Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  Trying to keep Paddy confined in the store was like trying to keep a frog in a barrel—he was always leaping up and rushing out to the nearby shops to purchase some small item, or checking the weather or running some errand. No room was big enough to hold him, and in winter it seemed as if he were constantly bouncing off the walls. Even when he sat as still as a stone, when he was listening to an elaborate story or a fine old ballad being sung by some visitor, you had the sense that he was quivering inside, that he was coiled to bound upward and outward. Paddy Beg, many people called him, because he was small, but more often he would be called Springheeled Jackson, for he seemed to have springs in his shoes. Perhaps he really did, for he could make a shoe that made a short man tall, or a crippled girl straight, or a clumsy child nimble and graceful. Paddy could work miracles with his clicker and his last.

  Mother used to say that the greatest miracle in the Bible was revealed to us when God reminded us in Deuteronomy that after forty years wandering the desert, “Thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot.” To think of all those people, walking and walking for forty years, and the shoes grew on the feet of the children and never broke or wore out. A miracle indeed, and not one we were blessed with. When I was a child, it was my mother who kept the shoes on our feet from becoming old, and indeed rotting off them, for Father never acquired the knack of waxing up the hempen cord to make the tacker for harnesses and shoes. Paddy could do it blindfolded, or blind drunk even, but Father couldn’t get the wax to stick and he just couldn’t manage the meticulous, tiny stitches the boots and harnesses needed, which is perhaps why he was so impressed by Paddy that he almost paid him to take me.

  Newfoundland is a hard climate for a bad boot—a shoddy piece of work means chilblains, frostbite, cracked and swollen heels, and toes with the nails falling off. Half the children in the Harbour were crippled from having bad boots or no boots at all. We had no logans then, no rubber boots, and the mud and wet and salt water was hard on footwear, so Mother cared for our boots, setting up the little last on the table in the evening and tapping the sprigs in, trimming down the leather for new soles or carefully detaching the topsides to construct an almost new pair from old ones. And always and ever she was greasing them up, scooping up the dark yellow muck and working it into every seam, every stitch, every crack of the leather. She said it kept her own hands softer, made it easier for her to hold a needle after a day on the flakes.

  Paddy made a good boot, that’s certain. No matter what condition he was in, when he had the leather in his hand he could make up a blucher or what we called a half gallon in no time at all. When we first had the shop near Springdale Street, he would sell the shoes right off our feet, calling the children in from their games, or me from the back linney, and then he would sit down and make a new pair as quick as a wink. He could make anything from a strong fishermen’s boot to a lady’s fine drawing room shoe, and make it as good as any Hamburg cordwainer. A pair of bluchers with swanskin or buskins were about the tidiest, warmest and most comfortable cover any man could put on his foot.

  Paddy had a sign in the window, over a pair of sample bluchers: “We never claim they are waterproof but they oblige the foot of man, woman or child in every other way.” The first sign he made said that his boots would keep the feet of Pharaoh’s army dry, but I made him take it down as it was a lie, and possibly even blasphemous, so we compromised with the other. I never could understand why Paddy, who made one of the best boots at a reasonable price in the entire colony, could not just be satisfied with the truth but had to layer it over with a lie every time.

  I recall once Paddy had promised a pair of boots to a fellow from the Garrison, but one of the apprentices sliced his hand on a knife, nearly taking off his finger, and it was Paddy sat with the boy one whole weekend, keeping the hand still and soaking the infection out. I had the girls down with measles at the time and it wasn’t a bad case but they needed constant tending and I just couldn’t leave them, so Paddy sat two nights with the boy and probably saved his arm at the very least. When the officer came in on Monday to get his boots, Paddy was shaking from loss of sleep and had eyes like two burnt holes in a blanket. He could hardly hold an awl, let alone turn out a pair of first-rate boots in a morning, so he made up some bit of nonsense about the leather being unavailable and the Spanish ship his order was on going down off Majorca. The officer was furious—it was so obviously all a lie. You could see the judgment written in his eyes, and as he went through the door I heard him say “Sot!” under his breath.

  I asked Paddy after why he didn’t just tell him the truth, that he’d been nursing the boy all weekend which was nothing to be ashamed of, and he said he hadn’t thought quick enough. That was Paddy’s burden, and mine; the truth always came to his tongue a second or two slower than a lie. I don’t know where he got this from—Old Mr. Fitzgibbon, who’s been dead this sixty years, told me that he knew Paddy’s” family in Kilkenny, and was on the wharf there the day Paddy sailed for America. He came from respectable people—his father was a crippled man who kept a store, a dry-goods shop of some sort—but he just couldn’t stick to the truth, and it drove me wild. If he sold twenty pairs of boots, he said it was thirty. If he had four men working for him, or six, he said it was eight or ten. He claimed to be doing so well that he was constantly being asked for small loans and donations, and since he wouldn’t admit he hadn’t the coin, he’d rob the few dollars I kept for emergencies in the lustreware jug and just give it away to anyone who told a lie as well as he did himself.

  Paddy was so open-fisted, such a braggart, that it was rumored he’d found a crock of gold in the back yard when he was building the foundation for our back linney. The only crock of gold he ever found was me, for I managed to stretch a penny to a pound, and it was Father’s money that built the shop in the first place, for he never doubted for a moment that every word that came out of Paddy Aylward’s mouth was as true as Holy Writ. Father saw the shop as income for his old age, when he would come and live with me and Paddy and watch our children grow up as he grew old, and Paddy would see that none of us ever wanted for a thing. It didn’t quite work out that way— Father never got old enough to stop fishing, and Paddy never saw the girls grow up, but if he had I don’t doubt we would have been less than wealthy.

  After Paddy died, I sold the premises just in time; the building was rented but I got $5,000 for the heavy machinery, $950 for the light machinery, utensils and appliances, and $1,900 for the on-hand stock of leather and semi-finished materials. The company who bought me out promised jobs for seven men and one boy, and by the time I had paid all the outstanding debts as well as the funeral and the tabs Paddy ran at the various shebeens around town, most of the money was gone but I still had enough to buy the farm out in the Waterford Valley. If Paddy had died two years later, we’d have been lucky to get half that price, for the factories were taking over and the logans and rubber boots were just coming onto the island. I got us out just in time.

  The cows are coming in now. I wish Kate had someone to count on. I’d never wish a man like Paddy on her, for he was too unpredictable, and it’s the not-knowing that’s the worst. But if he was managed properly, even the Big Galoot could be company for her, some sort of comfort. Here, Paddy has been dead now longer than he was ever alive, and he still lives with me. I find his yellow hair in the butter, and I can hear his heels banging on the floor as I am falling asleep at night. The only time I could ever escape him was when Mr. Donovan wrapped his big, heavy arms around me and his warm breath on the top of my head would drive all thoughts of Paddy out of my memory for minutes and hours at a time. And now, here I am remembering the energy and the clever hands almost as if I had loved him once. I never loved him—I never loved anyone until I loved my own sweet man. Kate is better off with no-one than with the likes of Paddy Aylward.

  June 11

  Stephen Walsh’s brother-in-law was here, asking if I’d sell the hotel. Said he figured I couldn’t manage on my own and acted like
he was doing me a favour to take it off my hands. The face of him, and Mumma upstairs probably hearing every word. I told him I wasn’t on my own and it isn’t my hotel to sell. Dropped and broke the large pudding bowl in cleaning it. Fine day.

  Lizzie was here, talking to amuse me. She says she has proof positive that Mr. Delgado dyes his hair. She can be a wicked gossip, but she knows when to hold her tongue. There are certain professions that require discretion, and the hotel business is one of them. “Tell the truth, the half truth, and nothing like the truth,” as Mr. Reid used to say. Sometimes I think it is the silent ones who learn most, for I’m lying here as dumb as a post and I’m learning all sorts of things I didn’t know before. If I ever get my tongue to obey me again, I’ll have a thing or two to tell Kate about that Annie in the kitchen.

  Now Father was never one to gossip, yet his twine loft drew men from all over the Harbour in the off-season. I don’t know why that would be—Father wasn’t a talker, and though he had a pleasant word for most, he wasn’t a particularly sociable man. He kept no beer or rum on the wharf and never tolerated those who brought it with them, nor did he smoke although he didn’t object to those who did. I suppose he had a dour and taciturn nature, a congenitally gloomy outlook on life. I recall once when Mother was feeling particularly optimistic about the outcome of some enterprise, a new cow or some hardy potato stock perhaps, Father kept reining her back with predictions of disaster until, in frustration, she stamped off to the other room and returned with the Bible which she thrust into his hands with the suggestion that he read the Book of Job to cheer himself up.

  Fathers dark, quiet moods seemed, if anything, to attract other men to him. When they arrived at his rooms, they would insinuate themselves into the gloom of the shed, finding a corner out of his way, and after a time they would begin to talk. He listened, I suppose, but it’s hard to say—perhaps he didn’t. Often these visitors picked up a bit of net or some item that needed work and would set to repairing it, often holding it out to Father to check that he approved or to accept direction, for if it was not done to standard Father would simply lay the object to one side, and the next time they came it would have been redone properly. He worked relentlessly, but he did it with an economy of movement that made it soothing rather than enervating, and the pace he set at the beginning of the morning was maintained right up to the moment he stopped work for the day.

  The fire in the twine loft chimney burned only when there was reason—if nets had to be mended, a fire was necessary to keep fingers from becoming stiff and clumsy. Barking and iron-work was done out of doors, but pots of glue, tar, seal oil with ochre, things related to work rather than food, were heated on the flat sheet of iron that could be slid over the grating of the twine loft chimney. Occasionally food was cooked there also. Sometimes we children would gather huge buckets of mussels that would be boiled in sea water and kelp in the twine loft, and the men would shell and beard them as they talked quietly among themselves, eating at least as many as they tossed into the crock that Mother would eventually top-up with vinegar and mustard seed and seal with wax for the coming Christmas season. I once burned the corner of my apron by using it to move a glue pot, and was so mortified by the scolding Mother gave me that I threw the scorched garment down the privy hole—Richard hooked it out with a gaff, and I had to scrub the filthy thing until it gleamed white again, and then resew it for a neighbours smaller child. Mother didn’t think the twine loft was a good place for a girl.

  Sometimes one of the regulars would bring a fish or a half dozen herring which they would boil up with a bit of Hamburg biscuit that Father kept in a string bag next to the chimney. I rarely took part in these impromptu lunches but Richard would tell me about them. Once I was present when someone brought a halibut. I was thrilled to the ends of my hair when it was served out on platters of spruce shingle, for we ate it with our fingers which would never have been allowed up at the house. Almost everyone smoked except Father, so there was often a strong scent of tobacco or tar or seaweed to cut through the ever-present odour of salt fish and gurry that permeated the place. In the deep of winter, the twine lofts were where the men went to escape the oppressive domesticity of the houses, with their bawling babies, steaming kettles and harried women. Work at these times was a relief to the men, who did not know how to savour their few idle hours the way the women did. Richard virtually lived in the twine loft in winter.

  Richard had the fisherman’s instinct from the day he was born. I recall one beautiful May morning, when he was about five years old and I was perhaps nine, we were down near the shore at Maddox Cove poking about where someone had pulled a boom of spruce logs in to the beach to begin building a stage. I don’t recall what had drawn us there but Mother had warned us to stay away from the logs, which were unstable in the water and when stepped on were likely to flip upward and knock out an unwary child. Richard could not be kept from the shore for long, and I was trying to distract him by collecting tiny starfish which we were laying out on a flat rock in the form of the big dipper and the other constellations that we recognized. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the water and before I could stop him, Richard was in among the logs, up to his waist in water.

  I don’t know what I thought it was—a mermaid perhaps. There was often talk of mermaids at school, but they were generally thought to inhabit the shore waters only when there was ice about. I suppose they were invented by our mothers to keep us off the water at such dangerous times. It was said that the mermaids would pull you into the water from the pans and cut your legs off and give you a tail, and they would never give you anything to eat but sea lice and guffies. When I heard this mighty splash and saw the silver tail flinging water everywhere, I naturally thought it was a mermaid and was sure she had come to carry Richard out to sea. Richard had no such fancies, however—he recognized a salmon when he saw one, for Father used to occasionally get them and would split them, pickle them in brine and pack them in barrels for sale in St. John’s.

  What ructions we kicked up—Richard grabbing for the salmon which was trapped in the shallow water by the logs, me grabbing for Richard, the slippery stones underfoot making every step a menace. Somehow, he managed to push the salmon up onto the beach so that I could see it really was only an ordinary fish, though the knife-like fins made it seem like some sort of glorious sea-monster, almost as exotic as a mermaid. Planting his feet securely into the shingle, Richard prevented the creature from regaining the water, but it was so slick and wet that it was impossible to get a grip on it and even with my help he was unable to move it much further up the beach. Turning to me in despair, and by this time panting with effort, he shouted “Take off your dress, Kezzy. Take it off, now.”

  Fortunately, it being so early in the year, I was wearing a petticoat or Richard would have had me stripped to my skin, so determined was he to keep that salmon. The apron came off, and then the dress, and in a very short time we had our catch slung into the skirts of my homespun shift. By the time we got the fish to the top of the hill over Petty Harbour we were both dropping with fatigue, but fortunately Father had come in search of us and relieved us of our burden. Mother was not pleased to see me arrive home half-naked, nor was she delighted to see my only dress tied around the salmon by my apron strings, but Richards pride and pleasure was such that once she had extracted a promise that we would never do such a thing again, she gave herself up to the excitement of the moment.

  The salmon must have weighed ten pounds at least, and although we normally had our main meal in the middle of the day and made do with a cold lunch in the evening, Mother cooked the tail in a piece of muslin and served it up to us with a creamed mustard sauce and boiled potatoes. Richard didn’t manage to get more than a few mouthfuls down his throat before falling asleep over his plate, but Father ate every mouthful of his own as well as Richard’s leftovers, and before going to sleep that night he salted down the remainder, which we ate on special occasions throughout the winter. Mother made me wash the dre
ss and apron myself, and since it rained the next day I was forced to wear one of her work dresses, which was so worn it had recently been consigned to the matting bag in the rafters. It was, however, a small price to pay for the intense pleasure Richard derived from his first major catch.

  Lizzie used to ask me, when she was small, if I’d had a best friend when I was a girl and would give me her hard, skeptical look when I answered that perhaps my brother was my best friend. Lizzie hardly even looks at her brother, and acts as if time spent with him is a peculiar form of torture. My childhood wasn’t like hers. I hardly ever played structured games, nor did many of the children in the Harbour. I used to watch my own girls play hopscotch and jackstones as if they were savages from across the water in Africa, so foreign were these things to me.

  Lizzie was right, of course—Richard and I weren’t friends, but we were one another’s closest companions, not counting Mother and Father. Perhaps it was because we all worked so hard that there was little time for friendships, or perhaps it was because we were solitary by nature, but neither of us sought out the company of other children, and they rarely sought ours. Mother didn’t encourage visiting, for we often had a difficult enough time feeding and clothing ourselves without having half-starved and ragged children from around the Harbour hanging in the doorway making hungry eyes at our few possessions.

  Since we lived on the Southside but attended school and church on the Northside, we didn’t mix much with the neighbours, except perhaps when there was an illness or death to be dealt with. At such times, Richard might be sent with an armload of wood or I might be told to mind a small child for a few hours, but like everyone we had limited resources and barely enough energy to keep body and soul together given the short season for fishing and gardening. Mother used to say that it was just as well our summers weren’t longer as we would wear our bodies out well before their time. Winter came almost as a relief, for once the snow was down there was little to do but stay warm and seek relief from the boredom of long, dark days by fashioning the few small comforts we could create for ourselves.