Far From Home (24 page)

“Lie here,” the sailor said, putting a pillow on the seat. She lay down, exhausted with thoughts of going home. Her mind felt as if it were latched to St. Anthony like an ose egg to a rock as the ship moved out to sea, bumping over waves, slapping down on them as if they were giant boulders. She shuddered to think that she was in the middle of a large ocean in a ship that could sink like the
Titanic,
whose grave she hoped she wouldn't have to cross. She curled up on the seat, her braces still on her legs, and let her body go limp. “
Hush, hush, sharp wind knitting seas
into a hundred knots. Drift, drift, sweet wind; flow free
your scarf of a hundred breaths
,” she murmured as she drifted into sleep.

Clarissa knew nothing else until a voice hauled her to her senses.

“You'm a sleepyhead fer sure,” the sailor was saying. “But yer here now in Battle Harbour ter wait for der
Segona
to take yar home. So, 'op, 'op.”

She followed him upstairs and was winched down into a smaller boat that would take her ashore. In the twilight, she stared at Battle Harbour, a cold, empty-looking place. There was hardly a tree in sight. Outside the hospital there were only a few crude dwellings, including fishing stages; the stink of fish was overpowering. The sailor helped Clarissa onto Croucher's wharf. She steadied herself and followed him over a bumpy path to the nursing station.

Nurse Barter, one of Dr. Grenfell's summer nurses, greeted her with a smile and a nod. “Come with me; your room is all ready upstairs.”

The nurse stopped outside a small room. Inside, a young girl was already asleep in a narrow bed. A lit lamp stood on a tall bureau.

“Goodnight then,” the nurse said, and left. Clarissa stared at the girl. There were sores on her hands and her mouth. Clarissa went into the room shuddering at the thought of catching the girl's sores. She was tempted to sleep on the floor. Instead, she slid into bed with her head at the foot and curled herself up like the tail of a cooked lobster. Despite her nap on the schooner, she soon fell asleep.

“Come on then, down to the kitchen for breakfast,” Nurse Barter called, stirring Clarissa from sleep. The other girl was already gone from the bed, evidence of her illness left behind on the pillow.

Clarissa washed her face in the basin sitting on a nightstand beside the bed, wiping away the salty crusts of dried tears around her eyes.

She was coming down the stairs when she saw Dr. Grenfell at the bottom, speaking to a German doctor she'd seen once before at the orphanage. Dr. Grenfell looked up, and Clarissa's smile vanished when he remarked to the other physician, “She was a mess when we got her.”

What does he mean by that remark
? she thought, as she made her way to the kitchen. She sat at a small table and Nurse Barter brought her bread and jam from the pantry.

***

Dr. Grenfell asked Nurse Barter to get Clarissa ready for an examination in the infirmary. The German doctor was in the room with them when Dr. Grenfell said again, “Yes, she was a mess when we got her.” The nurse helped her climb up on the table. Dr. Grenfell looked at her body and wondered aloud about the dents in her hip. “Why do you have hollows in your hip? Were they made by running sores? Oh, I know,” he murmured sheepishly. “I did that. I put them there myself when I was trying to stretch the muscle.”

Clarissa remained calm during the doctors' examination, displaying the sunny disposition she was supposed to have, but that night she lay on the bed crying as Dr. Grenfell's words banged at her mind. After awhile, her eyelids slipped together like curtains against the light, and she fell asleep.

***

Night after night, she hobbled back and forth across the veranda at the nursing station, crying. Her heart longed for St. Anthony. One evening she watched the green and lavender Northern Lights: Merry Dancers prancing across the sky, promising that the next day would be calm and sunny. Another night, the moon was so full and seemed so near, she reached up her hand as if she could hold it like a sand dollar.

On the tenth day, Clarissa saw the
Segona
cutting through the waters, its flag flying and spars lit up with multicoloured lights. Her heart felt as if it were caught in her throat. She was really going home. Her insides seemed to fill with fluttering moths, their discarded caterpillar bodies heavy in the pit of her stomach.

“Come on,” Nurse Barter urged Clarissa. “Make haste!” She grabbed Clarissa's arm, pulling on her, hardly giving her time to get the crutches under her arms. Once she got to the wharf, a rough-faced man lifted her into a small boat, and the crew rowed them out to the
Segona
.

Clarissa had just gotten settled in the bunk of a deck cabin when she was called for supper. The dining room had two long tables: one for the passengers, and one for the captain and the crew. The steward, dressed in a spotless white coat, asked her if she wanted fish or roast beef. The main course came with a salad topped by the cook's special dressing. There were soda biscuits and cake or pie for dessert. For a moment she forgot about everything but the food. She ate her supper joyfully, finishing it off with what the cook called a “civil” orange. Miss Elizabeth would have called it a Seville orange.

The next morning when she went for her breakfast, she was happy not to have to eat porridge. She filled up on milk, toast, eggs and bacon as she sat facing the porthole. Suddenly the sight of waves splashing against the porthole made her stomach lift and turn. A voice that sounded as if it was a long ways off called out, “See that container, with the cardboard lining, down be yer feet? Dat's fer yucking in.” She retched into the gum bucket, feeling as if her insides would split open with the force.

The steward hurried towards her with a wet cloth. “Yesterday it was so windy there was a lop on me soup, but today, me girl, 'twill be calm enough for you to stare the sea in the face and show it yours mirrored dere as plain as day. We'll 'ave a relish for yer puddick: a fine meal of Jiggs dinner.” The thought made Clarissa's stomach roll like the schooner.

From then on, she lay in her bunk without washing or changing her clothes and without eating. When her stomach settled a bit, thoughts of the strangers she would soon meet drifted into her mind. She remembered Missus Frances telling her, “Clarissa, you are going home to be with people to whom you belong.”

But I don't know those people
, she thought.
I don't know
what it feels like to belong to someone.
Her heart leaped
.
Maybe I'll have a sister who will share a bed with me. She'll
curl around my back and wrap her arms around me when I'm
having bad dreams
.
We'll be spoon sisters
.

One memory swirled inside her head until it became a clear image. She and her parents were in a little dory; they were going to Wild Cove on a picnic. The dory moved through the water, tickling it into laughter. When they reached the beach, Clarissa's mother jumped out into the shallow water and lifted her out of the boat. She waded ashore, holding Clarissa in her arms, while Clarissa's father hauled the dory onto the beach. They settled on a grassy mound and ate a lunch of bread slathered in molasses, and dried caplin her father roasted on a fire. Clarissa sat on a log and watched her parents swim. She touched a weed that had pretty, white flowers, and then put her fingers to her mouth. The yellow dust from the flowers made her stomach sick – the way she was feeling now.

The creak of the cabin door opening startled Clarissa as she lay curled around herself.

“Sure, 'tis a sad little gurl you be,” a gruff voice said.

She looked up to see Captain Simmons. His head was topped with a hard cap trimmed with a gold braid matching the ones on the sleeves of his blue uniform. Clarissa thought it dressed up his face in a royal way. “Yes,” she answered in a muffled voice. A tear slipped from the corner of one eye and rolled down her cheek into her mouth.

“But yer goin' home.”

“I thought I was, but now I know I'm leaving home. I won't know anyone, and no one will want a stranger.” She began to sob.

“Yer family is bringing home their own flesh, a part of ‘em dat was missing. Just like a part of you have been missing all dese years. I've met yer farder, sure, the train engineer – and a right nice man.” His voice softened. “Dry yer eyes, me maid. You'm too pretty a gurl to let yer eyes fill with water. The salt'll fade the blue.” He squinted. “If yer eyes was blue, but yers is as brown as earth.”

She didn't answer, but she let him wipe her eyes dry with his red handkerchief. When he tipped his hat to her, she smiled and settled down on her bunk and went past the grinding, trembling sounds of the boat into a deep sleep.

She slid into a wild dream. Viking warriors had pulled all the nails out of the schooner. It fell apart, dropping her into the Atlantic Ocean. She drifted on a boat rib. It slipped under the Tea House floor into the mysterious box. Her body was suddenly wrapped in musty fur, her head inside a skull.

31
A SISTER'S CONFESSION

C
larissa's eyelids flew open as her body made an abrupt shift in the bunk with the lurching of the schooner. There was a sudden stillness: the engine had been cut. Then came the racket of voices and feet moving, and the clanging of iron chains thrown out to secure the
Segona
to the gump posts of the wharf.

I must be home! I'll see my family soon
. A tremor went through her body.
What if I don't like anyone? Worse, what
if no one likes me? Will they expect me to walk and run like
them?

She had often imagined running towards her family, her feet light, her arms swinging carelessly, her body unshackled – running straight into her mother's arms.
If only that could be!
She heard people calling from the boat, and the distant sounds of unfamiliar voices answering from shore. A little later, a cabin boy knocked on the door and opened it. He glanced at Clarissa's wrinkled clothes. “I see yer ready, even if 'tis in a sorry state,” he said, smiling and raising his eyebrows.

I have been this ready since I left St. Anthony
, she could have told him. She would not let him know she had not had a good wash since the day she waved goodbye to the children at the orphanage.

The cabin boy picked up her crutches and passed them to her. Then he grabbed her bag and helped her out of the cabin, across the deck and down the gangplank. She was helped ashore by a jolly-looking man in a Lammy coat. The smell of lamb's wool and sweat filled her nose.

A man and a woman were looking in her direction. A dark-haired boy hurried to her side. “I'm your brother, John,” he said, grinning expectantly. Clarissa smiled at him, but she didn't say a word. It was as if her throat had grown together over all the words she had wanted to say for so long. John stooped and picked up the bag lying beside her feet on the wharf. When he slung it over his shoulder, a cry came from its depths.

“She's brought home a cat!” John exclaimed, his eyes wide.

Behind him, her parents smiled. Clarissa stared at them. She wished she could have cried Momma, like her doll had inside her bag, – cried Momma and gone straight into her mother's arms. But then her mother's voice floated on the air like music: “Welcome home.” Her father echoed his wife's words with a glad look.

“I – I thought – you would be old – older,” Clarissa stammered. She had pictured her parents as having wrinkles and grey hair. Instead, her father's face was smooth and fair, his hair blond below a cap that looked like a large ose egg perched on the crown of his head. Her mother was dark-haired and beautiful. Clarissa hoped that when she grew up she would be an exact copy of the woman standing in front of her.

As Clarissa and her family made their way along dusty Station Road, squawking crows lollied across the sky. John went ahead with Clarissa's bag while her parents stopped to wait as Clarissa crossed the train track. She did this carefully, making sure her crutches didn't catch in the track ties. “Take your time,” her father said gently. Her mother looked at her with an encouraging nod. They both stayed in line with Clarissa as she hopped up the road. They followed John, turning down a gravelled path to a white, two-storey house surrounded by trees. Clarissa's heart felt as if it was going to lift out of her into the clouds, and leave the rest of her in a swoon on the ground. She leaned on her crutches and breathed in the sweet scent of roses and honeysuckle.

“I'm Charlie,” a young boy called as he hurried around the corner of the house, his face stretched in a grin. When he saw Clarissa's crutches, he shooed away sheep that were running up from the meadow. He stayed close to his sister until she reached the veranda.

John shifted Clarissa's bag and eyed her self-consciously. “I'm next to you. I was born the year after you went away.”

Clarissa looked at him, but she still couldn't speak. She followed her mother and father towards the open door of the porch.

Her ears perked at the sound of a train chugging around a curve in the track, its whistle blowing. It brought the familiar feeling of a memory Clarissa had tried to pin down many times.

She stood in the doorway of the house, marvelling that she had finally come home. She suddenly felt that she didn't belong. The people smiling at her were strangers.
I left a place
where I didn't belong and now I'm in an even stranger place,
she thought in despair.

She swung her body inside the house and stumbled over to a settee, missing it and landing on the floor. She dropped her head to hide the burst of tears. Her family stood around her, but no one tried to console her. They didn't know her any more than she knew them. They might even think she was a snob when they heard her speak in a dialect different from theirs.