Blackstrap Hawco (41 page)

During these months of reconstruction, Patrick learned the farcical story of the great fire from the workers who had been present at the disaster. It was said that the fire was started by an overturned glue pot in the shop of a cabinet maker on George Street. The wooden frame of the shop went ablaze and the adjoining tenements were quickly engulfed. At once, the fire alarm was sounded, yet it took near half an hour for the fire engines to arrive at the scene. By this time, an entire block was spouting flames while the firemen moved about in fits of inaction for they were prevented from proceeding with their duties for want of water.

The story was told in varying tones of drama and comedy, for the event was rife with ineptitude.

Governor Harvey, in an attempt to create a gap that might dam the further spread of the fire, had ordered a derelict house on the south side of Water Street to be blown up with gunpowder. The resulting explosion, rather than exercising any sort of relief, only further exacerbated the situation by sending chunks of glowing, fiery timber of varying sizes for blocks in all directions, which rained down, most notably, on several churches and the Roman Catholic school.

‘Dis be da sort o' moronic leadership we be afforded,' one fellow
labourer griped. ‘Dis miserable colony be run by da usual lot of
Sassenach
crooks 'n 'alfwits.'

It was said that over half of the total population of 30,000 had been left homeless and this was evidenced by the roaming men, women and children who stood in the streets staring at the construction with tormented eyes, or wandered in a ravaged state of sleeplessness and ceaseless annoyance and disquiet.

It was months before the scent of greasy soot would dissipate. And each time that Patrick Lambly thought of St. John's, after he had fled the place, he would recall the town as a grim, smouldering smear of black that would not leave the skin, no matter how often the hands were washed. The faces always with a smudge or the blackness passed from hand to hand during the clasp of hands in friendly meeting. There was no way to be ever clean of it.

He had been under his master's servitude for near six months, rebuilding the stone walls of the Anglican church on Church Hill, when word reached him that Mary Snow, the woman who had travelled with them aboard the
Venus
and then the
American Pride
, had been convicted of murdering her husband, James Snow, of Port de Grave. According to rumour, she was to be hanged from the drop erected at the west end of the courthouse. At once, Patrick thought to tell Ferrol of the occasion. What might Ferrol think of such a thing, and what might the man do in reaction to this, obviously, unjust deed? Yet Ferrol had been a mystery to Patrick for months, disappearing for long stretches without explanation or penalty, it seemed, only to arrive back at work when it suited him.

The nip of winter was in the air and the stone walls they had been labouring over were now erected, leaving Patrick and the crew to nail up the inner wooden walls. In the cold, it became difficult to swing a hammer steadily for extended periods without having the tool catapult from the half-numb hand to deliver an unsuspected blow to some nearby innocent. Labourers steadily bore the marks of such injuries on their faces and bodies. The cold was beginning to grow unbearable and men soon lost fingers and toes to frostbite, despite the fire barrels that were kept lit within the structures.

So it was with relief that the men were given leisure time to witness
the hanging of Mary Snow, a rarity in the colony. Women were infrequently hanged, and this one, who was with child, had come near to being pardoned due to her delicate condition. However, in the end, it was only the scheduled whipping which was stayed. A tactic that seemed overly harsh, as the lash might have been seen to injure the unborn child should the lash inadvertently strike the belly.

A huge crowd had congregated around the grounds of the stone courthouse, the sight of the erected gallows causing a stare of famished speculation among those gathered in wait. The mass of people was so extensive that Patrick suspected that every resident of the town was present to witness the event. There were men of high office in tailored suits and coats and ruddy-faced labourers in patched cast-offs. Women in flowery hats and furs were flanked by servants and nannies who tended to the children who reached with their arms and demanded to be lifted for a more panoramic view. The homeless were everywhere, like grey blots amid blots of glorious colour. Three boys in floppy hats and shabby clothes, worn threadbare at the knees and elbows, clung to the iron fence that marked the property of the church Patrick had been labouring over. They clutched stones in their fists and whistled, trying to scale the bars to hang from the top vertical rail. The volume of conversation rose steadily, the ruckus charged with the taint of grim conjecture. Gradually, the buzz fell to silence as though a wave of deadness had wormed its way through the crowd.

Mary Snow, a small figure in the distance, appeared on the bare stage of the gallows. She was dressed in a black crêpe gown with jet beads fastened up the front. The gown, which neatly obscured the bulge of her belly, had been donated by one of the noted ladies of position in the city. There had been many offers of such gowns and yet Lady Bowering had been chosen as the lucky donator, having been more soundly connected with officials in the government.

Mary Snow stood upon the stage and allowed her hands to be bound behind her back by the executioner. The sound of her remote weeping carried out over the crowd, with Patrick, at such a distance, catching only the occasional high disquieting pitch of it. She was weeping weakly, the roll and ebb of the sound evident in the crisp air. Puffs of breath issued from her mouth, for her breath was warmer than most, although
as the entertainment carried on, Patrick noticed the thickening of the puffs of breath escaping each and every mouth.

Patrick expected a hood to be placed over the woman's face, as was the procedure for men who were hanged, yet this courtesy was not afforded the woman. She was Irish, after all, thought Patrick, and he felt his chest tighten with emotion at the thought of her words spoken to him after one of his poetic rants along the journey before she was savaged by the American soldiers: ‘Ye 'av a fine tongue fer verse.' Hearing those words in his mind, he felt impelled to press through the crowd to free the woman. Yet she had murdered her husband, hadn't she? Wasn't she due severe treatment? Or had her husband brought it on himself? He recalled how Mary Snow had been taken away by a large man on the dock. Had that man been her husband? Either way, it was some sort of puzzling, convoluted lover's tale. Another man had been involved, who had been hung in secrecy a month or more ago. A bald-headed man, according to description, who laughed outright as the noose was opened around his neck. Patrick took a swig from his flask and cast a glance to the side, seeing Ferrol there, having appeared out of nowhere. Patrick offered the flask to Ferrol, who, without removing his eyes from the gallows ahead, gave a slight shake of his head and raised a stern hand. So unlike him to deny himself a bit of morning libation.

Overhead, a stone arced through the air and clattered and rolled against the wood while one of the boys laughed in mockery. Ferrol searched toward the source. A few others in the crowd, men and women, chuckled at the exactness of the aim. Another boy hurled a stone and a dull crack was heard, as it had struck Mary Snow on the skull, her head tilting slightly, her face marked by a look of dumb bewilderment. This sound brought forth greater laughter,

 

of the sort lurking to rupture and burst forth

when the brutal ugliness of the world

was cast in humour, as was not often enough the case.

 

‘Dis be da worse sort o' offence,' Patrick quietly whispered, yet was shushed by a woman behind him who poked him in the back with the tip of her widow's parasol.

‘Faaaack,' said Ferrol in agreement.

Patrick drank more as the noose was opened and loosely placed over Mary Snow's head. With a tug, it was fitted snugly to her pale throat. Now, as realization hugged her neck, her weeping turned to open tears and cries for mercy, begging for the sparing of her unborn child. The child, thought Patrick, the prodigy of one of those dead Americans. At the sound of this plea, Ferrol made a step forward yet was held back by the tightly packed crowd, his eyes trained on the woman, as though his stare alone might forestall the tragedy.

Another stone clattered on the wooden staging. This time, there was a greater ripple of amusement, while Ferrol thrust deeper into the seemingly impenetrable mass, not caring who he might jostle aside.

Ears ringing in expectation, Patrick took another drink and turned away. He heard a prayer being recited by a derelict old man with shut eyes, who Patrick noticed in passing, and then the trap door opened and the hush of the crowd became its own dead-still, living entity swarming to hide in the heart and mind of each living person.

An instant of regrettable exclamation that held him from within and without. The pull of the crowd's breaths united as one as though sucked into a furnace of hell where their thoughts now delivered them. And yet, in a single moment, they were relieved, for they had committed not one wrong deed. It was the woman, after all, who had taken the life of a man, the woman who they would fear no more, the woman who, it was said, held a bastard child in her belly.

A lone voice then sounded, issuing from above his head, so that he looked to see a man standing on a box and calling out into the crowd: ‘In the presence of a multitude its comparative loneliness chills the heart. Hear this. The value accompaniments are forgotten in the ideal grandeur which gathers round the scaffold on which the last penalty of the offended justice is endured. We are alone here this day. Alone in multitude.'

The voice continued as Patrick, in a state of blur and distraction, paused at a shop up the road and knew not at what he was staring, until his eyes focused and he saw a china doll displayed in the window, its head on an inquisitive angle, its skin white, its eyes watching him.
What are ye saying ta me
? Patrick asked. He drank from the flask and felt dire woe punish him with a force akin to the assemblance of his own cursed
birth and cursed death, an obliteration, a mastication, an erasure. A poem made of this as witnessed in his father's and mother's tormented eyes.

He finished the flask and, with hands shoved deep into his pockets and head hunched as though repelled by the clarity of the vivid air, he trod off under the persistently blackening gloom of self-recrimination.

A crust of speckled white, a cackling hag and a three-handed infant

The animals that flocked to Bareneed wreaked havoc upon the lands, chewing and trampling the yards to muck. The birds that filled the sky, as their own winged, ever-present colony, drifted inches apart, wingtip to wingtip, without collision, and shat upon everything and anyone who ventured out of doors. It amounted to an infestation of life. The plague of defecation carried illness throughout much of the settlement and, by causing upset to the bowel, drained the life from the weak. In the years to come, the episode was spoken of, not without a generous heaping of humour, as the Reign of Shit, a play on words that referred to the reigning merchant, Master Lawton, who had had the unfortunate luck of being born with a number of textured moles on his face.

As the sky was blackened by the ever-present squall of winged creatures from all corners of all continents, the sun was blocked and the stars masked. To the great fortune of the farmers, what remained of the harvest, that which was not eaten by the marauding gangs of wildlife, was soon due and so the requirement of sunlight mattered less and less. However, the fertilizer, while suspected of aiding the crops, soon wilted them, burning the stalks from any vegetable in root. There were burials each and every week until only a handful of residents remained, many having fled to safer locales, while others stood steadfast, professing in their mother tongue that they would not be driven from their patch of land. It would not be Ireland all over again. Not here in this new-found land that had become the perishing hope of many.

The coming cold was longed for, as the remaining residents prayed that the chill might drive the animals off to burrows and birds to warmer
climes. Yet the creatures, rather than bounding off to the forests, dug their ways into abandoned and occupied houses where they sat, alert and watching, as though not only kept from sleep by the screech but appointed its sentinel.

While some accepted the animals into their homes, particularly the fox and rabbits, as it was believed that the murder of such creatures under a person's roof would bring woeful luck upon the household, others smashed the creatures to pulp wherever they sat.

In time, the remaining residents no longer heard the screech as it became part of the natural world, a pitch that all other sounds were judged against, its own uniform silence of sorts.

However, on the thirteenth month of Rose's pregnancy, the residents of Bareneed, growing weary of the animal overpopulation and the continuous need for slaughter, professed that it was the life-giving shrieking itself that had dammed forever Rose's ability to give birth. If the screech itself could not be stopped, then the creations that came from it should be struck down by whatever means possible.

Birds were shot from the air until all munitions were expended. Boys built slingshots from the limbs of trees and, with heads turned blindly away, fired rocks, then checked to see what they had felled. There was grease and fat glistening on every set of lips, meat stuck between every set of teeth, and feathers stuffed in every homemade mattress and pillow.

Yet the sound, no longer its tame, natural self as dead creatures filled the fields, rang to shrillness, varying in tone and oscillating higher, toward insufferable pitch, then lower to a bone-rattling hum. The locals, at the end of their tethers, now turned to Bishop Flax, who, upon returning from his reverential voyage up the coast, was baffled by the turn of events, and proclaimed that the screech, rather than being the product of agony, was, in fact, sprouted from a font of womanly bliss procured from the increased duration of this miraculous pregnancy. He sent a letter by boat to St. John's, summoning the finest doctor to Bareneed to officiate over the imminent sacred event.