Sophie turned startled and Elizabeth reached both hands to pull her daughter to safety. Sensing her mother’s tension the little girl began to wail.
Elizabeth soothed her. “Don’t cry,” she said even as she broke down crying so hard Sophie’s dress was soaked. The thing she feared had almost come upon her.
“Sophie’s guardian angel was with her,” the preacher said in church the next Sunday.
Every parent said amen, each one realizing how lucky they were that their children had not fallen over the cove’s cliffs.
Children aren’t meant to live on cliffs, Maggie wrote back after she received a letter from Elizabeth. A careless run and they can trip and go over and if the teeth of cliffs don’t gash them open the sea is waiting, all eager to swallow a body.
Elizabeth knew she was thinking of Jamie swallowed by the sea. Every time she saw a ship far-off crossing the bay she imagined it was the ghost of the Southern Cross rising from its grave.
65
“I’m coming soon,” William told Mary Jane as if she were sitting across from him. He felt his life dimming like a candle pooling in the bottom of its holder, its wick burning to that last flicker. He wasn’t sure where he was going but he liked to think that God knew and the devil didn’t. He hoped he’d see Mary Jane and Jamie. He’d once told Mary Jane, “The journey from here to where, no one knows. Whatever it is, it don’t hurt to be dead. Otherwise you’d hear a lot of complainin’ from the people underground.”
She had raised an eyebrow and given him an amused look.
Jacob and Elizabeth brought James, named for his uncle Jamie, to visit his grandfather. They found William shrunken and stooped, his round, healthy-looking face bearded and whiskered under a head holding a fringe of white hair around a bald crown. He was sitting in a navy guernsey on a long bench out by the door. A shoelace reeved the neck and was knotted tight.
William put his hand to his head, leaned toward James, and joked, “The arse is worn out of me hair from standing on me head.” The whiskers under his nose twitched as he moved closer to the boy’s face and warned, “Come here, me lad, so’s I can sniff dee up me nostrils.” He would say that to a lot of youngsters and they would always run away for fear he had a way of doing just that.
Elizabeth had told James all about his grandfather. He wasn’t afraid. He kept his ground and gave William a steady look.
William drew back impressed with the young boy. “You don’t have the likeness of my Jamie, now a ghost inside the chambers of me old heart, but you’ve got his boldness. Do yourself good and stay off the water. The sea’s mouth is always open and waitin’. Jamie learned the hard way, he did, and now the ghost of the Southern Cross is come to haunt me every day of me life.”
William stared out to sea and Elizabeth hurried to distract him.
Months later Caroline looked at Joe concerned. “I dropped in on William. He’s sluggish and gone all phlegmy, coughing a lot, and by the looks of the place without a day’s work in his mind. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘The way you’re hackin’ and snifflin’ you’ll blow your brains out in your handkerchief. What’s the good of you then!’ He looked up with no mind to answer me.”
Johnny huddled close to the stove. “It’s only what we expected,” he said quietly. “He faces the sea from his chair by the door and imagines a ship slidin’ under the waters with Jamie gettin’ smothered to death. Years of grief is wearin’ him away.”
Joe said, “We knows where Lavinia is; he knows nothin’ about Jamie.”
Caroline clutched her apron. “I know enough of what William is feelin’ from losing Lavinia. I’d have a mind to give up if there wasn’t two men lookin’ for care.”
When James came downstairs one January morning he shied from his mother’s look.
Elizabeth set his bowl of porridge in front of him. “Stir yourself and get your spoon in hand,” she urged. “There’s a new fall of snow you’ll want to be tumblin’ in.”
“Ma.” James’s tone of voice made her swirl around.
“What is it?” she asked the eight-year-old. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
He looked up at her, then. His voice trembled. “I dreamed that Pappa Maley died and was laid out on a new matchboard door, a white sheet over him.” His bottom lip trembled. “Over all of him.”
“Don’t be talking your dreams,” she admonished him. “Eat.”
Her throat constricted. This would be no time for her father to go. The sea was rough with lops and spray. When the sea calmed she’d send word for him to spend the rest of the winter with her. He could come by train but she knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t hold with the likes of an iron horse rantin’ and tearin’ down the tracks on land once set in seed.
That week Les Porter from Foxtrap came into the cove and Elizabeth asked him to see her father and urge him to get on the next boat coming that way. A letter came back in Caroline’s handwriting, written like William said it: “I can’t come over now, the marsh is frozen too hard fer me to dig up me money.” Caroline had added, “He’s not well a’tall and his house is in slings.”
Days later Elizabeth went across to Pick Eyes with a can of pudding for an elderly woman who was off her feet with influenza. A young boy came to tell her she was wanted at home. She hurried up over Jacob Porter’s hill and down over Cliff Path as fast as she could. The window shades were drawn and when she went into the house she felt the darkness. “Someone died, someone close to me. Who?” she whispered lurching to one side. She grabbed the kitchen blind and it snapped away from her hands back up the window clattering against its roller.
“You could have broken the spring,” Alvina said from where she was sitting on the settle.
Jacob was sitting beside her, pale and heavy-eyed. “Your father’s gone, Liz.”
Her voice was steady. “I’ll have to go bury him.”
“You can’t be going over there this time of the year,” Jacob said, “and the weather rough.” When he saw her face begin to crumble he relented.
Elizabeth and Jacob arrived in Foxtrap the day after William died.
Caroline called them inside her home and made a pot of tea to go along with a bowl of Baccalieu bird soup. Elizabeth sat at the table pale with shock while Caroline told her about the events leading up to the discovery of her father.
It had been a bitter cold day and Caroline had looked toward William’s house looking for a sign of smoke in his chimney. No smoke on a cold January morning was the sign of a calamity of one sort or another. She had turned to Joe stretched out on the daybed by the fire. “There’s not a sign of smoke rising from your brother’s chimney,” she said. “Get on over and check on the rascal.”
Joe found William’s house cold and his brother nowhere to be seen. Disturbed by a heavy quietness, as if the breath had gone out of the place, he climbed the stairs. William was still in bed. Joe was gruff with him. “A cat wouldn’t save her kittens in this icebox. It’s about time you got on your legs and down to light a fire. The mornin’ is half gone.” He went closer and saw that his brother was white as marble. He touched his hand and found it hard and cold. He rushed down the stairs and hurried to tell Caroline that William was gone.
Elizabeth remembered her visit the summer before. William had been complaining. “Damn leg falls asleep!”
“Don’t damn your leg,” she had told him. “It’s a part of you doin’ its best.”
He grunted and she asked, “What comfort do you give it?”
He shook his leg and answered, “I leave it idle while I sleep.”
Jacob opened the creaking door and they went inside the place, a cold, empty shell. He stopped in the porch to gather an armful of kindling. Water in the bucket had frozen into a solid disk, opaque like the moon.
Joe came behind him. He shook his head. “William’s been dead but for the washin’ a
long time. His will give out and then his body succumbed to sickness.”
Only when Elizabeth saw her father laid out on a new storm matchboard door, a white sheet over him just as James had seen him in a dream, did she believe he was really gone. She and Jacob didn’t use his bed. They slept on packed shavings in the house while her father was waking. She had dismantled the bed in her brother’s room and the one left in hers and had taken them to Hibb’s Cove the summer after Jamie disappeared. Later she had regretted leaving her father with two empty rooms to wander through. “You can come, too, with your bed,” she had told him. He shook his head slowly as if it was as heavy as the warming rock in his bed. “And leave me house without people. It would never forgive me.”
“You will leave it,” she had answered.
Now it would stand like a cracked jar, yellow grass growing up through it.
She looked through the upstairs window to the dark, skeletal limbs of an apple tree. It would come back to life in the spring, but her father was gone and she his only child left to carry on. Along the eaves conkerbells glittered in strong sunlight. She smiled remembering her father’s story when she was a child.
“Where do conkerbells come from?” she had asked.
He had pulled her unto his knee, his arm around her, keeping her snug against his chest as he answered, “From the ghosts in the attic. A family of ghosts lives there durin’ the winter months and when they gets too warm from the wood fire below they put their fingers out under the eaves intendin’ to reach the snow and cool off. Their fingers freeze into crinkly ice candles and the ghosts can’t pull them back in. The thirsty sun licks the candles until they shrink and break, fallin’ into the snow below.”
Elizabeth’s face showed disappointment until her father said that the ghosts grow new fingers each year. “It’s how you know they’re still there.”
Elizabeth smiled at the memory. She lifted the window and put her hand out to touch a conkerbell. Licked by a blazing sun, it let go and dropped to the ground. Elizabeth listened as it tinkled against other conkerbells already fallen. Children running below the window picked the longest ice candles from the snow and chased each other sticking them out like swords.
She closed the window and turned back to Jamie’s painting of Titanic on the wall. She blew away dust gathered across the plain wooden frame and lifted it off the nail. She held it in her arms unable to keep her composure. She bent over the painting, her cry hoarse and anguished.
There was the sound of footsteps. Caroline stood on the landing facing her.
Elizabeth sobbed. “There’s been so much dying.”
Caroline rushed to pat her shoulder. Then she took her hand and led her downstairs to the daybed, where they sat together in silence for a long time, hardly moving until, finally, Caroline offered, “I’ll make a cup of tea.”
“I wish I had as much as you,” Caroline said as they sat at the table, sadness darkening the lines in her face. “Lavinia is gone with me chance for grandchildren.”
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said laying her hand on her aunt’s.
Caroline gave her a wistful smile. “I have her memory. I think on that.”
The two sat mimpsing tea and staring ahead.
The October after William’s death, Elizabeth and Jacob sailed to Foxtrap to pick a barrel of apples from Mary Jane’s tree.
Faded uncut grass lay like sheaves of wheat across the ground as if blown there by a mighty wind. Among it spruce and fir trees stood straight and tall, a tremor in their aged branches. A soft soughing wind breathed life into a faded scarecrow like an old man bowing to the elements above fallow ground.
“William hove himself away,” Joe said coming down the path. “He was never the same after losin’ Jamie. He took no pleasure in his work and then he went idle.”
Apples lay fallen and wasting in straw grass trodden on by boys stealing the apples with no regard for the tree’s limbs. Some hung like arms broken at the elbows. Elizabeth picked her way to the ravaged tree. Just as if it was yesterday she could see her father’s face flushing in anger. He’d been on to boys stealing apples for years.
“Now, Pappa,” she’d said, “what’s your use for all the apples? Sure, you’ve only got one mouth beside ours.”
“Yes, but the sons of guns flings them about the roads. Mary Jane would have made tarts and bottled apple sauce.”
Elizabeth brought a bowl of apples inside, sliced them, and fried them in melted butter and brown sugar. She thought of Jamie and her as children lying under the table munching apples, first turning the stalk and running through the alphabet as far as they could go before the stalk broke revealing the first letter to possible names of the person they would marry. Their laughs resounded like a bell and their mother often stopped her work and smiled at them.
Her thoughts were interrupted as Caroline came with a bowl of cream for her fried apples. After the men were fed and went outside the women lingered for a visit.
Caroline followed Elizabeth’s intent look out the road. She touched her arm. “You’re thinking about Maggie, are you? You had likely expected her to your father’s funeral.”
“I thought she may have heard about my father’s death,” Elizabeth said.
Caroline shook her head. “I sent her a note. There was no reply. She’s likely busy with a load of children.”
“That’s it,” Elizabeth said wistfully.
When Elizabeth had written Maggie telling her about her conversion to the mission she had received a cool reply.
Dear Elizabeth,
I heard tell of the Missioners and I don’t need them to tell me I should be saved. If there’s a Rapture I’ve got as much a chance of being raptured as anyone else. The minister here is more relaxed about how to get to heaven. He says that people must work out their own salvation. I’m going to stick with the Church of England.
Your friend always, Maggie
Elizabeth and Jacob held each other in sleep during their nights in the house. Every time a branch brushed against the window, like the fingers of a ghost, she thought of the night Jamie had flung the Labrador box against her Uncle Joe’s house in the only way he could.
She stood outside the empty house alone, after Jacob had gone to the boat. A clear, amused voice sounded through her mind. “Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.” Her father’s voice.
“Maybe I will,” she answered. “I believe in The Rapture.”
66
Maggie had received news from Caroline that William had died, but when she told Ben, her face stricken, he had lifted the note from her hands and read the time of the funeral. Then he said sharply, “Stay away from the place and let the past lie. It’s taken up too much of your mind already.”
Maggie didn’t reply. Every time she looked on the ocean she still imagined the Southern Cross sailing through the distant mist carrying Jamie and the other sealers.
That night Maggie reached her hand to Ben’s back, ran her fingers along it, and laid her palm against his muscular body radiating warmth. “I’d die without you,” she whispered.
He stirred slightly as if her words had caught on a dream he was having.
Something had disturbed her, an uneasy feeling waking her and keeping her awake until the night wore thin. Knowing Ben wanted an early rise she slipped out of bed to start the fire.
Ben was soon hauling on coveralls to the wails of their infant. He scowled and muttered, “A real crosspatch, that one is.”
“He’s on for teethin’, Ben, likely like you when you was his age.”
“You’re right, for sure, always you is, and I the ignorant one not given to thinkin’.” He grinned. “But I’m learnin’ how to soften me notions because of you after these dozen years taking note of your ways.”
He left the house and went to the ba
rn to feed the horse and cow. He came back in, squinting as he lifted the damper on the stove and reached into the fire with a pair of tongs. He hoisted a coal to his pipe and drew in. He dropped the coal back and nodded to Maggie. “Storm the kettle, would yer! I need a hasty mug-up. It’s a fine, clear day in the woods.”
She saw a tiredness in his unshaven face. Sun-cut webs spread out from his dusty brown eyes. She didn’t think she’d ever dream about Jamie again. This was a decent man who had loved her wholly, reaching past Jamie inside her heart. He hadn’t complained the time he’d seen a photograph of Jamie in her Bible when they were first married. William had given her the photo a few days after the Southern Cross was lost. After she’d been married to Ben for a while she sent the photograph to Elizabeth with a note she told herself was true . . . “Jamie will always be your brother but, in fairness to Ben, I can’t carry him in my heart, only in my thoughts.”
Many mornings she had sat in silence beside Ben having an early breakfast, the fire crackling in the stove. She had wanted to promise him more than she gave, wanted to give him more than she had promised him in marriage, but she felt disloyal to Jamie’s memory. I married Ben to have a home and family. Why did he marry me?
He was always gentle and tender when he came to her at night. If she told him she was tired he would say in a chipper voice, “Okay, me ducky. Another time.” He’d hold her, his arm cupped around her, his body spooned against hers as if that was enough, and fall asleep as peaceful as a baby.
If he stirred to her some mornings she didn’t look into his eyes. She kept hers closed. He took his pleasure from her secret place and he never asked to know the mystery of it. If his hands strayed above her waist to her breasts she didn’t show the pleasure she felt or the guilt. Her breasts were to feed her children. Nothing else. She tried not to acknowledge the accidental pleasure she felt when he took his time and her body shuddered and settled. He always hugged her afterwards as if she had given him a gift. She never acknowledged what he had done for her.
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