Donovan's Station (7 page)

Since the cod run in summer, the demands of the fishing season conflicted with those of the garden, yet Mother managed both almost cross-handed. Little wonder that she struggled so hard to get me to help her with the fish. It wasn't to be, however. I attended well enough when she was teaching me to
notice what colour of blue or grey or purple lay upon the sea, and I am still all nerves when the horses start gailing, but the following year when it was necessary for me to dirty my hands more seriously, we both came up against an insurmountable impediment. The Bishop said that God never intended to engage me in the fishery, and let it go at that, but of course he had his eye on me for the schoolroom which I didn't take to either.

I had always been a healthy, sturdy child, as big at seven as most children were at nine or ten, and I have never shirked work, so I fell to with the fish willingly enough at first, but it took less than a week before my hands were cracked and red and swollen, and every day it seemed to get worse faster. There seemed to be something in the liquid which the salt drew out of the fish that I simply could not tolerate. All of the women had sore hands, covered in scars, blisters and calluses, just as all the men had pups around their wrists and lines through the palms of their hands where the twine cut in, but this was many degrees worse and I knew from the start that it was not going to go away. I tried for weeks, crying when I was alone and hiding my hands in my pinafore, but in a short time my poor paws were so swollen and bleeding that I couldn't hold a spoon to my mouth. Father could hardly bear to look at me, and I could see the tears spring into his eyes at times when he came home and silently lifted the clean cloth Mother used to cover my hands when she was treating them.

The day my nails began to fall off was the last day I worked at the fish. Mother had been soaking my hands in chamber lye, a common cure for what we used to call fish finger, and the pain was so extreme that I fought away from her and she had to bind my arms to my sides with a piece of rope in order to hold my hands down in the liquid. I had managed to kick the pot over onto the two of us. Father came in just then and found us sobbing at the kitchen table, me tied up in Mother's lap and the two
of us covered in Richard's urine while Richard crouched in a corner watching the process with big, dark eyes. Despite his age, he had wet himself with fright so we were all soaked and reeking.

“Enough,” Father said, and that was that. He disappeared out the door and I think it was with relief that Mother gave in without a word. By the time we were all cleaned up and changed into our dry clothes, Father was back with a small pannikin which he warmed over the kitchen stove. It held a tarry, black mixture softened with cod liver oil, and he spread it over my hands and bound them loosely in strips of cloth. For a week, he and Mother took turns feeding me, lifting my nightdress so I could use the pot, reading to me from the Bible, and at the end of the week when Father gently removed the tar with more of the oil, my hands were almost their normal size and colour.

Thus began my training as a farmer. Even before my nails grew back, I had taken the mattock and climbed the hill behind our house to the gardens my mother kept, and gave the weeds and worms a blow for every fish my mother turned. Sometimes, when it was an emergency and the fish were almost dry, I would help with turning or stacking, but Father hated to see me near the flakes and Richard claimed the entire wharf and flake area as his own territory, sometimes even throwing stones at me from behind a barrel to drive me away. Soon he was the one my mother turned to when the sky threatened. Richard was born to the fishery just as surely as I wasn't.

That October, after the seasonal fishermen left, I began school. It came as something of a shock to discover that I wouldn't be going to Mistress Martin on the Southside, but to Miss Lacey at the Northside school. Looking back at it, I think it was just as well, for Master Martin would have had all the baptismal records from the Anglican Church and would have known my exact age, while Miss Lacey guessed that I was three years older
than I was and treated me accordingly. Most of the Irish were illiterate and didn't know their numbers, so when they were asked the date of their birth they answered “Feast of Our Lady of the Pillar” and Miss Lacey would consult her calendar and write down October 12th, or “Our Lady of Good Council”— July 10th, or in many cases “Two days after Sheila's Day” or “Bonfire Night less a week” for which even Miss Lacey didn't need a calendar. A year might be identified by the sinking of a ship or a forest fire, but generally Miss Lacey just guessed according to the size of the child.

When Mother gave my birth date as March 12th, Miss Lacey glanced up at me, declared “And she'd be ten, I suppose.” I opened my mouth to protest, but my mothers hand on my shoulder warned me to be quiet, and instead of correcting her, my mother simply added the information that I could read already. Miss Lacey looked quite cheered at this news, probably because, as I realized some years later, she was not too confident in this area herself. I suppose she was all of sixteen.

I soon found myself placed at a bench next to two older girls I knew only by sight, but within a day or two I found that I was more teacher than student. Most of the bigger boys and many of the girls didn't attend school in the morning, but helped their parents with the fishing and such, but my mother insisted I be at my bench when the bell rang. The morning class was usually full of small children, who were inclined to fall asleep over their dinners and miss the afternoon sessions, so I was employed during those hours in doing alphabets and simple exercises with the small ones while Miss Lacey struggled to beat a little education into the older children. The beating process was literal—she used the strap frequently and indiscriminately, even on me at times, although I was a quiet and obedient pupil.

Our school room was plain but adequate—better than many I heard about later. We had several primers, and slates that
Father salvaged from a fire in St. John's that had destroyed a merchant's house. We had a good supply of rather hard chalk that had been collected by a Northside fisherman who had been swept away in a fog and stranded up the coast at Freshwater Bay for three days. The chalk required frequent spitting, which in turn required frequent visits to the water barrel, and eventually numerous trips to the outhouse, but all this activity prevented the most restless boys from rearranging one another's faces with their fists, so it was all to the good.

In winter the school was heated with a small stove that we fed with the two junks brought by each of us every morning. Sometimes we would be given a load of peat from down the coast, and if it were dry it would burn longer than the wood and produce a more even heat, but the fine, light ash was inclined to spread throughout the room from the drafts and settle in a thick, grey layer on every surface, so that even the best behaved students couldn't resist blowing it up one another's noses. When it got very cold, or the snow piled up over our heads, school was simply canceled. Lessons were scheduled to be conducted about six months out of the year, but we probably made it to our benches only about half that time.

I learned very little that was new in those first two years, but by teaching the smaller ones—as well as some of the bigger children, who were too dull even for Miss Lacey's simple lessons—I became more secure about my own grasp of the essentials of reading and writing. When Miss Lacey resigned to marry a middle-aged widower with half a dozen children, at least two of whom were older than she was herself, the four or five young men who succeeded her were happy to concentrate on teaching me the basic elements of addition, subtraction and multiplication in exchange for being allowed to abnegate all responsibility for the children under seven years of age. From then on, the baby classes were, for all intents and purposes, in my charge.

Many of the children never really did learn to read, though they could puzzle out a word or phrase. They could read the labels on boxes and barrels, but as often as not it was more an informed guess than an actual deciphering of the letters. My parents, being relatively comfortable with print, were frequently called upon to read letters that had come from Ireland or England for the Harbour families, and our precious hoard of cold-pressed whale or seal oil was often squandered while they painstakingly composed replies to these announcements of death, debt and disaster.

This unofficial service to the community only served to put a larger distance between us and our fellow communicants. We were privy to their secret disappointments, and they found that easier to accept if they thought of us as belonging to a slightly higher class of people than themselves, so the childen called me “teacher,” even though I was a pupil like themselves, and my parents were called Mister and Missus, never Uncle or Aunt like many others. No money ever changed hands, for none of us had coin, nor was there ever an offer of goods for little as we had, we had more than most. But if someone asked me or my parents to read or write a letter, we would usually find them unexpectedly at hand and willing to help if there was seaweed to be hauled, or caplin to be ditched into the garden.

By the time I was fourteen years old, there was very little left for me to learn in the tiny Northside school and the Bishop suggested I go to school in town, to the Presentation sisters who had come over from Ireland to provide education to the girls of the colony. Bishop Fleming objected to having boys and girls in the same classroom because he felt it coarsened the girls. Even the smallest boys who worked in the fishery got a rum ration, and they often arrived for their lessons in a jolly and elevated mood that could quickly degenerate into lewd and obscene behavior, and since he couldn't stop them claiming their tot of
Jamaica, he felt the next best thing would be to remove the girls from their influence.

As far as I was concerned, separating the boys from the girls in school only put off the day when the girls would have to learn to cope with the problem, but my real objection was to leaving home, not to leaving behind a group of rowdy lads. The idea of going to town frightened me. As it happened, circumstances contrived to keep me at home for several more years, and by coaxing my mother into getting a second cow, I managed to make myself indispensable around the house. My mother had to make the fish and had no time to tend to the cows, and even went so far as to say she didn't want to since she had left all that behind in England, but at the same time she delighted in the increased variety that the butter and milk introduced into our very limited diet.

Salt pork and doughboys, salt beef and doughboys, salt fish and doughboys or biscuit, all accompanied by the potatoes, cabbage and turnips my mother and I wrestled out of the ever expanding garden on the hill behind the Harbour, was the best we could manage through the winter, and even at that we were luckier than most. To have butter for the fish, and milk to put in the morning tea, even if that tea was made from dried clover or marsh plants, was a luxury she had long since given up hope of seeing ever again.

The cows, I believe, lengthened my mothers life, forcing her to stay alive at least long enough to teach me how to milk, put by hay for the winter, and treat sore udders, not to mention how to churn butter and then wrap the pat in a fresh rhubarb leaf to set it, how to clean the pans so as to keep the liquid sweet and fresh in the root-cellar, and a dozen other skills that went far beyond mere milking. I was able to trade the milk and butter for an occasional fresh partridge or a haunch of the small caribou that roamed the interior of the island—almost hunted out now—and it meant that even when we had to hire on help to
take Mothers place on the fish flakes, there was always some small, good thing to eat to coax a smile out of her right up to the day she passed out of this world and went to rest in the Bishop s cemetery until the morning of the Resurrection.

I know that my mother believed that as soon as she was gone, I would fulfill the Bishop s desire that I become a teacher, but there were things that happened at the school that I never told her about. Several of the young masters were brutes with the whip, and one of them in particular delighted in inflicting pain on the weakest and stupidest of the boys, though he left the girls pretty much to their own devices. One little fellow— he was from a particularly indigent family—took the brunt of this man's bottomless supply of anger, and something happened so that I felt compelled to go to the Bishop.

There had been talk of incest in the family—though nobody would have ever breathed the word—and certainly the child was odd, though not retarded in the usual sense. He had yellow, rheumy eyes and his nose was always running down to his chin and onto his smock, but aside from being a rather unappetizing boy, he wasn't so bad. The master, however, tormented him at every turn, making him kneel on pebbles for the slightest error and slapping him for “looking saucy.” His favourite trick was to walk behind the children and rap the backs of their necks with a metal-trimmed ruler, claiming that if they were concentrating on their work it wouldn't hurt. That boy—Cajetan he was called—got so marked on the back of his neck that the scar tissue bunched and turned his head sideways, giving him an even more hangdog appearance.

One day I forgot my sampler in the school house and when I went back for it, I saw the master through the window beating poor Cajetan's bare bum with a ruler and rubbing the child over his knees in the most unholy way. I hammered at the door, though I don't think it was locked, and by the time I got into the room there was nothing but the child, snot and tears soaking
his front. The ruler was back on the desk, streaked with blood. The master must have gone out the window.

That weekend, I coaxed Mother to let me go to town to bring the nuns some cranberry sauce she had made from berries I'd picked in the fall, and I managed to see the Bishop for a few minutes. I had never done such a bold thing in my life, and I was shaking like a leaf as I knocked on the door of his residence. I wasn't the only petitioner waiting on him that day, though I was certainly the youngest, but the moment I entered the room he knew something was weighing on me, for like many great men he had the ability to give his undivided attention, so that five minutes in his presence produced a feeling of satisfaction such as an hour or more with a less attentive person might.