Far From Home

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  The next day Clarissa hopped along beside Miss Elizabeth as they went down the path to the wharf to wave goodbye to the Governor and Lady Allardyce. If only my mother could see me now! she thought wistfully.

  That night she went to bed, not caring about the whispers of the other girls or the sound of “Pet!”digging into her ear.

  20

  SUMMER

  It was June, and days fell out of nights well before breakfast, opening to the brightness and the scent of new flowers and leaves. Friday came, and with it the promise of no school for two days. Clarissa lifted her face to a wind that breathed softly against her skin. She marvelled at the smooth, milky-brown roads over which her crutches moved, leaving tiny imprints in the clay. Cora had gone ahead and was taking turns skipping rope and counting rounds with Becky on a grassy nob beside the road. She threw the rope over her shoulder and came back to where Clarissa had stopped to look down in a pothole full of water. Cora leaned over the water, and Clarissa giggled at the sight of her friend’s image floating on an upside-down sky.

  Simon, a fisherman’s son whose eyes always looked hungry, and Peter passed the two girls. The boys were arguing loudly. Nicholas, the merchant’s son, caught up with them. He taunted Peter. “You haven’t got a father. You’re nothing but a ragamuffin Dr. Grenfell took into the orphanage.”

  “Mind now, you don’t know everything,” Peter answered, with a determined look in his green eyes. “I’m a good hand at adding and subtracting without rinding people. I’m looking to be an aeroplane flyer or a doctor.”

  “A fish doctor is what you’ll be – and Simon too,” Nicholas said with a sneer. Then he ran off down to the harbour wharf. Simon, indignant at being compared to a fish doctor: an orange beetle that clings to sick fish, yelled at Nicholas’s back, “If me father never got his summer’s haul, your father in his fancy hip-roofed house wouldn’t give him a bag of flour for a nod towards next year, even though his fish helps keep your father in business.”

  The girls turned away from the boys and looked towards the harbour and the sea, now patterned like a mackerel’s skin. Along the beach, small fishing boats that had lain bottoms up on the launch all winter, were being scraped and painted. Killicks were being made ready to anchor the boats in the harbour. Smoke no longer rose from funnels in store lofts, where the fishermen had spent cold months mending nets. Now the men were barking their nets in big-bellied pots. Other people were painting sheds and houses with tar and ochre. The strong, rich smell of oakum filled the air.

  The girls passed a ramshackle house. In the back of it, a red rooster strutted around the inside of a small pen. Butterflies floated among white daisies growing by a grey shed that leaned beside a weather-blackened stage. The stage’s legs had skewed under the weight of many summers. Now the high tide slapped and sucked its legs. Barked rope hung coiled against the stage’s strouters. An idle fisherman, with a poor-looking face, sat on the stage, his hands slack upon his knees, as he watched green and black shades move through water caught in the play of wind and sunlight.

  “Uncle Abe’s down with a TB spine. That’s why he’s dozin’ on the wind while his boat’s peeling on the beach,” Cora said under her breath. “Sure, he should have minded the ways of Uncle Jerry.” She looked towards a little man sitting on the stoop of the shed.

  Clarissa screwed up her face. She knew that on spring mornings when Uncle Jerry was leaving home to go to his stage, he always grabbed a wooden ladle and went down to the harbour wharf where scummy blubber barrels stood filled with rendered cod liver. He’d dip up a ladleful of the golden liquid, drink it and smack his lips. If he forgot the ladle, he’d stoop to the barrel and slurp a mouthful of cod liver oil. He believed that the smooth oil slipping down his throat would smother any consumption bug that might have gotten inside him.

  Cora nodded at Uncle Jerry and remarked, “Sure, ’tis a miracle his white whiskers stay white. But his joints are greased and he’s likely got enough energy to jump over the moon on a night when ’tis low.”

  Across the water, against the hills of St. Anthony, an open door shadowed a fisherman working in an ochre-painted shed. A newly painted boat slapped crimped waters beside a rickety stagehead. Clarissa looked across to Fishing Point, where whales were breaching the waves, then flipping the water with their giant tails and blowing it into the air. Harbour porpoises were chasing a school of herring into the harbour.

  The girls came through the orphanage gates, and when they got to the steps, Clarissa pulled her cloth bookbag off her shoulder and laid it on the steps. She sat down beside it for a spell, and looked towards the fence where pink and purple rockets nodded in the breeze. The whole place was being decorated for the prettiest season of all.

  Saturday came, and with it stars of sunlight twinkling on the harbour waters. Windows were raised in homes all around the place. The orphanage windows were lifted high, its curtains flapping in warm winds. Birch brooms stirred up dust in every nook and cranny of the orphanage; mattresses were turned and re-cased and pillows beaten out, letting a scattered feather fly.

  From around the harbour, women in brin aprons were gathering on the beach to scrub their mats with lye soap in the salty water. Later, they would hurry home with barrows full of clean mats and hang them to dry on wattle fences. The women knew that warm winds sweeping over the land might be chased away at any moment by galing winds with a nasty bite. Sometimes the women had to run and shut their windows, and keep them closed for days.

  Although the orphanage grounds were belted by black wrought-iron gates, the fence was open to the mission wharf and beach. Now the children were racing each other down to the wharf. Many of them leaned on the wharf rails, and watched the Strathcona sail in with barrels of food in her hold, including whale meat, sealed with reindeer moss, for the huskies. The schooner’s deck often held coal for the orphanage furnace, and skinned logs for the construction of houses and fishing rooms. The orphan boys longed to sail out to sea on Dr. Grenfell’s thousand pounds of iron: his steel-ribbed steamship.

  Clarissa and Cora made their way to the beach to the shouts of boys who had started jigging sculpins from the wharf. When they caught one, they would run after the girls, to touch them with the cold, clammy fish. Imogene squealed and Clarissa smiled, hoping the boys had put a live one down her neck. Peter was coming towards her with his hooked line twined around one hand. When he got close, he opened his other hand and looked at Clarissa. “Here,” he said slyly.

  She eyed the clear balls on his palm. “What are they?” she asked, as Cora reached over and boldly plucked a ball off his hand.

  There was a gleam in his eyes as he said, “They’re the balls in fish eyes. First you break the eyeball sac . . .”

  “What!” Cora cut him off in disgust. “That’s worse than holding a fish doctor!” She tried to let the ball slide off her hand, but it stuck. She shuddered and shook it free.

  Clarissa turned back to watch local fishermen boating into the harbour with all sails winged. Gulls waited to lift off the green hills and drop into the harbour for a supper of fish guts.

  Soon the harbour was alive with the sounds of boats being moored with iron chains or with thick ropes on the gump posts of the harbour wharf. Before long, men in oilskins were standing at splitting tables, using sharp knives to slit the throats and bellies of codfish. Fish entrails, backbones and heads dropped to the wharf, crowding the men’s feet. Fish livers were tossed into oil casks to be rendered into oil.

  In a few days, the odour of wet, salt-bulked fish mingled with the sweet scent of wild flowers. Men and women, arms up to their elbows in puncheons full of briny water, washed the fish; then they spread them open on bough-covered wooden flakes to dry. People living near a beach often spread their catch on flat beach rocks. As the fish lay turning into golden leaves in the summer sun, the harbour women sat by a small brook sewing flour bags together for a covering, using string from the bags. The fish would be rounded into piles of rosettes and covered each nigh
t – or whenever there was a sign of rain.

  Clarissa heard the woman laughing as if they were on a picnic instead of working. She knew they were laughing because the fish would save their winter.

  Late June came like a damp, grey eel, slipping down Clarissa’s neck, reminding her of a day last summer when Peter had pushed a long, slimy creature inside her collar after he’d spent the morning on the mission wharf with a hook and line.

  Caplin weather, Uncle Aubrey called it. This was the time of year the beach came alive with supple little fish. They rolled into the harbour and up onto the beach in silvery-green waves. Hagdowns pitched on the water in patches almost as thick as the caplin they were dipping for. Harbour dogs danced around the beach, grabbing the caplin flipping around in the sand. Clarissa could hear the husky dogs whining in their kennel. It had been built on the beach so the incoming tide could flush it out. Peter filled a bucket with caplin and went to drop the little fish into the kennel. Other boys were busy gathering caplin in buckets. The caplin would be dried and stored for winter dog food.

  All along the road, women were hurrying out of their houses with wash pans to gather fresh caplin for a fry. Poor people came with glad, eager eyes, as if they could hardly wait to rip the white flesh from the backbone of the fish. Clarissa recognized Esther’s mother among them.

  When Clarissa went into the orphanage through the basement door, Cora’s mother was singing in the kitchen, “I wish, I wish, but all in vain. I wish I were a child, a child again. A child again I shall not be ’til apples grow on an orange tree.”

  There were several frying pans going at once on the large coal stove. Clarissa watched as the silvery-green hues of the caplin faded to a crisp brown. The fresh fish would make a good supper.

  21

  SEESAW AND TRICKS

  On rainy days Clarissa stayed inside, not wanting to drabble through mud. The first Saturday morning in July, she looked through the dormitory window at a little cloud hanging all alone in a huge sky. Rain fell, tattering the cloud until it looked like pieces of burst balloon; a sudden blast of sunshine burned it up. Children were soon flooding the grounds with shouts as they lipritty skipped. Clarissa listened to their voices: “Blue eyes, beauty; grey eyes, greedy guts; brown eyes steal the pudding, fill it with a bunch of fish eyes.”

  Clarissa was the last one to go outdoors. Cora was nowhere in sight. As she sat down on one end of the seesaw, she noticed Hipper sauntering towards her. Dr. Grenfell had dropped him at the orphanage, calling him a fine junk of a boy. The other boys nicknamed him Hipper because he had arrived at the orphanage with a bent hipper nail fastening the fly of his overalls. The straps on the overalls were crossed at the back and knotted in the buttonholes of the bib.

  “You wanta seesaw?” he called.

  Clarissa had never been on the seesaw with anyone but Cora, who kept a slow pace and didn’t go too high. The boy’s interest in her was a surprise. She reluctantly agreed, leaning on the seesaw with her right forearm and holding on tight with her good hand. Hipper sat on the other end of the seesaw and swung her into the air. She trembled as he seesawed faster and faster, grinning all the while. Then he laughed and stopped suddenly, his feet planted firmly on the ground. Clarissa dangled helplessly in the air. He is going to do something terrible to me, she thought just before she felt a sudden shift. Hipper jumped off his end, letting her drop to the ground with a jolt. The braces cut into her legs, making her eyes squinch. Tears trickled down her face as she crawled to her crutches. She wanted to bang the bully with them for knocking her off the seesaw. It was so close to the sloping bank above the beach she could have rolled down over it.

  Hipper laughed again. But when Clarissa got up on her crutches and he saw the anger in her eyes, he muttered a threat. “You better keep yer mout’ shut or else.” Then he took to his heels, running in the direction of Peter, Jakot and the other boys.

  Clarissa didn’t know what it was about her that brought out the bully in boys. Hipper was as bad as young Ben, who had always seemed quiet and mannerly – until one day last week. He sat down by Clarissa on her locker with a calm look on his face. She had not suspected that his hands were balled. Suddenly he lifted a tight fist and pucked her in the face. Then he ran off, calling back over his shoulder, “Wooden leg!”

  “I don’t have a wooden leg,” she shouted after him.

  “You have two,” he called back.

  “And you,” she yelled, “have a timber head and the brain of a starfish, which means you’re out of luck because a starfish doesn’t have a brain.”

  Cora came out on the veranda laughing as Clarissa came in from the playground. She looked at Clarissa with a wide grin. “I saw what happened. But bully boys don’t always get the best of us. I got Peter good this morning. He was just gonna chop a bit of wood, and I was behind him when he swung the ax over his shoulder. He got me on the forehead, but only a touch. I screamed and fell on the ground. I closed my eyes and never moved a muscle. He let out a big screech and started dancing around crying. ‘I arn’t killed you, ‘ive I?’

  “Then he bent down and touched me on the cheek. I opened my eyes real slow. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. Then I got up and staggered towards the orphanage, leaving him wonderin’ if I was gonna drop dead. That’s what he gets for plaguing us.”

  The girls sat on the veranda tossing marbles on their hands and rolling them into their palms; every now and then one of them would laugh as she thought of Cora’s trick.

  22

  NO PICNIC

  One morning Clarissa and Cora hurried down the stairs to the kitchen where Cora’s mother was slicing bread for a picnic, and hoping aloud that the day would be abroad with sunshine.

  “Now, Cora,” said Mrs. Payne, “you’ve a choice between peanut butter sandwiches and strawberry jam sandwiches.”

  Cora looked at her. “Why can’t I have one of each?”

  Mrs. Payne shook her head. “No. You’ve to heed the rules – one or the other.”

  Clarissa could already taste the gritty peanut butter and the sweetness of berry jam. But she wasn’t going on this picnic.

  She had gone last year, tailing behind the other children as they galumphed through bramble bushes and willow weeds along the road, squealing and shouting in the morning sunshine. Peter and Jakot, banging on their mouths and hollering, had rushed down the steep bank to where the boat was tied. Clarissa edged her way down, and Uncle Aubrey helped her get from the bank onto the wharf. Then he lifted her into Dr. Grenfell’s little rowboat. With Miss Elizabeth sitting in the bow, Jakot and Peter took the boat for its second run to the beach at John’s Point. When they got there, the two boys jumped over the prow of the boat and tied the painter to a tree. The children jumped out onto wet sand with shrieks of delight.

  Clarissa stayed seated, dismay clouding her face. She’d left her crutches back on the wharf. Miss Elizabeth looked at her without sympathy, “You must remain in the boat, Clarissa. You should not have forgotten your crutches.”

  Clarissa spent the rest of the day sitting on the cross board. Someday all the orphans would move out into the world and she would be left behind. She tried not to be too down in the mouth, reminding herself that she had God to talk to – and her sister-self. After a while the grounded boat slipped off the sand into the water, and she became mesmerized by its rocking and the warm sun beating down on her. Laughter tumbled into the air as the children kicked balls and played games. Their voices lifted and blended in a familiar rhyme: “Here we go around the mulberry bush . . .”

  None of the children came to talk with Clarissa as she sat in the boat, her bottom dunch from sitting so long. When Miss Elizabeth brought her a slice of coarse, black bread spread with jam, she was too unhappy to care if she ate it or not. Her stomach was queasy from the heat of the sun and the movement of the boat.

  The air cooled, and wind began to stir the water. It rolled over itself towards shore, tickling the rocks and heeling back. They think I’m so much trouble
, she thought as the children came back, laughing and shouting and jiggling the boat as they got in.

  On their way across the harbour, Clarissa let her hand slip over the boat and slide through water. When she pulled it back in, water dripped from her fingertips and fell on Imogene’s neck. She jumped, letting out a screech. The boat tipped and water flobbered in over the gunwales. The mistress was quick in admonishing Clarissa, “Be more careful – or else . . .”

  When the boat got back to the orphanage wharf, the other children clambered up the wooden ladder. Jakot tossed Clarissa’s crutches into the boat. She grabbed them and tried to get a footing, but the braces had cut off her circulation. She was unable to move.

  “Get up! I shall never take you again,” said Miss Elizabeth crossly.

  Clarissa wished Old Keziah would be kinder. She seemed to have wind in her blood, wind that made her tongue snap and whip and rake the children’s skin with harsh words. I’m tough, Clarissa thought. I’m not going to cry. She moved her legs back and forth, and tried a second time to get up. She got to her feet just as Uncle Aubrey came to lift her out of the boat.

  Now the children were on their way to another summer outing. Clarissa followed them down to the bank. Soon Dr. Grenfell’s little boat was moving out through the harbour, filled with children going on their summer outing. They might even find some mainderberries. Clarissa’s fingers itched to pick the sweet, minty, white berries found in bogs. Her brown eyes brimmed with tears, and she opened them wide, making room so the tears wouldn’t fall. She looked longingly after the boat. I shouldn’t have to drag my body as if it were a killick, while everyone else sails free.