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.
After Richard drowned, my mother never regained her enthusiasm for life and turned more and more inward, away from my father and me and towards the church, the priest, and the life to come. The transition took several years, and time and again, particularly during the long winter evenings that had been such a source of companionship and comfort to them in the past, I saw my father look at her with such a longing and sadness that I feared for him as well as for her. When it was clear that she was dying, Father sent for Bishop Fleming who came to us immediately. It had been the Bishop’s usual practice, and that of all the priests who visited the Harbour before and since, to stay at Mr. Kielly’s, the only exception being the winter of the epidemic when he feared infecting those good people, but on this occasion he directed me to make up a bed on a low trestle in the kitchen, and it was here he slept after administering extreme unction to my mother.
During the night, my mother went to her final reward, happy in the knowledge that she was joining her darling boy, and saddened only by the awareness that her husband had not yet realized his error and joined the true church. Her last petition to me was that I pray unceasingly for his soul, and I would have done so had it not been for the events which followed. Because the Bishop was wanted back in St. John’s, the funeral was held immediately. Bishop Fleming conducted the mass, led the men to the graveyard and with my father saw the body placed in the earth beside Richard, and returned to the house to take a small collation before leaving to walk back over the hills to town.
Throughout all of this my father was quiet and attentive, ensuring that the Bishop ate and drank as well as possible, thanking him on my behalf and his own for such kind attention, and before he left handing over a substantial sum of the Spanish and English coins our family had so painstakingly accumulated as a donation to the new Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the foundations of which had just been laid. As soon as the Bishop was out of sight, my father stripped the bedding from the trestle he had slept on and pulled it into the path out-side the house. There it was soon joined by the chair the Bishop had sat on, the dishes he had eaten from, the very table at which he had taken his meal, every object he had touched. Father burnt them all to ashes so that no taint of papism was left in his house, with the not-inconsiderable exception of myself.
This mad and uncharacteristic expression of my fathers grief must have been reported to the Bishop, for some days later I received a brief visit from Father Edward Troy, the Bishop s former vicar-general. My father was back at his fishing, and I was uncomfortable about receiving the priest into the house behind his back, but he made no attempt to pass through the door. I was grateful for this, for what in the Bishop was zeal and enthusiasm, in Father Troy bordered on obsession and fanaticism. He told me that my friend had asked him to convey his personal conviction that my fathers generosity to the church, and his tolerance of my own adherence to the true faith, would surely open the gates of heaven when the time was right, and I was not to worry myself about the matter. It was clear that the message Father Troy brought was one he did not agree with, which only served to reassure me that the Bishop knew best, and from that moment on I left the care of my fathers soul in the capable hands of one who was much closer to our Heavenly Father than I was.
June 6
Thick fog and cold. One of the cows has as ulcer. Must not mention it to Mumma as I know who she will blame. I am so used to telling her all the small details of the household business that I feel bottled up and ready to overflow with talk, but it makes her fret.
I can hear the cows lowing. Where is that Big Galoot? It’s his job to bring the cows in when Kate has a supper on. I don’t know why she puts up with him—lazy, good-for-nothing. He’s like a fly on a nun when there’s work to do. Father was right to have as little to do with servants as possible. We never had dieters, and more often than not Father did his hand-lining alone. He said it was human nature for people to avoid extra work when they weren’t likel
y to benefit from it, but it drove him wild to see anyone sitting around dreaming, so he usually managed to get by with just an old man or a boy for the fishing season.
We never had trouble getting good help then, not like now. It was Mother’s cooking, I know that. She was such a good manager, and since Father ate his dinner down with the help she always gave them the best she could manage, within reason. They knew that when they signed on. In some places, the servants were half starved, given maggoty fish and fousty biscuit all summer, so it was inevitable that they’d drink themselves to sleep whenever they could get their hands on a bottle. Not in our rooms, though. As long as I could remember, Father always managed to get Mother the little extras that made cooking the same food over and over again a bit easier—mustard seed and nutmeg, quills of cinnamon bark, and cider for making vinegar.
It didn’t take much then to make a servant happy. We had a hop-pole in the back, for making bread as a change from biscuit, and a little beer for special occasions. There was native mint up by the well, and I used to walk on it deliberately when I went to get water so that I could sniff it in at every step back to the house. And the savory from the garden—oh, the smell of the savoury drying by the stove was heaven itself.
That Big Galoot Kate hired is fed like a king and is lazy as a cut cat. Still, he’s a decent enough man, I suppose, not like that sleeveen Thomas Salter. I’ll never understand how Father came to take him on—probably felt sorry for him. Mother, too. Mother seemed to like him well enough. I never took to him— I could smell a villain from the moment he walked into the house. What other summer servant ever came into the house? Thomas Salter was a sly one, always some excuse to come sniffing around the kitchen, looking for extra handouts. I have to confess, I thought it was Mother he was after. Maybe it was, and I… no, don’t blame yourself. That would be like blaming Lizzie if the Big Galoot… Oh, Sweet Gentle Joseph, surely he wouldn’t ever touch Lizzie.
It’s hard lying in this bed all day, with too much time to think. I’m starting to imagine problems that don’t exist. I should remember only the good times, not the bad ones, the way Mr. Donovan taught me, but it’s not in my nature. Like the cats, for instance. Cats were needed on every fishing premise to prevent the rats cutting up the nets and trawl lines, and we girls had such fun with them, babying them and putting them up in swaddling and bonnets. But when I think of the cats, foremost in my mind is the time I found that Thomas Salter had taken two young toms and tied their tails together and slung them over the line that Father used for drying rounders. They ate one another alive, and there was nothing I could do because they wouldn’t stop their biting and clawing long enough for me to get them down. Finally I cut the line and let the dogs finish them off, but I could never again take pleasure in seeing a sweet little moggie being crooned to sleep in some child’s arms.
Later that August I was out behind the Harbour, far back by the river, cutting country hay by the banks with a little grass hook. The whorts still weren’t really ripe and I was restless to get at them, so Mother sent me to cut the wild grasses by the river. I’d been at it for hours, and had stopped to sharpen the hook on a little bit of grindstone Father had given me that had broken off his. He’d shown me how to keep the edge on the blade, to make the work easier. It was hot so I’d taken off my shoes and stockings and when the blade was sharp I started picking over the low berry bushes, just for a spell, finding a few ripe berries to bring home to Father for his evening lunch. I didn’t hear anything, what with the noise of the river and the blood pounding in my ears from being so hot, and all of a sudden someone caught hold of my bare foot and pulled me backwards onto my face. Oh, the dirty man, I can feel the flush on my face now, his fingers up my skirts, poking and probing at my privates.
I heard my father say to Mother that I probably didn’t know what he was trying to do to me, but I knew. You’d see it all the time under the flakes, the wolfish dogs going at it all the time, and the bad girls down there with the store clerks from Newman’s. I was screeching and I could hear him laughing, and the berries all over the grass under me. I never did get the stains out of that pinafore. I took the bit of frill off and used the rest of it for rags after, and every time I mopped up a bit of spilt tea or a drip from the molasses keg I imagined I was wiping Thomas Salter’s name off the face of the earth.
The worst was I managed to forget for a time, and then when I married Paddy it all came back, he was so clumsy and stupid, grabbing at me like I was some kind of streel off the back streets. There were times I thought I might do to Paddy what I did to Thomas Salter. He got hold of my drawers, and I fought, hanging on to them through my skirts, and then I just let go and scraveled away, leaving the garment in his hands, and I went on my hands and knees for the river and suddenly the grasshook was under my hand and…
Why didn’t he stop? If he’d dropped the drawers and just gone on I’d have told no-one, but I couldn’t go home without them. None of us had more than one change of clothes, not even underthings, and I had to have them back. He laughed at me. He held them up to his nose and said dirty things and laughed at me, and the handle of the hook was there under my fingers, hidden in the grass, and I was crying, snot running down my face, and I begged him to give them back but he taunted me.
Why did he get so close? I was aiming for his eyes, those dirty, pale blue eyes that saw everything under my skirts, and he flung his hand up to stop it. There was a big slash through the drawers, and the whole thumb gone, so they knew he’d had them in his hand when I cut him, knew I was telling the truth. One of his friends got him out of the Harbour on board a boat to St. Pierre before the magistrate arrived. I was eleven years old. I never had any trouble with the boys after that.
We didn’t talk about it outside the house, nor inside it after Thomas Salter was gone from the Harbour. I told my parents he never did anything except put his dirty fingers up my skirts—I imagine that thumb rotted in the grass out by the river—but I think people supposed more had happened, for no respectable boy ever came courting me in later years, not even though girls were so few and my parents were ready to do anything they could for me when I married. Perhaps that’s why the Bishop stepped in, sent Paddy Aylward from town to meet me, almost the last thing he did before he put aside this mortal coil. Paddy said the Bishop gave him assurances I was a good girl, but once, when he was in his cups, he admitted he thought the Bishop was as capable of lying for a good cause as any man.
Was I a good cause? I tried my best, but Paddy just didn’t know how to approach a woman, not unless she was a trollop from the back streets with a belly full of grog and half a dozen bastard children traipsing behind her. Paddy wasn’t a bad man, not like Thomas Salter, but he wasn’t a good man like Mr. Donovan, either. I can’t even wish he’d been different, because he could never have been different enough to please me.
I mind the first time I saw Paddy, he was standing in the doorway, looking like the very corner boy, decked out in a snuff-brown coat reaching to his ankles. The coat had been made from a worn greatcoat of his uncle’s, and was still miles too big for him, and on his head was a white hat that was battered in the sides and crown. That white hat—it was completely ridiculous, and I blushed every time I saw it coming down the path from town. Maybe I married Paddy to save him from that nonsensical white hat. One of the first things I did once we were man and wife was to lose that hat in the bottom of a dead-man’s chest in the kitchen. He was searching for it for months, lamenting losing such an invaluble and attractive head-covering. Serves me right for being embarrassed by him—there are more important things than clothes, as I keep telling Lizzie, and you should never be embarrassed by anybody’s behavior but your own.
He was an odd looking character, was Paddy—small and wiry, with a mop of frizzy yellow hair and a big mouth. He was rough, more like a sailor in his clothes and manner than like a respectable tradesman, and always hot-tempered, irascible and loud by nature, and profane in language—you could see the sulphur co
ming out his ears when he got his dander up. Still and all, most men thought him a clever sort, what they called a good fellow or a card, and most women were far from immune to his charm, though it managed to escape me for most of our married life. Poor Paddy; it must be hard to be married to a woman who doesn’t like you very much, however obedient she is.
He told me once I’d as much flavour as the white of an egg, yet in my own defence I know that, insipid as it is, the egg is good for little but glue if it hasn’t the white. Now that I think of it, if I was like the white, Paddy was like the yolk—concentrated, colourful, too strong in flavour and too thick in consistency, just begging to be thinned or leavened by the white. He was the life of any gathering, and our kitchen was always full of people having a good time, but it was me who prepared the food and cleaned up the mess after. It’s a poor party you’d have on an empty stomach.
One thing Paddy could do was make a first-rate boot, though if he hadn’t had me to run the business end of things, it would have been a mess in no time at all. I’d learned my lessons from Father and Mother, and I have echoed their voices time and again in passing on that wisdom to my own children. “A few dollars paid cash over the counter means a considerable saving at any time.” “Local or Spanish, coin will buy more than trade.” “Truck will lead to debt, and credit will lead to disaster.” “Disbursments must never exceed earnings.” “Take in more than you lay out.” “Never eat your bread before you’ve earned it.” Paddy had to be watched, because if he had one copper in his pocket and another at home in the Labrador box, he would spend both of them twice. He worked hard when he worked, and he turned a good dollar in his day, but it was always feast or famine.
Donovan's Station Page 3
