“I’ll have her, sure,” one old widower said aloud as he leaned on a fence and eyed Maggie passing.
His neighbour let out a laugh. “You wouldn’t want her in your bed with Jamie’s ghost between yers.”
She felt like turning her tongue on them. Instead she kept on going.
Quilters were gathered around the table at Etta Whalen’s house when she got there. Etta explained, “We’re making a quilt for each family who lost a sealer.” She looked at Maggie. “We’ll be making one for William.”
Her voice came out low and scratchy. “What about me?”
Selena Petten from Kelligrews opened the door and hurried in just in time to hear the remark. She called to Maggie on her way to the table. “You wasn’t married. We don’t know for sure if that would’ve happened if—” She stopped at the look on Maggie’s face.
“We won’t be doin’ one for Olivia either. She went off to Boston leaving Zachary without expectations and come home without an explanation to anyone,” Susie Porter said. “The sealers should have gone off to Boston. That’s the thing to do, help build skyscrapers, not chase seals. Americans are building skyscrapers the like we’ll never see. They’re well-to-do, their families livin’ in fancy brick houses beside cobblestone streets, motor cars runnin’ along ’em all day long.”
“Not all the people’s well-off,” Selena said.
Maggie hardly heard their idle chatter, hurt that the women weren’t sewing a quilt for her. When she could stand it no longer she left a patch half-cut from a worn dress and stood up abruptly. She turned her back on the table and hurried to the porch, where she dragged on her coat and shoes and left.
Minnie watched her through the window, her slow drag up the hill, her shoulders heaving in sobs. She turned to Selena. “You should’ve had more tact than to suggest that Maggie and Jamie might not get married.”
“Yes,” said Etta. “Sometimes a tongue is so long it reaches a destination long before the common sense that should have gone with it.” She got up and opened the door calling after Maggie, “Come back, me maid! Don’t twine grief and spite.”
Maggie didn’t turn her head. I’d like to be finished with that crowd.
The women looked toward the window as Susie said, “There’s Amy comin’ down the path. She’s disgraced herself with a sealer who went on the Newfoundland and froze to death. Now she’s got to carry on with what he’s left her. Be sure your sins will find you out.”
“Is that so?” asked Selena.
“It is, then,” Susie answered.
“And I suppose your sin found you out when you got yourself in bungalow,” Selena said.
Etta shook her head, her voice sad. “We cut pieces of clothing belonging to each other and sew them together to make a beautiful quilt, yet we use our tongues to cut and tear each other apart.”
The quilters fell silent and turned back to their patches.
Maggie went on up the road thinking that only a few months ago the women at the Quilting Bee had told her they had saved their brightest pieces and were starting a quilt for her wedding before they got busy planting their gardens. Bright patches were coveted and not so easily gathered. There were more black and dull patches to be had from dresses worn to pieces from all the mourning done each year in communities where death came often.
Now there would be no wedding quilt. But there would be a quilt. She’d quilt pieces from Jamie’s clothes. A piece of shirt worn over his heart would be quilted in a spot that would lie over her heart. She’d use London Smoke for the backing.
Late spring Elizabeth came to see her father, holding him tight while she cried. She stayed to cook, clean his house, and wash his clothes without a sign from him that he cared.
“I have to get on home,” she told him after she had stayed more than a week. “Work is pilin’ up and the lambs born need care.”
William nodded. He squeezed her tight and let her go, his droopy eyes swollen.
Before Elizabeth left for home she went to visit Maggie. She found her working the treadle on her aunt’s sewing machine, going as fast as she could. When the thread broke from the strain she kept her foot going furiously. Finally she stopped and burst into tears.
Maggie hadn’t heard Elizabeth come in and stand motionless, eyeing pieces of Jamie’s shirts cut to be sewn into Maggie’s memory quilt.
“Maggie,” Elizabeth said softly.
Maggie looked up and her face opened in wonder that Elizabeth had come. The women embraced, holding each other—friends who had become sisters in a common grief.
“Jamie loved you, Maggie,” Elizabeth said, standing back.
Maggie nodded.
“I know you loved him,” Elizabeth said, “but you can’t be givin’ up on love. Sure, I had me eye on Nathan Lear, another young miner, before I met Jacob. There was only affection exchanged. He went away.”
“Do you love Jacob?” Maggie asked.
Elizabeth ran her finger along the seam between two patches. “With me whole heart,” she answered, “but marriage is not always easy to handle, not as romantic as we expect it to be. Life itself can get in the way.”
“I wish I had the chance to live through the good and bad of it,” Maggie said, picturing Elizabeth and Jacob with a baby in their home beside the sea. She imagined Elizabeth’s little girl climbing onto her lap and looking up into her mother’s face, her face alive with wonder, her eyes shining, her little hands reaching to palm her mother’s cheeks as she leaned in to touch her mother’s nose with hers. A child’s love must be the most precious love of all.
Maggie broke open with grief, weeping uncontrollably. It was not just Jamie’s love she missed. She’d lost the hope of having his children, their love, pure and binding.
“You have to get on with life,” Elizabeth said gently. “Bear up and think about others who have lost both husband and sons.”
“Their great sorrow can’t lessen mine.”
“No, but it can remind you that you’re not grievin’ alone.”
She lifted her chin, hardness in her eyes. “Jamie promised to be back with jingles in his pocket.”
Elizabeth stepped back. “You’re blamin’ me brother?”
Maggie gave Elizabeth a defiant look. “He didn’t have to go.”
Elizabeth shook her head and leaned to touch her hand. “Dear, dear friend, Jamie was me brother and I miss him every day. Blamin’ him won’t make you feel better.”
“No,” said Maggie, misery filling her face. “I need your courage and your strength.”
Elizabeth gave her a steady look. “We have to believe that even if things don’t turn out the way we expect them to we can go on and live the life meant for us.” She let out a weak laugh. “I don’t know when I’ll have to swallow me own words.”
Maggie said, “Never, I hope.”
“Come visit me,” Elizabeth urged Maggie as they said goodbye.
“I will,” she promised, feeling the soft touch of Elizabeth’s lips on her cheek long after she was gone. Skin of Jamie’s skin, she thought and felt comforted.
52
Summer had come and gone and autumn was letting go. Light was weakening, days shortening and nights lengthening. Intermittent winds blew stubborn tree leaves onto their backs showing tiny brittle veins. Under sunlight suffusing an autumn evening glow, yellow and scarlet leaves lifted and flared like tongues of fire. The wind running on the wispy feet of fallen crisp leaves moaned as it swept the leaves into nesting hedges. Flowers, too, were closing up and bending tired heads in relentless winds. Soon early morning air would be sated with frost.
A pain had slid under Maggie’s ribs and wouldn’t let go. Now she knew how bitter this season could be, how cold winter would be, coming to stick like an ice candle inside her heart.
“My wedding month,” Maggie
whispered to her face in her bedroom mirror, “and no sign of a groom.” The reality caught in her throat like a chicken bone.
Love at first is pleasing like an apple on a tree, a hearty colour infused with a fresh, sweet aroma. The apple is to be explored by biting into the skin tasting white flesh satisfying oneself with it. That’s how she imagined it. She had only gotten to the first bite. That realization added to her sense of loss. Last fall she had twirled the stalk of an apple A-B-C-D-E-F and the stalk had come loose before she got to J. She had let out a hearty laugh. “I’m still going to marry you, Jamie.”
“Know it!” he said and reached to taste the apple juice on her lips. He’d whispered a line from the Song of Solomon: “Under the apple tree I awakened you.”
Afterwards she had found the Song of Solomon in her mother’s Bible and read: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy statue is like a palm tree (more like an apple tree) and thy breasts to clusters of grapes (apples). I said, I will go up to the palm (apple) tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine (apple tree) and the smell of thy nose like apples; and the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved that goeth down sweetly. . . .”
He would never again take her hand and hold it against him, their lips bent to each other’s, their bodies quickening. All their dreams taken by a ship swallowed by a hungry sea.
Neighbours urged Maggie to move on as if she were in other people’s way, they tripping up in her.
“Let the dead rest,” Selena told her.
Maggie wanted to retort: “The sea doesn’t let a fish bone rest.”
“You’ll forget on times. Then grief will pool around your heart and you won’t be able to breathe.” That’s what a mother from the Quilting Bee had told her she was like after she lost two sons and a husband on a sealing ship years ago. “Still,” she said, “life never leaves us stuck in one spot. Our emotions are like the ocean, always in motion. No matter what we lose and who we lose we have ourselves and keeping ourselves whole is a promise we make to God, whose breath we hold.”
At night she lay in bed, her body a heavy stone while her mind yearned for what she could not have: Jamie beside her, his warm body folded into hers, his breath on her neck, his arms cradling her. Her imagination became unbearable and she pushed it away and tried to accept the truth. There was only misery in imagining something you never had. A thought pushed back: But I could have—I should have had Jamie, if he hadn’t been the fool he was to go on that ship. Other women were lying beside their men, manhoods rising, bellies promising. She stirred against silence, a heavy ringing in her ears.
Sam Butler had told Jamie that the Southern Cross constellation contained what was known as a coal sack—an empty dark place.
“It’s where you are now,” she whispered, “the kind of place I am—alone.”
One day when William found Maggie eyeing Jamie’s painting he gave her a rueful look. “Sometimes it was just as well to yell out to a man six feet underground as it was to call Jamie when he was paintin’. ’Twas a strange thing the way he went to work on the board paintin’ with such fervour he had a like to put his teeth through his lip. A forebodin’ it would seem now. What a hand he was wantin’ to paint Titanic, a ship no one would ever see ag’in. ‘I’ll set her in paint,’ he’d said, ‘to show everyone that she still exists if only on the bottom of the ocean.’”
Jamie had offered Maggie his painting and she had refused it. “I don’t want a reminder that ships disappear.”
The trace of a smile reached his grey eyes. “A ship can disappear but a painting of it can hang on a wall long after. I’m going to make enough money to buy brushes and paint. I’ll paint more than ships. I’ll paint our babies.”
She blushed. “Who says we’ll have children?”
“We’ll have fun trying,” he said, mischief in his eyes.
Now William offered her the painting and she told him, “I don’t want it. Jamie put adventure before our love.”
“Mind, now, me maid. You couldn’t be keepin’ him back. If a man won’t venture he’ll never have adventure. Everyone knows that terrible things can happen at sea but no one believes they will happen to them. Too many people like meself hove away the chance to go beyond our own comfort.”
“Was it because of Johnny almost dying on the ice pan?” she asked.
“It was a hard reminder of the dangers,” he answered.
He took in her downcast look and said, “Jamie’s life may be over but yours isn’t. He won’t hurt if you don’t think about him. You’ll hurt if you think about him too often and too long and if you let his death get in the way of your livin’.”
He was good at telling someone else how to mend a broken heart; his would never be mended.
A raw feeling sliced through Maggie late October. She overheard Liddie talking about Lavinia Maley getting married. Anger cut her so deeply she could almost taste blood. I should be married!
She walked to the beach where she and other children had spent so much time collecting stones odd-shaped and sharp, blue-speckled and smooth, pink-veined and flat. There was no end to the patterns and shapes telling the story of winds and tides. The children of the beach were all grown and scattered—some lost to an ocean that had lapped their toes. She picked up an ebony stone. It cut into her hand marking it. She tightened her hand wanting it to hurt.
She turned to the sound of a voice calling her. She thought at first that Elizabeth had come to visit her father.
It was Lavinia who had spied Maggie coming up from the beach. She offered her an apple from a basketful she had picked.
Maggie took it and bit into the sweet fruit. Another bite opened it up to a cluster of brown seeds.
Lavinia smiled softly. “I can see Aunt Mary Jane holding the apple seeds in her hand and saying, ‘We can count the seeds in an apple; God counts the apples in a seed. We’re each like a seed and inside us are children only God can see.’”
Lavinia offered Maggie an apple to take home. She shook her head.
“Come inside, then, and see Mam makin’ me weddin’ cake.”
Maggie gave her a miserable look and Lavinia drew back murmuring, “Sorry.”
Maggie turned on her heel and walked away. She didn’t want to think about wedding cakes.
Lavinia hurried to empty her basket in a barrel by the side of her father’s house. She went inside, where her mother was mixing her wedding cake.
“We’ll lace it with rum and wrap it in a rum-soaked cloth and it will be perfect by May,” Caroline said. She gave Lavinia a thoughtful look. “The wedding night is like a cake. Put your best into it and you’ll get the best out.”
Lavinia’s pale cheeks flushed. She managed a faint smile.
53
Since jamie’s disappearance Elizabeth had a greater mistrust of the sea, anger and resentment rising against it every time Jacob went on the water. She watched for signs of storms and mad seas, her prayer constant: “Please God, my mother’s first husband drowned in the ocean, Maggie’s father was lost at sea, and my brother is still out there. Don’t let my husband die on the water.” Her mind settled once she saw the boat turn in by the point, settled more once Jacob’s feet were on land.
Jacob never complained about his day on the water even after summer gave way to a cold autumn. More mornings than not, damp, cold air lambasted his face and continued penetrating his bones through the day. Sometimes by the time the boat reached the cove the sea hissed under darkness thick enough to swallow a man. He came home chilled, his weariness so heavy it weighed his feet like anchors.
Nine days into November Elizabeth gave birth to another girl and named her after her mother. Jane was tiny and dainty and in a few months her head held a mass of golden curls.
“The whole world is at war,
” Jacob said coming into the house and stooping to touch little Jane’s cheek. “I don’t suppose we’ll see any of it. Joseph and Nathan Bishop and young Josiah Porter left for Europe. I expect Josiah won’t get his coveralls changed every week over there and he won’t have his mother to clean out his ears. He’ll grow up fast.”
“And be fortunate if he gets back home with liver and lights,” Elizabeth answered. “Young men are urged to join the war and see the world. They’re not likely to see this part of it ever ag’in.”
“Our babies will be saved from goin’ to war,” Jacob said, looking down at Elsie playing on the floor beside Jane in her crib.
When Jane was baptized the minister quoted Isaiah 61:3. “. . . give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. . . .”
Jacob nodded and Elizabeth smiled. The spirit of heaviness following Jamie’s death had lessened with Jane’s birth.
By the new year of 1915, Lavinia had grown pale and thin. Often she let out a long, dry cough that kept on and on making Caroline cringe. “Sit in the fresh air,” she urged her as she bustled about making plans for the wedding. “Joshua will be none the happier if you beat yourself into an invalid before your wedding night. He’ll want you all fresh and full of vim.”
It was already too late.
“This is an active disease for which nothing can be done,” the doctor said. He closed his black bag. “She’s in God’s hands.”
Joshua Rideout lifted the latch on the porch door and faced Caroline. She’d seen him coming and had hurried to waylay him.
Ghost of the Southern Cross Page 24
