by Paul Rowe
the
silent time
Paul Rowe
© 2007, Paul Rowe
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Cover design by Sarah Hansen
Layout by Todd Manning
Author photo by Paul Daly
Printed on acid-free paper
Published by
KILLICK PRESS
an imprint of CREATIVE BOOK PUBLISHING
a division of Transcontinental Media
P.O. Box 1815, Stn. C, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador A1C 5P9
First Edition
Printed in Canada by:
TRANSCONTINENTAL PRINT
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rowe, Paul, 1954-
The silent time / Paul Rowe.
ISBN 978-1-897174-17-3
I. Title.
PS8635.O885S45 2007 C813’.6 C2007-904577-4
the silent
time
Paul Rowe
For Bessie
part one
1
The fair time had come and gone in Three Brooks, Newfoundland.
It was three o’clock in the morning, late September of the year 1900, and seventeen-year-old Leona Walsh lay in bed furiously awake. Not a single visitor had come to their house on Windy Point again this year. There hadn’t been any music or dancing; not one story told; not a single voice raised in song. Instead, Leona endured the rude confusion of voices ascending through the floorboards as her old man and four brothers celebrated the fair time in their own ridiculous way: getting drunk, arguing pointlessly, cursing loudly and banging their fists on the table. Last year, the whole thing had ended up with the boys squared off in the yard punching each other as the old man cackled with delight and egged them on.
It was all the old man’s fault. The fair time was meant to give everyone a break between the summer and fall fisheries, but the old man always kept the boys at the fish longer than anyone else and refused to celebrate with the rest of the community. Every year, this turned what could be a rare bit of pleasure for Leona into a wearisome bout of anger and frustration.
The old man had warned Leona that he and the boys would be heading out for one last catch at daybreak, so after a few hours of fitful sleep, she watched with one eye barely open as he appeared, as he always did at dawn, in her bedroom doorway. He shaved thin curls of tobacco from a dark brown plug with a silver-handled pocket knife. He snapped the knife blade shut, took the pipe from his jaw and gave it a sharp tap on the door to loosen the ashes. The noise was meant to wake her, so she obediently raised her head from the pillow as he, with a quick turn of his hand, transferred the tobacco scrapings into the bowl of the pipe. She could tell by the expert way he did this that he wasn’t drunk. His steel-grey eyes were sharp and clear. He preferred to see the boys get loaded instead so he could torment them when they were throwing up over the side of the boat. He struck a match, lit the pipe and, in his low mean voice, spoke the usual morning greeting: “Get up out of it, you, and get to work.”
Later, after breakfast, she watched the boys stumble bleary-eyed down the laneway and follow the old man onto the stagehead. He was hard on them, too, but they needn’t have minded so much since they had her to wait on them hand and foot. Leona cooked and washed and cleaned and cured and gardened every day that her brothers spent on the water or in the woods, yet she had to surrender her seat at the table without a word if one of them so much as waved a hand to dismiss her. There was no way to stand up to them. Her mother was dead since before she could remember, and all her mother’s people were across the bay. The only solution was to get away from this house. That meant getting married and Leona, even at the tender age of seventeen, knew that a good husband would be hard to find.
She turned her plight over and over in her mind all day and into the evening until, with supper waiting on the stove, she spotted the old man and the boys rowing across the pond in the dory. She had just enough time to make tea and have it steeped strong and black by the time they got to the house. She went to the pantry to get the tea from its fragrant wooden box and was about to put a couple of tablespoons into the teapot when she discovered that the lid was stuck.
This pot was new, bought in Placentia during the summer after the thin handle on her mother’s curvaceous white porcelain teapot, a thing too delicate for this household – much as she imagined her mother to have been – broke off in her hand one day completely full and smashed to bits on the floor.
“You’re gonna have to pick the bones out of that before I drinks it,” laughed Cyril, the oldest.
“Butterfingers,” smirked Vincy, who was younger than her but still thought nothing of mocking her when the occasion arose.
“Wipe it up,” grumbled the old man.
None of them made a move to help as she got to her knees with a worn tea towel and a washpan and tried to contain the expanding brown pool. She wiped up the entire mess, then made and served them their tea in a saucepan.
The next time she went to the Trading Company in Placentia she got this short, sturdy-looking pot with a small button-like handle on the lid. It looked as if it should last a generation, but it had turned on her already.
She looked quickly out the window again and saw the boat pulled up to the stagehead. In a few minutes, they’d enter the house by the back linney, toss their work shirts in a pile, wash their hands in the basin by the pump, and then stroll into the kitchen wordlessly expecting to be fed. They would not want to be kept waiting on their tea.
Getting a little frantic, she wound a piece of butcher’s twine around the button handle and pulled hard on it. The twine snapped. She dared not double it and pull harder for fear of breaking yet another pot. There would be worse hell to pay if she did that. She poured hot water over it, as she might do to loosen a jam jar lid, and almost burned the hand off herself. It occurred to her as she spread butter on the burn that a bit smeared on the teapot lid might help. That was also a bad idea for the pot nearly flew to the floor from her slippery hands. Finally, stinging with the memory of Vincy’s name-calling, she removed every trace of the butter and prepared to face the mockery.
Then she heard a tap on the door. “Come in,” she said, and turned as Paddy Merrigan from Knock Harbour, a short, stout, impish man with a peculiar tilt to his bearing, not unlike the teapot she still held in her hands, stepped carefully into the kitchen. Paddy had been hired by the old man to replace the windows in the stable. She’d spoken with him a couple of times this week and had caught the hint of merriment in his blue eyes and the trace of a shy smile whenever she’d approached. She was amused at how he shifted his gaze between the sky and the ground as they talked and looked at her only when he thought she wouldn’t notice. There was, she suddenly realized, as he stood there shyly fingering the worn brim of his cap, something nice about this fellow with the slight mischievous grin and the deep-blue eyes.
“Is your father here?” he said, keeping by the door.
“They’re at the stagehead there now,” she said, an obvious agitation in her voice. “They’ll
be coming up the hill in a minute.”
“Something wrong?” he said.
She let out a frustrated sigh and shook the stubby teapot at him with both hands. “The lid on this cursed thing is stuck, so I can’t make them their tea.”
He laughed and cocked his head to one side. “That’s a queer thing.” He stepped further into the kitchen. “Here, let me see it.” He laid his hand over it.
“Why?” she said, pulling it from his grasp. “What are you going to do about it?”
He left his open hand extended, wiggling his fingers, asking for the pot. He said, shyly looking at the floor, “Well, I can put a leg on a hen or an arse in a cat, you know. Why do you think your father hired me to put the windows in the stable?”
“I don’t know why he hired you, to tell the truth.” She secured the pot under her arm and his outstretched hand disappeared into a pocket. “He could do the work himself only he thinks he got to catch every last fish that’s in the bay.”
“Yes, girl. He do stay at it too long, don’t he? An’ ‘tis a rainy fall, too. Hard to get a good cure.”
“It’s me, not the weather, he’s going to blame for the bad cure,” she said, enjoying the chance to sound off. “But how can I do it right when there’s a shower every other day?”
“Goin’ to be hard to get a price for it,” he agreed, pointlessly wiping the toe of his boot on the floor.
“Last year, I fed half the fall catch to the pigs,” she said, “but he don’t care as long as I’m workin’ day and night. That seems to keep him happy, for some reason.”
He looked up for a second and she caught and held his gaze. She was slightly taller than him, she noticed. He looked a lot younger than her father, which was good, though he was certainly older than any of her brothers. She guessed he was around forty.
“Here,” she said, and handed him the teapot. In a surge of boldness, she added, “Anyone can put a window in a stable, but a man who can fix a teapot, now that would be a fella worth marryin’.”
“I dare say you’re right,” he said, and with that he slipped a hammer from his belt, tossed it one-hand to get the proper grip, and gave the teapot lid a smart tap. It popped loose with a rattle and he handed it back to her.
“Good as new,” he said, as they both looked toward the yard at the sound of approaching footsteps.
“I’ll go have a word with your father, then.”
“I never really meant I’d marry you,” she said, regretting her impetuous words.
“Oh, not about that,” he said, mischief in his eyes. “I’ll show him the work I done today. That’ll give you time to make a drop of tea.”
She was unused to the idea of an ally. Her stomach fluttered a bit as he moved toward the door. When he was gone, she put the lid on the teapot, then took it off and put it back again several times, amazedly.
Yes, she thought, a man that cute with a hammer got to have some good in him.
The following week the old man left an envelope with Leona to give Paddy when he came by to collect his pay. A sudden squall, an unseasonable mix of rain and snow, blew in in a nasty flurry around noon. The downpour flitted wet and cold across the shorn amber meadows, with their black rectangles of empty gardens. Thick clouds cast a grey pall over the spruce-covered hills. The burst of foul weather reflected Leona’s mood as she rushed to the flakes to pile the fish, already damp and stained red from earlier showers. Afterwards, she went into the stable, soaking wet and chilled to the bone, and found her cat, a giant orange tabby named Princess, lying cold and motionless in a corner stall. The exposed white slivers of incisor teeth, the vacant slits of eyes, the cold as she ran her hands down its furry sides, all told Leona that Princess was gone. The cat had been around as long as Leona could remember, a gateway to the time when her mother had walked around this place as a young and hopeful woman.
She decided to bury Princess quickly before the old man got home. He’d mock her for her foolishness, giving a grave to an animal, and order her to throw the poor thing on the manure pile. She’d rather drive the pointed spade leaning against the wall through his heart than do that, but she knew he’d make her do it just the same. With a familiar flush of anger rising in her, she scooped up the cat and grasped the spade in her free hand as she shouldered her way out the door. She’d bury Princess right now, good and deep, in the loamy soil below the hill.
Outside, she saw Paddy come round the corner of the house. The squall had caught him by surprise. He had his bare hands stuffed into his pockets and his cap pulled over his ears. His left shoulder leaned into the slanting drift of the mingled snow and rain.
“Where you going with that poor creature?” he said, when he glanced up and saw her.
“I’m going to give it a decent burial,” she said, “before that crowd comes home.”
“Hmm,” he said, eying her briefly. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
“It’s a she,” she replied, in no mood for jokes, “and, yes, she’s dead. So stop your foolishness.”
“Foolishness, is it? What if I told you I could probably bring that cat back to life?”
“You’d be a liar.”
“There you go again, speaking without thinkin’. Next thing, you’ll be promisin’ to marry me again.”
“I didn’t promise you last time. But I’ll tell you what,” she added, “you raise this cat like Lazarus from the dead and I will marry you. That’s how sure I am you can’t do it.”
He cocked his head toward the linney door. “Is there no one in the house?”
“No one,” she said.
“You got my pay in there?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, take me in and show me where it is and I’ll show you how to save your poor ol’ cat.”
“This is foolish,” she protested, holding her ground. He reached out and stroked one of the cat’s forepaws with his thumb. “She’s old,” he said. “It’d be nice to give her any bit of time she got left.”
Leona let the spade fall and walked into the house with Paddy following, first through the darkened linney and then into the warm, bright kitchen. The morning fire had cooled enough to allow Paddy to lay the flat of his hand on the stovetop. Satisfied with the level of heat, he pulled open the oven door. Leona held Princess like a baby, supporting the small round head with her hand. “I’ll take her now,” he said, and held out his hands. She felt some reassurance in the gesture since it recalled the episode with the teapot. She passed Princess to him and watched as he laid the cat gently on the bed of splits warming inside the oven. Then he raised the door again, leaving it open just a crack.
“Even if she is over and done with there’s no harm in tryin’, is there?” he said. “People gives creatures up for dead sometimes when all they needs is a little help to stay warm. That gets harder when you’re older.” He smiled. “Ask a fella who knows.”
“You’re not so old as that, Paddy Merrigan,” she said.
“I’m too old for you,” he said, as his gaze shifted again to the floor. She felt his eyes on her feet as she moved to a chair, sat and crossed her legs to reveal the toes of her black boots.
“You should not make promises you can’t keep,” he said.
“Why not? I can marry who I likes. Who’s to stop me?”
“No one, I s’pose. You could always take off, couldn’t you?”
“I could. I’m not sayin’ I’d want to marry you, though. For one thing, you’re as old as the hills and, for another; I don’t ever want to live on the Cape Shore.”
“Well, for one thing, you just said I wasn’t so old as that and, for another, what’s wrong with the Cape Shore, I’d like to know.”
“What’s right about it, you mean!” Her eyes widened. “The road’s not fit for man or beast and the place is full of ghosts and devils, so they say.”
“You don’t believe that old cod, do you? Old stories made up to scare the youngsters.”
“I’m sittin’ here with my dead cat in the oven waiti
n’ for it to come back to life, so you might as well say I’d believe anything.”
“This is different. Them old stories from the Shore have been around for years and years. No truth to ‘em.”
“There is a bit of truth to ‘em, or else they wouldn’t exist, would they? Who would make up a story about nothing at all?”
“There’s some would. People likes a story, whether it’s real or no.”
“Is that so? Well, the last thing I wants is to become part of some old story on the Cape Shore.”
He smiled at the toe of his boot. “What if it were a happy story?”
She smiled to herself. He could be charming, couldn’t he? “In that case, I’d have to think about it,” she said.
Her eye caught the flick of an orange tail across the crack in the oven door and she leapt out of her seat to the stove. She pulled the door down with a loud squeak and there lay Princess, her stomach rising and falling, clearly breathing and resting quietly. She lifted out the toasty animal and held it to her.
She could not bear to look at Paddy right away.
“Your pay,” she said, “is behind the statue of the Virgin Mary.” She heard him cross to the small oval shelf from which the Virgin surveyed the room. He slipped the envelope from behind the statue and tucked it into his pocket.
“T’ank you,” he said.
She was unable to overcome her silence as he slipped quietly out of the house.
A week later she was working the gardens in a spate of warm sunshine when she saw Paddy approach the stagehead in his dory. He must have rowed up the shore from Knock Harbour, come in through the gut and crossed the pond. A good three hours. That wouldn’t be so unusual if he had something aboard to sell or deliver, but the dory sat high in the water and seemed quite empty except for Paddy himself. She watched unseen as he climbed out of the dory onto the stagehead, then pulled a white handkerchief out of his back pocket, shook it vigorously and wiped his face and neck. She noticed a white shirt collar beneath his Guernsey. He buttoned his suit coat over the thick sweater and, looking a bit like an over-stuffed sausage, started on his way up the lane. She waited until the tramp of his rubbers came even with her on the lane above and called out to him. He came to the edge and saw her, then walked halfway down the steep bank and sat on the grass.