Blackstrap Hawco (16 page)

‘About Newfoundland?'

‘Yes, Newfoundland.'

The young woman pressed her lips together in a smile. ‘That'd be our “Local Interest” section. This way, over here.' The woman directed them to a few shelves toward the back. ‘You might find something here.'

His mother scanned the shelves.

‘Newfie Jokes,' she whispered, her fingers reaching out to shift one of the booklets aside. A number of them were arranged on the top shelf, a series by the looks of the similar covers with different colours. The covers with drawings of one fat fisherman and one skinny one. Both of them with stunned faces. His mother picked one up and opened it, read quietly, with a careful interest, like it was a book that contained secrets: ‘An old-timer Newfoundland fisherman was working on a wharf when a tourist from the mainland came along and asked: “Do you have any sons to help with your work?” The fisherman gave it a brief bit of consideration and then replied, “Yes, sir, I have two living and one in Toronto.”'

His mother didn't even smile at the joke. She started reading another but gave up and laid the book back.

On the lower shelf, she found a cookbook with Newfoundland recipes. None of this seemed to interest her. In fact, it seemed to frighten her by the look on her face.

She wandered off, slowly checking other shelves, stopping to put her hand against a shelf and wait. At the end of one long aisle, she reached for a book, took it in her hands.

‘It's about the Antarctic,' she said to Blackstrap, her voice almost hopeful. ‘Ice. A man named Shackleton.'

Blackstrap nodded, not wanting any part of it. There was nothing in this store for him. He felt nervous, edgy, like he had a hangover. He wanted to leave. The lights were too bright, blaring above his head.

His mother read a bit of the book and her eyes turned wet. ‘Exactly,' she said. ‘Yes, this one.' She took it to the counter and opened her purse to pay. Blackstrap waited outside the store until his mother came up to him with the bag in her hand. ‘I'll take that,' he said, reaching for it.

‘No,' said his mother. ‘You don't need to.' She watched straight ahead, walked in a strange way, like something might make her tip, might make her fall if she was not careful.

Blackstrap retraced his steps, remembering the map, and found the door where they first entered. When he got outside, into the fresh air, a weight left him and he breathed easier.

‘Is that what you were after?' he asked, nodding toward her bag.

‘Yes, thanks,' said his mother, facing the hundreds of vehicles before her, then looking at him with a serious expression. ‘I don't know what I'd do without you, Blackstrap. I really don't. I think I'd die.'

 

(October)

There was a knock on the door. Emily had heard a car pulling up in front of her house, and had risen to peek out the living room window. A grey-haired man in a suit, with a leather satchel under his arm, was walking up the beachrock path. She assumed that it had something to do with the upcoming election. Jacob's part in it as regional co-ordinator for the Tories, his new preoccupation getting Joey Smallwood booted out of government, or it could have been one of the candidates coming around to seek her support. She avoided answering the front door. Whoever knocked at the front door was a stranger. Friends always entered through the door at the back of the house.

Regardless, the man would not stop knocking. Emily laid down the book about the polar explorer and moved toward the hallway. Before reaching the hallway, she paused to peek around the corner where she could see down to the front door. Through the top window in the door, the man was staring in, his eyes directly on her. She faltered back, as though punched, but then stepped ahead creating an awkward movement that made her feel guilty of something. In an attempt to cover up the mistake, she hurried her pace to the door and opened it.

The man had a paper in his hand.

‘Is Jacob Hawco at home?'

‘No, I'm sorry.'

‘I have papers for him. You can sign for them.' He took a pen from his pocket, clicked down the tip. ‘Your name is?'

‘Emily.'

‘Emily Hawco?'

‘Yes.'

He eyed her for a moment, as though to make certain she was who she said she was. Then he wrote something on a piece of paper. ‘Sign here.' He handed her the pen. At once, she signed. The man watched her hand, his eyes moving to her face. When Emily was finished, the
man took the pen from her fingers. But he did not hand over the paper as expected. ‘Can I see some ID, please?'

‘ID?'

‘Driver's licence would do.'

‘I don't have a driver's licence.'

‘Birth certificate.'

Emily watched the paper in the man's hands. The words at the top read:
Supreme Court of Newfoundland
. She hadn't noticed this before. Her head gave a little shake.

‘Are you refusing to show identification?' the man asked.

‘What?'

‘Are you refusing to show identification?'

‘I don't…'

The man ticked something on his sheet and handed over the paper. It was a legal document. Emily took it in both her hands and read the words: PLAINTIFF: Memorial University. DEFENDANT: Jacob Hawco. She heard a car door slam and looked up to see the man drive away.

Baffled, with the legal document in hand, she edged back into the house and shut the door. The Statement of Claim was about the journal. Words typed there described the origins of the journal, where it was found and who had written it. Emily took the piece of paper into her room and stood there. She had no idea what to do, fear radiating from that document into her heart.

Bending down, she lifted the edge of the mattress and slid the papers in deep. She then went back out to the living room and took up the journal, where it lay beside the book on the explorer, and returned to her bedroom. She pulled back the bed covers and climbed in, covering herself, where she remained, staring at the ceiling and clutching the journal to her breast, dreading that what she had done was so wrong. The man had been angry with her. She should have shown him what he wanted. Her birth certificate. She had done the wrong thing. She was now going to get into trouble with the courts, with the law. She might go to jail. She shut her eyes. And, worse still, they were going to take the journal away from her.

 

(December)

An RCMP cruiser arrived with a yellow VW Bug trailing behind it. Jacob Hawco saw it from where he stood in the living room window. He heard the whine of a snowmobile. Blackstrap coming through the forest trail, crossing the tracks and cutting through the trees at the back of the house. Engine shut off. Blackstrap off it and walking away before it was even fully stopped. That's how he always did it.

Jacob watched the officer being trailed by the spineless little shit from the university. The two men stepped across his lawn and approached his door. A solid knock sounded.

Sighing, Jacob went to answer it.

‘Jacob Hawco?'

Jacob nodded at the RCMP officer.

‘A judgement has been made in your absence. You are ordered by the Supreme Court of Newfoundland to give over possession of the journal of Francis Hawco.'

‘Wha'?' Jacob shook his head. ‘Journal?'

Jacob searched beyond the officer to see Blackstrap coming up the rear. The two men heard him arriving and turned to see who it might be.

‘Hey,' said the young fellow, smiling like everything was okay.

Blackstrap glared as if to knock him down. He moved beside the officer and shoved by the young fellow who made an unexpected sound. Banging snow from his boots, he then entered the house, turned and took up position behind his father.

‘Dey've come 'bout some journal?' Jacob squinted and shrugged. Shook his head. Confounded. ‘Ye know anyt'ing 'bout a journal?' He said the word ‘journal' like it was something new to his mouth.

‘Don't know nothin' about that,' said Blackstrap.

‘You both were here,' said the young fellow, pointing toward the kitchen. ‘We sat at the table. Remember?'

Blackstrap and Jacob plainly, wordlessly looked at the young fellow.

‘Are you refusing to produce the journal?' asked the RCMP officer.

‘Don't 'av a clue wha' yer on about.'

‘You are instructed to turn over the journal within ten days or risk arrest for failing to obey the orders of the crown.'

‘Whose crown be dat?' asked Jacob.

The officer gave nothing in reply. He handed over the paper, and turned away and left. The young fellow from the university trailed after the officer until reaching the lane, where they separated and climbed into their cars. The young fellow glanced back at Blackstrap and Jacob as if he was afraid or sorry. Hard to tell the difference in a face like that.

Jacob watched the cars drive off. ‘Friggin' Mounties.' He spun around and cast his eyes across Blackstrap's face, then down at the paper. ‘Wha's ta be done?'

In silence, Blackstrap watched the yellow VW Bug as it curved up the road and disappeared around the evergreens. He moved ahead of his father, closer to the door's threshold. He felt his father's hand on his arm.

‘None of dat now,' Jacob said, drawing Blackstrap back into the house. ‘He ain't wort' it.'

 

‘I know what happens,' Emily said, holding her coat to her throat.

The barely visible orange flames rose out of the rusty barrel. Jacob stood in the waver of heat, the snow brilliant white behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see Blackstrap leaned in the doorway of the shed.

Emily held out the journal.

Jacob took it and raised a long stick to shove down the length of the book's spine, the point prying between the homemade page stitchings. He held it over the fire and lowered it, watching the pages ignite, then glancing at Emily whose face had gone as white as a ghost's.

The pages burned easily. Jacob caught a scent of the leather heating up. Hide. It reminded him of a hundred memories of skinning animals, of cooking animals with a bit of hide still on. The scent of the paper burning was distinct. The roar and crackle of fire gave way to the greater roar of the train nearing the junction. They all remained still while the train passed. Jacob studied the flames until they had blackened the pages all the way back to the spine. Then he lifted it out and dropped it on the ground, kicked a pile of snow to hiss on top of it.

At once, Emily bent there carefully brushing the snow aside, uncovering what had been buried. Bits of black came away in white. The pages burnt through. Shreds of words had endured the flames,
but what remained of the ragged edges of paper were black and deep brown.

Regardless, Emily turned the charred pages with her white, bloodless hands. ‘I know what happens,' she said, reading through the ruins while filling in those vanished words.

 

On the specified date in the court order, the RCMP cruiser pulled up Hawco Lane, with the yellow VW trailing after it like a toy.

In unison, the officer and the young fellow approached the door of the Hawco residence.

When the journal was requested, Jacob said: ‘Yes, b'y, we did come across dat after all.' He gave a friendly wink and went into the house. A few moments later, he returned, wagging the charred journal in his hands.

‘Had a spell of bad luck, it did,' he said, nodding at the scorched remnants. ‘It were filled widt such lively tales dat it leapt right inta da stove one day. Full of spirit dat journal. Cripes, I never saw da like of it 'fore!'

 

Although Emily Hawco, my great-grandmother, was never truly accepted in Bareneed (anyone coming to Bareneed from another place was referred to as an ‘immigrant' even if they lived there for the remainder of their life), she often had women visitors from the community who came to see what sort of gossip might be taken away. The women would tell one another of the fancy place settings and elaborate tables of food that were laid out, claiming that she thought she was so ‘high and mighty' and ‘butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.' Being the daughter of a merchant only made matters worse.

1953

Cutland Junction

The perfect skin of these women

The rumble in the earth rattled the cups and saucers and set the windows in Isaac Tuttle's house shimmying with a duller rattle.

Glancing out his back window, across the thirty feet of frosty land toward the narrow-gauge track, Isaac sighted the matt blackness of the train moving steadily along, his eyes trained on the windows of the passenger compartments and the faces of the men and women, some in profile, others studying the land and houses as the train slowed toward the station. The bold, iron authenticity of the locomotive never failed to impress him. A machine of unbendable presence.

Scanning the windows and passengers, Isaac's imagination conjured thoughts of the hundreds of different lives that moved through the Junction on their way east to St. John's. People from Canada, or America, even Europeans occasionally arrived, if only for a few brief minutes, in Cutland Junction, venturing from Nova Scotia where the train was driven onto the ship, the nine-hour voyage across the Cabot Strait, then docking on the west coast of Newfoundland, in Port aux Basque. Years ago, Isaac had worked in the truck-to-truck transfer shed
over on the west coast, changing the wheels beneath the boxcars from standard gauge to the narrow-gauge truck that suited the tracks running across the island.

Working in the railway yard as a young man in his twenties, he had lived a miser's life while marvelling at the people, the clothes they wore, the men in tan or blue double-breasted suits, so smart looking, and the gracefulness of the women in their fancy hats and coats, soft gloves on their fine slim fingers. Not a smudge of dirt on either one of them. They were clean. Blessed.

It was from this air of wealth that Isaac had come to realize the money that could be made, the money that was rolling across the one-thousand-mile stretch of island wilderness and ready to be picked up at every stop if there were only something of worth to offer.

Near the time of his revelation, he had received a cable from the priest; the message clear and exact: ‘Your Father Gravely Ill. Return Home A Necessity.' And so Isaac had left the west coast, headed east on a twenty-four-hour train ride, back to his home town, Cutland Junction, where he tended to his father, who was coughing and spitting up black, and unable to rise from his bed without collapsing in exhaustion. At once, Isaac took over his father's coal delivery business from his father's brother, Tommy, who was partial to drink, kept no records of delivery, squandered the coal payments, and even missed delivery dates, so that there were people, mostly the poor and ill-fated, who were near perishing from the cold.

Isaac set the business right, delivered in a dependable fashion, so that he was praised for his efforts by the good people of Cutland Junction and Bareneed who had cursed his uncle Tommy for the drunkard's slack ways. Isaac even paid his father's brother a small amount to keep him in liquor and, more importantly, out of his path, while he set up shop from the wages he had hoarded on the west coast. And in this store that he had hired a man to build, he set aside the window space and a full corner to display the latest fashions that he shipped in from London, New York and Paris. A coat, shirt or skirt expertly stitched together from a fine fabric made the travellers seem so beyond these woods, so sophisticated and of a mysterious elegance that produced in him a longing for the possibilities of their lives.

The fashions drew refined ladies and gentlemen to his store during
their station stop in Cutland Junction. The conductor forced to wait so frequently that the fifteen-minute stopover was eventually written into the schedule by the Newfoundland Railway Corporation.

Isaac's store was an oddity; the passengers disbelieved that the dresses and suits displayed in the shop window of Isaac Tuttle's General Store could be found there in the middle of nowhere. In disbelief, they would glance over their shoulders to face the dense wilderness, the snow-covered boughs of the evergreens, that carried on eastward for eighty miles until reaching a city built in the hollow bowl of a harbour that skirted the Atlantic Ocean. St. John's. A place of near civility where the fish trade prospered in the hands of a few families of merchants.

The passengers bought the garments in Isaac Tuttle's General Store as souvenirs to which a colourful story was attached. It intrigued the ladies to no end. They whispered about which friend or relative they might tell on their return home, how this one or that one would never believe such a thing, while they glanced back at Isaac Tuttle behind the counter, the imprint of the comb's rake grooved in his slicked hair, his collar yellowed and of a period passed, his blackened hands joined behind his back, a shelf of holy pictures and icons displayed on the wall above him, his big eyes fixed on them, his grin pointed sheepishly sharp. They could not help but wonder what this man could be made of. Why did he import these fashions and yet dress in worn garments of such threadbare nature himself? All of them wondering how or why this was possible, while Isaac studied the perfect skin of these women, savoured the foreign clarity of their speech, bathed in the scent of their bottled perfumes tinged by the heat of their bodies. He had listened in on conversations at the station in Port aux Basque, found delight in the way these sacred women spoke. Hearing the exchange between two passing women, he would smile to himself, almost giggle at the way they were so utterly different from the men and women of Cutland Junction. They trod like angels, drifting about his shop, setting gloved fingertips to an item, touching to determine if an object might be meant for them.

Emily spoke in the same manner, but still with a trace of a British intonation in how she shaped her words. Isaac adored her, secretly, unbearably. When he was with her, he felt the way Frank Sinatra sang.
He imagined tilting a fedora down over his eyes, drawing on a cigarette and taking Emily's hand, stepping out with her to all the extraordinary places he read about in movie magazines. Nightclubs and restaurants. He'd seen pictures of movie stars gazing into the cameras while dining at a noted ritzy establishment. Holding such images in his head, he saved his money so that he might buy the train fare to New York. Two tickets. One for him and one for Emily. One day Emily would be his. If only she had married him instead of Jacob Hawco. Emily's new baby had just been born. He flushed at the idea, recollecting the intimate moments they had spent together months ago, and wondering if it had been real at all. If Emily had actually taken him in that way. It gave him a splitting headache to think of it. If their union had been real, then why was Emily now acting so distant toward him? She should leave Jacob. She should admit her love of him. They should elope. If Jacob only knew the truth when he looked at that baby.

Regardless, the baby offered a fine excuse for paying a visit. It was ten days since its birth so it would be Emily's Sitting-Up Day. The Groaning Cake and other dainty fare would be laid out on the table. And a crowd of mostly women would be down for a visit, but he could hazard a visit himself. He might duck his head in without being given much notice to peek a look at Emily. The new baby in her arms. The baby that should be his.

Jacob was back from the trapline, made out to be some sort of hero for a broken leg he had been foolish enough to achieve while in the woods. Probably broke it himself, on purpose, so he could limp back acting all full of himself after fixing it up. Just like him to behave that way, even if he did almost freeze to death. The bragging bugger. That was the tenth or twelfth time he'd almost perished in the woods or drowned out on the sea. Why wouldn't he just get it done and over with? Rather than being looked upon as a hero, why didn't people just tag him for what he truly was: stunned?

Isaac tutted chastisingly and blessed himself for thinking such thoughts, faithfully muttered a prayer for the Lord's forgiveness, then decided it might be appropriate to bring Jacob a pack of Player's Navy Cut from the shop in honour of his salvation. And a holy card of the Blessed Virgin for Emily. No doubt, Junior might like a comic book.