Peg held the loaf of bread close to her chest, drawing the serrated blade back and forth with a well-practiced hand. Crumbs tumbled to the floor and onto the table but she took no notice. Balancing the thick slice of bread between the knife blade and her thumb, she passed the bread to Nora and then proceeded to cut a second slice for herself.
“I’ll get the soup.” Nora went to fetch the two steaming bowls.
“It’s just a bit of pea soup I made yesterday.” Peg brushed the crumbs off the table and sat down.
“It looks delicious. You still cook for yourself every day?”
“Yes, girl. I like everything fresh. Might as well boil up them newspapers,” she nodded at the pile stacked at the end of the table, “as eat that old garbage you get to the store. Besides, I like to do a bit of cookin’. Gives me something to do.”
The sun had edged its way around the corner of the house and fell diagonally across the table. Feeling the warmth on her shoulder and forearm, Nora looked up. “What a grand view you have from here.”
“On a day like today everything looks grand, girl. But there’s days I can’t see beyond the rise out there, the fog is that thick. It’s the same with the snow and sleet: everything blotted out, just like you’ve pulled down a blind. Can’t see a blessed thing then. But it can shift about just like that and then the cliffs and the rocks come out of nowhere, right at you. It’s all fine and grand so long as you’re in here lookin’ out, but if you’re out there lookin’ for a way in, it’s not so grand then.”
“Does the water freeze over in winter?”
“No, girl, not really. But time to time we get a skim of ice close to shore, and in the spring of the year the slob ice sometimes comes in the bay. The youngsters go pan hoppin’ then. You know, jumpin’ from one pan of ice to the other, playin’ about. When we were to the island we seemed to get it worse. Winter months I remember lying in the bed, a gale blowin’ outside. Nights like that you’d think the house would just take off with the lot of us still in our beds and be gone out to sea. Next mornin’ when we’d wake, the spray off the water would be froze solid on the windows to the front of the house.” She finished up her soup, wiping around the edges of her bowl with the last crust of bread.
“Matt never liked to be on the water,” she said suddenly. “Made him sick to his stomach, but now he loved the sound and the smell of the sea.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth. “Of an evenin’ he’d walk up over the hills and down in the coves. He paid no heed to the weather. He’d just sit for hours and watch the waves, and the tide and the kelp floatin’ about on the rocks. Put him in mind of Ireland, he told me one time.” She began to tease at the woolly fringe of her placemat, picking apart the matted strands with her thumbnail.
Nora watched and listened.
“June 10, 1920,” Peg continued, feeling grateful for the silence and the lack of small talk. She turned to look out across the water to the horizon. “It was a beautiful day, the day he arrived on the island, not so hot as today, but sunny and bright.” She smoothed the unruly fringe with her fingertips and pressed it flat to the table. “I was in the garden to the side of the house getting the ground ready to set out the cabbages. Tell truth I saw his shadow before I saw him. It was a long dark shadow with a hat and it fell right across where I was to. When I come about, the sun was in my eyes so I had a hard time to see who was there. ‘That’s heavy soil you have there, it needs to be worked.’ Them’s the first words he spoke to me. It seemed like he’d been close by, watchin’ for a while and I didn’t know. I was stunned for a minute but by and by I got a good look at him. First thing I noticed was the white shirt; all proper he was done up in a suit and a soft kind of hat. He looked for all the world like a priest except that the clothes were not real black, just dark. The only thing out of place was the suitcase in his hand.”
Her eyes twinkled as she turned to Nora. “‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘God be praised, it’s not every day a fine looking man in a nice shirt and suit shows up to my door.’ He was too, a fine looking man,” she added quickly. “Not a big man, but sort of regular size with a nice serious face. He was no youngster either; thirty-four years old he was then. ‘Am I speaking with Mrs. Barry?’ he says. ‘Yes,’ I said to him, ‘I’m Peg Barry.’
“With that he set the suitcase on the ground by his feet, took off his hat and began to tell me he’d met Johnny, my husband, in London a few years earlier. Johnny was on leave and was headed back to the front the next day. Matt made him a promise he’d come and see me. Well, my dear, if he’d taken the spade from my hand and knocked me to the ground I wouldn’t have been more shocked.” She turned to explain, “Johnny, my husband, twenty-four years old he was when he marched off to war one day and never came back. Missing in action is what they wrote me. Gone, like last year’s snow, disappeared into the ground in France. I never laid eyes on him no more.” Her voice trailed off like a wisp of smoke.
She found a small smooth dent in the table and began to rub gently with her forefinger. “I made supper for Matt that evening while he sat and talked to my father. Those days my father was poorly. He’d had a stroke the winter before and couldn’t get about no more. His mind was the finest kind but he had a hard time talking. You had to listen close to know what he’d be trying to say. When the neighbours used to come and visit him, they’d talk like he wasn’t there, like he was gone with the fairies or couldn’t hear no more. Instead they’d go on to me with their old men’s talk and foolish jabbering. To begin with, I tried to include my father in the talk and be interested in what they had to say but in the end I’d just say yes and no and wish them gone. But now Matt, he sat and talked to him and listened to what he had to say. He told him about London in war time and about Ireland and the troubles there. He took time with him, answered his questions, what he could understand of them, and never seemed to get crooked. At the time I thought how nice it was to hear again the sound of a man’s voice about the place: a young man’s voice. My father asked him to bide awhile with us and I was right delighted.”
She took a deep breath and cleared her throat. “Later that night when my father got tired of all the talk, I saw him to bed in the front room: that was where he slept those days. It was easier for me. When I come back to the fire and sat down, it was a bit awkward between us, but after a bit I got around to speaking.”
“About Johnny, a message written on a piece of paper…well, it doesn’t put a man to rest, you know.”
Matthew Molloy leaned forward in his chair, his elbows coming to rest on his knees, his hands clasped together. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.
She leaned forward, alert, anxious not to miss a word. The back of his head was close to her face. There was a faint oily smell off his scalp. The hair was thick and coarse, cut close in at the back and sides. Her eyes followed the curve of his head up to the crown where tight curls twisted and turned into a thick clump. About his ears, tiny flecks of grey showed through. In that moment, she had an urge to reach out and touch those curls, to reassure herself that it was someone real who sat in the chair beside her, but even as the thought crossed her mind, his head came up, as if he had sensed what she was about to do.
She caught his eye, compelling him to look at her. “You know something, Mr. Molloy,” she said. “People don’t talk about Johnny no more, not even his own mother. Once the letter came that was it. It’s like he never existed.” His eyes dropped and he shifted in his chair, pulling back ever so slightly, but she paid no heed. “Sometimes I think I hear him laughin’ below in the yard. I think he’s goin’ to walk in through the door or sneak up behind me like he used to, and frighten the livin’ daylights out of me.”
For a fleeting moment laughter seemed to fill the kitchen and then just as quickly it was gone, leaving behind an empty silence.
“How did you come to meet Johnny?” Her question, hard and precise, dragged them back to reality.
“I met him purely by chance.”The answer was on the tip of his tongue, as if he had been anticipating the question. “It was a chilly evening in London, close to the end of October. I had things on my mind that night so I decided to take a walk down by the river near Victoria. The war was on everyone’s mind, it was all people talked about. The streets were alive with men in uniform like Johnny. Some were injured, maimed, some laughing, excited and happy. The train stations were packed with soldiers leaving and returning from the front. It was a ghastly kind of excitement. Everywhere I turned, Lord Kitchener was staring out from a poster, pointing a finger, demanding: JOIN YOUR COUNTRY’S ARMY! It wasn’t my country and I wanted no part of the war here or anywhere else. I made the decision that night to go to America.”
He straightened up and leaned back in his chair. All the while he spoke, her eyes never left his face. Every word she took in like a clean breath of fresh air.
“Go on,” she urged him.
“I was feeling a bit light-hearted and relieved at the thought of going to America and as I walked back along the embankment, I heard noise and laughter coming from a pub and I wandered in. The lads in there were mostly in uniform. I thought they were Irish fellows who had joined up. They sounded Irish, but they were Newfoundlanders:The Newfoundland Regiment. They were back in London for a refit before returning to France. It was your Johnny who spoke to me. We talked for a while. That day he’d been ‘down to No. 58,’ he said, to pick up his wages and letters, and now they were celebrating. He looked fit and well, no injuries that I could see.”
He looked right at her then and she knew that he spoke the truth. She waited, not wishing to hurry him but eager for more.
“Johnny talked about Newfoundland and Berry Island,” he continued, comfortable in his role as storyteller. “He was full of stories about fishin’ and what he called swilin’, that was, ‘going to the ice,’ he told me, ‘after the seals.’ He was a great man to talk. In fact, when he got going he sounded as if he came straight from Waterford in Ireland. When I told him that, he was delighted, said his great-grandfather came from there way back.”
She could hardly believe what she was hearing: her Johnny, young, healthy, enjoying himself, and gettin’ ready to march off to his death. “Yes,” she said, “he was a great talker.” Then, suddenly, frightened that their time that evening might pass with chit-chat and be gone forever, she summoned up the courage to ask the one question that had been in her mind all along. “Did he … well, did he mention me?” The words sounded silly and girlish and were no sooner out of her mouth than she wished them back.
Without a second thought he answered. “Johnny told me that he had married the brightest star in the whole of Newfoundland.”
The very idea of him saying such a thing to a stranger shocked her but deep down she was delighted. That was the Johnny she loved: he made her laugh and that made up for a lot of his faults. “You wouldn’t want to pay no attention to him,” she said, pushing aside her feelings. “He could charm the leg off an iron pot with his old palaver.”
Matt began to rummage inside his pocket and produced a small package wrapped in brown paper. “He gave me this for you,” he said, holding out the package. “I was to tell you that it was what all the girls in London were wearing.”
Peg touched Nora’s arm and got to her feet. “I’ve got something I want to show you.” She shuffled off in the direction of her bedroom. A minute later she was back and placed a small package on the table. She sat down and slowly undid the string. The pale sheen of silk stockings, new and never worn, caught the light from the afternoon sun. Peg reached out to touch the silky folds. “I’ve never told that story to a living soul before today,” she whispered.