Caring for the children left at home and hopes that her children in the orphanage would soon be home was what kept her going.
The children came home the next summer in a box cart drawn by a ragged horse and shabby driver. Abe Porter had brought a load of eggs and fresh meat to St. John’s and sold them to the shops. He’d gathered the children from the orphanage. They climbed into his bloodied cart in clean clothes. By the time they arrived home they were ragged-looking, their face and lips dusty, their clothes stained. They climbed down with shy looks, more tired than happy. Maggie didn’t reach to hug them. Instead she filled the porch tub with water and scrubbed the children with soap until the scent of the orphanage was washed away.
During the weeks the children were home they kept aloof. They had life experiences Maggie knew nothing about, experiences they alluded to but were reluctant to divulge. They seemed self-conscious, afraid of being attached. When they had to leave the only sign that they didn’t want to go was the way they held their bags tight against them and pulled their lower lips under their teeth, their eyes narrowing. They waved goodbye without a smile.
Maggie bore down hard on her words as if to imprint them on her children’s minds as she called, “This is your home and soon you’ll be home for good.”
They didn’t come home for good. They got their learning at the orphanage, and when they left it was to go in service to families needing domestic help. They never forgot the Grace: “Thank the Lord for what we have. If we had more we would be glad but since the times they are so bad thank the Lord for what we have.”
What they didn’t have was their mother and their sisters and brothers born in the same house—children their mother had kept.
67
Golden Stanley was born on the thirty-first of March 1931. The midwife took in his robust look and smiled at his lusty cries. “There’ll be nothing to keeping him alive,” she said in her direct way.
Until now Elizabeth had remembered this day of the year as a day to mourn. Now it was also a day to celebrate the birth of a son.
The wind was blowing a gale. Elizabeth slipped out of bed to feed the baby just as day was breaking. She could see through the curtains a puff of white cloud hovering in the cold, faint blue sky. She pulled back the curtains and gasped. Ice had come! It covered the face of the bay invading the cove and walloping the shore. Its jagged teeth had taken the grey legs out from under the stagehead. The stage platform was gone. The squished stage room hung like a forlorn, grey head. Elizabeth woke Jacob.
“That happens now and then,” he said. “Spring tides with gales and ice threaten our stages.” He hurried to meet George coming down the hill.
Oil casts rolled across the ice spilling rendered cod livers like golden oil. It froze into a crusty yellow. The brilliant light of the sun reflecting off the ice stung Jacob and George’s eyes making them water as they scrambled over the ice bed to grab their empty casts before the ice moved out to sea as suddenly as it had come. They gathered the damaged legs of the stagehead and hauled them ashore. Children who had run down to the ice with sticks were running from pan to pan as far out as Offer Island, a large rock above water about a hundred yards from the beach. Pans loosened as if a dragon had spit out a mouthful of broken teeth now floating apart into the open sea.
Elizabeth, thinking about Jamie running from pan to pan risking his life, flung open the door. “Get in here,” she called to the boys, her voice loud and harsh startling young James. He turned quickly, almost losing his balance.
“Now!”
By afternoon the ice had floated out the bay. It left a lone berg wedged between two rocks, a reminder of what ice could do.
Misfortune followed the summer. The fishing season had too many water hauls. Fall came and one day Jacob strode up from the stage, laid his cap on the doorknob of the porch door, and hove himself on the settle.
Elizabeth read the lines in his face, heard the heaviness in his breath as he lifted his head. He looked at her. Finally he said, “All the work with only water in our nets and winter soon to set upon us like a wild creature. There’s hardly enough for a family. I’ll spend a winter in the Sydney mines. There’s more money to be made there than in the brown bowels of Bell Island. It will be hard on you but next year—” He drew his lips tight.
“You must go, then,” she urged. “I don’t want worry takin’ you in the heart. Then you’ll be no good to work at anything. There’ll be fish next year. Only for a winter you’ll be gone.”
He glanced at the dress she was making for Jane and asked, “How many miles did you go on your sewing machine today?”
“Not half as many as I need to. I’ll have to turn Elsie’s blue coat and leggings for Jane. Blue fades something awful.”
Elizabeth left her work and went to the kitchen stove. She lifted salt cod and new potatoes bursting out of their thin skins and laid them on a plate. Butter melted over them while Jacob sat at the table, his head bowed.
In prayer or despair? Elizabeth wondered.
“The mines are rough and dangerous,” Elizabeth had overheard Jacob tell George after one of his buddies was injured in the Bell Island mines. “You could soak your skin with blood down in the mines and the boss wouldn’t care.”
To lessen the danger for Jacob Elizabeth bought him a Welsh miner’s lamp, its light soft. According to the peddler who sold it the handsome brass lamp had flash-arresting baffling. It promised to reduce the chance of explosions in the coal dust–laden air of mines.
It was a long winter without Jacob. Elizabeth pictured him digging black rocks in the darkness of Sydney mines all the while thinking of coal ablaze in the kitchen stove of their Hibb’s Cove home lighting up his family’s faces.
When Jacob had spare time he wrote Elizabeth. She ran down the lane answering Elsie’s voice calling her: “Ma, we’ve got a letter!”
Her heart leaped in tenderness at seeing her name in Jacob’s strong handwriting.
. . . It’s a lonely and wearisome spot, Liz, down in the mine far from you and the children. I think of your comfort and how I’d be gone to heaven if I could lie beside you in our bed at night and after the day rises watch you out in the summer air walking up the path, your skirts fluttering around your bare brown legs like a host of butterflies. I wish for days of dazzling sunshine sizzling on the sea emptying itself behind evening hills. And the children. I hear their laughter in my head. Tell Jane and Elsie and James and Clayton not to fight each other. Get them to help with the work and mind Doris and Sophie. I’ll find a shop and bring home some sweets. I wait for the time I’ll wake to the morning sun glowing against our bedroom window and filling up the room, little Golden cooing in his crib and clapping his hands. It will come. Until then I remain your ever true husband, Jake.
The children gathered around Elizabeth to listen to her read their father’s letter. They giggled at the mention of themselves wanting to see where they were in the letter. In one letter Jacob told the children to count the waves in the ocean if they wanted to know how much he loved them.
Jane crinkled her nose. “No one can count the waves.”
“And no one can count how much your father loves you,” Elizabeth replied.
From then on Elizabeth read Jacob’s letters to the children, sometimes over and over. She had no trouble getting them ready for bed on a Saturday night once she promised to read their father’s letter at least twice. She lifted a porcelain jug from a row lining her pantry shelf and dipped water from a boiler on the stove. She poured it into the wooden tub in the back porch for the children’s baths. The small ones took a turn sailing one of Jamie’s little boats he’d carved a long time ago, sloshing water over the porch floor. They came out of their baths rosy and fresh, ready to sleep through the night. Elizabeth wrapped heated smooth rocks and brought them to each bed. She settled the children around her, some on the bed, others on t
he floor and began to read. They listened, their eyes shining with the wonder of being able to hear their father’s words even though he wasn’t there. Through his letters they learned what he was thinking, how he was feeling, how much he missed the cove, and how much he loved them and their mother. It was down in print never to be washed away, unlike words he might say when he was home, words gone like a spent day.
After the children were in bed Elizabeth sat by the dwindling fire tatting a blanket on which to sew her family’s names. Sometimes tiredness swept her away; she woke in the silence of a night half-spent and climbed the stairs to slip into bed alone.
When Jacob came home he walked in the door, his clothes soiled and his face unshaven.
“Your father’s home,” Elizabeth called. The children were in the back porch kneeling beside the wooden tub sailing Jamie’s little boats. One child followed another in running to greet him. They moved back in a huddle, his look and scent different, his face grown over and scruffy, his blue eyes tired.
Elizabeth remembered when he’d worked in the Bell Island mines, the smell of iron ore on him as if its ochre dust had penetrated his pores. Now she smelled coal dust, saw its black traces under his fingernails.
The little boats were taken away and the wooden tub was put to Jacob’s use. His hairy hands swirled water as fiercely as an easterly wind churning the sea in an Atlantic storm. Fob formed like spindrift around his ears. He lathered and shaved his stubbled face and cleaned under his nails with a paring knife. The coal dust grainting his pores would take weeks to work itself out.
Out in the front porch Elizabeth reached her knobbed hands to take down her washboard hanging beside yellow lace curtains. She laddered it against the washtub and dug into a Sunlight box, its dampened contents clumped by the sun’s warm spread on the windowpane. She squeezed a berg into white dust, sprinkling it into the belly of her tub, and dropped her husband’s clothes. She trounced the clothes and soapy water leaped in a swift swirl, its ivory curls soon beaten into a dark chocolate froth. She kneaded the clothes over the washboard. Then she slivered lye soap and rubbed at stubborn spots, her heart singing. Jacob was home. That’s what mattered.
He’d brought an orange for each child and two for Elizabeth. A tangy scent filled the air as the children lifted their oranges from soft tissue paper. They rubbed the paper all over their faces, the zest of the fruit lingering on their skin long after the orange was eaten. Elizabeth saved an orange for Alvina.
“I’ve left Sydney mines for good,” Jacob told Elizabeth. “Fish or no fish, we’ll manage.”
He didn’t tell her that he had been advised by the company doctor to leave after he’d had several blackouts. The years he had spent in the iron ore mines, beginning when he was fifteen, the hauling of fishing nets, and then the coal mines, had taken their toll, straining his heart. Some men worked underground; others worked on the sea. Jacob had taken chances with both places and risked making Elizabeth a widow. At night Elizabeth drew Jacob close, her body as hungry as his. Spent, they lay in the darkness, their quickened heartbeats subsiding as they held each other and drifted into sleep, Elizabeth’s fears of becoming a miner’s widow ended.
After Jacob came home, they sat under a string of Christmas cards, including one from Maggie, Emily, and Olivia, only their names. No news. Elizabeth and Maggie now had a disjointed connection, their lives not only separated by a geographical distance but filled with their own families and their own religion. Neither woman had written for a while.
I should write, Elizabeth thought looking up at Maggie’s Christmas card.
* * * * *
Jacob worked late into the night, in the days before Christmas, building a dollhouse, its front decorated like a castle. Two dolls he had bought in Sydney now sat together like sisters inside the dollhouse. When the dollhouse was opened on Christmas morning the two dolls had moved so close one head was leaning on the other doll’s shoulder. Elizabeth smiled. “Like Elsie and Jane when they’re tired.”
“Or when Elsie is telling me a secret she doesn’t want Doris and Sophie to know,” Jane said.
Doris and Sophie each opened their Christmas box to find their first bought dresses: blue satin with pearl buttons. Golden tore the paper off a stuffed bear while James and Clayton found sleds sitting on the porch steps. “With steering gear to save you from the cliffs,” their father said.
Jacob gave Elizabeth a bottle of perfume with a corked stopper and a jar of hand lotion. The skin on her hands drew tight after every washday and cracked in the cold air as she pegged articles to the clothesline during winter months. Jacob could do with lotion himself. After the layover on Sunday during the fishing season his hands were always stiff on Monday.
68
“You’ll have to go on the stage and flakes this summer,” Elizabeth told Elsie. “There’s nothing else to be done. I can’t risk losing this baby. I’ll have enough to do with the household, the garden, and minding Golden.”
Elsie raised her head from breakfast dishes she was washing. She nodded thinking it wouldn’t be forever. She’d be gone from the place once she finished another year of school, gone away from the brackish smell of salt fish and fish flakes. She knew what her mother would say: The place you leave is the place you want to come home to.
One September day Alvina stood in the doorway of Elizabeth’s kitchen, beads of sweat pooled in the spoon of her neck. She lifted the drooping peak of her bonnet and blew out a breath. “You could kill yourself trying to live in this place.”
“Don’t I know it,” Elizabeth answered, settling her dough to rise, the fire kept in on this sweltering day. She smoothed her hand over her apron pocket bulging with peppermint knobs she kept for the children when they were indoors on a dirty day or on other days when she wanted them occupied. They each nursed their knob while she enjoyed the quiet.
Now she felt a tightness and let out a gasp. It was as good a time as any to give out the peppermints.
Alvina knew the sign of labour that passed over Elizabeth’s face. She got her up to bed and soon her body was emptied of another child, Beulah Gwendlyn, born September 15, 1933. It was a joyful birth with hardly a push before the child let out a string of cries.
Alvina washed the squalling mite and wrapped her. Elizabeth pulled up her knees and leaned the swaddled baby, now quiet, against them. She wanted to remember the golden light of her hair, her squinted dark eyes, wrinkled skin fuzzy like a peach. She wanted to watch her skin unfold into smooth baby flesh and her eyes squeeze tight with a wail, hands with tiny fingers splayed one minute, fisted the next. She wanted to remember the baby’s hand opening, reaching for hers.
Jacob had hurried up from the stage. He shaved and freshened his skin. Then he bounded up the stairs to see Elizabeth. There was a glow about her that he hadn’t seen before.
My last baby! She knew it as sure as the day. Her journey through childbirth had ended with a baby girl. She looked at Jacob, then back to the baby as if to bind them together. A sob ripped through her. “How long will I have both of you?” The sound startled the baby and she let out a mewl.
Elizabeth’s change was so sudden and unexpected that Jacob rushed to her side.
The midwife had come to check Elizabeth and the baby. She went to wash some of Elizabeth’s bedclothes. She came back and saw Jacob trying to comfort his wife.
“It’s the birth,” the midwife explained. “She’s forty-three and she’s suffering the imbalance of emotion a birth can bring to someone her age. Give her time.”
Elizabeth came back to herself, secure in having another healthy baby.
Beulah grew to be a cheerful child and a willing helper. And her hair! It was long, thick, and golden under a bright sun.
“Her mother’s very heart, that child is,” Jacob said, not knowing then how agony and ecstasy can knot and the knot untie leaving only agony.
&n
bsp; Beulah and Golden were the only children at home. Beulah was off to school every day to learn her lessons while Golden had gone in the fishing boat.
Older children had left home and were married. When Elsie had gone to see her grandda years before she had taken notice of Fred Porter, one of the lads who had raided William’s apple tree. Fred had no trouble marrying her and settling on the Maley homestead.
One evening as Jacob tidied up for Sunday Elizabeth gave his greying hair a critical look. “You’re getting sprinkled,” she said.
“And you, too,” he answered.
“It’s all the youngsters,” they said in unison and laughed.
Elizabeth crooked her baby finger. “We said that together. Now we have to make a wish.”
Jacob reached his finger and linked it with hers. “My wish is that we grow old together.” A shadow crossed his face and he drew in a heavy breath.
Elizabeth pretended not to notice. Who knows who God will take first!
Jacob’s face had grown slack, his girth widened under his bibbed overalls, suspenders stretched. That night he scuffed through the hall to the side room and took a small volume of poems from the shelf. He sat down on the settle by the kitchen stove and began to read a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His voice rose:
“Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark,
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark.
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place;
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my pilot face to face,
When I have crossed the bar.”
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 33