Blackstrap Hawco (40 page)

Despite the suspicions of evil infestation, the infant was permitted burial, without the rite of holy sacrament, behind the cemetery beside the damned remains of Tommy Cavanagh. For a full day, the muddled screeching could be heard by wanderers strolling near the cemetery, the sense of suppressed and suffocated rage shivering the ground beneath their feet, and, again, the villagers were troubled by a predicament that cried out, yet again, for more pervasive action. On the second day, however, following Rose's dream of the baby clawing through the ground to gnaw at her husband, Tommy's rotting body, the baby was silenced. It was this flesh that made the screeching stop, this eating, it was said.

Rose was shunned by the other women and children. Even the naked children, who she had blindly and despondently taken for her own, avoided her, and ran off to occupy another room in one of the tilts where a place was made for them, as was the welcoming tradition. It was only the twisted boy, a body which remained nameless in its deformity, who kept pressed against the wall, watching what might happen with the
changing form of the woman who was growing to the point of bursting.

With Rose's husband and daughter gone and with the village unwilling to provide nourishment for her, her body wasted away, her belly alone continuing to grow. Her pregnancy, while anticipated with both dread and starving, hysterical curiosity, arrived at the end of its nine-month expectancy, yet there was no birth. Rose had taken to her bough bed and was tended to by the twisted boy who lingered near, watching Rose's face and fiercely chattering in an unintelligible language about some personal menace that existed in a land private to him. On some nights, the twisted boy slept by Rose's side, thickly curled up on the floor with limbs cast off at all angles. Other nights, he went no one knew where, hobbling about across the fields and into the wilderness, returning with murdered things, snuffed out of existence by his carnivorous leer alone, to feed the woman with the bauble belly.

In the middle of the tenth month, the sense of fullness turned excruciating. Rose's back ached so terribly that the roots of her teeth felt as though they were scratching, prying, gouging deeper into her unhinging jawbone. She sweated continuously and was fed food collected by the twisted boy whom Rose could not bear to look upon. Any face was painful to watch. The mere movements of her eyes were enough to make her plea with the Creator for mercy. She ate only what was required, for the food made her feel ill, poisoned, its taste akin to nothing she had ever encountered.

The twisted boy came and went, chattering and groaning, and nodding while he rubbed herbs and spices on Rose's forehead in the sign of a broken, one-winged cross.

On her eleventh month of pregnancy, Rose's skin turned green, and her fingernails fell off. The roots of her hair grew out grey and she urinated continuously without moving, her back punishing her with gruelling pain. Her face had shrunken to such a degree that she was unrecognizable as herself or any other form, and her arms wasted away to the thinness of twigs. In time, her hair collapsed from her skull as she seemed to age a decade a month.

The twisted boy continued with his vigil, polishing the pink glowing belly with a lotion made from spit and all manners of human and
wilderness excretion. It was said to be fit to drive the baby out. Hands lifted beneath flesh and knees and elbows stirred. There was constant movement, as though there was not a baby inside Rose, but an entirety of civilization, churning and moving and evolving from the state of her woe into a less worrisome state of something else entirely.

The twisted boy touched the hard, shifting limbs, fastened under skin, trying to clutch hold of them, and laughed in a guttural frenzy of excitement that made him straighten, loom larger and more erect, and then shrink back to his previous position of contortion when the final horsy hiccups of laughter were swallowed down his throat.

 

When the four-master docked at the Job Brothers wharf in St. John's, a crowd was gathered to greet the vessel. There seemed to be much fuss brewing, for a murmur rose up at the confounding sight of the unanticipated four-master. Store owners and fishmongers stood in wait, speculating and pointing.

From the deck, Patrick watched the crowd

 

with the great black skeletal backdrop

of the charred city

still warmly radiating behind those onlookers,

who stared seaward,

as though we might be a sight stranger

than the gloomy bluster they near perished in.

 

Most were overcome with the occasional fit of wheezing or coughing, while others shifted on their feet, for the ground still breathed heat beneath their leather soles. Up and down the line of carriages, horses sneezed, and shook their heads, jangling their fittings. Regardless of the manner of the merchants' attire or the height or weight of their physique, there was one thing they all had in common: eyes trained on the line of men and women that moved down the gangplank, wondering which would be their labourers and hoping for the most strapping or becoming of the lot.

Other men were present, in their soiled Sunday best with hats in hand, to meet their wives and children whose new-found presence
before them would make their days a percentage more bearable. There was much celebration, despite the harsh linger of smoke that collected soot in their nostrils and lungs.

Patrick stood on the dock in uncertainty, wishing he might have a draught from his flask, but a show of that sort might prejudice him in the eyes of his employer who, no doubt, lingered near. Bodies brushed by him, taking up with their escorts. He noticed Mary Snow being met by a tall broad man who roughly took her arm and led her away. Patrick checked around for Ferrol, but could catch no sight of him.

While the labourers continued to disembark, Ferrol made his way down the plank, treading with his meaty arms wrapped around a barrel where he plunked it beside Patrick to the chuckles, outright cheers and eventual applause of the passengers and crew.

‘Rum fer all,' he shouted, the merchants understanding the word rum, for it was the exact equivalent in English. The men turned back for the boat, as though having forgotten their bounty, and rolled or shimmied barrels down the plank, one for each labourer, although some went back for a second, as there was a fortune of them, no doubt recently looted from a trading ship by the American pirates.

A man toward the front of the crowd began shouting for a spell of quiet, and then the names of the men were loudly and clearly spoken, one by one, putting an end to their merriment and congratulatory remarks. Each singled-out man stepped forward, on legs unaccustomed to the steadiness of land, and was met by a merchant's servant on foot or a merchant himself, who, after casting his eyes over the shape and size of the body before him, merely turned, expecting the Irishman to follow on his heels. The rum barrels were left where they sat, the merchants unwilling to accept what they suspected to be ill-gotten cargo taken on as baggage.

When Patrick's name was shouted, he reluctantly stepped forward. For the fortification of bravery, he had gone a touch overboard in his consumption of rum as they neared shore. A tall, slim man dressed in a long coat and a bowler hat, and with a once-white handkerchief to his mouth, glanced him up and down.

‘Patrick Lambly,' said the merchant, lowering the handkerchief only briefly to confirm the allocation.

 

It were me name 'fore da voyage,

spoke he in broken Irish,

yet I've adopted anudder now.

Call me Prince Patrick if ye wish

son o' da great king Ferrol.

 

He pointed a wavering arm back to where Ferrol was unloading the barrels and stacking them on the wharf beside the others. Wiping his hands together, Ferrol took a suspicious glance over the Irishmen being committed to their masters. With a condemning scoff, he then turned and stomped back up the plank.

The merchant shook his head. ‘Speak English. And plainly, not in song.'

Patrick nodded, understanding the word English. He winked at the merchant and gestured to the barrels by his side. ‘These'll need escorting. The liddle ones.'

The merchant, done with paying the ship's master, shook his head. ‘I won't have any of that. Come.' In haste, he turned toward the carriages and strode off, only glancing back when he reached his vehicle to see Patrick still stood there, watching down at the barrel with a look of dour and calamitous uncertainty

 

for the ruination o'

me bounteous expectations

for the kindest of loves cradled

within those curved staves

 

and waving his arm at the barrels, he bade them farewell, going so far as to devoutly blow them a kiss and pledge his eternal commitment and adoration.

 

Soon, the screeching from Rose matched that of her perished infant and sacrificed daughter, Elizabeth. Yet rather than drive the birds and animals from the wood, Rose's cry appeared to beckon to them, for their numbers increased as they arrived in abundance. The traps and snares were filled each day, not one life-taking hole left unstuffed, and
the goat and cow and chickens in the yards produced offspring in startlingly unnatural numbers, the screech seemingly inciting them toward rampant copulation.

The villagers, rather than suspect Rose's cry to be the foreshadowing or laying down of a curse, and riding on the changing tide, as the hordes were eventually wont to do, took the screech for a sign of prosperity and celebrated their new-found gift. ‘T'anks be ta da Lard. T'anks be ta Awmighty God,' could be heard muttered extensively through the village when thoughts of the fresh extravagance disburdened a resident.

Animals were brought on ropes to the doorway of Rose's shack to hear the screech and then were led away, back to their yards or stalls where cow and goat might give birth to offspring numbered as high as four or five at once. The additional two pregnant women in Bareneed were coaxed near to the withered and screeching form with the shining distended belly, to touch the glistening orb that had a stench of mucous and seed filth.

The twisted boy officiated over the proceedings, speaking in his unintelligible language and grunting this way and that while the villagers commiserated with him about his day and night duty, or praised him to the high heavens for being party to the miracle of the screech.

The crows that had once alighted on the roof of the shack in staggering numbers, their claws scraping for a grip on the crowded surface that was a moving, living feathered cloak of black, were driven off by robins and finches and other birds of previously unseen shapes and colours that were diverted from their migratory paths by the gorgeous resound of the life-giving screech.

At night, fires were built outside the shack and instruments were tuned to the pitch of the screech. The music derived from the noise was chaotic and barbarous and tipped the singing and drinking beyond the celebration of life toward its murderous undercurrent that knew of the truthful need of its own perishing. Men and women were murdered at the edge of the woods to make room for new life. A war had come about, whereby animals multiplied fiercely in the ravage of attack while the people became removed from one another.

Jealousy of wealth, previously unknown to the residents of Bareneed, sprang up as ships arrived to load the copious numbers of livestock and
pelts. From the credits written down by the merchant, lumber and windows were purchased from the merchant's mill, and each tilt was built onto, receiving a second storey, which gave the tilts the look of proper houses, although they remained less than that.

Above all, the merchants prospered, buying the goods for the cheapest price and reselling at a commendable profit to other merchants along the coast. It was a marvel for all to see, and ships arrived so that those on board might watch up at the sky at the miracle of birds and the meadows and valleys that were overrun by rabbits, partridge, moose and fox. They watched in marvellous disbelief yet would not set foot on shore for fear of having the screech enter them too deeply.

While the people of Bareneed towered among the animals, they were little different in their intentions. When not hidden away in bush, house or barn, clutched together in the breakneck throes of coupling, they stood in the fields with their hands jammed down their trousers or up their skirts, then over their ears, waving at the ships for moments at a time and grinning at the money-giving visitors who had come to witness the lusty bounty bestowed upon them by the screech.

 

The wood was milled to the north of St. John's and carried to the merchant centre by horse and carriage. Other materials were offloaded from ships docked from Boston and Halifax. The majority of the reconstruction was financed by funds received from Governor Harvey's appeal for relief abroad. The call of distress was briskly answered by Great Britain, the United States and the British North American colonies. The Peel Government, although in the throes of dissolution, committed £5,000, with an additional £25,000 pledged by the incoming government. At once, the Nova Scotian government delivered £1,000, while the citizens of Halifax collected £1,500 to be set toward the purchase of provisions. The total amount of donations reached approximately £41,000.

With these large amounts of capital arriving daily, Patrick was often in the company of labourers who speculated on the most proficient means of making off with portions of those funds.
Naw all of it
, the workers would jest,
I'd be satisfied wid jus' a wee bit,
while rubbing their thumbs and forefingers together. Conversations were laughed over in the
public houses, with nothing coming of it, other than a sorry head in the morning and the grumbling or blearily silent return to raising walls.

Although this was not the work expected by Patrick – he had assumed it would be in the netting or curing of cod – he fancied the act of building. From it, something substantial, something created, might be walked away from at the end of the day. In the outdoors, working among men, while the
Sassenach
supervisor wandered about inspecting the progress, the occasional rum nip was passed secretly between the men as a remedy to the back-breaking boredom of hammering. With the alcohol alighting their senses, the men spoke openly of their elaborate adventures at sea and at home in their villages, yet confessed there were meagre stories to be had in a town of this size, only ceaseless work and the foolish yarns of urban exploits or the grand tales of currency passed back and forth between the merchants who visited to watch the erection of their new premises. The men laboured for weeks on end, sleeping only four or five hours each night.