by Galore
John Tom White came to King-me with the opinion there was a widow’s hand to blame, that someone had set the old hag on the girl. John Tom was a walking aphorism with a rhyme for every ripple in the weather, a charm for any ailment. Seven knots in a piece of string worn on your wrist to cure toothache. A potato carried in a pocket to relieve rheumatism. “If the wind’s in the east on Candlemas Day, there it will stick till the end of May.” It was the queerest case he’d ever seen of someone hag-ridden, he said, coming on so sudden in the middle of the day, and there had to be a witch at the root of it. King-me turned his face away and nodded.
—You wants to set things straight, he said, you got to put a bottle up, Master Sellers.
King-me pissed into a glass bottle and he stuck nine virgin pins in the cork as John Tom instructed.
—That’ll block the witch’s water up, John Tom said and he hung the bottle in the fireplace to set the liquid to simmer. —She’ll come around now the once, he said, begging to be relieved of that.
But the bottle boiled mad and shattered over the flames and a second bottle burst the same. King-me was hesitant to repeat the procedure a third time. John Tom had him place the bottle away from the heat in a corner of the pantry where the liquid came to a boil regardless and King-me smashed the works on the flagstones of the fireplace.
John Tom stared at the mess, running a hand in circles over the bald pate of his head. —You know who it is we’re working against, Master Sellers?
—Never mind, King-me said.
—There’s one way to escape the sleep hag, John Tom said, has nothing to do with the witch. You hammers nails through a shingle and sleeps with it on your breast. When the old hag comes to pin you to your bed, he said, she squats down on the nails and the fright drives her off.
For the better part of a month Lizzie was forced to wear a board of nails hung round her neck all hours of the day and night. She thought of it as a leper’s bell, a physical manifestation of her humiliation, and she refused to be seen wearing it. Eventually Selina threw the contraption into the fireplace. But by then Lizzie had developed an outcast’s habits, disappearing in the nooks and crannies of the house, slipping into the woods above the Gaze or out as far as the French Cemetery, solitude her only relief from the affliction that had stolen her life.
Occasionally she went past the cemetery to Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Except for the African who’d built a tilt near the waterline and worked there as a tinker, the Pond was quiet, too far a walk to be useful for water or washing. Lizzie pushed through the skirt of alders on the shoreline opposite the black man’s property, wading the shallows to catch spanny-tickles in her palms. Ralph Stone never paid the slightest attention to her there and it became her favorite excursion when the weather was decent. She spent hours sitting out of sight across the Pond for the sensation of being completely alone and still enjoying the company of the man pottering across the water.
She knew almost nothing about Ralph Stone. Callum Devine and Daniel Woundy came upon a lifeboat in a bank of fog off the Rump, the black man adrift with a crew of corpses, half a dozen fellows dead of hunger and thirst after three weeks on open water without provision. He was like to have died himself, lips swollen and cracked and his eyes wild, refusing the food and water offered him and carrying on a conversation with his dead companions as the boat was towed into the Gut. On his back by the fireplace, he was fed broth through a cloth tit until he could stomach solid food. Devine’s Widow thought his skin burnt or scorched black by the sun and for several days she covered him in a Jerseyman salve of Sea Doctors crushed and mixed with cod-liver oil before trying to scrub him clean with ashes and soap. He stared up at her on the third day, enough in his mind by then to see what she was about. —It won’t wash, Missus, he whispered. His name was Ralph Stone, he told her, and were his mates all right, the ones in the boat with him?
No one ever learned where exactly the man belonged, only that he’d sailed the tall ships from his earliest years and had seen the world half a dozen times over. His vessel went down in a storm eleven days out of Portugal and the men in the lifeboat died before his eyes, one by one. For days he had only corpses for company, facing them from the bow while they stared at him like an expectant congregation. His friends. Their faces every hour growing more tortured, more accusing.
He lost his nerve for the ocean after the rescue, refusing to leave the shore and going so far as to build on a piece of land out of sight of the sea altogether. He depended on the charity of others for a time, subsisting on cods’ heads and potatoes and wild berries and pond trout. Within two years he was cobbling a living with the cod-oil lamps he built in a tiny workshed and peddled door to door. Half the houses on the shore were lit by the work of his hands and eventually King-me Sellers shipped the lamps for sale in shops from Bonavista to Harbour Grace to St. John’s.
There were some who thought his blackness a sign of defilement or witchery and turned their backs at the sight of him. But he was easy to laugh and had more stories of exotic locales than Father Phelan, which made him good company. He kept to himself out at the Pond where the few who counted him a friend could seek him out. He lived in a tilt so poorly constructed a permanent maze of cups and bowls were laid out to catch the rain that sieved through the roof. The single table and chair and his low bed built with board salvaged from the lifeboat that carried him ashore.
Lizzie never laid eyes on him before her excursions to the Pond. From across the water she couldn’t make out his face or any features besides the remarkable cast of his skin. If the wind was right she could hear him singing snatches of hymns or drinking songs. She felt herself completely invisible to him and she began sneaking closer to his property to test the illusion. Gold rings in the lobes of both ears, a pale scar on one temple where the tight curls of his hair no longer grew, a missing front tooth like an open doorway.
He was much smaller than her imagination made him out to be from a distance, and older besides. He did little more than tinker out of view in his shop or crawl around on the roof of the tilt to stop up the most insistent leaks, all the while repeating the same three lines of a song. —Some marry for riches, the proud haughty way, some marry for beauty, the flower will decay, but if e’er I get married. He stopped there, seeming not to know how or why he would marry, and skipped back to the head of the verse in an endless loop.
She’d all but decided to give up her game the day he left his workshed, shirtless and walking straight for the spruce bushes where she was hiding. A disgruntled look on his dark face. She jumped to her feet, stars pinging across her vision. He stopped at the trees then and took his cock from his pants to piss.
When she woke from the spell of sleep Lizzie was in his arms and being carted at a run down the slope of the Tolt Road into the Gut. He was slick with sweat, out of breath and whispering some disjointed story about his mother and father, as if trying to keep her entertained during the trip. The strange paralysis that followed in the wake of her sleep made it impossible to nod or call out or ask where she was being taken before he pushed through a door and laid her on a table in front of the widow woman. —She’s not dead is she, Missus? he asked. —Tell me she isn’t dead.
—What is it you got done to her?
—She was in the bushes up at the Pond, he said. —Didn’t know she was there before she hit the ground. Right at my feet she was, he said, what a fright she give me, Lord Jesus.
Devine’s Widow peered down into Lizzie’s motionless eyes. A crone’s features and something ancient about the woman’s face Lizzie didn’t recognize, a stillness that wasn’t calm or peaceful. The widow’s stare calling up a mix of fear and distaste that would never fully leave her.
Callum had seen Ralph Stone carry the girl into the house and he came up from the Rooms in time to see Lizzie sit up on the table, looking about herself like she was drunk. She insisted she was fine and refused all offers of help getting home but Callum escorted her over the Tolt Road regardless. He did her the favo
r of asking no questions about what she had done to give Ralph Stone the shakes. He walked a little ways behind her and he sang to himself as they went, though not in the distracted, fragmented fashion of the African. Most of his tunes were Irish but she had the distinct impression he knew them whole and carried each from start to finish. He stopped behind her when they were within sight of Selina’s House to let her carry on by herself and she felt immediately lonely without his voice for company. —I liked your play, Lizzie, he said to her as she went. —You made a fine Mary.
She had to force herself not to look behind.
—That angel of the Lord was some sook though, he said.
She didn’t see Callum again until Christmas when he came to Selina’s House in the wake of a group of mummers. The children weren’t allowed downstairs when mummers invaded the kitchen but she and the boys sat on the landing to listen to their songs and drunken foolishness. She saw him come in, unmasked, and he smiled up where she huddled in the gloom at the top of the stairs. He bowed slightly. —Mother Mary, he said. Not a hint of mockery in his voice. Selina chased the children to their rooms when she found them there but Lizzie could hear Callum sing through the floor. An English air about the love of a dark-haired maid she recognized from their first encounter, and even the drunken mummers fell silent in the presence of what felt like a private moment. He left as soon as the song ended and she crept back to the stairs to see him out. Callum bowing his head again on his way through the door, as if something had been sealed between them.
Lizzie was fourteen when King-me took the entire family to England for her coming-out. During the voyage Selina taught Lizzie the dances that were fashionable when she was a girl. She was outfitted with stays and pannier and open-robed skirts to wear over a pink quilted petticoat, a black silk bonnet with a porcelain brooch, and she was paraded at masquerades and dances and church services, at teas and dinners arranged for eligible young men to have a view of her. She had the tiny features of her mother and a mane of coal-black hair that fell half the length of her back, and there was plenty of interest in her company.
A private audience was requested by a sharp-nosed twenty-six-year-old and they were sent off in a carriage circling a public garden. He did his best to engage Lizzie in conversation about pheasant hunting and French décolletage, his accent and concerns so affected he seemed cartoonish. He made the Newfoundlanders who visited her father with their endless stories of giant squid and shipwrecks and bad drink seem worldly. It struck her suddenly that her father intended her to marry such a one as this fart-faced bore. The notion was so disturbing that a spell overtook her and she nodded off while he talked.
On two other occasions she fell asleep in the presence of suitors and she was stared at and whispered about in the same way she had been at home. Eventually she refused to leave her room altogether. King-me tried threatening her from the other side of the door but it was clear that she’d poisoned her chances at a match in the West Country, perhaps in the whole of England. He and Selina turned their attention to finding a suitable girl to take back to Newfoundland as a housekeeper, so as not to have wasted the trip entirely.
Selina paced the deck endlessly on the voyage home and if the wind was up Lizzie walked with her to keep the willow of a woman from being blown into the ocean. Selina was distracted and melancholy and seemed in no mood for conversation, which suited Lizzie fine. Virtue Clouter often took the air with Selina as well, though she walked several feet behind. A shy sixteen-year-old, she never looked at a person directly and only spoke when spoken to. Lizzie resented the new housekeeper’s shadowing them and said little to avoid being overheard. But she couldn’t disguise how happy she was to be free of the corsets and petticoats and still single.
—You seem awfully pleased with yourself, Selina said one afternoon.
—I’m happy to be going home.
Selina shook her head. They stopped near the stern of the vessel and stared out at the ship’s wake, the empty expanse of ocean between them and England. —Your father, Selina said, won’t ever allow it.
—Allow what? Lizzie asked. She glanced back at Virtue standing six feet behind them, her gaze carefully averted. And in that moment it was obvious to Lizzie her secret was no secret now, if it had ever been one.
Her mother reached up to take the porcelain brooch from Lizzie’s bonnet. —Mark my words, Selina told her. She weighed the brooch in her hand a moment. —There’s your Callum Devine, she said, and tossed it over the rail. —You say your goodbyes now or your heart won’t ever be your own.
Lizzie glanced back at the servant a second time but Virtue had turned away.
Virtue Clouter was the only servant in King-me’s employ who lived in Selina’s House, sleeping in a new room built off the kitchen with its own door facing the outbuildings so she could collect the morning’s eggs and carry in firewood. She was inconspicuously competent in her work. She was modestly pretty and her prettiness went unnoticed by all but the most familiar. Harry and George both announced their childish intentions to marry Virtue, and Selina came to depend on her in all household matters. But there’d been no talk of hiring a housekeeper before Lizzie locked herself away in her room in Poole and the timing made Virtue suspect.
In the first weeks after their return Virtue sometimes followed Lizzie when she left the house on her wanders, keeping a discreet distance behind just as she’d tracked behind Selina aboard the vessel. It was a clumsy attempt at spying but Lizzie refused to give her the satisfaction of a confrontation, leading her a chase over half the shore, across rattling brooks that soaked their feet, through the thickest tuckamore on the hills.
Eventually Virtue relented and Lizzie was left to her own devices, though the simple fact was she had nothing to hide. No clandestine meetings in the spruce above the Gaze, no secret trysts on a bed of moss out by Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Lizzie was forced to make do with the barest glimpses of Callum sculling in off the fishing grounds with Daniel Woundy or carting a sack of flour from King-me’s store down to the harbor. It was her father’s meddling that kept Callum at a distance, she was certain, the threat of losing credit with Spurriers which would drive him off the shore altogether. He offered his modest bow if they crossed paths but not so much as a word passed between them.
Months went by in this fashion and years on top of those. Her only reassurance came in rare encounters with Father Phelan, who offered the details of Callum’s recent confessions. —Still lusting after a young girl he can’t have, the priest told her. —Tormented, he is. The places he imagines kissing the child, it would make the Devil blush.
—But not yourself, Father.
—The Lord gives me strength, he said.
She spent her life in a state of unrelieved anticipation that made her flighty and unreliable and increasingly reclusive. Her family treated her as a kind of retarded child they expected would carry on in the same perpetual half-life. She roamed as she wished and reported to no one and grew wild in her habits, spending days at a time alone with the plague of yellow nippers and blackflies in the woods, snaring rabbits in the backcountry or fishing for trout at Nigger Ralph’s Pond.
When King-me’s eldest boy turned eighteen, the family planned a return to England to find him a wife. King-me was afraid Lizzie’s strangeness would ruin Harry’s chances and was relieved when she showed no interest in going. She was left behind with Virtue for company and John Tom White assigned the task of watching out for them.
The two women barely acknowledged one another, even as the winter closed them inside. Virtue attended to the needs of the household and cooked the meals and retired to her own room early each evening. John Tom talked about Virtue regularly while they ate, sitting back in his chair with both hands on his belly, as if he were the patriarch of the house. —That’s a good woman going to waste is what that is, he said. —She twenty-three now and so many unattached men in the harbor. John Tom seemed unaware he might be implying the same about Lizzie across the table.
; In November, John Tom began bringing a fellow from Harbour Grace along for supper, a single man spending his first winter in Paradise Deep. John Tom introduced him to Virtue and sat back then as if a match had been made. The man appeared to assume as much as well, arriving on Sundays to sit with Virtue in the kitchen while she worked dumbly at the fingers in her lap. He talked of wedding dates and children and cutting lumber for a house in the droke at the base of the Tolt Road. Virtue refilled his tea without offering a word. She assumed she’d said or done something to encourage the man’s assumption but could not for the life of her think what it was.
John Tom White was delighted with the arrangement. —You won’t find no better man the length and breadth of the country, he told Virtue. —A horse of a man you got there.
He let it be known far and wide the two were engaged and Virtue could only nod helplessly when visitors called at the house to congratulate her and wish her well. She went at her work with a furious energy, scouring the walls and floors and windows, cauldrons of water at a full boil to scour bedsheets and curtains and their clothes, as if all the activity would free her of the obligation she’d somehow contracted.
On Boxing Day, John Tom White organized a dance in one of King-me’s stores. He convinced Daniel Woundy and Jabez Trim to play together and word of the entertainment made its way to every household on the shore. Lizzie had no interest in attending but Virtue was in a torment about facing her fiancé in public and begged for her company. —Perhaps your man Callum will be there, she said.
It was a sly tactic that Lizzie couldn’t help admiring. She said, Who was it asked you to spy on me, Virtue?
—Spy, ma’am?
—When you first came out here. Following me when I left the house.
Virtue looked at her feet. —I didn’t know a soul here is all. I thought maybe … But she stopped there and backed out the door. —I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, she said.