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Authors: Kenneth J. Harvey

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BOOK: Blackstrap Hawco
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Dear Mom:

There is a woman here afflicted by such poverty that she wheels a cart around town picking up bits of coal that have fallen from the coal delivery trucks. Her name is Sadie and I see her every day as though this is the only thing she was made for; my eyes to see.

There is a man who shovels coal for Missus Neary, a man named Jimmy who is so sorry and humble you could do nothing other than love him like a brother, for he is broken-down and in need of affection. He reminds me of Isaac Tuttle. Missus Neary
gives him two dollars and a mug of pot liquor for his labours. Done with his mug, Jimmy nods and nods, backing toward the door, where he steps out into the night and returns to his ten children and the memory of his wife dead from cancer, and sits up all night staring into his own head and the damage he has fixed on. Loneliness. Yet he loves his children more than anything that might deter him from living. They are the only things that, once thought of, make him smile perfectly.

There is a man where you order coal, over on Compressor Hill, who has a hole where his nose once was and two narrow lidless slits for eyes. To blink he must scrunch up his face so the underside of his skin cleans his eyes. When his hand slides forward to accept your money, you see that there are only flesh-true stumps for fingers. His lips appear hard, and next to the opening where his nose once was there is a twisted clump of skin where the fit and educated physicians worked with their tools to give him some sort of nose. A nose that is as monstrous as any damage that could have been exacted. I do not know his name. It is only the face I remember.

You'll be glad to know that in my room, there is a font of holy water hanging from the wall,

 

junior stopped writing to glance at the font, then his eyes returned to the letter, the words, his handwriting, ink from his brain, he crumpled it all into a ball and tossed it toward the shut panelled door, began another letter:

 

dear mom:

how are you, i am fine.

 

invention, make believe, he laughed and wiped at his lips, he had overdone the laugh, not intended, he rose from the bed and retrieved the crumpled letter, deciding he might send it along after all, smoothing out the wrinkles, gently lifting the paper in both hands and bringing it to his eyes, studying the texture, its porous nature, he thought of trees, of being deceived, told himself that he must flee bell isle after his next pay
cheque, number three mine shutting down soon, for two weeks, number four shut down for good back in january, he will return only for another month or so, one of the fortunate one thousand miners retained by dosco, while six hundred and twelve others got the axe, including norman, the canadian, gone now, junior would return at the end of july, work enough time to save money for a trip to toronto or boston, he reasoned with himself, this was not running away, it was, in fact, a necessity, to travel afar in search of men more like himself, not belonging here, an instinct, better dope on the mainland, too, he smiled, then thought of his father, his younger brother, blackstrap, the rock, younger but already as big as him, blackstrap would never leave, not his father and brother, they would never leave, not newfoundland, not the rugged island afloat in the atlantic and battered ceaselessly, never ever leave, because they thought they belonged, that sentiment was them, survivors of ill weather and economic woe, they were made of that, built from it, and like the people at dick's they would fight each other to prove it, to crack the face of ill weather and economic woe, but where were they from really, all of them, england, ireland, why did they think they belonged in a place that they settled for, left one place and came to another, to hold on to that new place with pride and vigour, not where they were from, really, and his mother, she did not belong there, why, why did she remain, junior fell back against his bed, his thoughts exhausting, he raised the camera above him in both hands, aimed it at his face, how in-focus was he, he had no idea, stared into the lens, his faint, curved reflection, pressed the shutter button regardless, sat up again, laid down the camera, too aware of his actions now, too, too aware, lifted the jay between his lips, fell back again, flicked the match to light it, sat up, fell back again, he wondered about the fire outside and shab reardon who lived on the green, his mind returning to shab, drawn there like an animal, the fire burning, here and there, he puffed:

 

gertie ryan knew it would prove futile to try and move, a few moments beyond the thrusting, pounding point, when she felt she could not draw another breath into her pneumonia-scarred lungs, shab reardon rolled off, to the side, dead asleep and snoring instantly,
gertie was cold now and wheezing, naked with shab's semen trickling chillingly along her backside, she crawled over him and set her twisted feet on the floor, wiped herself with the back of her skirt and stood, hobbled toward the doorway where two children stood, silently, watching her,

‘gwan ta bed outtuv it,' she said, her raspy throat scratchier now with thirst, the boy and girl hesitated, expressionless, remained where they were, only turning slightly to watch their mother sway unsteadily into the kitchen, their eyes pristinely dim with shadows, moving on legs bent by a childhood scrape with polio, she disappeared into the doorway so that the children could not see what their mother was doing, the doorway at the wrong angle and they could not see in, they heard the clink of a glass from the kitchen, a curse, then swallowing and a begrudgingly satisfied grunt, a moment later, they heard the front door open, two men talking and laughing noisily as they stomped in, the children stayed where they were, hungry, no food in the house, the older of the two, the girl, looking down at the boy, listening for his thoughts, gertie laughed a wheeze for the men, she argued over liquor and payment,

‘geev't first,' she said, her voice strained, shoving at something, a man laughed and there was the sound of grabbing, the sound of stumbling and dishes rattling, a pause as coins mutely clinked off each other then were slapped down on the counter, ‘now den,' said one of the men, the sounds of different faster laughter from deep in the throat,

‘i wants me turn,' a man's high-pitched voice, ‘hurry up, b'y da fuh'k, jeeze i'm gunna bust wid you hoggin' dat cunny,'

‘sum fak'n loose,' said a huskier, snorting voice, ‘drive a truck up dere wid a scoop on da front,' the sound of a wooden box, an empty dynamite crate from the mines, kicked across the kitchen, metal legs creaking and scraping, jolting and jolting, along the floor, the sound of playful rhythm, tittering and movement that attracted the children who shuffled away from the bedroom, first peeking a look at each other, then peeking a look in at where shab reardon snored and barked threats from his sleep, toward the light that spilt from the kitchen, the children leaned there in the doorway, their mother's naked legs, feet on the floor, their mother bent over the kitchen
table, their mother's arms lifting a bottle to their mother's mouth, the men with their overalls covered in red dust, down around their ankles, their hands and faces red with iron ore, their bodies white as flour, pale, untouched, winking over at the boy and girl as they took turns for fifty cents, the huskier one watching the girl more closely, while he worked away at the mother, his head filling with ideas that his pay could easily make real, the girl frowning, knowing too soon, but stunned by this, the boy's eyes reflecting, the huskier man pulled out and turned toward the girl, the other man stepped near the girl, his grimy hand out to the girl, his face smiling up close to the girl, his breath on the girl, ‘giv's a smile, me duckie,' their mother's arm lifting the bottle, their mother's mouth laughing outloud, laughing ha-ha to forget,

Uncle Ace Hawco, my great-great-great-uncle, was revered in Bareneed. Not only had he been on the same sealing expedition that supposedly claimed his brother at the age of twenty-six, but he was said to have suffered a miserable death on the ice and come back to life. Throughout his years, after returning to Bareneed, most had no idea if he was living or dead. Not a morsel of bread or a drop of water passed between his lips. His sister-in-law, Catherine, claimed that what had returned to Bareneed was, in fact, the bare remnants of Uncle Ace, nothing other than a spirit lost even to itself.

1926
I

St. John's, Newfoundland

Bloody decks
Blackstrap's Great-Uncle Ace sails for the seal slaughter

A crowd, hailing from every large and small settlement around the island, poured into St. John's in early March to see the sealing boats off at the harbour. The sight of such jubilant crowds, men in brim hats and long, woollen overcoats or in ragged caps and threadbare suit jackets, women from lowly and refined walks of life, energetic boys with dogs and shy girls in their pretty coats, swarming on the dock always confounded Ace Hawco. He saw no cause for celebration, no true reward in strength in numbers nor in the whiff of coming slaughter. It was less of a victor's sport and more of an abomination. There was a perfect dreadfulness to all of it, a terribly oppressive sense of desperation that forced him to draw deep breaths for fear of losing his breath entirely and vanishing in a smothering rain of bloody black. The slaughter on the ice loomed large in his head. The bone-splintering clubbing and brisk whisper of the slicing.
The men surrounding him were not men at all, but beasts set upon beasts. Slit-eyed and deformed by savagery. And he was nothing if not one of them.

To most, the boisterous clamour of genuine well-wishers, be it however unseemly to Ace, was a welcome-enough beginning to a voyage soon to be filled with vigorous labour and countless hardships. Hundreds of men, with their family members and friends, travelled in from the outports, arriving by train, horse-drawn sleigh or dog team, or on foot, walking for fifty or a hundred miles through the cruel bite of March air, to seek out a berth aboard one of the sealing vessels. The others were on hand to wish their loved ones a prosperous and safe hunt, a struggle with life and death itself that would, in the end – if the coin toss landed life-side-up – see each man earning ten or twenty dollars for their troubles. Yet it was not purely for the money that they descended upon St. John's in such numbers. It was for the adventure of the voyage, linking their minds and hearts through generations, and permitting the young – through slaughter – to amass the age-defining stories, until they were able to give recital. The hunt was not merely for seals, but for a victory to be won from the daring challenge to their sister ships of the fleet. Who might return with the greatest number of pelts in their hold and claim the title: Highliner of the Season.

A deep-voiced group of sealers sang songs from the decks, and waved their hats, others climbed up into the ratlines and swept their arms through the air, while yet others, like Ace, remained coldly silent, thinking ahead to the freezing, perilous journey, the leaping from pan to pan of brilliant ice far up north to club the young whitecoats that lay still, crying like babies and spilling tears while their soft skulls were bashed open and their hides sculped clear of their carcasses.

The crews of the three sealing vessels tied up at the dock, the
Ranger
,
Eagle
and
Terra Nova
, hollered as the
Terra Nova
's lines were tossed off and the vessel commenced drifting. Horns from the
Eagle
and
Ranger
bellowed in good-luck exclamation. And the crews, numbering near one hundred and eighty aboard each vessel, stood on freezing decks in their shirtsleeves or threadbare sweaters, jackets and caps, and roared and cheered, ‘Ta da fat.'

In response, the onshore well-wishers, crowded together in high spirits, called out, over and over: ‘Bloody decks!'

As the weighty hull of the
Terra Nova
floated away from the dock, Uncle Ace located his sister-in-law, Catherine Hawco, and his nephew, Jacob, in the crowd. The five-year-old boy, up in his mother's arms, was waving vigorously and with devotion. The boy smiling. The sight of them poured sickness into Uncle Ace's heart. The boy who had no memory of how his father, Francis, had sailed out on a similar voyage, four springs ago, to be lost on the ice when a storm blustered over the men, grey in the distance, at first, and then nothing but grey and whiteness like a blinding living thing hissing in from all points on the compass at once. White beneath the men's feet, white above their heads and before their faces, white to all sides. The ferocious, merciless gale battering them for two full days without cease, obliterating the existence of anything with definition, even their own bodies gradually turning white. Nothing but snow for fifty miles, north, south, east and west, and the men in the midst of it all, wandering blindly in circles, for there was no centre, no point of reference, the ship not far from them, trapped in the ice and waiting out the storm. The captain knowing that there was nothing to do but sit tight. In the vast cloud of snow, as large and desolate as an unoccupied country, his ship was a miniature of tiny wooden sticks, his men a gathering of dots regrettably built from human bones. All white and frozen atop an eternity of water that moved freely beneath ice.

Days later, what was thought to be Francis' body was discovered frozen, a mere hundred feet from the ship, clutching hold of one of his nephews, young Nathan Hawco. Flesh made into opaque glass. Both bodies bonded together by cold and death and love, and carried to the steamer by three living men where the solid mass was hauled up over the side by winch, loaded like a statue to be transported yet never erected. Buried, instead, in the sheltering earth. Other crew members were discovered living in a state of such torment that they were obliged to have limbs removed and discarded in the track of their broken sanity. Others were never found, their bodies slabs of eternal white, floating off in eerie exile, to be walked upon by arctic fox or polar bear, or, perhaps, in time, to be chewed warm again.

The frozen bodies had been unloaded on the docks in St. John's
where women screeched and bawled to see their sons and husbands returned to them in such a hideous state of mortality. Living sons and daughters huddled near, straining to recognize a fatherly face, but recognizing nothing of the sort, only a man's misshapen features, expressions unseen in the daily routine of a warm house, a man's twisted body, bones dislodged by the fluid's freezing mass, a man's frozen, unseeing eyes reflecting theirs only.

Uncle Ace had helped load the bodies onto carriages that were directed, through the sunny streets, to the King Edward Hospital. Once there and unloaded, the frozen carcasses were immersed in bathtubs filled with steaming water. Only then, when thawed, did the remains become familiar to the living, re-form into figures resembling the merely dead. With each thawed body, the air in the hospital grew colder to the point where all present could witness their breath hanging before them in clouds, as though the souls of the unfortunates, now unsealed from their veils of ice, were wafting from the floating bodies in trails of cold vapour. Uncle Ace had been expected to visit the hospital in order to identify his brother, Francis, one of the chunks of frozen white that he had unloaded from the ship, now laid out, the body warmed, yet remaining crooked in a pose of anguish and tremulous fear, the harrowing expression on its face as unmovable as fifty-foot-thick ice. There lay what was thought to be his brother, but not his brother, only a kindred death mirrored in sentiment. It was himself if anyone at all. His twin. An omen of sorts before the body took on yet other features, unrecognizable as any living man, yet assumed to be the one in need of claiming. Bright blue opened eyes and blonde hair with traces of grey where there had never been. A man much like the two of them, yet not. While others claimed the body to belong to Francis Hawco, Ace wondered where his brother might be now? Liberated from this profound closeness to self.

Francis' boy, Jacob, was barely one year old when he lost his father, and Uncle Ace was quick to lend his sister-in-law, Catherine, a hand, to help out in whatever way possible, and, in so doing, spending such time in his brother's place and marvelling over the pallor of the grieving woman, had become much like the boy's father, the only father Jacob had ever known.

As the
Terra Nova
drifted further from the dock, Uncle Ace considered shouting out one of the customary farewells to Catherine
and Jacob: ‘Keep a watch out fer me spirit.' But he could not summon the nerve nor the will to hurl the words from his body. Instead, he simply stared moodily as the shore slipped away, as the tremulous, unbalanced water opened up between him and sure footing. At first, he hummed under his breath, then whispered a farewell dirge:

 

Down came 'is old-aged fadder

A-wiping off 'is eyes,

'N cried out broken-'earted,

‘Where did ye leave me child?'

 

'E cried out broken-'earted,

‘Where did ye leave me child?

Fer 'is tender mudder I be sure

Will screech and now run wild.'

 

Oh dun't lament, ye parents,

Da losing o' yer son,

A proper prayer be offered up

Fer 'im dat now be gone.

 

Likewise men 'n cabin b'ys,

Men, women, 'n each child,

A proper prayer fer Uncle Ace,

May 'e rest in peace a'while.

BOOK: Blackstrap Hawco
11.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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