Donovan's Station (17 page)

Once when I was feeling particularly distressed over some misdeed of Paddy's—one of his usual lies or infidelities—she
put a curse on him that she claimed bounced back at her, for that day she slipped on the wharf and almost broke her elbow. She stopped by to let me put a compress on it and when I wasn't looking, she slipped a pissing bottle in the stove to cancel the curse. A few minutes after she left, I heard something crack in the coals and as I lifted the damper the smell of urine was unmistakable. When I cleaned the grate the next day, there was a lump of glass fused to the clinkers. In the months that followed, when we were together in the kitchen and we could hear Paddys voice from the shop, yelling at one of the apprentices or joking with a customer, I would see her rub her elbow and mutter under her breath.

Paddy returned her dislike, with just as little reason, but unlike Judith he made no bones about it to the girls. He called her a witch, and claimed he could smell sulfur when she had been in the kitchen, and said he'd be only too happy to put the torch to her. I don't suppose he would really have burned her as a witch, but would possibly have given her a good scorching as a warning. Once Min asked her if she was a witch like her dada said, and Judith just smiled and said “Of course I am, my darling,” as if she had asked if Judith were a Catholic. I have to admit now that Judith was perhaps a bit crazy herself.

That day, though, I saw none of that side of Judith, all I saw was a hardworking, tired barrow woman with sore feet. Just as the cheer went up to signal that the
Ida
had gone through the arch safely and was well on her way to the water, Mr. MacDermot came back into the kitchen with Judith s boots. He warned her that they would feel a bit uncomfortable for the first few days, but that she should persevere and before the week was out her feet would feel like those of a girl of ten. By the time his prediction came true, he had left for Nova Scotia, but Judith begged a bit of his old apron off me and made up a charm to keep him safe and make him wealthy. I heard years later that he eventually owned a factory with upward of a hundred employees,
up in New Brunswick, so perhaps her witchcraft worked. I prefer to believe that a man who could in twenty minutes make a shoe insert to cure a bad foot had earned all the success that came to him.

Fine, sunny day again. Mumma has apologized to Dermot, said she was confused. He looked embarrassed for her. No visit from the itinerant clergyman this week, thank goodness. That man makes me nervous, not like dear Father Walsh. I find myself writing the most surprising things in this small diary
—
I had better tuck it out of the way in case Lizzie or the girl happen upon it. It took me five years to fill the first half and now it looks as if I will need a new one before the summer is out. It's just as well
—
it keeps me from saying things that I might regret. Inundated with Orangemen, all surprisingly well behaved, considering, but then it is Sunday.

Kate looked tired this morning. I think it is the extra I work, looking after me, and I wish she'd get Mrs. Coady to help, but she says it's only that a mouse was gnawing at the picture railing in her room all night. That must be why the cat came in. After the lightning hit in 1907, I chinched up the hole over the railing with a mix of flour and salt, not having any lime and thinking the salt would make it unpalatable to mice, but that was seven years ago and perhaps the salt has leeched out. I should tell her to remove the salt-dough and plug the hole with lime or a bit of steel wool.

Funny, the way the lightning hit. I can see the shadow of a black smudge on the wallpaper here in this room where it passed through. I'll wager Father Roche said more than his prayers that
night. We got off easy—there were boats on the collar turned bottom up in Blackhead, and a horse struck onThorburn Road. And of course that poor woman in town, on Colonial Street, burnt to a crisp in front of her husbands eyes when the kerosene lamp went up. She must have taken a direct hit. They say she was cooked like a rabbit—they couldn't even move the body without a shovel for the flesh fell away from the bones and the bones from one another.

I don't recall ever seeing lightning like that before or since. There was once when I was a girl, but that was in the middle of the afternoon. Winny Weir—the one we always called Wormy Weir—thought the gunboats were shelling the harbour. I expect her family came here before the anti-settlement laws were revoked, and she'd been raised with the fear of being burned out by our own navy. It was exciting, the lightning. Mr. Donovan was gone to Harbour Grace to see about a new cow, and I wondered if he could see the lightning from there. It was so dark, even with all the lamps lit in the house for the supper, and then every once in a while there'd be a flash and the crash following it. I could hear the men in the dining room, counting together and laying bets on how many miles away it was.

Mr. Reid was acting as croupier that night—who was the dinner for? Someone from the
Calypso,
the paymaster, I think, not someone from here. There was Mr. Alderdice, and Mr. Outerbndge, and half a dozen Harveys. I know Air. Greive was with them, for he brought me a case of aerated water for the Church Lad's picnic the following week. When the lightning hit, every lamp in the house went out and we took the thunder in the dark. What a racket went up then.

There were only thirteen for dinner because one of the party was a doctor who had been called away to a patient, and they asked me if there was another guest who could join them, to dissipate the evil omen attached to thirteen at the table. I told them Father Roche was upstairs in the side bedroom, the room
Kate's in now, but I doubted he'd co-operate though I didn't say so. Mr. Reid went and spoke to him, and came away a little annoyed, I could tell. I suppose Father Roche was only following his conscience, and he probably knew by then that he was about to be raised up to vicar-general and didn't want to do anything that could be talked about, but I have never thought it would do any harm to accommodate a bit of frivolous superstition.

So I told them that I had two of Mr. Perlin's Russian peddlers in the back linney, nice clean boys though they didn't speak a word of English, this being their first time going with their packs around the bay, and they went and coaxed the two out to sit with them. I made sure they got a nice bit of chicken instead of the pork pie and ham the others were eating, and they sat like two little crows, watching the gentlemen enjoy themselves. I expect those two have their own shops on Water Street by now and will be gentlemen themselves before long. I was just bringing in the duff, and a beautiful egg custard with cream and bottled bakeapples I had put up myself, when the streak of electricity came in along the telephone wire and the whole house lifted up its skirts and settled back again with a bang.

The entire place was pitch black, except for a bit of flame coming off a glass of brandy that was sitting on the mantlepiece. I could hear the maids screaming in the kitchen, and the two peddler boys saying their prayers, and then Mr. Reid saying in a calm, low voice “Did I hear a pin drop?” and the whole room went up in a shout of laughter. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly light the lamp, but somehow I had managed to hold onto the tray with the desserts, for it would have been a real mess if I had dropped that, and not another bite of sweet in the house except some fruit cake and a barrel of biscuits from Woods, which would have been a poor finish to a very good dinner.

What with getting the oil lamps lit and dealing with the two girls with the vapours in the kitchen, I almost forgot about Father Roche. We had examined the damage downstairs—the lightning tore the moulding right off the wall and flung my engraving of “The Death of Nelson” across the room before it went out to the verandah and splintered two pillars—and the men were just sitting back down at the table when I heard the priest calling out for a light. Well, I ran up the stairs as quick as I could, given my size and age, and he was sitting in his chair next to the window with his breviary in his lap. I lit the oil lamp and we looked around the room, and there was the mirror on the floor, still intact, and the splintered frame on the wall.

“You'll be Pope before you're done,” I said, thinking of his good luck and his ambition and forgetting for the moment that he would never admit to having either, and he frowned at me, but I could see he was very thoughtful and even a bit shaken by the whole thing.

“I'll have none of that superstitious nonsense attached to my name,” he said, and then told me I wasn't to mention the incident downstairs. But I saw it in the paper the next morning, not in
The Telegram
but in
The Herald,
so he must have told someone himself for I mentioned it to no-one, mostly because of what I found when I went to my own room. The dinner was a great success, notwithstanding the lightning, but I suppose the lightning strike made the men more excitable than usual and they stayed on playing cards and drinking until close to two in the morning. By the time I saw the last of them off I was-the only one left awake in the house, Kate having walked Ettie Walsh home and stayed the night with her to calm her down.

I could hear the two little Jews snoring in the back, and the future Pope sawing wood up above them, and the peace of God descended on the house like a prayer. Then I went into my own room and right in the middle of our bed, mine and Mr. Donovan's, was a little tintype I had of the two of us, taken a
year or two after we were married, and one side of it was blackened and burnt while the other was untouched. It was Mr. Donovan who was blackened out and I knew it was a token. I took the picture and bent it inward into two and then folded it again and pressed it flat under the heel of my shoe, and then I crept down to the kitchen and put the thing in the stove, poked it with a stick into a good bed of coals, and went back up to bed to wait for dawn, for I knew Mr. Donovan would be home as soon as ever he could make it.

He was first off the train next morning, as cheerful and healthy as a man could be. He told me that a Harbour Grace woman by the name of Yetman had her house split in two by the lightning and her dog, which was chained onto the house, was killed. The cow he'd gone to look at was older than had been claimed and the stable wasn't clean so he'd decided against buying her. We looked at the two verandah posts, which were chopped into splinters as cleanly as if it had been done with a knife, and traced the zig-zag mark on the coping back into the house, though the dining room and up into the bedrooms. I showed him “The Death of Nelson,” or what was left of it, and the mirror, and we looked at the hole along the telephone wire. He left me to deal with the minor damage and set out to repair the verandah before any more guests arrived. I never told him about the tintype, and he didn't notice it was gone.

There was a lot of talk and head-shaking over at the railway station about the dinner of the previous night, and speculation as to what might have happened if the two peddlers had not been at the table. I didn't join in. I wished then I had the certainty of Father Roche that omens are nothing, not even the devils work. But I didn't forget, and I watched my dearest husband with a keen and worried eye and was there to catch his head that day six weeks later when Father Roche was appointed to the Cathedral and my Mr. Donovan put his spoon down in the middle of his dinner and died in my arms.

I had a lot more sympathy for Min after I lost my own husband. I tried not to make such a fuss as she did, for it wasn't seemly in a woman my age to go around grieving so much in public, but it was hard. Later that winter I fell coming in from the barn with the milk, and broke my hip, and it never healed, but in some ways it was a good thing to have happened. Before, I would sit in the kitchen trying to peel potatoes or pluck partridges, and as soon as my mind was free to think as it wanted to, I would feel this terrible pain, and I'd wonder where it came from. Afterwards, I could locate the pain in my hip, and some-times it was so great it stopped all thought.

At first, after Mr. Donovan died, I tried to take on all the work of the farm and the hotel that he had done, but I wasn't as young as I had been so at Kate's bidding I hired the Big Galoot. He has never been half as good as Mr. Donovan, but he did fix me up with a special chair so that I could work in the kitchen without too much discomfort, and Kate seems to feel confident with him. Its she who will be giving the orders around here soon, so that's important.

There was a lot more for Kate to do once I was stuck in the chair, but I tried never to complain and I did almost as much sitting down as I had once done standing up. It gave Kate complete control of the barn and much of the house, which was good for her. I have been too large in her life, too quick to take responsibility off her shoulders, so she has never developed the resilience she needs to make it through life on her own. I will say nothing about the cat, but will let her solve the problem of the mouse on her own. It is past time she was allowed to suffer the consequences of living in this vale of tears without her mother trying to soften the blows that inevitably fall on those of us who have hearts.

Fine, sunny day. Mumma slept all morning and all afternoon, or pretended to. Ate nothing. Quiet day, only one gentleman for dinner, none for supper. Worked on the accounts. I looked in on Mumma as I was going to bed, and she was awake. I offered to say the rosary with her, and she gave a little shake of her head and whispered “Mot tonight.” Instead she had me go into her Labrador box and take out several things she wished to give to Lizzie. Hidden away at the very bottom was the mat hook she so treasured, and I asked if she'd like to put it with the other things, but she managed to tell me that she didn't think Lizzie would be making many mats after school in Boston. She asked if I would like to have it, and I got very tearful for I know her father made it for her when she was a child. She also save me a small holy card with a quotation on it that she had used to mark her Bible, and said that when she died, I was to do whatever felt right to me and not to listen to Min or anyone else. She was quite drained by the effort and after taking a spoonful of milk to wet her lips, she closed her eyes again, but I suspect she is too exhausted to sleep. I have the feeling that she spent the whole day summoning up the strength to speak those few sentences to me.