Olivia’s eyelids lifted like pearly shells over milky, unseeing eyes. She was still regal and beautiful, hair falling to the side in a thick braid over her shoulder. An enigmatic look crossed her face surrounded by pure white hair. Her hand went to her heart as if to quieten its quickening, and then to her belly, emptied long ago of the child who had taken her away from Zachary. Her love for Zachary had brought her home only to face the terrible news that he was gone. She had imagined going to Boston, finding her baby, and bringing him home to Zachary’s mother, a tiny woman who had a kind face under a little woollen cap. She’d hug Olivia and tell her to come in. There was an extra bedroom upstairs for her and the baby.
“Only once,” she’d tell his mother blushing. “We were in love.”
“That’s all it takes,” she’d answer and say how much the baby reminded her of Zachary. She’d be happy thinking she had something of her son. After a time Olivia would imagine the baby was Zachary’s and not a child from rape.
Elizabeth knew she should not be eavesdropping. Still, she waited for Olivia’s answer.
Olivia lifted herself up on an elbow and turned toward her son. Her voice was husky as if age was pressing against her, its foot on her windpipe. “I expect I do,” she whispered. “I named you Abel, so you would always feel able to do anything you put your mind to. I’ve waited for you to find me.” Her head dropped and she began to weep. “You were lost to me and I thought it was forever.”
The man’s drawn face had a white cast; his eyes looked vulnerable, as if he were standing on a diving board, unsure if he should yield his body to the nothingness of air and fall into the enveloping fluid of a pool. He looked at her as if sensing that his body held a secret he couldn’t decipher—her secret. “Tell me about my father,” he said.
Olivia stilled a gasp. What if he knew his step-grandfather was his father? Some secrets are like one’s future, the less we know the better. She looked him in the eye and chose her words carefully. “I was in love with a sealer. He left for St. John’s to claim a berth on a sealing vessel that didn’t return. The Southern Cross. . . .” Her voice trailed off, but the hopeful look in his eyes made her add, “Zachary Butler was a fine fellow.”
Olivia’s arms ached to touch her son, to hold him. She had given him away and now she had no right to him. And then her son, the stranger, gathered her frail body to his strong one and she felt his strength and warmth and his forgiveness. It flowed through her, satisfied a hunger that had never left since her baby’s birth. Abel, her son, held her until she fell asleep. When she woke the next morning she wondered, at first, if it had been a dream. She smiled. A dream, indeed! One that came true.
Ashamed of herself for eavesdropping Elizabeth hurried away. So that’s why Olivia went to Boston.
“You have a son and he came to visit you,” Elizabeth said on her next visit.
Olivia reached and pulled Elizabeth down. Then she whispered in her ear, “Zachary wasn’t his father. I’ll tell you the truth and know you’ll keep it. It was me stepfather.”
“You poor dear,” Elizabeth said. “I always wondered why you left Zachary.”
“I was carrying a good reason. After my child was born Great-Aunt Lila promised to look out to his welfare. I didn’t want to give up my son; I did a bad thing for a good reason.”
Elizabeth remembered Olivia’s stepfather. Olivia’s son was his spitting image.
Olivia’s eyes grew misty. “I gave away my son believing I had no means to keep him and because he would remind me of my stepfather. Great-Aunt Lila and Great-Uncle Ernie died in a motor car crash soon after I came home. I never found out the whereabouts of my son. He found me. Now he tells me I have grandchildren and I will meet them. Here I was thinking I was all alone.”
“Something good came out of bad,” Elizabeth said.
“Someone good.” Olivia gave her a satisfied smile.
* * * * *
74
Not one of the grandchildren had asked Elizabeth about her life and she didn’t tell them anything. To them she was just a blank book with a faded cover. One day they’d want to reach out with questions and she wouldn’t be there.
Then out of the blue a granddaughter surprised her with questions. She gave Jamie’s painting an intent look and asked, “What ship is that on your wall?”
“Titanic. Jamie, your great-uncle, painted it.”
“Who was he?”
“My brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother. I never saw him.”
“Along with Jamie I had a half-brother and two half-sisters,” Elizabeth told her.
The little girl screwed up her face. “How can you have half a brother and two halves of sisters?”
Elizabeth explained about Mary Jane’s two families. Then she told her granddaughter her great-uncle’s story, adding, “The world is full of tragedy, child. We suffer a tiny part of it. When it comes we have to be strong.” She rose and went close to the painting. She lifted a steady hand to its surface. Its sky was dark and heavy, the ocean dwarfed by the huge ship.
Her granddaughter touched her sleeve and she looked down to the little girl scrutinizing her face. “You’re old so you must have a long story to tell.”
Elizabeth’s eyes twinkled. “If only you knew,” she said.
The little girl persisted. “Would it be a book with a hundred pages?”
“If each day were a page, let me see.” Her long fingers moved into the air, her face holding a distant and concentrated look. “Many thousands,” she answered, her voice tired and fragile. She no longer had the breath needed to tell her story.
“How old are you?” she asked her granddaughter remembering how light she once was on feet that carried her without effort. Now the weight of her years had settled in her bones and in her feet and she became aware of every movement, every step.
The child looked up into her face. “Gran. I’m new, only five.” Her eyes were clear like speckled grey pebbles the sea washes over leaving them shiny bright. They widened, full of the wonder of her age as five tiny white fingers shot up. “Look, Gran!”
“Your days are before you like the young bears,” Elizabeth said repeating her mother’s words to her and Jamie so long ago.
That night she folded herself away in bed resting while her mind carried on. Every life is a book death closes, but the memory of that life remains in the lives left behind. There’d be reminders of Jacob and her in a crinkle around the eyes of grandchildren, in the way they turned their heads, lifted a spoon to their lips—in a smile. She and Jacob had woven a lively patch in their life’s tapestry. Under closed lids her eyes moved as if seeing moments and scenes she was remembering. She picked through memories like she’d pick through berries on the hills discarding to the wind those unfit to keep. She pictured Jacob dressing in his Sunday clothes, putting on his black felt hat, straightening his tie, and taking his Bible. She saw him going down the lane turning first toward the henhouse, where he reached to take two fresh eggs from a nest of warm straw. He wrapped them in his handkerchiefs, one in each pocket. She followed him as he stopped at the house by the foot of the pond to bring an egg to each of his grandchildren for their breakfast. It must have been difficult for him to rise over the hills, he not well as he scuffed along to get to the mission a good ways away.
Jacob was some man. He never allowed their children to think they were inferior to other children. Now that the boys were grown they’d built many boats, one for Frank Moores, a man who became Premier Moores. He said they’re among the finest boat builders in Newfoundland. Nothing common there. The Pettens, Jacob’s cousins, were not too shabby, either.
Beulah took her mother’s hand and led her to a beautiful garden. Its gates held a wall of sparkling jewels. Beside a mountain, trees and flowers grew, none drooping or fading. Butterflies alighted on them. The tunes of
birds flittering through the air, drifted on a fresh, warm breeze. Elizabeth saw in the distance a beach where children played. They tossed and caught precious stones laughing all the while, their eyes like speckled rocks under sun-kissed water.
“Come!” Beulah coaxed.
“No!” Her voice came clear and firm. “Not yet, though I’m ever so tired.”
“You have influenza,” the doctor said after he listened to her chest, “and a troublesome heart. It’s skipping a beat.” He put his stethoscope in his black bag. “I’ll give you a needle.”
The doctor finished, zippered his bag, and left.
That night Elizabeth shifted up on an elbow and looked through the window. She gazed on a field of stars and thought of Jamie and the constellation that had inspired the christening of a vessel by that name. Her look became distant as if holding the ghost of the Southern Cross.
It wasn’t so bad living one’s life to eighty, the years reeving out like the yarn from a ball of wool. One needed to look for small pleasures: the sight of clothes on a line flapping in the wind. Changing a bed and slipping sheets from a clothesline that got the scent of a spring breeze brings such contentment. The last of life was like the sunset’s glow dipping into a pool of rainwater so dazzling its reflection poured in through the window, painted the walls and floors, leaving the sun’s thumbprint on a doorknob. And the ending was a beginning. She’d let her mind reach out to tomorrow and imagine slipping out of her old skin and into a new one, leaving memories behind like a closed pendant for someone else to open. Memories as rich as chocolate on the tongue; others bitter as an olive.
Elizabeth was dying. No one knew it, not even her daughter. Time was like a cup of tea she’d sipped. Tomorrow the cup would be bone dry.
It was early one morning when Elsie stirred to her mother’s voice. She got out of bed, the floor creaking under her heavy step as she walked across the landing to her mother’s room. Elizabeth’s lips were moving and Elsie stopped to listen as her mother spoke the names of each of her children. “Dressed in white, they is,” she murmured, her eyes closed. “Jacob is here. He looks as young as when we first met.”
“You were dreaming, Mother. Go back to sleep,” Elsie said and hurried to her own bed.
Her children were beckoning her. She felt their radiance and warmth. “Dear old, faithful heart,” she murmured against her warm pillow. “You have skipped and leaped like a calf at good news and you have lurched at a knock on my door, thumped in my throat like horses’ hooves as I went to answer it and heard tragic tidings.” She paused and took a shallow breath. “You have kept on without rest while I have rested in sleep through the years. I am satisfied to let you rest, and thankful. . . .”
Elizabeth felt a slight tremor like a woman feels the first time a child inside her makes its presence known. A new life is being born—mine. She didn’t feel a bit afraid. She’d been curious long enough. Now the thought of meeting God Himself and listening to His heavenly choir as He welcomed her home brought relief. She closed her eyes giving God her last breath.
Three knocks, one after the other, came on a door downstairs. When Elsie opened it no one was there. She tried to ignore the token. Still, she ran upstairs to her mother’s room hoping to get her ready for breakfast. She touched her mother’s cold face and drew back. “When I told you to go back to sleep I didn’t mean forever,” she whispered pressing a kiss on her mother’s cheek. “You had a good life,” she added, her voice holding steady, “and I had a good mother.”
Downstairs, Elsie listened to the whisper of rain and then its beat on the rain barrel outside. It came like keys tapping the end to her mother’s story.
75
Days burned themselves down to the quick and night clouds rose like a trail of smoke as Maggie rocked time away, the past so real sometimes the present didn’t exist. Her legs were reluctant to start the day though her mind had been going full tilt since daylight. And for what? Nothing around her was hers. Heaven, that other place, so real to Elizabeth, was like a distant dream to Maggie. The hymn said there was no sorrow there. A good thing! There was too much of it here.
She shocked herself when she looked into a mirror. Her once fresh face was now gaunt and wrinkled. I eat but my body must waste my food. She felt her body’s waste against her flesh and she wept. They think of me as useless, letting food in one end and waste out the other.
She recalled Jamie’s words: “Some day I’ll set you in paint.” She wished he had while she was young so that young ones who looked at her now could have seen that she was once like them, hands and face smooth and firm. They’d be old like her: longevity’s promise. She had grown too far from Jamie, too old to think of loving a young man. But then she’d let her mind wander back, let herself grow young, and she’d be running to the beach watching just in case a boat came from St. John’s bringing the men home. Sometimes she’d turn to eye the dusty road, watch for movement around the turn, the image of galloping horses and laughing men, clothes plastered in oil and gory under a hot sun. Her mind had become a ghost roaming through her head. Other times it was as if her mind had a leak. She put something in it and it was gone and she couldn’t get it back. Jamie drifted like a cloud across her mind. She’d feel sad and not remember why. She didn’t realize she was speaking aloud. “There’s times I’m slippin’ into the darkness, too, Jamie. I hope the Lord’ll light my goin’.”
The caregiver’s voice pushed against her ears. “Wandering off again, are we?”
“Who’s we?” she asked looking around.
A child stood on the beach facing her, innocent eyes bright and clear as the ocean. She moved over sea-licked stones shining in the moonlight. She beckoned Maggie to follow. She tried but her feet wouldn’t move. The child floated out over the ocean bed where Jamie had gone. She had left her footprints and Maggie pulled free and stepped into them. They fitted exactly. Her body felt brittle and unbending as she lifted a foot and reached to brush sand off the bottom.
“Don’t do that,” an irritated voice called.
Maggie answered, “I’m wiping the sand off.”
The voice continued: “You haven’t been anywhere. Now go to sleep.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. Her grey head dropped. The old rocking chair made a faint creak. Then there was silence.
Some days she was lucid. “As bright as ever the sun was,” Cyril, her son, told a neighbour.
She was content to sit by the window, a shawl draped around her drooping shoulders. The slack hoods of her papery eyelids lifted and she gazed on the sea. There was a stillness in her face. None of the turbulence of her life showed. “I think I see my father’s boat comin’ home,” she said, “and the Southern Cross. Jamie and me father is comin’ to take me with them.”
The caregiver’s voice rolled past Maggie’s ears like marbles across stone: “She’s gone off in her dotage.”
Her memory was like a bottle in a vast ocean. It travelled far bobbing out of sight. Winds and tides brought it back. She saw children scampering along the beach, Elizabeth, Jamie, Laura, Olivia . . . faces unmarred by trouble, energy enough to fly with the wind, off and away like a kite. A storm whipped the sea; the sea settled. The children grabbed up white spindrift and tossed it at each other laughing hard enough and long enough to make their cheekbones ache.
No one must see her push open the door and wander out. She made faltering steps in clay newly spread over ruts in the path. The prints blurred as she scuffed down the hill to the beach. She stopped to draw in a deep, painful breath. It was too far to the logan rock. She swayed, the tail of her dress trembling in a breeze as she stooped to pick up a flat stone. Diamonds of sunlight twinkled on the water as she lifted her arm, its flesh loose and spotted. She flung the rock and it skittered across the water as blithely as she had skipped over the beach years before. Water stretched in over her feet and swam through holes bored in
to seashells by the tides, seashells holding the radiant colours of sunsets. Her heart remembered all the beauty she’d seen; her mind regretted all the beauty she’d missed. The warm, salty, effervescent breeze carrying the ocean’s breath washed over her skin, a refreshing scrub.
She looked in the direction of the ocean, where she last saw her father. She glanced back at the rickety, aged house standing in shambles and cocked an ear as if she was expecting to hear her stepmother call—as if to ready herself to run up the path to avoid a beating. Then she relaxed. Those times had long passed. Her face lifted to the sight of an aircraft. The first time she had seen an airplane it had flashed like a pair of scissors and she had wondered if it would cut a hole in the sky and she would see into heaven. How silly was that! She now knew that the sky was deeper than she could imagine and heaven was a place only her soul could reach.
She turned back, tottered, and fell, folding down. She lay silent in the comfort of warm sand, a smooth stone under her cheek. As the tide rose waves rolled over her like a blanket. She murmured, “Jamie, I’m comin’.”
It was only a dream she was having in her own bed; it ended with her final breath.
Epilogue
Across the bay, in the small outport of Hibb’s Vove, a little girl lifted expectant eyes to gaze across blue waters, just as her grandmother Kennedy had done so many years before. She fancied she saw a black ship that resembled the Southern Cross her grandmother had told her about. She raised her hand like a visor over her brow to better observe the large, black ship low in the water, the dark forms of sealers on its deck reaching hands for help, countenances pitiful. The barque tossed and rolled, its bow lifting and falling. It finally vanished beneath the waves. Only a mirage, her mother had cautioned her times before when she had seen the ghost of the Southern Cross that took Jamie, her great-uncle.
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 37