Waiting for Time (47 page)
But Lav will have no time for such talk. By then she will have become a mechanic, an improviser, a scavenger who brings home bits of wood, bricks, wire, sheets of plastic, broken machinery, worn tires and a host of other things abandoned in marshes and old dumps
.
Shortages are commonplace, she has learned to mix mashed potatoes with the flour in her bread dough, to pick up faltering television signals by stringing wires around the roof, to grow onion, celery and pale lettuce in the kitchen window, to make a tonic from kelp, wine from dandelion flowers, shoes from seal skin. She can enjoy jam without sugar, clothes without style and months without visitors
.
Lav will find that she is not unhappy with any of this, not with the disintegrating highway, the absence of newspapers, the empty Cape to which no ships come. It occurs to her that one should not escape so easily, that her contentment is utterly selfish, that she will pay
.
And she will
.
The dark age will come, one day her son will leave, one day her lover will die. Wildly, despairingly miserable she will retreat into a small, silent world. During this sad, wasted time she will do nothing but sit on the front steps and stare at the street. She will frighten children—now very few for only the old, the hunted and the maimed live along this coast. The children run from Lav's mad face and fierce eyes
.
During these months she will go only once into the lane, to snatch up a rod and chase some official as he steps down from a government helicopter
.
Selina will live on and she will force Lav to live. They become old women together. “Don't you dare die on me, Vinnie Andrews!” Selina screams and makes Lav eat
.
Then one day, from God knows where, Rachel Jane appears. A skeleton walking up the lane holding a little girl by the hand. Rachel Jane takes immediately to bed. But the child, called Soshiska by her mother but quickly rechristened Sissy by Selina, sits herself down on the step beside Lav and begins to ask questions
.
After the little girl's arrival Lav will slowly become sane—or almost sane—she will still hear voices and sometimes forget to eat, will still hold long conversations with Alf, with her mother, with Rachel and Mary Bundle. She begins getting up early again. Taking her cup of tea and one of David Saul's old picture books out front on fine mornings, she will sit and read to the child—to anyone who happens by
.
Many years later, standing beside her father's grave, Lav will gaze across the Cape and see caplin roll up on the sand—the first person in decades to witness such a sight. She will call out to Sissy, who is clipping grass on Selina's grave. The two women, the old one hobbling, the young one running, will hurry down the beach towards the line of silver
.
Things come back, Lav thinks, things do come back! Caplin first, then cod, then people. Watching Sissy gather up the little fish she will remember what Zinnie had once said about the world being a better place without people—Lav has never felt that way
.
One morning shortly after this, the old woman will do something she has been thinking about for a long, long time. She will go into the old house and find Lavinia's journal. Walking all alone she will slowly cross the marsh, carry the book out to the Cape. Sitting in the weak spring sunshine, with her back against the black rock she will open the ledger and begin to write
.
She will write, “It is spring and in the great pit at the centre of the sacred hill afire burns as it has for a thousand springs…”
Lavinia Andrews,
Cape Random, June 2024
.
First I want to thank the readers of
Random Passage
, especially the real Lavinia, whose wish to know more about the Cape people encouraged me to write this book.
Of course I want to thank George, without whose knowledge of computers I would never have finished.
I would like to acknowledge the help of Fran Innes, Gerry Rubia, Jennifer Morgan and other members of The Newfoundland Writers' Guild who read sections of earlier drafts.
I am especially thankful for the critiques of Joan Clark, Helen Porter and Greg Morgan. These greatly improve what I thought was my final manuscript.
I am grateful to people who took time to give me tours of Department of Fisheries and Oceans buildings in St. John's and Ottawa.
The following is a very incomplete list of books by writers, living and dead, to whom I am deeply indebted:
The History of Newfoundland
by Prouse;
Dictionary of Newfoundland English
by Story, Kirwin and Widdowson;
Politics In Newfoundland
by S.J.R. Noel;
The Islands of Bonavista Bay
by John Feltham;
Sketches of Labrador Life
by Lydia Campbell;
The Decay of Trade
by David Alexander;
Newfoundland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
by Hiller and Neary;
More Than 50%
by Hilda Murray;
The Beothucks and Red Indians
by James P. Howley;
''Complaints is many and various”
by R.G. Moyles;
On Sloping Ground
by Aubrey M. Tizzard;
Women of Labrador
by Elizabeth Goudie;
The Peopling of Newfoundland
edited by John J. Mannion;
A Class Act
by Bill Gillespie;
The Story of Methodism In Bonavista
by Charles Lench;
No Pish and Our Lives
by Cabot Martin;
Industrial Development and the Atlantic Fishery
by Donald J. Patton
The Fishery of Newfoundland
by Sally Lou LeMessurier
I want to especially thank Paul O'Neill who kindly gave me permission to use the maid's whipping as described in his book
The Oldest City
and Isobel Brown for her stories about women who crossed the Atlantic as war brides.
I must acknowledge quoting from creative efforts of unnamed writers employed by federal and provincial governments to produce press releases, brochures, booklets, Northern Cod Science Program Reports and such publications as
Fish Is Our Future
circulated in 1978 by Premier Frank Moores and
Oceans Policy For Canada
issued in 1987 by Minister of Fisheries Tom Siddon.
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