The Pilgrim

by Paul Almond

But early this morning, when I felt a gentle shaking and opened my eyes to see my dark-haired companion bending over me, lamp in hand, I found it hard to make myself rise. I thanked her, she put down the lamp and withdrew, and I forced myself out of bed.

  I don’t know when I have ever felt so tired. As I dressed, I reflected that teaching school, a job I had not subscribed to nor trained for, was taking far more out of me than I ever imagined. Instructing a dozen children in Mutton Bay in the one-room mission house all morning, and then walking some five miles over to Tabacher Cove’s mission while eating lunch, then having to find lessons and keep interested another two dozen children of all ages, was almost more than I could handle. I also had pastoral calls to make and sermons to prepare for two services on Sunday and another one during the week. Now it was already the season of Advent, with three more weeks to Christmas.

  I went downstairs and gulped the bowl of porridge with molasses that Lorna had gotten up earlier to provide. Thanking her and putting on my coat, I went out to join the others for the day’s seal fishery.

  My legs felt wooden and my heart wasn’t in it. I needed my Saturdays for rest. We rode over the snow to Tabacher, five of us, my first time on a komatik with some ten dogs pulling us. No question, I reflected that the special events of this week had just caught up with me.

  The previous Wednesday, Russell Hackey had left Tabacher to go round his trapline in the interior, but not enough snow had fallen to go by dog team. So he had gone on his rackets (from the French, raquettes) as snowshoes are called here. A terrific snowstorm had caught him on the way home, and in the ensuing whiteout, with no trees and few landmarks, he’d lost his way. Had he been with dogs, they’d have brought him safely home. When the storm abated the following afternoon and search parties went out, they found his frozen body not a quarter of a mile from safety. And that’s where I came in.

  His wife, Martha, had waited up all night with five young children. After they had found his body, she went completely mad, tearing her hair, screaming, racing around, striking herself, even attempting to batter one of the smaller children. So they sent for me.

  Of course I had absolutely no experience handling such an event. When I arrived, she was restrained by two strong men who had a tight grip on her. But this situation could not last; she kept wrestling frantically. Fortunately, the terrified children had been taken by relatives to another house, in spite of the woman’s protestations and wails. I learned all this from Thomas Buffett who had come to fetch me. No one knew what to do. And I confess that included me.

  When her older sister ushered me in, although taken aback by the sight of those two men holding Martha, I made myself walk steadily forward, where I stood motionless before her as she howled and gritted her teeth at me. What should I do?

  And then, I believe the Lord prodded me into speech. I raised my right hand above her and cried in a loud voice, “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ — Satan, be gone from this good woman!”

  I made the sign of the cross over her. Then I bent and, staring into her face, firmly pronounced the words a second time.

  Bless my soul, didn’t she relax? I stood up. The men slowly released their grip. She sat, head bowed, and began crying softly. Then she doubled over onto the floor and cried out to the Lord, wanting to know why he had abandoned her husband.

  I knelt before her and took hold of her shoulders. “He has not abandoned your husband. He has taken him to a far safer place, where storms never rage, the sun always shines, and His light sheds unending love. Russell is safe in the arms of his Lord.”

  Her crying softened, though still she lay weeping on the hooked rug.

  I knelt back. Her two guardians now looked at me with great interest. I lifted my hand to indicate they should remain seated.

  Several minutes passed with none of us moving.

  “She can’t stay here alone tonight,” I heard whispered in my ear. Her older sister had bent down and was clearly asking what to do next.

  I nodded and held up my hand again. “And now, my dear Martha,” I said to the woman, “I want you to go with your sister, and —”

  “No no no no, don’t leave me, Mr. John, you can’t — I won’t let you leave me, please, don’t leave!”

  Now what? I was quite foxed. But then I heard myself say, “I won’t. Don’t worry, dear Martha, no one will ever leave you alone again, for the Lord himself —”

  “Stay with me, stay with me please,” she cried broken-heartedly, and I must say my heart strings were mightily tugged.

  “All right, Martha, come, you shall accompany me to Aunt Minnie’s where, in our prayers, we shall approach the throne of the Heavenly Grace, and there ponder on the wonders of His doing.”

  I rose.

  Opposite me, her two guardians rose also. I turned to her sister. “Get her warm clothes and her night things, and bring her over. We have a spare room. I shall sit and pray with her through the night.”

  One of the men looked worried and murmured, “I’ll be right ready should you need me, Mr. John.”

  I thanked him and they helped her into her coat. She tugged on a heavy hat and boots and the little entourage made their way to Aunt Minnie’s, where her sister got her into bed.

  Well, I spent the night sitting by her bedside, reading some psalms, the twenty-third, of course, which she knew by heart, and also my favourite, the forty-sixth: “God is our refuge and our strength; a very present help in trouble.” We prayed out loud, and sometimes I alone while she listened. Finally toward morning she fell into a deep sleep. I grabbed a pillow and lay on the mat beside the bed; I did not want to let her out of my sight. But then, when morning came, I had to go off to teach school, and so I left her in the hands of my youthful charge, who then summoned Martha’s older sister.

  But now on the jolting komatik, I could not get the sight of her five children out of my mind. How would she care for them this winter? How would she feed them with her husband gone? That image had been gnawing at me since the episode and contributed, with lack of sleep, to my present sense of exhaustion.

  We reached the flat ice covering this inlet. Beyond it in the low sun, I could see open water. I was about to get into the boat when one of the fisherman, Alfred Robertson, a cousin of Sammy John, looked at me. “You’re not goin’ fishing in that gear, Mr. John? Better come with me.”

  His house was not far away, and I followed him to it where, once inside, he got his father’s trousers, arm wrappers, and the white canvas jacket everyone wore at this time of winter. I reminded myself that I should have bought one, so perhaps now I would give myself a present at Christmas. I had a warm hat from the Gaspé and he lent me some heavy woollen mitts. His father had passed away the year previously and he had kept his clothing.

  “Won’t these wool mitts get wet in the water?”

  “Sure do. The water round your hands warms up, and they keep yer fingers from freezing.”

  Back we went to the boat and the five of us dragged it over the ice and launched it into the icy water littered with rocking ice pans.

  These seal boats were propelled by two men pulling hard on two oars at one side and one man opposite, toward the back, who manoeuvred a large oar, the “blaine” oar, like a sculling oar. This passed through a whiff, a rope loop, which is how he steered and balanced the boat.

  The wind began streaming across the ice as the sun rose; it bit into my cheeks with teeth of steel and I wrapped my scarf tighter.

  On the way over, my attention had been drawn to an open patch of black water. Heads rather like black dogs were rising above the surface and looking about: seals, playing like children, splashed and dove. They would hold still and stare at the boat, and then kerplunk! Disappear into the icy depths. Closer at hand, one little seal lifted his round, shiny head, whiskers twitching, probably a one year old. Then he turned and dove with a splatter back to join his school.

  “Cute little fellas, eh?” said Alfred as we rowed on.

  My heart sank. I
knew the seals would migrate in great herds from Greenland down to and along the Labrador coast, turning and migrating through the Strait of Belle Isle and along the Canadian Labrador heading to their whelping grounds off the Mags and PEI. So these seals still hadn’t pupped yet: it was the “teenagers” I was seeing.

  We rowed out to a white buoy that indicated one end of the sixty-fathom net stretched the previous day from one island across the whole channel. Shaped like a seine net with a kind of V at the centre, it caught seals heading through the channel at night which then found themselves with no outlet and eventually got tangled up and drowned.

  We began pulling the net up, four of us abreast, the man at the rear on the blaine oar still manoeuvering the boat.

  I found it heavy work and began panting even after the first couple of minutes. We hauled and hauled at the net without any sign of a seal. We just kept pulling and then after a bit, when I was about done in, the scutters (tail flippers) of a seal appeared. The fisherman next to me, Alfred, hauled off his mitts and in those freezing waters began to disentangle the seal with his bare hands. He had to unhook the net around the flippers while the other men pulled it sideways, until finally, the whole seal, all five hundred pounds, shiny, black, plump, was rolling around next to the boat as we kept pulling at the net. I was shouldered aside as Ivan Green, the fisherman on my left, bent over with Alfred and grabbed the flippers. They bounced the seal a couple times, dousing it deep in the water and lifting it up again, until they got enough purchase to haul it over the gunnel and tip it into the boat.

  “Any of them ever alive? “ I asked rather fearfully.

  Ivan shook his head. “Always dead.” He began hauling again and the four of us went at it, pulling up the net until another seal surfaced, dead as well.

  After a few seals had been landed in the boat, I took my place to pull one in, grabbing hold of a flipper on one side with Alfred on the other. We practised bouncing it — but I nearly took a header into the water as it went down, and then as we pulled it up I fell backwards into the boat on top of the other seal carcasses. The men laughed good-naturedly and I got up, embarrassed, and we began pulling the net in again.

  This went on until we had gotten a goodly load of seals into the boat. I thought it dangerous to haul in any more for the waters were up to the boat’s gunnels. Nervously, I watched another one hauled in, but then by mutual consent we turned the boat round and headed for shore. The wind was fierce, and we who were not rowing stood and beat our arms about our bodies to warm our fingers.

  Another boat had made it before us. With its added weight of seals, it had broken through the not-so-thin ice. We headed for this opening and once in the narrow channel, everyone piled out and, slipping along the snowy ice, pulled the boat up the waterway to the shore.

  I saw a couple of teams of dogs trotting toward the sealing station. One team had already begun dragging the dead seals along the ice behind the komatik toward the granite cape where they’d be processed.

  Once we landed, our fishermen got out seal-dogs, similar to the sharp pulp-hooks we used in the Gaspé, curved like a question mark with a round loop at one end as a handle. Alfred brought his dog down hard to spear the head of one of the dead seals and, with the help of a couple others on the slippery ice, hauled the heavy carcass out of the boat. They proceeded in such fashion until all the seals lay in a row: black, humped islands on a sea of flat white ice.

  Hollis Reed drove up on his komatik, keeping his team well clear of the others. The dogs had been setting up a chorus of barks, growls, snarls, and yelps. As I stood watching, Hollis winked at me. “One o’ mine is terble fierce. So I got to keep ’im clear o’ the others.”

  Then Hollis drove his hook with its cord into the head of the nearest seal, tied this to the komatik, jumped on, and shouted at his dogs. Off they stormed, all six of them, hauling the slippery seal over the ice a hundred yards to where the scaffold stood like an impending crucifixion against the grey sky. A couple of others had gathered there to sculp (butcher) the seals, or raise them onto the scaffolding.

  “What now?”

  “Once our seals are drug up, we go back for more,” Alfred assured me with a smile. “Some of these we sculp now, others we leave whole for the spring. That’s when we get the foundry working to render down the fat.”

  I was utterly beat, ready to drop, but I didn’t want to let on — the last thing I wanted was for the village to think their clergyman a weakling. So off we went in the boat and repeated the whole exercise a second time, until well into the afternoon. We had hardly taken a break for our dinners, stopping only for hot tea and some bread and molasses. I don’t know when I’ve been so tired.

  While Alfred’s team was unloading what was to be his last lot, the rest of us gathered about a fire someone had built to heat a kettle. I saw one of the dogs start tearing at a seal. The owner went over to beat it off with a whip. Another fisherman got down on his hands and knees to chisel up a patch of seal blood that had frozen itself into a wide red pancake on the ice. He took the chips and threw them to the team, so that the dogs had a little something to go on with. They tore at it, fighting among themselves. Ravenous, I thought, and I said so.

  “Naw, they’s always that way, eh? Unless you give ’em a real big feed. And they know that’s what’s coming tonight, big feed o’ seal.”

  I drifted away with my hot mug of tea, sensing the air and hoping there would not be yet another trip out on that black water today, for I just could not manage it. A boy, probably six or seven, came trotting over the cape toward us carrying a hot can of soup for his father. As he came closer, he tripped on the shiny ice and began to tumble down the hill. One of the dogs ran across to sniff at him and before we knew it, the rest of the dogs had followed and then they actually began to nip and tear at the fallen child.

  His father let out a yell; the men leapt up and ran for the child, screaming at the dogs.

  I was closest and awkwardly slithered as fast as I could toward the dogs that were now biting at the child with bared teeth and pulling off actual flesh. As I reached them, I tumbled into their feeding frenzy, but once under the welter of legs and snapping insanity, I thrashed at them with my mittened hands, one arm over my face to protect it, trying ineffectually to beat them off the boy. The men arrived with whips and poles and freed the child, and I got to my feet.

  But the child lay motionless.

  The father grabbed him up in his arms, shouting to another who marshalled his dog team. We ran for his komatik, fell on it, and off we tore to Old Post at the far end of Tabacher, to find Aunt Alice, the middah, as midwives are called.

  I couldn’t stop replaying in my mind the menace and utter madness of that horrible scene while the father kept calling out, “James, James, don’t worry, we’re taking you, you’ll be all right, you’ll be fine.” But as I looked behind, I saw a distinct trail of blood.

  We arrived at the middah’s and rushed inside. The father laid his child gently on the table while Aunt Alice hurried to bring hot water from her stove. I sat numbly in one corner.

  I’ve no idea why I had jumped on the komatik with the father: I must have felt a clergyman’s place was with anyone needing help.

  Aunt Alice worked at the boy, cleaning him, using a sewing needle to stitch the many cuts, while his father held his thumb on an artery as instructed. Would the lad be saved? I didn’t dare think. I just sat staring at the floor, my heart beating, my whole body exhausted, shaken, indeed tormented to my core, by this experience. What a cap to a horrendous week, with Wednesday’s tragedy, awful beyond all thoughts.

  Finally, after all that Aunt Alice could do, the little fellow just gave up the ghost.

  After saying a prayer over him, I walked home to Aunt Minnie’s, my head sunk on my chest.

  When I opened the door, Lorna’s face lit up but then frowned as she saw my distress. She and Aunt Minnie stood silently beside the tub they had been preparing for my Saturday bath. I shook my head and mounted
the steep staircase, unable to speak.

  At the top, I turned into my room and closed the door. I took off my shoes and sat on the edge of the bed. What was all this for? Why had the good Lord brought me here? I had not been able to stop the death of the little lad. I had seen the results of Russell Hackey freezing to death. Doing my best, working so hard all day, I had only ended up with feelings of helplessness, no good to anybody. Why come here if I had no effect upon the course of these good people’s destiny? I felt broken, covered in despair.

  Where are you, Lord, when I need you, I asked. This is just the perfect time to appear to me. I need you so badly.

  Silently the door opened. But I did not hear it. I leaned down, pressed my face into the bed, bereft, my eyes filling with tears. Stop it, you coward, I growled, sit up, be a man! Get yourself together! But I could no more move than fly. I just wanted to die. I had failed, failed myself, failed the lad, failed the village, failed everywhere and everyone. I wished I were a child again, with no worries or responsibilities.

  I felt someone come and sit close. Lorna lifted my shoulders and placed my head against her shoulder. And I heard the words, “Don’t cry, Mr. John. Please don’t cry.”

  And then I did exactly that, I did let the tears come. I found myself clutching her as though she were my mother. All the weariness, the emptiness and, especially, the frustration at not having had any effect on anything, had proved too much. My exhausted soul could no longer bear the strain. I let myself cry like a baby, while Lorna rocked me, whispering soothing words in my ear.

  And then after a moment, I lifted my tear-stained eyes and looked at her. “You spoke!”

  Lorna smiled, and then frowned. “I spoke...”

  Pretty momentous. I needed time to absorb that.

  She seemed to brighten as she realized that her speech had been restored.

  But I didn’t move. It felt so good, like being in a mother’s arms that I had not felt since I was ten years old. I needed to be held, to be loved, because with all the love that I had tried to give in the village, and with all the love I had seen reflected back in their eyes, there was nothing, just nothing like the touch of a woman, the embrace of her warm arms enfolding me as when I was little.