Blackstrap Hawco (21 page)

‘I need to see it,' she says. Nods. As her voice rises. Standing. From her chair. It scrapes. Along the flooring.

Blackstrap's muscles flinch against this outburst, but he remains steady. His mud-caked boots on the floor. He wants to make that call. Before Paddy starts drinking and forgets about the morning.

Rushing to him, Karen shoves up the sleeve of his sweater. The flat blue-black outline evident. Her name. And the naked feet. The crotch. The belly. The breasts. The shoulders. The neck. The head. The hair.
And the blank face that looks nothing. Like her. Blank. Blind resemblance. A smutty feeling. That clings to her. Like the dullness of the ink.

‘Yes,' she says. Leaning. To gently kiss. The tattoo. Pressing her lips to her own. Name.

Blackstrap touches Karen's thick black hair. He watches her face and thinks of a trapped animal, stuck there and loose at once. Twisting one way, then the other to yank clear.

She stares. Hungrily up at him. Her smile wide. Greedy want. She strokes his arm. Snatches for his crotch. Jabs her palm there. Wisps of smoke rise. From the table.

‘Yes,' she says. Gritting teeth.

Blackstrap notices Karen's cigarette burning in the ashtray. He thinks of the burning of the land, smoke rising above evergreens, and the backhoe idling out front, and the blackened trees that must be moved for a cabin lot. Burnt instead of chainsawed. One way of doing it. The sooty touch of the stumps like pencil lead. Another one behind Coombs Hill. Townies moving out in droves. Blackstrap worries about his father. He smells the sickness of his father off Karen.

‘My turn,' says Karen. Raising her head to bite. His stubbly cheek. Pressing against him. Biting harder. Her teeth. Groaning a throat laugh.

Blackstrap shoves her back toward the table where she crashes into a chair. The telephone dings. He should call Paddy. His wife nothing but an irritant, a woman in his way of getting the job done.

Off balance, Karen drops. Onto the seat. Her eyes averting Blackstrap's. While she nervously reaches. For her cigarette. In the ashtray. ‘My turn,' she whispers, accusingly. Taking a long harsh draw. Then knocking the ash off. The cigarette gone hot. And soft. She darts a peek at Blackstrap. Sees how he has placed his fingers. Against the tattoo. As if holding a bandage in place. Stopping something vital. From leaking out.

Blackstrap gives her no further consideration. He yanks his sleeve down with his eyes turned from her, masking the mark, makes the call to Paddy. No answer. Then leaves the house in a fit of not knowing.

Jacob tries to tell himself what he sees. He cannot hear and speak at once. Inside himself with his mouth and ears. Eyes on the ceiling. Junior Hawco stuck there like a bug. Face pressed sideways. A flash gone off. Frozen white. Is this winter? Palms and soles stuck. Jagged limbs bent at angles to the ceiling. Why there now? And a girl. Another flash. A picture in a book. A little girl huddled near. Face in a locket. Eyes green and leaking. Junior's eyes turned twisted to see. Straining at that angle. At that time. At that place. Afloat. And pinned. Where else would he be found? My father. Losing everything but not me. The dead. Never losing the dead. Losing your mind. But never the dead. The dead more than mind. I saw what was done. You bring me back in body to look this way. Says Junior. Your head wrong. I cannot fit here. I was soul. I was so much soul. And nothing but body now in your unblessed world. The girl giggles. Foam from her lips. I am not friendly, she says. I am friendly. See. Her voice tiny. I am not me, Daddy. Not anymore. Not me. Jagged teeth sharpened from biting on stone. Out from under the earth. Now that you are not. Giggle. Gag. Sprinkles of dirt into his open eyes. Her tongue dirt-brown. They cough, and sprinkle him, oh, how they cough, his dead children.

 

Suitcase packed. Karen leaves. Her brother, Glenn, has come for her in the car. She does not turn to see the house. Goodbye. The car pulls away. Crosses where the train tracks used to be. Glenn says nothing. Knows better.

They drive through the community. Down the valley. Up along the dirt road that joins to the highway. The long black road stretching straight ahead. Forest black. Ominous. To all sides. A moon above them. Clear dark sky with a hint of blue. Light on the edges and treetops. Almost pretty. Ghost trees. Not themselves.

Glenn switches on the radio. A commercial for fast food. A song about love.

Karen watches. Through the windshield. She feels calm with her brother. A ride in a vehicle. With him. The lull. Not a word spoken. Still, she cannot look at him. Her brother beside her. What they have been through. Together. To help each other. Her head drifts. Toward the window. Her eyes shut. She sleeps.

The car on the highway. Headlights through darkness. Leaving the land behind.

Glenn's eyes on the road. His hand on her inner thigh. While she sleeps.

 

Blackstrap parks the backhoe outside Wilf's New Place. This new place much like the place Wilf opened first. Only now it is a larger square room built onto the side of his house. A yellow clapboard dwelling with a cola sign over the second door. Set down where the road slopes deeply. Then rises before curving off into the woods toward the secluded penitentiary. Wilf bought a pool table at a government auction in St. John's. Centred it atop a sheet of grey panelling laid in the middle of the new room. Men and women slept on the green felt in the afternoon hours. When they drank so much under-the-counter beer and black rum. They could no longer stand. Legs and arms hung over the grooved chrome edges. Twisting off in all directions.

The bodies of a man and a woman rest there now. While Wilf blinks from behind the aspinite counter at the back of the room. His hand on the ledge. He nods with his head on a permanent tilt close to his shoulder. The tail of his green and grey plaid shirt hangs out around his waist. He nods again and turns, dragging one leg, shuffling over to the big cooler. Opening the long glass door, he pops the caps off two colas. So the young boys could mix the black rum to make sure it will be sweet. And not sting to such a wicked degree.

‘Whiskey,' says Blackstrap, wondering on the quiet. All eyes on him. He was thought to meet Paddy here. Work to be done. But no sign of him at home either.

Wilf pours from the bottle.

Leo, a skinny stick of a man, nodding and drinking. Not saying a word. Beer bottle up. Beer bottle down. Gord stood there beside Leo, smearing the laughing tears from his eyes with his pudgy oil-stained hand. He has been laughing at something, and is still chuckling. While he sips from the beer bottle some moonshine has been poured into. His face is small and his rounded cheeks burn red. When he smiles to show two rows of badly chipped teeth from chewing the caps off bottletops. Whenever a bottle needs opening, Gord always quick to snatch it away.
Impatiently bending the cap off with his teeth. While watching the person as if to say, ‘Dere's no trick ta dis. Ya jus' gotta 'av balls.' Breathing heavily, he moves his wide body to take a look around the room.

Leo lays his long arm around Gord's shoulders. Catching sight of Blackstrap, he senses the humour slipping off. He coughs and straightens up, weakly shaking his head and giving a merry sigh. Leo turns to the counter again to face Wilf's white oval head. Tilted to the side and bent close to his shoulder. His greyish-brown beard brushes against the front of his shirt. As he stiffly tosses a bag of cheezies to a boy leaning against the pool table.

Blackstrap sips his whiskey. The smell of it full in his nostrils when he swallows. Looks toward the opening that leads into Wilf's house. The curtain hanging there, separating the rooms, has fallen loose. And he sees the small brown couch low to the floor. And the colourful crocheted quilt thrown over it. The woodstove in the centre of the room. With a black-bottomed kettle resting on top. And a small square of carpet under the wooden box that is a coffee table. An orange and grey cat slowly leaps onto the box. Curls up to sleep.

A grumble rises from the pool table. A man wearing a dark blue baseball cap twists and tosses in his sleep. As if to fight off a commotion before rolling dangerously close to the edge. Half of his body dangles for a moment. Before all of him slips over. Dropping and crashing onto the floor. Bottles and windows rattle. And the floor shakes violently. Before the vibrations settle disagreeably. Like an explosion has been set off close to Wilf's New Place.

Two oldtimers sitting at a small round table by the door stare glumly at where the body has fallen. The body that now gets up without knowing what happened. The man stumbles toward a table. Sits. Stares at his feet. One of the oldtimers looks at the other. Their faces remaining unchanged. They each take a drink. One of beer. The other of rum.

Blackstrap finishes his whiskey. The place still. In silence. He orders another. No ice. No mix. His hand up to stop Wilf from adding anything to water the taste.

Then, finally, hours later, when noise comes again. From the others drinking. Arguing. Explaining. Sound building from where it was tucked away in each man.

‘I was through yer place a few day ago.' Leo still not looking at him. Nervous but wanting to say what was on his mind. Brave with the booze in him. ‘On da Sunday fer a case.'

Blackstrap swallows the whiskey, nods for another. Shows the glass. Raises it so Wilf can pour. Eyes around the room moving from Blackstrap to Leo. Wilf's head tilted at that angle from a car crash. Something broken that never killed him. That should have. A man lives with anything. ‘Yeah,' says Blackstrap as an afterthought.

‘You had company.'

Leo leaves it at that. The stutter of a smile. Rotten teeth showing for a second. Gord takes a sideways step in the other direction. Away. Not close to any of that. Not a part of it. He even mutters something resembling those words. Elbow skimming along the bar.

Blackstrap drinks another whiskey. Heat rising in him. He glances around at the faces that know. The secret. No tongue ever held quiet. No movement ever going unreported in a community battered by loss. Everything gained back this way.

They might not be looking right at him. But they all know. Gord with his head turned to be left out. Staring toward the opening to Wilf's house. His back to them. Staying that way he becomes suspicious in Blackstrap's mind.

What kind of company? Karen seeing someone else. That would explain the change. Another man. Another time. Another place. Gord.

Wilf says nothing. Usually can't stop talking, stuttering out words. But says nothing now. Pours another whiskey to get through it. A tremble that won't let a word out of his mouth.

It takes a few more hours. A grudge thickening his blood. Whiskey thickening his thoughts into shapes full and dark. And all his. Only his. Made that way by him.

But he is told when leaving with the noise of late-night laughter. Pounding through the walls. Not about him. But he cannot help believing that every sound is. Stood outside in the crisp night air looking up at his backhoe. Then the sky. The stars as bright as he can ever remember. The brilliance of those closer. And the dust of others too far away.

Waiting for Gord. Waiting for Leo. He can wait.

In time the door opens. And Leo shows himself. His face unknowing in its merriment. Blackstrap stood there seeing him. Rushes from where he's leaned on the backhoe. Storms forward and hits Leo. Knocks him back and down. Then bends and kneels and hits him again. One action. And another. Leo's head thudding against clapboard. Bouncing.

‘Who was it?' Blackstrap spits.

‘Isaac,' says Leo, knowing right away what is being asked. Drunk but holding to what matters. Blood on his mouth. On his tongue where he bit it. ‘Tuttle.' Blood on his chin. Dribbling. Blood flickering onto the dark moist night ground where he is hit again.

Blackstrap not nearly himself stopping. Snorts to taunt himself. Who knew what in him? Takes a moment to watch Leo's face. His fist held back. Spring-rock loaded. Hit him again? Hit him once more for saying? For knowing. Kill him for knowing. But instead flicks his grip from Leo's coat and rises. Turns. Knowing it would come to pass. Had to. Sick in every bone. He starts off on foot. Isaac Tuttle. A menace for too many years. A rustling in the trees nearby. Something Blackstrap takes for an animal.

 

Patrick Lambly, although not yet bearing the Hawco name, was the beginning of the Hawco story in Newfoundland. The passenger list from the steamer
Venus
that departed the port of Limerick had him listed (right below Abigail Labody, spinster) as a labourer. During my research in Ireland, I discovered various facts about Patrick's father and mother and paternal and maternal grandparents, but to list those facts here would mean to clutter things up. If the reader is interested, these documents might be found in the hall of records in the parish of Rathjordan in County Limerick. Enough to say, his people were decent folks, not the rogues and criminals that I expected (and, maybe, even hoped) they might be.

1886

Limerick, Ireland

Patrick Lambly and Rose Cavanagh's journey to Talamh an Éisc

It was those early memories of his mother's wilting starvation and his lame father's indenture to a landowner (by whom he was neglectfully worked to death) that drove Patrick Lambly, under the cover of night, from his beloved county of Limerick toward the broad horizon of the sea. The road that he travelled was known to him, each step measured against memory, for he had taken this path in darkness on many occasions with the exact similar threat of his departure, only to find diversion in the Ragged Death, his holdall hoisted up onto the bar while a good laugh was had about the utter foolhardiness of undertaking such a leaving, and plans were yarned together to no definite end.

It would be different this night. With the cries of his children worsening, day by day, he would not turn back. This night, unlike the others, he had taken no time to gather a few articles in a holdall, for he feared waking his wife, Siobin, or the ill baby, Claire, and two-year-old,
Angus. It was enough to simply creep from the door unnoticed. The rusty hinges painstakingly creaking like a perishing creature's cry.

On past nights, in the Ragged Death, he had sold all articles that might be gathered in a holdall to further his drinking. A pittance had been received for each article, with Patrick settling for the two-pence price of a pint for anything he might hold in his possession. The good that could be sifted from his worth was measured in increments of nil. He understood and denied this while he recited words in his head:

 

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there

Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:

May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,

And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

 

If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day;

But she, with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!

May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may

The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange

 

and pondered dipping into the Ragged Death for a pint or two to fortify him for his journey down over the hills toward the harbour. Christ, what good was such thirst to a man, the satiating of which would not extend his longevity, would it, but rather drive him deeper into a madder thirst or hunger for something otherwise which was entirely unagreeable. Yet seemingly agreeable, quite agreeable and ascending perfection, at the time.

Regardless, his shoulders inclined toward the Ragged Death, while his feet steered him steadily ahead. A peek in the window was all he desired. There they stood at the bar, the lads most known to him. The two Tommys. O'Neary and Shea. Christopher Kearney. Philip Foley. There was golden laughter, golden warmth within, all of it pouring freely over a man, to comfort him as he stumbled toward his most dire need or end. His fingers went up to the muddy pane and his fingernail picked at the dirt, clearing a better view of them all. Oh, it was succulent splendour. The view alone and the imagined fragrance of brew.

It would all be different once he had crossed the ocean and arrived
upon the shores of Talamh an Éisc. Once his transport had been repaid, his indenture to a merchant worked off, he would have the required currency to return and provide his wife and children with a bounty. Men from Limerick went off on similar journeys in the spring, only to return in the winter to warm and deserved welcomes. David O'Mara and Tommy Cavanagh were regulars on the journey, Tommy having sent for his wife and children just this past month. It was with them that he must now add his number. Away from cursed Ireland. He would not shed a tear should he never set foot on its damnable soil again.

Tasting the thirst in his mouth, he argued his will one way then the other. His view through the window took a turn toward unpleasant as the wench came into view. Despicable, she was, Christly despicable and whorish, for denying a man like himself a bit of leeway. The sooner he got away, the better for all. Never to have to set eyes on that wretched female again. She with her heavy bosoms and enchanting brown eyes. She with her fragile hands and floury skin. She with her devil's tongue entwining his in dreams of the past nights. All that was required of him was to expend the initial effort, to step beyond the Ragged Death, no matter how enticing might seem its enclosure. How difficult could that possibly be, just this one time, to step beyond, to let his shadow fall over the doorway in passing, rather than have that very door be flung open and have the welcoming voices of his mates come out to meet him? In truth, it would be all grim talk of the damnable current state of affairs and the need to pour a shine over it. Let his shadow fall over the door in passing. But the weakness that leaned him nearer the windowpane soon had his nose squashed up against it in an abundantly unbecoming fashion.

‘Here,' said Patrick. ‘Yes.' As though he might be recollecting a cherished memory, a celebration of Christmas or harvest. ‘Yes.' A story or two to be taken away at the end of the evening. If it were not for the slut, he might manage a decent bit of credit.

A burst of laughter from within as pints were drawn from casks and raised to lips warmed by conversation. A glowing palace amid the dark and desolate rubble of this village.

Patrick straightened and took a look back from whence he had come. There were no lights in the direction where he took his shack to be.
Christ, was there ever a more miserable father and husband? he wondered. He could weep from the feeling of physical uselessness, from the spiritual undoing of self-recrimination. The parcel of land that had once been his, upon which now he was merely a tenant, had become a worthless clod of dirt that would take no seed, as though it might have been poisoned by his own worthless sweat or the poems he spoke to it late in the evening, only the earth ever seeming to listen.

With a heart-heavy sigh, he turned his head to survey the path beyond the Ragged Death. Without the holdall, he would have nothing to sell, except, of course, the holdall itself. Straightening with a start from his dipped position toward the window, he felt a surge of optimism. Yes, why hadn't the idea crossed his mind on the previous nights where he had, again and again, planned his heroic departure, following a lambasting from his wife that he should go, that he should help them, for God's sake, that he should not let his daughter and son starve in their infancy?

He might sell the holdall.

On newly spirited feet, he trod back along the path he had taken from his house, hearing his own good-natured voice engaged in spirited song:

 

Here is the crab tree,

Firm and erect,

In spite of the thin soil,

In spite of neglect.

The twisted root grapples

For sap with the rock,

And draws the hard juice

To the succulent top

 

while he wandered back on this very path, night after night, from the Ragged Death. With thoughts of that vile barmaid swimming lewdly in his head and – underfoot – the earth sprouting from the seeds of his intentions.

The dark shack up ahead.

In silence, he approached it and, with the discreetness of a mouse and the gentleness of a lamb, delicately opened the creaking door just enough
to slip his sideways body through and face the threatening stillness within. His wife and daughter and son were sleeping in the bed, under the thin, moth-eaten blanket that a sewing needle could no longer mend, his wife clutching the holdall to her sleeping breast.

Where Rose's Ronan is lost to sickness aboard

Missus Rose Cavanagh and her two children, eight-year-old Elizabeth and six-year-old Ronan, had been fetched from County Limerick by her husband, Tommy Cavanagh. There had been little reluctance on her part to make away from the scurrilous misery of Ireland and join her husband in Talamh an Éisc. The only hint of reluctance was centred on the shameful expansion of her belly, an admission that she was with child, despite the fact that Tommy had been abroad in Talamh an Éisc for a time approaching three years, and one year without a visit home.

On that violent and punishing five-week voyage across the Atlantic, she had lost her only son. Even though it was stated that provisions had been made for a doctor to be on board, the doctor was inebriated on most accounts and could not be roused on others. A dearth of care was provided for the ailing Ronan. However, in a rare moment of sobriety, between waking and his regulation rum breakfast, the doctor had been reluctantly brought to the boy and had, upon sighting the pustules, in a fit of nerves and red-faced coughing, and with an eagerness to seek steadiness and escape, briskly pronounced, in a quavering voice, that the boy had come down with smallpox. Yes, smallpox, he repeated louder, grandly sweeping one arm back through the air, for the doctor, in his spare time, had devoted himself to the studies of an amateur thespian. With a lick of his lips and a rub of his bristly face, the doctor had then backed from the room, as though he were witnessing a horror of astonishing and unheard of proportion that had befallen the confines of the ship, and turned to flee in terror. A performance that did not fail to move the ship's populace, for the doctor's verdict had sent a general surge of panic throughout the bulk of the passengers and had, rather than drive men and women away from the young boy, drawn persons to
him in hopes of catching a mild case of the disease that would see them clear of being struck down by the more severe sort.

A number of frantic passengers stripped the boy of his clothes and blankets while – in a tremor of delirium and in the dim sway of lamplight – the child muttered a weak sing-song that resembled a nursery rhyme:

 

on rock,

on sea,

not you,

just me,

we sail,

we wait,

we fail…

 

and his mother, Rose, clutched the talisman bag she had worn around her neck with the dust of the boy's dried umbilical cord inside mingled with the hairs she had removed from his head.

No mercy in action as the passengers fought to wrap themselves in the dying boy's articles:

 

on rock,

on sea,

not you,

just me,

we sail,

we wait,

we fail

 

while others attempted to extract the boy's virus by wiping a cloth over the sores then cut themselves with blades or jagged bits of tin and rubbed the soiled cloth over their wounds. It was rumoured that this was a way of escaping the illness. Word had spread quickly of this practical remedy, yet, unbeknownst to the excited practitioners, in most cases it simply brought on a severe form of the disease that suffocated the victim.

Perhaps the most bizarre practice initiated by a few of the crew members, who had witnessed the undertaking in far-off lands, was the collecting of scabs from the boy's pustules that were dried and ground into powder. The powder was then inhaled in hopes of bringing on an inoculate's invincibility. This nightmarish behaviour was carried out in the presence of the afflicted boy, the sound of snorting and sniffing from a bench toward the dim corner. The passengers caring nothing for the pregnant Rose Cavanagh's sobbing protests while they hovered over Ronan's ruined body like ghouls in the shadow-pulling lamplight.

Yet when the boy died, having not survived the ordeal and thus being of no use as a preventative measure to the others, the passengers refused to sanction the standard procedure of packing the body in a crate of salt until docking; the boy was doused in vinegar and stuffed in a crate by one of the ship men, Cuz O'Malley, a tongueless one-eyed layabout who did as instructed and intuited these instructions – as was his primal training – by the mere pointing of a finger.

And, so, the boy's death became the sole piece of gossip that preoccupied all on board. That and the waiting on the others to perish became the gamble of prattle. It took no time for the pustules to spring from the newly sick, and the men – those still healthy and wishing to remain so – ambushed each infected male and briskly tossed them overboard, while the women were locked away together with their children to perish in the most dreadful and pitiful manner among themselves, in their own filth and within a cacophony of moans and wails and screeches that were rocked in the belly of the steady unrelenting ship. Any word uttered against this procedure – by husband or wife or child – would see the protester forever spied upon and shunned to the point of utter mistrust.

With the dead boy still on board, the healthy passengers – meant to land on foreign shores and not have themselves perish like the child – decided they should rid the ship of the boy. If ever there was a befitting representative of bad luck, the boy was it. A dead boy stuffed away in the bowels of the ship like a dead heart, the smothered scream of its beat propelling them forward across the black sea. Ill fortune at the very core. It was agreed wholeheartedly that the boy must be disposed of. Some insisted that the box be set ablaze and then released into the sea, the fire
required to burn off the distemper so it would not trail after the ship in its wake. A man from Cork insisted that the salt of the sea would punish any distemper out of existence. That would be suitable. Either way, the crate containing the boy was taken into possession of the crew and was stored upright, in a shallow room which contained nothing but contaminants and the natterings of rats that seemed to thrive in the void. Cuz O'Malley, the sole seaman who passed through this oily, rumbling corridor, would catch the splintering sounds of gnawing and the low fresh moaning of what might have been taken for a child, yet he would refuse to investigate. The ghost of that boy would be equally as contagious as the living person that breathed out poison, and if the vermin were feeding off the ghost then so much the better, for the ghost would be consumed and no longer of a haunting bother.