Blackstrap Hawco (2 page)

The fire in the kitchen stove burned hot. There was a flush in Emily's cheeks as she gazed out over the water, discerned the movement of a distant boat heading toward Bell Isle. One of the ferries, the
Caribou
by the looks of it, was bringing men to work the mines.

There came a sound from overhead in Jacob's Uncle Ace's room. Something had fallen to the floor. Uncle Ace rarely left his room, never speaking since returning from his final journey to the ice during the seal
hunt over twenty years ago. He merely sat on the edge of his bed and watched the floor. Hands joined on his lap, he appeared lost to the world, his presence in the house amounting to practically nil.

Snow began to drift straight down; large wet flakes beyond the pane. At the sight of snow, Emily began to fret for Jacob. She worried that a blizzard might rise, as it was wont to do. Grey skies sweeping in and with it, the blistering thrust of snow. Jacob trapped in the woods. Not able to find his way out. Freezing to death. It was the same inexplicable feeling she had experienced on occasions in the past when Jacob had been away, a peculiar sensation that her husband was not well, the feeling centred in her belly, seemingly in the baby that she carried and was due in another month. For the past three nights, she had been visited by dreams of Jacob talking to dead animals, holding them in his hands, stroking them and whispering in their ears as though to calm them and lull them back to life. She dreamed of an orb within her belly, floating in circles, made of something like glass but bendable, and Jacob centred there, slowly being covered in white. But she would not utter such thoughts to others in the community for fear of jinxing her husband.

Taking her hand from her cup of tea, she straightened her blue plaid bandanna atop her long, wavy black hair, then smoothed her apron over her pregnant belly just as a hard, tiny limb impressed itself beneath the fabric. An elbow or a foot. The baby shifting. It never ceased turning and kicking. This one wasn't like Jacob Junior at all, who had stayed inside her long after her due date. This one wanted out into the world.

Emily wondered if the baby might be a boy or girl. Another son, or a daughter? Ruminating on family, an image of her mother was brought to mind. When she thought of her mother, she pictured herself as a child. There was no other way of seeing it. Mentally skimming through her younger years, she became enthralled by the notion of how her privileged upbringing had come to an abrupt end and how different the lives of her children would be from hers.

Emily studied the floral spray design of her china cup. It held a similar pattern to the china used on her first journey by steamer, across the Atlantic. Liverpool to St. John's on the S.S.
Newfoundland
. She considered the side of the cup, thinking further back to that first night she
had ever been up and out in the world so late, the stillness of the air and the bustle upon the docks back in Liverpool. The nostalgic pang for the city that she had not seen since childhood. A place that had taken on, through her clear and naive recollections, the qualities of a magical location that she had dreamed of for years after leaving.

She remembered shivering for the chill and for the powerful look of fear on her father's face. An image that time had been reluctant to purge from her memory. She and her mother waiting at the foot of the plank leading to the S.S.
Newfoundland
while her father spoke with two men in grey hats and dark overcoats, their voices growing sterner, rising toward argument. The men had tried to snatch hold of her father's arm, but he had pulled it free and backed away, raising his hands to them and motioning toward his family standing in wait, motioning specifically to Emily, it seemed.

‘What's the matter?' Emily had asked.

‘I don't know,' her mother had tersely responded, holding her fur collar against her throat, tightening her gloved grip on Emily's hand. A whiff of calf leather.

Her father's hat had been knocked away and he bent to pick it up, his eyes still fixed on the men, his overcoat falling open. One of the men made a move for him, but the other man held him back, seizing hold of his friend's arm.

Her father had backed off then, backed away until he was close to his wife and child. The two men remained where they were, watching with their hands in the pockets of their overcoats. One of the men snickered. The other made a motion at Emily, pointed his black-gloved finger at her face and cocked back his thumb. She had seen his cheeks round out and his lips pop open with a sound.

Her father had quickly returned to his wife and Emily, his breath hard. Sweat was sheening on his face in the dull spill from the on-deck lights above them, his eyes alert, darting toward the steamer.

‘Onto the boat,' he said, practically shoving them ahead.

‘Are they the police, Alan?' her mother had hurriedly enquired.

‘No. Come on.' He made no motion to check back over his shoulder, yet Emily turned to see the two men in the long black overcoats and grey hats standing there, not moving, only following the family's climb up the
plank with their steady eyes. One man had his hands in his pockets, the other had his readied at his sides.

‘They know where we're going,' her mother gasped. ‘Alan?'

‘They were involved. They won't breathe a word.'

Years later, in Newfoundland, Emily's father would often make comments about the men who were watching them, the men who he claimed he was on the lookout for when he parked across the street on her tenth birthday, anticipating the men's arrival, and refusing to join the party. Emily had heard him pleading with her mother about the men who might come. He had to be on his toes, he insisted, vigilant. He had to make certain. For Emily's eleventh and twelfth birthdays, he stayed out of the house, as well. At first, Emily would go to the window, wishing him to come in, but eventually she accepted his behaviour as one of the many eccentricities that made him who he was. And then, one night before her thirteenth birthday, in a fit of panic after moving from St. John's to Bareneed to manage a merchant's affairs, Emily's father barred the door to their house and would not permit a single one of them to leave. They had remained inside for two days. ‘Don't eat the food,' he warned, refusing to touch it. He had sniffed at the water, carefully tasting drops from his fingertip.

On the third day of their seclusion, Emily heard her mother giving instructions to the servant girl to send a telegram, while her father was tending to the fire in the sitting room, poking at the logs and shouting out names she did not recognize, threatening these names in a terrifying manner. Georgie and Willy. She remembered because the names reminded her of cartoon characters. Georgie and Willy, and what she would learn of them so many years later.

The warm smell of baking bread drew Emily back to the house in Bareneed, and soon touched Jacob Junior who raced down over the half-mile of sloping hill from where the small schoolhouse was positioned beside the church. Emily did not see him coming. She was watching toward the water, always staring toward the water. The water was the domain of men. The earth, the hold of women. Despite the memories of her childhood in England and then St. John's, and the emotions they summoned, she believed that she belonged in Bareneed, belonged in that house, on that piece of land with that varying, yet ultimately
unchanging, view of the sea. She was not from there, but she would not feel at peace anywhere else other than in that house. This was her heart place.

Even though Jacob was on the trapline and not in his boat, Emily still took solace in the calming immensity of the ocean. Such a different life from her own early childhood, one she remembered with an aching she had no mind to return to, her mother gone now, a tender woman whose tenderness was needled until tragedy removed her, her father still living in the asylum, not knowing his name or having any idea of who he was, muttering the names of those in a faraway country. He refused to know her, no matter how many reassuring words she spoke in his presence. Denied it, going so far as to turn his face away when she stood before his eyes.

Emily believed her father was better off removed from his own mind as he was. She did not feel well thinking such bitter thoughts, understanding that those thoughts were more her mother's than her own, and that Emily must still love her father in some way, for there were special memories as well, delightful memories, yet she felt she would turn against herself, against her mother, if she admitted to this love of her father. A man who forbade her marriage to Jacob.
A man beneath you
, he had said from his room in the asylum, his eyes watching away. In a time when her father still knew who Emily was, although there were moments when he mistook her for her mother, dead many years by that time.
A man so far beneath you, Amanda.

Watching the ocean, Emily felt the wintry lull of the water. She stood from the table, stepped close to the yellow enamel stove with its two higher warming compartments. Their silver handles required polishing. She would tend to it on Saturday night.

My own clean life now, she told herself, bending down to open the door a crack, her pregnant belly restricting her breath, so she was forced to breathe through her opened mouth. Jacob nothing like her father, thank God.

The bread was golden on top, moving toward a light shade of brown. A few more minutes.

Jacob's mother, Catherine, had taught Emily the traditional ways of baking, passed on a store of family recipes, and Emily was proud for
having duplicated the process with such proficiency, for twinning the tastes she could make with those that Jacob recalled from his youth.

When Emily was a child, back in St. John's, before their ill-fated move to Bareneed, their servant girl, Jackie, would perform this chore, kneading the dough and then leaving it to rise in an enamel pan. Jackie would then pour Emily a glass of milk from the milk jug, the radio scratching out the tune ‘Ain't She Sweet' and Jackie revealing the black pegs of her teeth to the young mistress of the house, the only one that Jackie would smile for, would share that intimacy with. And as Jackie went about her duties, Emily always felt, as did her mother, that such tasks should be carried out by oneself. Her mother had always been troubled by the notion of servants, of one person serving another. Even though it was a common occupation – one needed a number of servants to proficiently manage the stately Victorian houses of St. John's – she still could not help but feel that servant girls were being taken advantage of.

Her mother had stated her concern to her father, telling him that she pitied poor Jackie because of her predicament. She could imagine the horrible life she must be leading, with a fatherless child and a dearth of basic necessities in her life. But Jackie had seemed quite content following the birth of the child, seeming to soften in speech and action, to become even more caring, until the sickness plagued her.

‘Imagine yourself in the shoes of that poor girl,' Emily's mother had commanded of her father. ‘Use your imagination, for God's sake, Alan. Use your imagination!'

‘Call it imagination, Amanda,' Alan had hastily replied, ‘if you will, or merely the foolish thoughts of a wandering, unoccupied mind.'

Seated in her tapestry-covered high-back chair, her mother had been struck by silence, her eyes plainly displaying the wound. Her imagination, as always, attacked as an inept by-product of inactivity, of sloth, something that happens when other, more busy or eventful preoccupations did not trouble a person. It was one of the times Emily had hoped that her mother would reply angrily, would defend herself with as much vigour as required, shout, scream, if need be, but she had remained silent, accepting the decree, knowing then, it seemed, from that point forward that her husband was nothing like the man she had imagined.

Emily carefully shut the oven door and straightened, hearing the brisk excited sounds of Jacob Junior panting and kicking off his boots in the back porch.

The boy was beside her in an instant, looking up at his mother with a wide smile and holding a damp paper in both his hands.

‘I got an A,' he said, beaming.

‘That's wonderful, sweetheart. Come here and give me a kiss.' She bent as low as possible, again her breathing cut short by the pressure of the baby, and gave him a warm hug. ‘I'm so proud of you, Junior.'

Stepping back, Junior glanced at his mother's belly – a constant source of intrigue for him – then turned, pulled his arms out of the worn sleeves of his coat and straightened them over the back of a chair. ‘The teacher says I'm one of the best in class.'

‘Wait till your father hears.'

‘How many days now?'

Emily rested one hand on her belly, rubbed gently, almost without notice. ‘Three or four more days,' she replied, trying to keep the worry from her tone. Turning, she bent to check on the bread. ‘He'll be back before you know it.'

‘I can't wait to tell him.' Junior yanked out a chair and sat at the table, anticipating the feast of what would soon be ready. Warm bread with melted butter and molasses. ‘Hope he gets lots of fur.'

‘You want the crust?'

Junior nodded hungrily. ‘Yes, please.'

Emily smiled at her son's sweet manners, the proper quality of his speech, the way her son had taken after her in that respect. Mannerly. Refined. She felt another kick, of admonishment, she suspected, and was stilled by it, paused to place a hand on her belly.

‘Is he kicking?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can I feel?' Junior was up out of his chair and had his hand on her belly in a flash. He kept his hand in place, his expression fixed as though he were listening. ‘Cripes! I felt that.' His face beaming.

‘Me, too.' She laid a hand on Junior's head, then turned away. ‘Lots of butter and molasses?'

Junior nodded and licked his lips. ‘Lord, I'm half starved, sure,' he said, impersonating his father.