by Darrell Duke
After working on the flake since daylight this morning, Liz made her way home.
“There’s no end to it,” she bawled out to Lize Foley.
Lize was coming out the side door of the church, brushing dirt and sawdust from her apron.
“Tell me about it,” Lize muttered. “That bit of wood should keep Fadder Dee from complainin’ ’bout the musty smell next time he comes. I s’pose we’ll be let into heaven for keepin’ him warm.”
She tut-tutted and tossed her head, then rounded the corner of the church and disappeared from sight before Liz could finish her next sentence.
“One of these days the fish’ll be so big an’ plentiful we’ll be able to buy sweaters in St. John’s an’ I won’t have to be mendin’ Pad’s all the time,” Liz said, not caring if anyone could hear her or not.
“One of these days the men might learn t’ make their own,” said Bridget Mullins, shouting over the flapping of her sheets next door.
“Ha! Mind, now. Make their own, me arse,” Liz said.
Both women laughed, knowing full well there’d be little chance of that ever happening. Winter was the time for that stuff. Mending sweaters and traps. There was too much else to be done before and after.
With their husbands, fathers, and sons fishing together, most of the women in Fox Harbour get along well. A cup of flour here, a few potatoes there, and a bit of this and a bit of that to get them by is part of their lives. All ages share a special sense of the Irish humour. Like their ancestors, much of the time it’s all they have to get them through.
Liz can’t believe the sweater is nearly a year old already. It seems like just yesterday she made it. She had mended it at least half a dozen times since. When she thinks about it, she supposes he hasn’t done too badly with it, considering what a man goes through in a year. Not to mention the poor sweater. Pad loves it, and anything else his dear wife makes with her own hands. The sweater slows the etching of raw rope burns into his forearms. It helps numb the chill on dreary days at sea when the bitter black fog creeps through the dyed stitches, into his skin, gnawing at his tired bones.
Liz was up before daylight this morning, like every morning, and had taken the fish from the round pile, carefully laying them out side by side on the bough-covered flake above the salt water in time to catch the early breezes mid-August dawns are sure to send. At first she thought she’d pack them up for Pad and Uncle Watt to lug up to Healy’s, but then she decided it was best to give them an extra day in the gentle wind. The sun had appeared in places, eventually burning off the fog. There’ll be no worry of ending up with number-two fish when the time comes to trade them in. It will never see the West Indies. Not if she has her way. If she can make it merchantable, and once the score is just about settled on fishing supplies and food, her well-made fish might mean she can have that new shawl she’s been wanting for ages. She thought she’d have it last year, but what a terrible year it had been for the whole community. And with the extra costs associated with fixing up the Annie Healy this past winter and spring, the Healys are not likely to do favours for anyone. Hanging on a wooden hanger in Healy’s store window for the past two years, the shawl has been the envy of most women in Fox Harbour.
There’d be some talk if they ever see me wit’ that on me back, she thinks. But it will hardly stop her from buying it, if she can. She wonders when the shawl draped around her tired shoulders will fall apart for good. Lize Foley has a lovely soft, black shawl sent home from one of her girls in the States but won’t dare wear it, afraid people will say she’s grand.
Down by the water the contents of last night’s slop pails entertain ugly sculpins, tough conners, and flatfish alike. Saddleback gulls, their voices like angry men, banish smaller gulls with quick swipes of their great, wide wings. The regal kingfishers mind their own business and dive for fish small enough to fit their bills.
Pad and Mike talk about what a fine day it is after all the rain last night.
“These nets should do the Annie’s traps for all next year.”
“’Deed they will, Pad,” Mike says with little expression.
Henry grabs the handle of a galvanized pail and dips cod-liver oil from a nearby vat. His nose twitches uncontrollably and his stomach convulses beneath his soiled overalls. He pours the reeking liquid into the blackened tanning pot bubbling with water, tallow, and ochre. With a homemade wooden ladle, Mike and Pad take turns carefully removing large amounts of the scalding liquid from the pot. Their birch brooms have seen better days. They’ve been soaked in tanning oil and used to smack the sails laid out on the bawn. The mixture will stick and sink in.
After scraping dried seaweed and other dirt from a seine, Cyril Leary, one of the shore boys, painstakingly gathers the net. He soaks it in the gigantic copper pot filled with tanning oil. His eyes water and squint constantly while his nose and upper lip lift to one side from the merciless stink.
With soot-soiled faces, the men agree they’d rather be at anything else on such a lovely day. The shore boys say the same thing, but only where the men can’t hear. The oozing, awful reek is a familiar one around the town. So is the sound of crackling, burning sticks and boughs under half a dozen or so similar black pots spread along the shoreline on both sides of the harbour. Erratic breezes off the putrid water suck fire through last year’s blasty boughs. Thousands of rust-coloured spruce needles burst and pop in all directions.
Cyril Leary’s eyes are still watering as he keeps the fire going. Billy Penny spreads the freshly tanned nets and helps the big men roll the extra sails spread along the shore.
Yesterday Billy painted the three dories aboard the Annie Healy. He’s done that for the past four years.
“This fresh coat will do ’em till this time next year,” he tells Cyril.
It might also be this time next year, Billy jokes, before he gets the yellow oil paint off his hands, neck, and face from scratching fly bites. His mother will surely make him scrub the skin clean before he hits the hay tonight. They both laugh, although they say there’s nothing funny about it.
Billy’s real last name is Murray, but, with several William Murrays in Fox Harbour, they call him after his mother’s maiden name. Billy went to work for the Healys when he was ten. Cyril started last summer. Billy torments Cyril about Nellie Reilly, Billy’s cousin, but gets little reaction, as they’re already considered an item. The boys’ afternoon will be spent turning over hay they’d cut a few days earlier. “If it don’t cloud over,” Billy says, “it should dry ’nough to store ’way in the loft ’fore dark.”
No job is more disgusting than that of the shore boys. Constantly covered in fish guts and blood, their skin absorbs the stink and keeps it for a long time. Cuts never seem to heal because of the continuous exposure to salt. Mothers and grandmothers apply poultices of bread and Vaseline to draw infection from red-raw waterpups on hands and wrists. The roar of greedy gulls, along with the stench of liver oil vats, is a constant, too.
The boys are good workers. They’re proud to have a credit at Healy’s store to help their families along in the hard, bitterly cold months of winter, when fish are safe from men and most men safe from the sea. Boats are hauled up, turned over or covered, made better, and given a rest until spring.
The hiss of steam from the heavy black kettle anchored on the stove takes Liz from her thoughts. She grabs the bottle of Sloan’s Liniment from the windowsill, knocking over the plastic Blessed Virgin she bought from the packman last month. She’s glad her Mary, Mother of God, is able to keep watch over the house, unlike the wrinkled picture tacked up in Mullins’s kitchen next door.
With the palms of her hands, Liz gives the window a bang. She puts the medicinal bottle back under the frame of the raised pane.
Pad’s sweater is mended and laid over the back of the chair, and the darning needles tucked safely away behind the dishes in the sideboard. A
bowl filled to the brim with plump blueberries is off balance. It teeters between the smooth, rounded indents in the seat of the chocolate-coloured wooden chair from her Grandmother Duke’s on The Rams. Uncle Watt never fails to say where it came from before anyone sits on it. Liz grasps the sides of the table with her hands to quicken her trip to the stove. The metal bowl clinks with a dull softness when her bare knee strikes the chair.
After his work with the Healys, Pad goes to John Kelly’s to get Uncle Watt.
Liz changes half the water on the salt fish in soak since last night and throws in the potatoes, carrots, and turnips. She then tops the boiler off with fresh water from the brook, lays more dry wood into the fire, and waits for the pot to boil.
The rest of the morning is spent cleaning berries to be used in pies and jam later in the fall. She hopes Pad will remember to cut the rhubarb tonight. She’s anxious to make her second batch and to have the pantry shelves full of jam for the winter, until next summer.
Scratching the bites on the back of her neck, Liz tut-tuts at the thought of the nippers and blackflies she’ll have to face for the next two weeks of evenings berry picking on The Barrens. The rust of the pail’s wire handle, colouring the deep cracks in her callused hands, allows a bit of grip until the sweat begins. She’s spent more time this year telling Johnny to stop eating berries than she did picking.
It’s not much odds to her, though, remembering the excitement berry picking brought her as a child. Although, there were times she had like to let Johnny eat until he was blue in the face, like her mother did with her. But berries were more plentiful back then, it seemed.
Dabbing the dried-in rust spots with a damp rag, Liz watches Johnny play with the cat’s kittens under the raised window from where she told him not to stir. She has enough to worry about.
Johnny’s not half as much trouble as Ellen, who’s eight and liable to be anywhere, anytime, at anything. She was no better, herself, when she was young. Ellen is tough as a gad. She brings water from the brook and wood from the shed every day without being reminded. Johnny is only five and not strong enough to do that yet. But he’s a fine hand at cleaning berries and carrying shavings from the damp porch for someone else to light the stove with in the morning.
The moment Liz thinks to tell the King boys to go home and for Johnny to get in the house, she sees their mother waddling her way up the lane.
“Get home t’ the house, ye little shaggers.”
Bridge King’s voice is muffled by the closing window.
Johnny bolts past the tied-back storm door and into the kitchen with an armload of dangling, mewing kittens. The harsh bawl of the scolding mother cat isn’t far behind.
“Put them cats in wit’ their mother before she scratches the face off ya again,” Liz says.
She expects Bridge King to drop in but sees her heading off down the lane again. Her boys criss-cross each other’s path just out of the reach of their mother’s hand.
Johnny lays two kittens in the wooden box and two more in the iron washtub. He watches them skid down the smooth side of the glass washboard and fumble into the waiting mother cat, who grabs them by the scruff of the neck. One by one, she lugs them across the floor and drops them into the box with the others fast asleep on the bloodstained patchwork quilt.
“Can we clean the berries now, Mam?”
“Take this rag first an’ wash yer hands out in the porch.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you an’ the b’ys have fun wit’ the kittens?” Liz asks softly.
“Yeah.” Johnny’s voice is raspy and tired from a long morning in the fresh air.
“Can we keep one, Mam?” Johnny pleads, catching a blueberry stem between the nails of his thumb and forefinger.
“Ya better not let yer father hear ya say that. One cat is able t’ catch mice an’ rats as well as two,” she warns. “Ya better enjoy yer time wit’ ’em before they goes to the harbour.”
The kitchen is quiet, and they go about their work.
Chapter six
Liz Bruce’s Living Nightmare
The sun no longer lingers behind the Crow Hill. It’s flooding Liz Bruce’s kitchen with wide bands of light, drawing attention to the air full of dust from the floor just swept.
Squinting past the glare coming through the front window, Liz sees two young boys running past the house. Their bodies twist and turn as they throw pine cones at one another. They jump, push, trip, and fall into the grass off the side of the path where they rampse and spar. Their playful squeals rob the house of its stillness.
Mindlessly putting her fingers into the bowl, Liz takes out a few blueberries and begins cleaning them. She drops them into the dented aluminum boiler quarter-full of fresh water. The sounds from the boys outside drag her back to a time she’d sooner forget, but her Catholic guilt will hardly allow her mind to stand for such inactivity.
Through a film of familiar tears, the bright sheen of the wet berries dims. Liz is mindful not to catch Johnny’s attention. She dabs her eyes with her apron, and realizes little is likely to distract her son from his work and eagerness to have blueberry jam and cow’s cream on fresh bread. His favourite.
She sometimes craves to revisit the same old sad excuse for a break against this life of repetitiveness. There are happier stories in her family, but this one always manages to make itself welcome while Pad’s not around.
In their nine years of marriage, little has gone on in Liz’s heart without Pad’s knowing. In or out of his company, thoughts of her dead brothers often make away with her time. In the grip of old torment, she shuts her eyes and fights to turn her head from the window. By the time she looks back, the boys are gone, but their untroubled voices are heard above a gust of wind fresh off the water. She begins to hum a song, but no tune can keep the memories away.
Liz supposes if she hadn’t heard Mammy retelling her own version of the story so often, she’d have little or no account of it at all. But Mammy always included her in what is now another hushed legend in Fox Harbour—one so dreadful her own brothers’ ghosts have appeared to generations of Fox Harbour children listening to one too many stories at night, the horror on their faces when they died, however they died, etched forever in the colossal rocks of the Crow Hill. Liz has her own version of the tragedy, and none can top this one. She’d like to be able to tell it to others. Perhaps then there’d be a chance of the nightmare going away. But the nerve for that will never come.
Liz’s brothers, Ben and Mike Sampson, got a sleigh for Christmas. Liz was only four and too young, Mammy said, to go galleying with them in the meadow alongside the path leading to The Sound. Instead, Liz spent the cold, clear morning watching a snowball fight between a crowd of older boys and girls on the frozen harbour. It was Christmas, and there was so much to do. There would be plenty of time for her to play with Ben and Mike, Mammy said.
After an hour or more of whizzing down the frozen tracks of the path below The Barrens, tipping over, rolling, tumbling, swallowing mouthfuls of snow, and tackling the steep climb back to the top again, the excited brothers took turns dragging one another on the sleigh through paths cut for hauling wood. They might even find a rabbit or two to take home to Mammy for cleaning. A drop of rabbit soup would be nice after such a long day in the cold. And Mammy made the best drop of rabbit soup in the harbour.
It was only early, and, if they liked, they could go all the way to The Sound—a long, deep arm of the sea reaching in past Little Placentia and Fundy Hill. It’s accessible by land through paths in over the hill behind Fox Harbour. A few people still lived there, planting gardens and setting nets.
When dinnertime passed without the boys’ return, no one paid much mind. “They’ll be home when they’re good ’n hungry,” Daddy said, tipping back the first of many drinks he would have that day. No one worried. After all, they were just two young lads w
ith a new sleigh. Christmastime, and what else could you expect?
About four thirty that evening, the winter sun set on the harbour’s smooth surfaces. Rough patches of ice near The Bottom glistened.
Liz, alongside Mammy and some other women, went around to every house in the harbour. The boys were likely caught up in some foolish games only boys could make up. In their minds, each of the searchers had the answer, knowing the boys would show up sooner or later. Perhaps they were long back from sliding and, in their excitement, decided to offer rides to other boys brave enough to hold on for dear life, the brothers pulling with all their might. “P’raps they’re off on other paths. There’s t’ousands of ’em ’round here,” one woman exaggerated. “What if they went out on the sea ice an’ went too far where the water don’t freeze like it do in here?” one woman whispered, thinking Mammy couldn’t hear. “Nah,” a whisper returned, “someone would’ve seen ’em.”
Liz and Mammy headed for home, alone with inconsistent pangs of gathering panic. The road was blanketed with fresh, thick snow that scrunched and squeaked beneath their boots. The snowflakes were big. Perfect for catching on your tongue. But there was no time for that. The increasing wind kept the ice-covered potholes clear of snow, providing little glimpses of light whenever snow clouds parted for the light of the moon. Slushy tears climbed clumsily across Liz’s numb, red cheeks, under the band of her wet woollen cap, and into her frozen ears ringing from the last words she heard her brothers speak: