Blackstrap Hawco (46 page)

Every adult from the community attended. People from areas around Cutland Junction. They arrived from Brigus. Bareneed. Port de Grave. Mourners travelled over from Cupids. From as far away as St. John's and Carbonear. Others flew in. Relatives who people barely knew. Who believed they should be there out of obligation or necessity.

The Hawco house was packed with visitors. Women fussing at a table where all sorts of food was laid out. There in glass and plastic bowls. Turkeys and hams and slabs of roast beef. Dainty sandwiches with the crusts trimmed. Desserts of every sort. The cellophane peeled off the tops.

The old people were escorted on the arms of their sons and daughters. They stood there to look at the body. Expecting what they saw. Yes, that's her, they said. Others silent or tutting to themselves. Visitors telling some stranger who they were. Explaining where they came from. Related to this one or that one. The son of so and so. And then a string of other names from other lands. One attached to another. Leading to Emily Hawco in a coffin.

Everyone needing one final look. Out of respect. Or to tell others they were there. What she looked like. What Emily Hawco was done up like. Who did her face? A lovely job. Right like herself. You wouldn't even know she was dead. The way her fingernails were painted so perfectly. Not a chip out of them. The rosary beads wrapped around her fingers just so. The coffin was second-rate though. And there was a sparseness of flowers. A pity when someone like that's dead and there aren't enough flowers.

Jacob was seated by the coffin. He looked up and took the hands offered him. Watched the faces with fragile hope. Tried to remember what each person meant to him. He saw the face back in Bareneed. Emily there. Hanging clothes from the line. Pregnant. Her hair in the breeze. Turning to look out over the water toward Bell Isle. He explained to everyone how Emily would still be living if they had not moved. The pastureland of Bareneed. Old houses boarded up. His eyes reflecting that. Other houses moved. The collapsed rock foundations remaining as a sign of what once was. Emily buried in the frame of one foundation. That's where she should be buried, he said. This place killed her.

‘It's all over now,' he told them. His hand with a bit of a tremble. Older than his years. ‘T'were a good life, dough.'

‘She died in her health,' one woman sighed.

Jacob Hawco had bought the most inexpensive casket. Claiming that she was being buried in it. Not displayed for the rest of all eternity. Not in a showroom. And that there'd be nothing left of it soon enough. Once it was in the ground. And the bugs had a go at it. Some thought his comments crude. And he questioned himself on them after they were spoken. Wondering why he had gone so far as to say such things. He said this aloud. To others later. To Blackstrap. Not knowing if he was speaking or thinking.

Blackstrap had offered to pay for a better casket. One that cost more. Bigger handles. Shinier fixtures. His money from working on the mainland. Up along in Toronto.

‘No need o' dat,' Jacob had said.

‘He ain't dealing well widt it,' one elderly woman whispered to another. ‘And where's Blackstrap?' said another. ‘Where's dat only son of deirs? Junior and Ruth both gone, bless their souls, only Blackstrap. Dey drove 'er to 'er grave. Dose dead children of 'ers. A mortal shame.'

‘Out getting drunk probably,' said another. ‘Dat Blackstrap Hawco, if I knows him.' Making sounds of shame. ‘Naw,' said another. ‘He's at da cemetery in Bareneed. Russell saw 'im on da way up frum da wharf.' ‘Doing what?' asked one. ‘You wouldn't believe it if I told ya.' ‘Wha'?' ‘I'll tell ya dis much, he's dig'n.'

 

December 3, 1984 Union Carbide poison gas emission in Bhopal, India kills 2,000

December 3, 1984 Wisconsin sees oldest groom, Harry Stevens, 103, wed Thelma Lucas, 83

December 5, 1984 10 Kanaken killed by French machete-wielding colonies in New Caledonia

December 6, 1984 2nd hostage killed by hijackers aboard Kuwaiti jetliner

December 8, 1984
Saturday Night Live
tolerates Ringo Starr

December 9, 1984 Mariel Hemingway marries Stephen Crisman in fit of inner serenity

December 10, 1984 Superman discovers first planet outside our solar system

December 11, 1984
Doug Henning and His World
opens with
Revenge of the Nerds

December 11, 1984 Colonel Maawiya Ould Sid'ahmed Taya dazzles relatives with Mauritania military coup

December 13, 1984 1st stroke suffered by artificial-heart recipient William Schroeder

December 14, 1984
Monday Night Football
punts Howard Cosell

December 15, 1984
Vega 1
launched by USSR for covert summit with Halley's Comet

December 18, 1984 Sweden beats USA at 73rd Davis Cup in Gothenburg

December 19, 1984 Release of
Pumping Iron, II
, film on female bodybuilders

December 19, 1984 Wayne Gretzky, 23, youngest pinball champion to score 1,000,000,000 points

December 20, 1984 33 unheard-of Bach keyboard compositions excavated in Yale library

December 22, 1984 4 black muggers shot on New York City subway by Bernhard ‘Don't Bug Me' Goetz

December 22, 1984 ‘Like a Virgin' by Madonna hits #1 for 6 minutes, then feels ‘used'

December 28, 1984 11,700-year-old creosote bush auctioned at Sotheby's

December 28, 1984 Sam Peckinpah, director, dies of one hell of a fucking adrenalin rush at 59

December 28, 1984 28-year-run of TV soap
Edge of Night
finally bridges daylight

December 29, 1984 3 escaped convicts take Carole and Syd hostage

December 31, 1984 Car crash claims arm of Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen

December 31, 1984 Quitting UNESCO, US cites winding down of education, science and culture at home

 

(
January, 1985
)

Emily's death breathed wasted life into Jacob. He thought of her at all times: the simple passing moments they had spent together, the ease of their lives in the presence of the other. Each recollection more vivid than
the reality of the moment. He dreamt of her and woke smiling with forgetfulness, the sheets beside him unoccupied, the weak frustration congealing in his bones. Dead and no longer with him, she grew exact and full-blooded. He often feared sleep. Other times, he longed for it to never end. He wondered how long he had been sleeping and rose from bed suspecting it might have been weeks, months or years.

Blackstrap, back in Cutland Junction for the funeral, had told Jacob that he planned to stay home, to not return to Toronto, saying he had enough weeks for his stamps. He would collect U.I. if it came to that.

Where Jacob once thought,
No bloody U.I. cum'n inta dis house
, he would say nothing to discourage his son. Blackstrap near now at whatever cost.

With Blackstrap to drive him around, Jacob began collecting items from other communities. Old furniture tossed out to accommodate newer pieces. Washstands, bureaus and sideboards that needed fixing up. He cluttered up his living room with them, wanting to fill up the house, to squat himself in tight, or force himself out.

It was while carrying a green sideboard in the front door that the phone rang. He left it alone but it kept ringing. The sideboard had been salvaged from Shearstown Line. It belonged to a Church of England minister back in the 1800s. Most of the old houses were being torn down on the Line. New bungalows going up everywhere.

The telephone kept ringing, drilling into his nerves. Finally, he stomped toward it and grabbed it up.

‘'Ello?'

‘Hello, may I speak with Emily Hawco, please?' A man with a British accent that brought Emily's father to mind. But it couldn't be him. He was dead.

‘No.'

‘Is she not home?'

‘No.'

‘When would be a good time to call?'

‘Never.'

There was a silence, and Jacob thought to hang up.

‘Could you pass along a message?'

‘No.'

‘It's just that she's due on the Arctic Excursion '85 and we haven't yet received the final instalment. We can only hold her place for a few more days. The tour commences in two weeks.'

‘Tour?'

‘The Arctic Tour. I'm sorry, would you mind having her call Mr. Norman? She has my number on the literature she's received.'

Jacob hung up. The Arctic. Who was trying to sell them the Arctic? Some shyster. If the fellow called back again, he'd give him an earful.

 

In the days that followed, Jacob painted every room, but left his bedroom the shade of pink Emily had chosen. The books on the shelves remained untouched. He cleaned the room daily, the dresser top uncluttered with only a few of Emily's bottles and jars and the crocheted doilies and the grey rosary beads with swirls of white, like glassy marble that belonged to his mother. The room held her smell. It was a medium-sized room with much clear space. He sat on the edge of the bed with his palms placed flat above his knees and looked around, thinking of her body in that space, moving through it as she dressed.

Then he stood and went out into the hallway, immediately having to turn sideways to fit past the old armoire pushed up against the wall, and next to that a pine washstand just like the one they had used down in Bareneed. In fact, it might even have been from his house, left behind for newer furniture. He moved out into the kitchen with its groupings of long, thick-glassed cola bottles and blue bottles on the counter, and the two tables, one on either side of the room. Jacob opened the cupboard door for a tea bag and the bag of flour fell out with a thump and spilled everywhere across the counter. A vast plain of white without a mark in it.

Tiny footprints soon seen there. Whose? A tread toward what?

His knees jittered at the smell of fresh-baked bread. It fed his nostrils from nowhere and his knees went weaker. His hand against the flour-covered counter. His head bowed. Eyes open, he stared at the field of white that went on for eternity. Then up at the bread box on the counter. The silver box that showed a warped reflection of his knuckles. The image of Emily stood behind him.

His footprints in that field of frozen white with what trailing after him?

Emily?

‘I have to bake,' she said.

‘Why?…Why, Em'ly?'

‘We have to eat.'

 

(Summer, 1986)

Jacob remembered the time he was stuck on the trapline with a broken leg. He had been removing the snare wire from around the neck of a woman from Nicaragua. And his foot had slipped through the snow. He had fallen. On his back, he had seen the white falling from the boughs of an evergreen. The white plume thickening in the sky. A trail following the
Challenger
's explosion. Thirty seconds following lift-off. He had dragged himself along the trapline, back to the lean-to where he would set his leg to mend. In the lean-to, made from evergreen boughs, toward the back, he had stored the $30 million worth of weapons that had been secretly sold to Iran. The money from the sale had been given to the Contras. Lucky for him, he had managed to pull through. If it weren't for the cases of Coca-Cola and Frito Lay potato chips he would have been a goner.

 

(Winter, 1986 )

Jacob looked at the baby. He was unshaven. There were stains on his shirt. His fingers were yellowed with nicotine. The glint of humour had faded from his eyes. They were sad and wrinkled downward at the corners. He had been beset upon.

The sight of the baby made his head tremble. He watched its face. Then he looked at Patsy who was holding the baby. Ruth. All grown up.

Jacob stared at the baby. Shook his head.

‘Wha'?' he said, not seeming to get the meaning. He checked Blackstrap as if for explanation.

Blackstrap said nothing.

The baby's name: Junior. He died.

Jacob turned away and set his hand on an old washstand. Pushed up against a wooden headboard in the corner by the window. ‘I got dis
from an ol' barn down 'n Bareneed,' he said. His eyes went to the baby.

Not mine.

Patsy stood there. Blackstrap stood there. He's not mine. I know he's not mine. I knew it all along. The baby in Patsy's arms. That baby, again.

The baby began to fuss and Patsy left the room. Wandered into the kitchen.

‘Is dat Junior?' Jacob asked in a whisper when Patsy was gone.

‘Jacob,' said Blackstrap. ‘That's what we named 'im.'

‘Junior,' Jacob said, turning to look out the window. ‘Junior ta some'un.'

The smell of fresh-baked bread.

Emily in the window. Turned to smile at him.

God help me.

 

(?)

Dere were a man name 'a Brent Linegar. He worked for the merchant. He were a drinker, like a fish. Dirty collar done up and dirty tie straight and knotted proper. He wore white gloves. Shined his shoes even dough da sides were practically out of 'em.

He would finish up widt his work. I'd see 'im keeping books, widt his pencil, every number perfect. He'd be done 'n 'e'd go off ta 'av a drink. All days all night, he'd wander off 'ome, hardly a stagger to 'im, but 'e never knew where he were, 'e'd wake up in someone else's bed widt his shoes laid neatly to one corner, side by side 'n his white gloves off 'n laid one atop da udder on the bedside table, wrong house dough, well one night 'e wandered 'ome 'n no one saw 'im again, we searched everywhere fer 'im, but dere were no report of 'im. 'e were never outside, 'e weren't da sort ta fall down, da merchant, yer mudder's father, alan, were on vacation, 'e went somewhere sunny on a ship, ta boston or furder sowth, when he came home 'n opened da 'ouse 'n brought his suitcase to 'is room he heard yer mother screaming, when he went to yer mudder's bedroom, dere was brent linegar, frozen solid, 'e were, looking well preserved and neat as anything, dat's a good story, ain't it,