Blackstrap Hawco (59 page)

 

Bareneed

What is buried with Emily's father

The funeral was intended to be a quiet affair. After her father's death, Emily had worried over where to bury him. Into what plot of land
should he be interred to embrace eternal peace? Finally, she decided that Bareneed, where her father had been removed from all those years ago, a secluded cove that he claimed as a hideaway for safety's sake, would be fitting as his final resting place.

During the days leading up to the funeral, as more and more people visited to offer condolences and to share stories of her father, she felt badly distressed. She could not sit still, her thoughts scattered and undecided. These stories. These memories of her father from the mouths of others. She did not want their words bringing him back to life, enlivening him in ways she had never known. The people spoke of kindnesses expressed by him, credits given at the store to the highly impoverished. Children presented with clothes and boots. Emily would notice herself watching Junior with a puzzled expression. And the baby was an entity that she could not fathom.

‘'E never show'd no one da books back den 'cause so many were owing,' explained one old man, while stuffing half a cookie into his mouth in the parlour. Crumbs falling. The cookie half chewed and pushed to one side, rounding out his cheek. ‘Dat's why dey hauled 'im off, dat bloody rotten bastard, Bowering.'

Emily dreaded the thought of enduring the burial, and wished she could do it alone. She wanted no further thoughts of her father. She did not want Jacob there. She did not want her son and the baby present. She did not want to be seen.

As she arrived at the church, she was astonished to find every pew filled. Despite her father's position in the merchant store, Emily suspected that respect was due him, and that respect would not be cast aside by a single living soul in the community. This is what she thought. But what she found out was that they were there for her. They told her as much. They touched her arm and they hugged her. They gently took her by the shoulders and watched her face with sad understanding. They warmly held her hands for moments on end. They were in tears for her. They wept for her. ‘So sorry about yer loss, me love.'

Watching her father's casket be lowered into the earth, Emily wondered on the mystery of him being buried. A madman. A man who told stories to suit himself. A man who invented the truth. Where was she in all of this?

The young woman, Annie, who was said to be her mother. She remembered that childlike face as her father went into the ground.

How to find Annie? Emily had not even thought to ask her father for the young woman's last name. How ever to know her? The possibility now lowered into the hallowed earth of Bareneed.

 

The poems in these sections, while not entirely the creations of Patrick Lambly/ Hawco, were found with his belongings. Because the scraps of paper were handwritten with lines crossed out and additional words added, I can only assume that they were partially his doing. The renowned scholar of Irish immigration to Newfoundland, Jon Bannion, has confirmed that portions of the poems were taken from lines penned by various great Irish poets.

1896

Bareneed

How the Hawco name fell from the sky

For Patrick, the drink was no dire problem, as decreed by most, but rather an elixir that untangled the snarly words that poorly mistreated his thoughts when sober. In a decent state of inebriation, the once rough-edged, tormenting bits of words became an elegant gush that poured out of Patrick with as much sublime spirit as the rum he effortlessly poured into himself.

Since the loss of both feet to frostbite ten years ago, he had been inwardly off balance, the derelict portion of his soul ballooning larger to make waste of his life, with time spent outside the public house committed exclusively to the scribbling of verse.

Patrick Hawco
were the first words he had written on a piece of wood, after recovery from the surgery to his feet. As luck would have it, behind the Sheas' front door where Ferrol had knocked that first night in Bareneed, there was a physician of high caliber attending to a woman in extended labour. Once done with delivering the twins, the physician had taken a look at Patrick's bloodless feet and pronounced that it was they that should be removed or, in time, the entirety of Patrick's being.

The name Hawco had been chosen by Ferrol, for as they were entering the doorway to the Shea household that full decade ago, a thud
had sounded behind Patrick which had been a hawk dropping from the sky. Its wings frozen stiff. Ferrol had kept the hawk and had it stuffed as a token of their good fortune.

The boys that Rose had given birth to on that night when the birds fled from the sky, in a mad torrent of escape, as though snipped free from their tethers, and the creatures dead and living vanished without movement from the loving cup of the valley, were given the names Francis and Ace.

Rose, while assumed to be not strong enough to survive the ordeal, where she muttered on her deathbed, balancing on the precipice between life and the hereafter, eventually recovered from her agony and, while lacking memory of any of her ordeal, spoke in hushed tones of mysterious events that no one managed to comprehend. Where was the twisted boy? she kept asking, yet no one knew of whom she was speaking.

As Rose's condition remained precariously frail, her twin infant boys were watched over by Margaret Shea in her childless home, where she treated the infants as her own and heaped motherly love upon them. However, a few days following their birth, and much to the terror of Mrs. Shea, the twins went missing in the night, supposedly abducted by the fairies, as appeared to be the fate laid out for all of Rose's offspring, yet they were missing for only a single night and were brought back the following morning by Ferrol, who refused to share the story of their recovery. In reply, he recited some verse, no doubt the invention of Patrick Lambly, relating to the eternal damnation of his soul through acts of abominable offence to the heavens.

News of the return of the mirror-image infants, while a jubilant affair that brought consolation to the community at large, was quickly overshadowed by the discovery of Bishop Flax's disappearance by one of his ship's servants. To the great consternation of the faithful of Bareneed, Flax did not return to his ship nor was he found, by the search party that departed that day, in any near proximity along the coast. It were as though he had disappeared off the face of the earth. It was not until two springs later that two boys, engaged in dangerous play, as boys were wont to do, came upon human bones and tatters of his regal clothing stuffed into the crack that ran through the headland in Bareneed.

Both Rose and Patrick were nursed back to health by Ferrol who made a point of sitting in the tilt between the two invalids, feeding them water and food as best could be managed, and tending to the fire in the stone hearth.

It was in his delirium, following the amputation of his feet, that Patrick discovered his true voice and, according to Ferrol, spoke in verse throughout most nights with the intonations of a master poet. Such was the greatness of his fever-sprung poems that Ferrol summoned Michael Ryan, the literate cooper from down in the valley, to transcribe Patrick's words for safe keeping. These Ferrol kept in a wooden box that he gifted to Patrick upon his recovery along with a knife so that Patrick might leave his mark on the trees. ‘Carve up da forest,' Ferrol commanded. ‘Fill 'er widt dose ravish'n words 'o yers.' It was a world of true wonder to Patrick. Often, while reading the poems, tears would brim in his eyes, for the sentiments were so beautiful, filled as they were with the florid passions of the dead and dying. Not by my hand, he would tell himself. They could not be. Yet they were.
Is liom an leabhar seo
.

In his fever-damaged mind, Patrick valued the box of poems as his severed feet and carried them with him, wherever he went about on crutches fashioned from twisted tree limbs, reciting them in public houses while being held above the gathered men on Ferrol's shoulder:

 

Beauing, belleing, dancing, drinking,

Breaking windows, cursing, sinking

Ever fighting, never thinking,

Live the life of Ferrol.

 

Knowing short but merry lives,

Going where the devil drives,

Having sweethearts, but no wives,

Live the life of Ferrol.

 

Spending faster than it comes,

Beating waiters, bailiffs, duns,

No one's true begotten son,

Live the life of Ferrol.

 

There was no more glorious moment in Patrick's life than when his head was awash with rum and his mouth full of words from the scraps of paper on which his poems had been written by another's hand, the words sometimes changed and rearranged and made more precise by the accommodating currents of intoxication that swept him off while still conscious, barely there,

 

yet speaking from that realm

where the aesthetically noxious

had not entirely exacted its killing force

upon that one good man.

 

Often, while carving his verse into the benches or tables of the public house, he would be paused by a word linked to home, and the thought of his family back in Limerick would visit him, yet he would strip the thought bare with the word: safety. He was safe here. Master Job would never find him in this place. Not with his name changed by his great friend, Ferrol, who looked after all requirements. And, yes, one day he would make his way back to Limerick to set things right. There was always another day. Tomorrow or in the years to come. In fact, although there might very well be a shortage of bread or coins or love, there was – without argument – no shortage of days to look toward where matters might be put in order.

‘Who 'a ye could argue widt dat?' he called out from his place high on Ferrol's shoulders. ‘One day perishes 'n anudder steps right up widt a big fat beaming look o' conceit sladdered all over its puss like a gob of…' His voice trailed off, for the lads to all sides of him were already laughing and calling out in agreement.

Noticing this, he gave a generous smile and laughed himself, swaying while he raised his mug, toasting not only the lads but the brotherly sense of inner wealth, accumulated only through the intake of ale. In his head, he heard a voice that must have been his own, and there came with it another sound, the settling of waves upon a shoreline, the great suck of the sea mesmerizing him, so that his spirits were made morbid and he spoke quietly in Irish and with heartfelt intonation:

 

You wave down there

lifting your loudest roar

the wits in my head are worsted

by your wails.

 

In time, the twins were returned to Rose Cavanagh, and Patrick Hawco remained settled in the home and took the boys as his own. Having abandoned his own family, and knowing nothing of their current fate, sentiments of this betrayal found throughout his verse, he felt that if he were ever to be made father again it would be to children that were not rightfully his. A fitting cross to bear.

Rose was seduced by Patrick's poems. In them, she recognized a way of life that was known to her, for now, in these days that seemed too mundane for words, the lines formed a bridge to places of pure feeling where she believed she might unearth a dwelling akin to that magical realm of painful invention where she had resided before the birth of the twins. In belief, she worshipped Patrick and fell hopelessly, devoutly in love with him.

The twin boys, at an age of sensitivity that fostered concern for the infirm, would help Patrick around. They would follow after him, even from an early age, as though they expected something of him, for he appeared to be held in high esteem by many in Bareneed. In his black cast-off suit and faded collarless shirt, he would kneel with a gnarled stick for support near the water and face northeast. He would ask the boys to do the same, one to each side of him as identicals.

With the breeze from the sea on his face, he would tell stories of Ireland, of the reprehensible voyage across the water, of the heinous American sailors who attempted to sabotage their journey, of their uncle Ferrol's dramatic escapades, of the great fire in St. John's that left the world black to the touch (of the hanging, he would not speak a word), of his brave voyage of escape from enslavement during which he had suffered nature's injury that necessitated the lopping off of his feet. With the mention of this last point, he would cast a glance back up the valley, toward the houses clustered there, and his eyes would betray the sadness he felt for those who still slaved for the benefit of the master in that house at the highest rise of the valley.

It was through these acts and the thoughts passed on that Patrick became the boys' true father, for they recognized no other man as that, and found resonant reflection in his memory for the entirety of their lives.

The curse of the girl's vanishing

It was in their tenth year that Francis and Ace, having just departed the edge of the cliff where Patrick was engaged in his daily kneeling and what had become regarded as a rite of recollection for the other villagers knelt gathered with him, went into the woods and came upon a clearing where the sunlight was sifting down upon the ferns and bright green grass. At once, with a double intake of breath, they were stilled by the sensation of a presence.

Through the criss-cross shadows of limbs, a small figure could be made out. It was not until the boys stepped nearer, trying to keep their step silent against the living earth, that they discovered the figure to be a blonde-haired girl with her back to the boys. Taking her for one of the girls from Bareneed, they called out. Yet the girl would not turn to face them.

Treading nearer, they were startled by the screech of what they took to be an overhead bird. Staring skyward in unison, their vision strained by that upward elongated lurch, they determined that it was not a single bird at all, but two crows perched on the upper boughs of a spruce tree and cawing in duplicate. Two for mirth, each boy thought, having heard the pronouncement on numerous occasions from their mother. Yet reflected in their eyes as two and watched by two, the crows should have been taken as one.

When they drew their eyes back to the earth and searched for the girl again, she was nowhere to be found.

‘Hello,' they called out, an echo resounding back to them that might have been one of their voices chasing the exact other to match it. The echo came back to them and entered their ears in perpetual vibration until they were forced to flee the forest to rid themselves of the irksome inner shiver.

That night, while eating stew, Rose watched the boys with extra interest, her eyes travelling from one face to the other.

‘Wha' 'av ye seen?' she asked, for their eyes still held the faint impression of the blonde-haired girl clouded by present intention and action.

They both shook their heads.

Patrick's gentle snore, from his bough bed in the corner, grew louder.

‘Wha'?'

‘A girl,' Francis admitted, the first to speak of their sighting, and so the one destined to have a greater dealing in it.

‘Where?'

‘In da woods,' Ace piped up, pointing in the direction. ‘She 'ad blonde 'air,' he added, trying to make up for the error of speaking second.

Rose sipped from her spoon.

Patrick snored louder until the sound became caught up in the table and the bowls of stew required holding to be anchored against the shimmy.

Rose, casting a look toward Patrick, reached for one of his stick canes and whacked him soundly across the back, where he whimpered and was silenced.

‘Tell me of it,' she said to the boys, pointing a finger to one face then the other. ‘Every scrap o' wha' ye 'old in yer liddle 'eads.'

 

That night, the curse of the girl's vanishing was lifted by Rose's deeds.

In keeping with the directions discerned from one of Patrick's poems, a medley of tradition and invention that was taken as spiritual fact by Rose, she wrapped the black glass rosary beads, gifted to her by Bishop Flax, around the skinned carcass of a rabbit, and ventured to the graveyard where the fairy changeling had been buried.

The twin boys followed after her, although uninvited. Their presence was noted by Rose yet she made no mention of it. At the grave site, she laid the offering at the back of the slate tombstone, on the front of which was etched with a sharp stone the specifics of the infant's death. Following a moment of reflection, and with a boy stood at either side of her, she searched for a thin stone around her feet and found the exact one required to fit neatly into her hand. Pressing its edge to the back of
the tombstone, she scraped a horizontal line, then two longer vertical lines straight down, one from each end of the top line. At the bottom she drew another horizontal line, parallel to the top one and connecting the ends of the two verticals. Toward the centre of the door and off to the left, she drew a circle, a doorknob. Done with her doodle, she let the thin stone fall from her grip and watched the door, then cast her eyes toward the starless sky, her head cocked on an angle to best invite listening.