The Bosun Chair

by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

  When Aunty Alice comes down the hall, Nanny says, Uh oh, here comes the teacher. And it could be a joke, a jab at her prim older sister, at this childhood that has come back to her like fog rolling in over the Narrows. No one asks.

  My mother makes an album for her of all her grandchildren, and points at the pictures like a text book, our nine faces flashing like multiplication tables, like French nouns. From birth through awkward grades, pictures of apple cheeks, la pomme.

  I don’t want to know these stories. I want to know the first childhood, I want nickel street car rides and faking sick to watch a matinee at the Capitol Theatre, Water Street ladies in hats with blue ribbon, stray goats in the streets. Fog like putting on a hat.

  Elizabeth dreams of fire, waking soaked in water from the fire engines—her own sweat. In the attic are three children who would have two wooden staircases to descend, as flames spread along the row-houses like a ball rolling down a hill. As they did in ’92 when a match in a hay loft flattened two-thirds of the city, burning through the homes of thousands, through the shops on Water Street and the wharves, stopped only by the water of the harbour. The flames would have no more respect for the thin walls between the row-houses of Bannerman Street than the maid, who stands in the kitchen with her ear to the wall, cheeks burning at the sound of the Mick neighbours saying their rosary. It is too close, this city, too thick with smoke and prejudice carried in coats from Ireland. She can smell the neighbour’s bathwater, taste their fish through her bedroom window. Feel the heat of their bodies and their flames.

  Snowed in my mother brings her paper, writes down the words Nanny cannot hear.

  You look nice in purple.

  It’s windy.

  This is a meeting of the Ladies Auxiliary homemade squares and strong tea,

  Thank you all for coming this afternoon.

  My mother digs, the pen a poor tool for wet snow.

  What is my name?

  Elizabeth Noseworthy.

  What is my married name?

  Outside, the lilacs are blooming, so it must be summer.

  In her hand is a flower stem, small lettered petals.

  This coat is too big, it must be Fraser’s.

  What kind of flower?

  Petunia?

  Nanny not sure.

  She nods to her guests, there is work to be done.

  It is cold and soon it will be Christmas.

  Where is Jean?

  Where is home?

  Alberta.

  The minutes will be passed.

  She can nod and pretend she has heard every word.

  Thank you daughters for the visit and the cooking.

  NANNY: He’d be gone all week but he always made sure he got home on the weekends. He’d take us to church in the morning, and then we had to go to Sunday school in the afternoon, and when we come home from Sunday school you had to have your little nap then. He’d be ready for us, and he’d all take us by the hand, Al and I and Harold, the three of us, and go down to the cemetery. Ugh! But we went anyway because Dad was such a good sport, he liked to talk and tell you things. I miss that too. Oh my, and when I think about it—I often think about the times we used to have. And the children, they’re never satisfied, they got everything now and they’re still not satisfied, well, we were satisfied with things.

  POPPY: C’mon honey, your milk is ready.

  NANNY: Wha?

  POPPY: Your milk is ready.

  NANNY: You milked a cow, did ya?

  POPPY: Yes, I did.

  I find her on this tape when silence has become a place.

  Where it is Saturday night, and her new mother joins the others along Bannerman Street calling their children in for their baths. Fake lemon and steam. Parade of skin pinked from hot water and scrubbing.

  Where her grandmother sits up in bed as she brings her hot water, her concentration rippling the surface of the bowl. Where she does sums at the table. Where cigar smoke sweetens the walls.

  Her head sinks into memory, a child in the bath finding giant squid and sunken ships. My voice inaudible, my face blurred in pale blue light.

  And each house along the empty street is filled with the smell of Sunlight soap — the laundry and the floor, the porch steps and the children all scrubbed shiny and raw from that blue and yellow box.

  SENSE

  ME: How did you meet?

  POPPY: Oh, out to church. We went to the same church, see.

  NANNY: Young people’s school, you know.

  POPPY: You had the Young People’s Association, and you’d meet every Tuesday night—

  NANNY: We went to Sunday school, and then we’d talk, at Sunday school,

  POPPY: —and we’d play games, and that kind of stuff, and you’d go to Sunday school,

  NANNY: Went to Sunday school, and I taught the—

  POPPY: Of course you had to go to church.

  NANNY: … And after that I went into the choir. And after that, I married that old fella. Some old now, I tell ya!

  He called her honey like he meant just that—a slow familiar sweetness. She couldn’t hear it but could see it, golden in his mouth, in his eye.

  And sometimes, sure, he would shout, a different shout from the one for her hearing aid—Who are all the eggs for sure it’s just the two of us You can’t put on your fur coat it’s the middle of the goddamn summer and where are you going?

  The nurses and the children came, but he put in her hearing aid, the only one who knew how to change the batteries, how to fit it right. The tender ritual: lifting back her brumey curls to set the case, gentle turn of mould into her ear, fingers on her cheek, breath in her hair.

  When the hand soap had to be hidden so she couldn’t put it in the dishwasher, he cleaned the house, learned to cook and managed to put the sewing machine needle through his thumb. She still wagged her finger when he told a dirty joke, sensing the punchline. If she could hear it she’d have topped it. And for a while they still sat at the table, breathing bergamot and the peace of a marriage six decades long.

  They got her a room in the Agnes Pratt, a double, so if that other lady dies—But once he’d tucked her in the quilt from home, he started letting go of the things that he had made last, patched and darned: his kidneys, his heart.

  And no one knew if she understood the news shouted in her ear. They found food in her mouth hours after lunch, rolling on her tongue like she was trying to match a taste to a memory.

  After he died, her doctor said that he had told him years ago—she had no hearing left at all. No point in keeping the hearing aid in.

  THE STEPPING-OFF PLACE

  On my grandfather’s wall

  the framed baptismal certificate

  of an older brother, outlived

  by eighty years.

  Only six months old

  when his small breath caught

       like a sleeve on a nail.

  Red eyes, spots inside his tiny mouth

  a spreading stain across his skin.

  In this family tree

  my great-grandmother’s limb

  bears more fragile things:

                  a leaf,

                      an egg.

  Or her body is scrub

  low to the ground,

      braced against wind

         with tender tubers reaching

                           into earth.

  On my grandfather’s wall

  a photo of his brother Leslie

  in his British Royal Navy uniform,

  the words

        For King and Country

        Killed in Action.

  Only twenty-four years old

  when his young breath caught

     in his throat,

  watching the swarm of Luftwaffe

  a spreading stain ac
ross the sky.

  My grandfather keeps these papers

  reminding him that he too

  is a sprout,

      an eye,

           a small thing cut from flesh.

  Leaves that make him stop,

  listen to his own breath.

  Have mercy on us down in Newfoundland, we are but a fog-shrouded rock in the North Atlantic.

  —Joey Smallwood, 1947

  The tide goes out, and the land swells like a lung.

  Erratics sit on the roadside, as if waiting for the glaciers that left them to return.

  Some call it The Rock.

  My grandfather tells of the boyhood friend who jumped over the gap in the cliff path, how rock and body gave way, gushed into the deep water below as my grandfather watched, his own body already leaning forward to follow. Even stone is fluid.

  My grandfather tells of the farm beneath the gas station, the pond filled in by the road. Of the rock that held potatoes and cabbages, the tendrils of carrot tops teasing the shy orange skin below ground.

  In an Alberta restaurant, eating mussels in white wine I get sand between my teeth, rock worn by water. Rock so fine that in the context of sun, it could be called soft under your toes.

  The pond used to freeze over—course we’d make a skating rink. Shovel the snow off and we’d go down there skating, and used to be crowds of people come in from town, they’d come in for skating on the pond, on the ice… A hundred feet from the house.

  Leslie was six years older than Fraser, an adult, when adulthood was a distant green country. They milked with numb fingers in the fog of their breath, and in summer worked side by side in the fields, pulling weeds or making hay, and swam in the pond in the heat of the afternoon, perhaps trying to dunk each other, and maybe smoking a cigarette, and talking about girls. Leslie probably giving advice, teaching how to throw a punch, and take one, racing across the pond—of course letting his kid brother win. Just a kid too, really. Fraser does not speak of this.

  What he remembers now, to his granddaughter listening, is the water, the way the clean cool met his hot dusty face, the way the surface held the ripple, when a diver dropped to the bottom.

  We’d go down there fishing—it had all sorts of trout into it, and a river running in and a river running out. Our swimming hole was right in the mouth of the river running in. And all the summer we’d be down there.

  And in the nighttime, we’d be out sitting on the veranda, and you’d see the moon shining on the water, you know? It was beautiful. That pond was the life of the place.

  The Newfoundland Butter Company bore the first neon sign in Newfoundland, a giant cow that glowed above the entrance as the workers filed in on dark winter mornings. The Newfoundland Butter Company didn’t even make butter.

  Thomas Noseworthy was a farmer who made oleomargarine, “Good Luck” and “Eversweet.” He left his sons to milk the cows and drove to town, entered beneath the neon bovine to a steady wage and the promise of a pension, the first in Newfoundland.

  In distant Canada, the dairy farmers kept the cheap fat from kitchen tables by law, enshrined in the British North America Act. But Newfoundland’s few cows made butter a golden spread, a fancy import from far away places, and margarine meant jobs. Bootleg margarine was smuggled into Canada, dyed yellow. It would sit between Newfoundland and Canada on the negotiating table after the war: Newfoundland would join Canada if they could keep making margarine; Canada would welcome them if they did not sell it off the island.

  The men at the Butter Company made the margarine with a little milk mixed with seal oil, heated in giant vats, emulsified, then cooled and congealed, the fishy odour of hot churning seal oil haunting their bread. There is no irony, then, in my great-grandfather’s career. In this country without enough butter, he collected his pay and went home to sweet fresh cream churned with an egg beater at the table.

  He pits the fish offal, the sour manure and turf warming the fall chill, ploughing it all into the bog for the winter to spread on the fields in the spring.

  (He once told me, city girl, girl of a new century, of thinning vegetables, the picking, the picking rocks. I saw an old man bending in the furrows).

  He heaves up the shovel thinking of Richard III. He can see Richard’s winter in his breath, and thinks of corrupt kings and rumours of war.

  (I have the small brown copies of his English schoolbooks with their softened cloth corners and his precise teenage handwriting: Fraser Noseworthy, September 13th, 1938).

  By spring, the pit will be ripe to fertilize the vegetables and hay, by spring, the Germans will have invaded Czechoslovakia and signed a pact with fascist Italy. By July, he will be seventeen and finished high school. He’ll put away his math book, his Richard III and English, Spoken and Written, he’ll help his brother to spread the bog that steeped all winter across the fields, and wait.

  At dusk, three schooners grappled the chain with their anchors, and the capstan heaved it from the bottom of the Harbour. Fort Waldegrave and Fort Amherst, Chain Rock and Pancake Rock, linked by iron that, from ships, looked like thread across the Narrows. It was 1770, and the chain would hold back the French, along with the shot furnaces that burned to load the cannons with fire.

  The chain became a net, the schooners minesweepers, the warships submarines. The eighteenth century became the twentieth, and the French became the Germans. Corvettes and destroyers in the Newfoundland Escort Force huddled before the convoy across the North Atlantic. The Constabulary confiscated rolls of film with children posed in front of the Narrows. The Canadian War Cabinet’s plan for German invasion was to sink the ships to block the port, fill the harbour with ten thousand tonnes of fuel drained from the tanks on the Southside Hills, and light the city on fire.

  Not the hinterland, not a half hour into the sea, but the very front of North America. The gateway to a continent, the stepping-off place.

  It burns every hour of the day, the stove in the hall. The one in the kitchen from dawn until bedtime. They burn and his shoulders burn, and he dreams of chopping wood, chopping from dawn until bedtime, chopping every hour of the day. In the fall, he and Leslie and his father had hauled the trees from the woods behind the house to prepare for this, the winter and the insatiable stoves. And on Saturdays they prepare for Sundays, chopping double to last the day of rest.

  In the morning, before the dark has lifted off the fields, he will milk the cows in the white fog of his own breath. And it will be worth it, then, the smell of smoke after the barn, the promise of numb fingers warming over the dry cast-iron heat, of tea strong as ink swirled with his own fresh cream. And in the hot kitchen his brother will tease him, punching his arms thickening with new muscle, the arms now of a man, his cheeks proud and burning like a boy’s.

  During the war, everything was blacked out.

  No lights, never saw a light anywhere. You couldn’t walk along the street and light a cigarette. And the cars, the cars had a hood over the headlights. And we had shutters on the windows, so you couldn’t see any light outside at all. See, it was the stepping-off place to North America, as you can well imagine.

  A German submarine sailed up Conception Bay. And the big high cliffs on Bell Island, they had guns up there. And I understand they tried to fire at this submarine, but they couldn’t deflect the guns low enough, so the crew came right in under the cliffs. And there were two boats tied up there waiting to take iron ore, and they were torpedoed, sunk right there. And that’s right in the bay, you know?

  All around the coast, they were swarming with German submarines.

  Leslie enlisted with the British Royal Navy, was stationed on the minesweeper Abronia. An Ordinary Seaman. She was an old fishing trawler from Grimsby. But he was a Newfoundlander from a farm, and she was no longer after fish. Her lines were set with paravenes that stretched out wide at port and stern to slice the mines from their moorings. When a horned head bobbed to the surface, he handed shells to the sharpshooters
trying to pierce its skull and gently sink it to the ocean floor. If they hit the trigger the mine, he knew, would explode in a maw of shrapnel and water. All hands put on their lifebelts as the trawler entered the grid.

  He knew that other things lurked too, silently beneath them: U-boats that could dive in thirty seconds, slipping under the escorts; magnetic mines that had no cables but sent shock waves from the bottom; acoustic mines that waited for the trembling of a hull.

  After all this, it was the dock that was deadly, and the sky and not the sea that swallowed the trawler at port, sitting still in east London. What did the young Newfoundlander on patrol think when he looked up and saw the 300 Luftwaffe bombers rolling in, a black fog of planes with their 300 tonnes of bombs for London? More planes than anyone had ever seen, descending on a city that lay anchored to the earth, pointing anti-aircraft fire at a storm. Twenty-four years old, he would not see as night fell blacked-out London alight with fire, misnamed Black Saturday. The first night of the Blitz. It was four months after he left home.

  His father was paid $8.17 for the “residue” of his wages, the residue of his body pulled from the water and buried in Communal Grave No. 1 in East London Cemetery, with the four other ratings who died on the ship, and the dead from the burned-out convent, the school-turned-shelter. The Abronia would be raised from the Thames a year later, while the bombs cremated their bodies in the ground.

  The American and Canadian soldiers wanted Newfoundland’s milk and fresh meat and vegetables. And they wanted Newfoundland’s farms for forts and barracks and runways. And they wanted Newfoundland’s men to build them, and they would pay a quarter of what they paid their own, and it would still be more money than the Newfoundlanders had ever seen. The forts and bases wanted Newfoundland’s men, and the war wanted Newfoundland’s men. And the farmer’s sons went to Europe to fight, and many would not come home. And all the tractors and milking machines that the Canadians’ money could buy would not bring them home, to help with the harvest in the fall, to stand beside their fathers and brothers pitching hay into the loft. To wash the sweat off their backs in the swimming hole at the mouth of the river.