The Bosun Chair

by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

  Fraser and Millie were always too much alike to like each other, siblings in their eighties bickering like kids over whether their bread was called “buns” or “rolls.” They’re not buns, you sit on your buns! Millie just as stubborn, Dad in a skirt, her nieces said.

  He hadn’t forgotten the time she returned home from Calgary with her new husband—the Canuck in his Cadillac with the antler hood ornament, showing off. Those Calgarians with their ten-gallon hats and their pint-size brains.

  He hadn’t forgotten how the Canadians had built the air base on farms in Torbay, how the Canadian troops stationed here were classed as serving “overseas,” while the Newfoundlanders, still bleeding from Beaumont Hamel, signed up to fight for Mother England and were shipped off to North Africa.

  He hadn’t forgotten his city a few years later, draped in black in mourning for the country, stolen, he said, in backroom dealings between imperialists with different accents.

  Millie squints in her bright Calgary sun, says, There were never any antlers on that car!

  The U-boats had sunk the Caribou—a ferry of civilians sailing to Sydney. Families thrown from their bunks by the torpedo blast, then throwing themselves into the icy sea. A vessel of the same class as the one he takes to his post in Labrador. There is a woman on board who sees a periscope, a finger crooked toward her across the water. The captain tells her she is wrong, it couldn’t be, even as he pulls the ship in to a sheltered bay for the night.

  One in the family is enough, they had told him when he tried to join the Air Force. Though he knew families with more enlisted, with more lost. Though he knew that one was, in fact, too many. He took night classes in wireless telegraphy, traded the cows for weather stations in Labrador. They call it Battle Harbour, the place where he is stationed, though it is miles from the battles of Europe and his brother’s battered body. Named for a forgotten war between the Montagnais and the Inuit.

  He awakes in the middle of the night to a bright light sweeping across the ship like a slow, hot hand. He waits, barely breathing, as if they will hear him through the steel hulls. He waits for the torpedo that does not come, that they do not waste on this boat. The next morning, a convoy of Allied ships nearby is sunk by submarines. 137 dead on the Caribou, who knows how many more on this morning’s convoy. And he is alive. And he is not on the escort ships, not speeding through the section of Atlantic called “the Pit,” two miles above a graveyard of Allied ships. Not watching the glow of London burning.

  Battle of the Atlantic. Battle Harbour.

  Who, now, will shovel the bog and seal blubber onto the land. Who will seed the potatoes with a knife, who will milk the cows when the morning tastes of fog and the barn is warmed by manure and breath. Who will haul the hay, pulling the chaff from shirt cuffs. Who will pluck carrots the width of veins from their rows, while the Canadians rumble over the road. Who will chop the wood. And who will chop it tomorrow.

  Who will swim in the pond, when the evening light silvers the surface, so that you worry a moment that your dive into glass will cut you on the way down.

  Mother would be out to church, just about every night, Women’s Association meetings, all that kind of thing. And he’d be home sitting in the little living room all night long by himself. After leaving the farm which was his pride and joy. And I didn’t realize, you know, what that would do to him. I didn’t realize what that was doing to him. Because he just sat there in this room, and he used to love to go out and walk around the fields, you know, and look at the crops when he’d come home from work in the night.

  The new house on Cavell Avenue has running water and central heating, and a wall that it shares with the neighbours, and a squat yard that overlooks the pool of rain in the street. Here he will wait out the war.

  She sees their son’s ghost, but he does not. He listens to the lowing of neighbours. He listens to the bleat of the traffic. And after the war, when the Canadians and Americans head home with their Newfie wives, he keeps marching to work, though production has been cut in half, though the neon cow was taken down during the blackouts.

  In his belly is a sickness that the company doctor calls a persistent flu. From his bed he can hear the neighbours fighting, making love, while sacs on his bowel grow with poison, like cow vetch in the furrows, like ringworm on cattle’s flanks. Just a flu, until she finds him on the bathroom floor.

  Peritonitis, someone says. But they will not operate because of his angina. His wife and two of his children are at his side.

  He’d come home from one job and he’d get something to eat and he’d go out on the grounds and he was working then till dark. And on Sundays then he’d go walking around, and ’twas his life. He was looking forward to retiring on this, and he sold it, got rid of it. And I didn’t know the difference. You know, didn’t realize the difference, what it was doing to him.

  Finally someone finds a surgeon who is willing to operate, since it is his only chance. The surgery is scheduled for the following morning at eight o’clock. He dies at three.

  There was a man moved in, he bought the property next to us, and most of that pond was on his land. Now, we weren’t there anymore, we were living out in town then, but he got bulldozers in and he dozed out the river. And drained the pond. And it was a shame because it was the life living in there you know, without that, without that pond there…

  I think if we were living there we would have protested that, but Dad sold the farm and sold the house, and the people that bought it never moved in, he rented it. So ’twas nobody to protest.

  And they tell me when he let it drain, and all the water was gone, they tell me the fish were flapping on the bottom.

  THE NEW ROAD

  AND THEN WE’D COD JIG, in the summertime. And Pop knew all the places to go. He knew where every shoal was, every rock was, up and down that arm.

  Whenever you talked about Little Heart’s Ease, I thought you were saying Little Heart Seas. I could see the outport facing the sea, clasping the fingertips of the Southwest Arm. The sea defined that place for a girl who had only been there once, who had always lived 1000 kilometres inland. Who could not find the ocean in waves of wheat.

  You showed me your grandparents’ house, the beach, with your wineglass, your fork and knife. Napkin for the bay, pepper for Caplin Cove, hand spread for the line of the harbour. Heart’s Ease was here, at the tender crook of your thumb. Sunday plates cleared from the table and it is summer down around the bay, your eyes bright in the sun with Pop showing you, drop the line to the bottom, two arm lengths up, and away you go, jigging your memories to hook me with flashes of light. Arms reaching above your head—you had to hold it up like this… cause if you did it like this, you’d get a face full of water.

  The wharves, the stage, the boat, speech and memories rolling faster now, calling it by Heartsease, run together in a single word with stress on the first syllable, and easy as the shaker of salt, you pass me your nostalgia.

  It was a five-hour trip from your home in St. John’s to your grandparents’ house. Before the TransCanada the narrow dirt road to Heart’s Ease followed the coastline, and if it rained, your dad’s baby blue Meteor sank in mud up to the axles. When the rain froze, the car fishtailed up the slope. And I remember that Chapel Arm and Norman’s Cove was like a welcome relief. Two small communities and they weren’t quite half way. But okay, you’re getting there. Your father approached the blind corners blowing the horn, the road wrapping the cliffs like a window ledge. The Meteor inching along it, as if deciding whether to jump. Your father making everyone get out of the car before he tried to climb the frozen slope, then waiting for you to walk up the hill when he got to the top.

  And Chapel Arm, Norman’s Cove, you don’t even drive through them now because they’re on the coast. Goobies with its chip stand in the summer, huddling beneath the awning out of the rain. Queen’s Cove. Long Beach. Island Cove, below the road, slope of saltbox roofs and gardens grown over with thistle. And you could look down and you’d see
the houses—nobody living there, but you could see the houses. Every time you watched for it, the ghost town, the place so like Heart’s Ease, slipping past the backseat window.

  This was the entrance to the arm, and here was a little outport called House Cove.

  In 1949, Joey Smallwood had become the first premier of Newfoundland. He said he would “drag Newfoundlanders kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,” he said, “Burn your boats.” He dreamed of glove factories and cement plants, of towns with the sweet smell of chocolate masking the sea. He said, “Develop or perish.” He gave families a few hundred dollars to move to his growth centres, where they fought for the fishing grounds. In two decades, 300 outports were gone.

  The big excitement was when the L___s, were going to be getting this house from House Cove. House Cove must have been abandoned about ten years before this. So the house was still in reasonably good shape—may have needed a coat of paint, but you know these people didn’t have any other income. And so the trick was to get it out.

  They put logs beneath the foundation, and chopped the house from its pilings. Horses and men pulled the house toward the water, and more men slowed it with ropes from behind. The logs left behind were dragged around front to meet the threshold. It took a full day to get the house to the beach. Then they hitched it to the boats waiting off shore, like putting a leash on an old dog.

  When the house went in the water, it sank, it must have been about three feet. I remember—aw geez I remember it to this day because the water was about maybe halfway up the door. And I’ll never forget, I said, is she gonna sink? Is she gonna sink? And my grandfather—no no, she’ll just drop down about three feet, b’y, and she’ll level off.

  House Cove, like a strange discount store, a used house lot. If you lived here you’d already be home.

  You tell me of going out across the arm in Pop’s sixteen-foot open boat, looking, even then, for signs of bad weather. How when whitecaps crested the horizon you would get up in the fore-cuddy, where the bow was planked across the gunnels, where there was just enough room for a small boy to hide amongst the jiggers from the waves. Even in the foulest weather, Pop would be smiling and whistling, while you did the worrying for you both. If Pop pulled up the oilskin, I knew we were in for it.

  Stories of stories, heard jigging in an open boat. The fishing trip when Pop jumped into the Atlantic to save his buddy from drowning, then headed for the nearest bit of beach, lit a fire with gasoline, and sat shivering naked in the snow, bright white bodies aglow while they roasted their oilskins like marshmallows. Sailing his schooner through the St. John’s Narrows in the middle of a storm, how as the wind caught the sails, the boom came around and broke his leg. How Nan ran the wireless station in Heart’s Ease, and got the message in a slow trail of dashes and dots. Pop would go out in a hurricane. Stories of a WWI commando, of putting ashore in a rubber boat with a 303 Enfield, of a soldier in Halifax on December 6th, 1917, when the harbour exploded. Fragments of running towards the city, of people without limbs, of rubble and smoke.

  And the old salts chuckling on the beach, saying, You aren’t going out in this now, are ya Skipper?

  Pop wrote poems that he did not keep.

  His poems were paper planes

  made of rhyme and the adventures of an afternoon

      landing at your feet with a laugh—

      that it flew so fast, that the nose brushed Dad’s hair.

  Each spring he scraped the old paint off the skiff:

  See the gaps here between the planks

  poke in the oakum with the chisel

  then we’ll seal her up tight with pitch and paint.

  He taught you the rhythm

  of pitch and oakum,

  the value of the line of rough hemp.

  Make sure you do it right

  you don’t want to be out in the bay

  when the oakum comes out.

  There are no poems left now

  from this man who died before I was born.

  I’ll never hear the timbre of his voice—

  only yours, reciting the smell of pitch,

      the hewn of the hull,

      the pleasure of hearing your own name

      rhymed with the afternoon’s lunch

      before he puts the poem in the fire.

  St. Jones Without was abandoned around the time that you were born. It sits outside Random Sound, while its favoured sister, St. Jones Within, keeps its residents tucked in the northern sleeve of the Arm.

  Without the Sound, without sound, save the flap of clapboard and gulls whose only garbage comes from the sea. Without the smell of seal flipper pie, without shirts on the line. Without skiffs but one docked by pillaging pirates, Viking explorers.

  At first, you are hushed too, like entering a church. Then you loosen again into your pirate stances, breaking windows because you can, fighting for roles of sheriff and outlaw, standoffs with driftwood guns. Scaring yourselves with ghost stories and the flutter of birds in the attic beams. Till the shadows stretch and your bellies growl, and everyone has been killed in the shootout. And the houses seem like bones scraped of meat, the hollowed rooms like playing inside a skull. And you long for your mothers and the fishiness of seal sealed in gravy and pie crust. To fold yourself within Pop’s voice and Nan’s arms, and pretend you are too old for kisses from your grandmother.

  Racing for the boat, yanking on the fly-wheel, your arms still as skinny as the cord.

  Pop knew where there was a stand of trees tall enough to build a new wharf, pilings long enough to drive them deep into the ocean floor to bear the sea ice. Near Island Cove, where there was a creek bed to float the timbers down to the water, where they could be leashed to the skiff and pulled down the arm to Heart’s Ease. Where no one lived anymore to claim them.

  The TransCanada had been finished in 1965, and there wasn’t much reason to drive by Island Cove anymore. The new road channelled through woods, away from the water, and the trip was easy now, when you had time to make it. Had you met my mother yet, that summer you built the new wharf? Were you already dreaming of med school? Of me?

  You and Pop and your dad and brothers spent the day felling trees for the new wharf. But when you set out for home the raft, dragging behind the skiff like a stubborn dog, strained the motor and you ran out of gas. And your mother, waiting at home, saw everyone she loved drowning in the arm, even as you slowly rowed in to shore, the raft set free to drift to a nearby island. Phoning everyone she knew in places up the arm, until a man in Hodge’s Cove spotted you rowing on the water. He met you on the beach, saying, Frances phoned, she’s kind of upset.

  The wharf that was built with the logs retrieved the next day is gone now. And the old house, and Nan and Pop, and the cod. But unlike House Cove and Island Cove, in Heart’s Ease there is smoke from the chimneys of houses once moved across the arm. There are old folks here, and in winter, a few seals on the ice. One summer, twenty-six tonnes of hash seized from a boat by the RCMP, and in your living room in Alberta you see your grandfather’s tiny outport on The National.

  Pepper and salt are returned to the cupboard, the placemats are wiped with a too-wet cloth, leaving a trail of water beading across the plastic. There were several communities up and down the arm—Loreburn was one, St. Jones Without was another, and House Cove, and Island Cove was another, that people were moved out.

  The turnoff to Island Cove was bulldozed after the residents left. And the path was barred, so you could never go back.

  THE BOSUN CHAIR

  AT NINE, SHE LEAVES HOME to become a servant in St. John’s. At nine years old she leaves school, leaves her mother and father and brothers and sisters, leaves her rag-doll and other childish things. Leaves the little outport of Brooklyn in the skirts of Bonavista Bay, for the city. There is one year left in the century.

  The mouth of the harbour is flanked by cliffs high as storm clouds. Sealing ships dock ju
st inside the harbour, near the seal oil refineries. Schooners cluster in further, foresting the harbour with their masts. The waterfront is lined with wharves spread with fish, waiting for inspection, and scaffolds for drying cod arch across the streets. Around the north side of the harbour, the old city tumbles up the hills, a huddle of narrow dirt streets, wooden tenements and gothic churches. The air is thick with smoke and the dank smell of animals and humans and water.

  She will become Mrs. Noseworthy to acquaintances, Mom to three, Nanny to my mother and her other grandchildren. But as she steps into this strange city she is only nine, and her name is Jean Chaulk.

  It may be one of the colonial mansions on Rennie’s Mill Road—crisp white porch pillars masting the doorways, twelve-foot walls jungled with wallpaper—where Jean is first sent to work for the old judge. Later there will be hints of abuse, that these days in this house are the seeds of what will become a life-long bitterness. It might be one of the mansions on Waterford Bridge Road on the west end, backing on to the Waterford River—grand staircases with mahogany newel posts reflecting the crystal chandelier light. She could not imagine that one day her grandson will live in one of these houses, restoring it to its Victorian glory.

  She works sixteen-hour days for room and board and a few dollars to send back home. Jean is days away from home, and lucky for it. Lucky to be in St. John’s and not working in the Boston States like so many other outport girls, closer to Brooklyn, New York, than Brooklyn, Newfoundland.

  Monday: Washing. She begins the day boiling the whites with lye. She scrubs stains on a washboard, cranks the clothes through a wringer, and hangs them to dry until Tuesday.