Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  The men sent from the Cathedral were Italians, ship’s carpenters who had been convicted on a charge of stabbing a third man on board a merchantman, and they were being allowed to serve out their sentence by using their skills for the greater glory of God. One of the nuns spoke Italian, having been to a convent in Italy when she was a girl, and she told us that these two were the devoted fathers of a large number of childen, and good Catholics as well. They adored the nuns and quickly turned their ingenuity to making the barn a cozy and comfortable schoolroom for the winter. Heat was not possible, for any fire in that building would have turned it into a death-trap, but they stacked the hay in such a way as to keep out the worst of the wind and snow and arranged small screens to keep the drafts down. There was a water barrel and a small shrine to Our Lady in one corner, where the children said their prayers in the morning, but oh, most glorious of all, they had painted the ceiling.

  I don’t know if it was their idea or the Bishops but I remember walking into the barn with the sisters and the Bishop, to view the improvements, and when we looked up, there was a pale, blue summer sky with a golden sun in one peak of the hip-roof and a dark blue sky with a moon and stars in the other. I turned around and around, finding as I looked Cassiopeia and Aquarius, the Square of Pegasus and the Scorpion, the cross of Cygnus and the Pole Star, all my old friends. The Bishop laid his hands on my shoulders and turned and turned with me, until we were like two dizzy tops, and we laughed and laughed until we fell down into the straw, but the nuns simply stood there and cried. I have never understood nuns and to this day I am puzzled by those tears.

  MRS. KEZIAH ALYWARD

  1880

  PATRICK DONOVAN

  1880

  MARY & THOMAS POWER

  1898

  JAMES & ELIZABETH POWER

  1908

  ELIZABETH POWER

  C. 1910

  KEZIAH DONOVAN

  C. 1910

  KATE AYLWARD O’DWYER, PROPRIETRESS

  DONOVAN’S STATION C. 1915

  WESTERN JUNCTION

  July 1

  Rather doubtful looking, rain. Fr. Roche stopped on his way to town—just had the train stop ten minutes while he looked in at the door at Mumma. Said he’d be back on the weekend. What does he want with us?

  Lizzie is full of surprises today. This is the third Sunday in a row she has come to coax me to eat. This time she appeared with a bowl into which she had put a mashed potato, a dipper of gravy, and a quantity of finely chopped chicken oysters. Some of the ladies who come for tea this afternoon are going to be disappointed when they start digging among the bones. I managed only a mouthful of it, but it was very good.

  “Nan, do you remember the time out at Littledale you brought me the chicken?” She sat there with the spoon in her hand, looking very serious. How could I forget? Mrs. Walsh from down the line had been over at the convent visiting her niece who was about to take final vows, and she stopped here with a message from Lizzie: “Tell Nan they don’t give us enough to eat and I’m hungry.” Mrs. Walsh said she thought Lizzie looked as plump as a partridge in a berry patch and it was all stuff and nonsense, but my heart just ached, thinking about my little girl going to bed with pains in her stomach, and first thing the next morning I set out, walked all the way, for she was only five and when you are five a day can seem terribly long.

  I had a whole chicken cooked and wrapped in a bit of oilcloth, hidden away in my basket under the ginger bread for the nuns, and they said it was breaking the rules to let the girls have visitors during the week, but since she was the youngest there, and no doubt they wanted the gingerbread for their own dinner, they let me take her out into the garden. She climbed up a tree with the chicken and ate the whole thing, dropping the bones down into my skirt where I was resting my aching feet. I swore I’d never forgive Min for sending her away, and her hardly more than a baby, but I suppose with the stepbrothers and Min newly widowed, it couldn’t be helped.

  “Nan, I wasn’t really hungry. They gave us plenty to eat, but it didn’t taste nice like your food and I was angry at Mam and I wanted to see you.” Lizzie was staring at the wall when she said this, like it was a great sin she was confessing. 1 tried to smile but it must have looked like something else for poor Lizzie looked very guilty and dismayed. “Oh, Nan, I’m sorry now, I didn’t stop to think what a long way it was, and I didn’t know you would have to walk. Mam had sent me out a pair of boots, ugly rubber boots, and I hated them so much that I wouldn’t wear them, but then a few weeks later I got my feet very wet and the sisters said I had to wear them or I wouldn’t be allowed out. I was longing to be with the other girls and when I went to put the boots on I found she’d filled them with Jerusalems, all done up in beautiful coloured wrappers. There was one for every girl in the school, and three left over that the nuns said I could have all for myself.”

  Poor Min. I’d told her Lizzie would rather have one beautifully wrapped candy than a hundred common mints, or even a dozen Gibraltars, but I didn’t think she’d listened to me. She is at heart a shopkeeper, and she’d rather sell her best and eat the rejects. Lord knows there were plenty of rejects when she first started the shop. Even the boys got tired of powdery bulls-eyes and scorched peppermint drops. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she was doing with all those cabbages I was sending out to her, and all the time she was using the leaves for wrapping the sweets until she could afford to buy waxed paper. I never thought she’d make a living selling oranges and apples, not at those prices, but the confectionary business is like the liquor trade—always a market no matter how poor people are.

  Lizzies confession about Littledale was only her first surprise, but the second one I anticipated for I smelled it coming up through the grill. Min had purchased two hundredweight of green coffee and sent some out on the train with Lizzie. I could hear the big frying pan banging on the damper as she roasted the beans, and then the smell of the oil went right through the house. After Lizzie gave up on the chicken, she brought me a cup of coffee, hot and thick with cream, and I did a bit better with that, though I think I got the best of it in anticipation.

  Her third surprise wasn’t so pleasant, but I think I hid my feelings for Lizzie didn’t seem to notice. It was a letter from Johanna to Min and Kate, saying she wasn’t able to come and visit—no surprise there, for the hotel business is no different in Boston than in Newfoundland. She has offered to take Lizzie next summer, and will pay for a tutor so that Lizzie can try for entrance to the Sacred Heart College in New York. My little Lizzie at school with all the well-to-do young ladies… I’m not so sure I like that idea as much as I ought. I don’t think the Sacred Heart Ladies will be as impressed by the Central Fruit Store as the girls of Littledale were. Still, Johanna has neither chick nor child of her own and it’s about time she did some-thing for her sister’s daughter. Lizzie wants to go, that’s certain. I can’t say I blame her—she can’t spend the rest of her life pulling toffee on the candy hooks, and with no father and no inheritance except the little I have put by for her, she will have to look after herself. I’m glad she has taken her letter off to show Mrs. Walsh so I can think about this without her watching me all the time.

  It was funny, Lizzie being so angry at her mother about the boots and harbouring that resentment even when she was five. We have a great talent for holding a grudge, me and Lizzie. I was upset at Min for getting a husband who already had two boys, and then upset at him for dying and leaving her with two more children, yet I liked those Power boys well enough, better than Min did, I think. She was a good stepmother to them, gave them an education and saw they had the best she could afford, even better than her own two, but she never really warmed to them, I thought, no more than she warmed to Mr. Donovan. I swear she held a grudge against young Thomas simply because he had his fathers name so she couldn’t give it to her own boy and was forced to name him James Thomas Power instead of Thomas James Power.

  I like to think I’m slow to anger, which i
s perhaps why it takes so long for it to dissolve once it finally appears. Paddy had such a capacity for infuriating me when no-one else could, and he seemed to take a particular delight in provoking me to any open display of temper. He didn’t succeed often, but even once was too often for my liking. I always felt so defeated when he got me to raise my voice or even start banging the pots in the kitchen. It s curious, but Mr. Donovan always laughed when he detected irritation in me, and it sweetened me somehow. Min’s Tom was the same way—whenever she was giving him a piece of her mind, he’d stick his tongue in his cheek and roll his eyes like one of the wharf rats caught with his hand :in the apple barrel, and instead of it making her worse, it made her ease up on him. He was so comical.

  Min always said that Tom was like Paddy, but I never saw it myself. Of course, she was only a girl when her father died, so she wouldn’t have remembered the nights he came late to supper, three sheets to the wind with a couple of Spaniards or Frenchmen in his wake, or the times he misled the customers, blaming the late boots or the bad leather on the tannery when really he had sold off the material to a higher bidder. Tom was never like that—if he made an error, he admitted it and he never allowed a servant to take the blame for something he had done or left undone. He liked his drop, and I feared he was going the way of Paddy at one point, but he had some excuse, being twice widowed before he was even thirty, and with two motherless boys to think about.

  Once, when I had gone into town to see Min, after Lizzie was born, I saw him in the street, his coat awry and his hat looking the worse for wear, as he was himself, and I was so ashamed for Mm that I turned into Ayre’s and pretended to be looking at the dried fruit in the bins so as not to have to meet him. He saw me, though, and saw that I had avoided him, and a week later he travelled out to the farm to tell me that such a thing would never happen again. I thought he would be angry at me, but he was only angry at himself and he promised that I would have no reason ever again to wish he wasn’t my son-in-law. When he left, he kissed me as if I had been his own mother and the day he died I wept as bitterly as if he had been my son.

  Min needed someone like Tom in her life—she was always far too serious, always trying to keep up with Johanna, which was impossible. When Tom died, I thought she would bring the children back to live with me, and help Kate in the dairy, but instead she got old Andrew Delgado to help set up her little shop selling fruit and confectionaries. Johanna was always a favourite of Mr. Delgado, and he did it for her sake, I expect. Min’s shop is a far cry from the Delgado’s. They brought that beautiful curved glass all the way from Portugal, they say. Going in there is like a trip to Lisbon or Pans—the Malaga grapes and the figs and dates and whole hands of bananas, all the exotic fruits and the colourful novelties, the painted fans and silk flags.

  Min makes a living, and she gives good change. She may add a coating to the cocoanut bars when they get a little lumpy, something to fancy them up and cover the unevenness, but that’s what any good cook will do, for even the best cooks make mistakes. The ingredients are pure and wholesome, which is more than can be said for some of those fancy British confectioners. Her oranges are Delgado’s rejects, but she has nowhere near the markup that old Mr. Andrew has, and Mr. Andrew, however fond he is of our Johanna, is not exactly a model of probity. When his first wife died, her sister ran all the way to Torbay to tell their mother that Margaret was finally rid of that old demon. Her mother thought that Margaret had murdered him, and was heartbroken when she realized it was Margaret who had died, not Andrew.

  I’ve been surprised by Mm more than once in the years since she grew up. Johanna was always bold, Kate was always shy, but Mm veered first one way and then the other, and I thought that with Tom gone she’d lose her grit, give in entirely to the black dog that always seemed to sniff at her heels. She was born with a morbid streak, like Father, and looked around for misery when experience tells us that it will find us soon enough anyway.

  How I used to laugh when they played Dead Baby on Saturdays. I gave those girls a dozen washings of arms and legs during the week, and wiped their faces a hundred times a day, it seemed, but Saturdays they always had a proper bath, and clean shimmies and night-dresses. When they finished their baths, they looked like little angels, all starched and white with their hair brushed out to their waists. Min used to coax the other two to lie down with her on the bed with their white nighties pulled as smooth as could be, and pretend they were all killed by the cholera and ready to be photographed. They’d manage to stay still for all of a minute, perhaps.

  After Johanna got tired of being dead, the two of them would pick on poor Kate, who would do anything to please them. They’d lay her out on my little sewing table, with a shawl draped over it, and put flowers they’d fashioned out of paper and scraps of cloth around her head and feet, and a tiny Bible in her hands. Min would be the mother and Johanna the father, and they’d cry real tears. Little Kate would be bored stiff and more than once fell asleep before they’d finished mourning her properly.

  Dead Baby gave one of the neighbours a horrible turn once, for she stepped in to ask to borrow my big jam skillet one Saturday evening and thought it was the real thing. Thank goodness it wasn’t Mrs. Smyth who saw them. It seems odd now that it didn’t bother me, seeing them laid out like that. Perhaps it was because it just seemed like they were going to sleep. Real death was the Cadigan baby, stinking and covered in sores.

  I remember once I went with Father into the woods to cut some knees he’d marked, and on the way back we saw a caribou, just one all by itself. Father had his gun, as always, but by the time he’d put in the powder and all, the deer had moved some distance away, so the shot didn’t kill it, only wounded the poor creature in the gut. The two of us ran after it, and it kept stopping to look back at us, as if it wanted us to catch up, which eventually we did, and killed it of course. Father was all out of breath and trying to get his knife out, and he called to me, “Hold its head, Kezzy, talk to it a minute,” and I did. I stood in front and wrapped my arms around its antlers and I could feel the warm nose through my coat, and I don’t know what I said but it seemed to work for it didn’t try to break away.

  Poor creature, its eyes were huge. Then Father felt with his fingers and pushed the blade of his knife down behind its head to sever the spinal cord, and it gave a shudder, just the way Egypt shuddered with pleasure when Richard came into sight, and then it was still. Such a strange feeling I had at that moment—I expected to feel disgusted to see the beautiful creature lying dead on the frosty ground but instead I was half ecstatic at what we’d just done. Helping to kill that deer seemed one of the most beautiful things I’d ever done in my life.

  Paunching and butchering the carcass was a dirty job, for the ball had punctured the stomach and it was quite a mess to work with. Father cut it all up in jig time, and wrapped it in the skin, and we left the head with the spruce knees to fetch later, but the foxes had picked it clean by the next morning. Father made me a mat hook out of the antler once it had dried, as well as three coat hooks for Mother and a crook-knife handle for Richard. I still have the mat hook in the bottom of my old Labrador box. The first mat I ever made of my own design had a caribou on it and I was so proud of it, I had Mother turn it face-side down except on Sundays. When it finally got so worn it was good for nothing but the men’s muddy boots, I burned it in the stove rather than see it ruined.

  Another call from Father Roche, Kate says. I can’t think what he wants with us—perhaps it is because I was Bishop Flemings pet, and Ned Roche will do anything to be seen as his successor. I don’t know why he is out in Topsail anyway. Hiding his tuberculosis from Archbishop Howley, perhaps. He’d never make the Terna if that was known. Or perhaps he’s just courting the likes of R.J. Murphy and the wealthy Protestants. He puts himself forward too much—I don’t care for that in a man, not even in a celibate. It’s the quiet, steady ones who have always gained my respect, men like Mr. Donovan.

  The evening I first took notice
of Mr. Donovan was like any other. I had decided to break up a small bit of meadow and plant flowers for the market in St. John’s, just to try it out, and had arranged for two men who had been working on the railway line to give me a week of work when they were finished. I agreed to pay them the usual wage, and to give them their meals, and in addition I told them they could sleep in the barn on condition that they did not smoke except out of doors. I under-stood that both were discharged naval men, so I knew if they said they would not light their pipes, there was a good chance they would not, for most former military men have learned the hard way to obey orders given for good reason, or even for no reason at all.

  They worked well for me, or so Kate said for I did not have the time to oversee what they were at, so I was not discomfited when I heard someone stamping and scraping his boots outside the kitchen door that evening as I finished kneading down the bread. I have no idea where Kate was—usually she was with me in the kitchen, but this Saturday night I was alone—but I was neither young nor frail, nor helpless either, and a visit from a transient labourer was no threat to me. I hardly bothered to look up when he entered the kitchen, but finished wrapping my bread pan in a layer of old quilts before putting it to rise behind the stove.