Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  In summer, there were not enough hours in the day to do all that had to be done. Aside from the endless task of making the fish, there was the garden to be seen to. We always struggled to find time for chinching the house, mending the roof and the hundred other chores that could only be done in reasonably good weather. It was my responsibility to gather the hop-buds before they blew, to pinch the young leaves of the Indian tea and dry them over the stove, haul seaweed and gurry to the garden, gather moss and country hay, mind the goats, keep the water bucket full, and much more. Once the garden was done, I had to pick partridgebernes and bounceberries, help slaughter the goats… Oh, the list is endless. The hours together when my own girls played with dolls or pretended to mind a shop were not something I had ever experienced.

  I do recall occasional times of idleness, but they were rare. Father had acquired a dog soon after he came to this country, a big, sweet-natured water dog he called Egypt, and I believe Egypt was my playmate for some time. I remember my mother telling me that when I first learned to walk, I would make my way down with her to the flakes by holding onto Egypt’s ears and staggering along the rough path from the house. He used to fish for guffies next to the wharf—I’d be sitting on a rock watching him take one after another of the ugly creatures and drop them into a pile at my mother’s feet. I don’t recall he ever ate them, but I expect they went into the garden with the caplin and the gurry.

  The shoreline at Petty Harbour is so steep, and frontage so scarce, that every square inch is needed for the fish. The broad flakes are in some places eight and ten feet high over the water, and I occasionally used to go under them with Egypt. I rarely dared go there without him, for this was the domain of the many wolfish dogs that infested the Harbour—dogs that had no proper owners or were abused by the men who laid claim to their labour.

  I have to this day a mortal fear of most dogs, for once I saw a pack of these brutes tear the scalp off a small boy. He was perhaps four years old, and what I was doing there under the flakes I can no longer recall, except that I was poking at a pile of maggots with a stick and looked up just as he took a misstep and fell. The moment he was down, the dogs were on top him. I never knew the boy to speak to him but I often saw him in later years, his head topped with a few comical tufts of hair and covered in a patchwork quilt of scars where his mother had pulled the skin back from his face and neck and stitched a cover for his bare skull. She claimed to have cured him by putting sluts on the wounds—nine female puppies, one slit open each day and applied fresh to his scalp nine days in a row.

  Richard must have been with my father the day I saw the child scalped, for unlike me he was a fine natural sailor and enjoyed being on the water. Once Richard was old enough to take his place in the skiff, Egypt came to work with me in the garden, pulling stones, hauling waste for fertilizer, applying his patience and muscle to a myriad of dreary chores. In winter he hauled wood and water, and in summer it was seaweed and gurry, and in all seasons he protected us from the wild dogs that ran in packs around the Harbour. When he got old and rheumatic, he still struggled to do the work of a whole army of dogs and it broke my heart to see him lurching stiff-legged after Richard or Father when they went on the water. I suppose I looked at Egypt the way Kate looks at me now.

  One day Father lifted Egypt into the boat, and I saw his nose and his tail tilt up in delight as the boat moved out the Harbour, but Father came back without him. He told us that Egypt had seen a puffin and had leapt from the boat and swum away, but Richard told me that the small killick was gone too, and we knew what had happened. When winter came, Father bought a pony from a man who had no hay to feed it.

  Paddy wasn’t fond of dogs—his incessant gatching and teasing earned him more than one nip at his heels from the crackies and water dogs in the town, and if he’d drink taken he was likely to strike a preliminary defensive blow with the toe of his boot. I have never been able to stomach the violent ways so many men have with their animals. I’ve seen the boys baiting fish hooks to catch gulls, and then after they’ve pulled half their guts out through their mouths they cut the legs off the poor creatures and leave them to die slowly. A boy who will do that is bound to turn into a man who will abuse his wife and children.

  I have never owned a dog since I had Egypt, though I have worked with any number of ponies and horses and have yet to own one that could do half the work of Egypt in his prime. I was glad Father had drowned Egypt, for other men were not so kind and would kill an old dog with a blow from an axe, and do it badly. Then they’d take the skin and leave the carcass to the crows and gulls, which seems poor reward for all their hard work—a few shovels full of dirt to cover them seems little enough to ask. If we can’t give an animal a good life, the least we can offer is a quick and humane death. I’ve never seen any point in drawing out any creature’s suffering.

  June 17

  Mauzy day. Too early for cap/in but: took the train over to Topsail Beach with Dermot just to look. I was tired when we left but he coaxed me into it and I felt quite exhilarated by the time we returned home. I guess it is all the fresh air. Met Monsignor Roche on the way, and addressed him as Father in error, which earned me a poke from Dermot who does it on purpose all the time, just to annoy him. Me is so young it’s easy to forget. Mumma seems a little better.

  Kate came in smelling of the sea. She had been down to Topsail and helped Mrs. Atkins turn the fish on the flakes. Kate hasn’t much colour usually, but today with her hair blown about and the flush on her cheeks, she looked very pretty. I always think of Kate as belonging in the dairy, just as I have always belonged in the kitchen, but she surprised me today by saying she enjoyed making the fish. She must have been telling the truth, for it can’t have been the company of that galoot Dermot that made her look so lively. I wouldn’t have thought an afternoon spent breaking your back was anything to speak fondly of.

  I never liked making fish and I was glad not to have to do it. It would seem to be impossible to grow up in Petty Harbour and not be engaged in the fishery but I was the rare exception, and as I have never loved the sea or anything related to her I am not sorry. My education in the fishery began the summer after the smallpox epidemic and came to a premature end the following year. My mother, frightened by how helpless I had been before the Bishop arrived, and perhaps impressed by how well I worked under his tuition, determined that my infancy was at an end and my initiation into this vale of tears should begin as soon as possible. Such a determination sounds harsher than it was—at that time, children who could barely walk or feed themselves were expected to help make fish, and my childhood had been unusually prolonged in that no demands had ever been made of me in that direction.

  As I was only six, and greener than most children that age, I had little to do but watch that first season. My mother would call me when she went to the flakes and would explain what she was doing and why. The fish had to be stacked, spread, covered, uncovered, turned and gathered in endless combination, all with a view to drying it out without burning it with too much sun or salt or wind. Mother would direct my attention skyward a dozen times a day and point out cloud formations. Then she would direct my eyes to the branch of a tree or bush and have me determine the wind direction. From indications such as these, we had to decide whether we could spread the fish on the flakes, or whether they should be turned, covered or gathered in to be transferred to the sheds on hand barrows.

  The weather was an obsession with all of those engaged in catching or making fish. Are the cows lying down? Is the soot falling in the chimney? Do the hills seem too close? Are the birds feeding or perching? One of the first Bible verses I learned to read entirely by myself was Matthew 16: 2 and 3.

  Our Lord said to the Pharisees, “When it is evening, ye say it will be fair weather for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and lowering. Oh ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky but can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

  Mother had a keen
nose, and if she could smell the earth closet, which was below the house over a small ditch, she was alert for rain and we were on tenterhooks. Even my own behavior was taken into account. One morning, Richard and I were loud and rackety, inclined to giggles over our breakfast, and she got very uneasy and a little sharp with us. She walked down to the flakes with Father, to study the sky before he took his boat out for the second trip of the day, and everything looked like fair weather so he went about his work, but just before she came into the house, the cow up in the field flicked its tail three times and took a kick at a rabbit or something. Then, as she stepped through the door, Richard upset a pan of milk warming on the stove. She didn’t even stop to clean the milk up—left it to burn and ran with all her might down to the wharf again to call Father back in off the water. An hour later, it was blowing a gale and a bait skiff went down with all hands drowned.

  The labour of spreading, turning and gathering the fish was endless, and there were few short cuts. If only a shower was expected, it was sometimes judged appropriate merely to turn the fish skin side up, but if any amount of rain at all was due, the fish had to be gathered in piles and covered with rinds or old sailcloth or anything to keep them dry. Serious weather required that the fish be put under proper cover and for this Mother had to have help, usually a boy or old man belonging to one of the bigger families, hired on through the summer in exchange for board alone.

  Since the cod run in summer, the demands of the fishing season conflicted with those of the garden, yet Mother managed both almost cross-handed. Little wonder that she struggled so hard to get me to help her with the fish. It wasn’t to be, however. I attended well enough when she was teaching me to notice what colour of blue or grey or purple lay upon the sea, and I am still all nerves when the horses start gailing, but the following year when it was necessary for me to dirty my hands more seriously, we both came up against an insurmountable impediment. The Bishop said that God never intended to engage me in the fishery, and let it go at that, but of course he had his eye on me for the schoolroom which I didn’t take to either.

  I had always been a healthy, sturdy child, as big at seven as most children were at nine or ten, and I have never shirked work, so I fell to with the fish willingly enough at first, but it took less than a week before my hands were cracked and red and swollen, and every day it seemed to get worse faster. There seemed to be something in the liquid which the salt drew out of the fish that I simply could not tolerate. All of the women had sore hands, covered in scars, blisters and calluses, just as all the men had pups around their wrists and lines through the palms of their hands where the twine cut in, but this was many degrees worse and I knew from the start that it was not going to go away. I tried for weeks, crying when I was alone and hiding my hands in my pinafore, but in a short time my poor paws were so swollen and bleeding that I couldn’t hold a spoon to my mouth. Father could hardly bear to look at me, and I could see the tears spring into his eyes at times when he came home and silently lifted the clean cloth Mother used to cover my hands when she was treating them.

  The day my nails began to fall off was the last day I worked at the fish. Mother had been soaking my hands in chamber lye, a common cure for what we used to call fish finger, and the pain was so extreme that I fought away from her and she had to bind my arms to my sides with a piece of rope in order to hold my hands down in the liquid. I had managed to kick the pot over onto the two of us. Father came in just then and found us sobbing at the kitchen table, me tied up in Mother’s lap and the two of us covered in Richard’s urine while Richard crouched in a corner watching the process with big, dark eyes. Despite his age, he had wet himself with fright so we were all soaked and reeking.

  “Enough,” Father said, and that was that. He disappeared out the door and I think it was with relief that Mother gave in without a word. By the time we were all cleaned up and changed into our dry clothes, Father was back with a small pannikin which he warmed over the kitchen stove. It held a tarry, black mixture softened with cod liver oil, and he spread it over my hands and bound them loosely in strips of cloth. For a week, he and Mother took turns feeding me, lifting my nightdress so I could use the pot, reading to me from the Bible, and at the end of the week when Father gently removed the tar with more of the oil, my hands were almost their normal size and colour.

  Thus began my training as a farmer. Even before my nails grew back, I had taken the mattock and climbed the hill behind our house to the gardens my mother kept, and gave the weeds and worms a blow for every fish my mother turned. Sometimes, when it was an emergency and the fish were almost dry, I would help with turning or stacking, but Father hated to see me near the flakes and Richard claimed the entire wharf and flake area as his own territory, sometimes even throwing stones at me from behind a barrel to drive me away. Soon he was the one my mother turned to when the sky threatened. Richard was born to the fishery just as surely as I wasn’t.

  That October, after the seasonal fishermen left, I began school. It came as something of a shock to discover that I wouldn’t be going to Mistress Martin on the Southside, but to Miss Lacey at the Northside school. Looking back at it, I think it was just as well, for Master Martin would have had all the baptismal records from the Anglican Church and would have known my exact age, while Miss Lacey guessed that I was three years older than I was and treated me accordingly. Most of the Irish were illiterate and didn’t know their numbers, so when they were asked the date of their birth they answered “Feast of Our Lady of the Pillar” and Miss Lacey would consult her calendar and write down October 12th, or “Our Lady of Good Council”— July 10th, or in many cases “Two days after Sheila’s Day” or “Bonfire Night less a week” for which even Miss Lacey didn’t need a calendar. A year might be identified by the sinking of a ship or a forest fire, but generally Miss Lacey just guessed according to the size of the child.

  When Mother gave my birth date as March 12th, Miss Lacey glanced up at me, declared “And she’d be ten, I suppose.” I opened my mouth to protest, but my mothers hand on my shoulder warned me to be quiet, and instead of correcting her, my mother simply added the information that I could read already. Miss Lacey looked quite cheered at this news, probably because, as I realized some years later, she was not too confident in this area herself. I suppose she was all of sixteen.

  I soon found myself placed at a bench next to two older girls I knew only by sight, but within a day or two I found that I was more teacher than student. Most of the bigger boys and many of the girls didn’t attend school in the morning, but helped their parents with the fishing and such, but my mother insisted I be at my bench when the bell rang. The morning class was usually full of small children, who were inclined to fall asleep over their dinners and miss the afternoon sessions, so I was employed during those hours in doing alphabets and simple exercises with the small ones while Miss Lacey struggled to beat a little education into the older children. The beating process was literal—she used the strap frequently and indiscriminately, even on me at times, although I was a quiet and obedient pupil.

  Our school room was plain but adequate—better than many I heard about later. We had several primers, and slates that Father salvaged from a fire in St. John’s that had destroyed a merchant’s house. We had a good supply of rather hard chalk that had been collected by a Northside fisherman who had been swept away in a fog and stranded up the coast at Freshwater Bay for three days. The chalk required frequent spitting, which in turn required frequent visits to the water barrel, and eventually numerous trips to the outhouse, but all this activity prevented the most restless boys from rearranging one another’s faces with their fists, so it was all to the good.

  In winter the school was heated with a small stove that we fed with the two junks brought by each of us every morning. Sometimes we would be given a load of peat from down the coast, and if it were dry it would burn longer than the wood and produce a more even heat, but the fine, light ash was inclined to spread throughout the room from t
he drafts and settle in a thick, grey layer on every surface, so that even the best behaved students couldn’t resist blowing it up one another’s noses. When it got very cold, or the snow piled up over our heads, school was simply canceled. Lessons were scheduled to be conducted about six months out of the year, but we probably made it to our benches only about half that time.

  I learned very little that was new in those first two years, but by teaching the smaller ones—as well as some of the bigger children, who were too dull even for Miss Lacey’s simple lessons—I became more secure about my own grasp of the essentials of reading and writing. When Miss Lacey resigned to marry a middle-aged widower with half a dozen children, at least two of whom were older than she was herself, the four or five young men who succeeded her were happy to concentrate on teaching me the basic elements of addition, subtraction and multiplication in exchange for being allowed to abnegate all responsibility for the children under seven years of age. From then on, the baby classes were, for all intents and purposes, in my charge.

  Many of the children never really did learn to read, though they could puzzle out a word or phrase. They could read the labels on boxes and barrels, but as often as not it was more an informed guess than an actual deciphering of the letters. My parents, being relatively comfortable with print, were frequently called upon to read letters that had come from Ireland or England for the Harbour families, and our precious hoard of cold-pressed whale or seal oil was often squandered while they painstakingly composed replies to these announcements of death, debt and disaster.