Harrow reappeared at the side of the bar and leaned a shoulder against the head of the coffin. “We thank you,” he said. “On his behalf. Come back on a happier occasion, the complimentary will still be here.”
It was weeks afterwards before Buchan could bring himself to take pen and paper to write a letter that would be sent on the first packet boat out of Portugal Cove after the spring breakup. He began, Dear Ms. Cassandra Jure. It is with regret and the most heartfelt sympathy I write with news of your father’s passing from this world in the early morning of November 21, 1817.
TWO
Cassie was telling John Peyton about the first walking trip she took with her father as a girl, between St. John’s harbour and Portugal Cove. She was sitting next to the fire at the summer house, wearing a thick wool sweater and flannels beneath the pale linen of her skirt against the chill of early May. The letter carrying news of her father’s death was in her lap and she worried at the paper absently as she spoke.
“I was only twelve at the time,” she said. She and her father were travelling an Indian path, an overland route through miles of what the books she read would have called impenetrable forest, impassable bog-land. It had been decades since the Beothuk Indians occupied this part of the island and the trail seemed to be little more than a rumour of their passing, barely marked, sometimes petering out halfway across a marsh, sometimes disappearing in a copse of spruce. They would spend half an hour or more then, zigzagging aimlessly to pick up some hint of the direction it continued in, her father walking bent at the waist as if he might be able to sniff out the path like a hound. He had thickly curled sideburns, a head of thinning hair showing pale scalp. He carried a nunny-bag packed with food and clean stockings, a costril of spruce beer tied at his waist. He squatted where depressions in the moss indicated the path might turn northward and pulled at the sideburns with both hands, considering.
He caught Cassie watching him and smiled across at her. “Yes,” he said, as if her watching was the deciding factor. “This way then.” He straightened and started off, and Cassie settled in behind him, her eyes at his feet, trotting every few steps to keep up. She was exhausted and near tears by this point, but refused to give in by naming it, by asking for relief. Her father was moving at the same pace he’d set when they began walking out of St. John’s in the dark that morning and she was determined not to alter it, not to slow him down. At the time she aspired to his indiscriminate appetite for the world. Just as her mother once had.
Her mother was a girl of barely seventeen years when she met the man who would become her husband, moving away with him to Newfoundland to protect her parents from unacceptable public embarrassment.
Cassie looked at Peyton, to see if he understood what she was saying. He nodded for her to go on.
Her mother wanted to live a respectable life, and before the years and her father’s increasingly dissolute behaviour exhausted her, she struggled to maintain some semblance of dignity. In her eyes, the pub operated by her husband was another humiliation she had to endure and she couldn’t speak of the place without a tremor of distaste in her voice.
Peyton said, “You’ve told me how she felt.”
Cassie nodded. Her father complained his wife had airs about her, but thought she had suffered enough at his hands to have a legitimate claim to some disappointment. He let her censure of the tavern stand without serious rebuttal. But the unresolved disagreement between the two spilled over into other areas of the family’s life, particularly when it came to their daughter. Her mother was fastidious and demanding, attentive, solicitous, firm. Her father was reckless, delinquent, uninhibited by notions of what was proper for a girl her age, particularly if he was under the influence of drink. He allowed her to read the early poems of John Donne, took her lining for conners off the wharves in the harbour, taught her to swim at Quidi Vidi Lake. He taught her to load and shoot a rifle in the hills above St. John’s.
“You’re going to ruin that girl,” her mother warned him.
“I’m through ruining girls, m’love,” he told her.
She gave him a dark, disparaging look. “I wish I’d never clapped eyes on you.”
Cassie sometimes worked the tension between her parents to angle for concessions from her mother that would otherwise have been out of the question. John Donne was a little beyond her comprehension, lining for tomcod was more or less a bore. But learning to swim, firing a rifle, these things were exhilarating and worth fighting for. When her father announced his plans for the walking tour to Portugal Cove, she began lobbying to accompany him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother told her.