Donovan's Station

by Robin McGrath

  Paddy was back in the kitchen then, and I’d got the hat back from Kate and was trying to straighten it out, when he bragged—yes, he bragged—that it had taken him ten minutes to get the hat out from under the wharf, but gotten it he had. Ten minutes! The child was sitting on the stagehead, wet and cold with snow on the ground, and Paddy had gone fishing for a hat! “Papa won his wager,” piped up Min, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. At that moment, Kate had leaned forward and snatched the hat from my hand, and put the wet, bedraggled thing on her head with a triumphant “Katie’s hat!” and that’s when I went mad. I grabbed the hat from her head and hit her across the face with it, the pink dye and the ribbons leaving a slash mark on her cheek as if I had whipped her with a belt.

  I’ve never been so sorry about anything in my life. Johanna was standing in the doorway, and Paddy and Min were at the table, and they all saw me hit the dear baby—poor, frail Kate with her blue skin and her wet hair hanging around her pinched little face. And it was all Paddy’s fault. He was the one I should have hit, but by the time I realized that, it was done, and he was across the room and gave me the back of his hand so that I went over a chair and hit the stove with my head. The children were all crying, and Paddy was hanging onto Kate and Min and Johanna all at once, and I’d have gone for the carving knife except that I couldn’t have got at him through the children.

  It was never put to right between me and Paddy after that. I apologized, and he apologized, and the children all apologized, and the hat went into the stove after Paddy promised Kate another just like it, and in half an hour we were all sitting down to our dinners, but I never forgave him. He thought I never forgave him for the blow he gave me, but it wasn’t that— it was the blow I gave Kate I couldn’t forget. I confessed it to the priest that night, up in the Cathedral, and he said that he didn’t need to give me absolution for striking my own child, especially since I had been provoked by fright and righteous anger, but I made him assign a penance and I made him give me absolution, for if ever I sinned in my life it was that day. All else I did in the months that followed was nothing compared to it.

  I was never Paddy s wife again after that, and I didn’t care if he got the priest to me or not. I hardened my heart against him. I washed his clothes and cooked his meals, I helped in the shop and I worked harder than I had ever worked before or since to see that he had a well-run household. I took over the bookkeeping for the shop, which had always been a trial to him though he was clever enough with numbers, and we had our best year ever. I scoured the doorstep so that it was white, and I polished the stove so that it was black, and I used whitewash to paint the special notices on the window when Paddy was trying something new. I coaxed the apprentices and flattered the journeymen and curtsied to the customers, and everyone said what a wonderful match Paddy Aylward had made, and what a lucky man he was to have a woman who was such a hard worker and a good manager.

  But one thing I did not do was let him touch me as my husband again, never again after that. At first he let it go, thinking I’d come round, and then he got angry and tried to bully me, and he even threatened to call in the priest, but I was unmoved. It said in the wedding service, “Let not the author of deceit work any of his evil deeds in her… let her shun all unlawful contact.” Being with Paddy had led me into sins of thought, word and deed, for I would have driven the kitchen knife right into his heart that day if the children had not surrounded him, and I was never going to let him bring me to that point again. As long as my body was my own, I could tolerate anything, and I think he must have known it for he found a clicker under our mattress one day, an old one I had sharpened up and put there for him to find, and after that he sulked and cursed and went to the trollops in the lanes but he never forced me again.

  Two years later he was dead and buried and I had made my escape to Western Junction. It’s a pity I never told Judith about the clicker. She would have liked that part.

  July 9

  Hot day. Rained last night but burned off early. Mumma tried to get out of bed in the middle of the afternoon and fell. Dermot was mending the front step and heard her so he ran up and found her on the floor. After he lifted her back into bed—no easy feat as I know myself-—she struck him. He says she is old and sick and frightened. She is frightened of no one and nothing, not of God Almighty Himself. Why does he let her treat him that way?

  The cat got into the house and when Lizzie crawled under my bed to get her out, she tipped over the pan of salt water and soaked her dress. Lizzie has a mind like a steel trap—argued that there was no rational reason why a basin of sea water should stop bed sores, which are caused by chafing, as if it was Kate’s fault the basin was there. Mrs. Coady must be a trial to Father Roche, with all her superstitions and her old-fashioned ways. I’d just ignore it but the Reverend Father seems to think it is the thin edge of the wedge and we will all revert to idol worship if he doesn’t stamp out such practices. She casts spells right under his nose and he doesn’t recognize it.

  Oh, that’s a dreadful thing to think about a good Christian woman, but she really is fearfully superstitious, and its not really fitting for a priest’s housekeeper. Lizzie says it’s shocking ignorance. Judith was like that. Good, kind Judith. I wonder what ever happened to her? Sometimes my memory is so unreliable, like the screen door in the kitchen after Jimmy poked it full of holes with a pencil. When I worried inordinately about something, Mr. Donovan used to say”’Tis nothing, ‘tis a hole in the ground,” but you can fall into a hole and hurt yourself. Judith was older than me, so she’d be close to a hundred if she were alive today.

  The day we became friends was the day the Ida was launched. Little Kate was only just deciding to live, and Paddy closed the shop and took Min and Johanna and the two apprentices over to Mr. Kearney’s shipyard to watch them bring the new ship through the archway and across the street to the harbour. No doubt he had a wager on it—half the men in town did. I must have heard Paddy tell the story a hundred times of how Mr. Kearney was so sure that Mr. Bennett was wrong when he said the ship would scrape her sides, he was willing to risk his gold watch, which he hung on a nail driven into the brick-work. The Ida cleared the watch by two inches and came down into the water without a mark on her.

  If Paddy had been in the house, Judith and I would never have become friends, but there was nobody home except me and the baby, and Mr. MacDermot out in the shop, finishing up a small job of work. I knew that he was leaving us at the end of the week. There was no future for a Scotch in St. Johns, not in the shoemaking business anyway. He was too good to work for Paddy—Paddy liked good work but hated good men.

  There was Judith, calling into the open door as she went by to see if I needed anything. Such a quiet, warm day, I was finally feeling better than I had in months. The bread was put to rise and the baby was asleep, and the kettle just on the boil, so I asked her to stop for a minute and I noted that she was limping as she came in the door. She laughed when I asked if she’d hurt herself. “You’d think it’s the hands that would go first,” she said, and held out her hands, palms upward. They were all cracked and callused, and the fingers were crooked like claws. I’d seen worse down by the flakes in Petty Harbour, but I looked at my own hands, soft from bathing the baby and putting up the dough, and I wished I could do something to say thank you for all the times she’d stopped and emptied the night soil bucket because Paddy forgot.

  “I suppose if I had to wear boots on my hands, and walk on them, they’d hurt just as much as my feet do,” said Judith, and settled with a groan onto the settle next to the baby. That’s when I thought of the jar of lanolin I had from Father, and in a trice I had her boots and stockings off and her feet soaking in a pan of hot water. I put a fresh kettle to boil for tea and took the boots out front to Mr. MacDermot. He was a big, quiet man and I’d had little to do with him, but I’d always made sure he had an extra potato with his dinner and I counted on him having noticed.

  There was nothing wrong with the b
oots, he said, but he came back into the kitchen and had a good look at Judith’s feet, taking them in his big hands and feeling the bones, and then he said he’d need the boots for half an hour. Judith was uncomfortable at the attention, but she was there with her feet in the pan of water and there wasn’t much she could do about it. I made tea and brought a pannikin of it to Mr. MacDermot, and two slices of bread and jam, and then Judith and I had our tea. I could hear the racket of the crowd at the launching and I knew there would be a cheer as she went into the water, so we had plenty of warning before Paddy and the others would be back.

  I took a plug of Paddy’s tobacco, and shaved a little of it into the basin of water, for Mother had said that an infusion of tobacco was good for rheumatic bones and I hoped it might help Judith’s feet. “Mrs. Aylward, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven,” she said, dabbling her feet in the water and blowing on her tea. When Judith smiled, which wasn’t often, it was a smile that could light up the room. All the misery and depression I’d felt while I was sick with Kate just seemed to blow out the window, and I thought how easy it was to make someone happy.

  I asked her to call me Keziah; because she made me feel like an old woman, calling me Mrs. Aylward, and I said if she was married she’d know how old and tired that can make you feel. I don’t know why I just assumed she had never married—perhaps it was because everyone called her by her first name. Most of the barrow women were married, and those that weren’t were widowed, with a dozen children to feed, which is why they chose to do such hard work. The wages weren’t as good as the men’s, of course, but they were better paid than most women doing unskilled labour.

  “Oh, I have a husband, Mrs. Aylward—Keziah—and you’re right about marriage making you feel old and tired.” She nodded at the baby, who was asleep next to her. “Not that I was ever blessed or cursed with one of those little darlings. When I hear women complaining about their children, I just say All my children are perfect’ and when they figure out what I mean, they give me this pitying look.” I tried not to give her that same look myself. Even on the worst days, my girls made life with Paddy tolerable.

  “And where is your husband, Judith?” I asked, being too stupid to know that if things were all right between them I wouldn’t need to inquire.

  “Today, he’s probably digging potatoes. I visit him on Sundays, out on the farm.”

  “And what farm is that?” I asked, not thinking what I was stepping into. I often dreamed about having a farm of my own, and took any opportunity to find out more about the ones in the district.

  “Oh, it’s a very special farm, Keziah, I expect you’ve heard of it. Palk’s Farm.” And then she saw the look on my face, and laughed. “Oh, I shouldn’t tease you, please don’t take offense. Yes, he’s in the lunatic asylum, God help him, been there for years.” She reached over and patted my arm, sorry for having played a joke on me. “He’s happy enough, poor soul, and he’s the star inmate so they don’t torture him or mistreat him. Besides, I keep a close eye on what goes on, and if there was so much as a mark on him I’d have them all before the magistrate.”

  “And is he really a lunatic, Judith?” The cheerful way she talked about him seemed to invite questions.

  “Crazy as a March hare,” she answered. “He could leave any time he wanted, but he has found his place there, and they won’t make him leave because he is so good with the other patients. He all but runs the farm, and there are some really violent inmates that no-one but him can go near, so they keep him on as a pauper, and I bring him new clothes when he needs them, and a bit of extra food, though usually I come home with more than I’ve brought as he’s really the best farmer on the island. I sometimes think that George has worked out the perfect arrangement—hard work and reasonable food, in exchange for never having to make a decision of worry about anything except getting your eye plucked out by a fellow inmate.” She laughed again.

  That day was the only time Judith ever talked about George. He had what she called an excess of rum and religion, if by religion you meant a strong belief in ghosts, phantom ships, witches and such things. She said he’d made a study of the Book of Meditations, a foul volume—the lurid details of the damned in hell would give any imaginative soul the horrors.

  George, according to Judith, had once been a fisherman, with a side-business in smuggling loaf sugar, liquor and tobacco from St. Pierre, and he got into trouble when a tidewaiter was overzealous in the performance of his duties. The tidewaiter had come to his house and tried to arrest him one night, and George had refused to submit, had instead stuffed him into the woodbox and threatened to kill him. Judith was there in the house with them, and she said this was the first time she realized just how deranged he had become from reading the Bible and sampling his own contraband once too often. She reminded George that to kill the tidewaiter would be murder, a mortal sin, and he argued that surely it was only a venial sin considering the man’s profession. After a few more tots of rum and considerable reflection, he decided that a tidewaiter wasn’t worth the risk even of purgatory, so he let the man go and then fell asleep by the fire. They took him into custody the next morning.

  Judith followed him into town, when they brought him to trial, and he lasted two days in the prison before he tried to cut his throat, but he was rescued in time and his throat was sewed up. “That was just like George,” Judith said, as she patted the baby who was stirring in her sleep. “He never could get anything right.” After prison, it was the lunatic asylum, and that’s where he stayed all the time I knew Judith, or at: least I assume so because every Sunday I saw her walking west on Water Street with her bundle in her hand, and sometimes she’d bring me back fresh vegetables or a carved wooden toy for the baby.

  In later years I visited the farm at the lunatic asylum but I never saw anyone that fitted Judith s description of George, and they knew of no long-term inmate called by that name. Perhaps she made him up for some reason. Whatever the truth of it was, Judith was the saving of me, for though we saw little of one another, she was the only person I ever spoke to about Paddy. She had taken a violent dislike to him without ever having spoken to him, and while she couldn’t do enough for me or the children, she would go so far as to pray that Paddy would choke when he coughed. She said nothing when the girls were around, thank goodness, for I couldn’t have let her in the house if she had tried to turn them against their father, but when we were alone, she vented a spite that was shocking and unbounded.

  Once when I was feeling particularly distressed over some misdeed of Paddy’s—one of his usual lies or infidelities—she put a curse on him that she claimed bounced back at her, for that day she slipped on the wharf and almost broke her elbow. She stopped by to let me put a compress on it and when I wasn’t looking, she slipped a pissing bottle in the stove to cancel the curse. A few minutes after she left, I heard something crack in the coals and as I lifted the damper the smell of urine was unmistakable. When I cleaned the grate the next day, there was a lump of glass fused to the clinkers. In the months that followed, when we were together in the kitchen and we could hear Paddys voice from the shop, yelling at one of the apprentices or joking with a customer, I would see her rub her elbow and mutter under her breath.

  Paddy returned her dislike, with just as little reason, but unlike Judith he made no bones about it to the girls. He called her a witch, and claimed he could smell sulfur when she had been in the kitchen, and said he’d be only too happy to put the torch to her. I don’t suppose he would really have burned her as a witch, but would possibly have given her a good scorching as a warning. Once Min asked her if she was a witch like her dada said, and Judith just smiled and said “Of course I am, my darling,” as if she had asked if Judith were a Catholic. I have to admit now that Judith was perhaps a bit crazy herself.

  That day, though, I saw none of that side of Judith, all I saw was a hardworking, tired barrow woman with sore feet. Just as the cheer went up to signal that the Ida had gone through the arch safely and
was well on her way to the water, Mr. MacDermot came back into the kitchen with Judith s boots. He warned her that they would feel a bit uncomfortable for the first few days, but that she should persevere and before the week was out her feet would feel like those of a girl of ten. By the time his prediction came true, he had left for Nova Scotia, but Judith begged a bit of his old apron off me and made up a charm to keep him safe and make him wealthy. I heard years later that he eventually owned a factory with upward of a hundred employees, up in New Brunswick, so perhaps her witchcraft worked. I prefer to believe that a man who could in twenty minutes make a shoe insert to cure a bad foot had earned all the success that came to him.

  July 12

  Fine, sunny day again. Mumma has apologized to Dermot, said she was confused. He looked embarrassed for her. No visit from the itinerant clergyman this week, thank goodness. That man makes me nervous, not like dear Father Walsh. I find myself writing the most surprising things in this small diary—I had better tuck it out of the way in case Lizzie or the girl happen upon it. It took me five years to fill the first half and now it looks as if I will need a new one before the summer is out. It’s just as well—it keeps me from saying things that I might regret. Inundated with Orangemen, all surprisingly well behaved, considering, but then it is Sunday.

  Kate looked tired this morning. I think it is the extra I work, looking after me, and I wish she’d get Mrs. Coady to help, but she says it’s only that a mouse was gnawing at the picture railing in her room all night. That must be why the cat came in. After the lightning hit in 1907, I chinched up the hole over the railing with a mix of flour and salt, not having any lime and thinking the salt would make it unpalatable to mice, but that was seven years ago and perhaps the salt has leeched out. I should tell her to remove the salt-dough and plug the hole with lime or a bit of steel wool.