Waiting for Time (27 page)

She does not breathe a word of how she pursued Thomas Hutchings: of the weeks she spent watching his comings and goings, of how she sat beside him at the Vincent table smiling like a fool. She does not tell how the thought of Thomas' tin of money filled her mind day and night: how she had swayed her hips, pinched her cheeks, simpered and tried to catch his eye, how she had even bribed Sarah to cast a spell on Thomas, how lying awake at night she'd considered creeping up to the fish store and slipping into his bed. She does not confess to Rachel that one day she had taken bits of hair Thomas had clipped from his beard, mixed the hair with her own menstrual blood and smeared it under the boards of his bed. Does not say how useless all her efforts had been.

“Thomas Hutchings was right on the hand of proposin' to me when your great-grandfather come courtin' and I chose him instead,” Mary says. She instructs Rachel to write this all around the margin of the page where Lavinia described how her brother Ned came to marry Mary Bundle.

For of course it was Ned Andrews she had married—foolish Ned, the dancer, the singer, the liar—Ned who would never in his life own one gold piece, much less a boxful.

He had been one of the people on the wharf the day she arrived. Mary remembered his red hair and red beard, the grinning devil weaving in and out among the dour, silent people. He'd been dancing his small daughter around the wharf, warbling some foolish song about ships filled with diamond rings. His voice had wafted up to the deck, mingling with the smells of spring, bright with promises of wealth, of security, of fine clothes and jewels, of ships laden with everything Mary had ever wanted. And she, soft and sick from a night locked in the fetid galley, heard the promise, picked up her baby and marched ashore.

In her haste she had not noticed how the little point of sand with its rock spine jutted dangerously out into the sea, did not see that it held but one fish store and one lonely house, could not know that these people, looking as if they had grown out of the rocks, had themselves newly arrived, had spent one winter in the place and almost died of it.

Unbeknownst even to himself Ned Andrews had lured Mary Bundle onto the Cape and for a long time she held that against him.

After the fish had been culled and counted, loaded aboard the
Tern
and sent to St. John's, when the only proof it had ever been taken out of the sea was a briny crust on the store floor and a few marks in Thomas's account book, when the last ship had left the coast and the first ice had glazed over fresh water, when Mary knew her decision to stay the winter could not be changed; during that period, when her thoughts were continually occupied with Thomas Hutchings' coins and how she might lay hands on them, then, sometimes, she slipped into the store. It was empty of fish now, holding only their winter supplies and Thomas' belongings, a desk, a chair and a bed crowded around the fireplace, and, at the far end, the long keel of a boat Ben Andrews had started to build.

One day when she was alone in the fish store—staring at the tin filled with money she dare not touch, thinking dark thoughts about Caleb Gosse and the piles of dried fish now stacked in his St. John's storerooms, or in the hold of some ship already sailing to England—Mary became aware of a great commotion on the wharf attached to the store.

“The last ship,” Mary thought, “the one that'll get me out of this place!” Her escape—coming late from Labrador—sailing just ahead of ice that will soon freeze the sea solid as lead.

She did not stop to consider. Never for a instant asked herself why such a ship would turn in to the Cape, where it might be going, or if she would be let aboard. Lifting her brin apron so that it covered Thomas Hutchings' desk, she pulled down the tin and upturned it, spilling a glittering pile of gold and silver onto the brin. Quickly she folded the brin over the money, knotting it onto the rope that kept the rough apron tied around her waist. She dropped the empty tin and picked up Fanny who has been sitting on the floor nearby. The child, so used to being jolted about, only blinked as Mary raced out onto the wharf.

Outside, every youngster in the place, even staid Annie Vincent and her surly brother Peter, even Ned's sooky son Isaac and Meg's Willie, were skidding across the wharf, screeching and yelling, slipping about on their arses and bare feet. Ned was there, of course, flinging dippers of dark blubber about and singing. Each dipperful, which he scooped out of the barrel of cod livers that have been bubbling in the sun all summer, slopped half its oily contents down the front of his jacket and pants. Unconcerned, he danced about like a lunatic, spreading the cod blubber on the boards in front of the crazed children.

As Mary rushed through the door, Ned slipped and tumbled onto a great moving mass of children. Mary was barely aware of the noise, the shouts, the swirl of arms and legs gliding towards her. She saw there was no ship. In the instant before Mary fell her mind registered that—and nothing else—that beyond the wharf the sea was steel grey, cold—and empty.

Then she is off her feet and sliding. The world was a noisy blur. She hit the water—hard—as if it were already solid. But it was not solid and she sank. The baby, the tangle of skirts and apron, the weight tied to her waist, pulled her under. Water and terror filled her mouth, her eyes, her ears. Everything was silent.

The rope around her waist was being tugged, it cut into her body. There was a hand under her jaw, her head was pulled around. Face up, she gulped air, saw the sky

Mary remembers it all, every detail. Although years later, Annie Vincent will swear that Mary did not even ask what had happened to her baby, Mary knows she was calling Fanny's name as they hauled her out of the water.

“Steady on, now—steady on,” someone is saying, “steady on—while I gets ya aboard.”

She is hoisted over the side and flops into the dory like some large, wet fish. The boat has not even been untied, it bangs against the stagehead. The man in the boat hoists her up, children reach down, dragging her onto the wharf where she sprawls on her knees and vomits. Groaning she rolls onto her back, lies in a spreading pool of seawater, kelp clinging to her hair, tangling in the rope and brin knotted around her waist.

Mary sees that the man who has saved her is Ned Andrews, fighting to hold back laughter, he stares down at her. Silent, wide-eyed children peer into her face, one of them begins to giggle.

Mary wishes the little brats would die—or she would die.

“Shag off!” she mutters when Ned reaches out a hand to help her up. Ned Andrews had laughed out loud. “Such words to come out of the mouth of a lady!” he said in mock horror. Then, “Thomas's after savin' your young one,” he nodded towards Thomas Hutchings who Mary could see climbing onto the wharf holding Fanny under his arm as if she were a sack of flour.

“Some good dive!” Ned calls to the dripping man.

Thomas glowers. “You'll kill someone yet, Ned Andrews, with your carelessness!” he says and without a glance at the woman lying on the wharf he strides off towards the Vincent house with the squalling baby.

“By the sound of her she'll live! Come on maid, let's get ya inside before ya catches your death,” Ned grabbed Mary's hands and pulled her to her feet, then ordered the children to go get Meg, “and tell her to bring some hot tea and a quilt,” he called as they raced away, each one eager to be first with the story of Mary Bundle's plunge off the wharf.

Inside the fish store Ned propped Mary in a corner as if she were something made of wood, an oar or boat hook perhaps. Then he looked around, went over and picked something up from the floor. As he walked towards her, Mary saw that he was holding the money tin in one hand and a knife in the other. Numb with cold and fear she wondered if Ned Andrews was going to kill her.

But the red-haired man stands in front of her smiling—smiling and humming, singing softly:

My mudder says I never should,

Play with the gypsies in the wood,

If I did she would say,

‘What a bad boy to disobey…’

“Gypsies should be smarter,” he said and slashed across the brin apron.

The coins clattered into Thomas Hutching's tin and Mary began to cry. She is never going to get the money! Never going to be rich! Never going back to St. John's, much less to England! She continues to cry as Ned puts the box back on the shelf. So he held her, rubbing her cold arms, blowing on her hands, pulling bits of seaweed and cod-liver from her streaming hair. And she kept on weeping as if her heart would break.

Throughout that winter Mary had reasoned with herself—sometimes even when lying in Ned's arms: “A person'd be some stunned to make fast to a man don't have n'ar thing to his name, not boat nor house, nor pot to piss in. A man what don't even care!”

It was the not caring that had bothered Mary most, it was what made men die paupers, the not caring. It was what made Ned so different from men like Tim Toop or Thomas Hutchings, men who tallied up every coin, men who had little hoards of gold.

“Was Meg of course who tormented Thomas Hutchings into sayin' words over Ned and me. Meg talked to God—told us he spied on the Cape through a hole in heaven. And she thought a wonderful lot of Thomas, wouldn't hear a word against him, even later on when we all knew what he done.”

But Mary let it happen, had gone quietly to the altar—or to be more precise to the cloth covered splitting table Meg had improvised as an altar. Because she saw that to own anything on the Cape a woman must have a husband, because sleeping with Ned Andrews had been enjoyable—infinitely better than spending another winter in the crowded coldness of the Vincents' loft.

That day, watching Thomas Hutchings write the names Mary Bundle and Edward Andrews in his little book, her feelings had been a strange mixture of apprehension and happiness. Thomas had drawn a swirl below the words. “There,” he said, and shook Ned's hand, “The first marriage on the Cape. Congratulations, you're a fortunate man, Ned!”

“Liar!” Mary had thought. But she held her tongue and smiled, still clinging to the hope that the money in Thomas's tin might somehow, someday, belong to her.

ten

The last winter of Mary Bundle's life is the stormiest she has ever known. In notes that her great-granddaughter Rachel scratches around the margins of Lavinia's journal, the sky is always dark, the sea rough, the wind always blowing a gale
.

In the dim, over-heated kitchen the girl and old woman lose track of time, morning blurs into evening, evening into night, days run together. Mary talks quietly to people long dead—asking questions unthought of until now. The small room is full of ghosts, sometimes Rachel can see them—beautiful Lavinia smiling mysteriously from the corner, Ned sitting astride a chair, chin resting on his folded hands, eyes focused on Mary's face. It seems to the young woman that she has been sitting here forever, that the past, the present and the future are all one—like a shell curved in on itself so you cannot see where the outside ends, where the inside begins
.

“You done that on purpose—just for badness, didn't y a, Ned Andrews?” Mary says one day. Then she smiles, begins to cackle and, for the first time in an hour, speaks to the living person who sits beside her in the shadowy kitchen: “I were so contrary that first winter me and Ned was married 'tis a pure wonder the poor man didn't run off,” she says
.

“All the Andrews—Meg and Ben's four youngsters, Ned and his children by Hazel, a daughter named Jane and Isaac, his nuisance of a son, even Lavinia and the old Missis, along with me and Fanny—thirteen of us all cooped up together in somethin' no better'n a tilt, for all Meg called it a house. Bread and potatoes, salt fish, rolled oats, molasses and partridge berries was what we had to eat. Enough ta keep us from starvin' but some tedious. Nowhere near as good as what me and Tim used to eat under Gosse's wharf!”

“Jane was a good enough young maid but Isaac was forever bawlin' and clingin' onto his father so as me and Ned was never alone for a minute. Fanny was cuttin' teeth, Meg's oldest girl Lizzie almost died of fever, the baby Willie along with Pash and Emma all got some kind of croup and every mortal one of us had chilblains.”