pleasant, her voice slightly husky, had come to hold services. The tail of her navy dress shivered around her thick, dusty-brown stockings as she told converts that Jesus was coming in the twinkling of an eye and Christians should not be weighed down with the things of the world. She quoted the Bible: “. . . women adorn themselves . . . not with gold or pearls. . . .”
Fearful that she would miss The Rapture if she was weighed down by worldly possessions one convert pulled on her string of pearls. It burst and the pearls went down inside her dress and rolled across the floor every which way.
Another convert knelt at the altar with tears streaming down her face. She let out a laugh like the clapping of a bell. One laugh rolled into another until, exhausted, she stood to her feet, her face shining, hands raised. The minister explained that she was laughing in the spirit.
That was the strangest thing to Elizabeth. She had never imagined anyone laughing in a place of worship, not even Jesus. She sat quietly, eyes closed.
One Sunday night after the sermon, the congregation was called to stand at the altar. The pastor went from one person to another touching each forehead and praying. There was the slight touch of fingers on Elizabeth’s forehead and she fell backwards to the floor. There had been no measure of time and distance, no jolt from the fall. One instant she was standing and the next she was lying on a floor soft as a cloud under her. She was taken by surprise when unknown sounds unwound from her tongue and rippled forth, soft sounds, unrestrained, as if her heart had found its voice and was speaking its own language.
The mission children were sometimes hissed at and called holy rollers by other children. One child was attacked on her way to school, punched in the nose and swung around by her hair.
Elizabeth knew about the attacks. One rock thrown at the back of James’s leg had bruised it. Another rock had hit Jane in the back of her knee.
“Persecution makes us strong,” Elizabeth told them. “If someone smites one cheek, offer the other. That’s Jesus’s way.”
To Jacob she said, “If the children don’t react the other children’ll get tired of their behaviour. But a prayer wouldn’t hurt either.”
* * * * *
Jacob didn’t mind when there was no preacher. He felt at home in the pulpit, as if he was meant to be there. He tended to his sermon on Saturday night and on Sunday morning he dressed in his new suit. He wore it with a vest over a spotless, starched white shirt and coloured tie. Elizabeth put a white handkerchief in the upper pocket.
He stood in the porch ready for church in a polished pair of shoes and wearing a quiff hat and Elizabeth eyed him with a saucy glint. “Sure, I hardly knows you.”
Away from the sounds of the sea, and the rush of winds over it, the little church beside a pond in the shelter of hills became a haven for Elizabeth to settle her weary bones and renew her strength each S
unday night.
Jacob stayed home with the younger children taking the chance for a nap once they were tucked away. Sometimes Elizabeth came home to find him leaning against the curved head of the settle, legs stretched along its body, their youngest child asleep in his arms.
Jacob was having the finest kind of rest on the Lord’s Day.
One Sunday night she came home from the mission and the children were all asleep in bed. She pulled out her hatpins and lifted her hat away from her head. She shook out her hair.
Jacob glanced her way meeting her bright-eyed look.
She moved to where he was lying on the settle, stooped, and ran her tongue down his cheek, devilment in her eyes.
“Is this what you learn at prayers?” he asked.
“No, but it is what I can do after prayers. So many men in the Bible knew their wives. You need to get to know yours over and over.”
He pretended to be serious. “Now, now. The Bible says thou shalt not work thy horse nor thy ass on the Sabbath—the fourth commandment.”
“Ask any Jew and he will tell you that the Sabbath was yesterday,” she lipped.
He slapped her behind and pulled her to him. They hurried upstairs.
The chance for another baby.
* * * * *
Patience Kennedy, known as Aunt Pace, was up in her rocking chair mending her handkerchief when she heard that the Missioners were going to have an open-air baptismal service come Sunday. New converts were eager to be baptized before they left home to fish in Labrador for the season. Aunt Pace came outside to where Alvina was throwing feed to her hens. The day was calm and the conversation was carried down to where Elizabeth was hanging out clothes.
“I think the Missioners are too saved,” Aunt Pace told Alvina.
“How can anyone be too saved?” Alvina asked.
“Gone in the head, then,” she answered and went back inside.
The water is too cold, Elizabeth thought as she looked over the cove. She wasn’t up to going into water that might still carry slivers of ice from floes not long left the cove.
Still, on Sunday afternoon she followed Jacob to the beach where converts had gathered. She looked around. The baptismal service had drawn people from as far away as Brigus. Onlookers lined the wharf and Cliff Path.
Elizabeth had sewn weights from a discarded cast net in the tail of her dress to keep it from lifting like an open umbrella as she stepped out, cold water gurgling in her worn shoes. Icy pain shot up her legs as she went waist deep. The preacher pressed a pure white handkerchief against her nose. His other hand on her back bore her weight as she went down through the blue liquid and came up, her wet eyelashes blinking, water falling away from her hair in beaded streams. She waded ashore and stepped through the crowd, her clothes sodden, her feet sloshing. She faced skeptics’ mocking stares. Low in the sky crows cawed amid sounds of “Where He leads me I will follow. . . .”
Aunt Pace came out of her house to stand on Kennedy’s Hill. She tut-tutted each time a Missioner rose out of the water, hands raised, bivvering lips praising God.
“I don’t need a dip in salt water to prove I’m good,” she muttered. “The Missioners’ll be gone to heaven before their time if they catch their death. Sure, May water is cold as water lodged in the heart of an iceberg.”
There would come a time when someone would whisper, “Death is in the waters of baptism.”
More than one person would agree.
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George wasn’t one to talk about the loss of his little girl and his parents. So much dying could make a man forget about living. The rush of grief that often came made him feel he was in a punt without an anchor drifting in a stormy ocean that threatened to slam him against a growler. He could see his father sitting in the pine chair holding little Nellie, both of them frail. He was thinking this sitting in the mission beside Alvina wondering how he could fill the emptiness when the Missioners started to sing, “Come home, it’s suppertime.” He thought of when he was a boy and his mother called across the cove to where he was running with other boys playing lalleck and hiding under overturned old punts lying in the sand like beached whales. The boys may have been scattered from one end of the cove to the other but when their mothers called them they hurried home so hungry their stomachs were ready to eat their tongues. Now George was hungry for something more.
“It’s wonderful to come home to God,” the preacher said.
George felt as if a divine power lifted him off his seat and he found himself running to the Mercy Seat. He fell to his knees sobbing.
No one had seen George cry in public before. The men of the cove rarely cried. In the mission some of them became so soft-hearted they did little else.
More than an hour later George rose to his feet feeling lighter and free.
The preacher said, “The devil’s been laughin’ up your sleeve long enough. Now you can laugh back.”
George nodded in relief though it was the first time he had imagined the devil laughing.
Alvina couldn’t see well. “I can see as well as God meant me to see,” she insisted. She didn’t believe what Aunt Pace had suggested: God made earlobes to hold spectacles in place. She’d been straining to see boats far out into the ocean for a while not wanting to admit that everything was blurry. She could see Elizabeth’s clothesline, the motion of her wash in the wind, but not as clear as when she was first married. “To wear glasses is nothing but a show of vanity,” she insisted.
“There’s nothing about glasses to make you feel vain,” Elizabeth told her. “They’ll only show God’s world as He made it, not blurred as you see it.”
One Sunday Alvina couldn’t believe her eyes. The new minister was sitting on the platform as proper as you please wearing spectacles. She began to think about days when she wondered what was going on across the cove where people on the wharf were only a smudge. The next day the minister came down the hill to get a cod from the fishermen and Alvina got close enough to catch a glimpse through the side of his spectacles. Her eyes rounded in excitement. The world looked much brighter and clearer and everything at a distance was more defined, closer, which was exactly where she liked everything to be. She began to think that spectacles weren’t sinful—not a’tall. She skimped to save money, a bit here and there from the sale of fish. She placed it in a small tea can. When she had enough money George took her to Bay Roberts to get her eyes tested. After weeks waiting for the eyeglasses they arrived by mail. She put them on and pulled them off with a sharp intake of breath. She gave George a shocked look. “I feel naked! It’s as if everyone can see me more clearly now.” She had not realized how comfortable she was behind her own eyes. Now she was open to anyone’s stares. That lasted only for a moment. She looked through the window and drew back astonished. Elizabeth was coming out of her house and going down the lane. Alvina could see what she was wearing as plain as if she were standing beside her. She no longer cared about being vain. She went running down over the hill to tell Elizabeth that she never knew the sky was so close, the earth so sharp and beautiful, and the waters so lively.
She exclaimed, “What a world we live in!”
“Indeed,” Elizabeth said, slightly amused by her sister-in-law’s enthusiasm. “Come on up for a cup of tea.”
She followed Elizabeth back to the house saying, “I’ll have a clearer view of our men’s boat coming home.”
Jacob looked up from reading his Bible, the hint of a smile on his lips. “I don’t say but you’ll be taken with philistinism now that you got spectacles.”
Alvina didn’t answer. She knew Jacob was toying with her.
As the weeks went by and Alvina listened to Sunday’s sermons she knew there was a reason God hadn’t wanted her to have better eyesight. She saw too much of other people’s business. She was sure God was calling her to give up her glasses to av
oid temptation. She wanted to listen but her stubborn will held out. Maybe some day, she promised as she knelt at the altar. She looked out over her lenses and up at the platform where the minister was shining his glasses with his handkerchief, likely to better see sinners in the back seats.
She knew then that even God would wear spectacles—if He needed to.
62
“I figured I had my share of children,” Elizabeth told Alvina as they stood on the stagehead tying on their barbels.
“For sure you have,” Alvina said.
Elizabeth felt weary from all the times she’d had babies tugging at her breast sucking her milk until her blood seemed drained. Older children yanked her hands throughout the day wanting drink or food until finally it was night and she was relieved to be able to settle them in bed only to be awakened by cries. Often she had sighed through nights of broken sleep. No more babies!
Now she felt the load of another child, a secret her barbel strings had been loosening around since early summer. Every morning she eased out of bed, her hands on her hips, her back aching.
When fog rolled in banking the cove Elizabeth felt as if her face were pressed against the sea. Other times battering winds stormed over the stagehead. There was no shelter as they licked the cold water and blew it in Elizabeth’s face while she reached inside the limp fish. Her fingers stiffened with cold as she dragged entrails from the split bodies lying on a bloodied table. She dropped the gory mess and it formed a damp heaviness around her feet. Again and again she slid the insides of cod out, the cold surge snaking through her veins.
Her strength petered often as she and Alvina bore a barrow bearing cod from the stage up the steep path, often after water had trenched it, making the path rough, uneven, and rocky as they trudged to the fish flakes. Children running alongside the barrow of heavy, waterlogged fish sometimes dragged on the handles. Elizabeth was wearing out from work and from the damage work could do.
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