Donovan's Station (8 page)

“Keziah, my child, what is your trouble,” he asked, as I bent to kiss his ring. I hardly knew how to answer. I could not tell him exactly what I had seen for I hardly understood it myself. He held my hand for a moment, and when I did not reply he gently lifted a finger under my chin so that my eyes met his. “Have I ever done anything to cause you to distrust me?” he asked.

“Oh no, Sir,” I whispered, and tears came into my eyes at the thought that I might have offended him.

“Then you must trust me now, and tell me what is wrong,” he responded.

“Its the master at the school, Sir. He is tormenting and beating the poor children so that they can hardly bear it.” The tears turned to a torrent, and I wept openly at my own confusion and helplessness. “I cannot bear it myself, for just to watch is a torture.” He looked grave and was silent for a moment.

“Keziah, you understand, do you not, that corporal punishment is a necessary and integral part of harnessing the human passions?” I did not answer, but continued crying and began searching frantically for my handkerchief in the basket I had at my side. “You have heard the saying, ‘Spare the rod and spoil
the child'?” he said less gently. With my handkerchief pressed to my face, I nodded. “Sometimes it is necessary to strike a child for his own good, and not to do so is a grave sin for it allows any weakness in the child's nature to take hold and grow.”

“Oh, but Sir, the master is not doing it for the children, he is doing it for himself. He takes pleasure in hurting the little boys and they are so terrified that they cannot possibly learn.” I scrubbed at my tears and determined to speak up on behalf of poor little Cajetan and the others.

“This is a serious accusation you are making, and not one that can be easily supported or disproven.” The Bishop looked grim and angry now, but I did not feel he was angry at me. “If the masters and mistresses are to be of any use in the schools at all, they must be able to impose discipline where and when they feel it is necessary. You will discover that for yourself when you are a teacher with your own school.”

“If being a teacher means I will have to break slates over the heads of my charges, or beat them until the blood runs down their legs, or terrify them so that the mere sight of me causes them to tremble, then I would rather see the whole nation remain in ignorance sooner than turn into such a person.” If the Bishop was angry, I was beginning to feel some anger of my own. The Bishop sighed at my passionate outburst.

“Keziah, it is possible that some individuals lose control of the classroom and consequently lose control of themselves, but most masters are good men, under-educated perhaps, but attempting to do a difficult job for very little reward. Possibly this man goes a little too far, but you cannot throw out the whole system because it occasionally fails.” He sighed again, and then gave me a rather sad smile. “We are old friends, you and I, and we should not be disagreeing in this way.” I blushed at this, for it was dreadful temerity in me to disagree with the Bishop in any way at all. “I will look into the matter, but I also ask that you think this matter through, for when you are a teacher, you
will need not just a knowledge of the alphabet and numbers, but a knowledge of human nature. Sometimes a lesson must be delivered with a blow if it is to be properly learned.”

At that I knelt at his feet and he put his hands on my head and gave me his blessing but I resolved there and then never to be a teacher. The brutal master was removed and went on to two other schools before leaving the island in disgrace, and the boy Cajetan was put into my charge by the next master. I did my best to treat him with kindness, and at my urging Mother was able to get a few shillings from the church to clothe him properly. Poor little Cajetan—I suppose his parents gave him a fancy name as it didn't cost them anything. He shipped out of Petty Harbour as a catchee when he was eleven years old and I never heard of him again.

I have often wondered since if I should have been more forthright with the Bishop, but I was only fourteen and regardless of what I'd seen under the flakes in the evenings, I could not comprehend what I had witnessed. Instead, I turned my face away from the profession I was being trained for, and resolved never to use violence against any living being if I could avoid it. It is the one regret of my life that I broke that resolve.

Splendid day. Five tables of ladies for tea. Went to check on Mumma after lunch and found her with wet cheeks. Washed her face as gently as I could, and combed and rebraided her hair. She seems so sad today. Felt a little sad myself. I have spent my life being the baby, and now Mumma is the baby but I won'tget to see her grow up.

Kate came and cleaned me up in case Father Roche should come, as he has so frequently in recent days. It was very soothing and after, she sat with the wet cloth in her hand and told me about how things were doing in the kitchen. The window was open, but that Big Galoot, Dermot, had forgotten to put the screen in so a nipper got into the room and bit Kate on the eye which was soon swollen half shut. The mark was so red and looked so painful on her pale face that I felt quite angry with Dermot, even after he brought her a fresh basin of water with a little soda in it to bath the eye. She scolded him, as she said I could have been eaten by the flies if it had not been such a breezy day, but I am never bitten. Too savoury, Mr. Donovan used to say to tease me.

Mother could never understand how it was that I could break out in blisters simply by looking at a bit of green fish, but I was apparently immune to fly bites. Father and Richard escaped them in early summer because they were on the water
most of the time, but Mother had to stay with the fish on the flakes and she often finished her day dreadfully marked by the mosquitoes. The Bishop once jokingly called it the “Scourging at the Pillar” and said she should offer it up for the souls in Purgatory. She told Father later that when he said it, she wanted to answer that she'd do as well if she'd learned either to swear or to smoke, but came too late to do either and instead had to suffer the flies with nothing but a loop of oakum around her neck to drive them off.

Richard seemed to suffer even more than Mother from the hordes of mosquitoes that made life so difficult in June and July. If he was chopping wood, he would often set up a small smudge fire to keep them away, and old Egypt would crowd up against the pot with his head in the thick of the smoke, only to emerge in desperation some time later with red and streaming eyes. Up on the hill, in the gardens, I had the advantage of a breeze of wind to keep the flies from settling too often, but I also had my own way of coping with them. Like Mother, I always had a hank of oakum at hand, but in sultry weather this was of little use.

Caplin time was often the worst, for then the weather tended to be mauzy and the work could not be put off. At such times, the flies had to be ignored or no work would get done, so ignore them was what I did, though at times it was difficult. Regardless of the heat, I would bundle up with every extra bit of clothing I could find, more even than I might wear in winter, with the fringe of an old shawl dangling in my face to protect my eyes a little. Egypt would help me haul the caplin, which had to be turned into the earth before the maggots set in, and I'm afraid that good old dog suffered more than all the rest of us together.

At such times, I would apply what Richard had dubbed ‘The Bishops Holy Water,' which was water I collected from the
pitcher plants in the bit of bog over past the river. During the smallpox outbreak, I had learned to gather this water in a little jug and strain it through a scrap of linen into a small bottle to apply to the eyes of the people who had the pox scabs on their faces. The Bishop feared that these poor sufferers would be left blind from the scarring on the eyes, and several times a day he would apply a few drops of this water from the handle of a spoon right into their eyes as a wash. Nobody in Petty Harbour was left blinded, so the application must have worked.

I would carry this water in a bottle in my pocket, and when poor Egypt's eyes and nose were a swollen mass of running sores from the flies, I would take a bit of well water and clean his face and then drop a bit of my precious “holy water” into his eyes, which were by then usually like two scarlet buttons in the black fur of his head. I would also drip a little over his poor swollen nose. He was generally very patient as I did this and seemed to know that it was for his own good, for he always sat quite still with his head in my lap. When I was done, I would drape a bit of brin sacking over his head and allow him to sleep for a short while before it was time to go down to the flakes and drag the gurry up to the garden as Mother took the fish from the splitting table for salting.

I asked the Bishop once why God who loves us would have put such fierce little creatures on earth to torture us, and he said it was to remind us of the millions of sins that daily lacerate His heart, and to turn our minds from evil to good by showing us how the Lord suffers on our behalf. But why then would an innocent creature such as Egypt be so plagued? And why would Richard, who was always cheerful and obedient, suffer so much more than me? For though I seemed quiet and accepting on the surface, in my heart I was stubborn and stiff-necked and both the Lord and I knew it, even if the Bishop and my parents didn't. I tolerated the mosquitoes because in my pride I wouldn't
let them beat me, and so I became immune to the bites of the little devils.

I learned to milk cows by accident when I was eight. Mother had long wanted a cow and had finally got one, and we all watched with interest as she milked it the first few times, but then, quite unexpectedly, Mother got ill from a fish bone that penetrated the heel of her hand. The infection set in quickly, and aside from the fever and pain, there was a swelling so great that she was incapable of closing her fist and for ten days was unable to do anything about the cow. She was so weak that even had she been capable of milking with one hand, Father would have butchered the cow sooner than let her attempt it.

The creature had to be milked twice a day, morning and night, and the first evening Father talked the matter over with Mother, it was clear he had to attempt to empty the poor animal's udders before she became miserable. He was determindedly cheerful about it, not wanting her to worry, I suppose, but as he headed for the door he called “Come on along, youngsters,” and I could tell that he wasn't looking forward to the experience and wanted us there for moral support.

“Will you get as much milk as Mama does?” asked Richard as we followed him up to the field, excited by the novelty of it.

“You'll be afloat in milk by the time I'm done,” he answered. “Stands to reason, doesn't it, that if a woman can do it, a man could do it better.” It was bravado, of course. Mother had forearms like a blacksmith when he married her, and although the muscles had wasted to some extent when she left off dairying for fishing, she was still stronger in the hands and arms than any normal man.

“I have a riddle for you, young bucko,” said Father, and hastily added “and Keziah, you keep the answer to yourself,” for I knew immediately what the riddle was going to be and already had my mouth open to tell:

Four stiff standers, four dilly danders
Two lookers, two crookers and a wig wag.

I helped as Father tied on the cow and laid down a handful of feed to quiet her, and she could sense that he was unsure of himself and kicked and moved about in a way we had never seen her do with Mother. Richard began gailing, because he'd figured out the riddle, which didn't help. Nevertheless, Father did his best, soothed the animal down and tried milking as Mother had told him.

After ten fruitless minutes, Father was shaking his aching wrists and threatening to make bully beef out of the cow. No matter what he did, he couldn't get so much as a squirt. After a time, the poor cow became almost as anxious as Father was to get the process going, but even after much to-ing and fro-ing from field to house and back, and lengthy simple instructions, there was not so much as a drop of milk. Usually only a restless cow needs to be stalled to be milked, and this one had always let down easily in the middle of the field, but we moved her to a makeshift stall in a shed, for Father had not yet built her winter quarters, hoping it would help. It didn't, and by then it was getting very dark indeed, and we were almost as agitated as the cow.

Mother thought perhaps it was the clothes that caused the problem, for it was well known among milkmaids that if you changed the colour of your dress the volume of milk dropped until they got used to the new one, but Father said there was no way he was putting Mother's smock over his trousers. It was Richard who said “Let Keziah try if the cow doesn't like men,” so on went Mother's smock and back we went to the shed. I was a big girl and my mother was a small woman, but I still had to gather the skirt in a bunch at my waist as I made my way up the path. I made Richard stay behind as I knew he would tease.

“I don't think I can do this,” I told Father as he sat me down on the stool.

“If you can't, then that's all there is for it, we'll have to ask among the neighbours. But Keziah, some things aren't learned, they are a natural talent and this may be one of yours. Look at those hands,” he said as he held my palms upwards and began rubbing in the bag balm. “They look like they could empty the Milky Way.”

I looked at my hands, which had always seemed so huge on the ends of my arms, and I remembered Father finding me with my hands in the chamber lye and saying “Enough!” and suddenly I knew this was what I had been waiting for, a chance to show him he'd done the right thing when everyone else said he was spoiling me. So I tried, and I can't say I did a very efficient job but I milked the cow that evening and again in the morning and then every evening and morning after that until Mother recovered from her injury. There was something so musical about the way the milk shot into the tin bucket, and the white, foaming look as it filled higher and higher gives the same satisfaction as a full berry bucket. It wasn't long before the cow started to let down her milk as soon as I started to wash her udders.