Thursday's Storm

by Darrell Duke

  Anne sighs, and tries once again to focus on the letters only half-written.

  Chapter twenty

  Sunday, August 28, 1927

  Poor Hearts Broken

  Lize Foley is inconsolable.

  “Yer fadder’s gone now. What will we do? What will we do?” she says to Bernadette. Over and over. The flannelette gown in her hands is soaked with her tears, and she’s sure Healy’s won’t take it back.

  “’Tis one thing,” she says, “for the merchants to own everything ya ever had, but ’tis worse altogether now with no one to catch fish to pay back what ye owes.”

  She’s supposed to leave this lifetime of misery in God’s hands, and some good that will do her and Bernadette, with no one to catch fish, bring home wood, and tell stories around the stove on the long, bitter winter nights not far to come. She grabs hold of the drapes in the front room and hauls them to, dulling the lines of light sneaking through the closed blinds. The last thing she wants to see is the evening’s bright sun, although the heat of it would be all right. With the drapes hauled to, she doesn’t have to see the dust floating in the air after she’s spent half the day making it spotless for the wake. If they ever find Jack, that is. And God help the priest this time if he mentions a bit of lint on his pressed black pants. She’s hardly in the mood for that.

  Moving back to the kitchen table, she looks out the window for something to take her mind off reality, to the shed where the sun’s glare is blocked by a little droke of trees. She stares at the shed window, looking for Jack’s head bent over in concentration, the way it always was when he was fixing something. Often he stayed out in the shed till all hours, picking at this and that, in the dim light of an old lantern once belonged to his grandfather and brought over during the Famine. She looks down to the worn spot of ground in front of the shed door and wonders how long it might take for the grass to grow over it if she never went near it again. She doubts it will ever grow over, unless the day comes when she doesn’t have to burn wood to stay warm, to cook, to clean, to dry clothes in winter—unless they get the electricity, like her daughters have in the States. If it ever reaches Newfoundland, she wouldn’t have to lug wood from the shed to the house and church anymore. In their letters her daughters speak of electric lights on the ceilings in their homes, glass bulbs not unlike the few she hangs on her tree at Christmastime, but without the colour, and switches on the walls to turn the lights on and off. And you don’t even have to strike a match to see what you’re doing, let alone pour oil, so they say.

  Bernadette is told she’s to go up in the woods first thing in the morning, rain or shine, and pick up whatever sticks and blasty boughs her arms can hold, lug them home, and go back for more. Lize doesn’t bother to change her orders when Bernadette reminds her mother someone has brought slabs of wood and piled them up by the shed. And others have brought junks and they’re on back of the house, near the door.

  “No odds,” says Lize, “we needs blasty boughs to make the fire start.”

  She gets up from her rocker and stands back-on to the stove, allowing a bit of heat to sink into the muscles of her aching back. Her lanky, thin arms hang loosely by her sides and the worn rosary beads in her hand rattle against her long black dress. Although she’s not much more than skin and bones, Lize feels she’s carrying the weight of a horse on her shoulders. She hurts all over, while a tingling in her spine keeps the chill in her muscles. The strain of it all causes great numbness down one side of her face, as her head is forced back and off to the side. Her right shoulder blade feels like it’s going to detach from her body as she turns around slowly to put her hands up to her face. She rubs her temples with her bony fingers while the heat from the stove puts a bit of colour in her pale face. Tears sizzle and disappear on the stovetop. She’d like to open the windows, but won’t for fear of disturbing the blinds. She tells Bernadette she’s all in with the heat.

  Lize looks to the table and sees Jack last week, and the week before, complaining of his own aches and pains, saying how he’s never going back to sea again. She wishes she’d encouraged him to stay, but she never encouraged him to do anything in their time together and wouldn’t know where to begin if she’d ever thought to. Instead, every time he opened his mouth, she drove him out of the house and to the shed on rainy days where she knew he was hove off in his cot or sitting up smoking his pipe. If she heard him singing, she knew someone was after giving him a drop and he was in his cups. She’d have a mind to go out to him, then. But she’d be too poisoned to look at him. She’d wait till he came in for that. But he was cute enough, always inviting some straggler into the house who would offer her a little nip. Soon enough the kitchen would be half-full and she’d be heaving the old Irish songs out of her, smiling away, with an arm linked into Jack’s. Those were the times they lived for, and they mostly seemed to come by accident. The fish and flakes and boats could go to hell, God forgive her.

  She’d give anything, if she had anything to give, to look out the side window now and see the outline of Jack’s big frame in the shed window. He wouldn’t be too pleased to see the window, smashed from something caught in the wind of Thursday’s storm. She shakes her head in disgust at herself for thinking about the broken window with poor Jack dead and gone. Somewhere out there beyond The Isaacs, his lifeless body is floating or tumbling in the same undercurrent he always spoke of whenever someone fell overboard and was never seen again.

  She sees him walking up the road, past the house, with Pad, and wonders what they were talking about that day last week, when he came home right willing to go back fishing. It was Gus, most likely, because Pad wasn’t laughing and carrying on. And besides, Jack hardly spoke about anything else. How come Jack never talked like that with her? A great sense of betrayal comes over her. Why could he talk about anything with his friends, but nothing with her? Perhaps he did try speaking his mind, but she was too tired and vexed and told him to mind his prate and don’t be so useless. She thinks of how good he was never to say a word back to her, and how she used to fight to keep in a little laugh when she’d see him going for his pipe and tobacco, and then feel bad the moment he was out the door.

  “Put the kettle on, Bern’dette,” she says, trying to get comfortable in her rocker.

  With a cup of tea in her trembling hands, Lize wanders around the house. Thirty-two years of marriage to Jack and, all of sudden, little pieces of their lives that had helped them get by stand out from every crack and corner. The sores she imagines covering her heart, and those festering deep in her soul, are picked open. Her strongest, worst memories play over and over in her thoughts: her sister and closest friend, Sarah, dying of TB at twenty; her mother dying of dropsy; her father’s fatal heart attack; little Lizzie dying in her arms; her daughters leaving home one by one, knowing they might never afford to come home again; poor Gus suffocating from the TB, coughing up the blood, and dying; and Jane’s beautiful baby boy, Gus, named for his uncle, dying the same horrible death with the cursed TB last year, and he just two. It all killed her.

  Now poor Jack.

  The cast iron shoe last behind the door to the porch is likely never to stir from its place again. Rust works its way through the hard bubbles of black oil paint and will eventually own it. She can hear Jack now, taking the Lord’s name in vain after banging his thumb with the hammer, holding tiny sprigs in place for the young ones’ worn taps and soles, and Bernadette’s winter boots that came in the barrel once the girls were settled away in New Bedford.

  A horse bridle hangs in the corner of the kitchen, stiff and dry from years of heat from the stove. Lize hardly remembers the time they had a horse and wonders why the bridle is still there, serving no purpose, and the little stable, with barely enough room for the poor animal to lie down, crumbled in rot not far from the shed.

  The weight scales in the porch remind her of Gus. Closing her eyes, she sees him, as a young boy, hears his lau
ghter and excitement after making a fine haul of cod tongues at Healy’s Wharf from the men cleaning their fish fresh from Golden Bay. He’d give some to old widows with no one left to get them a feed of tongues; the rest Lize rolled in flour, if they had it, and fried with a bit of animal fat in the cast iron pan. Jack’s mouth watered and Gus rocked proudly by the stove in his mother’s chair.

  Now, here, she is a widow herself and wondering if someone else’s young fellow will bother to ask her if she’d like a meal of tongues someday. And she with nothing to give him in return. She could give away the rusty scales. Perhaps the boy wouldn’t have a set of his own. But never mind. She’ll keep them where they are, on top of the barrel in the porch to keep the rats out of the flour.

  The nail in the wall behind the stove is empty. Its nakedness drives her mad. It was where Jack hung his other shirt, or the double-knit mitts she’d made him and they frozen stiff or soaking wet and heavy as lead after a day in the woods. She lays her cup of cold tea on the table and walks back to the nail, caressing it between her thumb and forefinger, and cries.

  On the stove is the flatiron Jack gave her the first year they were married, and she tries to imagine the number of times she’d dragged it in her tired hand over the pieced-together clothes of her family. The wooden-handled clamp belonged to the iron broke and is long gone, but she always manages to pick the iron up with a rag soaked in cold water, long enough to get the wrinkles out of her apron and Bernadette’s dress now soaking in black die in a bowl laid on one of the kitchen chairs.

  Poor Jack. The only man she’d ever kissed, and that so long ago. The only love she’s ever known. Gone away forever. No habit, no coffin, nor proper Christian burial. And no grave for her, Bernadette, Laura, and Angela to visit. Nothing. That good man, her man, her Jack, never to be home again, and she says quietly how it’s too much to take and what’s the point of being alive. What use is there going on without him?

  “They’re not comin’ home, now. Me poor heart is broke,” she cries to Bernadette, and Angela, her daughter sixteen years Bernadette’s senior, who lives up the lane, behind their house. “Yeer poor fadder’s gone now. What will we do? What will we do?”

  Bernadette stands against the sideboard, head down and bawling along with her mother and sister.

  “Thank God yer only up over the hill,” Lize cries to Angela, as the young mother leaves for home to feed her two girls. “An’ tell Frank thanks for the bit of wood he brought.”

  Angela’s not out the door five seconds when Lize starts again.

  “An’ poor Michael, he only seventeen,” she cries. “Oh, yeer poor auld father. ’Tis just as well now if we were with ’im.”

  Bernadette walks to the rocker and kneels, crying into her mother’s apron while Lize strokes her girl’s long brown hair.

  Bernadette sees only her father’s gentle eyes and the slight nod of his grey head under his black knitted cap. The way he looked when she saw him last, thanking her for the tea buns she brought before the Annie sailed away. She was sure she’d see him again soon, and now that he’s gone forever, she prays for that time back. She’d give him a hug.

  Bernadette hates going outdoors, where people ask questions and she doesn’t know what to say. She wishes to be like her mother, telling some people it’s none of their concern and stop foraging for news. It’s them ones who’ll add and add onto her empty answers and rush to the nearest house to tell it. Then there are the ones who ask no questions at all, only whisper and stare. What do you do with them?

  In her room upstairs, Bernadette sobs for Laura, who’ll soon be home on the long train ride from Grand Falls Station.

  The stench of sewer at low tide soon replaces the smell of fried salt fish cakes in the kitchen.

  Peeking through the drawn blind, out her front window, Lize is momentarily distracted by the big leaves of the September mists stretching to meet the evening sky turning grey with fog. And while she’s mad with God, she still gives thanks for little distractions like this—anything to keep her mind off the boat and crew. Jack.

  The sound of the ocean pushing and pulling beach rocks along distant shores enters the room. It momentarily calms the nerves of mother and daughter.

  When she picks up her mug from the flowery tablecloth, Lize’s hands shake. She feels Jack’s presence as the last drop of cold tea from her cup trickles past the lump in her throat. She tells Bernadette to bring her a cold cloth, as the lingering heat of the stovepipe gives her another hot flash. Dabbing her face and forehead with the damp cloth, Lize watches the grease trying to harden in the pan.

  Though weak with hunger, neither can stomach a mouthful, and the fish cakes go cold on the plates.

  The putt-putt of make-and-break engines grows louder and fades again. The remaining daylight sends men in two small boats out through the harbour for a look.

  “Men on their way back to look for yer father,” Lize mumbles, unaware Bernadette has left the kitchen.

  From the back door Lize sees Tojori coming in the harbour. The men stay just long enough to refuel and head out again. They’ve been doing that for the past four days.

  Voices calling out to Jim and Mike Healy echo across the water, asking if they’ve seen or heard anything of the Big Annie and her crew.

  When Tojori is out past the shoals, the harbour is quiet again except for the scattered smack of heavy wooden oars on the water.

  Lize grabs a few junks of wood from another pile her son-in-law has thrown by the porch door and goes back into the kitchen. She takes a sip from her new cup of tea and enjoys the strength of it in the hollow pit of her guts. Standing to the table rolling balls of dough for bread, she stops to find a clean spot on her apron and dabs her tears.

  Bernadette wonders why her mother’s making so much bread but won’t dare ask. She wishes she had something to distract them, instead of thinking about someone coming to the door to say they’ve found her father, drowned, and then Mrs. Mart Mullins having to come and wash the body and prepare it for the wake in the front room—the same way she did when Gus died. She feels her father’s big hand on her shoulder, as they both stare at Gus’s gaunt, grey face in the coffin. She has uncles here in Fox Harbour, good and funny, and they will keep her occupied for a while, but it won’t be the same, she knows, when it’s her daddy there in the coffin.

  The priest, Father Dee, has been making his rounds visiting the widows, and Bernadette can’t stand the thought of being in the front room when he comes, having to sit up proper, coffin or no.

  Peeping through the blinds of her room, Bernadette sees the clouds getting heavier. Soon raindrops will replace the whistles and conversations of robins and sparrows in her mother’s rose bushes below. She goes back down to the kitchen and pours hot water from the heavy cast iron kettle over the dirty dishes in the white enamel pan, partly rusted at its edges, and wonders why her mother doesn’t use the new one.

  A gust of wind races over the harbour and hits the front of the house, rattling the windows Jack would have soon secured against the fall winds. The draft coming through the closed window where the caulk has withered and peeled away stirs the closed blinds. The candle on the shelf Jack built above the sideboard flickers. The shadows on the walls and low ceiling do a little dance until the wind moves on and the wick’s flame settles down again.

  Lize stares at the black oil lantern hanging from a hook in one of the ceiling beams. The flame on the wide wick is blue and low. There’s little kerosene left, and she shakes her head, wishing she’d let Jack fill it up as he wanted to before he left. Go on, she told him, he’d be home soon enough and they’d scrape along with the little bit that’s left. Only stubs are left of the holy candles from Lent, and it turns her stomach to look across the harbour and see some homes with light in other rooms besides the kitchen, all flickering the one time. Big shots, she calls them, and tells Bernadette to blow out the
candle for the love of Jesus, it’ll be dark again tomorrow night, and that candle’s not an eternal flame. If there was a drop of oil in the house, she’d stay up longer, here in the kitchen, instead of up in the bedroom where it’s black as pitch unless the fog is out and the moon’s light off the water fills the room through the mirror in the dresser. Nights like that will be scarce, though, because everyone knows the fog is made in Placentia Bay and it seems to fancy Fox Harbour in particular.

  “No odds, anyhow,” she grumbles, “with the blinds closed.”

  Now that the last of the dough is kneaded and placed in pans to rise under a patched quilt of old clothes, Bernadette notices her mother looking more lost than ever.

  “Jack will be good an’ hungry when he comes home,” Lize whispers, like it will bring him back, then looks toward the door.

  Scuffing across the worn kitchen floor, she recalls the time, years ago, when Jack lugged the canvas home from a schooner wreck outside the harbour. And all the times they danced across this floor. She wonders if, one day, people will dance across the Annie Healy’s sails, having washed upon some not-too-distant shore, perhaps, and brought to someone’s house in the same fashion.

  Although Lize can’t resist peering through the drawn blinds for Jack’s return, she knows the worst is already upon them. She’s lived long enough to know life is nothing more than one pile of misery after another, and the rare lulls in between are what the priest and the Bible really mean by miracles. There’s a better chance of the Lord, Himself, walking in across the harbour than them ever laying eyes on Jack again. This is hell and heaven is yet to come, though the thought of Jack and Gus and little Lizzie together again brings some comfort.

  When Lize and Bernadette have to venture outdoors, the sun will offer little reprieve. It will only highlight the growing lines of despair on their faces worn out from bawling. And at night it’s too black, except for the brans people carry for fear of running into a wandering horse or sheep.