Ghost of the Southern Cross

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  After the laymen left, Alvina squeezed Elizabeth’s arm. “Pay no heed to other people’s words. I’m sure God won’t turn down a little help. George didn’t mind a’tall that people gossiped about him lettin’ the doctor operate in our house.”

  Under a flake, that reached from one shed across the road at the foot of Porter Hill to a shed by the beach, fishermen sat on logs used to roll a newly built boat down to the beach, where it was pushed into the water. The flake shaded the men peering out under bibbed caps as they waited for news. They knew that over the hill, across Cliff Path, a beautiful young girl lay deathly ill. The men cast uneasy looks that way. A silent prayer rose to the heavens as they sat quietly while the ambulance passed taking Beulah away.

  Monday afternoon, Elsie and Fred drove to the General Hospital in St. John’s to see Beulah after nurses had settled her in a hospital bed. Elizabeth stayed in Foxtrap.

  “First along, Ma thought she had the summer flu,” Elsie told the doctor.

  He shook his head and asked a few questions. Then he wrote in his file. Before leaving he left orders with the nurses for Beulah’s medication.

  Elsie told her sister, “I’ll read you a story from our Sunday School paper, The Gleaner.”

  Beulah smiled, her voice faint. “Can you begin at the end and stop there? I’m tired.”

  “You got the Maley sense of humour, that you do,” Elsie replied.

  Elizabeth was startled when she heard the diagnosis: spinal meningitis.

  The news reached families in Hibb’s Cove creating a polarization of opinions.

  “She should have been left in God’s hands,” some people said.

  “She needs to be in the doctor’s care,” others said.

  There were thoughts they wouldn’t voice, not then. Later.

  Elsie tiptoed into her sister’s room on Friday daring to hope for improvement after doctors drained fluid off her spine. She came home telling Elizabeth that doctors were taking good care of Beulah.

  On Saturday Beulah hardly spoke. That afternoon she reached into the air, her tired blue eyes opening wide, and exclaimed, “What beautiful flowers!” She let out a gentle breath and was gone.

  Beulah lay in her coffin in Elizabeth’s drawing room. She wore a white dress that Elsie had picked out. Fresh white daisies decorated a mane of golden tresses flowing down her bosom almost to her folded hands. It was only as Elizabeth looked on the still face of her daughter that she felt her limbs let go. James held her up.

  Now, little more than two years after Jacob’s death, Elizabeth walked through the mission graveyard above the sea. She passed little picket fences around small graves, white cradles inside with glass covers over dried flowers on the grass-blanketed earth that covered her babies. She moved past the painful scene telling herself, My babies left only their bodies; they’re in heaven.

  She walked to her husband’s grave to put their youngest child beside him. Her rigid stance and stony look belied her feelings. There was no comfort in other people’s words, no softening of her despair as Alvina and others hugged her. Their words fell like weeds crisped by a hot sun.

  Elizabeth was deaf to a hymn wafting in the heavy air: “Will your anchor hold in the storms of life when the wild winds blow. . . .” She was adrift under a blind eye on a dark sea, her faith like a boat in a storm whose anchor had let go.

  She touched Jacob’s headstone. It was true what he had read in Reader’s Digest: “Living is like licking honey from a thorn.”

  She came home and climbed the stairs feeling as if the house holding her had been blown away by a vicious wind and she was left huddled, her head against her knees, trying to hold on, trying not to be picked up and blown out to sea.

  69

  Elizabeth went to the bookcase and took out Jacob’s grandfather’s Bible. She held it between trembling fingers. Printed in 1813, it looked like a brick that had come out of a wall, its brown cover rough and blistered and its uneven brittle pages yellowed, their edges like something scorched. When she opened the Bible, pages against the spine showed gaps. String threaded through the sheets had frayed in places and broken away from the binding. She had taken a snippet of Beulah’s blonde hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue satin ribbon. Now she slipped it between the pages of the book of Job.

  Elizabeth looked upwards, her words bitter. “You got the rest of her. I’m keepin’ this bit of her hair.”

  She touched a tiny, crisp four-leaf clover and wondered what kind of luck the person who placed it there had been looking for and what kind of luck had been found. Touching stained pages she pondered on the tears that had fallen on the old book. What sorrows had caused them! She laid the Bible aside and went to sit in her rocking chair, a chair that had been a rest for her arms while she held her babies. She remembered her time downstairs with Beulah while everyone else was asleep upstairs. Her baby’s bright eyes had sparkled like gems in the flickering firelight of the stove grate, her long-lashed eyelids growing heavy with sleep, her breathing gentle. Now Beulah was a flower whose petals had closed around its heart for the night. She had to believe that it would open on a new day in a new world where roses never faded.

  She recalled Jacob reading from Sirach in the common Bible he’d bought from a peddler: “Like a drop of water from the sea and a grain of sand, so are a few years in the day of eternity.”

  “Why am I here?” The words seemed to float out of her one day.

  Alvina heard them and hurried to answer. “You came here to be with Jacob.”

  “No, why am I here on this earth?”

  Alvina turned her face away. She was unable to answer. Beulah’s death had unstitched the wound cut into her when Nellie died. She opened the door and went out. She walked up the path to her house, her feet heavy. George came into the house. He faced her drawn look with blunt words. “There’s talk.”

  She looked at him puzzled. “Talk? About what?”

  “About what really happened to Beulah. People’s sayin’ she took sick from havin’ been baptized in water.”

  Alvina looked at him over her glasses. “And what about Edith Mercer in Bareneed? Sure, she had meningitis and she never went near the water.”

  “Your mother’s down in her mind,” Alvina told Elsie, in a letter, as she watched her sister-in-law standing on the barren windswept cliff and looking across the sea, the pathway to her childhood home.

  Cove people’s criss-crossing voices reverberated through Elizabeth’s head, chiding, accusing, building a storm inside her: “. . . lack of faith to take her to the doctor. . . . She should have left Beulah to divine providence . . . letting that child go in the water and be dipped. For sure it killed her.”

  Accusing voices repeated like a flat stone skipping over water breaking its surface while Elizabeth sat at the table holding a letter stating that Beulah had passed the exams in her last year of high school. She laid down the letter and sat at the table, her fists holding up her chin.

  For the first time she felt lifeless and gutted like a fish housed in the darkness of the fishing stage.

  In a dream that night a woman from an ancient time walked toward her. “I’m Job’s wife,” she said.

  Elizabeth nodded. “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I can tell by your angry look that you were ignored in your suffering.”

  Job’s wife looked relieved. “I don’t hold with mothers losing children so fathers can pass a test whose outcome God already knows and Satan got no business knowing. Job scratched his sores, worsening them, and I ready with salve to relieve his itching. For all that he’s the upright one. Well, he didn’t look too upright sitting on the ground and I left alone to mourn the loss of our children, grief so searing I felt skinned from my toes to my skull.”

  The woman’s hand went to her breast. “There, I’ve said it.” />
  “You have a right to speak what’s in your heart,” Elizabeth said.

  Job’s wife sighed. “Still, before I can accuse God of taking what was His all along,” she said, “I must thank Him for the family He gave me, if only for a time.”

  Elizabeth woke in the darkness of the night. Her lips formed the words and I must thank Him for giving Beulah to me for sixteen years.

  Jacob’s voice, echoing Job’s words, swept through her as if her husband were still alive: His candle shined up on my head . . . by his light I walked through darkness.

  70

  From her upstairs window Elizabeth looked out into the bay and across the ocean to the Southern Shore. Jacob’s love had brought her to Hibb’s Cove. Beulah’s death would release her from it and its foreboding cliffs, their cragged faces lifted over the deathly cold waters of the Atlantic. She’d go back home to her father’s gentle land—her land.

  She faced herself in the mirror. She had come to this place not knowing what to expect, not thinking that after ever so many years her face would be lined, her eyes fading behind wired glasses, and her body spent like those of grandmothers up over the hill—like Sarah Ann’s. But the young girl had not gone so far down a back lane that she couldn’t reach and pull her back. She was her again, every time she looked at Jacob and her in their photograph. I’m still a young girl inside, not this aged grandmother who’s not strong enough to bear whatever comes against her.

  She dropped to her knees letting her head and arms rest on the featherbed. There was comfort in letting go of her body’s heaviness. She tried to cast her burden on God.

  Elsie came to visit her mother. “Come away from yourself,” she urged. “You can’t get back what you’ve lost. Let it be as it is. Otherwise, your mind’ll be a whirlpool of what-ifs every mornin’ when you stir from sleep.”

  She accepted Elsie’s urging to come home and stay with her. They went by train and Fred came in his truck to get them from the station. He didn’t say much on the way home and, when they arrived, Elsie took her mother’s arm and led her along the path holding tight as they went inside. “You’ll have a hot cup of tea now and tomorrow we’ll see what the doctor says.”

  She sat down on the settle and gave her daughter a straight look. “I’ve been quakin’ inside and now I’m gone to pieces. The whole lot of us is like a crowd on a beach watchin’ the sun come up and go down, watchin’ tides ebb and flow, death takin’ one of us away from another day and we never knowin’ who’ll be next. I’d be grateful if it’d take me now.”

  “Now, now,” Elsie said. “The doctor’ll get rid of this talk and remind you there’s still joy to be had and pleasure to be spent.”

  Elizabeth had lost her girlish laughter, boxed, it seemed, inside her daughter’s coffin. The bright-eyed clear look she had carried for so long was gone. Sorrow had been strained through a voice that once could ring as clear as a bell. Her eyes were misty as she sat drinking a cup of hot tea and staring at the tea cloth on the table that her mother had made. She ran her finger over an embroidered forget-me-not.

  Elsie gave her mother a bedroom facing the old homestead and orchard. It had occupied a smaller space than she remembered. Her hand trembled as it closed over the back of a wicker chair. She leaned to take a look at the place where her father’s house once stood. It was as if the house had never been, except for its shadowy imprint left on the pressed yellow grass beneath it.

  “The house had to come down,” Fred said.

  Until then she hadn’t thought of that ever happening. The house was the box that held her childhood and the images of her and her family. Now there was only an empty space, as if her father and mother and brother had never existed—as if her time there was only a dream. She had not been there to notice the wood eaten out by weather and age. The shelves with their few dishes had lain under dust. Death itself had stolen in through the air, its breath foul and potent taking Mary Jane and William. The ground William had turned with laboured breath and slackened muscles was nature’s to do with as she willed. Grass and weeds crept up along the path. Among them evening primroses and boy’s love nodded in a breath of wind. Tiger lilies leaned straggly—spent. A bumblebee droned among them. Morning glory vines that had trailed the picket fence now crept inside the opening in a window frame of a leaning old shack soon to crumble from a strong wind.

  The landscape along the lane had changed. Familiar fences had disappeared. Her Aunt Caroline and Uncles Joe and Johnny had died. Their empty house was now boarded up. The faces of people Elizabeth had known as a girl were old; there were unfamiliar young faces. The young people knew nothing about the girl she was and the older people might not recognize the woman she’d become. She felt displaced.

  Whenever a tree branch scraped against Fred and Elsie’s house like the fingers of a ghost Elizabeth thought about how, on the night the Southern Cross disappeared, Jamie sent back the Labrador box.

  Away from Hibb’s Cove she dreamed she was tumbling over dark cliffs. She woke just before she reached the turbulent sea. A cliff was not a safe place on which to live. Neither was her mind a safe place for her thoughts. Her heart felt ready to break and drop her into the depth of nothingness.

  Sometimes she wished it would.

  The doctor gave Elizabeth a keen look and spoke to Elsie as if Elizabeth were deaf and dumb.

  As if I’m not even here.

  “What’s her history?”

  “Going back?”

  “Yes, as far as you know.”

  “She had no real sisters, just two half-sisters and a half-brother. She lost her only brother, Jamie, on the Southern Cross. No doubt you heard of its sinking.”

  He nodded. “Indeed. Yes. A terrible calamity. And after that?”

  “Then she lost a child.”

  Elizabeth looked up and Elsie hastened to add, “Twin boys, one stillborn, the other three days old, and later she lost an unborn daughter.”

  “And that was difficult?” he asked. Then, taking in Elizabeth’s set face, he said, “I shouldn’t have said that. Go on.”

  Elsie said, “She lost her husband almost suddenly and less than two years later Beulah, her sixteen-year-old, died in a short time of spinal meningitis. So much suddenness. . . . Other than that nothing much happened.” She leaned forward. “Still, it seems she’s spent all her optimism, Doctor, used it all up on one sorrow or another.”

  Elizabeth’s look drifted. “I had to live with a graveyard in me backyard, its headstones leaning toward the kitchen window. No wonder death got into me house.”

  There was a moment of silence while the doctor scrutinized Elizabeth. “You know,” he said gently, “a place is only where your body resides; your body is where you live. You have to do whatever it takes to keep it happy.”

  He bent toward his papers and began to write a prescription. “I’ll give her medication to settle her nerves.” He passed the prescription to Elsie. “Be patient. It could take a couple of weeks.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes sparked. “And then I suppose I’ll be dancing on me husband’s grave.”

  “Well, Ma,” Elsie said, “the way you’re going, if you don’t take charge you’ll be in his grave.”

  “Is it so wrong to love your daughter so much that when she perishes you don’t want to live?” Alvina had asked Elizabeth after Nellie died.

  Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to ask that question. She asked it silently.

  Elizabeth came back to Elsie’s home with a bottle of pills in all colours like decorations named hundreds and thousands used to decorate a cake. “How many grains of happiness can one bottle hold?” she said sarcastically.

  “Now, Ma, it’s not like that.”

  “No, it’s not. Happiness is not in a bottle.”

  She scrutinized a copy of her and Jacob in a photo on a shelf in Elsie’s parlour. She
ran her gnarled hand over it. “When you’re young you take a good picture. When you’re old your face is shrivelled like the rind of an apple fallen to the ground, left to rot among yellow leaves.”

  “Don’t think that a’tall, Ma,” Elsie said. “Your face is a road map reflecting all the places you’ve been, in your body and in your heart. Yours isn’t so bad. I ran into your old friend Maggie a while ago. She’s thin as a skiver. She asked about you and said she was sorry you hadn’t kept in touch.”

  Elizabeth nodded. Maggie was a faint memory and she herself like a frozen rag hung above a clothesline, not feeling anything and not caring about anyone or anything.

  One morning she dragged herself off the sofa telling herself, You have to survive your feelings. You have to survive your circumstances. You have to survive. You have to. You have you.

  She pulled on a sweater over her flowered dress and walked down the path to the beach where the stagehead once stood. She saw the children as if it were today. Jamie, Noah, Zachary, Maggie, Laura, Olivia, Emily—the beach children. Early in June one year they discovered a nest holding five tiny white eggs behind a barrel in a corner of the stage. A mother bird flew up startling them as they raced through the stage. Every day they watched for the eggs to break open under the beaks of babies wanting to get out. Then one day there they were, like a miracle, five babies nestled against each other, necks stretched, beaks open. Every morning the children raced down to the stage stopping all together as they came close, fingers against their lips. They listened for the clear whistle of the chickadee and then the flutter of wings and the tiny chip-chip of baby chickadees as the mother brought food, one dangling, tiny, green grub at a time. Her head darted from side to side and, sensing no danger, she darted inside. The father chickadee took his turn. One morning the children raced each other to the beach and to the stage. They stopped in their tracks. The familiar sound had disappeared. A lone chickadee perched on the nest. It flew away and its noise was a constant repetition: Chick-a-dee-dee-dee. The children drew closer to the nest, their faces peering down. The birds were gone. High in the sky they noticed a bald eagle. They looked at each other. The sound of silence was louder than the sea rush, louder than a mother bird’s call to one of her babies. The sound of silence was deeper than any sound they had ever heard.