The Doryman (6 page)

Chapter Fourteen

O
derin was once the most important island in the bay. Lying in the western part of Placentia Bay, it was only one and a half square miles, fashioned like a horseshoe. Its open end looked to the southwest and offered ships welcome shelter against the gales that haunted the bay each year, especially in August.

It was named in the 1660s, after Audierne, a small port in Brittany, France. Oderin had a central place in the history of Newfoundland's South Coast and appeared very early on in the historical record. The first people to winter over on the island were two Frenchmen in 1704, Ricord and LaFosse, men whose first names are lost to time. LaFosse came with his family; he was on the run from the French, who had accused him of spying for the English. Everyone who lived on Oderin knew that he had buried treasure down on the beach, in a tunnel between Beach Pond and Castle Island. The old people said LaFosse's ghost haunted the tunnel, and they had no wish at all to see him.

The rise of Oderin as a centre of commerce began when Christopher Spurrier, a merchant from Poole in England, set up a fishing and shipbuilding enterprise there in 1773, on the north side of the harbour. An ambitious man with his sights set on the growing South Coast fishery, Spurrier set up premises in Burin and other spots at the same time. He sent some of his 150 fishing servants stationed at Oderin to Baine Harbour, Boat Harbour, and Rushoon on the Burin Peninsula to cut timber, for there was very little on the island.

The people who came to Oderin from then on were mostly English: the Baileys, the Butlers, Drakes, Smiths, and Mannings. They had winter houses on the Burin Peninsula where they could better access wood and hunt rabbits and partridge from December through to March. Eventually some of them began to stay on the peninsula year-round, but others returned to prosecute the summer fishery from Oderin. Then Spurrier descended into bankruptcy. Injecting a bit of glamour into Oderin life, local rumour had it that Spurrier's wife frittered his fortune away at the gaming tables in England.

Spurrier's place was taken by an Irish-born merchant called James Furlong, who set up shop with another man called Hamilton. Irish settlers followed Furlong to the island: the Murphys, Powers, and Clarkes, people who had had enough of being itinerant or tenant farmers for English landlords, others who'd been driven off the land, a few in search of adventure.

Late in the nineteenth century, a young Mr. Edward P. Morris, the brother of the local priest, came to Oderin to take up his first teaching position. Later, he would become prime minister of Newfoundland, something in which the island people would take pride.

Politics was not new to Oderin, though. Richard McGrath was elected the Member of the House of Assembly for Placentia and St. Mary's Bays in 1861. More than twenty years later, his son James F. was elected to the position. Oderin became the hub of the bay and certainly its most important island. The way officer was stationed at Oderin, so that letters might be sent and received. So was the police constable, and the customs officer. Early in the twentieth century, Dr. McCullough came to the island; he was the only doctor on the Placentia Bay islands.

In those days, the sea was a highway and Oderin was one of its main stops. Every fall, huge shipments of fishing gear – nets, dories, navigation equipment for schooners – came in from the St. John's firms of Job and Bowrings, who bought the island's renowned fish. Men carried crates of supplies from ships to wharves and fishing premises: tea, molasses, sugar, pork, and flour. Local schooners went to Prince Edward Island in Canada to buy beef and farm produce that they sold all along the South Coast, stopping first in Oderin where they knew there was a good market for it. Spirits, tobacco, and rubber boots were brought in from St. Pierre. Gear for the five lobster factories on the island was landed. This was a prosperous place.

At the centre of Oderin society was Lady Day, the annual devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and garden party held in August. On the morning of Lady Day, the harbours of Oderin were chockablock with dories, western boats, and tern schooners. People came from all over the bay, whether they were Catholic, Church of England, or Methodist, to celebrate and see each other in the middle of the summer fishery. There was food, games, and dancing, and for a young woman, the chance to meet the man who would become her husband.

Chapter Fifteen

A
ngela Manning was a native of Oderin, the great granddaughter of William Manning who had come to the little island from Bristol, England with his wife Margaret in the early 1800s. She had just returned to Newfoundland from New York, where she had worked as a maid for four years. She wanted to see something of the world before she settled down and got married back home, as she always knew she would and as she wanted to. Lots of the young women from Oderin were going into service in New York and Boston then. They used the connections their fishermen brothers and uncles had from fishing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts to get good situations. It was more exciting than going to St. John's, as so many of the unmarried women of the South Coast did.

In New York, Angela worked for the Spurrells who lived in a Brooklyn brownstone. They were a family of English descent whose father had spent some time in Newfoundland with a fishing enterprise in Trinity Bay. The Spurrells still had relatives “back home” as they called it, even those who had never lived there.

Angela's day was cluttered with work. She rose long before dawn to start the fires in the kitchen and drawing room, where Mrs. Spurrell would start her needlework right after breakfast. Her next task was to help the cook, a black woman called Rosa. The cook was elderly now and had been born a slave in Georgia. She had been in service her whole life and had never married.

Angela took the bread from the breadbox – white, they never ate brown – and cut enough slices for Mr. and Mrs. Spurrell and their four children, Lillie, Andrew, Evelyn, and George. Then she got the oats off the top shelf in the pantry and laid out the butter, sugar, tea and milk for Rosa to prepare breakfast. She buttered some bread for herself and gulped some of the tea that Rosa made for the two of them. Then she crept into the bedrooms and collected the chamber pots, which she then dumped outside. She cleaned them out before replacing them, fresh for the first use of the morning.

By now, the younger children had awakened. Angela went into the boys' room and fetched baby George's clothes from the wardrobe. Then she went into the girls' room and chose a dress for little Evelyn. She went back to George then and dressed him. When she was done, she returned to Evelyn and helped the little girl, who was into her petticoats by then. Lillie and Andrew were old enough to dress themselves.

Rosa set the table, between stirring the oatmeal and making the toast, but Angela always cleared it and brought the cutlery, cups, and dishes back into the kitchen. As Mrs. Spurrell settled into the drawing room, Angela always remembered to ask her if she was comfortable with the fire. Angela had figured out early on that it was best to have the mistress of the house as an ally, should anything go wrong. Like most girls on the Placentia Bay islands, she had only three years of schooling; her mother had plucked her out of the classroom to help with the younger children. But Angela's brain worked non-stop, and she was described proudly by her parents in Oderin as “smart as you can get.” She was more than a competent reader, and in the top drawer of her bureau she kept a notebook into which she copied prayers and her favourite poems.

After Mrs. Spurrell was settled away, and the two littlest children by her side in the drawing room, Angela got Mr. Spurrell's briefcase from his study and put it out by the door so he could take it as he left for work. He was an accountant for an import-export firm, who took the subway into Midtown Manhattan every day. He never spoke to Angela, only nodded in her direction once in a while. That's for the best, Angela often reflected, all too aware of the pinching, teasing, and worse, much worse, that other young women in service had to contend with.

Then Angela walked Lillie and Andrew to school a half-mile away, answering Lillie's incessant questions about everything under the sun on the way. Although the Spurrells seemed to Angela to be well off, both children attended Public School 30 in central Brooklyn, rather than a private academy. She wondered if this was a philosophical decision, or whether the Spurrells conserved their funds in case providence decided to deal them a financial blow someday. After all, their roots were in Newfoundland, where few people took the future for granted.

After the children were ensconced in school, Angela walked back to the house, where a mountain of chores awaited her. She made the seven beds in the home, swept the three layers of floors, beat the area rugs, fetched wood from the basement, stoked the fires, washed windows and walls, dusted in every room, mopped the porch and hallway floors, and did laundry.

Washing clothes was the hardest and most time-consuming task of all. Angela started by gathering the dirty clothes from the three bedrooms upstairs. She stripped sheets and pillow cases off the beds and tore down any curtains that needed a wash. Then she took the clothes to the basement – sometimes this took two trips from the top floor – and sorted the fabrics by type and colour. She went upstairs again and boiled water on the stove upstairs in a large pot. When the first pot was boiled, she carried it downstairs and put another on the boil. Downstairs, she poured the water into a steel tub, added lye soap – store-bought, not like back home where they made their own soap – and soaked the clothes. After a time she ran upstairs to check on the boiling water, which she carried downstairs, and took the soaking clothes out of the tub. Then she put the washboard in a washtub with clean water, loaded the clothes in, and started scrubbing. It took her the better part of the morning, because she always had more than one load, and she had to start the process with each load. By the end, her arms were sore and her hands chapped.

She fed George and Evelyn their lunch at midday. Rosa had laid it all out. It was usually tomato sandwiches with vegetable soup, though sometimes the children had pea soup or chicken sandwiches. Angela brought Mrs. Spurrell her lunch in the drawing room. Angela ate her lunch, which was whatever the children were having, on the run. She cleared the table and then brought George and Evelyn upstairs for their nap. Evelyn hated her nap and usually refused to go to sleep. She cried and tried to cajole Angela into letting her stay up, but Angela was firm and took no nonsense.

With the children finally asleep, Angela went into the kitchen and got the shopping list from Rosa. It was the younger woman's job to go to the butcher's, three-quarters of a mile away, and get the meat. Some days it was flank steak, others it was ham. Occasionally fish was on the menu, and Angela always took careful note of the quality of the fishmonger's offerings. Walking to the butcher's or fishmonger's was the most enjoyable part of Angela's day. She had no children hauling on her skirts and no one telling her what to do. She was alone with her thoughts. Sometimes she thought of Oderin and her parents and brothers and sisters. Other days she merely enjoyed the Brooklyn street sights: the crowds, the endless rows of brick houses, the buggies, even the odd car. She loved to pause over the flower stalls and smell flowers she had never seen before. Most days the butcher, young, dark-eyed Giovanni Casanelli, flirted with her. “I hava the besta meata for you, Mizz Angela,” he said to the tiny, blue-eyed woman. And “Are you sura you are notta Italian?” But Angela laughed out loud and did her business; she had no real time for New Yorkers because she had her heart set on going back home.

She dropped her purchases at the Spurrells' and then went to fetch the children from school. When she got home, she got George and Evelyn up from their naps and helped the other children change out of their school uniforms. The rest of her afternoon was often filled with washing either windows, floors, or clothes. She heated up the iron and pressed the clothes at this time as well: Mr. Spurrell's white shirts, his wife's blouses, and the children's uniforms. She put the clothes and sheets away. When Mr. Spurrell came home at six-thirty, she helped Rosa serve supper to the whole family.

After clearing away the cutlery and dishes, Angela sat down with Rosa for her own meal in the kitchen. The two servants talked about their work and the family's comings and goings. On a rare occasion, Rosa would tell Angela about life on the Georgia plantation where she was born and reared. It fascinated Angela; she could not believe that one person could own another, no matter what colour they were, at least until President Lincoln changed the law and there was a war. The men in her family knew what it was like to do unpaid work, though, and she told Rosa that. The older woman's big eyes grew even wider. “Imagine, white folks doing work and not getting paid for it,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. Angela joked with her that she should come to Newfoundland and see it for herself.

After their bit of fun, it was back to work for both women. Angela stayed in the kitchen while Rosa washed the dishes, and she began work on a pile of clothing that needed mending. They were quiet as they concentrated on their work. Angela's work was usually interrupted by Mrs. Spurrell's announcement that it was time to bathe the children. After their bath, Angela got their nightclothes and helped the little ones change into them. She said good night to the children but didn't tuck them in; that was their mother's job. As the night closed in, Angela tackled one more load of wash, hers and Rosa's. She rarely got through the pile that awaited her. She was tired by this time, so every night the pile seemed to stay the same size. She didn't worry about it, though. Worrying was not her way. Do your best, she told herself, that's all you can do.

In the meantime, she looked forward to the one Sunday she had off every month. On those rare days she slept in until eight o'clock, went to nine o'clock Mass, and had a nap until her dinner with Rosa at noon. Then she read a few poems from her notebook and took the subway into Manhattan to spend the afternoon exploring the largest – and finest, to her mind – city in the world.