Island

[Izabella]

Meep. I have been internetless for a long time, and this is my first foray back into the world of electronica. Sorry for my prolonged absenteeism. I'm not sure that I posted this correctly, but I'm hoping a kind elder will guide me down the right track if I messed up. I meant to start a new topic, but I may have mangled it. Sorry in advance!

 

A cultural note about the text: Newfoundland, before Resettlement, was primarily composed of extremely small settlements scattered around the Island. These were called outports. Mmany of the outports were on small islands just off the mainland. A very popular leader in Newfoundland, Joseph R. Smallwood, Confederated Newfoundland with Canada in a rigged election in the 1940s. In the 1960s, the same man cut off government aid in the form of doctors, electricity, etc. to the tiny outports in Newfoundland, which resulted in a Exodus to the mainland of the province. This period has become known as Resettlement. My family was one of those Resettled in 1969. Joey Smallwood is loved and hated by many in Newfoundland.

 

 

 

Julia and Mock Gaulton were fraternal twins who had been together since birth, with the exception of a few months in 1944 when Mock, proper name Maurice Alfonsis Gaulton, had joined up with the regiment and went to Europe to fight alongside the Allies for life, liberty, and whatever else needed fighting for. Mock had wanted to see the world, experience something outside of the islands. He wanted to get the gun and the knife and the sharp uniform that all the girls loved and stick it to Johnny Germany. What he got instead was a whole lot of shrapnel and a few less fingers. When he finished his tour early and came back to Isle Valen, there were pitying glances and shy, clumsy greetings for the disfigured fellow who returned from France, looking like someone they used to know. Julia was waiting for him when he limped off the Petit Forte, blinking in the light, one eye bandaged and his arm in a sling.

 

Julia was crippled, had been since birth. The doctor who delivered her said the problem had been caused by a combination of underdevelopment in the womb and pressure from her brother, the larger of the two babies, who had likely pinned his sister against the supposed-to-be protective walls of their mother’s insides. The Islanders didn’t believe this. Sheila simply didn’t know how to carry a baby, they said. She pushes and pushes all day long, never a rest even though we offers to help. Foolish bird, that one, out at the flakes all day when Aloysius or Eugene could do hers as corn as they gets ours done. That kind of pride is no good to anyone. That kind of pride is the dangerous kind. She better watch out for them babies.

 

With her husband gone on the schooner for weeks at a time, Sheila learned to get by on her own and pushed her body to the limits of its ability. She was only 17 and everyday she cursed the babies growing inside her. 17 was no age to be slaving away all day on the flakes, in the kitchen, on the mash, in the cellar. 17 was no age to be married or to be saddled with a baby (or two, says the Carbonear doctor who thinks he knows everything!). 17 was precious and it had been taken away from her. And so every day while she turned the stinking, salted codfish on the flake, flies buzzing around her like blue static, everyday when she crouched for hours on end in the bogs and mashes, picking berries for jams and cakes, for summer in winter, everyday when she baked bread and boiled jam in the heat, she poured all her anger down her throat, all her malice, her hate, and her disappointment, down into the babies below her stomach, and they ate their mothers badness along with her salt fish, her partridgeberry jam, and her yeasty white bread. Is it any wonder, then, that Julia emerged disfigured? Or that Mock broke free of his mother, waling and screaming in a diminishing sea of blood and amniotic fluid, at the precise moment that Sheila closed her eyes and left, went to be 17 forever in some other place, either free of disappointment or, more likely, filled to bursting with it.

 

Having such a distinguishing appendage as Julia’s lame right leg led to typical schoolyard abuse, but no more than Susan Smith got for her nose (the Smith curse, the Smith blessing, the Smith snoggin that they all wore proudly, down to a man), or Jose Pomroy got for his great pork belly, or Shamus Ryan got for the overbite that would later earn him the nickname “Bugs.” Miraculously, Julia, dragging her right leg behind her, was no more a target than anybody else. There was a fog around her, though, which dirtied and browned as she got older. It wafted from the Island houses, came out through the doors and windows as she walked past, evaporated up the chimney with the wood smoke and sought her out, setting over her in the quiet night, the dark night of an outport that knew no street lights, no midnight lamps, and often no stars. When Julia lay alone in her second floor bedroom, she could feel the smog of the Island, the pollutants of their pity, come and settle on her as she tried to sleep, settle and choke her, until she sprang up in the dark, threw open the old windows in her bedroom, and sucked in great hulking gasps of sea air, shivering and trembling in her white flannel nightgown and shooing the poison of their behind-closed-door whispers, their filthy air, back into the night. Their emissions increased as she grew, as she reached puberty and marrying age.

 

She stayed in school for a long time, longer than most girls on Isle Valen did. At 17, she reached the unlikely achievement of a high school diploma and the unwelcome requirement of attending the small prom held Patty Rowe’s barn. At this point, her nightly battles with the stinking, atmospheric assaults of her neighbours grew and intensified until she almost became sick with it. The smog got thicker, denser, and somehow louder. Who will she go with? Who would take her? Some fella’ll offer, for pity if nothing else. Sure her father won’t allow that! The poor thing’s likely to get carried away, she don’t know what she’s doing, she don’t know how to deal with some Sonny Jim, I doubt she ever learned, poor child, what with Sheila being passed. Perhaps I should get our Gary to take her. She choked on it every night, tried to keep it out, but sometimes she swallowed it, felt it enter her, diffuse her body, settle in her just as her mothers disappointment, anger, and bile had settled in her 17 years ago and warped her leg, disfigured and almost destroyed her. And every night she sat with it all around her, every night she felt it trying to enter her, sometimes successful, sometimes not, and every night she would get up, drag her useless leg to the window, and stand in the dark or glowing or brilliant night and let it flow out of her room, watch the brown-black poison of it flow past her. On the nights it got into her, she would open her mouth, breathe deeply of the salt air, of the damp ocean wind, and let it empty her, wash her clean like a purifying fire burning in her lungs.

 

A few months after Mock got back from the War, he settled into a queer habit that would define him for the rest of his life on the Island. He got his father to make him a little mesh bag fromleftover bits of twine from the net mending. His father topped the bag off with a drawstring and made a loop in one end of the string just big enough to fit over Mock’s left hand, the one on which only a thumb remained. This Mock took, along with a knife, to the stretch of coastline that the Islanders called the Bad Place. On a few rocks just above high water mark, Mock stripped down to his long johns. He waded out into the water, drawstring sack looped over one mutilated hand, army knife in the other, and dived. This he did for two hours, down and up, down and up, pausing at the surface only long enough to draw a ragged breath. When he emerged for the last time, staggering onto the rocky shore, his twine sack dragged heavily behind him, full to the brim with plump mussels and the scattered brown disc of a scallop. He sat for a little while on the beach and warmed slowly in the sun.. Eventually, he shrugged and shimmied his way back into his clothes, a dance he had learned after the war. He gave the mussels to Julia when he got home, and she shelled and bottled them without complaint or question.

 

The response from the Islanders was immediate, and when Julia walked along the paths that criss-crossed the town, she felt her brother’s disease as keenly as she felt her own, and it reminded her of the few months after his return from Europe. When they had seen him, young Mock Gaulton, diminished and desecrated, their pity for him had briefly dwarfed their pity for Julia. As he learned to take care of himself in this altered state, they watched with tilted heads and impossible frowning smiles, and they talked about how awful it was and how Frank Gaulton now had two cripples to support. When it got late and there were just the adults left around the kitchen table holding cups of sweet milky tea with slabs of home-made bread toasting over home-made fires, the conversation turned. When Julia came into the night to collect the clothes from the line, she would see their darkness issue from their chimneys and whisper through the cracks in Mock’s window casings. If my son was half so foolish, I doubt I’d let him back in my house, no matter how much he begged. What in the name of our blessed Jesus was the point of going all the way to France or Germany or wherever to get all beat up like that? Now his father is one man short on the schooner and all the b’ys are gonna suffer for it when crab time comes. Selfishness, that’s all it is. He believes all that stuff he hears on the radio. Well Mock Gaulton, that’s what being so headstrong gets you- a crippled arm and a blind eye. The fool is lucky he got back at all.

 

When Julia saw her brother’s darkness creeping toward his room that evening in May, her first instinct was to go and tell him the magic of the salt air, how it purged and cleansed the bitterness away. But if she explained her magic to him, would it still work? Would explaining the trick destroy it? She stood for a long time, holding the cloth sack full of clothespins and staring up at Mock’s window. When her father came out to see what was keeping her, she took the laundry inside and went quietly to bed.

 

For three days she watched him, debating whether or not she should tell him the magic of the air. Mock had become distant since he returned; he was compacted, he had been sucked or pushed inward on himself, and nothing that happened within that small space ever made itself visible to the Islanders or to Julia again. And so she subsided, quieted herself with artificial reassurance and kept her magic for herself. The whispers eventually lost strength, but they didn’t disappear altogether. Two months later, when Mock began cutting shellfish off the rocks at the Bad Place, the commotion began again and remained at a moderate pulse for the rest of Mock Gaulton’s life.

 

When their father died, Mock and Julia sold the fishing license and the schooner to Mike Bennet, which left them a small allowance on which to survive. Most of their supplies came from the Petit Forte or Collins’ General Store; they were given fish by the Islanders, they kept their own sheep, chickens, ducks, and pigs, and Mock continued to go to the Bad Place on fine days and bring home bags full of mussels. Julia was 34 with no prospects. The women of the Island encouraged their children to visit Julia, poor soul. After school, some of them would show up at her door with small pails of berries. In return, she would bake them cakes and pies, make jams and tarts and muffins and pour all her lonely love into the bakeapples and frost-sweetened partridgeberries simmering on the stove. The soft buzz of midnight chatter never left the Island, but it dissipated and shrank until she was able to bear it more easily. Eventually, it flared again when Leo Mulrooney began to make the slow pilgrimage by rowboat every evening, across from St. Kyrans and up to Julia Gaulton’s door.

 

Julia had known Leo for a long time, as Isle Valen and St. Kyrans were so close together. There was only one priest for both islands, which meant that churchgoers often rowed to one island or another for mass. Many families were connected by marriage and St. Kyrans- IsleValen weddings were a common event. It was at one such union that Julia Gaulton, spinster, attracted the attention of Leo Mulrooney, aged bachelor. Julia was known on both islands as a bit of a queer stick, but her cakes and pies had also gained a reputation. Julia was often commissioned to bake the wedding cake for most of the inter-island nuptials, and she and Mock were sometimes obliged to attend.

 

A few months after her 37th birthday, Julia baked a two-tiered marble cake, filled with wild strawberry preserve, for the wedding of Fred Flynn and Darlene Mulrooney. When Leo bit into the cake, when he tasted its sweetness and that other, that unnamed ingredient, he knew he had found the source of Julia’s unrivalled skill. He talked with her for some time, sitting with her and Mock, far removed from the band. Mock remained characteristically silent while the other two discussed the cod quotas, the cake, the wedding, and the foolishness Joey Smallwood was getting on with in St. John’s. They talked about how warm the weather was getting and how beautiful the bride was. At 11:30, Leo volunteered to bring Julia and Mock home, and at 12:30 he bade her goodnight on the doorstep of her fathers house. As Julia climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she felt lighter than she ever had before, unburdened, unsmothered. In her flannel nightdress, lying under faded quilts, she watched the blackness collect outside her windows, dirty the glass, and block out the moon and stars. She watched it pool and pulse and coax and beg and, unrequited, die. And then Julia Gaulton fell asleep, darkness and salt air both locked outside.

 

Leo ran Mulrooney’s General Store in St. Kyrans. When he was younger he had fished with his cousins, despite the staggering luxury of not having to. Fishing, Leo said, was in his bones; nancing about in the store was not. When his parents died, though, Leo put away his jiggers his nets and his pots and settled down to take care of Mulrooney’s. He had never married and had no children, so there was wild, if private, speculation about who he would leave the store to. When he started rowing across to Isle Valen every evening, more than one St. Kyrans widow watched from her parlour. The Islanders across the water watched him, too. Walking by, they could peer into the gaps between the gauzy white curtains at three people sitting in the parlour. Mock rarely spoke, had been as good as mute since returning from the war. He hunched over a card table near the woodstove and played an endless game of Solitaire. Occasionally, Julia and Leo would join him for 45s, but mostly they sat in quiet conversation, a respectful distance apart, on the burgundy chesterfield. Julia would ply her caller with cakes and pastries, of which she always had plenty. Leo ate like a starving man, plate after plate until he thought he would burst. And there was always more. Leo’s fingers grew thick, his waist a little wider, his face a little fuller. This continued from spring to fall, and even in the winter there were enough summer berries for Julia to bake into pies. Eventually, the Islanders began to notice a decline in Julia’s sweets; her pastries were no longer so light, her cobblers no longer syrupy, her jams no longer so perfect in consistency and taste. When she accidentally scorched the underside of Carm Casey’s wedding cake, the Islanders realized that the magic had gone out of Julia’s kitchen.

 

Then, one day the following June, a young man named Rowe came to the islands on a government boat, where he landed at the Government Wharf and read a proclamation from the lovedhated hand of the Honourable Joseph R. Smallwood. The young Mr. Rowe was surrounded by police officers, and on more than one island they were forced to beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the open water. After each visit, after every reading of the magic words, after every abra cadabra, the islands began to disappear. It was slow at first; bits of Isle Valen and St. Kyrans began to fall into the water and drift towards Placentia, debris dragging behind, floating or sinking by the will of the tide. And then the avalanche began, because no lump of rock and trees can stand up to the erosion of Progress. Red Island was the first to disappear completely. By the time November rolled around, Julia and Mock were in the cabin of Joe Casey’s boat on the way to St. Mary’s. The sea had swallowed Isle Valen, and St. Kyrans was smothering in her wake. The Islanders, in their struggle to survive, had scattered.

 

Julia and Mock went where they had family. The Allowance they had received from the government could only go so far, and their Aunt Agnes had volunteered to provide what the government had not. Their house was left on the island; there was no one to drag it in for them yet, there was too much to be done. They packed their suitcases and locked the door behind them, leaving the house ready for their return. When Mock managed to get back with Joe Casey the following spring, the Gaulton home had been stripped of anything of value, right down to the floorboards. No one had remained on Isle Valen that winter; those who hadn’t dragged their houses in through the bay were left with nothing.

 

Julia and Mock settled in the cottage beside their Aunt Agnes’s home. Mock spent much of his time with the cousins, trying to scrape the moss from the roof, seal the gaps in the window casings, replace the rotting floorboards. Some of the Islanders had come to St. Mary’s, as well. Julia talked with them as much as possible, visited on Sundays, scrounged for information. Leo had seen her to the wharf on the day she climbed aboard Joe Casey’s boat. He had been determined to stay in St. Kyrans, and she hadn’t heard from him since. “What would I go to Placentia for, Julia? If I wanted to sit around on my arse and rot, I could do it here just as easy. No b’y, Julia. What is there for me in Placentia that isn’t in St. Kyrans?”

 

In March she found out where he had gone. The winter had been too rough for one man living alone on St. Kyrans. Some of the Mulrooney crowd had gone out to get him and, defeated, Leo relented. He boarded up the house and the store and moved to Long Harbour. Julia, sitting in Bernie Power’s living room, smiled and placed one trembling hand atop the other.

 

The darkness of St. Mary’s was not like the darkness of the Islands. There were streetlights, scattered neon signs, security lights in the few small stores. There was no true darkness and no reliance on the stars. Julia had chosen a bedroom that faced the water, so when she looked out over the pasture at night she could see the ocean, and when she woke in the morning she could make out the hazy blue outlines of the Islands. She sat by her window for a long time after returning from Bernie’s. The sky darkened slowly and the water disappeared, sunk into shadow. She could hear the ocean through the cracks in the window casings, barely make out the roar, the crash, the white noise she had known all her life. It had been louder on Isle Valen. She had been closer. She sat in darkness, surrounded by the waves and waited for it.

 

It came for the first time since its defeat. It collected on the mottled window pane and slid between the glass. It whispered to her, wreathed her, and entered with her breath. That poor thing. I hated to do it, you know, but someone had to tell her. No good to get her hopes up, to be sure. Everyone knew Leo Mulrooney had no intentions of coming to St. Mary’s. It was all fine and good out on the Island, but you can’t go getting on with that kind of thing in here. Next thing you know, he’d probably have the Mounties at his door. Can’t go fooling around with one like her. The poor thing, she’s not right in the head. School smart, sure, but no common sense. No, even Leo couldn’t take one like that. It was good of him to give her a bit of attention, of course, but he haven’t got the store now, and he got to live on a little for the rest of it, just like everyone else. No, I doubt he got enough put by to take care of Mock and Julia both, and you know as well as I that you can’t have one without t’other. It’s better she knows now so she can stop mooning around St. Mary’s and making a fool of herself.

 

Mock found her the next morning when he went to give her the telegram. She was sitting in the chair beside her closed window, eyes open, staring toward the blue islands as they rose and stretched in the sun. When the exiled Islanders found out, they nodded with damp eyes and brave, sad smiles; homesickness was, indeed, a powerful pain.

[Patrick]

I really liked the way you used descriptions in this piece to convey Julia's story. And the conclusion you work towards, of being homesick even towards a place where she got nothing from life, is also very well done. I enjoyed reading this piece and look forward to reading more of your work.