Silent Time (8 page)

He adjusted his coat and gloves to ward off a deepening chill, and as he did, he once again remembered a cold January day in France. He'd been chilly that morning, too, gloomy and despairing as he stood in the wet mist drifting over the Somme Valley. It was a few months after the Armistice. He was part of a government delegation sent to inspect the battlefield near the small French town of Beaumont Hamel where so many Newfoundlanders had been killed. Proper graves hadn't yet been dug and that day dozens of corpses lay partially exposed by heavy rains.
He felt the urge to vomit, fell behind the others and suddenly found himself alone in the trenches. The word “Newfoundland” on a helmet protruding from the grass caught his attention. He picked it up without thinking, then recoiled and dropped it at the sight of the skull inside. He vomited, and stayed there for a long time bent over with his hands on his knees feeling feverish and broken.

Back home, another blow awaited him. Morris, the man who'd led him into this fray, who'd urged him to carry out what now seemed like murderous recruitment campaigns, suddenly left the People's Party in ruins and retired to England with a seat in the House of Lords. It was a nasty and cowardly retreat that only sharpened William's growing fear that the slaughter he'd encouraged had been for nothing, that all those young lives lost had served no greater cause than to elevate people like Morris into the peerage. This terrible thought had mercilessly eroded his peace during the five long years since the war. Today, it had finally reduced him to hiding away in this remote community under an old bridge that, like his life, he suddenly realized, was falling apart as he stood by powerless to stop it.

Still, he'd have to leave in a few minutes. He'd have to return to Thomas's house and find a way to reassure the good old man who, thankfully, hadn't lost a son in the war: another reason the Tobin's was a good house for William to stay.

William had been done with praying for a long time, but he couldn't deny the inarticulate yearning he felt as he gazed out from beneath the bridge and up at the pearl grey sky.

That's when he noticed the girl fishing beside the river.

Maisie was busying herself around the stove when he got back to the house. She placed a piping hot cup of tea and two tea buns in front of him.

William obligingly buttered one half of a tea bun saying, “Funny, I don't often see a girl trouting, but there's a little one over there by the brook now and, my son, she sure can handle a rod.” The girl by the river had been strangely adept with the fishing rod, had even hoisted a large trout ashore while he'd observed curiously from beneath the bridge. She displayed only a calm sense of routine as she captured the slippery thing in her hands, whacked its head on a rock and threaded it through the gills onto a gad made from a peeled alder stick.

“That must be Dulcie,” Maisie said. “Leona Merrigan's little one. The poor little thing spends whole days there sometimes, when she's not busy dragging buckets of water from the river to the house. I dare say she puts more food and water on the table than that mother of hers.”

“Now, Maisie,” said Thomas, provoking her to throw him an angry glance.

“Oh, don't mind him, Mr. Cantwell,” she said, daring Thomas to interrupt. “He's always the one to stand up for Leona Merrigan, ever since she showed her sorry face here, what, over twenty years ago now.” She lifted a damper from the stove and, with a knock of the poker, collapsed a small birch log into a bed of bright red cinders. An orange glow touched her face as she watched the small busy flames reappear. Thankfully, she refrained from adding another junk before she sat down opposite William at the table.

“Poor old Paddy Merrigan! God rest his soul, he come to a sad end,” she said, making the sign of the cross. “He got more than he bargained for when he brought that one down the shore from Three Brooks, I can tell you. He thought he had it made marryin' a young one half his age, but he soon learned the rights of that.”

“I've heard the story, of course, about the terrible thing that happened,” William said. “She lost all her children in one night to some sort of fever and, then, her husband took his own life. Isn't that how it goes?”

“They lost their three boys,” Thomas said.

“It was no one's fault but her own,” Maisie said. She caught the surprise in William's look and, likely only out of respect for his standing, quickly softened the remark. “God forgive me for sayin' it,” she said, “but it was an act of pure covetousness that brought that misery on their heads.”

Despite himself, William smiled at the way she pronounced the word.

Cubby-chus-ness
.

“I always assumed she'd remained childless,” he said. He'd seen Leona Merrigan only a few times, her dark figure shuffling from her house to the stable. She'd never shown the slightest interest in speaking to him, not even during the elections when his knock at the door went unanswered. He'd accepted the local view that she was an eccentric, perhaps disturbed woman who might well be left alone. He must have been too distracted by the war to have noted the arrival of a baby and the inevitable gossip that surrounded it.

Maisie lowered her voice. “Paddy Merrigan's younger brother, Jimmy, he did a bit of work for her over there a few years back. He went and got killed in the war afterwards, but everyone knows that's where the little one come from.”

Thomas raised his hand in a weak protest. “Maisie!”

“Oh, be quiet, b'y,” she barked. “All ya got to do is look at the youngster to see that! She's got the Merrigans all over her.”

Thomas looked at William. “Nobody really knows for sure.”

“No b'y,” Maisie cackled. “She was conceived by the Holy Spirit. You thinks I'm joking, Mr. Cantwell, but that's what fools like him thinks.”

“I don't,” Thomas protested, “but the poor soul would deserve no less after what happened to her.”

“If it hadn't been for her cubby-chus-ness those youngsters would be alive today!” Maisie declared this with unrestrained vehemence. “She went behind all our backs when she snuck out to the wreck that time.”

“It was a long time ago, Maisie,” Thomas said, “Time to forgive and forget.”

“It's not my place to forgive,” said Maisie, then bit her tongue with a defensive glance at William.

William recalled Leona Merrigan's story more clearly now: a shipwreck and a salvaged trunk of clothing infested with typhus-carrying lice. Three
boys dead in one night. The thought of it. Some stories you were better off not knowing.

Unable to contain herself, Maisie pointed emphatically toward the brook. “That poor little ghost of a child shoulda never been born. Think of the life she'll have now, all alone over there in that house with a madwoman.”

“Madwoman?” William looked to Thomas who gave a slight shake of his head.

“Never speaks to a soul,” Maisie continued, “drifting around that old farm over there like a ghost. Pretty well the only people that goes there goes at night to get a bottle of rum, and she hands it over with never a word, they say. What kind of a situation is that for a youngster?”

“I guess that's how she makes ends meet,” William said, still struck by the severity of Maisie's views.

“Oh, she's cute enough when she needs to be. She sells a few vegetables out of her garden every fall, but it's true, without the bootleggin' I dare say they'd starve altogether.”

“She don't make it or anything,” Thomas said. “There's a fella from St. Pierre keeps her supplied, though nobody ever sees him either.”

“Deeds done at night,” said Maisie, in some vague Biblical reference. William considered the many bottles of rum he'd killed in the company of Cape Shore men. Some might well have come from Leona Merrigan's.

“I can't quite put my finger on it,” he said, “but there's something about that child. I don't think I've ever seen a more lonesome creature.”

“Well, you're right there, Mr. Cantwell. She is so lonesome, sir, ‘tis a sin. All the time by herself. The poor thing goes to neither church nor school an' there's nothing to be done about it.”

William looked puzzled. “I can understand, after what she went through, that the woman might have lost her faith, but why wouldn't she send the child to school? The girl seems bright and healthy enough.”

Maisie's bony arse seemed to reply as she bent over to forage in the woodbox for a suitable junk for the fire.

“They tried sending her to the school over there,” she said, “but the poor little thing couldn't make no headway wit it.”

“Oh? Why not?”

Thomas spoke up mournfully. “Maisie, don't ya see? He don't know!”

Maisie turned and looked at William.

“Oh? Right. I never said, did I? The pity of it is, Mr. Cantwell, the poor little thing was born as deaf as a doorknob.”

“What did you say the girl's name was?” asked William, as he rose from his seat.

“Dulcie,” said Maisie, with a light laugh. “I don't know where she come up with that. It's a name I never heard on the Cape Shore.”

“I think it means ‘sweet',” he said. He was thinking of poor dead

Wilfred Owen:
Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori
.

“Sweet, is it?” said Maisie. “I heard she wasn't too sweet the way she carried on in that school, but the poor thing is more to be pitied than blamed, I s'pose. That's …”

She turned around just in time to see William leave.

William knocked gingerly on Leona Merrigan's front door. People liked to use the front door to welcome an important visitor and he decided that would likely be his best approach. The faded, crinkled paint certainly made it look as if it didn't get much use.

“Mrs. Merrigan?” he called. After a few minutes he heard a low croak from the other side.

“Yes?”

For some reason, his own deep voice struck him as an embarrassment and he made an effort to soften it.

“It's William Cantwell, Mrs. Merrigan, your Member of the House of Assembly. I realize we've never really met before and for that I must apologize. However …”

The door came open with a sharp pull and a strip of daylight fell across Leona's pale face. William was struck by the deep array of wrinkles radiating neatly out from each of her sharp dark eyes.

“Oh, hello,” he said, removing his hat. “I'm here about your daughter, Dulcie. I understand that's her over by the brook.” William's gaze faltered under the scrutiny of the bullet-like eyes. He glanced toward the brook and adjusted his spectacles.

“Yes, that's my Dulcie,” Leona said, her voice failing a bit even in that brief reply. William thought of what Maisie had said and wondered how the years of seclusion had affected the woman. It was difficult, at the moment, to judge her state of mind.

“I wonder if I could come in, perhaps for a cup of tea, so I can explain to you why …”

She closed the door with a flick of her hand and he heard her walk away.

He made a second, more careful knock, which went unanswered before he decided to speak again, this time quite loudly, through the door.

“Mrs. Merrigan, I came over here to tell you that there is a special place for children who are afflicted like your daughter. It has long been an act of public charity to send deaf students, at government expense, to the School for the Deaf in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As your government member I can help you see to it that Dulcie gets the right sort of education there, that she learns to read and write and move in the world. We can make that possible for her, Mrs. Merrigan. But you have to let me help you. Please.”

The silence behind the closed door held, so he retreated and picked his way down the rocky path.

Leona did not like it when men, especially men wearing suits, came to the door, especially the front door. They usually meant trouble, like the half dozen times that Arthur Duke, the little prick from St. John's, had come out here with his men in uniform, supposedly looking for her stash of rum. She knew damn well what he was looking for, but he never found nothing, neither rum nor anything else. Nor would he ever, if she could help it.

A good hiding place was the most important thing. That's what the Frenchman told her when he came to the door that first night, long ago now, soon after Paddy and the boys were gone. She knew then the word had travelled fast; even the rum-runners in St. Pierre had heard there was a new widow on the shore. She remembered how hard it was that night as the Frenchman, after leading her by moonlight into the Back Cove, carried the first keg of rum ashore in his arms and laid it gently on the bank like a small child. She swallowed her sobs and choked them back into her chest. She wasn't going to break down in front of a total stranger.

“You give me five dollar now,” he said, his strange accent also tearing unexpectedly at her insides, “and in two month I come back for ten more. The rest you keep.” The Frenchman was very good at doing business.

When she agreed, he took a shovel from his trap skiff and went a ways into the droke. “Now I show you to make a good place for hiding,” he said, his voice an eerie whisper in the shadow of the trees. But when she heard the shovel penetrate the dark earth her heart started to crumble again and she rushed back to the house to get the five dollars. She took it out of the tiny bit that was left from her widow's allowance. The Frenchman had good timing.

They knew that widows made the best bootleggers. The police usually let them be and, best of all, no men around to make trouble. Even back then, she wasn't the first woman on the shore to do it. Old Auntie Doyle
in Rose's Cove had been at it for years. But Leona Merrigan was the youngest.

The fact that she was widowed and alone didn't stop that young bastard from St. John's coming out and turning her place upside down. She hadn't seen him in a long time now, though. Maybe he'd given up. The fellow on the doorstep today with the glasses and salt ‘n pepper hair, with his nervous smile and his Adam's apple bouncin' in his throat when he swallowed, he had stirred a familiar fear in her. He was different from Arthur Duke, for sure, older and sadder mostly, but there was still no way she could have let him inside.