The Bosun Chair

by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

  To make fish n’ brewis, soak the hard tack and the salt fish overnight. Then, when you can see the team of dogs coming over the hill with the firewood, put the bread and the fish on to boil. Serve them together with pork scruncheons or drawn butter.

  If you are on a ship, bags of hard tack will last months without going mouldy. And if you are on land and too poor to eat the fish that your father caught last summer, the stones of hard tack will soften slowly in the hollow of your cheek.

  I was very young but I can remember people coming in the shop to get what they called a dole note filled? I can see those notes now. It was written on it flour, sugar, butter, the bare necessities for food, you know.

  And the relieving officer was such that he got his job because he was such a hard man—that’s what they say, and I believe it, too. I know people who have walked from a place called St. Joseph’s, right up to the country—oh, it must be about what, God, maybe twelve miles to walk, in the winter time up to his office—and he would say, “Now see here, in the last six months you had so many weeks work. No. I can’t give you a dole note.” And that man would have to turn around and walk back again, those long long distances, with nothing. No note.

  No dust bowls in this Depression, no parched prairie cracked open with drought. Here there was water for miles, and there was work. They worked to pay for their nets and boots, for the food they gave their children, the hard bread they gnawed till their jaws were sore. They fished for fish that did not belong to them, in a place where you could starve by an ocean still full of cod. A Depression you could drown in.

  You know if my father had a dollar, he would give half of it away, you know? He couldn’t stand to see someone suffering if he had anything to give him. And he gave away more than one pan of flour to people who didn’t have any flour to make bread. He said,“I never want for anything, no. I never want for it. I’ve got enough to do me.”

  When he returns from the Labrador the relief of home is clot with thoughts about the catch and its worth, the merchants in the city and the rating their cullers will give each fish.

  Merchantable, that’s what you’re after. Madeira—less than eighteen inches. West Indies, the cullage—sunburned, saltburned, blood spots. Poor fish for the poor of Barbados, and a poor price for the poor of Newfoundland.

  Each fish they have handled fifty times, catching, splitting, washing, salting, spreading; the fish were shielded from weather, swaddled in rinds, touched more than their wives.

  The culler paws at the stacks, hurling yaffles of good fish into the cullage and Pop stands silent, surrounded by men, hundreds of men waiting for their turn with their schooners cradling their own fish, watching as the culler, that stunned arse ugly as a sculpin cocks his head like he’s done him a favour and reduces his year’s work to a note of debt.

  And I remember saying to him one time, “Oh I wish you wouldn’t go to Labrador anymore, why can’t you stay home now.” And I remember him saying to me, “Well maybe another year or so and I won’t have to go to Labrador and I’ll be able to stay home.” But that last time he was down, I heard him say about so many thousand dollars in debt, didn’t make any money. No fish. And that was when he decided to sell the schooner.

  She leaves this place to teach school in other towns on the coast. She worries for her pupils balanced on the ice pans. She knows the pull of the ice, gathered along the shore. She, too, was once immortal.

  In choosing names for her own she will think of these children, the students who were too raucous, or slow. She will hope for a girl and get four boys. She will catch them on the counters, pretending the floor is lava, and envision cracked skulls and broken necks.

  Ice is building now on the eaves. I know her alone with a burnt porch light. I know her pointing to a wharf taken long ago by the ice. They say I look like her, in black and white youth, before grief caught her, ignoring her talisman of worry.

  That way is the depths of the North Atlantic. That way, too, is home. The ballycater sits in the cove like a hundred white rafts. Hold your coat closed at the neck and follow the path down to the water.

  On a clear evening she walked with her sweetheart back from Ganny Cove up the arm, their toes growing numb in their boots and their hands warmed in each other’s. And they wondered if they could cross the ice instead of walking on the shore, the long way round. Cross the mouth of the harbour where the ice breaks up early, chipped teeth grinning from shore to shore.

  So we said to a man who was standing there, “Do you think we could cross over there now?” And he said,“Aw I think so. Take this stick and you can sort of pound on the ice as you walk and you can judge for yourself.” So we did.

  Her lipstick was worn off from talking and the crust of ice was as calm as the kitchen floor. Before they were married, before they moved to St. John’s. Before the boys left the door banging open in the wind, racing home from Larch Place Park, before the house on Elizabeth Avenue glinted tinsel through the front room window. When her waist was still as narrow as the length of his fingers wrapped around it, when their bootprints were in step and their path was swirled by the ocean wind. When there was no way they wouldn’t both see their future sons grow taller than them.

  And we hit the ice like that and then we’d take a step and then we’d take another step, and no lights on, only the snow was bright.

  In thirty years, he will be on his back on a bed of ice, its cold passing through his coat like a door opening beneath him. Shards in his jaw, and shards in his chest, fishing rods abandoned in the snow beside him. Above him, the clouds will bunch across the sky until he thinks he is standing on a hill, looking down at the ballycater floating across the cove. His son running through the woods from the hole in the ice to the highway for help.

  And so we got over like that, and we knew it wasn’t too safe and that’s why we had the stick. And gosh, the next morning it was all water.

  She grew up hopping on ice pans without knowing how to swim. She had her first swimming lesson at the age of sixty-six, because on her annual winter trips to Florida she would see her friends having so much fun in the pool. And then she found that she was afraid of the water, the clear warm pool, the visible white bottom.

  SUNLIGHT

  NANNY: My mother died when I was two.

  POPPY: Yes but then you had a stepmother—

  NANNY: Yes I had a stepmother—

  AUNTY ALICE: —when she was eight.

  NANNY: I was eight, eight years old? My father remarried when I was eight years old.

  AUNTY ALICE: And in between, we had Grandmother Godley look after us, after Mother died, for I don’t know how long, wasn’t very long before she died. After that, Nanny Lever would come over and we had a maid, then Nanny Lever and Grandfather Lever come to live with us.

  NANNY: What’s her name?

  AUNTY ALICE: Whose name?

  NANNY: That, that maid, first maid we had? You have a better memory than I do.

  ALICE: I don’t know, we had so many.

  ME: And what did your father do?

  POPPY: Travelling salesman.

  NANNY: Hardware, hardware for how many years?

  ALICE: I don’t remember how many years.

  POPPY: Well he was at it when he was eighty years old. He was working.

  ALICE: He started down to Martin Hardware.

  POPPY: Fifty years travelling. At least fifty years.

  NANNY: Everybody knew him! “Billy Lever, Billy Lever!”

  POPPY: Oh yes.

  NANNY: All across the country.

  POPPY: Even today you’d go out and—

  NANNY: Everybody knew him.

  POPPY: —somebody would say something about Billy Lever. “Oh yes, Billy, we called him Billy.” ALICE: Very outgoing. I don’t know where they got me.

  NANNY: I wonder where they got you!

  ALICE: I don’t know, I guess Harold was that way too.

  NANNY: There was no fun in ya.

  ALICE: No.

 
; NANNY: Never tell a joke…

  POPPY: She crawled out from under a rock!

  NANNY: There was one good thing about her, though. Often we’d all go up to LeMarchant Road, you know, boys and girls, and then you’d pair off, you know. Comin’ down then, she’d always wait by the candy store on the corner, you or Harold, and then come home together so Mother never knew who I was in love with! Oh my! Fun and games.

  ALICE: Lots of boyfriends.

  NANNY: I was a good girl.

  POPPY: Yes but nobody ever found out what you were good for!

  NANNY: Well you did, you asked me to marry ya! Oh gee, I’ll get you for that.

  It is more than a decade since this was recorded. All three are gone now, yet their voices fill my head like my own.

  Nanny always beeps when I hug her, always jumps at her own bionic sound. The whine cuts through the cloud of quiet like a needle through cloth, trailing the thread of the room.

  She has found sound inside her own head, baffled by grey curls. She knows the rhythm of the spoon in the cup by heart. Her husband’s mitres and jigs in the garage as he builds clocks and tea trolleys. Her children fighting in the hall. The house’s winter breath, the creak of its jaw. A voice that says, wake up now, Nellie, time for school.

  Every time I stay here, the first night I hear my grandfather’s clock chime the hours, and the second night I don’t hear it at all.

  Cigar smoke warms the chilly spring air. Baymen back from the ice crowd the station, shouldering their packs and their lice. Fortune seekers bound for Cape Breton share stories of mines brimming with black cash, pulling cases packed with bravado.

  Billy’s case is packed with nails of different sizes. He will take them to Port Rexton, Wood Spur, Port Union Junction, Catalina. He will take them into Tilley’s store, and O’Flaherty’s, balancing his gab on their fine points. He will sleep in a boarding house, or with a family whose price includes breakfast and a supper called tea: beef frosted with fat, briny cabbage. Paying in cash and news from the city.

  He was one of them, once, these boys heading to Boston and the General Electric plant, the high steel of New York. Sixteen and full of his brother’s stories of cities with buildings tall as thirty masts, of pockets bulged with bills.

  Before the war had settled on the world, turning young men’s heads toward Europe. He was one of them, too—twenty-four and lured by the stories of honour and glory for King and Country. He still bears the scar along his belly from the doctor’s knife, the appendicitis that saved him from the First Five Hundred of the Newfoundland Regiment, which fell almost to a man at Beaumont Hamel. Saved from that ridge in France, he had found himself in Alexandria, and Suvla Bay, and then buried alive in the trench mud where his friends had fought and died three years before. He carries these things, too: heads pounded down into the trenches, bodies rusted with blood. Memories threaded to deepen into flesh.

  All aboard that’s goin aboard, and the cigar stub drops into his breast pocket, cushioned in ash.

  Would like to know about the family of Kizziah Harmon, wife of William Lever. Their son John Wade Belton Lever is buried at … I’m looking for Charles Hopper who worked for Lever Brother Soaps in the 1930s on the West Coast. Any connections…

  My Uncle Les has spent years on the family tree, plotting it out like a map as if you could follow it to the past: Billy Lever, to William Senior, to James, to Richard, b. 1780. Stops where you can rest a while, take off your boots, along the road to Port Sunlight on the shore of the Mersey.

  Somehow we are related to that other William Lever, Lord Leverhulme of England, founder of Lever Brothers, of Sunlight and Vim, who named the company town after his soap. Born the same year as my great-great-grandfather, also William, also son of James, like the Levers of a parallel universe. Probably never called Billy in his life.

  My Great Aunt Alice tells quiet tales of a letter from England, how her grandfather saw Port Sunlight on the return address and threw the letter in the fire, unopened. If they wanted to contact us, he said, they should have done it years ago. Whispers become lore, of a will, an unclaimed inheritance.

  Uncle Les follows the Williams, the Jameses, along the fine threads of the web, through dusty books, across oceans. He walks through the Lady Lever Art Gallery, looking for a different kind of fortune: that intake of breath that comes when you see yourself in the distant past.

  Like holding a map whose rivers trace the shape of a face.

  I am searching for a Yhost Lever (b:1800) who came from Germany thru Pennsylvania to Indiana and then Michigan … Searching for my paternal grandfather, Henry Lever Ferguson, who is believed to have died in Canada about 1939…

  Billy rides the train to its farthest reaches, through the Topsail mountains—even mountains speak of ships—up tidal grades, through squalls of snow, across the plateau at Gaff Topsails, the section that has stranded trains for weeks in snow drifts two stories high, derailing even rescuers.

  It is raining in St. John’s. He can hear it in the knock of the car along the track, in the sound of a child crying in a distant berth. His children are tucked in at home by Jenny’s grieving mother and a maid he hired in an afternoon.

  When he returns, he’ll tell them tales of the giant red plow on the engine that shovels through the snow, the whole train reversing and then ramming at the mound, pitching the passengers back and forth, piling the banks up higher and higher on either side till the train is tunnelling through a planet of snow.

  Days of nothing but dark through the windows. Like riding off the edge of the earth.

  My mother was named for two grandmothers, not maternal and paternal, but living and ghost, mother and dream. A genealogy told when I was a child: Elizabeth for her mother’s stepmother, Jenny for Jenny Godley, the mother who had died when my grandmother was small enough to wait for her by the door, and small enough finally to forget.

  Jenny Godley is a whisper, the fascination and the horror of first learning that your mother can die. Never just Jenny, never Jenny Lever, always Jenny Godley, her maiden name in one breath.

  A name for an angel smiling sadly on a Christmas card. Restored to maidenhood, princess on a bier, mermaid turned to foam.

  Where’s the baby?

  What baby?

  Your baby.

  I don’t have a baby, Nanny. You must be thinking of Colleen.

  Ah, yes.

  Wasn’t too bad, I s’pose. A lot luckier than a lot of people who lost their parents. But Dad saw that we were well looked after, when he was gone always. But Grandfather died, so my grandmother came over. So we had a housemaid and then the servant girl, see, doing work. They let the housemaid go, and Nanny used to make sure that she was there overseeing everything, you know, she had to ’cause my grandfather died, so we had her come over that winter to stay.

  I can’t follow the chronology. A collection of caregivers and deaths—not a line of train cars, following one after the other; but the snow beyond the window, white upon white upon white. She was too small to remember, and now she is old enough to forget. Her mother, and Grandmother Godley. Whispers of other losses—Uncle Jim and his wife who had died somewhere in Massachusetts. Jim’s orphaned children who had been sent back to live with their grandparents in Newfoundland, until the girl died of pneumonia, until the boy fell off the fishing stage.

  This is what she remembers: Nanny Lever’s cane always set to crack against their legs if they passed too near. That kind maid who kicked the rug wet with pee beneath the bed so that her grandmother wouldn’t see. Who let them watch the cat play with a mouse in its paws.

  During the summers, their friends went to visit cousins down around the bay, to fish and pick berries, while she and her siblings stayed in St. John’s, no cousins to visit. And when Grandfather Lever passed away, the other kids in the neighbourhood refused to enter the haunted house on Bannerman Street.

  Elizabeth Churchill is the Matron. Married now to the new hospital and its heavy browed dormers, married to care and
cleanliness, to her nurses’ good comportment. Her old house was sold to the hospital after her husband died, and dragged across the Tickle ice to be the doctor’s residence. Now she sees it from the nurses’ cottage, watches Dr. Parsons pull out walls and build a sun porch cased in sparkling glass.

  The patients come in skiffs from across Notre Dame Bay, from Herring Neck, Musgrave Harbour, La Scie. They come with their hooked fingers white with infection, their broken bones, the lungers with their blood-soaked handkerchiefs. Those with no money bring vegetables, and berries picked on the hills, to be preserved and spooned into the patients’ chapped mouths come winter.

  She watches over the nurses as they sharpen needles on an oil stone, boil instruments and the TB patients’ dishes. She wipes the pink spittle from her patients’ chins as she had done for her husband, when the nearest hospital was in St. Anthony. His cough, then, like the coughs of these strangers, foreign and wild, running like a frightened horse. She will soothe them as she did him, and bathe their naked bodies, all limp, all thin.

  Billy comes from Lewisporte on the Clyde, like a letter someone mailed her, tucked between the supplies from St. John’s. New wounds for her healing hands, new souls to salve. She will be his matron, now. She will follow him back to the city, on the steamer and the rail lines, like a new hammer in his case ready to smooth old nail heads.

  This man will give her the children that God never did, already grown near as tall as her, but growing still in other ways. She will rely on duty until she loves them. They will care for the porch steps, and make their beds; she will train them. Faces starched and fingernails cut clean. No one questions if the children will call her Mother.