by Darrell Duke
John Mullins, her old friend, yells orders to the crew of the boat named for her. She’s proud of him. The hard work of the crew goes far beyond wrestling a living from the sea; she knows that well. It’s for their wives and children and neighbours. Even for strangers, should they show up at doorsteps having survived schooners wrecked on the shoals of the harbour’s entrance. Especially in November and December storms, when the place is often mistaken as a safe haven.
“It’s good to be home, Jim,” Anne calls out to her oldest brother. He’s standing with a tally sheet, counting fish on the flakes.
“No place like home, Annie, girl,” Jim replies with a little laugh.
He makes his way out of the yard and under the flakes toward the wharf.
Jim is like their father. At fifty-five, Jim is big and tall, tough and strapping. He’s carrying a large killick with one hand, with a ten-foot plank on the other shoulder.
Anne laughs to herself, remembering the time Edward came home with an amusing tale of her daddy’s strength. Edward, Anne’s husband, is a manager with T & M Winter Ltd. He was travelling around the city drumming up business while Richard, his father-in-law, tagged along for company. Finished business and leaving the office of a gymnasium, Edward noticed the old man hanging and spinning on a pair of gymnast’s hoops. The best part, Edward told her, was Richard still had on his winter coat and boots.
Anne walks out of the garden and turns onto the road. She’s to meet someone who’s not so busy and perhaps has time for a chat. Alongside the lane past Jack and Lize Foley’s, she says hello to little girls playing among the big rocks. The white glare of the sun across part of the harbour’s surface takes her back to winters long ago. She and her friends would jump from one drifting ice pan to another, often falling into the water near shore, where the ice was not as thick and less stable. Then came the chastising from the parents, who later admitted they had been punished for the same reasons, in the same places, when they were young. Anne smiles again. She knows if she visited Fox Harbour in winter, her own young ones would want to jump ice pans, too, and her nerves would be gone.
Open areas where houses once stood are grown in with alders and grass. Pink rockets, normally shooting straight for the sky, are a little bent in the light breeze. Goldenrod stands tall, catching all the wonder of the sun.
Anne remembers old people who lived here and there. And the songs they used to sing. An old wood-horse, nearly chopped to bits, peeks through the high grass in search of a bucksaw blade to pierce its weather-worn, dull, grey, termite-ridden surfaces, to bleed its dust to the wind. At one time it held little children who swung their legs in time to made-up nursery rhymes. Later it was known to generations of young lovers—a fearless girl standing in her homemade summer dress leaning into a shy boy in his dungarees and clean white singlet, resting on the wood-horse in the gripping marvel of that first kiss. A seat for minds of all states to sit and contemplate what it’s all about, to feel, to dream, to fall off with too much moonshine aboard, to watch the shooting stars of the Perseid fall behind The Isaacs or over the Crow Hill. To be. A simple sawhorse and all those thoughts.
The haunted houses long abandoned are all gone now, but several incumbents stand by. They’re leaning into the wind, foundations not what they used to be, sure to take the place of their predecessors in years to come. People have died in every home in Fox Harbour. But from some, once they’re abandoned, come noises late at night. It’s not safe to walk by alone, night or day. Evil curses, for some reason left behind.
She wonders if angry fairies still hide in the woods and meadows, and if they’re still responsible for the loss of those two little brothers who went sliding and never came back.
The wind stirs Anne’s long, greying hair. She’s pleased to find herself so much a child again. Rekindling her youth, she remembers the games of truth or dare, where stubborn tongues and weakened nerves often resulted in having to kiss on the cheek boys she wouldn’t have otherwise chosen over a sculpin.
Had she been anywhere but Fox Harbour, she might have been the quintessential spoiled merchant’s daughter. But not here. Children know better than to talk back to their elders, and a clout in the gob for being brazen might be expected from anyone, anytime. Unlike St. John’s, where several small towns lay scattered about, most here take on the responsibility of the community, youngsters and all. Girls follow their mother’s apron strings, learning how to keep a man fed, clothed, and looked after in general. Chores have their place morning, noon, and night. Between chores, people visit where they like and don’t have to knock. Anne finds inviting people to her home in the city a little strange. And that’s only on Sundays.
When she was young, feeling she’d witnessed more refined people and things on trips to the city, Anne thought nothing of leaving Fox Harbour behind. Now, these people, her people, so full of character and life, never fail to beckon her. She’s glad to be home. And no time could be better than now, with community spirit on bust in support of the schooners preparing to leave for another spell of fishing.
From her handbag she takes a small ledger. She found it in a musty box in her father’s old office this morning. The ledger is green with a concoction of black and cream lines resembling the remnants of a rotten curtain, not unlike ones she noticed in the abandoned houses. Just above the centre of the book’s cover, running diagonally from left to right is carved, Mr. RICHD. HALEY. Holding the book, Anne traces each letter with her index finger, trying to imagine her father inscribing his name there. Was it day or night? Night, most likely. Not enough time in the day. What did he use to carve each letter so straight? A blade? What was he thinking at the time? Was he happy? Was his business worth the hassle of all those days and nights spent in St. John’s bartering and trying to secure deals to outfit his shop? Where did the book come from?
When she opens the cover, her eyes are drawn to a dark brown stain from a kerosene lantern, its light having guided her father’s eyes over his pen’s light soaks in the ink bottle. No breaks in the writing tell of uninterrupted thoughts, as his business thoughts fill the pages. The eloquently written date, Nov. 2, 1883, tells the book’s age. A faint trace of the stink of kerosene remains after forty-five years. At the top of the page in neat handwriting reads: Mr. Richd. Haley in a/c with Job Brothers.
The first entry in the little log is 40 hhds Salt, and Anne wishes, for her brothers’ sake, it was still only eighteen pounds. And 1 Puncheon Molasses: eighty-four gallons, just eleven pounds and eighteen shillings. Not that anyone here goes by that currency anymore. But Anne remembers it well, as it was used outside St. John’s, in places like Fox Harbour, for years after it was replaced by dollars and cents.
She sees the names of men, mostly long gone. Their own sons, now grown men, still carry their fathers’ and grandfathers’ names and debts. Their sons to follow are sure to remain in books like this one forever. They’ll all die owing something to someone. They have that in common.
On other pages, Mr. Richd. Haley in a/c with Job Brothers appears again. Pride is evident in the easy-flowing loops of her father’s penmanship.
Page to page, no kerosene stain is the same. A few people’s names appear, showing what they borrowed from the store and how much they owed. Anne knows some of the poor souls never lived to pay off their debts, and she wonders how her father ever explained to the Jobs those instances when he hadn’t enough money to cover what he, himself, borrowed to lend out to poor fishermen in the first place.
The dates on the surprisingly white pages make it to 1884. On the top of a couple of pages dated that same year in lead reads Anny. Anne thinks of her mother and longs for her. The long nights, years ago by the stove, in lantern light when she was about three and a half. Mother’s warm hand lay over her own little hand, tracing over the letters of the alphabet. Her first attempts at spelling her own name. “Now, Annie, only black Protestants spells their name with a ‘y�
�,” Mother would say. The lowering of her voice suggested she knew it wasn’t proper to say such a thing, even when no one was around to hear. A little rectangular sticker on the inside back cover reveals where the book was made: C. & H. Ratcliffe, 4 Rumford Street, Liverpool. Anne imagines the little book being assembled in some brick building on a bustling street like those described on the pages of Dickens’s David Copperfield. Then packed in a crate and floated across the Atlantic in tall ships in wild gales where men prayed for death and on calm evenings where silence beckoned them to never go home, or anywhere—to drift forever. The little book. All the way from England to St. John’s and then here, by boat.
On an unused page and, at the risk of soiling her good dress with black ink, she dares to reflect. She’s inspired by what her brothers, Jim and Mike, were saying this morning over tea about last Saturday’s time at their house:
Each person here contemplates life in his or her own way, never without the wit, marinated handsomely in the well-timed sauce of our Irish ancestors. All ages are glad to shed tears for ballads, and still, through good seasons and bad on the water, on Saturday nights, circles of friends, linked arm and arm, sway too close to the stove, rattling dishes in sideboards from their boots pounding kitchen floors like tomorrow will never come. Fox Harbour. Home. Of course, they didn’t say it quite like that.
“Hello, Annie H’aly!”
“Oh, hello, Mart,” Anne says, startled out of her daydreaming. “Still delivering babies, I s’pose?”
“Never stops, me dear, never stops,” Mart says. “I’m on the lookout now for Mag Whiffen. She’s ready t’ go any day now.”
“Well, I better not keep you, then.”
“Don’t be so foolish, girl. I’ve lots o’ time t’ talk wit’ an auld friend,” Mart laughs, perching upon a big rock alongside the road.
“Ah, what would Fox Harbour do without good women like you, and your mother and your sister, God rest their souls?” Anne says.
“There’d be no wan here, I s’pose,” Mart says, laughing, “’cause they wouldn’t be born.”
Anne lets out a laugh and slides over alongside Mart. “You’re liable to be right, girl.” She laughs again.
“Ya know,” Mart says, “Mother often told ’bout all the babies yer own mother lost, the poor t’ing. The consumption, me dear, ’twas much worse than ’tis now, b’lieve it or not. You were lucky, I dare say, t’ muster ’nough strengt’ t’ fend off the cursed TB. Mother said ya never knew what was lingering in the damp recesses of every corner o’ this place, the way the youngsters were dyin’. ’Tis not half so bad now, Annie, girl, as bad as ’tis. Poor Lize Foley’s daughter, Jane, in the States lost her little fella just last year. He was only two. Poor Lize isn’t over it yet.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Anne says.
“’Deed He do, me dear, ’deed He do,” Mart says. Both women lower their heads and make the sign of the Cross over their chests.
The women silently explore their lives. The moist salt air sinks into their sunburned faces while the breeze dries the sweat on their foreheads. Each woman sighs at the beauty of the harbour. The dark green hills, silhouettes in the bright day, rolling back from The Isaacs are woven into the haven of big hills behind that seem to go on forever.
“Well, dear, I must be goin’. Too much work t’ be done this lovely day. ’Twas lovely talkin’ to ya, Annie. How long ya out for?”
“The day after tomorrow. I’m sure we’ll run into one another again before then.”
Is letting Mart go away this soon wrong? Anne wonders. Perhaps she mistakes my silence for arrogance. After all, this is a little holiday for me and the children, and what right do I have to let go of a chance to have a good yarn with an old friend?
“Mart!” Anne gets up from the big rock and dusts the back of her long cotton skirt. “I know you’re on your way someplace, but I’m heading up the lane to the old meadow, not far. Want to come along for a spell? Just a while.”
They stroll up the lane and on to the meadow they both knew well from childhood. It was so much bigger one time, they agree, having grown in lots the past forty years. The delicate scent of alders and their shiny green leaves soothe their senses. A big rock beckons them. They enjoy the rugged beauty of the harbour. Anne begins talking about her family. Their life. A symphony of hard work in the background breaches the air. Through the glare of the sun, The Isaacs and the Neck are lovely silhouettes against the emerald sea.
Chapter three
The Healys
Richard K. Healy was born at Fox Harbour in 1840. He had been a merchant and general dealer there since 1882, when Annie was less than four. He married Johanna Whiffin of Long Harbour, a small community just north of Fox Harbour.
Richard bought and sold fish, and he got supplies for his store on trips to St. John’s. Bought in this case meant he took the majority of fish brought in to his premises by fishermen with berths on his schooners in exchange for supplies they had borrowed from his store throughout the year. Supplies weren’t especially those required for going to sea. They also included basic possessions such as oleo; molasses used for baking and in tea in the absence of sugar; flour; raisins; sewing and knitting needles; thread; and material for both the making and mending of clothes. Most clothes, however, were made by wives and daughters from used sacks in which food items were shipped. The fish he took in was brought or shipped to St. John’s, where the process started over. Seldom did money exchange hands, especially between fishermen and Richard.
Before the twenty-six miles of railway track was completed from Whitbourne to Placentia in 1888, Richard and his hired captains sailed his schooners the lengthy trip out of Placentia Bay, around Cape St. Mary’s, Cape Race, and Cape Spear and into St. John’s.
Also acting as the culler, Richard decided the grade of fish brought to him. This decided its worth. His family wanted for little. Johanna looked after the children, Jim, Mike, Mary, Annie, and Henry, while servant girls were hired and did what was expected of most wives. They cooked and cleaned, washed clothes and diapers, sewed and harvested vegetables, and tended to fish on the flakes and hens and livestock in the family’s gardens.
But regardless of the presence of servant girls and shore boys, and due to the endless amount of work required to operate such a business, the Healy young ones were little different than other children in the town. They did their share of work. Curing fish. Mending twine. Hooking mats. Growing vegetables. Shoeing horses. Minding sheep and cows. Carding and spinning wool. And cleaving and lugging wood. Girls made the boys’ and men’s clothes, and hated it, especially Sunday jackets and suits kept for weddings and wakes.
As a planter, Richard owned boats and hired other men to use them. Since the early 1880s, he chartered two big schooners, Hope and Queen of Providence, from Job Brothers Ltd., an elite mercantile firm in St. John’s. They’d been around since 1750, with irons in fires all over the island of Newfoundland. Richard’s store carried all available makes of fishing gear. Trips to the city weren’t always necessary. Job’s had an outpost in Placentia, where Richard bought portions of his store’s supplies, and sold fish there, too, if the timing was right and boats were heading to St. John’s.
At the turn of the century, when Job Brothers had stakes in the short-lived silver mines at Broad Creek Canyon near Little Placentia, Richard acted as an agent, supplying local workers for the mine.
He also had two schooners made for himself: the Mary H. in the 1880s and the Annie Healy in 1900. The four schooners of Richard K. Healy & Sons Ltd. provided fishing berths to men from all over Placentia Bay.
From spring until the middle of November, men in boats left Fox Harbour to fish Golden Bay, near Cape St. Mary’s. The old saying, Cape St. Mary’s pays for all, was little more than a saying a lot of the time. The waters off and around Cape St. Mary’s have been a forest of schooner mast
s since the mid-1850s.
Some years the nearly fifty-mile sail from Fox Harbour proved fruitful, while, following other fishing seasons, both Richard and the fishermen were left in the worst kind of plight. Shortages of fish brought no end to debt, and the inevitable lack of food brought a want of energy. And if lack of fish wasn’t enough, young and old alike were regularly dragged down the suffocating halls of consumption. People also felt the deadly pangs of dropsy or the incurable chills of the common cold. This, along with a lack of medicine and no doctor to be found, at least on time, made winters longer and harder. Community spirit and an unrestricted devotion to prayer kept them going a lot of the time.
Healy’s home is a large whitewashed two-storey in The Bottom, looking straight out to the harbour’s entrance. On the right of the harbour is the biggest of The Isaacs: two great hills of granite protecting the town from the impulsive tides of Placentia Bay. The closest hill climbs almost 350 feet while the other is about half its height. The Point on the other side of the harbour is clothed in evergreens rolling off Sampson’s Hill. A small grassy meadow at the base of the hill has a handful of boulders gnawed off the cliff by wind and wave over the years. This point of land stretches out across a fair bit of the entrance, making the harbour shallow and tricky to navigate. Hundreds of years ago, French soldiers called it a “faux” harbour on their maps, but no one seems to know or care where the name came from. Not even the Church had the power to rename it for a saint in 1918.
A widow’s walk running the length of the roof of Healy’s home once gave the place an air of importance—this, and the rarity of a front step. Everyone still thinks the step foolish. A waste of wood, only used by the priest when he visits. Why can’t he use the side door like everyone else? He’ll stand there on the step, people say, straight as a whip, looking back to the water, right proud of the big operation in front of his eyes, like he had a hand in it himself. As if the women and children hobbling around, bent over with perpetual bad backs, laying out and picking up fish on the flakes, enjoy their work. As if they wouldn’t drop it all in a second if opportunity to make a different living presented itself. As if they’re not sneaking a peek his way now and then, cursing and swearing on account of his clean clothes and the two hands never known to a callus.