Ghost of the Southern Cross

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  One palled summer day, she strained to lift Clayton over the playpen set in a corner of the stage. After feeding him she bent to set him back down. She let out a sharp cry at the tearing inside her. It subsided and she thought how hard the work would be on Jacob if she was laid up now. Not before summer’s end, please God. Not yet!

  She went back to the fishing table, gasped as pain like a splitting knife turned in her insides and dragged her hands away from the white, leg-like belly of fish she was gutting. She turned from the table and dragged her cumbrous body through the stage. She almost crawled up the steep path with its rain trenches, pebbles rolling and scattering under her rubber boots, her feet bearing down in anguish. Her fingers, as brown as the skins of potatoes she dug from the side of a hill each fall, strained to touch and unlatch the gate and then to reach the storm door to her house. She dragged her body through the kitchen, then the hall, and crawled up the canvas-covered stairs whispering, “Stay, baby, stay, only your heartbeat is strong. You’ve months to go.”

  Her children rushed after her staring in fright at the blood her body was splashing on the steps. They flattened their shivering bodies against angels and flowers imprinted on the stairs wall as Alvina rushed by leaving her barbel reeking of fish blood and guts on the newel post.

  Knowing their mother was wounded, but not knowing by whom or what, the children sensed a black presence in the house. Dropping their voices deep inside them they listened at the door to sounds muffled by creaking boards beneath the heavy feet of their aunt, who hurried down the stairs, then up to silence.

  “Be quiet, all of you,” Alvina admonished them.

  Elsie stared at her. No one was making a sound.

  There was never ranting and roaring out of Elizabeth. She always delivered her babies quietly. Her eyes were closed now, her hands on the hard mound of her belly as she bore the harsh pain expelling the baby before her time. The baby lay folded like an unopened flower. Stunned, Alvina slipped the tiny alabaster body, veiled in a thin vellum sac, from her hand into a white blanket.

  The stage work was left to George as Jacob hurried up to the house. He sat down heavily on the settle and bowed his head. “Save Elizabeth,” he prayed. Then out of his fear came soft, unknown words tumbling off his tongue, anguished sounds only God could understand.

  Finally, Alvina called Jacob upstairs and parted a blanket to show him the tiny, unblemished body.

  Elizabeth opened her eyes and in a thready voice asked, “Where’s my baby?”

  The faces above her, pale and drawn, eyes dull and sorrowful, spoke without words, their silence too harsh an answer. She heard it, felt it slice through her heart. Her cries to see her baby made no sound.

  Time passed with Elizabeth’s body resting in its white shroud.

  Jacob had opened the bedroom window and a fresh breeze stirred the curtains. Disembodied voices of cove people calling from one stagehead to another drifted on the wind. Elizabeth felt far away from all of them.

  Tears dried on the faces of the children as they stood hushed outside their mother’s room. Then one day Jacob called them inside and Elizabeth opened her face into a smile at little faces looking in at her. She reached her hands, their washboard nails worn to the bow of her fingers, toward the rushing, soft warm flesh of her children. They let out tinkling laughs as she held them tight against the dark wave of her unpinned hair, wet with the salty flow of her tears.

  After the children reluctantly started down the stairs Jacob sat on their bed and reached his hand to stroke Elizabeth’s hair. He choked on his words. “I did this!”

  He did! There were nights he had come to her and she had answered to his need when she hadn’t been inclined.

  Alvina had once leaned on a fence rail and whispered, “St. Paul said to offer due benevolence to your husband. How can a man who lived centuries ago take the power from a woman to say no to her husband?”

  Elizabeth smiled. “He can only if you let him.”

  She had let Jacob and, in expressing his need, he had left a pain that would never leave. Her impulse was to slap his face but when he lifted his head as if it had been bowed in shame, an overwhelming tenderness filled her. It was the human condition: men rewarding themselves after a discomforting day on the water in an unsteady boat, drenched to the skin, often cold and hungry. Settling into bed against the steady warmth of a woman’s body was what they thought of on their way to shore, never that a child they helped make could be pulled from the bloodied grave of a woman’s body.

  Smarting from the loss of her baby girl, Elizabeth later stood by the fence, hanging sopping clothes to dry on her clotheslines, complaining to Alvina, “I’ve been in child much of the time I’ve been with Jacob, bearin’ children and recoverin’ while carin’ for them and carryin’ a barrow of fish, bendin’ in half to spread the fish, risin’ up for a good breath and to see something other than layers of fish. A woman is never off work till she’s off her feet—and not then if there’s a man beside her.”

  “It’s the way of the world,” Alvina answered.

  It wouldn’t be the same from now on, she decided. She wouldn’t be as free to turn her body into a coffin, blood tears weeping from the very place Jacob and she had found comfort in each other.

  She didn’t have to. Jacob kept his place folding himself with his back to her. If he stirred in need she didn’t know about it. Jacob dared not reach to hug her.

  “I don’t want to be this way,” she whispered against Jacob’s back one winter night when the wind howled against the bedroom window, its lonely voice running around the house, “but losing children not only wears on my body but on my mind and heart.”

  Jacob turned to the night table and opened a drawer. He struck a match and lit the lamp on the bedside table. Then he took the Bible and opened it. Finally he found what he wanted. He began to read I Cor. 7:3. “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.” He skipped to verse five. “Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time. . . .” He grinned at Elizabeth. “The like of that! God is interested in our bedtime shenanigans. He believes in time out.”

  “Dout the lamp,” she said turning her back. Her heart skipped with hope. Jacob understood!

  63

  Elizabeth sent her father a Bible study with a note saying that in his twilight years he needed to know where he was going in the hereafter.

  “He needs something. You can’t trust him not to be a prankster,” Caroline told Joe. She had seen the book lying on William’s table with Elizabeth’s note suggesting that if her father’s eyes were too clouded for reading he could ask Joe to read it to him.

  Caroline didn’t have the heart to tell Elizabeth about the things William had done. Monday last, women along the lane had pinned their undergarments under other articles on the clothesline. Later that day, Ned Porter said to his neighbour, “The women’s puttin’ on a show for us—wonder what it could mean.”

  The other man’s jaw dropped and he rushed to tell his wife knowing she’d be mortified. She scravelled to gather navy and orange bloomers sprawled on blueberry bushes along the side of the road threatening to kill whoever did it. Down the road another neighbour found her calico drawers stood up on a stick.

  News went around that William Maley was the likely culprit. After all, they knew he had stolen a pot of soup during the potato harvest. The soup had been cooked for the six hungry men hired to gather the crop at Jessie Porter’s farm.

  By noon the men’s clothes were grubby, their steps heavy as if their tiredness had sunk to their feet, adding to the heaviness of clotted clay around their boots. Their eyes lit up in faces holding sweat and dirt as Jessie came outside to call them to dinner. The scent of baked bread crackling under melting butter and simmering chicken soup made the work in the fields worthwhile.

  Jessie w
ent back inside, her baby in her arms. She laid him in his playpen and hurried into the kitchen. She ran back out calling in a panicky voice, “My pot of soup is gone! For the love of God, what’ll I do? The pot didn’t walk off by itself. Who the devil took it?”

  She rushed back inside disheartened. “I’ll have to make a pot of doughboys in a quick and run partridgeberry sauce over them.”

  William sauntered down the lane and poked his head in the doorway. “I know just where your soup might be,” he said. “I hear your chickens cluckin’. They’re after smellin’ soup and thinkin’ the aroma is familiar.”

  Jessie rushed to the henhouse. There with the lid on and rocks keeping it tight was the soup. William followed her, letting out an abrupt laugh. “I just left it to cool.”

  Jessie grabbed up the pot and hurried to the house sputtering.

  “Don’t be talkin’!” she told Caroline later. “The man’s gone off his head since poor Mary Jane and Jamie passed away. Mary Jane wouldn’t hold with what he’s doin’.”

  “No she wouldn’t, then,” Caroline said. “He’s been gettin’ a touch of dotage since he lost Jamie.”

  Joe defended his brother. “A harmless thing it is, he acting the rascal. He’s got a funny streak.”

  “He’s got a funny bone and it’s in his head,” Caroline countered.

  One day Fred Porter and other boys came to raid William’s apple tree. They had assumed he wasn’t home. The door was latched with a stick against it. Fred climbed the tree by a bedroom window upstairs. All of a sudden there was a roar. William had poked his head out the window and fired his gun. Fred fell to the ground as fast as the apple he was stealing. The other boys started running down the road with William calling, “Get outta here else you won’t know nothin’ till you wakes up in the mornin’ to find yerselves dead.”

  A neighbour who figured what had happened intensified the boys’ fright by exclaiming, “Look at all that blood!” One boy almost fainted before he realized that William had shot off a bit of gunpowder. Other boys came to his house with money. William stroked his whiskers and asked, “What do you want, me lads?” Then he filled their arms with apples for five coppers or a five-cent piece.

  When Elizabeth came to see her father she stood in the doorway, her hand lifted to her forehead. “There you is, not a clean plate in sight and you eating out of your frying pan. I don’t want your grandchildren to remember you as the crusty old man who didn’t take care of himself. You’re not givin’ this place as much as a cat’s lick. I’ll send Elsie over for a spell.”

  He lifted his head looking bewildered. “I tell yer now, ’tis not all gravy livin’ in this house.”

  Elsie went to stay with him for a time mixing a bun of dough to bake or fry as toutons and making him a pot of soup. As soon as she left he went back to his old ways of never washing a frying pan from one meal to the next. He made kettle tea: boiled water with milk, sugar, and tea leaves, all in the kettle and strained into his cup. He soaked hard bread in it.

  “I’ve been given a fool’s pardon for being a rascal, Mary Jane,” he said, looking toward a chair as if she were sitting there.

  He could hear her voice: “It’s the ghost of the Southern Cross with the loss of our boy that’s sent your mind a-kilter.”

  He nodded. “That’s it, then.”

  64

  “I’ve been tryin’ to think the Bible way, ‘Perfect love casteth out fear,’” Elizabeth told Jacob as they lay in bed facing each other. “I want to be a wife to you.”

  He gave her a self-conscious look. “That’s easy for me but I don’t want you fearin’ another child and with so much work while doing it.”

  Her eyes grew distant. “It’s a wonder me toes aren’t worn out against me shins. It’s been uphill and downhill in this place, downhill to the fish stage and uphill to the fish flakes. From there downhill and uphill to the house. I help set seeds and drill trenches in the uphill gardens and bring in the crop many times with the weight of a baby pullin’ on me insides.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Jacob said. “When you grow up in a place like I did your body grows with it. I was selfish to bring you here for me, selfish to believe you’d grow accustomed to the place.”

  “I came for me,” she answered. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It’s my weariness talkin’.”

  Jacob pulled her to him and she laid her head against his chest, a warm resting place. She smoothed hair away from his forehead and smiled as tension drained from his face.

  * * * * *

  Flora Sophie was born on the ninth day of April 1926, six months after a large, white-haired goat knocked Elizabeth down breaking her collarbone.

  “It’s better to have it over so I’ll be ready for the flakes in June,” she told Alvina as she lay against her pillow nursing the newborn, a bright-eyed, dainty child.

  “Another child to worry over,” she added. “The cliffs and all. A misstep in a draft of wind and a child can go over. The sea got no mercy. It’s eager to swallow a body, baptize it for death.”

  “Shush!” Alvina said. “No one’s gone over for ever so long.”

  Elizabeth felt a chill along her spine. She looked down at her baby safe in her arms and up at her sister-in-law and asked, “When did someone go over the cliff?”

  Alvina’s face showed her reluctance to answer. “It was long before George was born. I knows only that a little Lear boy fell over the cliff. It so happened that a gust of wind swept right under the boy and he floated down as if an angel’s wing had slipped under him. He drifted like a leaf down to the sea right beside a fishing vessel. He was picked up none the worse.”

  Jacob and George had grown up, comfortable with cliffs facing the vast, empty space between them and the sky, and the surge of the sea below. The dark ledges and cracks shadowed a danger the brothers courted standing on the edges or lying on their stomachs and yanking shelves of shale out of the cliffs. They dropped splintered pieces down over the edges and cocked their ears for the explosion of rock against rock and the crash into the sea.

  Elizabeth’s children, scampering about, busy in play, never realized her constant fears of some mishap as they made their rounds playing under fish flakes on the cliffs. They heaped up piles of tree needles fallen from the branches spread overhead or they dug holes for a game of marbles. Sometimes the older children beat a barrel hoop with a stick to see how far they could get down the hill under a flake before it wobbled out of control and fell to the ground or over the cliffs. They often chased each other close to the edge despite Elizabeth’s warnings.

  Fishermen and their wives clearing away fish on pleasant summer days smiled when they heard the sounds of children’s shouts and laughter. They listened to the singsong voices of little girls bouncing a ball: “Bouncy, bouncy bally. I broke the head of my dolly. Mother came out and gave a shout and turned my petticoat inside out.”

  The lazy drift of the pure, sweet voices of happy children was a sign that all was right in the world.

  Elsie had the care of Clayton, her blond and fair-skinned brother. “Keep him in the shade of the flake. Mind him so his skin don’t peel like a boiled apple,” Elizabeth cautioned as she made her way to the fishing stage on a hot afternoon. While her hands worked as fast as they could to help clear away fish her ears stayed tuned to the sounds of the children under the flake.

  Despite Elizabeth’s fears, most children of the cove knew instinctively that if they didn’t watch their step, they risked tumbling over jagged rocks to the waters below.

  That is every child but Sophie, still too young to join the other children. By the time she was two she was running down the lane trying to get through the gate.

  The cove children were warned to stay off the flakes when their parents were down in the stage. A child crossing the flakes could easily trip up in the nets and often did an
d near the edge. Despite the caution, sometimes by late afternoon the children were hungry enough to sneak up on the flakes and whitenap: skin the navy napes off the spread salt fish. This practice made them thirsty and they wandered up to the nearest house and inside the porch and helped themselves to a drink from a bucket of water. One of the children on their way from Elizabeth’s house, in a hurry to get back to playing, left the gate unlatched.

  Elizabeth and Alvina were chatting on their way up from the stage when they caught sight of Sophie sitting on the cliff happily swinging her legs into the air above the churning sea.

  Elizabeth’s heart stood still just as it had the day she’d been mixing bread crumbs with savoury in a white enamel bowl to make dressing for a chicken when Elsie came running. “We can’t find James,” she panted.

  He’s gone over the cliff! was her first thought.

  The cove people left their work on the flakes and in their stages and searched for hours before they found him. He had gone into the shed beside the house and climbed down a ladder to the cellar to hide in a game of lalleck. Away from the heat of a sweltering day he had lain on a pile of old netting and fallen asleep.

  This time there was real danger. Elizabeth’s legs, weak with fright, could scarcely carry her as she hastened out over the road, seconds like minutes, her focus on her baby, the whole world shut out. She stepped as softly as she could toward her child, her heart beating wildly. She prayed that there wouldn’t come a sound to cause the child to move or shift slightly and go over the cliff. There wasn’t a stir of wind, not a sound from anything or anyone. Then Elizabeth noticed, from the corner of her eye, children starting down the hill.

  If they ran toward Sophie she might turn quickly and fall to her death. Elizabeth put her fingers to her lips and they stopped, stark still, their faces frozen. Finally Elizabeth’s trembling hand reached out and grabbed the back of her child’s dress.