Far From Home (12 page)

She would lie in bed, snug under her blankets and counterpane and read her Christmas book.
Little Women
was sure to make her smile.

11
MISSUS FRANCES'S
BOXING DAY VISIT

O
n Boxing Day, Clarissa and Cora stood on the orphanage steps looking towards a shed across from the orphanage. Missus Frances would soon be on her way to take gifts to children in isolated places. The girls watched a Labrador driver rigging his komatik with a rifle, axe, sleeping bag, medical kit, snowshoes, and whale meat and blubber for his team of seven husky dogs. An extra pair of sealskin mittens hung over the horns of his sled. Harbour dogs were barking excitedly as the driver got lashings and ropes out of the shed, and tackled his huskies. When he drew up by the orphanage door, the yelping dogs were so excited that if Missus Frances hadn't hurried out and got into the deerskin-lined seat, there was a chance they might have broken their traces. It was good that cold weather was holding. If it had gone mild and then frozen, the jagged ice path would have been like knives against the feet of the dogs as they ran.

Uncle Aubrey brought out gifts and supplies, and the driver piled them into the coach box fastened to the komatik with leather cords. Missus Frances wrapped herself in a sealskin robe and the Eskimo driver snapped his walrus-hide whip. “Ohoosh! Ooisht!” rose in the frosty air. The dogs made a rush over crisp snow shining like glass under an ice-blue sky.

Clarissa's mind followed the komatik over the hills, black branches shaking away snow as they flicked against its sides. The driver's voice would be sharp against the ears of the dogs. “Ouk!” turned the team right; “Urrah! Urrah!” turned it left, and “Ouk oo-ist, hoo-eet!” made the husky dogs go forward. She thought about the komatik going up over Fox Farm Hill, past Dr. Grenfell's castle, past the Tea House and the strange box wrapped in snow like an unopened Christmas box.

Only once had Clarissa gone past Tea House Hill and around the pond. “It is twelve miles to Devil's Pond, and it is the dead of winter, so dress warmly,” had been Miss Elizabeth's caution last year. Clarissa had pulled on extra clothes, including her double mittens, and had hurried out to sit on the sled drawn by a team of husky dogs, their fur parting like pompoms in the wind. Cold wind had come like a naked blade against her face as the dogs jolted her over high ground and low, and down into the valley where the silver skim of Devil's Pond lay. The komatik came back down Fox Farm Hill and along the road. It pulled up by the orphanage, and the driver hauled out his walrus-hide whip and called “Aw” to stop the dogs. By then, frost was biting down on Clarissa's fingers so hard she could barely get her hands on her crutches. When she did, she started up the steps, leaning heavily on her crutches and crying. Tears had frozen on her eyelashes by the time she reached the top step. Miss Elizabeth held the door open without speaking as Clarissa dragged herself inside. She stood there trying to fold her fingers inside her palms to stop the burning pain.
I'm a crybaby,
she thought.
I
won't ever get to go on a sled again
. And she hadn't.

Now Clarissa stared wistfully, visualizing Missus Frances and her driver going past deer standing silently, and snowbirds rustling in the trees. Like a ship in a headwind, the sled would ride over the hills and dip down into the rutted valleys on its way to settlements such as Flowers Cove. The mistress would be gone for two days. Anything could happen on such a trip. Clarissa hoped no harm would follow or meet Missus Frances. The brake stick could snap off the komatik going downhill . . . the dogs could get loose or tangled up in their traces . . . her driver could run off . . .

As soon as the mistress and the dog team were out of sight, Clarissa turned to Cora. “We should go see Esther. I'd like to take her a hard knob candy and a book.”

Cora shrugged. “Miss Elizabeth would skin us if she found out. You know she has warned us not to go marming around the harbour – mixing up with the likes of the harbour crowd.”

Clarissa looked at her. “It will always be like this,” she said flatly, “one lot of people thinking they are finer than another lot, even though we are all from the same first skin.”

“You mean Adam's skin?” Cora looked at her sceptically.

Clarissa rolled her eyes. “Well, I didn't mean Santa's skin.”

Missus Frances, her face windburned, came back looking sad. She stood before the children at breakfast and told them that she and her driver had stopped at a small hut made of crude boards, just a hovel with a sod roof. They had found a mother with children scantily clad pressed against her, hiding their faces in the folds of her ragged dress. A baby lay in a wooden crate, diapered in moss and wrapped in sheep's wool. Their Christmas tree stood as bare as the trees outdoors, even plainer. The trees outdoors were decorated with snow and ice crystals. During the night the children's father, thinking he had heard the sad cry of a trapped rabbit, dressed and made for the woods, hoping to bring his family a Christmas dinner. The mother was waiting anxiously for him when Missus Frances and her driver showed up.

The mistress looked around the dining room at her charges; there was a quaver in her voice as she finished her story. “The children lost their dreary look at the sight of Christmas coming by dog team. They were timid at first. Each reached shyly to take an orange, looking at it in their hand as if they were seeing the sun come up for the first time. One little boy tried to eat it, peel and all. He shivered as the zest of the orange touched his tongue. Those children would be happy for warm stockings to put their feet in, never mind having them to hang up on Christmas Eve.”

Clarissa wished she could give the children her porridge – wished, too, she could go home and let one of the children take her place.

12
NEWS OF CLARISSA'S FAMILY

N
ew Year's Day came and went with the burning of the Clavie. The boys split up old blubber casks and set them alight, smoking the sky to open the new year.

Six days passed and then it was Old Christmas Day. It came with a golden shine on trees, their dark limbs lifted like fingers in crystal gloves. Conkerbells hung off the orphanage and fence like silver carrots with a golden shine. The older girls got busy taking down Christmas decorations that trimmed the dining room windows and walls. Clarissa helped undress the tree until it was as bare as when it left the forest near Fox Farm Hill.

“Bad luck it will be indeed if we keep any sign of Christmas after its twelve days are spent,” Ilish tutted, shooing the older boys to the task of taking away the tree. They laughed and poked at one another, and pulled sprigs off the tree, tossing them into the faces of anyone near. Miss Elizabeth heard them and put a stop to their bantering with a flash of her eyes in their direction. Owen and Peter picked up the battered tree with mournful faces, as if they were lifting a dead body. They dragged it outdoors and through the snow to the shed where it would be limbed for firewood. Other boys went off to the woods to cut a turn of wood for the furnace and fireplaces. They were always watchful for the footin's of bears and foxes as they hauled the wood home by sled.

Clarissa stared out her dormitory window, feeling that the spirit of Christmas had closed its wings forever. She hadn't minded that December carried more night than day when she had Christmas to anticipate. Now that January was here, she hated to wake to night staining daylight, and not fading until after breakfast.

She brightened at the thought that she would have another special day to look forward to. It would carry her through this cold month, and the vexation of being dragged to school by boys who wanted to be running on their own. Her twelfth birthday was coming. She rolled her eyes at the sight of Peter turning heel over hand in the snow. It was bad luck that they had been born on the same day, if not in the same year. In a few days she would have to share a birthday with him. She and Peter would blow out the candles together, his head leaning in towards the cake as if it was all his.

She had been almost ten before she learned the real month and day of her birthday. She was about to celebrate her birthday with Jakot and Ettie in August when Nurse Smith came back from a trip away. She told Clarissa and Miss Elizabeth that she had dropped in on Mrs. Dicks in Humbermouth, and found out that Clarissa had turned nine on the twenty-seventh of January.

“Well, my child,” she had announced, “your father is a train engineer, and your mother looks after a kitchen full of children.”

“Boys or girls?” Clarissa had asked in awe, wanting to touch the nurse for having been in the same place as her family. There were so many questions racing after each other that they piled up, clogging her mind, even while the nurse was answering her first question.

“Likely a half-dozen of one and half a dozen of the other, I should think,” the nurse said, smiling. “You will celebrate a real birthday now, with your true date, instead of getting lumped in with the other children who have birthdays in August.”

“Yes, we'll wait for January,” said Miss Elizabeth, ignoring Clarissa's disappointed look at being cheated out of her birthday for that year.

On the Saturday following Old Christmas Day, Jakot and Owen shovelled a path from the orphanage to the road; school began again on Monday. Clarissa stood on the steps watching them. Then she made her way down the icy steps to the ground where she looked longingly at boys and girls tossing snowballs at one other, laughing and slobbering into their mitts. She wanted to pelt all of them with snowballs. Instead, she sat making tunnels in the snow with her crutches, and building pyramids with her hands. Cora and Treffie joined her, digging big holes in the snowdrifts.

The boys soon finished their shovelling, and began to build a fort. They called to the girls to build their own fort, so they could have a battle. Clarissa sat on the ground, helping to dig the hole that would be the girls' fort. She could hear the boys yelling: “Ours 'll be bigger than yours.” The boys were using the shovels they had been given to dig snow away from around the orphanage.

Clarissa swung herself inside the girls' fort.

“You can't be in the fort,” Peter called. “We're going to war.”

“I'll come,” she said, lifting a resolute chin.

“You can't come. If there's anything wrong with your legs, you can't be conscripted.”

“But it's just a toy war. We're using snowballs, not cannonballs.”

“In with you then,” he said, shrugging.

The girls squealed and shouted, firing snowball after snowball until Peter screamed in triumph, “We've made the most hits. You girls come out with your arms up.”

“But my crutches will fall down,” Clarissa called back.

“That's the fun,” he said grinning. “Surrender with your face and eyes in a snowbank.”

Clarissa pressed her armpits down on her crutches and tried to balance herself on the lumpy snow. She would meet the enemy eye to eye.
I'm not going to fall on my face,
she told herself, just before she slipped and went down.

Cora looked at Clarissa sympathetically. “We'll go indoors and play Snakes and Ladders
.”

“We could build a snow woman,” said Treffie, coming up beside Clarissa.

“There's no such thing,” said Cora, going up the steps.

“There will be,” Treffie called, “when I'm finished.”

Miss Elizabeth was just opening the door to come outside when the wind veered up like a demon, grabbing at her coat and swirling her shawl around her head. Her muskrat hat sailed into the air. The fierce wind pushed back the door and then slammed it in her face. “Newfoundland, this wild plantation,” she muttered. “What an adventure this has turned out to be!”

The wind settled as suddenly as it had come. Cora and Clarissa looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Too bad she didn't say a naughty word and have to wash out her own mouth,” Cora said with a wicked grin.