He closed the book and smiled at Elizabeth. “If one goes first we will not part; each one will live in the other’s heart.”
“You’ve been readin’ too much poetry, Jacob. It’s spilling off your tongue in your own words.”
Elizabeth had watched him in his prime, in stained coveralls and a lumberman’s shirt covering a sinewy body as he sweated to harvest the sea and the land. No one knew all the words that kept building inside his head, all the words he tried to hold on to. In the garden under the sounds of the shovel beneath his calloused hands and on the sea, wet fishing twine running along his palms criss-crossing them with trenched lines that told the story of a fisherman’s life, words were often swept into the wind. Those words now were not ones she wanted to hear. She pushed them aside and gave him an intent look. “There’s no more children for us. Let’s enjoy each other as fully as we can.”
“So we will,” he answered.
The next day Elizabeth walked down the path through the stage to the stagehead where James and Clayton were piling barrels. “Your father’s not going fishing anymore. His legs isn’t all that steady. If he fell overboard there’d be no way to haul him back in the boat, his frame so well filled out in his after years.”
“We’ll get his fish for the winter,” James said.
“So do. And he’ll help me with the gardens and give you your winter’s crop.”
Jacob, after writing letters to the government, got appointed as the paymaster on the Road Board. When the men working on the road came to his house for their pay they stayed around for a cuffer: telling ghost stories. Some people claimed to have seen the ghost of the Southern Cross on stormy nights. Others said that some relatives of the sealers had seen them walking on the waves, arms outstretched.
After Beulah and Golden listened to the stories they huddled together, afraid to go as far as the porch for a drink from the water bucket.
Elizabeth followed them upstairs to their beds and hushed them with a song. Soon they drifted past their fears.
On a Sunday the next spring Jacob didn’t go to church. On Monday he got up from where he was sitting, a book about World War II in his hand. He looked through the window at a line of clothes Alvina had hung out. Elizabeth didn’t answer when he mused, “One day clothes will be dried in a machine inside the house.”
She didn’t see him go to sit on the long bench between the table and the wall or notice his head fall to one side, his body leaning against the wall.
Beulah had just come home from school. “Pappa!” she exclaimed.
At the sound of her daughter’s distress Elizabeth turned from the stove, where she was stirring a pot of soup. She lifted her apron to clear her steamed glasses. Jacob’s mouth was open like the loose neck of a sock.
“Run as fast as you can and find your Uncle George,” she told Beulah, who backed away as if unable to tear her eyes from the sight of her father speechless, his eyes wide open.
Elizabeth made their bed ready and George and James carried Jacob upstairs. He lay in bed like a useless junk. When he was lifted to a sitting position his unfocused eyes opened and when he was laid back on his pillow they closed.
That night Elizabeth lay beside him reaching her warm hand across his chest. She splayed her fingers over his heart. Under her fingertips she felt its unsteady thump. Her own heart lurched. How long will you be with me? She lifted her hand to his face, felt the rugged skin. Wind and sun had marked it well. She took his hand, criss-crossed with lines cut by trawl twine, his lifeline clearly defined. It would be easy for a fortune teller to read Jacob’s hands and tell his past. What of his future!
By the end of three weeks Jacob’s flesh had lost its blood supply on one side. The skin on his thighs looked scalded. One day, when Alvina was helping Elizabeth change him, the flesh came off and Elizabeth let out a wounded cry. Alvina pulled her away from seeing Jacob’s once strong flanks in such a cruel shape. His strong legs in weathered breeches had held him steady while his boat, facing vexing winds, ploughed through swallowing seas. Now he was almost lifeless.
What is he thinkin’? Elizabeth wondered as she sat beside him. Is he rememberin’ the sea wild and wily? Is he thinkin’ of me or is he taken with comin’ face to face with God? She hoped his mind wasn’t blank, memory lost, taken as if by a great wave and knocked into a sea of forgetfulness. She stood and leaned to place her lips on his lips, soft and pale, drained of the passion that brought his body to life and helped bring their children into being.
“He’s going, Elizabeth,” Alvina warned.
Jacob’s eyelids quivered and whispers of breath left his lips; then there was silence, the deepest silence of all. Elizabeth turned so suddenly she tripped against a sea chest by the wall. Alvina caught her hand. She shook it free and ran downstairs, her eyes dry and bright, lips apart in anguish.
She shouted, “Jake,” his name echoing in her ears until her lungs ached. She collapsed on the settle staying there until her senses quietened. Then she climbed the stairs to sit by the bed holding Jacob’s hand until it cooled. He was gone and death was a cold wind breathing down her neck.
Alvina came into the room and Elizabeth stood up. She gave her beloved Jacob over to Alvina to wash while she went downstairs. She took herself in hand and laid the flatiron on the stove. When it was heated she lowered it to Jacob’s white shirt, the last one he would wear. She ironed it front and back as carefully as if he were wearing it for prayers, ironed it over and over. She brought it to Alvina.
Jacob lay in his coffin, as cold as winter clay, a man emptied of himself—his spirit gone. Instead of kissing him goodbye Elizabeth looked up and whispered, “Gone but not forever. I have the hope as sure as each sunrise that beyond the horizon we’ll be together.”
When it was time for the funeral she lifted a delicate, dark hairnet over her fingers like a cat’s cradle, careful not to hook it on a fingernail. She reached her other hand under it and spread it over her head and down under hair rolled tight against her neck. She pressed a black felt hat with its slight lip on her head, its net shading her eyes. Beulah, her own blue eyes swimming in tears, held hatpins bunched in her hand like white balloons on metal strings. She passed them to her mother one at a time. Elizabeth pushed them into the sides of her hat to hold it against March winds. A pin pierced her scalp and she let out a sharp cry.
She stared at her face in the bureau mirror. She had been too busy to notice how far she had come from that wide-eyed slim girl Jacob had married. She looked at her hands and its brown spots. I’m spoiling like an old apple.
Growing old had not been real but now she saw herself as others must see her, as she saw people her age. It was as if the years from then, before she was married, to now had been swallowed whole.
“It’s no distance from where you’re at to where I is. One long dream and you’ll be here.” Her father’s voice echoed from the past. It hadn’t meant anything until now.
She leaned closer to the mirror. I’m still in there, still young in spirit. She lifted her chin and left the bedroom where Jacob had taken his last breath, in a bed that would hold only her from now on.
She looked through the upstairs hall window to the cold face of March. Snow still lay on the hills, soiled like sheets blown from a clothesline, dragged across the soggy brown earth and held down by large grey rocks. March was a cruel month. It took her brother, her cousins, her half-sister, and now it had taken her husband. She came downstairs and tucked her black-gloved hand in James’s arm. They followed the white-runged, coal-black carriage holding Jacob’s coffin stayed by fastening hooks. Above the coffin lay a wreath of paper flowers Beulah had made.
The minister’s words at the end of his sermon lingered in Elizabeth’s mind. “Our brother didn’t go underground with his body. He was done with it.” He paused and read from the Bible. “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the st
rength of my heart. . . .”
The spoked wheels whiled away Jacob’s last day above the earth as the funeral procession made its way up over a hill and along a path to the white-fenced graveyard already awakening with the scent of heather and berry bushes. At the grave a cold wind beat into Elizabeth’s face. She stared into the rectangular hole holding Jacob’s coffin. I can’t imagine life without you. She brushed away a tear. No! That’s the biggest lie I ever told. I can imagine life without you, without the scrape of the door latch liftin’ under your hand, your footsteps on the floor, your place in our bed. The hole where your body is can’t be as deep as the one I’m fallin’ into.
She felt Beulah’s hand on her arm drawing her away. “I’m here, Mamma. I’ll always be here,” she said.
Elizabeth smiled believing her.
As Elizabeth and her family walked back down the cove Richard Newell, sitting on the rock wall, banged his pipe against a slate, sparks flying. “Jake’s head’s not aching now,” he said, too low for Elizabeth to hear.
Elizabeth went on and he sat talking to his Newfoundland dog sitting beside him: “When Jacob’s woman first come she was a slight thing to be climbing steep slopes holding the handles of a barrow of wet fish and while carrying youngsters in the kitte. I thought Jacob’d be wishing his cake dough. But they got on.” He patted the dog and she wagged her tail.
At home, after the funeral, Alvina kissed Elizabeth’s cheek and slid an arm around her shoulder. She sighed, “Oh my, Liz, what will you do now?”
“I’ll sleep with a heated rock at me feet as I did before I had Jacob,” she answered, determined to hold steady for the children’s sake.
It wasn’t that easy. Sleep came like an angel to take her away to a place of rest, only to bring her back to mornings when she woke stunned at the silence, Jacob’s place beside her cold. She reached across the empty space as if to palm Jacob’s back as she had often done, to feel his strong warm flesh gone now like an amputation. As days opened without him her need became a thirst, a hunger to lie with him in their bed, her cheek against his beating heart. He had gone not for a day in the boat or for months in a coal mine but forever. She wished she had loved him more instead of hurrying to a task.
She parted the curtains and stared out at the boat on collar looking as lonely as a horse without a rider. She might have known he was going, the way his heart failed him as he walked up the path these last months, the way he shuffled through the hall in his slippers.
Later, when the path to the graveyard dried and a headstone was in place she visited Jacob’s grave. Her voice was soft: “Your body lies in the darkness of the earth but your life’ll spring in new beginnin’s. Our offspring will ride the sea you loved and be smacked by its salty kiss.” She leaned in to touch the headstone. “We were happy to the end—your end. Mine will take longer.”
At home she took a notebook from the bookcase and read something Jacob had written in heavy strokes under the title. “Our Family Tree: The tree embodies our growth, strength, continuity. From it is carved the cradle that holds our newborn children, the shelter that houses our family, the boat from where our livelihood is harvested, the box that holds us when we die, and when our generation passes the tree records our history in books created out of it.”
“Ah, Jacob. Maybe someone will write our history. What a story that will make. Our lives will get to be lived twice.”
All through the summer months after Jacob’s death Elizabeth took down a china cup and saucer for her tea, a wedding gift she favoured. Bright blue flowers decorated the gold-rimmed, milky-white cup and sauce. She loved how the handle crooked as if it were the white arm of a woman waiting for a lover to link his arm in hers. She slipped her finger into the handle and lifted the cup to her lips. Steam rose like a warm breath, the tea a comforting kiss. She sat sipping her tea, a smile playing on her lips. She recalled how Jacob could make their children feel good about themselves. When Clayton was a boy he had asked his mother, “Ma, is I a common boy?”
Her brow had furrowed. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because,” he said, “yesterday the teacher’s wife was out on her doorstep calling, ‘Reggieee. Come home. It’s suppertime.’ We were all together in the dark and she couldn’t quite make out Reg at first. When she did she said, ‘Oh, Reggie, I thought you were one of the common boys.’
“Am I common?” he asked.
Jacob, sitting on the settle reading Reader’s Digest, lifted his head. He answered in a nettled voice. “There’s two kinds of education, son. One a person gets from books. The other one is got by doing. Ask Reggie’s father how to tell tomorrow’s weather by observing the sky. Ask him how to build a boat, sed a trawl hook, make a coffin, or sandals for his son’s feet. What makes a person common and what makes another person think he is above the common person is attitude. If you feel less than other people you won’t make more of yourself. Even a king’s got to lower himself to sit on a common throne—like everyone else.”
Jacob had looked up and smiled, as if he could see an outhouse with a king sitting on its seat.
Elizabeth laid down her cup, satisfied that though life was short memory was long. The children would remember Jacob as a wise father.
The second summer after her father died Beulah got baptized in the Ship Cove pond. People lined the banks and the roads as converts went through the waters while Missioners sang, an accordion playing, “Where He leads me I will follow. . . .”
A few weeks later, on a warm summer day, Beulah and Clarice, her best friend, were walking down around Ship Cove pond. They were now proud young Canadians, Newfoundland having joined the Canadian federation only a few months before.
The southerly wind glancing off the pond suddenly changed to an upwind turning the waves around. Beulah felt a chill when the easterly wind struck her chest. A day after, she wasn’t feeling well. She moped about, sewed a little, read a book. She came out on the doorstep to look up at her mother and aunt spreading fish on the flakes. She had no energy to help them. Golden taunted her: “Mind you don’t come out and catch your death.”
He flicked her at every turn and mocked her. The more Elizabeth scolded him the fiercer he got. When he came in from the fishing stage to scoop a dipper of cold water from the bucket he goaded her: “Get off the settle and go out on the fish flakes.”
Days passed and Beulah lay around, no better. When she took to her bed Golden passed her door and called, “Get some muscles in your spit. You’re just puttin’ on.”
Elizabeth lifted her daughter’s damp, hot body, her hand under the slim neck, blonde hair dangling. She put water to her lips thinking, Tomorrow she’ll be better from this flu. She’ll smile and make a smack at Golden for teasin’ her about lyin’ around.
The next day Elizabeth nodded when Golden, his voice thick with guilt, said, “She’ll need to have the doctor, Ma.” He had masked a fear gathering inside him, a quiet fear emanating from his mother. Death had come to claim his father. Who was to say it wouldn’t be back?
Fishermen at The Tell commiserated about the latest sickness.
“You’d think Elizabeth would’ve had Dr. Pritchett before now,” Richard Newell said.
Dr. Pritchett, a tall man in a black hat, had come to the cove frequently to pull children’s tonsils. George had become acquainted with him during little Nellie’s illness. When he learned that Dr. Pritchett was going around taking out children’s tonsils he had offered his table for him to perform surgery on his young patients.
Silas Bishop flicked ash from his pipe. “I minds the time the doctor come as large as life, a big black satchel in his hand, a black hat to match, to take out the tonsils of the cove children. Ever so many lost their tonsils that time, when all they needed was a bit of kerosene boiled with molasses.” He laughed and nodded toward a two-storey house. “I remember one young maid being flung over her father
’s shoulder and she dressed in only her boots and nightgown kicking and screaming. When her father put her down in George’s porch Newman, George’s boy, whispered, ‘The doctor’s goin’ cut dee t’roat.’ Well, didn’t she bolt! The poor maid barrelled out the door and up over the cliffs and the night dark as tarry pitch.”
Sandy Porter said, “The doctor yanked out our Dotty’s tonsils. Afterwards she complained that she couldn’t hear well. Who would have thought it! The doctor tampered with her throat and her ears took offence.”
“I didn’t know that a man like George, who believes in divine healing, would allow Dr. Pritchett into his house to do the likes of that to a child,” Silas said.
“’Tis all done,” said Richard. “That’s fer sure, and sometimes for no good reason.”
Dr. Pritchett came to see Beulah twice. On his second visit he lifted her leg and she winced. His voice was grave as he gave instructions for her to be sent by ambulance to the General Hospital in St. John’s.
“Sure, that’s practically unheard of,” Alvina told Aunt Pace. “It can’t bode well.”
“Elizabeth’s prayers should have had the maid better by now,” Aunt Pace said. “Jesus raised Jairus’s young maid and she was more than sick. She was dead. I’ll join the mission meself if Beulah gets well.”
The night before Beulah was taken to the hospital she smiled and spoke to the laymen who came to pray for her. She thanked them for their prayers and said good night in a strong voice.
Those who didn’t believe in mixing faith with human doctoring suggested to Elizabeth that Beulah should be left alone to wait for divine healing. “If God could make us He can cure us—or take us if it’s His will,” one said piously.
Elizabeth, trying to keep the anger from her voice, answered in an even tone. “You need’n think I’m waterin’ down me faith by sendin’ Beulah to the hospital. Luke, one of Jesus’s disciples, was a physician.”
Willis Lear gave her a perturbed look. “That was before he followed Jesus. After that Jesus did the doctoring.”
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 34