Waiting for Time (25 page)

Forcing herself to ignore the deep, steady roll of the ship she stood up and made Fanny a kind of nest on one of the bins. The child whimpered for a few minutes and then fell asleep.

It took some time to coax a fire out of the charcoal that filled the ugly squatting brazier. When it was finally burning she unlocked the bins, found potatoes and salt fish, and started supper.

As the
Tern
made its way north Mary went quietly about her business trying her best to be invisible. She often caught the Escott man's malevolent glare when she ventured above deck to get water or serve up meals, but he didn't come near her. Except for the mate, who checked the galley every day or so, the seamen hardly noticed her. Captain Brennan tried just once to engage her in conversation but appeared unconcerned when Mary shook her head in answer to most of his questions.

“What they don't know can't hurt us!” she told Fanny, and pretended not to notice when the hands started calling her Mary Bundle.

The sea stayed calm but Mary seldom went above deck. Nor did she go ashore in any of the outports where they dropped supplies. Out of the way places, all of them, with nothing but a wharf and a few houses set right down by the sea. She wondered what made people live so cut off from the world—depending on the sea to bring them everything. Mary promised herself that when she got back to St. John's, not Tim Toop, nor no one else, was ever again going to pawn her off to some out of the way hole.

She was less afraid of the Escott man when she discovered the hatch could be hooked from below, but she hated being barred in. She worried about the charcoal fire, imagining the galley in flames, herself and the baby trapped and screaming, pounding on the hatch. Although it meant getting up even earlier she began putting the fire out at night. After that she slept soundly, bedded down beside Fanny in the walkway between bins of salt fish, potatoes and hard tack.

In the middle of their sixth night out she was jarred awake by a loud rattling not two feet from her head. A sudden storm was pitching the
Tern
about, shaking the round-bottomed brazier inside its circle of bricks. Mary reached out in the blackness to make sure she'd replaced the iron cover over the charcoal. Satisfied that at least they would not burn to death, she lay down again—and there she stayed, holding the crying baby, rolling from side to side, listening to pots bang off one another, to the crash and scrape of cargo, to the shouts of men racing about overhead, but not really able to hear the sea. She was glad for that. She vomited into the bucket but did not stand up all night—not even when a large rat ran across her legs. Once someone pounded on the hatch. She did not answer—no matter if they were sinking—anything would be better than this.

Eventually the gale must have blown itself out, she fell asleep and was awakened by banging overhead. “For Lord's sake—are yuh dead or alive down there?”

Feeling stiff and sick, she got slowly to her feet, climbed part way up the ladder and undid the hatch.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph I thought ya'd suffocated!” Captain Brennan's cheerful face beamed down at her as she stood, still dizzy, clinging to the sides of the ladder. “We're safe and sound on Cape Random—yuh can come on up now, Mary Bundle.”

Fresh, cool air swept down into the hold. Suddenly, above everything, Mary longed to set foot on land. “The baby's sick,” she said, “I got to have her seen to—any women in this place?”

“I heartell Josh Vincent's crowd are after movin' down from Pond Island—Sarah Vincent's a good woman, she'll help ya. Go ashore if ya got a mind to. But be quick—all hands is in need of a bite to eat and I wants to be outta here by nightfall.”

Down on the wharf someone was singing: “I saw three ships come sailing in, come sailing in, come sailing in.…” The singer, a man, repeated the refrain over and over.

“I'm stayin',” Mary said, “I'll not put another night over me head in this old hulk.”

“Don't talk foolish! The
Tern's
as sound a craft as you'll ever sail in!”

“I tell ya I'll not spend the summer on no ship! I'm goin' to bide here for a spell—go back to St. John's first chance I gets.”

“You signed on for the season, Mary Bundle—anyways, what can a young maid like yerself do on the Cape? That was a hard blow last night but you'll be alright now ya got used to it.” The Captain dismissed her fears with a shrug, “Sure ya got your sea legs now, Mary Bundle!” he grinned each time he said her name.

“Now, bring that pot and a bag of vegetables ashore, we'll have a meal on dry land and you'll feel better. Mind now—Caleb Gosse don't take kindly to havin' hands jump ship on him!” he went off, shouting orders at two seamen who were putting out the gangplank.

“How stunned was I at all—thinkin' I'd bide aboard a fishin' boat for the full season. That's what the sea does, makes ya forget how bad it is the minute you're off it! I didn't put much store in what Captain Brennan said—since I can't read or write I knowed that about me signing on was wrong. If I was signed on 'twas Tim Toop done it and 'twould be him, not me, old man Gosse'd be after.”

“'I'll do what I likes and the devil take the hindmost,’ said I to meself.”

“And that's how I come to the Cape. I was seventeen—if I'da known I was never again to set foot out of this place I allow I would ha' gone back and faced up to the sea, bad as it is.”

nine

Rachel was disappointed. She wanted to keep on writing out her Nan's story. She had been enjoying it, it kept her mind off the strange movements inside her belly, off her fear of childbirth, distracted her from thinking about the mixture of sorrow, pity and curiosity she saw in people's eyes
.

But, “I'll have to think on it,” Mary said. “Regards things happened here on the Cape, I expects Vinnie put all that down. Tomorrow we can start readin' what Vinnie wrote—and them pages Thomas Hutchings put in. No sense markin' down the same words over again.”

So, the next morning Rachel settled the old woman comfortably in her rocking chair and began to read: “In the beginning we all lived on Monk Street in Weymouth and we was all happy…”

She read for hours. Sometimes Mary seemed to be sleeping but whenever Rachel paused she would give a start and without opening her eyes direct her great-granddaughter to go on. The day was well along when Rachel came to the part of Lavinia's journal recording Mary's arrival on Cape Random: “Mary Bundle come ashore today, she's the nearest thing to a savage any Christian soul is likely to see,” the girl read
.

Mary sat bolt upright, made an unpleasant sound and jabbed at the book, “Show me!” she said, “Show me where that's writ to!”

Rachel pointed out the words
.

“I can hardly credit Vinnie markin' such a thing down!”

The old woman stared into the fire, brooding on the treachery of her friend. The sharp, bony face peering out from the folds of blanket seemed hardly human, more like the face of a large bird guarding some mountain cave
.

“I s'pose Lavinia Andrews never give no thought to what she looked like that day—nor any of them Andrews and Vincents. Just standin' there, twenty or so people lined up along the wharf, like an army of scarecrows they were—with a red haired imp of a man singin' some foolish song and dancin' in and out among 'em. Never in me born days did I see a more poor lookin' crew—skivver legged and pasty faced with eyes sunk into their heads. Apart from the dancin' man, not one of 'em was makin' a sound.”

It was not just the appearance of the Cape Random people that made Mary uneasy. Their manner, the scrutiny of the children, the quiet appraisal, gave her the shivers. “I couldn't make out what kind of crowd I'd fallen in with, couldn't make head nor tail of 'em. Not Thomas Hutchings, though—I seen right off what he were!”

Thomas was the boss and in Mary's experience such people were to be watched and feared. Josh and Sarah Vincent referred to Thomas as “The Skipper,” and the children, who called every other man Uncle, always addressed Thomas as Mr. Hutchings.

“Had it good, Thomas Hutchings did—the rest always took his word for everything—even when he were wrong. Went around with his nose up in the air like he owned the Cape—like a king. So there they were on the wharf, a rag-tag crowd of scarecrows and a devil, and, of course their jeezely king—all statin' at me.”

Mary had stared, too—stared and watched and listened. That was her main occupation those first days on the Cape. She could see from their clothing, from the bareness of Vincent's loft where she and the children slept, how poor the two families were. Knew, by the way they held a bit of bread, savouring the smell and feel of it before putting it into their mouths, that the arrival of the
Tern
had saved them all from starvation. Despite this, Mary hoped to find something valuable on the Cape, something worth floppin', worth taking back to St. John's.

“'Tis a poor crowd don't own nothin' worth havin',” Tim used to say but during her first weeks on the Cape, Mary wondered if even Tim would find anything to steal in such a place.

“I got meself landed in the back of beyond!” she would think, lying in the loft with Fanny, the Vincent children sleeping around her. She would frighten herself imagining what it might be like to stay forever on this fog-shrouded shore, a place inhabited by creatures odder even than her mother. At such times Mary could only get to sleep by thinking about the coins she kept tied in her shimmy and the gold watch Tim Toop held for her in a little bag around his neck, by picturing some vessel that very minute making its way towards the Cape—a vessel that would surely give her passage back to St. John's.

But maybe the old woman misremembers, maybe her dislike of Cape Random was not so great. She and her child were taken into the Vincent household. No one was cruel, no one questioned her, and, at least during the summer, there was enough to eat.

And there was certainly enough to do. From dawn to dark no one stopped—men back and forth to the fishing grounds, hauling nets, heaving great piles of slippery, shining cod up onto the wharf—women splitting the fish, washing and salting it, turning and yaffling it. By mid-summer Mary was proud to be able to keep up with Sarah Vincent on the flakes. Every day she learned something new, how much salt to spread, when the fish needed turning or covering, how to render oil out of cod liver, how to gather mussels, cut out cod tongues, dry caplin, dig fish-guts and caplin into the potato garden, how to gut herring, fill their bellies with salt and pack them into barrels. She learned how to make soap and candles, bread and hay and rag mats—even how to mend nets.

“As time passed on I found meself gettin' more easy—saw them people was no more'n meself—nothin' to be afraid of. The work was no harder than I done in Armstrong's scullery and nobody was bawlin' at me all the time or hittin' me. For all nighttime was black and lonely, 'twas nice to be outdoors in the daytime.”

Beyond considering her sister Tessa beautiful and herself plain, Mary had never given much thought to her looks. Yet the day she walked ashore from the
Tern
both Meg and Jennie Andrews had commented on her prettiness. Small and barefooted she'd been, her black hair all uncombed and blowing about in the wind like a gypsy, still wearing Lol's blue gingham dress that had pink flowers embroidered around the hem.

“A good bit of stuff in that dress—well made, apart from how 'tis brailled together in front,” old Jennie Andrews, who had once traded in second-hand clothing, said.

“Been a spell, though, since her or the dress seen soap and water,” Meg remarked when they saw the girl close up.

As soon as she arrived, under the women's direction, Mary's appearance began to change. Lol's castoff dress, declared too grand for the flakes, was washed, mended and carefully packed away to become the official wedding dress for a generation of Cape Random women. From somewhere Meg, Sarah and Jennie dredged up an outfit identical to their own, a shapeless black garment, rusty with age and darned beneath the sleeves, and a big white pinny. The apron was only for the house. Mary was instructed to replace it with a brin bag or a bit of sailcloth when she worked outdoors.