T
he girls passed the few houses along the bottom road of Fox Farm Hill and the hospital Dr. Wilfred Grenfell had built. When they started up Fox Farm Hill, Cora asked anxiously, “Have you got company bread in yer pocket?”
“You know I don't believe in fairies,” was Clarissa's quick retort. An uncertain look crossed her face and she added slowly, “Even if I did believe in them, I know that a bit of bread in a pocket won't keep them away if they want us.”
“Never mind then,” said Cora reaching into her pocket. “I've got some crumbs of hard tack. I'll throw them along our path.”
Clarissa giggled. “Maybe we should be more scared of the Norsemen ghosts Peter boasts about. He may think his ancestors were Norsemen warriors, but all his father ever did was trap rabbits and foxes â and gun kittiwakes.”
Cora shook her head. “That thing he wears around his neck on a piece of leather â a broken piece of flint, it 'tis. He brags that it came from his grandfather, and long-gone Norsemen have the piece that matches it. He calls it a hag-stone â supposed to be lucky.”
“He dreamed a story, or read it in that history book Miss Ellis told him he had to read,” Clarissa said scornfully.
There was still a ways to go up the hill. Clarissa's arms ached as she balanced herself on her crutches to climb the rocky path up to and past Dr. Grenfell's castle to the Tea House. Her round cheeks bloomed into blushes like apples ripening whenever she was hurrying on her crutches, her green-flecked brown eyes twinkling under a forehead of dark curls.
Fallen leaves lay scattered like gold coins among stones in a path spotted on both sides with orange crackerberries on bows of red leaves. Here and there, the cragged noses of cliffs stuck up under the girls' feet. Brooks sang under crossing boards, their clear water alive in silvery movements. In this peaceful setting, the girls forgot the discordant noises of the orphanage.
Clarissa stopped to take a little weight on her right toe while she knocked the cap off a mushroom, the kind Missus Frances called a chanterelle. “Here's something for the fairies,” she said, laughing. “The devil's bread.”
Cora looked at her in dismay. “If you touch fairy caps and the fairies see you, they'll get angry and take yer.”
Clarissa scoffed. “You can't go believing stories other people dream. You'll be frightened to death all your livelong life.”
The girls reached the Grenfell castle standing in a dell surrounded by trees. Clarissa slid her crutches along the rutted walk and stopped to look in through the long windows of the large, green house with a roof almost as steep as a witch's hat. Today the windows looked like black sheets of ice. Clarissa moved closer and peered into one window hoping to see Mrs. Grenfell at her desk and her little girl playing with a china doll on the floor. It wasn't a Children's Home, not like the one where she and Cora lived. Dr. and Mrs. Grenfell had two boys and a girl, though there was no sign of anyone now.
Some distant memory of her own family stirred in Clarissa each time she was by this place. The windows set in the tiny room under the peaked roof in the large house seemed familiar and she had a vague memory of sitting by a window in a house smaller than the orphanage. She wanted to be in a smaller place with people who didn't taunt her, a place where she didn't have to climb so many stairs. Sometimes she daydreamed about living in the castle with Dr. Grenfell and his lady. Mrs. Grenfell was big and strong and regal looking; on her visits to the orphanage she wore a dolly hat over a mass of fine, brown hair. Clarissa liked Mrs. Grenfell, even though she had an uppity air about her. She liked her because she was willing to give out a measure of kindness whenever she saw fit, and she didn't treat the children of the orphanage as if they were lowbrow creatures. Her face looked kind most of the time.
The girls went past the house, past Fox Farm Hill and up towards the Tea House. Cora led the way. Her blue dress and yellow wool sweater, against scarlet autumn leaves, was an image of colour and energy even if her breathing rattled sometimes.
The wind began to freshen and leaves rustled to the ground. Clarissa watched one leaf flitter at the edge of the others like a butterfly. A snipe's long t-werps echoed as the bird glided up the hill on a light breeze. The wind fell dead on the land and the snipe dropped to its feet. It looked around as if startled. Then it flew back into the air.
As Cora clambered up the steep path ahead of her, Clarissa felt as if she were a little rabbit trying to escape the snare of the straight leg brace on her right leg and the short one on her left leg, her toes banging against the uneven and slippery earth. It would be difficult to climb the steep hill, but she wanted to do it before snow filled the path and kept her bound to the low land around the orphanage.
Clarissa sniffed the tangy forest air, happy to be away from the stale porridge smells of the dingy Home. She stopped climbing to admire a leaf with a dewdrop as bright as a diamond under sunlight. She dipped her finger into the bubble just as Cora called, “What's yer looking at?” Cora never bothered with dewdrops, so Clarissa didn't answer. She continued her climb, noticing that the undergrowth drooped like a crinoline gone limp under a faded summer dress. Except for purple asters scattered here and there, summer's flowers had shrivelled to raggedy muffins, their dull grey heads bending on scrawny necks.
Cora slowed down and leaned against a mountain holly. She coughed loud and long, stopping just as Clarissa caught up with her. “Look!” She pointed to a spruce tree; its sap had rolled down the bark and stopped to form a brittle mass. The girls looked at each other and shrieked, “Frankgum!”
Uncle Aubrey, the caretaker at the orphanage, had told the children that frankgum would help their teeth stay strong and keep consumption away. It helped Cora's coughing. In the spring, when the older boys went to cut trees for fuel, they picked off the sticky lumps of sap that had congealed on balsam fir and spruce trees full of sap. The sap turned into a rubbery chew between their teeth. But this time of the year the frankgum was old. It broke off under the girls' fingernails and turned cruddy in their mouths. They spat it out, but the taste of the forest lingered on their tongues.
Clarissa leaned against white, lacy scabs patching a bearded fir and picked off black, brown and green strands of maldow hanging like hair on the trunk.
“Our dolls won't be bald if we can get enough of this,” Cora said, her blue eyes shining. She gathered a bunch and quickly pushed it into her pocket.
Clarissa shook her head. “I don't mind having a bald doll. I'm using my maldow as her diaper.”
“Watch out your crutches don't go through the space between the steps,” Cora cautioned Clarissa when they reached the veranda to the Tea House. Dr. Grenfell had built the cabin lookout for his nursing staff. During warm weather nurses used to stroll up from the hospital to sit on the landing. They could lean, a cup of tea in hand, on the gnarled railing that ran around the front of the Tea House. Now the place looked as if it had been ruined by bad weather or prowlers.
Before going into the Tea House, Clarissa leaned against a large boulder and gazed out into the harbour. Here she felt that she was on top of Newfoundland. In the St. Anthony schoolhouse, there was a map of the island: a long neck on a thick body with several short legs hanging loose. St. Anthony was at the head of the long neck. Clarissa imagined sliding down the neck to the body, and into her mother's lap. Wind tickled her senses as she looked down at the sea and across miles and miles of it sucking at the land between her and her real home. In the distance, long, furry mountains lay against the clear sky like a dark beast between her and the people to whom she belonged. She visualized a table full of children. She could almost hear their chorus of laughter, the sounds of spoons against porcelain plates. Here in St. Anthony she wasn't someone's child or sister. A faint memory of her mother often tickled her mind like a feather. She felt her mother tremble against her as she quickly dressed her for the journey away from home. When she tried to tighten her hold on the memory, it drifted away.
She stretched her hand and covered the whole place: a toy village with almost five hundred people. There was the church with a steeple, and the mission school, with an upstairs library, down the road from the orphanage. Farther up were the houses and stages of the better-off fishermen and Merchant Moore's premises. Next to these were the cabins of people who worked for the merchant.
From the top of Tea House Hill, Clarissa saw the orphanage as a tiny box, the houses and the merchant's premises tidy. She couldn't see â behind the decent houses â the rotting boards in the straggle of unpainted, black shacks where the poor lived off their own faces or in the merchant's ear. From the Tea House, the whole place sat like a pretty photograph, without the chatter of children and grownups, the howling of dogs and the buzz of logs being sawed.
“There's the
Prospero
,” Clarissa called excitedly, looking past a flock of snowbirds heading out over the ocean. A large schooner was sailing around the point on its way in to anchor in the basin of St. Anthony Harbour. Flags were flying from its spars; smoke from its funnels drifted into the blue sky. The ship was bringing passengers and goods, and maybe another orphan before the harbour closed for the winter. Clarissa had often heard The St. Anthony Band, as the husky dogs were called, answer the ship's whistle with their wild, eerie howls.
Clarissa dropped her crutches on the ground and settled on a fallen log. The stillness of the forest air hung softly around her face. Just then a leaf rustled and a bird's song rang through the trees. A white-winged crossbill linnet hopped beneath a black spruce beside the veranda as if looking to gather seeds for its winter cache.
Clarissa lifted her head and was sniffing the faint fragrance of Indian tea shrubs when Cora called from the Tea House, “Look what I found!” Clarissa gathered her crutches, stuck their crosspieces under her armpits and grabbed the handgrips. She made her way up the steps and into the house.
Cora was down on her knees. Her straight, black hair, usually drawn from one side to the other and held with a barrette, hung over her. Beside her were broken boards and an opening in the floor. Cora looked up at Clarissa, her eyes popping.
Clarissa eyed her cautiously. “Why are you puffing and blowing like a pothead whale?”
Cora's voice filled with wonder. “I've found an old box!” She leaned down, her hands moving quickly to wipe twigs and dried leaves off the brass surface. She straightened to pick up a stick lying on the floor. Then she tapped on the brass-overlaid box.
Clarissa peeped down, puzzled. “It looks like it's been here a long time.”
“We were never up here this late in the year; leaves and grass likely hid it. But I can't remember these boards being broken off. Anyway, look!” Cora leaned closer.
Clarissa followed her look. “The box's got scenes etched in brass and raised so that even a blind person can feel the picture and tell a story. There's men, some standing and others sitting around a table. One man is drinking from a jug.”
Cora tipped her head to her shoulder and squinted. “On the side there's a crowd of men inside a place with brick walls and a fireplace with some jugs on a mantel above it. A crowd of ruffians drinking their pint and gambling â sure, that's what it looks like to me.”
“Well,” Clarissa said, “Peter did say his father told him yarns about an ancestor coming down from L'Anse aux Meadows on snowshoes after the rest of the Norsemen died off. If the man was a trapper and had a trapping path from here to over the hills, perhaps the box belonged to him or his relations.”
Cora was sceptical. “There's no Norsemen on it. Sure, there'd be horns.”
“They didn't all have horns; it was mostly the Viking warriors who had horns on their helmets,” Clarissa said quickly, remembering stories she had read. “Some of them wore caps like everyone else.”
Cora hesitated. “I don't know if I want to open the box. My mind's splitting into wantin' to and not wantin' to open it.” She tightened her arms against her body and looked around. She whispered, “Someone could be watchin' us. I want to let it be.”
Clarissa shrugged. “A weasel or red fox might have us in its eyes. Most humans are a ways from here. We can cover the box until next summer and think about it, or next Saturday we could sneak away with a hammer and knock off the lock.”
Cora recoiled, her blue eyes like two china platters. She whispered, “What if 'tis a fairy box?”
“A fairy box!” Clarissa's face screwed up in disdain. “I told you I don't believe in fairies. I barely believe in imagining them.”
The girls looked out through the open doorway; the sky was like an old man's face overgrown with grey hair and a grey beard, one dull eye visible. The wind dallied in the air like a ghost. It grew stronger, moving its fingers through the fallen leaves.
Cora shuddered. “I'm all abiver. Let's go. It gets dark quick in the fall. We got to get down before Old Keziah finds us gone.” Old Keziah was the nickname the children stuck on Miss Elizabeth after she washed out their mouths with a hunk of lye soap.
Cora ran outside and gathered an armful of fallen spruce branches. She hurried inside and dropped the branches as fast as she could over the box. Then she fitted the broken floorboards back in place as well as she could. Clarissa got up from her stoop reluctantly. She slipped her crutches into place, and the girls made their way down the Tea House steps.
“Let's not tell anyone about the box,” Clarissa said as they started down the hill. “It's probably just an old box with nothing in it but rotting furs left by a trapper passing through.”
“I won't tell,” Cora promised, crossing her fingers.
Clarissa tried to cross her fingers and lost her balance. She winced as her body hit the ground. And then she went tumbling down the steep hill until a tree stump stopped her wild roll. Cora came running with her crutches. Clarissa, dazed and trembling, hauled herself up on them. She looked herself up and down and asked nervously, “I'm not dirty, am I; I haven't torn my clothes?”