So the next step was for Richard to go to Badger.
They planned their trip to Central Newfoundland. Papa’s Studebaker would have to stay home. In 1954, the few roads there were in Newfoundland were unpaved, potholed and narrow, and when it rained there were many washouts. The best mode of transportation to the interior of the island was definitely by train.
From the old railway station in St. John’s, it was a fifteen-hour trip to Badger. Richard had never been off the Avalon Peninsula before and being a city boy had no idea how big, empty and lonely the island could be.
After they crossed the isthmus of Avalon, the landscape changed dramatically: no more weird rock formations and desolate bogs.Now there was heavy forest stretching unbroken for miles. Mountains and rivers and lakes wherever your eye looked. Richard was entranced. Audrey had seen it all dozens of times and pointed out things of interest.
And they had a fine day of it, laughing, talking and reading. Mama had packed a grand lunch basket: cold chicken, salad, ham sandwiches made with her own homemade bread, cookies and small cakes, bottles of ginger ale. They ate as they clickity-clacked along. Many others were doing the same thing, although some went to the dining car.
Audrey told him more about her family. Her father was a woods contractor, she said. She wasn’t very knowledgeable about his work, saying that he operated a woods camp for the A.N.D. Company. She’d never been in a woods camp. Women weren’t encouraged to do that. It was just the way things were.
The long summer evening came to a close and they rolled into Gander in darkness. When they got going once more, the conductor dimmed the lights and passengers settled down to doze as best they could.
Audrey slept on Richard’s shoulder. He put his arm around her and drew her in close, resting his chin on the top of her head. He realized that, no matter what awaited him in Badger, or whether her parents liked him or not, Audrey was the person with whom he wanted to spend his life.
It was after midnight when the conductor walked through, calling, “Badger, next station.” The train came to a halt. Conductors slammed open the doors. Richard followed Audrey onto the platform.
Mr. Anderson was there to meet them. The two men shook hands, sizing each other up as men do. The word that came to Richard’s mind was staunch – a staunch man. Rod Anderson was of medium height, solid, compact, clean-shaven, dressed in a summer shirt and pants. He looked like anyone you’d meet on the streets of St. John’s. Richard thought, What was I was expecting, a Paul Bunyan – type person with a bushy beard, an axe over his shoulder, and a booming voice? He felt somewhat ashamed to be thinking that way.
The house was nice, not as nice as his parents’ home but nice just the same. It was late. Too late for cups of tea and talk. They all went upstairs to bed. Audrey’s mother, Ruth, showed Richard the spare room, saying the bathroom was downstairs should he need it.
Next morning, Richard sat with Audrey and her parents for breakfast. He felt uncomfortable, as if he were under scrutiny. He supposed it was only natural, seeing as he was being viewed as a possible suitor for the Andersons’ daughter.
He tried a little conversation. “Mr. Anderson, I am surprised to find that you have amenities like electricity, running water, indoor plumbing. In St. John’s we always believed that the outports had nothing like that.”
Mr. Anderson chewed his bacon slowly. “First thing you have to remember, son, is that Badger isn’t an outport. We are sixty miles from the ocean. Second, this is a Company town. We’re here because of the stands of timber across the Exploits River that supply the pulp and paper industry. This is the centre for the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company’s Badger woods division. Many Company personnel live here, from England and other foreign parts. It’s necessary that they have good living conditions.”
“I never knew any of that, sir.”
“No reason why you should, son. Lots of stuff I don’t know about St. John’s, too. Before you go back, I’ll take you across the Exploits – the River, we always calls it – and show you the woods operations.”
Audrey was impatient to get out and about and show him the town. “Come on, Richard, finish your breakfast. It’s a beautiful day. Let’s take a walk around town before it gets too hot.”
And it was hot. Audrey said that was the peculiar thing about living in Badger. Summers were very hot and winters were extremely cold. When she took him to the place where the three rivers met, Richard was amazed at the powerful waters. The only water he was used to was St. John’s Harbour and Quidi Vidi Lake. The deep swift-flowing Exploits was a new experience.
Audrey’s favourite spot, the great round hill, gave a panoramic view of the three rivers and the little town. The place had a magical, dream-like quality. “Beothuks used to be here,” she said, as though that explained everything. She pointed out a mountain in the distance. “Hodges Hill,” she said, “highest point of land for miles.”
They walked around the town in half an hour. Everyone knew Audrey and she knew them. People shook Richard’s hand. What a different way of life! Richard couldn’t imagine how people lived from day to day, month to month, year to year with no pavement, no Water Street stores, no city buses, no Bowring Park. But then, what right did he have to look down upon the little town of Badger?
14
When Cecil Nippard was ten years old his mother died from stomach cancer. She was only forty-two years old. That was in 1952. His strongest memory of her was that at every mealtime, day in and day out, all she ate was bread and tea. She said anything else gave her stomach pain. When she died, it came to Cecil’s mind that maybe she’d starved to death.
His father didn’t know what to do with his two young children: Cecil, ten, and Emily, eight. Then he found a woman from somewhere over around Herring Neck, married her, and brought her to live with them in Rodgers Cove, Gander Bay. He used to go in the lumberwoods when he wasn’t fishing. The woman from Herring Neck was fierce cruel. With their father gone so much, Cecil and Emily grew up to hard work, beatings, being barred in the attic, going to bed hungry.
When he was fourteen, Cecil went to work in the woods cutting pulpwood with his father. He was glad to get away from the mean woman his father had married and felt sorry for Emily who was left behind, but he had other more important concerns. Father said he had to learn how to survive in a man’s world. That was 1956. If there was one thing Cecil was good at, it was dates. He could remember every date of any event, big or small.
Cecil didn’t have much luck with the woods camps. Within a week, he sank the blade of an axe into his leg. The blade was dirty and the wound became infected. He was laid up in Badger, it being too far for him to go all the way home to Gander Bay.
That was when he met the Mi’kmaq lady, Missus Annie Drum. When they brought him down off Sandy with the leg all swelled up and red and throbbing like a son of a bitch, someone got him over to Missus Annie, who knew Indian cures, they said.
He lay on the daybed in her kitchen and watched the old woman set a match to a thick yellowish substance in a dish. It burned for a few seconds before she blew it out. While it was still hot she smeared the substance on a clean piece of cloth and bound it around his swollen leg.
Cecil was scared out of his mind. “What’s that?” he asked.
She laid a kind hand on his fevered brow and spoke gently. “That, my son, is myrrh from the bladders on a fir tree. I cuts it off and squeezes out the sap.”
He limped up the road from the loggers’ staff house three times a day, and she would dress the wound until all the pus and infection was gone. He tried to give her some money before he went back to the camps. She wouldn’t take it, so he left a two-dollar bill on the table, under the tin of Carnation Milk.
A couple of months after that, at another camp, while watching a little tom-tit eating crumbs of bread from his hand, Cecil was hit by a falling tree. It knocked him out a cold junk. He was dizzy and stomach sick afterward. The foreman told him to go on down off Sandy, ending h
is stint as a logger for awhile. He was told to come back when he was older.
In the same year, the family moved from Gander Bay to Windsor. Father wanted to be closer to the woods, and his sister lived in Windsor. The bitch stepmother came too. In the six years since he’d married her, she had produced five other children. Emily’s life wasn’t much more than that of nursemaid for them all.
Father told Cecil that he would have to try the woods again when things started up the next spring. By then he should be old enough not to keep getting hurt, he said. He was disappointed in his son because he didn’t seem to be much good for any kind of work. The stepmother called him stupid, but his father always stopped short of saying that himself.
Pastor Damian thought long and deeply on what Jonathan had written him regarding conforming to society by taking a wife as was expected of him. He looked around Badger for someone who he thought would suit him. There were half a dozen young women who simpered over him, hoping to be noticed, but they all had flaws. One was too fat, another too skinny, another too beautiful – heaven forbid that his wife should outshine him in beauty. He didn’t want a woman who was too smart or one that wasn’t smart at all. After all, she had to be a pastor’s wife and help with the congregation.
His housekeeper, Mrs. Adams, who did not live-in, but came to clean and cook three times a week, had a daughter, Virtue. Damian liked Virtue. She was the right age, a good Christian, and ordinary in her looks. He got to know her better when her mother broke her ankle and Virtue took over Damian’s housekeeping.
Surprisingly, Virtue treated Damian differently than any other female ever had. His good looks didn’t put her in awe as it did most women. She wasn’t coy and wasn’t what Damian considered foolish and romantic.
They took to walking along by the River on summer evenings.
“Pastor . . .” she said in her forthright way.
“Damian, my dear,” he murmured. “Call me Damian, please.
” She nodded. “Damian, many people are asking me if you and I are going to marry. I merely think of you as my friend. I am wondering how you think of me.”
“I think of you in the same way, of course,” he said. “It’s too soon to tell if it would be more.” How will I ever force myself to take this step? he wondered to himself.
Soon it was all over town that the pastor and Virtue were an item. Damian let the rumours continue, since it made him look good, although, so far, he had not so much as held her hand.
The year 1952 had been tumultuous for Jennie. She had nearly died from pneumonia, become estranged from her husband, went to St. John’s to work, her twin siblings had become ill with polio and died, and now she was home in Badger caring for the family. It was a hard time for them all, but worse for Mam. She could not get herself past it. Her mother wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, walked the floor or rocked in the rocking chair all night long. It became Jennie’s turn to care for Mam as she had cared for Jennie. Pap was beside himself, grieving for his children so much that he didn’t know how to go about comforting his wife.
Autumn set in. Days were shorter, and Mam seemed to fade as the light faded. She took to her bed early in November. The girls tried to tempt her to eat with bowls of custard and jelly. They would wash her face and braid her long hair, which had not been cut in her fifty-nine years in the world.
Nothing worked. When the sun dragged itself over the horizon on the first of December, Mam left the world behind.
The leather hinges on Mam’s old brown trunk creaked as Jennie opened the cover. The sharp odour of mothballs stung her nostrils. This was where her mother kept what she called the “good” clothes for her family. There was the christening dress worn by Jennie, Phonse and their sisters, her father’s good suit, the First Holy Communion dress and veil that all the girls had worn, and the white muslin dress in which her Mam had been married.
On top of the good clothes was her mother’s prized and sacred possession, a personal burial shroud or “habit.” Made from five yards of broadcloth, it was dark brown in colour, and long enough to cover the whole body, from neck to feet. Over the heart were the letters IHS embroidered by Mam’s own hands.
Mam’s people, from Stock Cove, Bonavista Bay, were of Irish descent, and good Catholics all. Carrying on an old tradition, the women of the community took great pride in making themselves habits to be worn only when they were dead and resting in their coffins.
Throughout the years, Bridey would occasionally show it to her daughters and she would quote a little rhyme:
I’ll sew five yards of cloth,
To have and to keep,
I’ll need it where I’m going to lie,
To warm me in my sleep.
The young girls, who thought that their Mam would go on living forever, didn’t show much interest in either the shroud or the rhyme. But now the time had come for poor Mam to wear it and suddenly the rhyme and the habit took on a different meaning.
Her coffin was made by hand. Phonse was friends with the man who worked in the A.N.D. Company carpenter shop. He told Phonse to get the pine together and, yes, they would make her a coffin. Phonse told Jennie later that the carpenter did the oddest thing: he saved all the shavings that came off when they planed the sides and the cover. When the box was finished, he put them in the bottom. He told Phonse that was from the old ways, when people believed that if any stray shavings from a coffin were accidentally carried into anyone’s home on their boots, someone else was bound to die soon after.
Jennie bought some nice white satin to line the box. Her sister sewed a lace pillow for Mam’s head to rest on. The Catholic women of Badger washed her and dressed her in a long, snow-white night-dress. Pap himself lifted her in his arms and gently laid her in the pine box. Then the women put the habit on her, from front to back, tucking the open part in behind her body, and tied the hood under her chin. One of her daughters threaded her prayer beads through her folded hands.
Pap’s house had the usual front room or parlour, which wasn’t used much. One thing that parlours were used for was to lay out the dead and that was where they put Mam’s coffin.
So Jennie and her sisters readied the room for the wake. Phonse borrowed three benches on which to rest the coffin and got the kneeling pad from the priest. They put two candles at the head of the coffin and two at the foot. These would burn until poor Mam was taken to the church the next day. By the door of the parlour, where people could dip their fingers in it, Jennie put Mam’s holy water font. It had belonged to her grandmother and had been brought all the way over from Ireland. Mam always kept holy water in the house and Jennie poured it into the font.
Straight-backed chairs were placed around the room for people to sit. Phonse scrounged up some rum and some moonshine, but people would bring their own flasks too. The sisters cooked a pot of moose soup and made tea buns. Friends and neighbours would also bring food. All was ready.
That night, the Catholic population of Badger and many Protestant friends came by to pay their final respects to Mam and to mourn with the Sullivan family. A couple of Pap’s cousins came down from Buchans. They were put up for the night at Rod Anderson’s house, as they were also relatives of his wife, Ruth.
Jennie was pleased to see Pastor Genge come by. With him was Albert Hillier, but without his wife, Suze. Mr. Albert shook hands with Pap and sat on a chair beside him. Watching them, Jennie thought once again of how Mam used to say that the two men, across the vast gulf of religious differences, had a kind of friendship.
Pastor Genge didn’t stay long. Perhaps the smoking and drinking bothered him, Jennie thought as he said good night to her. Pap and Phonse, in the Irish tradition, loved to sit with friends and relatives and have a drink and a smoke.
After the pastor left, Jennie, busy with seeing people were looked after, noticed that Mr. Albert had stayed. She saw him accept a glass of rum from Phonse. Jennie was glad he was there beside her father. It seemed right, somehow. She thought about the telegram that had arrived, am
ong many others, during the day. It was from Tom. He had addressed it to Pap.
BUCHANS DECEMBER 2, 1952
MR. NED SULLIVAN BADGER, N.F.L.D
SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS STOP
THOMAS HILLIER
She had only given the telegram one glance and passed it back to Pap. Her tears were close to the surface and she hadn’t wanted her father to see. He never even mentioned me – his own wife. I’m sure now that he doesn’t love me anymore.
Jennie pulled herself back to the present and to the task of caring for her Mam’s mourners. She felt bad for thinking about her own marital problems when her poor father was trying to deal with his wife’s death.
The Catholic visitors flicked a drop of holy water on their fingers and blessed themselves. Everyone, Catholic or Protestant, knelt by the coffin, looked at Mam’s face, and said a prayer. Most everyone left a Mass card, a black-edged card stating that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would be offered for the soul of Bridey Sullivan. But they didn’t write Bridey. They wrote Bridget. Mam’s name was Bridget Sullivan.
There was lots of food in the kitchen. It seemed that everyone had brought a covered dish of something. People can be some good, you know, Jennie thought. The men would sit and smoke and drink with Pap and Phonse, then drift out to the kitchen and have a bite to eat and a cup of tea. Then they would go back in the parlour to sit again. It was a long night, made bearable by the presence of friends.
Pap held up well during Mam’s wake, seemingly relieved to see his poor wife resting so peacefully at last. He had shown Jennie the death certificate, signed by the doctor. It said “heart failure.” It should have read “broken heart” because Mam never got over the death of her twins. Jennie wondered if her spirit was joined with them now. Were the twins on hand to welcome Mam to the other side? My Scared Heart of Jesus, she thought, it’s all some big mystery.
By two in the morning, most people had gone home except for family and close friends. Ralph was there, as was his mother and a sister. His other brothers and cousins had been in earlier, but had left as well.
The Badger Riot Page 11
