The Bosun Chair Read online

  Copyright © Jennifer Bowering Delisle, 2017

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system—without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Delisle, Jennifer, 1979-, author

  The bosun chair / Jennifer Bowering Delisle.

  Based on the author’s thesis submitted to the University of Alberta 2003.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-926455-87-7 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-926455-88-4 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-926455-89-1 (mobi)

  1. Newfoundland and Labrador--Poetry. I. Title.

  PS8607.E4844B67 2017 C811’.6 C2016-905877-8

  C2016-905878-6

  Board Editor: Jenna Butler

  Cover design & layout: Kate Hargreaves

  Author photograph: Jennifer Bowering Delisle

  Interior photographs care of Jennifer Bowering Delisle

  Cover photograph: Tim Boote

  All Rights Reserved

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.

  201, 8540 – 109 Street

  Edmonton, AB T6G 1E6

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  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

  1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17

  For Malcolm and Coralie, so you may build your own histories.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Three Thousand Quintals

  Ballycater

  Sunlight

  Sense

  The Stepping-Off Place

  The New Road

  The Bosun Chair

  PROLOGUE

  IN JUNE OF 1915, LIKE EVERY JUNE, Captain John Bowering of Coley’s Point, Newfoundland, set sail on the Swallow for the season’s fishing in Labrador. By the time he and his crew were ready to return home at the end of October, the ship was so full of fish that some of the sailors were left behind to return on the Lorna Doone.

  Mid dangers thick, seen and unseen,

  On waves which smash our barque,—

  A sailor’s life is hard indeed;

  And oft’ the way seems dark.

  His ballad “Trip of the Ill-Fated Swallow” was printed by someone in the family in little twenty-page booklets, covered in red card stock. In the tiny type he tells me, his great-granddaughter, the story in quaint rhyme.

  Now all on board, — ready to sail,

  That fine October day;

  All hoped a breeze of North West wind,

  Would hurry us on our way.

  My parents left Newfoundland when they were twenty-three. They were not fishers pushed by empty nets, outport people in search of black prairie gold. But Alberta called them nevertheless, with a residency at the U of A Hospital for Dad and a whole province pulsing with oil money. Four thousand people a month came in those days. My parents did not plan to stay in Edmonton. They have never left.

  My parents had aunts and uncles who moved to Calgary and Vancouver in the ’40s. A brother already in Winnipeg. More of the family would follow them, to Grande Prairie, Fort St. John, Houston. The population of the province is only half a million, and they say that more than 200,000 Newfoundlanders live “away.” But that 200,000 does not include the children of Newfoundlanders born in Toronto, or Boston, or Fort McMurray. I am one of that unknown number who grew up hearing Newfoundland called “home.”

  Jean Chaulk was just sixteen when she set sail aboard the merchant schooner The Duchess of Fife in September of 1907. A maid working in St. John’s, catching a ride home to her family, she may have been the only passenger, a favour from her cousin on the crew.

  We left St. John’s on Monday morn,

  Our spirits were light and gay.

  We were bound home to Brookland,

  In Bonavista Bay.

  Her poem “The Loss of the Duchess of Fife” is typed on plain legal paper, photocopied many times and curling at the edges. I don’t know who typed the poem, or when.

  While Carbonear we reached that night,

  And early left next morn,

  To run for Catalina,

  As our captain feared the storm.

  It must mean something that my great-grandparents on either side of my family wrote poems. It must mean that despite a distance of a hundred years and three thousand miles, there is a connection between us that runs deeper than the DNA. A line that I can follow back across a continent.

  When I was growing up, I was angry with my parents for leaving Newfoundland. I wrote sentimental stories and poems set there, describing the pattern of tide against the rocky shore or the smell of salt in the air. On visits from St. John’s, my grandfather told tales of a conspiracy behind Confederation, how St. John’s was draped in black on the day Newfoundland joined Canada. We were taught in school that Canada is a mosaic. My friends were Ukrainian, Indian, Chinese—we were all born in Edmonton. My heritage was Newfoundland. This was where I looked for rootedness, a kind of belonging.

  Make no wonder, my mother might say.

  Make no wonder. I was a grown woman before I knew that that was a Newfoundlandism, adding on the “make” to that certain phrase.

  While here upon the trackless deep,

  So far away from home;

  The thought comes forcibly to my mind,

  We know not where we’ll roam.

  As the Swallow was heading toward home, the weather turned. A gale charged in, the seas began to pummel her sides. One by one the sails burst under the hurricane winds. The heavy sea swept the wheel aside and the foremast threatened to topple.

  As The Duchess of Fife approached the harbour at Catalina, the storm the captain had feared surrounded her, wrenching away the main boom, leaving the schooner to drift all night in the taunting swells.

  Both ships were left to the mercy of the wind.

  THREE THOUSAND QUINTALS

  IT WAS A GIANT DOLL’S HOUSE, without a back wall. I wanted to follow my father as he picked through the rotten boards, the cobwebs, the barrels of china whose plates, held up to the light, shone clean through the dark room. But Mom held my hand.

  My grandfather was a wooden boy, donning old-fashioned clothes by the crackle of the fire. My great-grandfather was made of paper, eating fish and brewis at the table before running off to school.

  I thought we could take the china, but we left it there. It doesn’t belong to us, Dad said. Meaning there were uncles and aunts who also belonged to this place, who grew up and moved away, whose lives here were not pretend, just long ago.

  From my spot in the yard, the old room was the size of my small palm.

  Someone humming that old song “She’s Like the Swallow” as he loads the barrels of salt, the crates of tea and hard tack, into the holds for the long northern summer.

  She’s like the swallow that flies so high…

  I love my love and love is no more.

  The Swallow, Fradsham’s two-masted schooner. Someone named her this, thinking of a white flapping: the mainsail and topsail, the flying jib. Or thinking of Sir Humphrey’s old ship, alongside The Squirrel and The Golden Hind, in which he claimed the New Founde Land for England—back when a bucket, they say, could be lowered in the water and come up again full
of fish. Forgetting the tragic Newfoundland song, the maiden scorned by her lover who lays down to die—

  She took her roses and made a bed, a stony pillow for her head.

  Thinking instead of the long migration to the Labrador, the flocks that fished for cod in the Strait of Belle Isle, as far as Cape Chidley, the northern tip of coast that looks across the Hudson Strait to Baffin Island.

  She’s like the sunshine on the lee shore…

  She’s lost her love and she’ll love no more.

  But swallows at sea are a good omen, so long as no one whistles on board, or coils a rope against the sun.

  The schooner loaded, the weather fine, Captain John Bowering kisses his wife Rhoda and daughter Nellie on the beach. Sixty people board with him for the ten-day journey to the fish.

  Coley’s Point began as Cold East Point, a good beach in Conception Bay for the fishermen of Jersey to dry their catch. Became the warm cove of some imagined man named Coley, who still searches the coastline for the point to lead him home.

  Conception Bay, once the fishery’s fecund source; in 1915 it is already scraped raw. Half the men of Coley’s Point venture north to the Labrador for a summer at the fish. Then south for a winter in the coal mines of Sydney, then north again for a spring on the ice when the seals perch on pans heaving on the ocean.

  A summer on the Labrador: four-thousand-foot fjords flanked by icebergs and tiny islands, guiding the schooners to their rooms. They call them rooms, the little fishing stations where the fish are made, as though these ramshackle stores were a house, as though this cold bit of coast were home.

  A quick mug-up of hard bread and tea and the men crack their morning joints towards the cod traps. Balanced in their skiffs, they heave the nets out of the water, hoping for the ache of a heavy haul breaking the surface. By 7:30 a.m. the first loads have already been pitchforked onto the stagehead.

  Put away the fish: simple as plates in a cupboard, clean as socks in a drawer. The cutthroat slits the fish with a double-bladed knife. The header lops the head and entrails, and the splitter, the skipper, slips out the backbone before the salter puts the fish in the salt barrels.

  Make the fish: simple as tea, clean as bread. Wash the salted fish, then pile them for the night—piles six feet wide, drained by the weight of their own flesh. Spread them on the flakes to dry for the day in the sun and the flies, pile them up again at night, spread them again, pile them up, covered in spruce boughs, covered in flies. Watch for dryness and signs of sunburn, watch for bad weather. Spread them out again, until the fish is dry and hard.

  By October, the work is done. More than 3,000 quintals of fish. Not as good as they’d hoped, but it should bring in enough for winter.

  Behind the house, from tiny eyes closed with earth, the potatoes grow in rows. Rhoda picks out the weeds and rocks around them, leaning up the slope, her back to the water.

  These things were planted before he left, and now are pushing upward, skinned with dirt. The potatoes and the carrots will be barrelled and sold, save the ones cellared for the winter. The best heads of cabbage will be pickled in salt, like round green fish.

  The sun is warm for fall as she lifts her skirts out of the dirt, and when she closes her eyes she can see her own blood through her most fragile skin. She has buried other things too in this ground, things that will not grow.

  Soon it will be time to harvest the potatoes, and if he has not returned, she will dig them up alone.

  So much fish was loaded on to the Swallow that forty-three people returned to Bay Roberts on the Lorna Doone. Seventeen went on the Swallow.

  That night the wind was good and free,

  A breeze of North West wind;

  We glided up the shore, and left

  Old Domino behind.

  The crew: Samuel Kinsella, William Russell, Arthur Greenland, and the cook Clara King of Country Road. Ten freighters—passengers returning from a season’s work at the fish—John Jones of Upper Island Cove, three Battens of Bareneed, and others from Clarke’s Beach. Skipper John Bowering of Coley’s Point, and 1,400 quintals of fish.

  Had the wind held another twenty-four hours, they would have been home. Instead, the Swallow floated through St. Anthony, Englee, White Bay, Green Bay, slow as a dory. In her lee, the storm-petrels followed low to the water, picking at the plankton churned in her wake. For two weeks she waited for the wind in Seldom-Come-By, as if to console the village for its lonely name.

  When the wind finally came, it came determined to make up for lost time, blowing away their own breath, making them gasp like fish on the stagehead. They reefed the sails, tried to get the foresail down as it began to tear. Cabot Island was ahead. They tacked the schooner and managed to get around the island, the jumbo and the jib tearing behind them.

  We lowered our mainsail—all seemed dark,

  Crushed, hopes of getting home;

  We ran her then before the wind;

  We knew not what would come.

  This is what comes: the foresail bursts the rigging. A cask of cod oil knocks the wheel out of place. The foresail blows away. The mast heaves open the deck like the key on a can. The sea sweeps over, smashing a small boat on deck, hurling molasses puncheons over the rail. The ship’s constant roll bursts the tackles rigged to hold the mast in place.

  This is what comes: a storm that does not relent for days, stripping the schooner of her canvas, prying apart the fingers of the planks that grip them above the waves.

  Before it is tucked between the logs of the stove, she peeks at the pages of the Bay Roberts Guardian, reading as the bread is rising.

  The body of John B. Mercer was the only one recovered among the 23 Nfld.

  Reservists lost on the H.M.S. Viknor.

  The death of Mrs. Flight, who resided at Chelsea, Mass., occurred at that place sometime ago. Mrs. Flight was formerly Miss Bertha Russell, of Country Road.

  Formerly, she thinks, no longer a Russell, neither a Flight any longer.

  Deceased was afflicted with the dread disease consumption, and knowing there was no hope for her, she longed for the end to come.

  Hun Shipping has Suffered Heavily.

  ARCTIC INDIGESTION CURE! CAN YOU DOUBT THESE WORDS? I WAS A SUFFERER FOR 18 YEARS!

  All this death, all this useless news. She pokes the paper into the pyre and lights it, bringing the cold stove to life to make her bread.

  John tried to lighten her by throwing their summer’s work, the fish, overboard. The ship was turning to water. Her deck was a landwash flooded with waves, her hull was sand washing out from beneath their feet. They pumped for their lives, without pausing to wipe the salt from their eyes. But John knew that the Swallow would never make it back to land.

  In a few days, the petrels, too, would wreck on the beaches, exhausted from fighting the winds, starved of plankton on the turbulent sea.

  On the fourth night, just after dark, the distant light of a steamer heading west. They paused in their pumping, lighting desperate flares, blowing their horn, praying that the steamer would turn. But the ship continued on her course and disappeared.

  By October she begins to watch the horizon, as if to spot him as he crests the hill. She could see him now but for the fog. A broad smile as he scoops up his daughter and tells of his record catch. Then leaning into tales of his summer.

  Other schooners begin to return, the Jennie Jones, the Hope. The Lorna Doone makes it back to Bay Roberts with the bulk of the crew, but by November there is still no sign of the Swallow. Finally, a one-line wire from Seldom to the company to say that they are on their way, and then the storm devours the coast, and the Swallow vanishes.

  The storm brought down telegraph lines all over—they may be safe and just unable to wire. He’s having tea in Catalina this afternoon. He’s setting out from Bay de Verde now and heading home.

  As November wears on, other schooners caught in the storm stumble into ports. The Florence had safely run for Portugal Cove, and then was towed back to Bay Roberts by
the Bell Island steamer. The Rattler made it in to Little Catalina; the crew of the Blanche M. Rose were rescued from their wreck by the May Duff and taken to Sydney. And still no sign of the Swallow.

  The ship was filling with water like a dipping spoon. It was the fifth night since the storm began, and they began to lose hope.

  But no! The scene did quickly change;

  For at ten o’clock that night,

  While anxious eyes were looking hard,

  One shouted “There’s a light.”

  They fired muskets and flares made with oil clothes and twine soaked in cod oil, until the steamer’s light changed shape, became two across the night. Port and starboard. It was changing course. It was coming their way.

  As the lifeboats rowed toward the steamer, John looked back at the ship they had abandoned. For nearly a week they had fought day and night to keep the schooner above water. He had begun to get used to the idea of being the captain who goes down with the ship.

  Aboard the steamer, he discovered that she was a Norwegian ship called the Hercules. They had drifted many miles, and the Hercules was bound for Europe.

  Rhoda sits with her mother-in-law knitting in dim lantern light, purling tea and wood smoke into the yarn. For the old lady, the needles’ rhythmic clicking is comforting, meditative. For Rhoda, it is a clock, tapping out the time that is gone.

  Mother knits little mittens for her granddaughter, the white wool jigging against her knee. Rhoda knits a new pair of stockings for her husband’s next season on the Labrador. If he is dead, she is wasting time that should be spent on cleaning the stove, on polishing the tea stains from the cups. If he is alive, then he will need his stockings, perhaps even a new sweater, underwear, and other things for the spring. This unrelenting rhythm, purl purl purl, knit knit knit.