Blackstrap Hawco (11 page)

 

II

Liverpool, England

The single bullet
Blackstrap's grandmother, Amanda, learns of their imminent departure from Liverpool

Alan Duncan glanced up from his newspaper to see his wife Amanda lounging in her favourite wingback chair, reading the copy of O. Henry's
Heart of the West
she had purchased at that cluttered shop on Bold Street, and had been dipping into for days now. Her expression exhibited concern for the characters that lived for her on the pages.
Lost in her book
, Alan told himself.
She has absolutely no idea of the mess we're in. Silly woman with her inane preoccupations.
It was only a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before they must flee, his heart twinging at the thought of poor little Emily and what might become of her. He had attempted to set things right, to pay the price, but his finances had been drained by the blackmailers and money was of little concern to these people in the higher echelons. For them, there were other aphrodisiacs more potent than pounds.

Amanda and Emily would be better off without him. After all, he had brought it upon them, hadn't he, his association with this league of fine gentlemen. No,
he
would be better off without
them
. Why a family anyway? Why the claustrophobia of that sort of life? But then who would look after Emily? It was anything but her fault. He regretted deeply the idea of leaving his belongings behind. This sense of impending loss commanded an intense appreciation of all that surrounded him. He studied the bookcases neatly set into two walls, the hard-edged sheen of crafted mahogany and – upright on the shelves – the dark leather-bound historical volumes and gilt-edged collections of verse. His
eyes took in the polished mahogany furniture, the regal portrait of his mother and father. Two as one, their stern, gloomy stare filled with an admonishing ponderance that seemed to prophesy his ultimate failure. Under such a weighty, collective gaze, how could their only son be anything other than what he was?
Be prepared
, their eyes seemed to chastise.
You will fail because all of this came easily to you. You lack the common sense of a self-made man.

Miffed, Alan's glance turned quicker. It skimmed over the fine rugs, the scarlet tapestry-upholstered divan. He rattled the paper without knowing. Even the house itself would be confiscated or burned to the ground, hopefully not with them in it.

The sharp-sounding horn of a Rover Nine beyond the window drew Amanda's eyes from her book. She glanced briefly to the lace curtains with a grace that affected Alan in the saddest manner. She was a lady, after all, with a pedigree from the finest merchant stock (this she never mentioned, of course, she wasn't that sort, yet it was always implied), and what was he? The car horn had commanded Alan to his feet and set off a sharp cramp in his stomach where he laid his fingertips. Thinking of the Milk of Magnesia in the bathroom cabinet, he feared that downing the entire bottle would offer not the slightest modicum of relief.

Amanda's eyes followed him as he crossed the room. At the window, he cautiously lifted back the edge of the drapes to peek out. No glint of a sinister car parked on the street. Alan regarded his wife. She had returned to her book. He had not told her yet of the disgrace, or even harm, that might be brought upon his family. There was only distance between them, a wall of tension he had been consciously building to make the hardship of telling – if need be – less painful.

Through the soft light from the dimmed, teardrop chandelier overhead, Amanda looked at him, smiling vaguely, yet not without concern. A blessed beauty, she was.

‘How is your book?' he asked.

‘O. Henry must be quite a man.' She admired the book cover in her lap, then laid it on the ornate-edged side table. ‘So touching.' Studying the floral spray cup and saucer resting beside the book, she decided that the tea must be cold by now and so shifted her attention toward her husband, noticing the peculiar expression on his face, the manner with
which he was regarding her, in an almost sickly fashion, as though the mere sight of her was slowly turning him.

‘Is something the matter?' she asked, having sensed, over the past few weeks – by the late visitors and the frequent extended telephone calls – that something was not quite right with Alan's business affairs.

‘No, nothing,' he assured her, returning to his chair, to sit and raise the newspaper to conceal his face. He folded over the page of the broadsheet, holding it up higher. Not a peek at her. A sheet of blurred words that could tell him nothing. His eyes would not focus. Instead, he ruminated on ways of laying out the truth. When? It must be now. Now or never. Rustling the newspaper, he lowered it and was bothered to see that his wife was leaving the room.

‘Where are you going?' he demanded, as though his wife might be attempting to elude his sudden push for courage.

Amanda turned slowly from the door, cup and saucer neatly balanced in hand, and smartly looked at him. ‘And who do you think you're addressing?'

‘Why don't you let one of the servants remove that?' He nodded toward her burden of cup and saucer.

‘I have no problem with it,' she said, her face hardened by his words.

‘Take advantage of them now. You might not have them forever.' He felt compelled to look away from the baldness of this revelation.

Amanda was watching him, still in silence, an exhausted sense of anticipation making her believe that anything he had to say could not possibly be as awful as the tension fastened between them for the past month. She longed for a spell of relief. Why wouldn't he, why couldn't he simply say what was troubling him?

‘I have to leave here,' he revealed, ‘very soon.'

‘Oh, Alan,' she exhaled, sunkenly disappointed, shaking her slight, ebony-haired head. ‘What have you done this time?'

‘Not one wrong thing, I assure you. I am not the problem.'

‘Then how many wrong things?'

Alan laughed with a bitterness that seemed to scar his lungs. ‘Wonderful you can hold to your sense of humour.'

‘What must we do without now?' Returning from the door, she reset the cup and saucer on the table and patiently stood beside her chair.

‘It is not simply a question of what we will have to do without.'

‘What do you mean?' Worriedly, she touched the armrest of the divan, then slowly sat down on the very edge of it.

‘I just told you, I'll have to leave here.'

‘You've said that before.' Amanda cast her eyes at the rug, then raised them to stare at her husband with a new look, one that implied how truly saddened she was by her ill fortune of ever having set eyes on him. This weak man. This spineless failure. If it were not for Emily, she would have left ages ago.

‘Where will you go?' she asked, thinking,
Fleeing, running away, like a criminal
.

‘I haven't decided exactly.'

‘Then where do you
think
you are going? And what about us?'

‘A place called Newfoundland.'

‘Oh, dear God.' She took a breath as though the wind had been knocked out of her, her hand coming up to clutch the low arm of the divan as she sank back. There had been a recent article in the
Liverpool Echo
written by Lord Beaver who had vividly documented the hardships of life in Newfoundland, the pitiful squalor and rampant disease that were pervasive throughout that colonial outpost. A moment later, after collecting her wits, she managed, ‘Is it that bad, you have to go so far?'

‘It's probably best…if you come as well.' Alan shamefully kept his eyes fixed on his paper, then challenged her with a stare, his trim handsome face the product of generations of particular British breeding. A softness in his features, as though an essential element had not only been neglected to be bred into him, but – rather – had been bred out.

‘Us.'

‘They could arrest me,' he told her.

Amanda held her tongue, retreated into silence for a count of moments, then sighed a whisper, ‘Poor, poor Emily.'

‘Stop with that nonsense,' Alan snapped. ‘This will be for Emily's sake. Don't you think I feel bad enough?'

‘Oh, yes, you must feel terrible. Poor darling.'

Alan glared at her, a ruckus of thoughts noisily batting around in his head. He did not deserve this. He shouldn't stand for it. Not from her. Not from his own wife.

‘You never learn, do you. You just never learn.'

‘Learn what?'

At a loss for words, she stood and strode for the door, needing to see Emily, wanting to hold her because the holding of her husband would impart nothing. He was as insubstantial as a ghost. She would simply slip through him.

‘I have to leave in a matter of days,' he said, quietly.

‘I?'

‘Yes.' He knew that they were meant to come too. After all, this was about Emily; she was the one who required protection, but he felt it best to start out with the idea of him leaving. That would be less of a blow.

‘And what becomes of us? You said that we should go as well. Just then. What have you done?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Enough to see us in danger?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘You're lying. It's you. Always you and your nonsense. Whatever nonsense you've wrapped yourself up in.'

Outraged, Alan watched his wife, not knowing how to reply, then deciding to get it done with. ‘Only a few ship's trunks each.'

‘You knew this all along. I can see that.' Amanda made a noise of suppressed rage, as though she were grappling with the urge to murder him with her bare hands, and stomped from the room. She rushed as best she could, the skirt of her jade crêpe smock limiting her stride, out into the small front foyer, her heels clipping along the veined marble, moving up the carpeted stairs and across the long portrait-and-landscape-hung hallway toward Emily's room. The door was shut. Inside, the air remained comfortable from the embers lingering in the fireplace. Amanda moved to the sleigh bed and looked down on the sleeping seven-year-old, her black hair spread out against the pillow, a God-given innocence beaming from her face in the moonlight through the window.

Amanda had no greater need than to hold her, to hug her daughter tightly, but that would wake the child, perhaps startle her. It would amount to little more than a selfish act. And so Amanda remained standing, stilled by thought. She glanced toward the heavy drawn
curtains that were open a crack and wondered of the voyage across the Atlantic. A new land. A backward place inhabited by drunken Irishmen. She could not help but cry, stifling her sudden sobs. She stopped herself and regained composure, bracing herself with the thought:
One of us must be strong, if only for you, sweetheart.

Taking one last aching look at her daughter, Amanda saw that the quilts were without need of straightening and so kissed Emily lightly on the cheek and turned away to see the dark impression of Alan stood in the doorway, the newspaper hanging from his left hand, his right hand holding something fitted into his mouth.

There was a moment of silence that Alan held, as if clamped between his teeth like the hardness of steel, before his finger nudged, pulling the trigger. There came the clicking sound of the pin striking an empty chamber. With theatrical sadness, he slipped the short barrel from his mouth and cast his eyes away, toward the deep red and grey hallway runner.

‘If this would make you happier,' he said.

Pathetic,
Amanda thought, aware that Alan did not own bullets, wishing for an arm steady and wilful enough to punch him in the mouth. She hastened from the room, elbowing Alan out of her way, while she carefully shut Emily's door, then quietly moved toward one of the guest rooms, where she crossed the threshold and locked the panelled door. Another clicking sound, seemingly characterizing a similar emptiness that now lingered throughout the house.

Alan stood before his daughter's shut door, studying the panels, the dark varnished wood. He thought of the servants in the lower back rooms and the mess they would have been obligated to clean up should the revolver have fired the single bullet he had spun in its chamber. A servant's last chore in his employ, to scrub bits of his brain from the walls of his father's house. A fitting final duty.

 

III

Off Cape Bonavista, the Atlantic Ocean

Brilliant sparklings of red in the sun
Uncle Ace loses his mind

The ship creaked in the black ocean darkness, heading NNW. The harsh scraping sounds of ice prying against the iron-sheathed bow trembled through the bunk Uncle Ace lay awake in. Beneath him, the boat shuddered to the thunderous splitting of ice, as lines of cracks sprouted and zig-zagged off over the moonlit, silvery ice fields like veins reaching out for miles into the magnificently treacherous unknowable.

The men to all sides of Uncle Ace in the black hole snored within their wooden bunks, many of them having consumed a near lethal amount of rum on shore, enough to blot out the first night's journey. A few men stayed up into the wee hours, sitting awake at the table, talking, laughing, smoking and spitting, the shadows grotesquely shifting on their faces as the overhead lantern listlessly inclined back and forth.

Other men lay in their bunks, breath misting from their mouths, eyes glistening in the faint light, each one of them a clear distance from sleep, their minds blanched awake by imaginings of the icefields spreading out into darkness, praying for a bounty of seals that would crown them the most profitable ship, needing the money for the bare necessities, yet always clinging to the hope for a pittance more than the merchants were ever willing to let slip from their coffers.

Uncle Ace's young bunkmate, Billy Gilbert from Buchans, lay still behind him, the heat of the young fellow's body flush against his back. The boy was sleeping, his breath even and untroubled. No worries in
the golden glow, the easy infallibility of youth. With both men crammed in the narrow bunk, it was only the wooden lip that prevented Uncle Ace from tumbling out onto the coal-strewn, slush-muddy floor.

Directly across from Uncle Ace, there was movement in the empty bunk previously claimed by two men from Port de Grave still gathered at the table. Something had shifted beneath the grey greasy quilt, nudged the wrinkles and creases. In time, the shifting travelled the length of the covering, then ceased as the weighty vermin crawled free and slunk onto the floor.

Uncle Ace pondered death. He faced, as often was the case, his own death, ruminated on climbing the ladder from the black hole and stepping onto the snowy deck where he might throw himself overboard, his body crashing through ice and into the mute, suffocating embrace of black water. It would not be wet. It would not be cold. It would be peacefully pleasant, and he would be gone. In his fishing dory in the summer, his thoughts often pulled him that way, his eyes fixed on the surface of the magnetic sea. With its deeply gaping enormity, it instilled in him a feeling that his presence upon it made him less and less, reducing him to nothing. The immeasurable weight and breadth of the watery sea cancelled his birth, withdrew his eyes and, in so doing, made him absolutely invisible to himself.

Despite the cold, he began to sweat and his heart sped. The tingling that never failed to work deeper and broader, like the waking of some thing sleeping, poured its ugliness through him so that he feared he was being driven out of his own body and mind by a barely containable and uncustomarily savage form of derangement. He threw his legs over the edge of the bunk, sat up, then, in a fit of unrest, stood. A few faces turned from over toward the table. Men Uncle Ace did not recognize. They watched with dull, dumb interest, barely interest at all, more of the nothing that he felt himself becoming. One man crouched near the useless stove fire, a slice of bread toasting on the point of his knife. The man coughed from the smoke. The boat timbers groaned steadily. Overhead, the lantern swung. Shadows shifted and stretched, then inclined the other way, smearing the contours of the men's faces that returned to their stories, to their cigarettes, to their chawing and spitting, to their dim, masking laughter that shielded them from every blow the world would or could deliver.

Uncle Ace stood there, his eyes unfocused. As though to reel himself in, he thought of home, of his garden back in Bareneed. He imagined green grass. Meadows. The calm ocean that appeared less malevolent beneath a sunny sky. He imagined tilting his face back and having the sun warm him. Clouds sweeping in. The chill. The greyness. The death of all things living. Weeds to crowd out the healthy. The endless plucking. The crows pecking at what came up. His garden would need planting when he returned, and the roof of his own house required patching, a leak in the upstairs bedroom, the room that was once his mother's and father's, another leak in the room where he and Francis and their twin sisters, who had perished at the age of seven, had slept in a narrow bed. Water dripping into his parents' house. Weeds sprouting. No one living in that house now, not since the death of his own wife, Alice, and their son, Peter. Tuberculosis. Coughing and coughing and wilting smaller. Weeds. Yet he kept up the maintenance whenever his meagre earnings allowed. A struggle to deal with it, to shift his despairing bones in gestures of simple action, keeping his parents' house in good repair for his nephew, Jacob, who might need it in the years to come. Hope against hope. A wife and a family for him. Children that might expire horribly as Uncle Ace had seen his sisters do. Weeds plucked out so that the garden might grow. Brothers and sisters from families throughout Bareneed wasting away from unknown maladies, nothing to do to prevent it, to stop the end of the little ones. Disease and malnourishment. And pluck them out. Different times now. Different times when not nearly so many children were stricken. The goat and sheep that needed feeding. Catherine would see to them. A devout woman who could manage the daily chores of any man, splitting and salting fish, toiling in the garden, baking, scrubbing the house from floor to rafter, and still finding time to traipse up the valley to church for morning and night service.

The thought of Catherine polished the blackness in him. Recalling her eyes, he felt the heavy pull of her superstition. The ancient complexity of her beliefs. The language of her hands that blessed herself upon rising and retiring, before a meal and at the mention of a stricken soul. The wood that he cut for her, a pleasure in that action, cleaving it, a crackling fire to drive off the niggling, persistent cold that coursed through him even in summer, but not enough wood to do her, for she
was always cold and liked the fire blazing. If need be, she would cut more wood for the stove, carrying the splits in the pouch of her apron. A capable woman. Brought up right by Ace's parents after he and Francis had found her that day in the woods. Uncle Ace had always been fond of Catherine, and had been pleased when Francis married her. He had even been happy for them, a fleeting gesture that feathered the dust from his heart. Feathered pink then freshly wilting black against him. Death. Francis and Catherine had been content, like two love-birds.

The soles of Ace's boots trembled, a tin cup rattled against the table and was silenced by a quick palm, as ice was split and tossed aside in giant slabs that piled up to either side of the vessel. Ace came back to his dreary self, the glimmer dimming from his eyes as they glanced toward the ladder that would take him up from tweendecks. Again, he imagined rising to the deck, if only to peer down at the edges of the ice slabs, gleaming greenish-blue under the too-near moonlight. The beauty of that and the dark tug of the gluttonous abyss beneath.

A laugh rose from the table where a thin, eager-faced man in a brown sweater hawked and spat. A shadow trod down the ladder and approached the others, murmured: ‘Da glass be fallin'.' Eyes searched from one to the other. A nod barely made here and there. The barometer dropping, an Atlantic storm galing through the minds of each man, blinding him with silence.

The greenwood and oak hulk of the
Terra Nova
tilted starboard, then back, levelling and smoothly dipping toward port-side. The lantern swung in accord. Shadows skimmed one way, skulked to utter stillness, then stretched blackness the other way, bending definition. Uncle Ace stood with his back to the black wooden hull, his palms and forehead damp with sweat, while he stared at the filth and breathed in the petulant stench of men. He glanced down and saw the eyes of his young bunkmate, Billy Gilbert, now curiously watching up, the young man in for a taste of it. Uncle Ace gave no word, nor notice. He regarded the men and found his thoughts, one by one, moving him along latitudes he feared in himself. He stood there for a stretch of time he could not measure. The men paid him no mind, accepting what they had heard of him as truth, for every man knew, or had learned from another, that Ace Hawco was mad.

They came upon the seals at dawn, passing the larger dangerous hood seals, some of them over ten feet long, barking savagely up at the boat and baring their sharp teeth. Passing alongside the hoods, the men knew the main herd was close at hand. They aimed their rifles across the railing and shot each hood silent, before they, as sentinels, were able to slip into the water thus signalling the others of the urgency to flee. Better that they were dead, and worrylessly still.

As the final hood was bullet-punched to sleep, an ear-crackling cheer rose up from the men on deck who were moving barrows of rock ballast under command, carrying shovelfuls of glowing coals to make fires elsewhere, or sharpening their sculping knives on a makeshift grindstone. One man flung handfuls of salt on the stairs and rails to melt the glitter, while the bulk of the others crowded the rails.

‘First in da fat,' one black-toothed man winked at Uncle Ace. He rubbed his bare, scarred hands together and nudged two others who were gathered near, passing a smoke amongst them. ‘We be inta da swiles soon.'

The boat laboured on, quivering while it carved its course, snapping the fresh ice and tilting it aside, languid slab upon slab rising.

Uncle Ace stared out over the icefields that radiated so white beneath the March sun that the ice appeared to be made of light itself, nothing but beaming white that gave the impression the vessel was suspended by the aura, held magically above it, only the sound of the thunderous crunching convincing him that they were, in fact, moving through something solid, breaking the white radiance to pieces so that they might sail through it.

A shout issued from the barrelman high above the ratlines, ‘Swiles!'

Uncle Ace looked into the sky, then back at the ice. Up ahead, specks of grey and black, bugs against snow, became evident, and then the delayed notice of specks of tainted whiteness. Baby seals, their whitecoats vaguely yellowish.

Another roar of shouts and fighting cheers.

The
Terra Nova
dropped anchor, its chain rattling, and the labouring grind of the engines was silenced. There came a shout from Captain Kane: ‘Starburd over. G'wan, me sons,' as the men cheered again, gathered ropes, gaffs and belts and hurriedly stepped down ladders nailed to the sides of the vessel.

With gaffs in hand, the men trod carefully, testing and leaping toward the harder whiteness in the centre of the ice pans, the blinding thrust of the sun against crystal white making them squint to assure themselves of the crammed edges, the boundaries that would tilt and open, exposing the pull of the black water beneath.

Captain Kane watched from the bridge, warm in his enclosure. He gazed out at the panoramic view beyond his window, delighted by the steamer's nearness to the herd, not needing to send his men off miles in search of seals, not yet anyway. Through the bridge glass, he saw a hundred and twenty of his men, grey, brown and black dots spreading out along variously patterned trails, then the smaller specks that were the seals: dogs, bitches and pups. The cowardly dogs deserted the pack at once, lumbering and hunching away until slipping into the water to save their lives, the bitches holding steady a while longer, but soon fleeing, too, into the ocean where they swam deep, then resurfaced, their eyes and nostrils poked above the water, watching toward the hunters and pups.

Soon, only a few large hood seals remained, and the hundreds of harp whitecoats left unguarded to stare up with huge brown-black eyes, unknowing, as the gaffs swished down to smash their soft skulls to splinters, the crimson sparklings of red in the sun, flaring blasts of sprinkles, holding Captain Kane's attention. Gush after gush as a hundred and twenty gaffs came down, and from the whitecoats the slow seeping of vividly glorious red across white.

The men progressed with ease, rolling over the thrashing seals and gashing them open where they lay, sculping to cut away the hides and front flippers in a few swift, economical strokes, leaving the carcasses as a meal for other predators. Each man gouging holes in the hides to thread their towing ropes through, pulling the steaming hides behind them, the white, red-drenched fur against the ice, the fat exposed and jiggling. The men fanned out and forward far beneath Captain Kane as the brilliance of the white ice was slowly replaced by more brilliant and heartening blazes of red.

‘Mighty fine patch, as they say,' the captain told his second hand, Wil Critch, a grisly-faced man with two wide, mismatched eyes.