Donovan's Station (3 page)

It is hard, now, to imagine my mother, so small and contained in her person, taking on the butchery of sealing, but I suppose she saw shillings in the eyes of every seal on the ice and determined not to let them escape her hands if she could do anything about it. Father said she was wearing a bright red jacket that was stained with oil and blood within moments, but she told him he could buy her a dozen jackets with the money they would make at the sealing. She did the butchering and flensing and he towed the pelts back to shore, collecting not just hers but others that were left panned on the ice. The seals were so numerous that people simply killed them and piled the pelts up indiscriminately as the week went on, leaving them for whoever had the rope and the energy to tow them ashore. She was not the only woman to turn her hand to the seals—whole families were out, with kettles left cold on the stoves and babies left crying in their cribs.

Father said that as the week wore on, he became more and more worried that the wind would turn and take them all out
to sea, and he became reluctant to let Mother out of his sight. Once he turned to look back and could not see her and thought she had gone through a rent in the ice, but she was only hidden behind a hummock. Another time he lost sight: of her for only a moment and he was so exhausted that, in tracking back towards her, he followed a man in a red flannel shirt for two miles before realizing his error. Finally, he could take no more and insisted that they stop and be satisfied with what they had. That night, three women and a boy were lost and never seen again when the ice moved off unexpectedly.

Father was all for settling in Grates Cove after that, but Mother was only seventeen and the place had little appeal for her, so after a time they went to have another look at St. John's again. I believe it was her intention to open a small shop, making clothes and hats, but Father was still attached to the fishery, and besides he found the stench and noise of St. Johns disturbing to his constitution, so after a winter in town they moved on to Petty Harbour where he used the cash from the sealing bonanza to build a skiff and set up rooms. There was no road to town then, but there was an Indian path and since it was only ten miles from St. John's it was not as isolated as Grates Cove. At Mother's urging, they purchased a small cutover lot from a tilter who was moving on—at that time there were few land grants and no formal titles, just occupation, but the tilters had their own system for ascertaining ownership of land—and it was here they established Mother's gardens.

I think that my father never quite got used to the availability of wood in such quantities as we had near Petty Harbour. There were times when I saw him stop and gaze at a stand of spruce or fir and he would laugh aloud at the absurdity of being able to go and cut as much of it as he wanted without paying anyone a penny for the privilege. Men who had settled only a few years before he did complained bitterly that the woods around the harbour were chopped and burned to nothing, and
if they couldn't reach out their hand and cut a stick to put on the fire without getting out of their beds they were aggrieved, but for Father to travel five, ten, even twenty miles to find knees for his boats was nothing, and he often hauled our winter wood from fairly long distances.

Whatever he could make, he did, and insisted Mother do the same. Despite the promise of a dozen red jackets, I never knew her to wear anything but homespun although she always had a way of making even the coarsest clothing look delicate. Com was so rare in those days that few could afford to purchase imported furniture or clothing, but most people got at least a few things from home. Such wasn't the case with us. The table and two chairs we had—for we children used three-legged stools—were carved by my father during the long winter days when he would set a block of snow outside the small window near the stove to reflect light in so that he and Mother could work. He had no tools for turning legs but he carved them so perfectly that only the most discerning eye could tell the difference. My mother spun wool whenever she wasn't busy with anything else—could do it in her sleep, she said.

I believe the only things we had that were imported were a few dishes, the stove from Grandfather Bulley and our Argand lamp, and that last was used only on relatively rare occasions as Father was concerned that the oil would corrode the mechanism and leave us with no proper light in an emergency. Like most of the people in the Harbour, we rose with the sun, and went to bed with it as well. During winter, when the days were short, Mother and Father would often sit by the stove for a time late in the evening, using the dim light from the mica insert in the front of the stove to finish some small job, and Richard and I would listen to the quiet murmuring of their voices until we fell asleep or they climbed the loft to join us in bed. I occasionally heard them disagree—Mother wanting to raise more goats or plant more turnips than Father thought we could use, or Father
wishing to hire on as a servant someone Mother felt was giddy or unreliable—but I never heard them raise their voices in anger, nor did I ever hear my mother weep for her lost hat-shop or her red jacket.

Fine, cool day. No change in Mumma. Wish Lizzie would visit.

There's a bluebottle at the window that keeps me restless. I hope Kate comes soon to deal with it. I have such a nervous mind today, and for once I am glad I can't speak for almost anything could come out of my mouth and there are some things best forgotten. I'm glad I settled the matter of the grave when Mr. Donovan died, for that's one worry off my mind. I'd have preferred to be buried in town, but we belong to Topsail parish and he liked the view out over the bay, so I chose a nice double plot well back from the gate so we would be away from the tramp and curiosity of casual passersby. We always liked our own company best. Pity we never had our own graveyard here at St. Ann's, but I suppose with no church, and the hotel, it wasn't really practical.

That was a nice graveyard in Petty Harbour that the Bishop set up after the smallpox epidemic. Perhaps that is what Father Roche wishes to talk about. There was some problem at the time that I did not understand—a petition had gone from several of the Protestant families to Governor Prescott with the professed object of preventing the removal of the interred remains of some of their deceased friends from the chapel-yard to the new cemetery, but common sense prevailed. When the Bishop had first arrived the previous fall, there had been three
deaths from the pox and the graveyard, which was in the middle of the town, was already a considerable threat to the health of the inhabitants. Some of the graves were within three and four yards of the doors of the houses, virtually on top of some of the wells, and it was necessary to make a more hygienic arrangement.

One of the first things the Bishop did, once he was settled with his medicine chest in a small waste house near the church, was to locate a piece of land half a mile distant where there was sufficient soil to cover the bodies of the dead. Those most recently interred were quickly removed to this more suitable place, a process I recall watching with a somewhat morbid fascination, and then of course the Cadigan baby and his family quickly joined them. As the temperature continued to drop and the critically ill grew less threatened, the Bishop convinced the men to move as many more of the graves as they could identify. He then, at his own expense, purchased a piece of ground adjoining the old cemetery and, by blasting the rocks, reduced it to a level that allowed him to begin the construction of our fine little church. The dear man had the heart of a cleric but the eye and ambition of an architect.

The Protestant petition was motivated, I suppose, by sectarianism from the outside, for the Bishop was on terms of the best friendship with ourselves and all our Protestant neighbours, and the suggestion that he was interrupting the repose of the mortal remains of our relatives was nonsense. Most of us did not have close relatives in the Harbour, having emigrated to the colony only relatively recently. The majority of the graves in the community, some of which were scattered between and even under the houses—in any small ditch or hollow that afforded cover—were those of transient fishermen who had come out as servants or dieters. Unbaptized babies, of which there were a surprising number, were disposed of almost anywhere. In later
years, on at least two occasions, I unearthed bones in my garden that I am quite certain belonged to humans.

The little square of level ground that the Bishop had cut into the rock stood empty for several months through the winter while he waited for Governor Prescott to intervene with the Anglican clergy on his behalf, and as most work was stopped by illness and bad weather it afforded us children a fine new place for playing. There were hardly six square yards of flat ground in the entire district, so it was a great novelty for us to have somewhere we could run and gatch without fear of tumbling down a hillside or into the sea. Some of the boys played a game called tiddly, employing any sticks and stones they could find about the place—the rules of this game were and still are a mystery to me—but mostly we just used the space for running about.

When the Catholics finally got a church, of course the Protestants had to have a new church too, but that made no odds to us. I preferred St. David's to St. Andrew's, perhaps because I knew the old church but never set foot in the new one. Our own had the superior bell, for St. Andrews bell came out of an old ship while ours was a gift of the Bishop of Hamburg, and it produced a fine, pretty sound that must have rung in the ears of Napoleon himself in his day. They say it came out of a pre-Reformation monastery.

There was little division between the Catholics and the Protestants in Petty Harbour, other than a geographic one which was the result of when each group arrived rather than deliberate separation, but there was an awareness that the two groups were on two sides of a fence that was troublesome to cross over. It was a fence that the Bishop worked to remove and that Father Roche would build up again. I myself was made painfully aware of this barrier as I grew older, because of my special relationship with the Bishop.

There was current, at that time, a children's rhyme or game that was often played out for my benefit. A boy, or more often
a girl, would pull her hands up into the sleeves of her coat and stick a knuckle out of each cuff, affecting a gruff or falsetto voice. The following dialogue would ensue:

Good Morning, Father Francis.

Good Morning, Mrs. Murphy, what takes

you abroad so early?

Oh, Father Francis, I have committed a

great sin and have to go to confession.

And what is that great sin, Mrs. Murphy?

Your cat stole a fish off my flake, Father

Francis.

Sure, ‘tis no sin at all, Mrs. Murphy.

But I killed your cat, Father.

Then ‘tis a very grave sin, Mrs. Murphy;

you will have to do penance.

And what would that penance be?

You must kiss me three times.

Oh, but I can't.

Oh, but you must.

Well, if I must, I must.

Kiss, kiss, kiss, and away.

At the last line, the hands would pop out of the sleeves and there would be general laughter all round with a sly look in my direction.

I believe that the nuns were responsible for making more of my friendship with the Bishop than was warranted by his small attention to me. It is true that when I was five, I did not hesitate to climb into his lap and demand a kiss in exchange for any small errand. I quickly learned to keep myself to myself and by the time I was in school I never put myself forward during his annual visit but waited for him to ask for me. I doubt I saw him more than once every year or eighteen months, and never heard
from him directly although he very occasionally sent a brief message through my mother expressing his affection and his hopes for my future. He treated me like a niece or young cousin that he took an interest in but knew little of. It was the nuns who behaved as if this was some extraordinary blessing that had been bestowed on me and that I had best exert myself.

It is true that my association with the Bishop, tenuous as it was, made me feel special in some way. My own father was a fond and indulgent parent, but he had such a dire outlook on life that when I was around him I found it necessary to suppress my natural instinct for happiness. I believe my mother must have laboured under the same oppression, but she was more outgoing by nature than I and better able to struggle against his melancholy. The Bishop was the opposite—always building, planning, raising money for the churches and schools and convents that now stand as monuments to his energy and optimism. If on the outside I emulated my father's guarded solemnity and sobriety, inside I could feel the Bishop's hope and gaiety surging upward. The Bishop once said I was his spiritual child, and in this he was right, for no matter how difficult things got, I never lost my belief that I could improve my lot through hard work and effort.

The summer after the epidemic, the church was consecrated, all the impediments having been removed through the kind intervention of Governor Prescott and the churchyard having been completed. On the 15th of May, Bishop Fleming confirmed over 400 people in the church at Petty Harbour, close to fifty of these being converts who had decided to join the Catholic Church out of gratitude for his having looked after the Anglicans on the Southside as tenderly as he cared for the Catholics on the Northside when the smallpox ravaged our little town.

My mother, Richard and I were among those confirmed, and I know it was the source of some pain to my mother that
Father did not join us in this enterprise. I remember clearly that we all dressed for the occasion and he came to the church with us, but when I knelt before the Bishop and received his slight blow on my cheek, my mother was there but my father was not. Father attended mass with us whenever there was a priest available, and at night when we said our evening prayers he knelt with us, but he never took the sacraments nor did he ever discuss the matter in our presence. This was something between my parents that was as private and hidden as those other secret aspects of married life that I came to know only as an adult.