Blackstrap Hawco (57 page)

‘Yes.'

Alan watched the woman, his mind feeling uncharacteristically clear and lucid. A clarity had come over him, all at once, upon word of the woman's arrival. At first, the sensation alarmed him, as though he had been far off in another world, and been yanked back into this one to face the brash accumulation of a painstakingly incomparable reality.

‘How are you?' he asked to centre himself around his own voice. That was the right thing to say. If he had possessed the strength to do so, he would have smiled in compliance with the ritual.

‘Fine.' The woman laid her case on a chair toward the door and stood there in her coat and hat.

What was there to do now? Why had she arrived in the room?

How peculiar it must be to her, Alan thought. Leather straps holding his thin wrists to the bed frame. His old head, with only a few grey wisps of hair across the yellow scalp, tilted on the pillow, chin dipped down,
trying to fully see her. The smell of him, the length of him beneath the sheets, the thought of him. A white room, in a bed forever.

Alan continued studying her. A woman like any other, one that he was meant to claim as his own, and, perhaps, felt a yearning to do so. Concentrating, he made an effort to welcome the attachment. Yet the child was missing. ‘How are you?' He might have already said that. A woman, not a child.

‘Fine.'

‘I see.' He tried to guess at her age. When had he seen her last? Yesterday? No, longer. A week. A year. Before he was born. Misery, he thought. Medication and misery. And never a child in here. Never one. Not ever. The squeal of laughter skipping in the corridor. Little hands grasping his.

The woman had been thirteen at the time, when they wanted her back. Was thirteen a child? No, not in those years. Thirteen was a woman.

‘How are you?' she asked. Or was it him? Or was she merely aping him, mocking him? Her face gave no sign of it.

He offered no reply to the question, instead saying, ‘They've taken something away, you know.' The words presented themselves, without gathered thought, to both him and her. ‘If not you, then me.'

The woman gazed over her shoulder, then around the room.

She must have been in her thirties. No longer thirteen. The gap in between, a life of insidious complications that required management and endurance.

‘What?' asked the woman, almost with reluctance.

‘This dying.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Dying. I'm not afraid to say it.' He waited, his eyes fixed on her, unfamiliar with the meaning of what he might be wishing to express, as though his mind, the reason for his being and being here specifically, continued to be kept at a distance from himself, for his own good. ‘That word in the mouth. It won't jinx anyone, anymore than it already has.' Yet a frayed sense of intuition was guiding him. The woman was magnetic. He could not draw his eyes from how her figure stood out against the white wall. ‘This sickness that's killing me…' His voice
trailed off, as he realized he was not talking to a nurse or doctor. This woman was something unlike that.

The woman nodded, seeming to understand but, perhaps, doing so in the interest of self-preservation, so as to not complicate matters. Was that how it worked? He remembered these subtleties. These translations. Not so base and vulgar now. He chuckled at what he saw. The chuckle pained him. ‘Oh!' He shut his eyes, smiling. A man lodged in the throb of one silent laugh. How old am I? he wondered. His eyes closed. It went on for years, this wondering.

‘Whatever it might be,' his dry lips said while his eyes opened. ‘Eating me up. It's taken away the mess.'

Emily stood speechless before the foot of her father's bed, her hands joined before her, the large wooden buttons of her coat still fastened. It was stifling in the room. She glanced toward the radiator and thought of placing her hand on the iron. She suspected it might burn. Noticing the bars on the window, she regarded her father again. His eyes were beseeching her, yet she would step no nearer. She watched him, expecting his face to darken toward that bestial expression she recalled with such despair, yet he did not spring from the bed, he did not pace the room, tossing his arms here and there and muttering accusations that she was not who she said she was: another child. He was taken away, so she, too, must have been taken away. How could she not have been if he was not there to watch over her, to protect her from harm? He did not bellow filth at her now. There seemed to be not an ounce of strength left in him. This was the end. She sensed the quietude that she knew was her father's knowledge of his own impending demise. Finally, he was broken, benevolent, cowed by the certainty. Whole human beings away from himself.

‘I could care less.' He smiled and his teeth were a deeper yellow than his skin and two were missing, one front tooth and another off-centre on the bottom. ‘It's killing the torment. Not me. That's worth the effort, isn't it? Death in the mouth.'

It was not the mouth Emily remembered, neither as a child nor from her last visit six years ago. Where had her father's teeth gone? she wondered. Had he lost them, bashed them from his mouth off some hard object in a fit of rage or had they been extracted? She searched
around inside herself to discover what she might feel for him. A dying man who resembled no one she knew. Yet she loved him. Love of the sort that was sutured layers deep, the layers of love for her husband and children growing over that love. Yet she did. Yes, love him.

Watching this woman, Alan Duncan was surprised, for he recalled this woman as a baby and as a child. Her birth. The complications involved because her mother, not his wife, was of a tender year. Her first day at school. Her tenth birthday party. The stopwatch start of when she was expected back. They said tenth or – at the latest – thirteenth. Between one date and the other, any moment in between she would be lost to them. Hadn't they moved when she was young? Fled because of this. England. Newfoundland. The city of St. John's and deeper into the backwoods that people mistook for a picturesque seaside. Bareneed. That word. Was it a place? Or an expression? So many years scratched away like an eraser over pencil markings. A breath, the remnants blown from the page. It was as simple and as forgotten as that. The shadings of an imprint remaining. Debris on the floor that others trod around. How the years went away. Every day died silently, without ceremony. No funeral for the passing minute, no liturgy conducted over the gaping grave of the perished hour. The imbalance balancing itself now. There it was, his life. There it was, always in the distance, nearer now, his death. And the secret that stood there, perfectly defined against the white wall.

Emily watched her father sleeping. She hoped that he was only sleeping. His chest rose beneath the white sheet. She gazed toward the shut door and thought of leaving. It would be much easier to return on the train. Follow the route back to where she had come from. But wasn't she doing that now? She watched her father's form beneath the sheet and thought of Jacob, how her husband had forbidden this visit. Forbidden if not in harsh commands but in silences. Thinking of home, of Jacob, Junior and the baby, her breasts began to leak again. She sensed them let go and glanced at her chest, hoping that the tissue paper she had stuffed inside the front of her brassiere would absorb the embarrassment.

Alan Duncan, thinking of the woman, the woman who was named a name he and his wife had smiled into being, was dead with sadness. Breathing and dead with sadness. Tears pouring behind every inch of his
skin, collecting at his fingertips, if only to touch and burst. His daughter, Emily. The secret. Forgiveness was meant to be exacted here. He would restore nothing, yet there was the need for it. He opened his eyes. Dead with sadness. If I am to die, he thought, I am to die. I will be as gone as nothing. Look at the life of her. What does that mean to me? This woman I had named and saved. She knows nothing of it.

He would tell her this: ‘Do you remember the dock in Liverpool?'

‘Yes,' she said at once, as though expecting those exact words.

Emily watched her father's eyes. He was seeing into her and she into him. Neither knew the true meaning of what they remembered together, for what they remembered together was not the same.

‘We left.'

The door to the room opened and a nurse leaned her head in. She checked over the situation, smiled at Emily and leaned back out, quietly pulling the door to.

‘They don't want the truth,' he said, his voice quavering, faltering. Not a stain of interest in the departed nurse, while he continued with his probing search of Emily's eyes. ‘Merely whatever is convenient. Whatever they say it does. It is a pronouncement.' His eyes went to the window. His life was a story he told himself to believe. He would not share the story because he was of his own invention and not meant for others. But the secret that was his life was not for the grave, for he could not keep it there with him. The worms and maggots would eat his secret, piece by rotting piece, strip by tattered strip. It would come away from his bones. The secret would be dissolved and that would be the end of him. For there were secrets in the flesh, secrets that pumped the blood, secrets that shaped thought, secrets that drew each breath into the lungs. The doctors wanting the secrets so that they might make life plain. Here was his secret. He shifted his eyes from the window to the woman. There stood the beginning of the disclosure of his secret.

Her.

The one they said was his daughter.

‘I have told this to no one before.'

The woman took one step nearer the bed. That was all it would take, an admission, to draw people nearer. Another secret closer to another secret. The secret wanting to be known by the secret in another.

‘On the dock in Liverpool, there were two men. Do you remember, Secret?'

‘Yes.'

‘Their names were George Chapman and William Gull. Georgie and Willy. They were brothers, even though they never shared the same surnames. These two men knew you. They kept separate names because they were hiding from each other.'

The woman, the secret, straightened on her feet.

‘Do you know how they knew you?'

‘No.'

‘They were your uncles, yet not related to me or your mother.'

The woman, the secret, appeared confused. That was customary in the beginning of the progression of the revelation of the secret.

‘Do you remember those two men?'

Emily tried to imagine their faces. She had little trouble doing so, for they were always as vivid to her as if she had witnessed them in the hours past. She wondered why and felt icicles beneath her skin, for now she knew that they were linked to something other than her father. They were linked to her. One of her earliest memories had been of that dock, but only because those men had been involved in even earlier memories.

‘Your secret will take the place of my secret here.' Again, he moved his eyes toward the barred window. ‘The two men had a sister. Her name was Annie. There was a circle of men in Liverpool who I had fallen in with. They were business associates. They knew Annie from an early age. She was kept by them, they told me. At the age of thirteen, Annie conceived you. She was secreted away to an elderly woman in a parsonage in Lancashire. You were born when Annie was fourteen. This history I was told. As Annie was under the financial and social protection of this group of…gentlemen, you, too, became their protégé. Georgie and Willy were the collective threat. They did the bidding of the circle of gentlemen. I have no recollection of why I told them I would harbour you, perhaps it was for reasons of protection, or perhaps perversity, perhaps a bit of both, a man's heart is not that easily divided…For whatever reason, I told them that I would take you in and keep you for them. An import, they called you, a conversion. This would be our secret. Your mother could not conceive. She was incapable. I took
you home and assured her that you were ours. A child in her arms. An infant whose parents had met with unfortunate circumstances. Your mother asked no questions. The questions were blanched from her mind, at the sight of you.' His eyes, slowed by age, illness and trepidation, scoped across the room to settle on the secret's image. ‘Her face. You should have seen it. Your mother's face watching you. And you watching her.'

Emily felt as though she were being driven back from the bed, back toward the wall and floor at once, although she was not moving. Bits and pieces of this information she had heard before, all of it taken as the ravings of a madman.

‘On your tenth or thirteenth birthday you were meant to be returned to Annie and the circle of gentlemen. If you recall, as I do, you celebrated your tenth birthday here, in St. John's. Your thirteenth in Bareneed. The year I was removed to set up lodgings here. If we had remained overseas, you might have found yourself in a place much like this. One of the minds of others in here might have been yours. A circumstantial substitution.'

Emily had often argued with herself over memories. She had heard people claim that their first memories were from an age of five years or so. Yet Emily believed she had recollections of being in a crib, as an infant, despite others' insistence that such memories were an impossibility. Now, as she had in the past, she recalled the face of a young girl, a friend of the family in England. Never had she once suspected the face to be that of her true mother. She thought, of course, that the girl looking in at her, standing above her, was a girl who had visited, a girl who had nothing more to do with her, a girl with a face that betrayed existence, for she was timeless. A girl who remained a girl in Emily's mind. Her mother. A girl.

Emily found herself repeating the word ‘Mummy' in her head. How was any of this to be verified if her mother, Amanda, the only mother she truly knew, had passed on? It was out of the question, and this sense of drastic uncertainty and – somehow – failure sank through her entire body, threatening to suck the breath from her lungs.