Donovan's Station (14 page)

Min always said that Tom was like Paddy, but I never saw it myself. Of course, she was only a girl when her father died, so she wouldn't have remembered the nights he came late to supper, three sheets to the wind with a couple of Spaniards or Frenchmen in his wake, or the times he misled the customers, blaming the late boots or the bad leather on the tannery when really he had sold off the material to a higher bidder. Tom was
never like that—if he made an error, he admitted it and he never allowed a servant to take the blame for something he had done or left undone. He liked his drop, and I feared he was going the way of Paddy at one point, but he had some excuse, being twice widowed before he was even thirty, and with two motherless boys to think about.

Once, when I had gone into town to see Min, after Lizzie was born, I saw him in the street, his coat awry and his hat looking the worse for wear, as he was himself, and I was so ashamed for Mm that I turned into Ayre's and pretended to be looking at the dried fruit in the bins so as not to have to meet him. He saw me, though, and saw that I had avoided him, and a week later he travelled out to the farm to tell me that such a thing would never happen again. I thought he would be angry at me, but he was only angry at himself and he promised that I would have no reason ever again to wish he wasn't my son-in-law. When he left, he kissed me as if I had been his own mother and the day he died I wept as bitterly as if he had been my son.

Min needed someone like Tom in her life—she was always far too serious, always trying to keep up with Johanna, which was impossible. When Tom died, I thought she would bring the children back to live with me, and help Kate in the dairy, but instead she got old Andrew Delgado to help set up her little shop selling fruit and confectionaries. Johanna was always a favourite of Mr. Delgado, and he did it for her sake, I expect. Min's shop is a far cry from the Delgado's. They brought that beautiful curved glass all the way from Portugal, they say. Going in there is like a trip to Lisbon or Pans—the Malaga grapes and the figs and dates and whole hands of bananas, all the exotic fruits and the colourful novelties, the painted fans and silk flags.

Min makes a living, and she gives good change. She may add a coating to the cocoanut bars when they get a little lumpy, something to fancy them up and cover the unevenness, but that's what any good cook will do, for even the best cooks make mistakes.
The ingredients are pure and wholesome, which is more than can be said for some of those fancy British confectioners. Her oranges are Delgado's rejects, but she has nowhere near the markup that old Mr. Andrew has, and Mr. Andrew, however fond he is of our Johanna, is not exactly a model of probity. When his first wife died, her sister ran all the way to Torbay to tell their mother that Margaret was finally rid of that old demon. Her mother thought that Margaret had murdered him, and was heartbroken when she realized it was Margaret who had died, not Andrew.

I've been surprised by Mm more than once in the years since she grew up. Johanna was always bold, Kate was always shy, but Mm veered first one way and then the other, and I thought that with Tom gone she'd lose her grit, give in entirely to the black dog that always seemed to sniff at her heels. She was born with a morbid streak, like Father, and looked around for misery when experience tells us that it will find us soon enough anyway.

How I used to laugh when they played Dead Baby on Saturdays. I gave those girls a dozen washings of arms and legs during the week, and wiped their faces a hundred times a day, it seemed, but Saturdays they always had a proper bath, and clean shimmies and night-dresses. When they finished their baths, they looked like little angels, all starched and white with their hair brushed out to their waists. Min used to coax the other two to lie down with her on the bed with their white nighties pulled as smooth as could be, and pretend they were all killed by the cholera and ready to be photographed. They'd manage to stay still for all of a minute, perhaps.

After Johanna got tired of being dead, the two of them would pick on poor Kate, who would do anything to please them. They'd lay her out on my little sewing table, with a shawl draped over it, and put flowers they'd fashioned out of paper and scraps of cloth around her head and feet, and a tiny Bible in her hands. Min would be the mother and Johanna the father,
and they'd cry real tears. Little Kate would be bored stiff and more than once fell asleep before they'd finished mourning her properly.

Dead Baby gave one of the neighbours a horrible turn once, for she stepped in to ask to borrow my big jam skillet one Saturday evening and thought it was the real thing. Thank goodness it wasn't Mrs. Smyth who saw them. It seems odd now that it didn't bother me, seeing them laid out like that. Perhaps it was because it just seemed like they were going to sleep. Real death was the Cadigan baby, stinking and covered in sores.

I remember once I went with Father into the woods to cut some knees he'd marked, and on the way back we saw a caribou, just one all by itself. Father had his gun, as always, but by the time he'd put in the powder and all, the deer had moved some distance away, so the shot didn't kill it, only wounded the poor creature in the gut. The two of us ran after it, and it kept stopping to look back at us, as if it wanted us to catch up, which eventually we did, and killed it of course. Father was all out of breath and trying to get his knife out, and he called to me, “Hold its head, Kezzy, talk to it a minute,” and I did. I stood in front and wrapped my arms around its antlers and I could feel the warm nose through my coat, and I don't know what I said but it seemed to work for it didn't try to break away.

Poor creature, its eyes were huge. Then Father felt with his fingers and pushed the blade of his knife down behind its head to sever the spinal cord, and it gave a shudder, just the way Egypt shuddered with pleasure when Richard came into sight, and then it was still. Such a strange feeling I had at that moment—I expected to feel disgusted to see the beautiful creature lying dead on the frosty ground but instead I was half ecstatic at what we'd just done. Helping to kill that deer seemed one of the most beautiful things I'd ever done in my life.

Paunching and butchering the carcass was a dirty job, for the ball had punctured the stomach and it was quite a mess to
work with. Father cut it all up in jig time, and wrapped it in the skin, and we left the head with the spruce knees to fetch later, but the foxes had picked it clean by the next morning. Father made me a mat hook out of the antler once it had dried, as well as three coat hooks for Mother and a crook-knife handle for Richard. I still have the mat hook in the bottom of my old Labrador box. The first mat I ever made of my own design had a caribou on it and I was so proud of it, I had Mother turn it face-side down except on Sundays. When it finally got so worn it was good for nothing but the men's muddy boots, I burned it in the stove rather than see it ruined.

Another call from Father Roche, Kate says. I can't think what he wants with us—perhaps it is because I was Bishop Flemings pet, and Ned Roche will do anything to be seen as his successor. I don't know why he is out in Topsail anyway. Hiding his tuberculosis from Archbishop Howley, perhaps. He'd never make the Terna if that was known. Or perhaps he's just courting the likes of R.J. Murphy and the wealthy Protestants. He puts himself forward too much—I don't care for that in a man, not even in a celibate. It's the quiet, steady ones who have always gained my respect, men like Mr. Donovan.

The evening I first took notice of Mr. Donovan was like any other. I had decided to break up a small bit of meadow and plant flowers for the market in St. John's, just to try it out, and had arranged for two men who had been working on the railway line to give me a week of work when they were finished. I agreed to pay them the usual wage, and to give them their meals, and in addition I told them they could sleep in the barn on condition that they did not smoke except out of doors. I under-stood that both were discharged naval men, so I knew if they said they would not light their pipes, there was a good chance they would not, for most former military men have learned the
hard way to obey orders given for good reason, or even for no reason at all.

They worked well for me, or so Kate said for I did not have the time to oversee what they were at, so I was not discomfited when I heard someone stamping and scraping his boots outside the kitchen door that evening as I finished kneading down the bread. I have no idea where Kate was—usually she was with me in the kitchen, but this Saturday night I was alone—but I was neither young nor frail, nor helpless either, and a visit from a transient labourer was no threat to me. I hardly bothered to look up when he entered the kitchen, but finished wrapping my bread pan in a layer of old quilts before putting it to rise behind the stove.

“I've a deadeye, Missus,” he said, and held his hand out to me, palm up, as simple and plain as a child.

“And what is that to me?” I asked, not in an unmannerly way, for I had no reason to feel hostile. I was merely curious.

“I will be little use to you on Monday if I do not do some-thing for it now, and old Scrappy Jack can barely piss straight without someone telling him to, so if you want your field ready before the snow falls, you will need me to see to it. And I cannot fix a deadeye on my left hand, since I am contrary.” It took me a moment to realize he meant that he favoured his left hand rather than his right.

“Sit,” I said, and tapped the table to indicate where he was to settle. A good worker needs looking after, just as a good horse does, and I had no reason to think this man was not earning my dollar honestly. He came forward and waited with a stillness and patience that I well appreciated as I rooted around in the barrel chair in the corner for a bit of wool and a needle. “Let me see the gall” I said, once I had found what I needed, and he turned his hand, palm upward, on the table. In the middle of the palm was a hardened blister the size of a shilling. Settling into a chair, I laid out my instruments—a hank of
wool, a needle, a jar of hardened pork fat, and my smallest scissors. I lifted his hand into mine, and was suddenly, awkwardly aware that my own hand was as large and as callused as this young labourers.

“It's been a trouble all summer,” he said. “Mostly I ignore it, but the gall just gets bigger each time.” He was not complaining, just telling me. I took the bit of wool and dipped my fingers in the fat before I began to twist it into yarn. He said nothing more and I said nothing more. For a full minute I tried to thread the yarn into the needle, but my close-vision had recently begun to fail me and even with the stiffened yarn I was clumsy.

“Let me,” he said, and taking the needle and yarn from me he quickly threaded them.

“Are you certain you trust me to do this?” I asked, and I was surprised to hear a slightly unsure note in my own voice.

“I have been eating your cooking for three days now, and you haven't poisoned me yet,” he replied with a laugh. “In fact, I can hardly remember the last time I ate so plainly and so well.”

“I cook plain because that's what the men want,” I replied quickly, even more astonished at the hurt note in my own voice than I was at his praise. Most men notice what you give them to eat, but don't think to comment if it is good, only complain when it is not.

“I trust your hands even if I don't trust your eyes,” he answered, and once more placed his hand in mine. I took the threaded needle and quickly pierced the gall, drawing the greased yarn through so that the two sides were opened, and then I quickly snipped off the ends so that there was about an inch of yarn left in the palm of his hand. I bedded the gall in a bit of raw wool and bound it with a strip of linen.

“Done,” I said, laying the scissors down on the table, and trying to look as if I was sure of myself.

“And well done, I'd say,” he responded, and laughed. “Has
your eyesight gone recently?” he asked. “My sisters all lost their close-vision when they stopped having babies.” I didn't know where to look. A common labourer, in my own kitchen, saying such things to me. He must have noticed how I stiffened, for he immediately pushed back his chair and stood. “Forgive me if I have been too familiar,” he said, not meeting my eye, which would have undone me altogether. “I was a great deal with women in my early life and I forget sometimes that there are things that are not remarked upon outside the family.” And before I knew it he was out the door.

I did not see Mr. Donovan the next day, for I went over to Topsail to attend mass, and stayed the night there visiting with the priest's housekeeper, Mrs. Coady, but on Monday evening when I got back, he stopped me as I was going to look at a cow that had been sick.

“I am looking for a place for the winter, Mrs. Aylward. I was wondering if you could help me,” he said, as he held the barn door open so I could pass through.

“We don't keep anyone over the winter, Mr. Donovan, I'm sorry,” I answered.

“I'm not looking for a berth,” he said, most politely. “I am going to speak to Mr. Smyth about using the tilt in the back wood-lot on his property, in exchange for working on his fences. But I understand from Mr. Walsh that you are going into St. John's tomorrow to get your winter provisions, and I thought perhaps I might go in the long-cart with you. If the matter is settled, I could carry back some things I will need.”

I thought about his request as I examined the cow, which did not seem particularly unhappy, having consumed a half gallon of blackstrap molasses that morning, according to Kate. The man was civil and there seemed no reason to refuse him.

“I'd be glad for the company, Mr. Donovan,” I said, “particularly if you will give me a hand loading up my own things. I find the storehouse boys at Ayre's are sometimes careless in the
way they stow the barrels and I'd rather not lose my flour on the road.” I paused for a moment and then drew a breath and risked being thought a gossip. “A word about Mr. Smyth—he's a capable, honest man, but he often leaves his memory in the bottom of a glass, so when you speak to him on business, address your remarks to him but make sure Mrs. Smyth is at hand. She is the real brains behind that operation. That way, whatever terms he agrees to, you can count on them remaining the same.”