by Darrell Duke
“Mudder, girl! We’re only goin’ swimmin’,” Michael says, his big laugh tearing his fretful mother away from her thoughts and what he sees as her foolish fears.
Bridget admires her son’s handsome face with her hand and then tousles his unruly head of black curls.
“Go on, girl, leave me ’lone,” he jokes.
“You’ll know what I means someday, me child. Now, here! Eat this an’ have a nice time with the b’ys into The Falls after yer work.”
Michael makes a face at her, shakes his head, and rolls his eyes. They both laugh, and Bridget pours the last drop of grease and onions over six big fish cakes. Mary Ann comes into the kitchen. She adores Michael and sits on his lap. Michael eats to his heart’s content, feeding his little sister a bite whenever she asks for more with an open mouth.
“I hears yer father’s big feet comin’ ’round the house,” Bridget says vibrantly. “Who’s that with him, I wonder?”
John Mullins comes into the kitchen in a hurry. The brisk mid-August wind is at his back. He’s stocky, wider than the door frame, and the benefactor of his son’s good looks, according to Bridget. Little Mary Ann gets up and goes to her daddy’s side.
“Michael, you’re goin’ out wit’ us t’morrow. We haven’t enough men t’ make the run,” John tells his son.
Michael shoots a swift, frantic look for help in his mother’s direction but knows better than to protest. The look on his father’s face offers no incentive for appeal. Mary Ann also looks to her mother for help. Michael always makes time for his little sister, and she adores him for it. Especially when he sings to her.
“Never ya mind lookin’ at yer mudder, now, Michael,” the captain says. “Make ready for a week and be down t’ the stagehead in no more than an hour t’ help make the boat ready for leavin’ tomorrow!”
Michael is upset, having thought about swimming with Katie as often as possible for the rest of the summer. That amounts to the rest of this week, with September already sending scattered days of chilly winds from the northeast. Not that The Falls is ever that warm. The running water and shade from the trees on either side of the swimming hole keep it good and cold. But being close to Katie will take care of that, though. Michael is engulfed in thoughts of her, the prettiest thing he’s ever seen. He thinks of her working a flake, or just standing there, waiting by the front gate. He sometimes makes her wait on purpose so he can watch her from the window of his room. He can see more from a distance. Close up just gets him lost. Katie is so beautiful with her big brown eyes to match her thick, long hair. And that smile that couldn’t get any bigger or better. When they’re alone, Michael tells her nothing else matters in this world but right now. Every time.
In Poppy’s twine loft, and by the woodpile in the cold rain in front of her father’s house, they kissed their way through the bitter winter and its leftovers—spring in Newfoundland. Hardly a day passes without one or the other making a crack about doing something more serious when they’re alone. “We’d have t’ be married, or Mudder would have me head,” Katie always says. “And me fadder would have yours.” When she pretends to be his bride-to-be at the altar, with the priest all the one time, Michael likes to play along as the patient groom and would love to know if she’s really serious. But he’s scared to ask, for fear of scaring her away. He thinks of ways to convince her they can pretend to be married and do what they like and no one will be any wiser. When she gulps at the onset of his advances, he senses she’s serious, maybe even a little afraid of what might become of their desires, and he backs off, saying he’s only letting on. “I know, b’y,” she always lies. He prays for every drop of strength to keep from being knocked over by the pounding of his heart, his legs right weak.
At these times, more frequent these days, Katie’s head falls slowly to one side, and her full lips press tightly together while her stare drains him of all energy. Then he doesn’t have the guts to hold her the way he wants to, the way she might like him to. The look in her eyes forces him to run from his thoughts, to laugh awkwardly, to say stupid things he knows she won’t recall the next day because each night apart—the waiting, the dreaming, and more waiting until those few short hours each evening bring them together again—allows their minds plenty of rest from the night before.
He was deflated at the thought of not seeing Katie for a week or so. But something enlivens him again, something he’s not sure he’s ever felt. Pride, perhaps. Did Daddy just call me a man? Michael wonders, smiling, and looking back toward the kitchen, afraid his mother might see him and wonder what’s the matter with him, smiling to himself. He’s close to running out through the house, to asking his father. But a conversation about life, they both know, isn’t about to happen now, if ever.
“What about your dream, Michael?” Mary Ann sings out in an anxious voice.
“What dream is that, dear?” Bridget asks her little girl.
“I can’t say. Michael said not to say it to anyone.”
“It’s just a dream, sweetheart,” Michaels sings out from his room.
“But you . . .” Mary Ann is interrupted when her father comes back in from outdoors.
“Go out and beat the mats some more, Mary Ann, darlin’,” John tells his daughter.
Up in his room, Michael’s thoughts are consumed with Katie and his plans for the future. At least he’ll get to spend this evening with Katie, and there’ll be plenty of time to long for her at sea. Maybe even make up a poem or song to surprise her when he returns. In another couple of years at the most, he knows, they’ll be married. Michael plans to go to school, to get away from this life of uncertainty, and to sing wherever and whenever he can. But there will be plenty of time at sea to go over all of this in his head.
Now he’s consumed with Mary Ann’s reminder of the awful dream he’s been having lately. There’s no thunder. Nor lightning. The sun is even shining. But he’s floating, more like fumbling, above a raging sea, crashing through walls of spray and foam. He’s hurting. Buckled over in pain. But he’s singing. It’s a sad song. Mary Ann is there, too, but not in danger, just smiling, listening to her favourite person singing. All of a sudden, a schooner rises in front of him and crashes down upon him. He’s sent to the ocean floor, where he gets caught up in seaweed and old nets. He hears his father’s voice yelling orders to hoist the mains’l, with an old man trying to help. He’s relieved to be back on board the boat, but they can never get the sail to budge. The old man isn’t trying hard enough. “Pull! Pull!” Michael screams at the old man. The old man doesn’t respond, but his head turns slowly toward Michael. Beneath his torn sou’wester there is no face. Just blackness. Space. Staring into the old man’s head, the wind swings the mains’l’s boom and strikes Michael in the guts. He’s carried over the side and into the boiling sea again. That’s when he always wakes up. He’s had the same dream for the past week or more, and shared it with Mary Ann and Katie one evening out walking around the harbour.
Down in the kitchen, Bridget serves John his fish cakes and sits at the table at the opposite end to eat her own.
“Who’s out to the shed at the wood, John?” she asks.
“The youngf’las from H’aly’s Wharf. They’re luggin’ a few junks from the store for the trip. There’s plenty left t’ do you till we gets back. When I’m done eatin’, I’m goin’ over t’ tell Mother we’ll be leavin’ in the mornin’.”
Through the window Bridget watches Healy’s shore boys lug the handcart piled high with wood down the rocky lane. They turn left onto the road leading past Murray’s flakes to Healy’s Wharf. She turns her head back to stir John’s tea and lays his mug on the oven door to keep it warm.
In fifteen or twenty minutes, John is back from his mother’s. Bridget has his food packed away in a brin bag and is back in her chair for another rock.
“How long will ye be gone this time?” She hates asking the same
old questions.
“A week at the most. As long as it takes t’ make up for the last trip, I s’pose, Bridget, girl. Mon’s right sick . . .”
“Yes, I heard.”
“. . . and John Kelly, too, but he says he’ll come out and do what he’s able. Ellen was fit to be tied.”
“I s’pose she was. I wouldn’t want you goin’ out, either, if you were sick,” Bridget assures.
“And brudder, Pad,” John goes on. “Pad’s liable t’ be lyin’ down for another week after fallin’ off the roof.”
Besides the familiar low key in the house when it’s time for John to head back to sea, there is something else. Looking up from the floor where he’s knelt by the stove to poke at the fire, he sees Bridget’s eyes are glassy, like they’ve been polished, and darting around the room. She rarely stops to focus on anything while her hands find their way in and out of her apron pocket. Her fingers fiddle through her hair, unguided, without purpose. She knows he knows she’s been talking about little Jimmy again.
“Where do the time go at all, John? Where do it go?”
John heads to the porch for more splits. He doubts sailing away from little Jimmy ever took away the hurt. Bridget retelling that story will never make the next day any easier. He bangs the palms of his big hands hard off the woodbox.
“’Twas God’s will, Bridget. ’Twas God’s will. That’s what we agreed.”
“I know, John, b’y. I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Bridget sobs from her place at the table.
“’Tis not yer fault, girl. ’Tis not our fault,” he says.
Michael comes down over the stairs and quickly stops singing when he sees his mother crying at the table. He pretends not to notice, keeps going again, and does the same when he sees his father hove over the woodbox. Michael heads out the porch door. The enthusiasm he’d been feeling is banished again by the talk of his dead little brother. He was only seven when his little brother died, but it seems like yesterday, they were that close.
“What about your dream, Michael?” Mary Ann’s voice breaks into Michael’s thoughts.
“Who knows what dreams are all about, sweetheart,” he says, kneeling and pulling her close to him. “It’s just a dream. I just told you and Katie for something to do, that’s all. I didn’t mean to scare ya.”
“Will ya take me into The Falls with ya as soon as ya gets home again?” she asks, reluctant to accept his explanation and his having to go away.
“Of course I will, sweetheart,” Michael says softly. “Of course I will.” He kisses her on the head and takes off down the lane toward the Annie Healy, where his father told him to go and see if the men need any help. He joins Kate at the end of the lane and they both walk to the Annie Healy.
Chapter five
The Bruces
The wind from the northwest is strong. Sporadic gusts swoop past The Isaacs, stirring the grassy meadow and the long, wide expanse of black spruce, fir, and juniper of The Neck. A schooner hove to in the cove bobs gracefully. Cool salt water hisses and sighs over the lines anchoring the large boat to its rest. Great white sheets of reddish canvas fastened by rope to the tall masts of the boat have been hoisted to dry. Swift blows from the passing wind echo throughout the vast hills of scantily clad rock strewn along the coastline, all the way to Ship Harbour.
Two young boys skip rocks across the top of the small whitecaps, trying to hit the wooden nameplate, Pauline, on the bow of the schooner. Lunging mischievously in their bare feet, the lads taunt the ebb tide. They slip now and then on the green, slime-covered rocks. Their shouts and laughter get carried away on the breeze.
The pushing and dragging of beach rocks by the open sea on the other side of The Neck is eerie, as if the boys might be crushed and swept away any minute. But the heavy action of the sea is far enough away, and the creepiness only adds to their excitement.
Old schooners lay abandoned, rotting in varying degrees around the whole of the harbour. They’re wonderful playgrounds for curious children in their spare time. In the little cove below King’s Meadow, a pair of young teenage girls plays, posing for each other on the mainmast of a beached schooner.
“Luh, I’m Greta Garbo,” one shouts over the rustling of the trees.
The girls love pretending to be famous people. They hear about them from newspaper theatre ads. It makes them feel as though it will help fulfill their dreams of one day getting to St. John’s to see a real moving picture. They’d do anything in the world to get a train ride to the city.
“Lots of people from Fox Harbour lives in New York where the stars are, makes the movin’ pictures,” one says, continuing to strike poses for an audience of birds. Crooked crows scowl at full-bellied kingfishers fluttering to dry themselves on dead, grey tree branches.
“I know. Sure, one of the H’alys lives in California, where Hollyrood is,” the other says, certain she’s outdone her friend.
A little farther up the beach from the pair of daydreaming starlets, four or five other girls, younger ones, collect chainies for their cubby. Huddled behind a big rock, in the shade of an old tree, they count their little treasures. The little pieces of old cups, saucers, and plates, their once-jagged edges smoothed by years of tumbling in the sea, are the real thing for playing house. Homemade rag dolls with woolly hair and mismatched buttons for eyes rest on the big rock. They gaze through the yellow grass, partially hiding the girls meticulously sifting through the black muck filling the spaces between their toes.
Goose grass appears in places, tall and waving in the breeze. A swampy floor reveals itself. Juicy mussels hide in their shells, but not well enough to escape the flocks of hungry seabirds constantly circling the earth for food.
The girls are too busy playing to bother chasing off the noisy gulls stealing from their collection of mussels promised to their parents in exchange for time to play.
The gusts of wind leaping over The Green cause crisp white sheets on clotheslines to snap sharply. Tiny twisters of dust leaving the road spin to their death at the water’s edge.
By the time it reaches The Bottom, the big gust of wind fades considerably. It slightly rattles the half-raised, single-paned glass in Bruce’s front kitchen window.
Liz is busy darning her husband’s sweater. It wasn’t all that long ago she’d mended it, and here she is wasting precious time at it again. It’s a lovely summer’s day with no end to work in sight.
Earlier this morning, before the sun lent its warmth to the misty air, Pad was down to the landwash lending a hand to Mike and Henry Healy. They were tanning nets for the Annie Healy. The sails were done last week. The heat from the big fire warming the copper tanning pot was too much for Pad, so he took off his sweater and laid it on a rock.
Nearby, a few young boys were rubbing the belly of a sculpin they’d just caught, causing the fish to inflate to a good-sized ball. A handful of palm-size rocks tossed into the ugly, bony lips and the wide-open mouth of the fish gave it a bit of weight.
A flanker from the tanning pot fire landed on Pad’s sweater, quickly etching a hole in the wool.
Just as he was about to give the fish the first kick, six-year-old Arthur Sampson buckled in fits of laughter at the sight of big Pad Bruce cursing and stomping up out of the landwash and onto the road.
“Jaysus! Jaysus! Jaysus!” Pad shouted, dancing across the coral- and conch-covered beach in his rubber boots. “Liz’ll have me fookin’ head,” he said, shaking and swinging his sweater over his head, each curse delivered with a passion deeper than the one before.
The group of young fellas, along with Healy’s shore boys, laughed at the top of their lungs.
“Get back t’ work, ye!” roared Mike Healy.
Henry Healy snickered loudly through his nose, rooting up more laughter from the boys on the wharf now intensely involved in a game of soccer with the ill-fated fis
h.
Walking toward home, Pad waved his sweater to Liz as she edged along Murray’s high flakes with an armload of salt fish. Laying them side by each, she was careful not to let them overlap. It was her second time this morning laying the same pile of fish out.
“Put it on the table next t’ the rockin’ chair where me needles are,” she said.
The look on Pad’s face told a familiar tale, and he knew he didn’t have to say a word. Liz turned away and smiled, careful not to let Pad see.
It’s no secret she loves him to pieces. No matter the time or day, or what they’re at, together or alone, she always feels that strong surge of adrenalin in her chest, as he’s constantly in her thoughts. Pad is funny. Perhaps too funny at times. But she’d choose no world other than the one he’s in, if she was ever made to decide. She takes his temper tantrums lightly, knowing he’s liable to be making a wisecrack a minute later. “Pretty bad if ya can’t have a laugh,” he always says. “An’ he’s right,” Liz told Bridget Mullins earlier. “Ya never know what’s goin’ to come out of his mout’ next,” she said. “But he’s as good as gold an’ would give ya the last bite out of his mouth if he t’ought ya really needed it.”
Bridget didn’t disagree. All the men were the same. They had to be. But Pad was really funny.
Liz thinks back to last year, in May month, when she sheared the sheep by herself. It’s usually a job for two women, but there was no one else around that day. The sheep were good and round, and one at a time, the fidgety, smelly brutes were held down with one arm while, with her free hand, she forced the wool off. The old scissors she used wouldn’t cut butter. Carrying a load of freshly cut wool in her apron with the illusive feeling of more fish and a brighter tomorrow always brought a smile to Liz’s pretty, round face. Her long ponytail of dark brown hair swung side to side over her back as she waded through the tall grass behind their house. She’d washed the wool once or twice in Billy’s Brook and would do so again before carding it. Throughout that summer she and Ellen, her daughter, picked at the wool stored out in the shed, removing twigs and other dirt. Later on in the fall, she carded and spun the wool. Over the winter, while Pad wore out his old sweater, Liz knit a new one. She often wonders what all the hard work is for.