Waiting for Time (33 page)

The youngsters grew sullen, muttering against her heavy hand. Her own sons most of all: “Mudder'll have our backs broke afore we're half growed,” Henry, George and Alfred would complain and hide when they heard Mary's voice or saw her shadow.

It was a common sight in those times to see Mary Bundle stalking about the place, shouting orders at rocks and bushes behind which she knew her sons were crouching. She had become the overseer of the place. Without any inclination to cajole or charm, without any authority to command, she had only brutish determination to bend their will to hers.

“All hands went by what I said in them days. They might grumble and complain behind me back, but to me face they done what I wanted—they had good sense,” she told Rachel with pride.

The second spring after Thomas left was a long, wet season. The coast was continually shrouded in mist, damp seeped into the houses, clothes and bedding smelled fousty and the feel of sunshine was all but forgotten. The caplin came, were spread on flakes to dry, and then turned maggoty, fit only for dog food. This was a huge loss, since barrels of dried caplin could mean the difference between survival and starvation at the end of a long winter.

Mary decreed that more caplin would have to be caught and spread. Everyone kept watch for the flick of silver and the familiar black shadows just below the surface of the water. Day after day passed, when the sun finally broke through the mist they concluded that the small fish had struck off.

Then one morning Mary looked out from the store and saw a ripple on the water, saw small silver crescents on the beach. Snatching a casting net off the wall she raced from house to house, banging on doors, calling: “Caplin, caplin, caplin in!”

She had just lifted her hand from the door of Meg's and Ben's house when it opened and Meg stood on the step looking at her with grim disapproval.

“Don't you even know what day this is, Mary Bundle?”

Her sister-in-law's face and the sound of Charlie Vincent's voice made Mary realize why no one was about. It was Sunday, the day for service, the day when everyone sat on chairs and benches in Meg's kitchen to pray and sing hymns. Every Sunday, apart from the warmest days of summer when they held services inside the roofless walls of their church, all hands gathered like this—but Mary never went and never remembered.

Meg tried to make her son Willie take turns reading out, but it was almost always Charlie Vincent who did it. That morning they were working their way through the book of Matthew, Mary could hear every word clear as a bell, “…every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or child, or lands for my sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.…”

Mary remembers still the numbing effect the words had on her, remembers wondering what a strange religion they had that encouraged men to abandon their families. Before she even opened her mouth she had a premonition of defeat, an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation which she ignored.

“Caplin's in, Meg girl! Leave off this foolish rigmarole and come on down—might be the last sign well have of 'em this year!”

“No one in here will cast for caplin this day—we're not going to break the Sabbath for you, Mary Bundle. You might think you owns our bodies but I can tell ya, you don't have no claim on our souls!”

Meg looked down at her from what seemed to be a great height, very much as she'd done the night so many years before when she'd turfed Mary out of Ned's bed.

“Ya stunned bitch, we'll likely all starve next winter 'cause of you!” Mary had screeched.

Meg remained icily calm. “The Lord will provide for his own, now I'll take no more of your brassen tongue,” she said and closed the door.

“Stunned bugger—where was the Lord last time we starved?” Mary howled at the door. She thought of barging in to drag out her own crew. Instead, she gave the door a childish kick and stalked off down to the landwash.

On the beach Mary pulled off her boots and wool socks, knotted her skirt up around her waist and waded into the icy cold water with a casting net.

She worked for am hour or more, enjoying the way she could whirl the net out over the moving shoals of fish that swirled around her, revelling in the pile of silver bodies she was collecting above the water line, remembering how she and Tessa used to fish in the Watt with the little underwater net. Hypnotized by the shining water and circling fish she forgot her anger, completely forgot the people up in Meg's house.

“Cold of May, heat of June, send me fishes of the moon,” she chanted. Then, suddenly as they had appeared, the caplin vanished.

The harvested fish now had to be salted and spread out to dry. When Mary turned to estimate how long this tedious job would take she saw a figure bending over the great silver mound, picking fish up one by one, gathering them in her arms as if they were flowers. Mary thought she was seeing some spectre, the spirit of all the murdered fish, a woman with waist-length hair, stringy grey hair, grey face, and tattered grey clothing to which glittering fish scales clung. The creature moved without a sound, carrying each armful of fish up to the flakes, carefully spreading them in the pale sunshine, returning to gather more from the pile.

“Frightened the life out of me, it did, 'til I saw 'twas Frank Norris's wife, Ida. It was the way she moved sort of lop-sided that made me realize who 'twas,” Mary tells Rachel.

For the first time since the day she arrived on the Cape, Mary saw the mad woman close up. The doll-like face was faded to a flaky grey, like old chalk. The blue eyes did not focus and the once pretty mouth hung slightly open. Ida's dead foot made strange patterns in the wet sand as she dragged it back and forth between the flake and the pile of caplin.

They worked in silence until the beach was bare and caplin lay row upon neat row on the flake. About five barrels, Mary calculated with satisfaction. She turned to tell the apparition this but Ida was gone—vanished as completely as the caplin scull.

Later, when the worshippers came pouring out of Meg's door and down to the landwash, they allowed, a bit shamefacedly, that Mary had done a good morning's work. Although she was in fine humour by then, Mary was not to be placated by their compliments. “The better the day, the better the deed!” she shouted and marched away without mentioning Ida.

“In late years I thought about Ida Norris, maybe she wasn't pretendin' after all. I seen other women go strange like her—Rowena that time she heard Samuel Blackwood's schooner'd gone to the bottom with two of her sons on board, and Jean Loveys after her little girl were lost in the woods—maybe such sickness is real.”

“Anyhow, I never saw Ida Norris again after that day, not 'til the day she died, and that was a good spell. Just before she died she started doin' them foolish things again, same as she done when Annie and Frank were goin' at it, puttin' salt in sugar, pissin' in the water bucket, them kinds of things. Then, one day she died. Just died in her sleep like a baby.”

By the end of January both Mary and Rachel were finding it difficult to get around. The girl because of her increasing girth and Mary because of sleepless nights and daytime spells of dizziness that washed over her like dark waves.

“Don't dare tell your mother I'm not well, or Calvin either, none of them. I plans ta leave this world me own way, not with that crowd up here pickin' at me!”

“But Nan we got ta do somethin'—maybe it can be cured, maybe Aunt Tessa or Mamma knows.…”

“Stop mewin' or I'll send you off,” Mary said sharply. “'Tis old age, girl—not a thing in this world ta be done about it!”

After that, Rachel began making the hot drink she gave her grandmother stronger, mixing ground-up lily root with herbs so the old woman would sleep at night.

twelve

“Thomas Hutchings was gone three, four year—no I thinks it was three—write down three,” Mary directs Rachel
.

The old woman has a sense of urgency, is trying to hide from the girl how little help the lily root is, beginning to think she will not be able to hold on until the baby is born. But she is determined to get all of her story written into Lavinia's book
.

“Everything were strange the day Thomas Hutchings come back—I kept feeling it were all set out, learned off beforehand like them recitations people gives Christmastime. I often wondered if there were one grain of truth in anything Thomas told us that day. Regards him and Vinnie, I can only go by what she told me years and years after.”

“So we can't write it down then 'cause you don't know,” Rachel is disappointed
.

Mary cackles, “Oh I knows all right, well as anyone could—and yes, girl, we'll write it down. Vinnie was flick enough to write down all that stuff about me'n Ned, wasn't she?”

Brighter than Rachel has seen her for weeks, Mary recalls the time just before Lavinia's death when the two old women spent hours talking about early times on the Cape
.

“One day we was rhymin' off every ship ever come into the Cape—the Tern, the Molly Rose, the Seahorse, the Charlotte Gosse, and so on—remembering how the youngsters'd go around bawlin' out ‘Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!’ So's all hands would be down on the wharf waitin'. When we finished namin' off all the ships we could think of I asked Vinnie right out what she remembered about the day the Seahorse brought Thomas Hutchings back to the Cape.”

“Everything, she said—the colour of the sky, the two crackie dogs runnin' around the wharf, the hole in her sock and the raw spot on her heel, the smell from the landwash where someone was barkin' nets, the fancy stitch in Meg's knitted shawl, the way Pash held both Lizzie's babies 'tho other people kept offering to take them—everything. Vinnie was like Ned that way—everything ever happened to her was stored away so's if she had a mind to tell about 'twas like you been there.”

Gosse's new vessel was a beauty. The great four-master came billowing in towards the Cape like a white cloud on the water. There was a sigh of disappointment wheal, well back from the sunkers, she struck sail and lowered her anchor.

“Can't say as I blames him—ya wouldn't want to take a chance groundin' the likes of that,” Ben said.

As they watched, a small skiff with a man at each oar was lowered over the side and held fast while two boxes were eased down on ropes. Then a man carrying something in his arms climbed down into the skiff.

“Might be Joe and Frank comin' home,” Lizzie guessed. Since her little girl's death she had given birth to twin boys, had a miscarriage and was now pregnant again.

Brose Gill shook his head, “They'd not get free passage on a vessel like that—and I doubts Frank or your Joe'd be parted with sealin' money just to sail home.”

“Young Joe's too close to do such a thing, not while he got feet under him to walk,” Sarah chuckled. Then, as if realizing what she had said, a queer look came over her face, “Them boxes—them boxes looks almost like coffins.”

“It's Joe, I knows it is,” Lizzie whispered and crumpled in a dead faint. Meg knelt and pulled her daughter's head into her lap but no one else stirred or looked away from the small boat rising and falling as it came towards them.