5. Corsets, cod, and constipation
THE TIME I spent with the Morrys was all too brief. I continued to spend most of my hours, by day and by night, in a mazed struggle to transform a living nightmare into a bearable reality. As the days passed and the work seemed to get no forwarder, I began to feel that Enos and Obie and I were doomed to spend the rest of our lives up to our knees in gurry and frustration. The days slid by—literally slid—until one morning the moment of truth was at hand.
The day had come when Jack was due to arrive from Toronto at St. John’s airport. The day had dawned when he and the little schooner would come together for the first time.
As I drove Passion Flower toward the grey city I was in a subdued and apprehensive mood. However it occasionally happens that the black Fates which haunt our lives feel pity for their victims. There was a considerable amount of fog over the Southern Shore that morning. Since this was the usual state of affairs, I gave it no particular heed. It was not until I had felt my way through St. John’s to the airport, there to be told that all flights had been cancelled for several days because of the fog, that I realized I had been reprieved.
I went at once to the forecaster’s office. He warmed my heart and brought me joy by predicting that the airport would remain fogbound for some time to come.
“How long?” I asked.
“Difficult to say, old man. Not less than a week, I’d guess.”
Feeling positively carefree I wrote a note to Jack explaining that, since there was no phone at Muddy Hole, I would have no way of knowing when he arrived. And, I added, since there remained a certain amount of work to do on the boat, I felt I should not waste time making speculative trips to St. John’s on the off chance that Trans-Canada Airlines had managed finally to find the place and effect a landing. I suggested that when he arrived he should rent a small truck (preferably one with four-wheel drive), pick up various items of ship’s stores that I had ordered locally, and which I listed for him, and make his own way to Muddy Hole. I left these instructions with a young lady at Trans-Canada’s information desk.
Some people may wonder why Jack did not come by rail instead of air, but if any such people there be, they do not know anything about the Newfoundland railroad system.
It is a narrow-gauge railway running five hundred miles, mostly through uninhabited wilderness, from Port aux Basques to St. John’s. And it is an antiquity out of another age. Its schedule is so uncertain that under the seats of each coach large wooden boxes are stored. These contain emergency rations for use in case the train is unduly delayed. There are authentic records of the train having taken up to four weeks to cross the island.
The most prolonged delays usually occur during the winter but serious delays can happen at any season for a variety of reasons: fog so thick the engineer cannot see where he is going; rutting bull moose challenging the locomotives to unequal combat (unequal because the moose seldom win); explosions of boilers; windstorms that blow the cars right off the track; temporary loss of passengers who wander off to pick berries while the train is climbing a grade, etc., etc. Not for nothing did Canadian servicemen stationed at St. John’s during the war give the train its enduring name—the Newfoundland Bullet.
There have been many poignant happenings aboard the Bullet, but perhaps none holds quite so much pathos as the story of the young lady travelling east from Port aux Basques. As the days drew on she grew increasingly distraught. Every time the conductor passed through her car she would stop him and ask anxiously how much longer the trip would take. He did not know, of course, and eventually he became impatient with her. Why, he asked, was she in such a plunging hurry anyway?
Modestly she told him. She was expecting a baby.
“Ye should have knowed better than to get on the Bullet, and you in this condition!” he told her indignantly.
“Ah, Sorr,” she replied, “but I wasn’t in this condition when I got on.”
Jack McClelland preferred not to take a chance, so he came by air.
I might have guessed that the Fates were only playing with me when they offered a week’s respite. The morning after I returned from St. John’s I set off with Obie in Passion Flower to visit Shoe Cove, some distance down the coast, in hopes of finding spars for the vessel. Just before noon we were both rendered nearly blind by an unexpected burst of sunlight as the fog rolled out to sea. In far away St. John’s people stopped in the street to speak to friends they had not seen for many a day, and to stare upward as they heard the unfamiliar thunder of an aircraft’s engines.
I have never been able to decide whether I am glad I was not present when Jack arrived at Muddy Hole, or whether my absence should have been a matter for regret. I missed witnessing a scene which has since become part of Southern Shore folklore.
Jack’s plane arrived in St. John’s at a quarter to one. He disembarked, got my note, and sprang into action. He is like that. He springs into action. On this occasion he did not spring quite as lithely as usual because he had recently put his back “out” and as a consequence was wearing, under his Savile Row sports coat and sharkskin slacks, a fearsome device composed of rubber, steel, and whalebone that would have been the envy of the tightly corseted ladies of the Victorian era.
Nonetheless he sprang to such effect that in less than two hours he was heading for Muddy Hole. Some of the spring went out of him as he drove south, and all of the springs went out of the brand-new, chrome-plated, red-painted convertible Buick which (it was the only such car on the island) he had managed, with his usual ability to overwhelm the better judgement of those he deals with, to rent from St. John’s leading garage.
At seven o’clock he arrived at Muddy Hole. The fish plant had just let out, and scores of girls in white aprons and rubber boots, and dozens of men in overalls and rubber boots were pouring out of the stinking building in which they had done their day’s servitude. They were stopped in their tracks by the tremendous blare of a tri-tone horn.
At first they thought some strange vessel must be entering the harbour; then one of the girls saw the glint of the setting sun upon a mass of polished chrome poised on the lip of the rocky slope above the settlement.
This was a visitation the likes of which none of the inhabitants of Muddy Hole had ever seen before. As they stared, transfixed, the flame-coloured monster on the crest eased forward over the lip of the descent. That galvanized them into action. A hundred arms began to wave as hoarse voices were raised in a great shout.
Jack, at the wheel of the red beast, was delighted.
He thought the people were welcoming him to Muddy Hole. He also thought he was still on the ill-defined track which led down the boulder scree to the shore of the cove.
He was wrong on both counts. There was no road, and the inhabitants were trying vehemently to warn him of this fact.
“My son!” one of the observers of the scene told me afterwards. “It were a wunnerful sight to see!”
And here I had better explain that in Newfoundland the word “wonderful” still means what it used to mean in older times: full of wonder, full of awe.
The car negotiated the first few yards without incident, then the slope abruptly steepened and although Jack, suspecting by now that all was not well, tramped on the brakes, it was too late. Down came the red behemoth, careless of the boulders in its path and heedless of a number of split-stick fences, leaping and bounding with the abandon of a hippopotamus driven mad by hashish. Things flew out of it. Two thirty-gallon, galvanized tin tanks intended for the boat (one for water and one for fuel) that had been insecurely reposing in the back seat, rose up and described glittering parabolas in the evening air. The trunk flew open, and Jack’s modest assortment of seagoing gear, five suitcases and some smaller oddments, abandoned ship.
Suddenly it was all over. The car stood still, its shiny face buried in the end wall of a sheep shed. For a long minute none of the watchers moved. Before they could run to the rescue Jack stepped out of the small dust cloud that hung over the battered shed.
As might be expected of a man who, as commander of a motor torpedo boat, once attempted to make a new entrance into St. John’s harbour through a four-hundred foot granite cliff, he had lost nothing of his cool. Blithely he made his way down the remainder of the slope. He was as nonchalant as if he were about to board a luxury cruiser moored to the carpeted docks of the Royal Yacht Club at Cowes.
Enos nervously stepped forward to meet him. He was completely befuddled by the spectacular nature of Jack’s arrival. Instead of guiding Jack to his house, pouring him a drink, and holding him there until I returned, Enos obediently responded to Jack’s imperious demand that he be taken to the boat at once.
Enos conducted the jaunty and resplendent visitor directly to the stage. Jack took three steps out on the oil-soaked poles, stepped on a putrid piece of cod liver, and his feet went out from under him. Appalled, Enos and three or four other men leapt at him, rather than to him, and in their awkward attempts to help him up—they shoved him overboard.
Although years have fled since then, Jack still refuses to talk about this episode. He claims he cannot remember it at all. I suspect his mental blackout resulted from the ministrations he received that evening from Enos and Enos’s seven husky daughters. The strain of spending several hours in an overheated kitchen, being force-fed by a clutch of Valkyries while clad only in a corset and inadequately swathed in a blanket; and while attempting to establish human contact with eight people who seemed to speak no known language, is explanation enough.
Obie and I arrived back at Muddy Hole at midnight. Fortunately Jack was asleep by then. It was with a heavy heart and dubious hopes of the morrow that I crawled into my sleeping-bag.
I was awakened early. Jack stood by my bed wearing a blanket and an anxious look.
“Hi,” he said. Then, tautly, “Where in hell’s the bathroom?”
Now it is to be borne in mind that Jack is the product of a very good private school, an old Toronto family, and a life of comfort if not of luxury. He is not one of your rough-and-ready pioneering types. He likes his conveniences. He is used to them and he is unhappy without them.
Muddy Hole homes, however, do not boast many conveniences. There are no indoor toilets and there are no outdoor toilets. Ladies keep porcelain pots under their beds but men do not. This seems unfair and, indeed, downright cruel, until one is inducted into the mystery of male behaviour in an outport.
On my first visit to Newfoundland it took me several days to resolve this mystery, and I suffered accordingly. However having become a member of the fraternity I was able to spare Jack the agonies of having to find out for himself.
“Hello there. Have a good sleep? Yes? Well, you go on down to the stage; you know, the wharf thing made of sticks. And there’s a little shack on the shoreward end of it. It’s called the fish store and every fisherman has one. You go inside and you’ll find a hole just beside the splitting table, where they dump the cod gurry into the water. And, oh yes, better take some paper with you.”
Jack’s face was a mirror of the struggle taking place within him. I was touched by the pleading look in his eyes, but it was necessary to be firm.
“Look,” I said gently, “you don’t have any choice. Not unless you want to try sneaking into the girls’ room to borrow the pot.” (All seven daughters slept in one room in two beds.) Jack flinched. “And as for the great-out-of-doors, forget it. You’ll find yourself entertaining five or six little boys and as many dogs, all of whom will spring full-blown from nowhere as soon as you think you’re alone.”
Jack moaned a little, gave me a bleak look and headed out the door. He was gone a long time and in his absence the girls got up and lit the fire. By the time he returned they were preparing breakfast.
I felt sorry for Jack, truly sorry. I well remembered my own first visit to a fish store when, perched precariously between wind and water, and surrounded by pungent tubs of codfish soaking in brine, I had injudiciously looked down to behold a consortium of flatfish, sculpins, crabs, and eels staring hopefully upward at me out of the shallows.
Traumatic as the experience must have been, Jack managed to rise above it. But he nearly collapsed when the smell of breakfast struck him. He is a gourmet and a delicate eater. Furthermore he has a weak stomach.
He clutched my arm so hard it hurt and whispered hoarsely in my ear.
“What in God’s name is that?”
“That,” I explained cheerfully, “is Newfoundland’s national dish. A special treat for visitors. It’s called fish-and-brewis.”
“Never mind the name. What’s in it?”
“Well, basically it’s a mixture. You take hard bread or ship’s biscuits and soak them all night to make them soft and to get rid of the weevils. And you take some shore-dried salt fish and soak it all night, ‘watering it’ is the term. Then you boil the fish and the hard bread and when it’s all nice and mushy you pour a cup of spitting hot sowbelly fat over it, and then….”
I never finished my explanation. Jack was already on his way back to visit the sculpins and the eels.
Later that morning when, with the aid of the jeep and several tough but tiny horses, we had extricated the Buick and towed it back to the top of the hill, I felt compelled by some latent trace of honesty to tell Jack the truth about our situation. I explained that even with the best of luck we could not hope to get the boat fit for sea in less than two weeks. I told him that, even then, sailing her would be a most uncertain venture.
“If you want to call it off, Jack, I’d never blame you. Not after what you’ve been through and, I’d better say it, what you’ll have to put up with until we go to sea. You say the word and we’ll leave the damned boat lying where she is and head back to St. John’s. There’s a freighter service running to the Caribbean once a week and the next boat sails tomorrow. We can be aboard her tonight.”
Jack was silent for a moment. He looked out across the harbour, past the stages and the fish stores, past the brooding barrier headlands to the grey void of the waiting fog and the dark sea-then to his eternal credit he replied:
“Not a chance! I expect I’ll have the worst case of constipation known to medical science. My back is never going to recover from what happened last night. Probably we’ll drown when we put out in that fantastic pile of junk you’ve bought. But, Farley, we are going to sail her out of here if we both have to die for it. Now, let’s get down to work.”
