Waiting for Time (38 page)
But there is nothing, nothing she can say except what the girl has been copying down for weeks—and maybe Rachel doesn't even believe that—maybe she thinks it's all just a yarn made up by a foolish old woman.
“Tis all true, ya know, true as the Bible, every word of it!” Mary says sharply.
“I knows Nan, I knows it is—and I got everything you told me writ down,” Rachel closes the book. For the first time in weeks Mary seems to be really seeing her great-granddaughter.
“I'm not sayin' they wasn't good people—they was. And hard workers—my maid, you never knowed the like of them people to work! Not like this crowd we got now. Nowhere on this coast is the likes of Meg or Sarah, nor men like Ned and Ben or Josh Vincent or Frank Norris. Times changed, girl—things comes too easy to ye lot.”
Rachel expects her great-grandmother to doze off as she has most evenings when the writing is finished. Instead, the old woman sits up, looks towards the window, sniffs, says, “I thinks meself the wind's veered. I doubt there'll be a speck of snow left by morning. We'll have supper now—what about roastin' one of them nice rounders Jack brought over, and we'll toast some of your mother's bread—I must say I'm partial to Jessie's bread.”
While the fish is roasting, wafting the smell of sea and woods through the kitchen, Rachel goes down to her parents' house for a jar of jam. It is true, the wind had changed, swung around to the southwest. Winter is almost over.
“Nan's feelin' better. I thinks she's goin' to be alright after all,” Rachel tells her mother, partly because it is true and partly to distract Jessie, whose eyes fill with tears every time she sees her daughter's thickening form.
Throughout supper and while Rachel washes up, Mary tells about the years after she became owner of the store.
“Made no difference, really. I can see that now, except for makin' me more content in me mind. Thomas and Vinnie kept on livin' there 'til they built this house. And was true what the clerk feller said, vessels comin' down the coast did get bigger. Then there was them steamers and they stopped comin' in here altogether—still, we made a livin', hung on somehow. The barrels helped. Thomas' idea for burnin' 'em inside done somethin' to 'em. Made our herring and berries taste better—least that's what people come to think—and 'cause they thought it we got a better price.”
“What about Thomas and Lavinia, did they get married proper?”
“Not for a good spell—there was a big revival goin' on somewhere along the coast and I s'pose the preacher got stuck in one of them places tryin' to get everyone saved. Anyway, poor Willie and Rose had to wait right through that summer and winter 'til the next summer to marry. Didn't make one bit of difference to Thomas Hutchings and Vinnie. They just acted like they was married. Took young Toma to live with 'em and settled down—never mind Meg and Sarah was havin' fits prayin' over 'em.”
Mary talks for a long time that night. Not things she wants the girl to write down, happy things. What she calls old foolishness—banners of memory that float above the changeless cycle of fishing, bearing children, fighting the cold, surviving the winter.
She tells Rachel about the time Alfred hauled in a fifty-foot sea monster longer than his boat, about how Lavinia started telling stories just as Ned had done (“'Twas times I'da almost thought was him, 'steada Vinnie, sittin' across the fire from Thomas Hutchings, yarnin'”), about the winter Ben and Thomas built a big catamarain and all hands went sliding down the hill and out across the frozen reach, about the fall Sarah saw the ghost of the little girl lost in the woods (“But I think meself 'twas Sarah's nerves”), about the summer picnics Thomas and Lavinia used to have on Turr Island (“Course they never asked no one else, but I'd see 'em go off with blankets and baskets—like two youngsters, laughin' and gigglin'. She never growed up Vinnie didn't and after they got together Thomas caught whatever it was and started gettin' younger”). About the Christmas someone left a tin of English biscuits on each doorstep and they never found out who it was, the time every soul on the Cape except Mary got saved, of the day Annie hauled off her oilskins, put on a dress and marched down to propose to Frank Norris, about the time they'd all seen a ship in the sky, plain as day, sailing on clouds with every rat-line in place.
Happy and bizarre stories. Most as familiar to Rachel as they are to Mary, for children on the Cape speak of things that happened long before their births in the same way they talk of yesterday's weather or last season's catch.
Mary is still talking as Rachel helps her undress, settles her on the couch and tucks quilts around her.
“Just like Ned, Vinnie were,” she says, her old crony's face cupped in her hand like a child ready for sleep. On impulse, Rachel bends forward and kisses her great-grandmother before blowing out the lamp and going upstairs to the cold bedroom.
Sometime during the night Mary Bundle died. She died alone, which was what she had planned, and she made a good death, which was her most fervent wish. She was lucky. “But then,” she thought, just before she slipped into unconsciousness, “I always been lucky.”
In the morning Rachel finds her. The girl does not turn hysterical, cry, or go running down the hill to her mother. She walks across the kitchen, which is still warm from the fire she had banked the night before, and stands looking down at her grandmother's face.
The old woman must have gotten up during the night. The knitted afghan has been taken from the rocker and spread neatly over her, her long grey hair is coiled into a bun—Rachel knows that would have been hard for Nan to do with her right shoulder so stiff.
Only one thing is not as Mary had wished. Her eyes, still flinty black as bits of coal, are open. Rachel takes a deep breath, reaches forward and gently presses the lids down. Now the face looks peaceful, more peaceful than Rachel has ever seen it. She wonders where Smut is, has he run off as animals are said to do when their masters die? Then the afghan moves and the cat crawls out from where he had curled against Mary's side.
Rachel goes to the back porch, takes the weighted net from the jug her mother had sent up the day before and pours milk into the cracked saucer behind the stove. Then, seeing Mary's big teacup set down on the fender, she picks it up.
A thick brown residue, like black molasses, has hardened in the bottom of the cup. Rachel studies it a long time, sniffs it but cannot identify the sickly sweet smell. Returning to the pantry, she washes it. As she carefully dries Victoria's face and the chipped curlicues around her crown, the girl remembers how it had delighted Nan to outlive the old queen. She decides she will keep the cup.
Repeating to herself the instructions she and Mary had gone over so many times, Rachel goes upstairs and empties the contents of Lavinia's bag out onto the quilt.(“…mind me now, three things to do before ya goes down to call yer mother…take the gold and the book. I wants them hid, no one but you're to have 'em…mind now maid, you might need that money when the child comes.…”)
Rachel does just as she's been told. First she packs the book away in her own school bag, pushing it under her change of clothing. Next she knots the gold pieces back into the cloth and tucks it, just as Mary had once done, down the front of her flannel shift. The other things—the small roll of merchant's notes, the even smaller roll of bank notes, and the thick parchment—declaring the store and wharf to belong to Mary Bundle and to her heirs in perpetuity—Rachel returns to Lavinia's frayed bag, which she pushes under the feather mattress. Her mother and aunts will find it when they came to lay Nan out.
In the kitchen the blind is still down. Rachel crosses to the window and eases it up (“Gentle, girl, don't pull the guts outta it!”). When the women come they will pull all the blinds down—every blind on Cape Random will be lowered, every curtain drawn until the funeral is over.
For now, though, Rachel watches the pale morning sun move slowly across the scrubbed wooden floor, across the flowered oilcloth on the table, across the old picture of sheep and shepherd coming home along a path lined with trees taller than any Rachel has ever seen. She watches sun fall on the brown and blue squares of the afghan, so neatly tucked under the pointed chin, watches it flicker across the strangely peaceful face of the old pagan who lies waiting for her people to come and take her to the graveyard beside the church she has not entered since the clay it was finished.
After studying her great-grandmother's face for a long time, Rachel leaves the house, walks down the path, past the hen house, past the clump of damson and the already green rhubarb that Nan keeps fenced against goats, down to her father's house. Before going in she pauses, gazing for a minute down at the store and the wharf. Smoke is already rising from the chimney of the twine loft where Uncle Willie Andrews will be getting ready for his day's work. Out beyond the wharf the sea is smooth, boats bob on collar, reflected perfectly in the blue water. Out beyond the clean crescent of beach, out beyond the white frills of the Cape, the ice-coloured Atlantic stretches up to what her grandfather calls the Labrador Sea. Rachel takes a great gulping lungful of the cold morning air before going in to tell her mother.
One hundred and twenty-six people stand beside Mary's grave. Half a hundred more lie silently in the graves around. Some graves are old, grass covered and hollow, others are still raw mounds of clay and rock, like upturned boats. The graveyard is bare, jam jars and cups that once held flowers lie cracked by winter frost. Neither rose tree or lilac, nor the Sweet William women plant each year will grow in this high, windy spot.
After the schoolteacher has read the funeral service, after Calvin has prayed, they sing one of the old hymns:
Unto the hills around do I lift up my longing eyes,
From whence for me shall my salvation come,
From whence arise.…
The familiar words make Rachel cry. Tears stream down her face as Mary's sons and grandsons slowly lower the coffin into the hole, as the new church bell begins to ring. It keeps on ringing, on and on, rolling across the marshes, down over the hills and the houses, rattling off the great black rock called God's Finger.
The sound, at first doleful, changes, becomes clamorous and fast as the boys pulling the ropes warm to the novelty of their job, it rises to a pandeinonium, a great raucous din that crashes out over the sea, rippling the surface of the water, reverberating off the seaweedy tops of sunken rocks, cutting down into the fathomless stillness where millions of cod swim, confused by the dim echoes penetrating their cold, still world.
Turning and turning Lav follows the road up the north side of Bonavista Bay, a route marked on the map spread out on the seat beside her. Under the map is her briefcase, which contains the Ellsworth Journal. She has been on the road since dawn and has so far managed not to think too much about what she has done or is doing.
Almost a week has passed since her melodramatic interruption of the Fishery Minister's press conference. Days of complete silence.
Apart from a visit from Mark Rodway, no one has contacted her. Not one of her accusations, hurled at the Minister and his special assistant, has appeared in the press. No shot of her distributing copies of Mark's report to media people has been shown on television. Mark himself had only heard of it from a friend at CBC.
She had gone to the front door only when the ringing gave way to pounding. Pulling a dressing gown over the disreputable nightdress she'd worn for two days, raking her fingers through her hair, trying to compose herself for God knows what—Wayne Drover come to fire her, Lori Sutton come to reclaim the stolen Ellsworth Journal, a policeman with a warrant for her arrest?
But it was Mark Rodway, jogging in place on her doorstep. “Good for you!” he said, grabbing her hand, shaking it with such vigour that his bouncing feet started her head throbbing.
“Just thought you'd like to know I'm out of jail—'released with a warning' was how they put it.” After making this announcement Mark dropped her hand, turned, waved and jumped down the steps. At the gate he stopped, whirled around and bounded back.
