Mabel whimpered, her body shaking and weak. “I don’t know if I can.”
Miss B.’s voice was firm. “You ain’t got no choice … now here we go. Mother Mary, help this mama, help this baby, Mother Mary, Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Moon and Star of the Sea, Ave Maria Stellas … un, deux, trois …”
Mabel closed her eyes and let out a long, anguished wail. Bertine and Sadie cried out loud beside her, moaning right along with her, all three women letting out heavy groans. As the baby slipped out, all milky-looking and wet, I pulled the cord free from its neck. Miss B. scooped the baby up, opening its tiny mouth with her fingers. She held her mouth to the infant’s, her cheeks puffing with gentle breaths, then made the sign of the cross over and over as the baby gave its first cry.
It was late by the time we finished tending to Mabel and her new baby, clearing away the bloodstained sheets, spooning fennel broth between Mabel’s tired lips. Miss B. squeezed drops of watery red alder tea into the infant’s mouth “to clear the liver and cut the hives.” When mother and child were sleeping, we left them to Sadie and Bertine’s care. I recorded the day’s events in the Willow Book, still amazed at the way it felt to be the first person to bring her hands to a child’s life. While it cannot replace the sadness I feel over Darcy, it has changed me, somehow opening my heart again.
December 8, 1916. Evening, about half-past eight.
Mabel Thorpe has another beautiful baby girl.
Her name is Violet.
Not wanting to wake up my family, I stayed over at Miss B.’s cabin and slept in her rocking chair until dawn. I woke to find Miss B. standing beside the rocker, praying over me.
She whispered, “You believe in spirits of the dead?”
Thinking I was dreaming, I whispered back. “Yes.”
“You know where they lives?”
“Right here. Right where we are. Everywhere we are.”
“How you know this?”
“I just do.”
EACH SUNDAY AT the Union Church we recite the Apostles’ Creed. The voices of the congregation rise up together in holy-mouthed repetition, saying, “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” When my Auntie Hannah June died, she came to me in spirit. She told me she’d forgotten to do something before she left. She’d forgotten to write down her mother’s recipe for brown bread. Hannah June was always the one to make the bread, for every social and family picnic. She guarded the secret with her life and never bothered to write it down. I guess she thought it was the one thing that meant she was needed. Maybe she was right.
At family gatherings, everyone always waited for her arrival, anticipating the basket of warm, doughy sweetness she would bring. Once, before a Women’s Institute bake sale, I saw her standing just outside an open window at the Seaside Centre, as if she was waiting for someone to say her name. No sooner had Aunt Fran said, “Where’s that Hannah June and her brown bread?” then in she came, flour still clinging in the wrinkles of her hands, smelling like yeast and molasses.
The Sunday after she died, there in the middle of church, while everyone else was saying, “To thee all angels cry aloud; The heavens, and all the powers therein; To thee cherubim and seraphim continually do cry.” Auntie Hannah June’s ghost settled down beside me and led my pencil across the inside of the back cover of the hymnal. To my dear sister Maude, ¼ cup molasses, ½ cup oats, 2 egg yolks … I passed the book behind me to Aunt Maude. She cried, right there in the pew, trembling and dropping wet tears all over the place.
The morning after Mabel’s birth, Miss B. had gone on about her thoughts of the dead, sitting down in a chair next to me in her kitchen, clutching my hand. “Wherever them spirits lives, up or down or in the treetops, hidin’ behind gravestones or under my bed, I’m goin’ there soon. Goin’ to meet with Mary and the angels, my maman and my grandpapa Louis Faire.” She opened her eyes wide and stuck her face in front of mine. “See? The brown of my skin and the bright of my eyes is all muddy with clouds … my knittin’ needles been playin’ waltzes instead of jigs.”
I started to speak, but she put her finger to my lips. “Shh … I gots to give it up and it’s you that’s got to follow.” She pulled at the tangle of beads around her neck, her bony fingers tugging apart the strands of pearl, jet, coral and wood. A single black strand came away from the rest, weighted with a silver crucifix, a long brass key and a small leather pouch. “Keeps the gris-gris, the evil eye and the voodoo away.” She held the rosary beads to her lips. “I remember the day you arrived.”
“The day I was born?”
“Oh no, long before that … I’m talkin’ about the day your spirit came down and started flutterin’ around in your mama’s belly like a pair of butterfly’s wings.”
She slipped the beads through her fingers, one after another, as she spoke. “Your mama had come to me crying, convinced that the baby in her belly was dead. She’d had a dream, a vision of a beautiful lady with hair as dark as night and sparklin’ green eyes. She done thought it were an angel from God, come to tell her that the baby had gone to heaven.”
“I just knew that weren’t the way it was, so I sat her down, brewed her some raspberry tea and began talkin’ to her belly. It wasn’t but a minute later that she felt you beginnin’ to move.” Miss B. laughed. “I told your mama not to worry, that her dream was showin’ her that she was gonna have a fine baby girl. Oh, she could hardly believe it, the wife of a Rare man havin’ a girl. But after you started kickin’ her in the ribs, she trusted me, she knew it was true, not like your father … he wouldn’t hear it, no matter how many times I grabbed him after church and swore on the reverend’s Protestant excuse for a Bible. Why your daddy almost went and fainted when you didn’t have a piddler danglin’ between your legs.” She placed the crucifix, key and pouch in the palm of her hand, the beads trailing down in her lap. “I knew from the start who you was, Dora Rare. You’s what I call lagniappe, a little something extra.”
“Miss B., I’m not sure what you mean by all this.”
She went on, stroking the crucifix as she spoke. “I know most folks think what I do ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of witchery, but everything gots a reason, I promise you that.” She looked up at me. “It’s the things they can’t see, the things they’re afraid to get an understandin’ of that I gots to pass on to you.” She laid the strand of beads in my lap. “It’s time I gave this to you.” She put her fìnger to the pouch and made the sign of the cross. “This holds the veil, the caul that covered your eyes at your birth.” She untied the ribbon that held the pouch shut and gently fished out the contents. It was a homely little thing, unremarkable, looking much like the withered red bits of Irish moss I often find in the twins’ coat pockets. Once considered a treasure, now forgotten and left behind.
“Seein’ how he couldn’t brag you was a boy, your daddy bragged over that caul. As any good sailor knows, a caul’s as good as any blessing of St. Christopher, it brings fair wind and plenty of it, and it’ll save ‘em from drownin’ too. You weren’t even a day old, and the men were all fightin’ over it. A letter even come from as far away as Halifax, offerin’ great sums of money, but your maman thought better of it and give it to me to keep safe. It couldn’t get no safer than hangin’ ‘round my neck, burnin’ next to my heart while I whispered to it, day on day, night on night. I give it all the