Donovan's Station (18 page)

I have given my last scrap of advice to Kate—from now on, she will be making all the decisions herself. When Paddy died, everyone kept telling me not to make too many decisions right away, everyone except Sister Mary Magdalen O'Shaughnessy. While the men were at the funeral, the good sister came to sit with me and she gave me a gilt-edged card with a sentence written upon it: “The only way to begin a thing is to begin it immediately.” This was one of the mottoes of Nano Nagel, the Holy Foundress. Little Kate was near my knee at the time, and as I read the words, she ran her forefinger under the letters. Looking down at her pinched, white face, made paler and more fragile by the black clothing she had on, I determined to get her and her sisters out of mourning as soon as possible and into a healthier, happier life. I took those words to heart and made up my mind at that moment to sell the shop as soon as possible and to look for a property outside of town, away from the filth and stench and noise of St. Johns.

It was Sister Mary Magdalen who suggested I consult with Mrs. Smyth, prompted perhaps by that poor woman's own losses. Mrs. Smyth, with her husband, ran a sewing machine and organ shop several blocks east of our own place, and Paddy had had occasion to consult them with regard to some of our own small machines. Mr. Smyth had a genius for mechanical work but he was known to drink too freely, the result, no doubt, of having lost six beautiful daughters in little over two years. He doted on the one remaining child, a little girl, and for her sake he continued to work a relatively normal day, but it was his wife who really ran the business. As well as sewing machines, they carried a few select items of haberdashery, although it was generally claimed that they made most of their money off sewing machine needles, an essential item which needed constant replacing.

I didn't know if it was possible to make a living selling such
a tiny item as sewing machine needles, and had no wish to try doing so myself, but Mrs. Smyth had business connections with every bootmaker, tanner and leather worker in the city, and many outside of it, and I thank the good Lord that I had her to guide me through the negotiations needed to sell off Paddys stock, place the apprentices in decent positions, and give up the lease on the premises. I believe that without her guidance, I might have fallen into the hands of a dishonest buyer and lost most of my money through sheer ignorance.

Aside from steering me toward men who could give me honest appraisals for the contents of the shop—men Mr. Smyth could vouch for through the Mechanics' Society— and then toward buyers for that stock, Mrs. Smyth encouraged me to begin immediately to plan for the long-term support and upkeep of my daughters. It was with considerable trepidation that I confessed to her my long-held dream of having a small farm, a place outside of town where I could hear myself think, where the stench of seal oil and fish did not permeate the air. Imagine my surprise, then, when she told me she thought it was a sensible and achievable goal.

Looking back, I suppose it was my mother who was responsible for my rather pessimistic attitude towards farming in the colony. Mother, having been raised in a milder climate, constantly lamented what could not be grown in the thin soil of the hills surrounding Petty Harbour. Never having had the experience of tree-ripened pears or oranges grown under glass, I never missed them, yet I had without knowing it, become convinced that a garden, worked in conjunction with fishing rooms, was the most we could ever manage on the island. Experience had taught me that the weather was never so bad that potatoes and cabbages did not grow to at least a moderate size, and the cows we owned had never starved even in winter, yet I did not take this knowledge and apply it more broadly until I discussed my hopes and plans with Mrs. Smyth.

In looking for a property suitable for farming, I turned naturally toward Kilbride and the Goulds, those
two
places having been settled by Petty Harbour families who could not find space to expand their family holdings in the contained area of the Harbour. Paddy had several cousins in Kilbride, and I had my own connections in the Goulds, for it had been the pattern for several generations for fishing families to move back into these areas and establish winter homes and summer gardens which they temporarily abandoned for the coast during the fishing season. As the market for fresh meat, vegetables and butter grew in St. Johns, some of these people gave up the fishery and relied only on sealing for quick infusions of cash. Several times I left the children with neighbours and walked out to look at properties in Kilbride, but either the land was uncleared and unsuitable for cattle, or the price too steep for my limited resources.

I was in the last stages of selling off the stock in the shop, and had only three weeks to find alternate accommodation before the new tenant took possession of the premises, when I received a note from Mrs. Smyth asking me to step along for a word as soon as it was convenient. This was when she first told me that her husband had long owned property in the area later called Western Junction, and that he had heard of a small farm being offered for sale there. She had hesitated to bring it to my attention, there being no school and no relatives in the vicinity, and there being no real village, just a handful of farming families strung out along the road to Topsail. Mr. Smyth was traveling out that way by carriage the following day, and was willing to take me along for a look if I wished.

I did indeed wish, and it was everything I could wish for. It took many years before I could look at the property Mr. Smyth indicated as for sale without feeling the tug at ray heart that I felt that first day. Compared to the large piece of land owned by the Smyths, or for that matter the land grants held by most
of my neighbours, my own farm was small, and the meadows somewhat sloping, but compared to the garden in Petty Harbour it was Eden. It consisted of a small triangle of land, about seven acres, wedged between the path from Freshwater and the road to Topsail, with a one-storey, hip-roofed house, a number of outbuildings, several cleared meadows and a small patch of woods at the back. Across the main road, on the other side, the land dropped away to the Waterford River.

“The only way to begin a thing is to begin it immediately,” I thought, and climbed down to walk over the area while Mr. Smyth conducted business with his tenant half a mile away. The house was empty and the fields had been neglected for a season, but the land had been worked carefully and the drainage looked good. Crossing the road, I climbed the short path down to the river. An osprey flew along the bank, between the shrubs and trees on either side of the water, and for the first time in many months I heard birdsong. Crouched by the side of the river, I could see water weeds and sticklebacks, and after my eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom of the foliage I could distinguish brown trout, waiting motionless in the stream for lunch to offer itself.

In later years, I came to know the river quite well, and caught there not just brown trout but brook trout and occasionally salmon as well as eels. Up towards Neville s Pond there were muskrat holes, and in the fall there were usually ducks of various sorts, but it was the sticklebacks that caught my imagination that day. The Waterford seemed such a small, safe river, a river where a child could play and not be drowned. I imagined Johanna and Min and Kate paddling in this cool, green paradise, catching sticklebacks and pulling flowers to braid into their hair, and I wanted that small farm more than I had ever wanted anything else in my life.

All those years in town had dulled my perception of the weather, and I was not really aware that this was a particularly
dry year, and that the eight shillings a barrel that were being offered for potatoes was a relatively high price because of scarcity. The Waterford was normally a bigger river than it seemed, but by the time I realized that, most of my fears for the children had subsided to a relatively normal level. By the time we were driving back to town, I had made up my mind. 1 did not speak of my decision with Mr. Smyth, partly because I was somewhat shy of the man but also because I wished to let his wife do the negotiating for me. I had learned the hard way that a man might say anything in his cups, and I was afraid that if the owner knew how determined I was to buy the place it would suddenly be priced out of my reach.

I did not even look for another property while Mrs. Smyth and the lawyer who was looking after Paddys will made the arrangements for me to buy Byrne s farm. I have to smile when I think of that name—I was determined that it would be Mrs. Aylward's Farm within the year, and yet it never was, though seven years later when I married again it was immediately referred to by all and sundry as Donovan's Farm. It's a good thing a woman is not raised to have too great an attachment to her name. As far as Mr. Donovan was concerned, it was my farm, but as far as the rest of the world went, it was his and that suited me well enough. Perhaps if he had had children, he might have wanted it for them, but that was something that he put behind him when he married me.

Those were the longest three weeks of my life. I kept packing up the household, selling everything I felt would be of little or no use in the country, and tried not to think what I would do if the sale fell through. I said little about it to the children, which I believe now was a mistake. One morning, a woman came to look at the kitchen dresser and she asked the price of Paddys concertina, which I had stowed away in the lower shelves and forgotten about. I was about to let her have it for nothing when Johanna came in from school and burst into tears
at the sight of it. I realized then that I had been so relieved to have my own life back again that I had forgotten that my girls had lost their father and were about to lose the only home they had ever known. I took the concertina back and stowed it in one of the barrels I was packing dishes in, and gave the disappointed woman the dresser at a bargain price.

After that I spoke a little to the children about the farm I hoped we would be getting, but they had never been on a farm and didn't really know what one was. When the papers were finally signed, I engaged a man with a cart and prepared to take them with some of our belongings out to Western Junction to see their new home. I had hoped Judith might come along, but she had made herself surprisingly scarce since Paddys death, and I was unable to locate her in time. The girls were excited on the way out, but when we got there, they sat in the cart and looked around in puzzlement.

“Mama, where is the sea?” Johanna asked, and Min and Kate craned their necks around as if searching for their lost father.

“The sea is where it always is,” I answered, pointing across country towards Petty Harbour.

“But why can't we see it?” I could hear something like panic in Johanna's voice. It was as if the sun were suddenly absent from the sky, or the grass had disappeared from beneath her feet.

“Come and see the river,” I said to them, and began by lifting Kate out of the cart. “There are sticklebacks in it, and trout.” The two older girls reluctantly jumped down and followed us across the road and down the bank to the river.

When I first came to Western Junction, it was like going to a place I'd known all my life, though I'd never been there before. It never occurred to me that my children wouldn't feel the same way. They hated the farm, they were afraid of the cows, the silence at night worried them, and they claimed that the noise
of the crows and other birds at dawn gave them a headache in the morning. Min said the air was tasteless, and she longed for the stink of the harbour and the bite of soot on her tongue. In time, they became resigned to life in the country, and after the railway came and we opened the hotel they even began to enjoy it, but Kate was the only one who ever learned to love it.

That first day we did not stay over, but just unpacked the cart and went back to town, to sleep on a pile of mats and blankets on the floor of the almost empty shop. The stove was gone, so it was a sorry supper we made of it, but Mrs. Smyth walked down with her little girl and invited us to come and have breakfast with them the next morning. Little Anna had brought each of the girls a tiny sewing box, put out by the Singer Company as an advertisement for their machines, and my poor bereaved children hugged these to their chests and cried themselves to sleep.

As for me, I dreamed all night of potatoes at eight shillings a barrel and foolishly convinced myself that life at Western Junction would be like Petty Harbour without: the fish and without the sea. I did not stop to think how lonely it would be for a woman with three small children. I only knew that I would not have to put up with Paddy, or even Paddys cousins. The fact that the sea, which had been central to my life and the lives of my children, was now at least ten miles away in almost any direction, was a blessing that I had not had the imagination to hope for, nor did I have the sense to realize that: you can miss something that you hate. There were times, in the years to come, that I missed Paddy and I missed the sea, but I never admitted it to anyone, least of all the children, and in time the longing went away forever.

Fine day but air is heavy. War declared. Dermot will be exempt because of his turned eye, and Min's little fellow is too small. Thank God we run to girls in this family.

The train made an unscheduled stop today. It left a package that Mr. Reid sent out from Johanna, a beautiful pink and blue blanket, woven from such soft, light stuff it is hard to believe it can be so warm. Kate says it is goat hair, but no goat I ever owned had wool like this. Kate has taken the heavy feather quilt off and replaced it with this beautiful blanket, though I think it is much too good to use. I confess, it is a relief for the quilt pressed down on me and made my already heavy limbs feel even more leaden, but I am so chilled, even with the sun streaming in, that I need a good warm cover. I cannot imagine where Johanna found such wonderful stuff.

There are movers and stayers in this world, and she was always a mover. When we went trouting, Johanna was willing to stop in one place for no more than ten or fifteen minutes before going on, up or downstream, to a better spot. Kate was a stayer, like me, rooted to the carefully chosen rill, convinced that eventual success was inevitable if one was stoical enough. Min was sometimes one, then the other. She often trailed after Johanna, but not without long, lingering looks back over her shoulder, at other times biding with us while sighing in the direction Johanna had taken.