Canadian Stories by Kathy McWilliam

What follows is a little snippet from a work in progress. It’s the story of Johanna, a girl from the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland, who finds herself married, at 17, to a widowed fisherman with 5 children. It’s by turns hilarious and tragic, as it chronicles life in the early twentieth century all the way through World War Two, a time when choices were few and not always happy for girls and women. It’s written in the vernacular of the time, but you’ll catch the rhythm quick enough!

This is Johanna’s recollection of her wedding night.

Night of my wedding, and bedtime come, I busies myself with the little children, cleans their teeth, and fusses over alls I can find to fuss over, which were precious little. First the girls, they says the beads and steals away to bed, and Tom, he looks as fiery red as I feels, and makes a big noise of walking up the stairs. Henry pokes along at mending a line, looking down at his hands when I looks his way.

WHAT? What is it he wants me to do?

Mam said he’d know the doing of it. I think she be wrong. He don’t know the doing of it with me, it seem!

So in the quiet, and it be a heavy, heavy quiet, I walks to his bedroom and closes the door. I takes off the sad pink dress and sits on the side of his bed. And waits. I waits. I shivers, my skin all bumps and the hairs on me legs hard in the cold and sticking up strait. In my shift, I is, and it don’t cover much, nor warm me at all. Why did I close that door, I thinks, when the heat from the stove be out there with him, and why do he not come in here with me?

It don’t take so long for me to be blubbering like a babe in a dirty nappy. There I sits, tears and snot and bumps and hairs and in he walks. “Lord in Heaven, girl! I wondered where you’d got to,” says he, and I thinks to myself, Ain’t I where I’se supposed to be? Where was you?

He pulls the blanket from the bed and he wraps it around me, arms and legs and all the bumps and hairs tucked away inside. Then he lifts me, he does, and I’m no wee girl, and carries me to his chair by the stove. “Wipe your nose”, he says, kindly-like, and hands me a rag from his pocket. I takes it. I doesn’t even mind that it’s dirty.

“We’ll have some tea and we’ll have a wee talk,” says he and puts the kettle to boil. I sits and loves the heat, though himself I’m not so fond of right now. He fusses with getting the tea, like I does before with the tooth brushing and little ones’ baby prayers. And I thinks this wee talk, it be a hard thing for him, like the bedroom is for me.

“Josie,” says he, and he never said that name before, my mother’s name for me – and don’t it sound strange in his mouth! “Josie, “he says, “does you ‘member what I told you a while back? You was my wife in every way but one, and that one you could choose, if you wished it? I means that yet, you know.” And he speaks so soft and kind, I blubbers again, but not so loud this time. “Do you fear me?”

“No,” says I, “you be a good man.  Mam says so, and I know it to be true.”

“I loves you like I loves me children,” says he. “I marries you to keep the biddies from talking, as they will, you know – a young girl In an old man’s home. What eyes can’t see, they conjur.”

“I knows what conjur is,” I says. “Conjur is what the devil do to confuse us all with what be not true but look true. I knows what perjurers is, too. There be plenty of those about. You be not one, Henry.”

“So where does I sleep, then,” says I.

“You sleeps where you wants,” says he. I supposes he sees me looking at me cot against the wall near the stove, because he says next: “Go put on your night clothes, girl, and find your bed. It’s been a long day, tomorrow will be another. Wipe your nose.”