Donovan's Station (20 page)

I didn't go to sleep for a long time, though, for once I was settled, Mr. Donovan did the most extraordinary thing. He picked up Paddys concertina, undid the straps, and then he began to play it as quietly as a lullaby. Some of the tunes were strange to me, Portuguese or Spanish perhaps, and some were the old songs from home, but they were all so sad and so beautiful and I had never heard the concertina played like that, for Paddy had always made it jump and howl like a banshee. I fell in love with Mr. Donovan as he played the concertina, and if that isn't a miracle nothing is.

In the morning, when I woke, the kitchen was still warm and Mr. Donovan and Kate were sitting at the table eating fried potatoes and bread and butter. When he saw I was awake, he brought me some more tea.

“I'll be going to St. John's today, to report to the magistrate about the mummers. I'll give them the name you told me and the descriptions. I'm also sending a message to Manuels, to have the priest read the banns next Sunday,” he said. “It's the only thing for it, now.”

He was right, of course. There was no going back. We were married in the hungry month of March, and I counted the days. He made me teach him to sign his name, so that he wouldn't
shame me in front of the children, but he never got beyond that in his lessons, though he taught me a thing or two.

Probably the only thing I didn't tell Mr. Donovan that night was that I wanted to have a railway hotel, but I didn't at the time know such a thing existed, though he probably did, having traveled in his early years. As the first stop on the railway, we never got many real travelers since on a good day it is only twenty minutes or so from St. John's, but being the first stop also made us the cheapest for picnics and society outings, and these were usually booked in advance so it worked out quite well right from the start.

Within a few years, I had my new house, and we used the old cottage for overflow and for the occasional long-term boarder, such as the station manager and the Big Galoot. Mr. Tooton made a postcard for us— a fine view showing both storeys and the verandah fight off the dining room, with Kate in a carriage out front. We had six bedrooms, and a big back kitchen and pantries enough for a month of Sunday dinners. Even Sophie Maher didn't have as beautiful a prospect as the Waterford Valley affords. And she wasn't as good a cook as I was; Mr. Donovan said so.

Wet and still. Yesterday evening a pack of dogs came through the yard and two of the buggy harnesses broke when the horses bolted. One of the buggies was damaged and the horse is lame. Mumma would never allow Mr. Donovan to use poisoned bait or to shoot the dogs, but it is a trial. Mr. Walsh says that in the spring, someone posted a sign further along the road that said “For Sale
—
Delicious Lamb” and scribbled underneath was the comment “One thousand roving dogs can't be wrong.”

Such a quiet morning—Monday is Sunday in the summer, as Mr. Donovan used to say. Kate thinks we should close on Mondays, but we get so few customers that it is very little trouble to stay open and it is good advertising to be open seven days a week. I can hear Dermot fixing the railing for the horses—it's past time he bestirred himself and did something useful. There was a day when I was as good with a hammer as I was with a mathook, but Kate's not like that— though I must admit she is much better with the accounts than I ever was, and I wasn't too bad.

During that first winter in Western Junction, I had to learn to fadge for myself. I was determined that the money left over from the sale of the contents of the shop would be used as sparingly as possible, in case things did not work out, but I had not realized how jarring this change in lifestyle would be for the
girls. Like me, they had gone to school from an early age, but little else had been required of them except knitting and the care of their own clothes, and small chores such as cleaning lamps. The apprentices had filled the gully each morning, and I had emptied the slop buckets and night soil, so they had been exempt from even these regular duties.

I was determined that we should be self-sufficient as soon as possible, and had purchased two cows, as well as a pig and a number of fowl, to raise over the winter, and as part of my agreement with the Lees in Petty Harbour, who were still cultivating my garden on shares, I obtained what I hoped would be sufficent fodder for the animals and vegetables for ourselves. Since I had to teach the girls their lessons myself, it was essential that they help me with the household chores as there simply weren't enough hours in the day to allow me to complete all that had to be done.

Each morning, I would rise and light the stove before going out to milk the cows and check my snares. It was an unusually good season for rabbits that year and I discovered that the woods at the back of my property were full of the creatures. I showed the girls how to push sticks into the ground to narrow the rabbit paths and lead them into the snares, but at first they absolutely refused to kill any of the rabbits they caught alive, even the ones that had had their eyes pecked out by the crows, although they were happy enough to eat them after they had simmered for an hour or so in a pot full of carrots, turnip and potatoes. Rabbits were all the fresh meat we had that first year, except for a fowl for Christmas, and every one I skinned for the pot was one less to eat my cabbages the following summer.

It was lonely for all of us in the beginning, but worst I think for Johanna who missed her classmates and the bits of music and such that she got from the nuns. She did what she could with her sisters, putting on a Tom Thumb wedding with Kate as the bride and Min as the groom, taking the part of the priest
herself, but I was a poor audience, being usually too tired and too worried about the work left undone to enjoy it properly. After a time I got to know my nearest neighbours and arranged for two of the Walsh girls to come and learn their lessons with my girls. In exchange, their father took some of my butter and cream to town when he went to sell his own produce. Like my parents, I found myself writing letters and such for the people in the area who had little or no schooling, and like them I found that there were a surprising number of willing hands when there was heavy work to do that I could not manage by myself.

There were times when I longed for the companionship of a friend such as Judith, someone I could talk to without restriction, but the women I encountered were just as tired and just as busy as me, and there was a constraint between us because of my widowed status. The married men dared not speak one unnecessary word to me, and would not cross over the doorstep for fear someone would see and report them to their wives. Occasionally a boy from down Neville's Pond way would come round, ostensibly looking for odd jobs but in reality looking over Johanna, but lonely as she was Johanna quickly made it clear that she was not going to marry a farmer, and they would soon drift away.

Once the snow was down, things settled somewhat. The occasional trips to St. John's stopped, lessons became more interesting as I had more time to give to them, and the girls began to realize that their comfort was more or less in their own hands. I began insisting that they take their turn milking the cows in the evening, and it sometimes took all three of them as much as two hours, but the cows got milked and it was one less chore for me. Johanna was in charge of the cows, while Min looked after the pig, which was fed mostly on skimmed milk and dried caplin. Kate took a particular interest in the hens, and on Easter morning she presented me with the first of our own
eggs. I boiled it up and shared it between the girls, two spoonfuls each, and it was as fine an egg as the Queen herself ever ate.

I thought about potatoes a lot in those days. Once, before Paddy died, there was an agricultural fair held in St. Johns, the best ever put on in the colony, and we all went. Paddy was bored by it, but I saw there a display of about eight kinds of potatoes from the west coast of the island, all different colours and sizes, each with its own special quality, and I marvelled at the variety. I had grown Black Minions in Petty Harbour, although I knew there were varieties that gave a higher yield. Father liked their dark red skins and their yellow interior flesh, and I liked them because they were such good eating, but I had always wanted to try others as well. Before I left St. Johns, I had gone around all the small shops, looking for different varieties, and I now had four kinds besides the Minions, packed away in sawdust waiting for spring.

These days, we have Jenny Linds and the Setawayos, Green Mountains and Kerr's Pinks, but in those days there were not such well-known kinds and it was necessary to watch your own crops and your neighbours' very carefully to try and discern some pattern in the growth. Some kinds of potatoes seemed more resistent to canker than others, and my own experience had been that the use of seaweed along with the caplin cut down on infection. We all used bottle kelp on cabbage—the substance in the knobs worked wonders with the white maggots—but the area around Petty Harbour was generally not suitable to the seaweed harvest and I was determined to find a potato that carried its own resistant properties.

In March, while the ground was still frozen, I bundled up the girls and we went with our neighbours to dig peat. Each farm then had a shallow pit dug into the ground for making fertilizer. We cut the peat with a sharpened shovel and then broke it into powder before spreading it in the pit. On top of the peat went gurry and guts, caplin and sewerage, anything and everything
that could add a little richness to our poor soil. Every time a cart went into town with butter or vegetables or wood for sale, it came back with a load of rotting, stinking refuse that was added to the mix.

That day, as we walked home in the dark behind the cutter, I could have been as content as I had ever hoped to be, if it had not been for the children. I had dressed them in their oldest clothes, layer upon layer, but their hands were chafed raw by the shovels and their cheeks were burned red with the wind and cold. Seeing them drag themselves, one foot after the other, along the frozen mud of the path, almost weeping from exhaustion, I wondered if they would ever adjust or if I had made the biggest mistake of their young lives in taking them away from the town and moving them to the country.

As I pulled my cuffs off, I realized that my wedding ring had worn through from contact with the shovel and was caught on the wool inside the mitt. The children were cold and shaking from fatigue, so I had no time to fuss, just bent the soft gold open and pulled my hand free, and dropped the ring into a broken cup I had laid on the mantlepiece to be mended.

I made them a meal of hot oatmeal before putting them to bed, and then went to see to the milking. Usually the cows soothed me, but this evening I could not settle into the usual rhythm and they sensed how disturbed I was. As I walked back from the barn, a little owl that had been hunting mice in a rock wall nearby flew out of the dark almost into my face before going off into the woods. Later, I sat by the stove and prepared to say my rosary. I had promised myself I would say the rosary every night for a year for the souls of Mrs. Smyth s children, the only thanks she would accept for all her kind help, and the thought of her six girls, buried in the cold gound, while mine lay sleeping in the next room, added to my melancholy.

Three of Mrs. Smyths children died in one week, of the cholera, and the others died within two years of the rest. Some
blamed the sailors who came from foreign ports, some said it was the fault of the Irish immigrants who drank and failed to keep the Sabbath. In my own mind, I was quite certain that Dr. Carson had been right when he blamed the dirt and filth of the town for the deaths of so many from cholera and other diseases. The narrow, cramped houses kept what little sun we got from reaching into the streets, and there were dogs and pigs, with all their filth, in half the houses and cellars of St. Johns. The stench from the seal oil vats made breathing a torture in May and June, and there wasn't enough lime in the entire country to clean the gutters and alleys of the place.

As I sat there, holding my beads and looking at the mark on my ringer where my wedding ring had once been, I searched my heart for solace. The owl began calling from the woods, and I thought of the potatoes I grew in Petty Harbour, of sitting on a three-legged stool weeding them out and holding my breath—when the horseflies hovered and buzzed and landed on my outstretched arms, feeling the good luck passing into me from their tiny pitchy-paws. I knew then that I could not bring myself or my children back into the chaos of St. Johns. Sure of my decision, and calm once again, I made the sign of the cross and said the Memorare before I began my fifteen decades.

Rain. The Sons of St. Andrew booked Squires Station for their annual dinner this year. Good riddance to them
—
still haven't managed to get the boot marks off the ceiling from last year. And they claim the Irish are savages.

The sound of the train is so soothing in the evenings. I never guessed when they first put the tracks through that I could feel that way about it. Mr. Reid used to say that before the railway came, travel meant coaxing a jaded nag over the bogs and barrens or tossing about in a fog in a stinking jack-boat, with as good a chance of drowning as of reaching your destination. I suppose a great many people agreed with him, which is why they turned out in such numbers for that first run. I know that for the fishermen, who had no work between September and Christmas, the work on the railbed was very welcome.

When the railway was first built, it cut right through the woods in back of my property and I resented it. I was paid, of course, but it wasn't the money I wanted, it was the land. That bit of woods was my refuge when I needed to get away from the children. I could cut a few sticks to mend a fence or put in the stove, I could snare a rabbit, or I'd just sit on a log and think about what I had to do around the place. Sometimes, in the early days, I'd go and cut a bit of brouse for the cows—young birch and dogwood—to save on hay. The girls used to picnic
back there, and I knew they were safe. Then the railway came and the woods were full of strange men, cutting and hauling and tearing everything up.