Waiting for Time (16 page)

The old woman rocks, pondering life's infinite capacity for surprise: “That terrible time after Ned was killed I thought I'd never know another day's happiness, still and all I did. Then, all them years later when Vinnie died I'da sworn I'd never laugh at another thing—but Rachel and me had a good many happy days together since then.”

Part of her happiness these past years, of course, has come from the fact that she's abandoned responsibility, a strangely intoxicating experience that Mary had deliberated upon for some time before informing her children and grandchildren.

“I got it all hove over, all of it!” she announced on her eightieth birthday—or what they have come to celebrate as her birthday—really it is the date of quite a different event, but what they don't know won't hurt them. “I'll never dig another potato, nor chop wood, and I'm never again going to darken the door of the fish store nor gut a fish, nor even turn one—fact is, I never wants to see a fish again except on a plate!” she said, and she hasn't either.

“I got to say they takes good care of me,” the old woman brags to anyone who will listen, pointing to the red dress, the laying hens, the good tea Tessa brings down from Greenspond. Last spring the boys got together and tarred her roof, and hardly a day passes but one of them doesn't bring in a rabbit, a wild bird, a fish or a nice trout, all ready for the pot. The women look after her garden and every time she comes in from the woods there's a jug of milk, a warm loaf or a bowl of soup waiting on the table. They're good to her and she would have been content—but she would not have been happy if it had not been for Rachel.

Year in, year out, from early spring when the first tiny white flowers appear until the ground freezes in the fall, the old woman and her great-granddaughter would be outdoors. Together they picked fairycaps, aspen catkins, maidenhair, heart's ease and alder buds, gathered kelp, moss and eel grass, dug up the roots of yellow pond lilies, of snap dragons and dandelion, brought home basketsful of bakeapples and rose hips, buckets of blueberries, marshberries, partridgeberries, pillow-cases filled with wintergreen and the buds and petals of a hundred plants that grow in the crevices of rocks and under the shadows of evergreen trees. Rain or shine they could be seen foraging in the woods and marshes or along the beach.

When snow began to fly they would move inside and work in the spicy warmth of Mary's kitchen, amid the clutter of things they had gathered. Roots must be dried and ground to powder, some for burns and others for stomach disorders. Leaves can be made into tea for the cure of rheumatism, earache and lung disease or sewn into pillows to ward off consumption. From rose hips and seaweed they concoct ointments for anointing the eyes in cases of snow blindness, salve to cure hemorrhoids, to stop bleeding, to heal sores. Together they brew tonics for canker, for spring sickness and women's complaints, drinks to ease childbirth, headache and death, and some that can even lift sorrow from your shoulders for a while. When the sideboard jars are again full, when all the little cloth bags are tied and hung in lines behind the stove, Mary and Rachel would turn to jam making, to bottling caribou, seal and wild duck.

Winters when there was a teacher in the place the girl went to school with the other youngsters, but even then she would come straight to Mary's the minute classes were let out. Sometimes they would just talk, considering every curious happening or bit of gossip either of them had heard during the day. Other times Rachel would sit by the hour listening to the old woman describe how to put warts away, make hot fomentations, cure Seal Finger or tie off a baby's cord. Over the years Mary has taught her great-granddaughter every old charm, spell and incantation she has learned in a lifetime of tending the sick. Sometimes it seems as if the woman is pouring her spirit into the body of the small dark girl.

“Far as Nan's concerned our Rachel's the sun and the moon, she got the young one pure spoiled,” Jessie says in her pleasant, absentminded way, more because such remarks are expected than because she has any real concerns about her daughter.

“That child was born with an old head on her shoulders,” Mary tells anyone who dares suggest: she might be keeping the girl from more suitable activities. The woman who has never had one word of praise for her own children boasts that Rachel is the brightest, prettiest and smartest child ever born on the Cape.

“She was, too—is still—and I'd have died content just knowin' everythin' was goin' to be all right for her,” Mary thinks as she sips her cold tea. 'Tela gone without a word 'tho I never did get all, nor half, the things I shoulda got outta life.” This last is a stern reminder to God that she is still able to bargain.

“Then that slack-arsed bugger had to come along and do what he done to her. Where was God's friggin' pocket then?” During the years Mary lived with Lavinia her language had improved, but after her friend's death she had quickly slipped back to her old ways and nowadays, as her daughter Tessa says, “Would make a holy show of us in front of our Saviour should he see fit to land on the Cape.”

Stephen Vincent, the young man Mary is thinking of with such bitterness, arrived on the Cape in June. Unannounced and unexpected he came, carrying two big suitcases, leather with shiny brass corners, one filled with books and the other with clothing the like of which no one along the shore had ever imagined, much less seen. The men and boys hated Stephen on sight, laughed themselves helpless the day he tried to scull a boat and fell in arse-over-kettle. Almost drowned. Mary wishes he had.

Girls and women loved him, doted on him, said he was the face and eyes of his grandfather. Rachel's mother Jessie, who was old enough to have better sense, let him sit at her kitchen table and recite poetry by the hour. “I do wonder you don't like him, Nan, sure he reminds me so much of Lavinia the way he says them poems!”

Mary had stared at Calvin's wife. Sometimes she wondered if Jessie was weak minded like poor Fanny—who was after all the woman's grandmother. Lavinia had once pointed out that since Calvin was Mary's grandson and Jessie her great-granddaughter the two were first cousins once removed—“That's no reason for her to be so stunned!” Mary protested and Lavinia had had to agree that it wasn't.

“Hid behind the door when they passed out good sense, you did my girl,” Mary told Jessie the day she suggested Stephen Vincent was like Lavinia. “How could nuisance-face be like Lavinia when his grandfather were Char Vincent what married someone in St. John's, then went off to convert savages in foreign parts? The young whelp got no connection with the Andrews.”

“Far as I'm concerned Stephen Vincent's a black stranger. S'posin' he is Charlie's grandson—and we only got his word for that, I don't take to him,” Mary said and would not be charmed.

She found it hard to put her finger on what it was she disliked so intensely about the blonde, graceful young man. For one thing he was a good ten years older than Rachel, who was barely fifteen and innocent as the driven snow. And there was something foreign about him, not just his unfamiliar way of talking, either, but his manner. He had a sharp, bright glitter that never went away like he knew he'd just have to put out his hand and whatever he wanted would fall right into it.

Perhaps, like Jessie said, she was just jealous. Certainly she hated to see Stephen Vincent and Rachel together—and they were always together. Sometimes when Mary was out tramping the hills, she would come upon them, sitting in some mossy spot, their heads close, talking quietly, or him with a book open reading to the girl. For all her good sense Rachel was foolish as a kitten that summer.

Then, quite abruptly, unexpectedly as he had arrived, Stephen left. Got himself up to Wesleyville on Eldon Gill's bulley and caught the coastal boat to St. John's.

From Rachel's silent despair it was clear the boy's leaving had surprised her as much as anyone, but, “Good riddance!” the old woman said, delighted to have Stephen Vincent out of Cape Random. Now things would get back to the way they should be.

And it seemed this might be so. As fall came on, the girl rejoined her great-grandmother, foraging in the woods and along the beach. But it was not the same, Rachel seemed smaller, shrunken, all her bright exuberance gone. It was pure torment for Mary to see the girl's pinched face, the way she hovered, hoping for word of him whenever a ship came in.

Still, Mary thought, it will pass—she's not the first whose heart's been broke—she's only a youngster and hearts mend faster than heads.

In early November she found out different. Wesley Lush, working his way down the coast by dog sled, arrived in Mary's kitchen with the last mail for the year. It was a terrible day, fog and freezing rain had coated everything with glitter. Yet Wes barely had his backside on a chair when Pash and Tessa, who must have seen him pass their house, came floundering up the lane.

It was Pash, blind as she was, who clutched at the ice-crusted fence, pushing and pulling fat, arthritic Tessa along. They made so much noise that the dogs Wes had barred up under the house rushed out and knocked Pash right off her feet.

“I mighta' knowed them two old fools'd be the first here,” Mary said and sent Rachel out to help the women up the steps.

“Don't s'pose Miss What's-her-face could pass out the mail, was Tessa Andrews not here to tell her how. Been twenty year now since Tessa taught school but she still wants to oversee all occasions—anyone'd think she was Meg's daughter instead of mine,” Mary was muttering to no one in particular as the two women came puffing and steaming into her kitchen.

“Stop jawin', mother,” Tessa said. She is the only person on the Cape who dares speak to Mary Bundle in such a tone. “I want to have me way with Wes before the place fills up,” Tessa winked at Rachel, eased herself down beside the mail carrier and proceeded to question him on church attendance, the results of the Labrador fishery, the progress of courtships, the weather and ice conditions, sickness, births and deaths in the communities he's passed through on his way to Cape Random.

Right behind Pash and Tessa, six youngsters slipped quietly into the kitchen, and behind them came Rose and Willie Andrews with their youngest grandchild Ki—a young nuisance. Tessa directed the boy to sit on the other side of the kitchen from the younger children who have jammed down together on the sofa like a line of big-eyed puffins. Next came Toma Hutchings and his wife Comfort, then Floss Gill and Dorcas Vincent, each with a small baby in their arms, behind them were Ned and Greta Way, Aunt Min and Skipper Lem Hounsell—all tramping water in over Mary's clean floor, smelling of frozen fog and wet wool, drinking her tea and eating her raisin buns, which Jessie passed around without so much as a by-your-leave.

They surround poor Wes, a painfully shy man, who had pushed his chair further and further back into the corner behind the stove, stared miserably at his hands and answered their urgent requests for information with monosyllabic grunts.

When Miss Mugford, the schoolteacher, arrived, Tessa told her not to wait for anyone else and the teacher began distribution of the mail. Parcels first, as was the custom, with good long pauses so that the contents of each package could be passed around, examined and commented on.

There had not been a lot of mail in Wes's bag. Mary sets herself to remember each item: the door hinges Calvin had ordered two years ago from Currain's in St. John's, Jessie's church paper, the box of oranges Toma and Comfort bring in every fall for the youngsters' Christmas, a sample copy of the new Methodist hymnal—addressed to the church but Tessa takes charge of it—and a calendar for Rose from The St. John's Fine Art Emporium. The calendar had a picture of what Tessa said was the Colonial Building, all draped out in flags with some stuck-up looking men lined up on the steps. Apart from that there was just the package of crochet thread for Triff Norris, a big roll of newspapers for David and Sophie Hutchings—and two letters, which Miss Mugford gave out last. One letter was for the teacher herself, the other for Rachel.

The girl snatched the envelope as if someone had given her the keys to heaven. Then she pulled on her jacket and disappeared out the door, although it was still sleeting and already getting duckish.

Nobody else made a move to leave. Women took out their knitting and Jessie put on another pot of tea. The newspapers, some of them four months old, were distributed among the men, who passed them from hand to hand, taking turns reading out bits they thought the women might find interesting.

The Boer War is still going on, they were told. The export price of salt cod has dropped twenty percent in the last ten years, government is suggesting people get out of fishing and into farming. St. John's is being rebuilt again, bigger and better than before the latest fire, with boardwalks and electric street lights along Water Street.

At first the women and children listen attentively but the press of information became too great, too ominous. Rival conversations sprang up: Are “Boers” people or animals? What are boardwalks and how can you possibly have lights along a street? Incomprehensible, unanswerable questions—quickly dropped in favour of examination of a new knitting pattern or the bleeding gums of Floss's baby.

But when Captain Hounsell shook his paper, commanding them to hear what he called the latest bit of government skullduggery, they all became silent again. “‘It has been revealed that A. B. Morine, Minister of Finance, who is negotiating Newfoundland's contract with railway builder R. G. Reid, is also solicitor for the Reid company and was last year paid a $5000 retainer by Reid's firm.…’ Now what do you make of that?” The old man held the newspaper at arm's length as he read.

“Go on, wasn't for Reid none of us woulda gotten a cent last winter—wasn't it him paid ta have all that lumber cut and hauled?”

Some of the men agreed, “What difference how much big shots skim off so long as an honest man can get a day's work out of it?” Others insisted it was barbarous how the likes of Reid can make fortunes off Newfoundlanders. “What gives that bloody clique in St. John's the right to run the government, anyhow?” one of the younger men asked—Mary had been pleased to hear someone besides herself swearing.