Donovan's Station (11 page)

Paddy, for all his faults, was a great help to me then. He did for himself for almost a month while I took the girls to Petty Harbour, and he was out over the path every few days with any small bit of news to catch Father's interest or a treat he had found to tempt him to eat. If it was food, the girls usually got most of it, for Father was much better at not eating than I am, but to please Paddy he would try to take a small mouthful of
the cake or fruit or whatever it was. Paddy once brought a whole hand of bananas, won on a bet with a Frenchman on a vessel sailing out of St. Martin's. They had the bunch tied in the rigging, to ripen I suppose, and Paddy went up the mast, dead drunk, to get his prize. It's a wonder he didn't fall and kill him-self. Min was little then, she had never seen a banana, and she tried to eat it with the peel still on. Oh, the face she made, and now she can eat a banana every day of the week if she chooses.

Poor Father. All his plans—to move into town and live with us, to spend his old age with his granddaughters around his knee—all came to nothing. Ah well, he wouldn't have liked it in town, and his affection for Paddy would have worn a bit thin after a few weeks of having to put up with his bragging and his lying. It was just as well. But it hurt me to the heart to see him lying in that bed in the front room before his time, almost a corpse already. I didn't want him in there, for we hardly ever used that other room except for keeping things good and laying out the dead. Richard first, when the room was still almost new, then Mother, after that the Angel twins, because their family had nowhere to wake them, and then Father. Still, he insisted, and it was quieter there for him than in the kitchen, what with the girls up above in the loft. He never liked to make a fuss.

I recall the day he died, he had taken a little soup and then spit it up again, all over his shirt, so I washed him up and was pulling a clean shirt over his head when he turned his head as it came through the neck opening and he looked so like Richard that I couldn't help myself, but I began to cry. He gave me the sweetest smile, more like Mother than like himself, and said “You've been a good little maid, Keziah.” And that was it. He fell asleep almost as soon as I laid him back in the bed and he never woke up. How I have consoled myself with those words all these years. I must try to say something for Kate before I go, but it is so hard, not knowing if the words are really coming out or if I am just imagining that I am speaking.

How Paddy carried on when he came that evening and found Father had died. You would think he was the one who had suffered a great loss, not me. He got the girls crying too, banging around the kitchen, pulling at that yellow hair of his and telling all our visitors that he had lost his best friend and the dearest man on earth. He was right about that, anyway. Father was a dear man. For all his gloomy predictions, he never stopped anyone else from having a good time. If Paddy couldn't dance, he didn't wish anyone else to, but Father wasn't like that. He took as much pleasure in watching Mother dance with the jannies as if he were dancing with her himself.

Not that Mother made a habit of dancing with mummers, only that last Christmas before Richard died. We never saw much of the jannies because we didn't keep strong drink in the house, but this one time they came and crowded in to the kitchen and the fiddler sat in the corner and played the Jew's harp while everyone sang. It was such a treat for Mother that Father lit the lamp, and Richard stood on a chair and sang “Eggs and Marrow Bones” and then someone arrived with a concertina. They moved the bits of furniture out into the snow, and Mother rolled up the mats and put them into the loft, and we had a real dance. I could see Mother's feet tapping and stepping while she clapped, and I never saw her look so young and pretty as she did that night.

When they called out that it was time to dance out the light, Mother looked so wistful that even Father had to notice, and when one of the jannies came forward and tried to pull her in with the dancers, Father gave her a little push too, and that was all she needed. I guess he figured one dance wouldn't be wrong, even if she was a married woman, but he hadn't counted on how solidly he'd built the house. At the last beat of the jig, all the jannies stamped as hard as they could, but our house was on such strong pilings that the floor hardly shook and the lamp barely gave a flicker. So they had another jig, and again
tried to stamp out the light at the last note, and again the lamp kept burning.

The third time, I could see Father was getting worried about the stove, for he moved over to it and took the rag in his hand in case the chimney pipe came down. Mother was panting for breath and her hair was sticking to her forehead, but she was having a wonderful time, as light on her feet as if she danced every night of the year. Richard was hanging off the ladder to the loft, crowing like a little bantam cock, and when they played the last note, he shouted “Plank her out.” and every janny there stamped down as hard as he could on the floorboards and the whole house groaned like a cow in labour. I was near the lamp, and it gave me such a turn that without thinking I leaned over and blew on the flame just as it threatened to come to life again, which put an end to the dance. I was sorry, after, that I'd done it, but we'd probably had the best of the night by then anyway.

Afterwards, lying in the bed with Richard while Mother and Father put the kitchen back to normal, Richard told me that when he got older he was going to get a concertina himself and he would play for our mother so she could dance for him when-ever she wanted to. Down below, we could hear the voices of our parents, so happy they sounded that it was like lying in a field on a warm spring day, with all the sounds of the insects and the birds and the cows in the distance, the whole world murmuring and talking with itself. We were never so happy before or since.

I watched Richard as he fell asleep that night, for the snow outside made the whole room light, and he lay on his back with his hair sticking up, and his mouth a little open, and I could smell the warm breath from his mouth, and I loved him that night like I loved my own children later. He looked so much himself, and yet so perfect that I couldn't imagine ever being angry with him for any reason. He looked just the same that day only a few months later when I leaned over the wharf and saw
him in the water, his arms and legs spread wide, about six inches under the surface, except that then his eyes were open, looking up at me and not seeing me.

Death is such a mystery. How this weary old body of mine can hang on day after day, while Richard, who was so full of life and vigour and who still looked so perfect, could have been turned in a moment to a useless parcel of flesh and bone is something that I have spent a lifetime trying to understand. One rotten rung on a ladder, a tole pin left in a gunnel, a lump on his skull I could cover with my thumb, and it was all over. He never knew, probably thought as he tumbled backward off the wharf that he was going to get a soaking and perhaps a scolding from Mother. A soaking was a joke to Richard—he was like our old dog that way. Once, when Mr. Angel launched a new skiff, Richard followed it down the slipway right into the water, and Fathers only comment was “There is nothing on earth that can excite a man like a new vessel.”

Going into the water after Richard was one of the hardest things I've ever done, for the water was over my head and I had to hold onto the boat while I reached for him. I was unable to get out again until Father heard my cries and came to find us. I couldn't stop shaking after, even when Father had changed my clothes and put me by the stove with the mats over my shoulders. I've never been so cold in my life. Mother was in shock, I think, for she just went about dressing the body and doing what had to be done as if she were in a trance, but Father took the whole thing in immediately, understood right to his core that his only son was gone, and I could see him trying to control the wild grief in his eyes.

That night, Mama collapsed and he had to carry her to the bed and send to St. John's for a doctor to come in the morning. He got Mrs. Martin, the Protestant school mistress, to sit with me so that he could tend to her himself—he didn't trust anyone else, and all the Irish women were in the other room wailing
over the beautiful boy, but he still found a moment to speak to me. He lifted me into his arms and held me tight, and then he said “Keziah, if I lost one hand I would still have another and I would cherish it all the more because I had only one. If I lost an eye, I would care doubly for the other.”

“I tried to get him out,” I wept into his ear. “He was too heavy.”

“He'd hit his head and was already gone when you found him, I swear there was nothing you could do.”

I wept all the harder, trying to believe him. “Nothing at all?”

“Keziah,” he said, “what can't be cured must be endured. This thing cannot be undone. All we can do now is help one another endure as best we can. We must both look after your mother, for she is in very deep distress, but we must not forget to comfort one another as well. For the moment, she has forgotten that we need her too, but she will remember it eventually and she will come back to us again.”

From that day I have regarded the sea with terror and disgust. On the sunniest morning it looks black and greasy; during a storm it foams at the mouth like a mad animal, and in winter it is a treacherous field of ice over a bottomless abyss. The greedy maw of the sea swallowed Richard in two minutes and then spit him out again to lie in God's small acre with Mrs. Cadigan's baby. He probably escaped a worse death, and I'm sure he escaped a worse life, for the sea was all he wanted and for most of the people in Petty Harbour, the sea provided nothing but poverty and misery.

5:00 pm

Dermot—

There is a loose board on the front step that has
needed fixing for the past week. Do your job.

Miss Elizabeth Power

6:00 pm

Dear Miss Lizzie,

If a certain young snip spent more time in the kitchen helping her Aunt Kate who was up all night with Mrs. Donovan, and less time reading the trashy romance she has hidden behind the harmonium, I might be able to do my own work instead of hers.

Respectfully,

Mr. Derm. O'Dwyer

When I opened my eyes just now and saw the red reflection on the ceiling, I thought it was fire and my heart was halfway to the door before I realized that my body was going nowhere. It's only the sun setting and if the pounding of my heart would quiet down I will be able to tell the time from the noise in the kitchen below. It's such a warm day, Kate has put the shutter over the grill in the ceiling to keep the heat out of the room but I can still hear enough.

I don't suppose I'll ever lose my fear of fire—worse even than the dread I have of the sea, although none of mine have ever been burned, nor have we even lost a stick of furniture or a bit of clothing if you don't count the boots Paddy burned fighting the big fire just before he died. That was when the stands of trees on the Southside Hills finally went, and haven't grown back yet, it seems. Their roots were destroyed—the soil was too thin to protect them. Paddy fought that fire with all the other brigades, and then afterwards went wandering up through the ruins of the hills where I used to get the spruce tips for the beer, walking back and forth through the smoldering ruins of the woods, until when he finally came home he'd burned the shoe leather right off his boots and singed his feet so badly that he could hardly hobble around for a week. He put the boots in the window, nothing but uppers left to them, to show what a big man he'd been, chasing around with the brigade.

I don't recall what started that fire. A Camphene lamp? A candle left burning? It could have been any one of a hundred things. It was a glue pot set off my fire, glue left on a stove in a carpenter's shop on George Street, and a pipe dropped in a pile of hay started Min's. I suppose every one of us is doomed to trial by fire: “As the fire devoureth the stubble and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their roots shall be as rottenness.” It was one of the reasons I hated living in town—the bells from the Garrison going off every night or two and the acrid stink of the smoke lingering and keeping you nervous for clays after.

My fire had already started when I set out from the Harbour to visit the nuns. I'd told Mother I was going to go into town if I got the garden sorted out in time, and she went on down to the flakes. When she saw the smoke from St. John's rising like a pillar in the air, she walked halfway up the path and saw I was still in the garden, so she went back to her work. I wasn't there, though. I'd been restless, not able to settle down to my work, and the crows were tormenting me, so I found some
old rags, bits of brin and old sacking, and tied them to sticks in the ground to keep those nasty birds off my new little plants. Then I collected a few pounds of butter, and I packed a dozen fresh eggs into a basket of moss, and added a piece of salt salmon, and started out the path to town. I was halfway there when I saw the smoke, so I took the road away from the river, heading more towards the Freshwater Valley, and turned down when I got past Flower Hill. I was so green—I just thought it was all an inconvenience, something I would have to work around.

Long's Hill was a good way from the fire, but it was still quite frightening to look down and see the flames whipping up in the wind, and when the vats of seal oil went up at Bennett's I very nearly gave up and ran home, for I thought it was the new gas works at Riverhead. That's when the wind changed. The smoke was blowing away from me then, so I went on to the convent thinking they'd need a bit of extra food for the people who were burned out. Even then I didn't realize how bad it was.

From the top of the hill, in the convent, you could hear the roar, like a gale of wind or a cataract, as the fire leapt from roof to roof, and then the crash as the roofs fell in. When the men from the Garrison blew up Stabb's house, the flankers exploded and reached as far as Circular Road and they even ignited the sails on the ships in the harbour. Two thousand houses were destroyed, they say. I heard after that an artilleryman was killed, and a prisoner they forgot about at the courthouse was burned to death in his cell. To this day I shudder to think of that poor man, trapped inside those stone walls with no way out. I don't think I have ever been so frightened, before or since.