Tuesday: Ironing. She heats the heavy sad irons on the stove, cycling through them as they cool, with breaks to stoke the fire. Sweat trickles down her back, and the heat chokes her with her own yellowed collar.
Wednesday: Baking, years of bread, cakes and scones (a secret taste of batter when her thumb pokes down into the bowl).
Thursday: Cleaning upstairs, where the summer sun spotlights the dust.
Friday: Cleaning downstairs, where the winter snow puddles on the floor.
Saturday: More baking, between the dishwashing and cooking, scrubbing the tea-stained cups with baking soda. She retreats at midnight to a draughty attic bunk, a hook for her apron behind the door. Where she will start to bleed, far away from her mother.
Sunday: A half-day rest—a book in the kitchen with her feet under the stove. Rereading a love letter before returning it to its hiding place in the hollow iron bedpost, under the loose brass knob.
Monday: Washing. She begins the day.
On the 16th of September, 1907, Jean Chaulk boarded The Duchess of Fife, a cargo schooner loaded with goods for a merchant in Bonavista. She was sixteen years old. Outport girls often worked in the city through the winter and came home for the summer season to help make the fish. But no one knows why Jean was returning home at this time of year. She was not returning home for good.
While Carbonear we reached that night,
And early left next morn,
To run for Catalina,
As our captain feared the storm.
The storm the captain feared was faster than the schooner, though they travelled on the same wind. Thirty miles off Catalina. The gale grew. Twenty miles, and the day was so black they might have looked for stars. Ten miles off, the Duchess lost her main boom, leaving her adrift on the waves.
She drifted to the Funks, the island named for the foul odour of guano left by the millions of terns and gannets that nest there. Off its southwest shore, hidden sunkers skulk beneath the water in wait for the flesh of ships’ hulls. In this place, the Duchess began to leak with the strain of the wind and swarming waves.
Tom Noseworthy is a mason, stacking stones until whole buildings take shape beneath his hands. Maybe she falls in love with him for this; while she spends the hours scrubbing collars that will be re-soiled with sweat and baking bread that will be gobbled with one cup of tea, what he makes can withstand the worst of the Atlantic’s gales. Perhaps they are to her like private monuments around the city, like secret, intimate messages that everyone can see, but of which only she knows the meaning. Perhaps she simply sees in him a way to leave the big dark houses of Rennie’s Mill Road.
After they are married, Tom gives up masonry, goes to work at the Harvey and Brehm margarine factory, and buys a farm for his growing family on Portugal Cove Road. She runs the farm, the house, she raises three children. She spends the hours scrubbing collars that will be re-soiled with sweat.
There is a picture of Jean and Tom on the farm. It reminds me of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, with their stern expressions and rigid pose––all it needs is a pitchfork. She glowers like a rough wind is blowing in her eyes. The face of a hard woman, or hardened.
The sea washed down our cabin,
From the berth unto the floor,
It threw me with a terrible force,
I thought that all was o’er.
In the high seas the swinging boom became a swinging weapon. And the barrels of salt, and the cargo for Bonavista, bouldering down the pitching deck. The captain’s leg was broken. And the first mate’s leg was broken—Jean crawled on deck to find him lying on the house.
The wounded men were got below,
And those that did not fall,
Pesolved to do the best they could,
To save the lives of all.
Though she went by Jean, her siblings Tryphie and Pearce had always called her Jane. As if she was once one for nicknames. As if she once played with her sister instead of minded her, as if she once played house instead of ran one. Jane and Jean, cognates of the French Jeanne, cognate of the English John, God is gracious.
It was Pearce who told my grandfather about his mother’s shipwreck experience. When Jean found out her brother had told, she was furious. But she kept the full story locked in her mind. She kept the poem locked in the strong box with her birth certificate and other papers, and no one knew it existed until after she had died. Her memory dressed in rhyme, like wearing a nightgown beneath the sheets for decency.
It came to me groomed by typewriter on legal paper, and photocopied many times. It is signed “Miss Jean Chaulk, Sept. 7th, 1907.” But this must be the mistaken addition of whoever typed it out, for she couldn’t have written it ten days before the storm.
Part of outport life is growing vegetables to stretch the fish on your plate, spreading rotting capelin on the soil. Little girls weed alongside their mothers, making chains with the piss-a-beds.
This farming in St. John’s, it takes a new kind of hopefulness. Yet they can grow things here, even on this land long ago stripped of trees and blown raw. Dairy cows, hay for the dairy cows and the horses. Vegetables, chickens.
She pulls weeds in the vegetable garden—the swine cress, the wormseed, the cow vetch, the goowiddy. She picks the rocks from the land in spring, stones brought up to the surface of the soil by the winter cycle of freeze and thaw. They say that the land in Newfoundland grows rocks better than vegetables.
The thistle, the blood vine. The piss-a-beds—boil up the greens with some salt meat.
She washes the milk bottles, washes the milk bucket. Pitches the hay into the hayloft, swallowing the green musty smell.
The winters are lean. The price of fish is low and the price of vegetables is low. The world is dusty, skeletal. But they have milk and butter, eggs. Barrels in the cellar stocked with potatoes and cabbages.
She hooks mats, a new runner for the stairs. The brin stretched over the frame, sketched with pretty things. She sorts out old clothes by colour and tears them into strips. The stained housedress with the faded flowers will be worked into a new pink bloom to damp the winter drafts.
Tuesdays, the ironing.
Sometimes a knock on the door, a lean, wasting body begging for leftover vegetables, or a bit of milk.
THE DAILY NEWS, ST. JOHN’S, SEPT 21, 1907.
WORK OF STORM
Latest News.
Several messages giving further losses as a result of the storm Wednesday and Thursday, were received in town yesterday, and it is feared the end is not yet. The telegraph lines north of King’s Cove are, we understand, still down, so that no reports from that part of the Island have yet been received.
SHR. DUCHESS OF FIFE
The following message was received by the Marine and Fisheries Department yesterday afternoon, from E. Button, New Melbourne: “Schooner Duchess of Fife went ashore, yesterday, at Lance Cove; total wreck; loaded with provisions for P. Templeman, Bonavista; goods practically intact. Const. Dwyer watching wreck; Captain and two of crew with legs broken; in a very precarious condition. Drs Macdonald and Pickard will do all possible for them…”
Late last night, Messrs Baine Johnstone & Co. received the following message from Mr. Barrett, of Old Perlican, “Unknown schooner lost here, points to the Effie of Trinity. Nothing human to be seen.”
She raises three children but her body has born five. Ralph just six months when he died of measles. Leroy, born blue, before she even had time to teach his tiny mouth to latch. Before she had time to worry about a whoop in his cough, to watch his sputum for blood. Stillbirths and miscarriages common as a spring snow, midwives paid in fish and bread, arriving with nothing more than a bit of twine and a pair of scissors.
She is putting away the tiny sweaters, the booties, the diapers, all the clothes but the ones that will be buried. They keep her grief warm.
We drifted fast to Brownsdale,
Uncertain of our fate.
The rudder fastened with a rope,
T
o make her go in straight.
Edgar Pye, despite a fractured leg, spent all night at the pumps. The captain and first mate were below with broken legs in a cabin half full of water. No one was left to take control. Jean, sixteen but strong, used to seeing what needed to be done, took the wheel and steered the ship across Trinity Bay through the storm. Saving all souls on board.
For some reason the letter that comes from the British Royal Navy is addressed to Jean alone, as though the death of a son in war were a particularly female burden. She sees him then, not just in dreams and faces at the other end of the street, but in silent rooms, moving as if deep in thought. Walking into the barn as if there were cows to be milked and no time for conversation.
One in the family is enough, her surviving son will be told when he tries to enlist. And for the rest of his life he will believe that it was she who somehow begged or bullied the Service Board to reject him. She will lose him anyway to the remote northern coves of Labrador, her daughter to the Canadian who whisks her away to Alberta.
And when she and Tom move into the city, her ghosts will follow her to Cavell Avenue, floating past her windows not as shapes of comfort but of loss. The way that shadows are the shape of the absence of light.
Jean immerses herself in church projects and the Women’s Association, assembling care packages for soldiers, making Red Cross bandages for other mothers’ sons.
When she finds her husband collapsed on the bathroom floor, she finds the muscles in her arms, built on washboards and sad irons and bread dough, the muscles and adrenaline that had heaved at the wheel when the Duchess pitched off Lance Cove. Enough to carry him to bed, blood in her ears like waves and the floorboards creaking beneath her staggering steps. It feels like days before the ambulance comes.
If Jean wrote him elegies, they no longer exist. She lays his body out in the parlour as the family gathers for the wake. Normally, bodies are laid out for viewing for three days before burial. But they decide to bury him after two, concerned for the state of the body poisoned with peritonitis if they wait another day.
From the N.C. Crewe File, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland:
Henry George Chaulk’s daughter (Tryphena, now a widow somewhere) when returning from Labrador in a schooner, when the skipper and mate become disabled by the seas and the third man frightened, she took the wheel at Cabot Island and steered her until she ran aground in Chance Cove, Trinity Bay.
Through the years, the story has become knotted as it has passed through the hands of people on that shore. What landed in the archive is a tangle of truth and fiction. The girl, of course, was Jean Chaulk; Typhena was Jean’s sister. And the ship was leaving St. John’s, not Labrador. And it ran aground at Lance Cove, not Chance Cove.
The poem suggests that the same swing of the boom that broke the Captain’s leg also destroyed the wheel—that the only way the ship was steered was with a rope tied to the rudder. That she couldn’t have taken the wheel and steered the ship to safety. Stories here without tellers.
My mother remembers a dark and forbidden room in the house on Cavell Avenue, where little girls are not invited. She remembers a stern and bitter woman who nags her son and criticizes her daughter-in-law, a supper when her father stands up in anger and lets his plate drop down on the table, spattering gravy across the cloth. She remembers how, the night before the family is set to move to a bigger house, with room enough for the children and the new baby and a suite in the basement for Jean, Jean decides she will not move after all. How they take only their beds and leave the rest of their furniture behind for her, how she shuts herself in with her ghosts as her living son and grandchildren load their borrowed truck.
At about 2:00 in the afternoon, they sighted land. The schooner was steered aground with the hope that rescue would come from the shore. Someone made this decision, to rip the ship further apart on the faith that someone would be able to help. There must have been a violent jolt as the rocks tore into the bow of the ship. Jean would be haunted by the sound.
The Duchess struck the reef three times,
She then lay hard and fast
Her bottom grinding on the reef,
While seas went on her mast.
It seems that day I’ll never forget,
Until my dying days.
The screaming of the women,
Amidst the winding sprays.
Perhaps she does forget. As she forgets the names of people she knew, as she forgets to turn off the stove, as she forgets the year.
Jean lives for a year by herself in the house on Cavell Avenue. She is befriended by a woman who lives across the street, who starts coming over every day. The neighbour tells Jean she is living on a dead man’s pension, that Leslie went overseas to get away from her.
Dear Madam, It is with very deep regret that I learn of the sad death of your son.
Jean does not miss the armchair from the farmhouse, or the tea service she got for her wedding. Within a year, the woman has stolen almost everything Jean owns.
Perhaps she does forget that day of the wreck. Or perhaps she remembers it more clearly, the bare floorboards tilting beneath her, that grinding sound of the ship on the reef.
THE DAILY NEWS, OCT 2, 1907
Editor Daily News:
Dear Sir, — Two of the crew of the ill fated Duchess of Fife, and a passenger, a young girl of 15 or 16, arrived here yesterday, and from them we gather a sad recital of the hardships which they endured while battling for their lives…
The young lady passenger proved herself a heroine, for after the crew got broken up, she would get on deck and do all in her power for the men who were injured. Unfortunately she could not do much, as everything was soaked with water. The name of this plucky young lady is Fanny Chalk, and she should rank amongst the Florence Nightingales of the world…
Thankingyouforspace,Mr.Editor.
Yours truly,
X.Y.Z.
Brooklyn, Sept. 25th, 1907.
One day, as Jean puts out the garbage, the wind takes the storm door and takes her with it. She falls into the street and breaks her arm. The wind had been waiting all these years to break her bones.
With an arm in a cast, unable to take care of herself, Jean has no choice but to move in to my grandfather’s house. And once her arm is healed, she stays, her mind continuing to erode. She accuses one of my mother’s boyfriends of taking ten dollars out of her purse, another of taking her red shoes.
In the small hours of a summer night, Jean leaves the house in her nightgown and starts walking down the hill. A passing stranger stops his car and asks where she is going.
I’m going home.
Where do you live?
Cavell Avenue.
The man drives her to Cavell Avenue, and as he pulls up to the old house, he looks at her. You’re not Fraser Noseworthy’s mother are you? St. John’s is still that small. You don’t live here anymore.
My grandfather finally puts his mother in Hoyle’s Home, where she is diagnosed with “senile psychosis.” My mother visits her here, her stern, prim grandmother smelling like pee, with her stockings rolled down to her ankles, and stains on her blouse. The home mixes up the clothes, puts her in other women’s dresses, ill-fitting on her shrunken frame. Her mouth mixes up her words, ill-fitting on her shrunken sentences. Eventually my grandfather forbids my mother to see her. Jean Chaulk Noseworthy dies in Hoyle’s Home in 1975, at the age of eighty-five.
The boats were hauled both back and forth,
Till all was safe on shore.
The wounded men with fortitude,
Their suffering increased more.
The people took us to their homes,
And treated us most kind.
To tell of half they did for us,
Expressions I can’t find.
Jean writes of the bravery of her fellow crewmembers, of the hospitality of the men and women who rescued them, but nothing of her own heroism. She probably never took the wheel. But there is another story, one
my grandfather told, as he was told it by his uncle. As the Captain lay unconscious, the sixteen-year-old girl made a bosun chair, to lower the crew into the lifeboats sent from shore as the Duchess sank. She scrounged for rope and board or torn canvas, her wet fingers trembling as she rigged up the chair. She heaved the men up into her arms one by one, gently easing the Captain himself into the sling, his limp weight dragging on her shoulder.
I don’t really know what a bosun chair looks like, could not find any descriptions in books on schooners or Newfoundland history, no pictures on the Internet. Hoists for window-washers on skyscrapers are also called bosun chairs. Yet I can still imagine her, slipping along the deck in pointed boots, shouting against the wind and the groan of the bow on the rocks. Soothing the men as they drop over the side of the deck. Bending against the ribs of her corset as the ship careens in the waves, somehow hoisting herself overboard. She is the last to leave the boat.
I have nothing to prove that this is true. But of all the ways to remember her, I like this one, this story.
When my grandfather was in his late seventies, he found out that his mother’s name wasn’t Jean. He met a distant cousin who had written a book about the area where his mother was born, who somehow knew the truth, that she was born not Jean, not Jane—nor Tryphena, nor Fanny—but Mavis. Mavis Jane Chaulk. My grandfather had his mother’s birth certificate; it said her name was Jean. But in those days, it was the parishes that kept all the records of marriages, deaths, and births, and the church had burned down. When they reconstructed the records after the fire, they simply asked her what her name was.
She told them: “Jean Chaulk.” And it was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL to my family members who allowed me to record them, whose words have been reproduced here: Frances Bowering, Fraser Noseworthy, Nellie Noseworthy, Alice Lever, and Keith Bowering. Thanks also to those who helped me with the family research: Elizabeth Bowering and Leslie Noseworthy. I am indebted to my great-grandparents, John Bowering and Jean Chaulk, whose poems “Trip of the Ill-Fated Swallow” and “The Loss of the Duchess of Fife” I have quoted.
The Bosun Chair Page 6
