Blackstrap Hawco (23 page)

Tommy watched while what was thought to be the final occupant, Captain Jones, a retired officer from the Queen's Royal Navy, trod from the deck toward him.

The captain, upon sighting Rose's burning stare and then shifting his eyes to Tommy, showed no sign of faltering confidence. In fact, he seemed bolstered by what he was now destined to face, and hurried his step toward Tommy.

Once before Tommy, the captain professed: ‘Your son was a carrier. If it were not for his removal from my vessel, he might have infected the lot. Good thing that occurrence was stalled, for our sakes, as well as yours.' With this, Captain Jones tapped Tommy's chest with the white gloves he held in his hand and studied the fisherman's face with puckered lips. With eyes lowered, Tommy made a motion to speak, yet could find no spirit in him to challenge this educated man. The captain,
immune to the ire of Rose's stare, then turned abruptly to be greeted by his own wife and children, whom he embraced openly and with fondness.

Again, Tommy's eyes searched the abandoned vessel. All were gone, he thought. Was it true? All had left the ship. It might as well have carried not a single soul. But, no. While Rose and Elizabeth stood in silence and in wait, and the din of the departing carried on behind him, Tommy noticed movement upon the deck. A lone, diminutive form nearing the gangway. A figure that limped as though injured and watched toward his feet. A boy. Ronan.

Cuz O'Malley.

Rose had seen no sign of the mute man since that night when he had set blaze to her son's body, twenty-two days into the journey. He lumbered along, watching toward the planks of the wharf, as though lost in disgruntled thought, until he was stood directly before Tommy. Head bowed and body stinking of filth, Cuz cautiously put out both hands and held them near Tommy's shirt. There were two fingers missing on his right hand and a thumb severed from his left. The scarred and calloused fingers stirred, as though in want of touch, the grimy cuffs of his ill-fitted shirt extending near his knuckles. The two fingers and blunt thumb on Cuz's right hand slid nearer to rest on Tommy's shirtfront where the fingers tremored and patted, until Cuz raised his one eye and his grotesque frown was the entirety of his lower face and his sappy eye stared hungrily and yet with a savage peacefulness that brought tears to Tommy's eyes, for there was communion there in disgust.

With the sound of Rose growling low in her throat, Tommy wept openly, while his wife set her injurious stare on Cuz O'Malley until the cripple snatched hold of Elizabeth's hand and tried to walk off with her. Elizabeth, making a cry, leaned away and yanked her hand free, finding in her palm a folded note upon which was drawn a portrait of her brother, Ronan, the boy's face active in the telling of some urgent truth.

Cuz backed away and limped off to meet no one and go nowhere expected.

Alone as three, Tommy, Rose and Elizabeth Cavanagh studied the drawing, then pressed nearer and held on for dear life as they wept
together for the return of one. Between them, a hard rounded belly felt by the two.

Done clutching on to each other for the sake of mercy, forgiveness and misery, Tommy, Rose and Elizabeth separated, never to find such familial closeness again. In silence and despondency, they wandered toward the lone sea chest left on the wharf and carried it to the small open boat that would transport them from Harbour Grace to Bareneed.

Tommy sat toward the helm, drawing the oars back and forth with great strokes, while he stared away at the sea and the coast, then watched his living daughter, wondering why.

The land passed beside them, giant ragged cliffs with stunted spruce trees tucked into nooks and crannies. Tufts of grass sprouted here and there from dirt, bringing Ireland to Rose's mind. Here, however, the landscape appeared more medieval, desolate and scorched than that of her native home, which, under the troubled gaze of her husband and with the fresh gouge in her heart, she now wished she had never departed. Goats leaned to remain upright on the steep incline of a cliff, their hard hooves slipping with each nudge of movement, yet none of them plummeted into the ocean as Rose expected. She sat with the sea chest before her, her eyes set on the box that held all left of home. In addition to her own items of clothing, there were the one spare suit of clothing that Ronan had owned and the single dress belonging to Elizabeth. A dress that had been tailored by Elizabeth's grandmother, dead two years ago from a malignant madness that left her clawing the walls, the dress prepared for a crossing-over that the grandmother had years ago foretold.

The deep blue ocean was without ripple as the open boat sailed across its surface.

Tommy Cavanagh watched his daughter while he stroked the oars. His gaze held there, avoiding his wife's presence like the plague.

‘
Daid
?' asked Elizabeth in a voice tamed by Irish. ‘Why're ye staring at me face?'

Tommy gave no answer in reply, wondering on the sound of his daughter's words, spoken in the language of his homeland, a sound more foreign and unsavoury now transplanted here. He kept rowing and staring as long as his eyes could endure, a trick to pull away for the
explanation or comfort or damage that might be recognized in that young face.

‘What're ye staring at?' Elizabeth put in again, to which no reply was given, which made the child's intolerable obviousness of her own existence more explicit. Rose, hearing the child's voice rising up from the slat beside her, gave an enquiring look in that direction. Her eyes remained there, unable to help herself.

Adrift, thought Tommy.
Bheith ar fuaidreamh.

Elizabeth looked from her mother to her father. ‘
A Thiarna
!' said she. ‘What in da name o' God are ye staring at?'

Tommy Cavanagh rowed, the bow of the boat aimed toward the looming headland in the distance, behind which lay a small cove where the shacks of Bareneed were cheerlessly cloistered.

 

The quarters arranged for Rose and Elizabeth were Tommy's own, two rooms with an open stone hearth and hole cut in the ceiling for the ventilation of smoke. The beds were two heaps of swamp grass, rotted rags and boughs arranged in the far corners. Of this, or any other matter, Tommy never spoke. He merely met eyes with Elizabeth and nodded toward the beds which reeked of human offence.

The other room in the tilt was occupied by four small children, the second eldest being a girl of six who spoke not a word. There was no sign of a mother. The children were without clothes and picked and scratched at each other ceaselessly.

Tommy made no mention of them. Those children. He would leave them to themselves as he had for weeks, since the death of those who loved over them. Not so much an impoverished, pitiable presence now, as an infestation. His blood in none of them.

Rose had just unpacked her belongings from her chest and prepared the necessities of privacy, setting down on a narrow ledge fastened to the wall her soap and a comb she had saved from her mother, when the naked children were upon the two articles and made off with them, grunting and shivering and screaming as they chewed off bits of the soap, dropping the bar every few feet and leaving a trail of crumbs that the youngest ones squatted over and picked up between two tiny fingers to stare at and then gobble down. As a snatching and squawking group, they
moved toward and through the door before climbing into a small rotted boat outside another shack, its boards greyed by age to the point of black.

Tommy walked to the doorway and paused, as though thinking on something he might have forgotten or wished to have said, yet would not turn to face the room one final time. He put his cap on his head and strolled down over the valley toward the sea where there was work to be tended to, and then up over the headland where his small form could be seen climbing, grasping at bushes and newly sprouted spruce and rocks before reaching the top, where he stood, and then knelt on one knee, staring out, northeast, to sea.

The naked children returned without the soap or comb and were upon Rose at once, pushing her in through the doorway, touching her belly and pressing their faces there, listening or kissing or patting the mound. They squealed and bounced at the thought of something hidden from them, the youngest, barely able to walk, opening and shutting his hand over and over, and sucking on his bottom lip while making ‘ma, ma, ma' noises, while yet another bent and shoved her head up Rose's skirts.

Although she tried to accommodate them, Rose soon grew weary of their attention. Only one of them, the eldest, a boy, kept absolutely away from her. He was struck by some bone-twisting affliction that had not had its entire way with him. He leaned against the inside wall, picking at the moss that had been poked into the seams, his eyes searching elsewhere. His manner brought Rose's mother to mind. Occasionally, the boy watched her with a sideways leer that was both menacing and horribly needful. In the boy's growing expression of delight, Rose saw that his teeth were cracked and chipped so that he came to possess a monstrous smirk. Of course, she had seen this sort of child before, the wrongdoing of families too closely linked by blood to have that blood run purely away from itself. The boy took an interest in Elizabeth and went to her and clung on. Elizabeth tried to edge away from him, yet there was no doing so. He yelped and made a hissing sound like one of the cats that roamed freely in and out of the shack, so that Rose was forced to drive the twisted boy from the room.

That night, the naked children slept with Rose, but soon, one by one, made their way over to Elizabeth who shied away from them, finding
them frightening with their eyes watching her in the dark, and their fingers twirling her hair and mouths sucking on the strands. The eldest boy did not return, making Elizabeth thankful for that small mercy, at least, while Rose, awake as well, worried for her life with Tommy, who had not yet returned.

Elizabeth, unable to endure the children's persistent pawing, slid away, over to the straw, where she settled alongside her mother and kept watch over the huddle in the other corner. She wished for her home and her friends, until sleep easily took her, as it was wont to do with children, and the naked children returned to her long after midnight, doing what they chose with her in her sleep, until they had satisfied their curiosity and gravitated toward the bigger female body, Rose.

The next morning, while Rose was rising, carefully freeing herself from the gaggle of sleeping children, so as not to wake them and take the brunt of their ceaseless demands, a knock sounded on the door and a man in a suit, vest and wide-brimmed hat appeared in the opening. The man identified himself as ‘
Máistir
Lawton,' yet that appeared to be the full extent of his Irish. Rose expected no such visit and, so, was startled to see the man stood so vividly at the edge of the room.

‘Unfortunate news, I'm afraid,' said the master. ‘Your husband has been drowned. Fishermen discovered his body this morn.' The master pointed off toward the water. ‘It was from the headland that he plummeted to his death.'

Rose caught little of the meaning of the merchant's speech. He spoke in English, which she was worried to understand, and had avoided learning back in Limerick, despite Elizabeth's insistence and knowledge of it. It was only the word ‘husband' that made the sentiment carry through. She nodded and cast a glance at Elizabeth, who was not awake and might know the implication of the words.

‘You understand?'

Rose gave consideration to the master's face. She said: ‘I can't catch yer meaning,' in her own dialect, which was unintelligible to the master.

The master spoke again, his tone prompting her to give a simple nod, for this seemed the desired response.

With this, the master took an expressionless look around the room, and turned to leave the misery to the miserable.

Rose remained stood in the shack, ruminating on what had been said about Tommy.

In time, the woman from the nearest shack, whose name was Minnie, came to tell Rose the news. It was as anticipated and feared, for what might be expected of the trouble she had brought with her, the baby in her womb that she now cursed for causing such piteous and insufferable woe?

 

The bishop at sea, and a visit to Bareneed

(from the journals of Bishop Flax)

 

The Newfoundland Church ship was put into commission this year on the 20th of April, and on that evening was dispatched to Bareneed, in Conception Bay, for duties performed on behalf of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,
under which society I have had the honour to be a missionary in British North America nearly ten years.

It was under great difficulties that I had kept even the slightest diary of my journey; my ink would frequently be drunk by unbaptized children, in spite of all my precautions; my supply of paper was always necessarily scanty, and it occasionally altogether failed me, in districts where it would have been as reasonable to have expected a gas-lamp for my convenience at night, as a sheet of letter-paper by day. Had it not been for some boxes of paper, which had been dispersed along the shore from different wrecks, I might have failed entirely in procuring this convenience in some places where my application was successful.

The notes which I succeeded in keeping, under all these dis advantages, were, moreover, very slight; they were intended merely to furnish me with brief particulars of dates and journeys, and duties performed.

The evening of the 20th of April, we bore against a head-wind through the night, and by dawn managed to reach Brigus, south of Bareneed in Conception Bay.

Here we saw the wreck of the
Royal Nigger
, a fine vessel of the Messrs. Newman's, which had run ashore at this place on her way to St. John's, about Christmas last, and which, I regret to say, the people, instead of protecting as they might have done for its owners, had been unprincipled enough to plunder and break up.