Cold Pastoral Read Free Page A

slap of the sea had a “Y” quantity of endurance. It was impossible to be defeated by the accident of birth in a skiff. Although infant lungs, violated by the air of the North Atlantic, showed signs of not being able to contain it, they became soothed by the glow from her mother’s stove. She thrived, not in size, but in quality. Josephine was soon up and about, and during very cold nights slept on the kitchen settle, getting up to feed the stove with spruce-logs. It was a luxury unheard of in the Cove, but the manner of Mary Immaculate’s birth and the change of sex in her issue made Josephine superstitious about tending the breath of life. By day her daughter slept in a wooden cradle, was taken up and fed, put down to sleep again until she grew to some waking moments. Then long eyes in a minute face followed her mother’s figure round the kitchen. Often while Josephine was stirring a cauldron of food the spoon would slow as she stared at her child. “Glory be to God, Mary Immaculate, by the looks of you I had no hand in your makin’, nor your Pop, neither. Did the fairies come out to the skiff to leave me a changeling? If they did, you’re a powerful change to Molly Conway! By the sweet face of you I’d say the angels were ticklin’ your feet.”
    After the loutishness of her sons Josephine loved to wash the tiny baby and hold it naked in her lap. Like a skinful of milk it looked, in contrast to the blackleaded surface of the stove. A small, narrow baby, long for its age! And how it strained towards the few spots of colour in the kitchen! The bright red in the robe of the Sacred Heart, the blue of the Virgin’s hood and the gold of the lustre jug! Even the glow from the bars of the kitchen stove was an attraction! She didn’t like anything dark. On her first Ash Wednesday she roared when Josephine bathed her with a smut on her brow: but when her brothers returned from Mass on Palm Sunday she grabbed the bright green boughs.
    Benedict would gaze at his daughter from far-seeing blue eyes, as if trying to focus something out of his vision. With a cup of stewed tea in his hand he would declare, “Woman, she’s powerful light from stem to stern.”
    â€œThat she is, Benedict! And a fair treat to wash after them with a stern like a western craft.”
    Benedict could doubt the advantage of such lightness.
    â€œThis is no life for canoes. She’s like nothing yet!”
    Such comments were balm to Josephine. “That she’s not! She’s the dead spit of the angels in Heaven.”
    Unprepared to call up the imagery of the angels in Heaven, Benedict would clod-hopper back to the beach. Once he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stooped to lift the baby from Josephine’s lap. At that moment he saw his hands for the first time in his life. The sight of them against a delicate skin gave him an acute shock, and he jerked them back to the pockets of his overalls. His hands were his maintenance and knew a multiplicity of crafts, having built his house, his fish-room, his stage-head, his boat and his oars. Calloused, cracked, blunted at the finger-tips, scarred with lines and twines and splitting-knives, their ugliness hurt him against his child’s skin. In his world of work and wrest and food eaten from hand to mouth he had no knowledge of any other kind of life. In that brief second he saw his daughter amongst different people, with work that gave them smooth hands. After that he was afraid to touch her, and he came to regard her like the sun or the horizon—something visible to his eyes but out of reach of his hands. It was necessary to dismiss something he could not handle. As she grew she became her mother’s child.
    To her brothers she was a toy. They poked at her with fishy fingers and hung over her cradle with loud claps of laughter. Then her white brow would contract, as if she found their size and violence oppressive. But