Sweet Landing

By Marcia Davey

Sweet Landing is a story about Bella Fergus who was born in Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia. Orphaned at birth, she was raised by Millie, her mothers sister, and her uncle Charlie. A discovery in the cellar of her old homestead brings her back to the landing and forces her to recall a life she thought she had left forever.

She wants a perfect trip down memory lane, but instead, she unearths a completely different history. She finds that she is more connected to this place and to her early years than she could possibly have imagined. And she finds that even now, even now in her last years, her story is not yet finished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543443288

Marcia Davey

Marcia Davey graduated from Acadia University and Providence College. Her first book, Three Stories, was published in 2004. Camille’s Fond Embrace was published in 2004, Gallivanting in 2008, Priest in 2010, Chevy Blues in 2013, and now in 2016, Isabella.

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Sweet Landing

Marcia Davey

Copyright © 2017 by Marcia Davey. 766311

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 08/07/2017

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CONTENTS

Sweet Landing One

Sweet Landing Two

Sweet Landing Three

Sweet Landing Four

Sweet Landing Five

Sweet Landing Six

Sweet Landing Seven

Sweet Landing Eight

Sweet Landing Nine

Sweet Landing Ten

THE ART OF LEAVING ISN’T HARD TO MASTER;

SO MANY THINGS SEEM FILLED WITH THE INTENT

TO BE LOST

THAT THEIR LOSS IS NO DISASTER.

Elizabeth Bishop

SWEET LANDING ONE

The cemetery at Pictou Landing is tucked behind a half mile of mature pine and spruce. You could easily miss the sign, Greenwood, carved in black iron atop a supporting arch of the same material. The sign has been there for a long time, perhaps a hundred years. The one-lane gravel road has been there even longer, according to the dates on the headstones. In spring and wet summers, the wooden funeral coffin would have been carried from the rutted main road by designated family members or close friends, and then lowered into the waiting excavation amid an army of mosquitoes. If the death had occurred in the hostile winter, the body may have been stored in ice until the earth thawed.

Nobody was cremated.

Scottish names predominate on the stones; the Macs (MacPherson, MacDonald, MacKay) dating back two hundred years. Most of the Macs built and still support the small Presbyterian Church on the high road across from the school.

A few headstones are decorated with etched Scottish thistles. Anything more would be ostentatious, a sin.

So here I am today, the summer sun leaving and the mosquitoes arriving. I am standing before my mother’s flat grave marker: Marcella Fergus: Born – Died -, the exact dates missing. But I know when she died; she died on the day I was born.

Millie took me often to my mother’s grave. In Spring I brought Mayflowers and tucked them under the corner of her marker. This person I didn’t know – this stranger. We stood silently and prayed. In my prayer I professed my sorrow and apologized. I did this because, as Millie reminded me, I was responsible for my mother’s death.

My mother was gone. And when I asked where she went, Aunt Millie told me she had gone to Paradise, and someday I will see her again. I will join my mother in Paradise, a place far away, she told me. But how will I know her? I have never seen her. How will she know me? Millie assured me that my mother loved me. I prayed silently – a rhyme my friend Joy and I used when we skipped rope together:

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,

Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.

Some like it hot, some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

I felt as if I were sending a message to my mother in Paradise. She would be interested to know that I was skipping rope with my friend; she would be happy to know that I had a good friend. And I’d promised her that I would learn a proper prayer when I started Sunday school.

But today, all I can remember is Pease Porridge. I stand above her grave marker and can think only of Pease Porridge and my friend Joy who is living in Vancouver. I no longer believe I am responsible for my mother’s death nor am I responsible for the failed brake on the railway car that killed my father. I am not to blame for the recent death of my mother’s sister, Aunt Millie. She and Uncle Charlie are buried nearby. Pease Porridge cold.

The cemetery lane has an elbow which horses can navigate better than automobiles. I should have left my rental car near the main road and walked in. I backed around the elbow and thrust right instead of left and hit a sturdy pine tree. There was no damage to the car, but I was stuck for a time in a rut. My exuberant efforts to escape left the car dotted with muddy pine needles, but I got on track and continued my backward journey to the main road. This road from the town of Trenton to Pictou Landing is now paved but still has little traffic, and is a favorite speedway for teenagers and folks who want to test their new cars.

My Aunt Millie’s house, the place where I grew up, was off the lower road, on a hilltop with a wide view of Pictou Harbor. I passed it because I didn’t recognize the overgrowth of trees along the driveway. I drove passed the skeleton of the coal pier and turned around to make another attempt. This time I recognized the lilac bush, turned and drove up the lane.

The roof of the barn sagged in the middle. The bungalow beside it had once been painted yellow and patches of color were still surprisingly vibrant. The veranda roof sagged to match the barn. Someone had bought the property and a lawyer contacted me by email, asking me to remove any valuables before they demolished it. Really? Did he believe there was memorabilia still remaining on this forgotten property? I could have told him no, I couldn’t come, but I didn’t. I flew Air Canada to Halifax where my rental car was waiting. Now I was looking across the harbor to the town of Pictou, a scene engraved in my memory.

A few sailboats, some larger than others, were coming home through the narrow outlet from the Northumberland Strait. Or perhaps they hadn’t left the harbor at all. Perhaps they pulled the sails around when the tide shifted, before they reached the lighthouse. In the far distance, across the water, I saw golfers. I sat in my car and remembered; I was glad to see this scene once again.

But I had spent too much time in the cemetery and, with the sailors and golfers, was now losing the daylight. The sinking sun was casting golden shadows on us all, but before I headed for the lodge in Pictou, I drove along the shore road where, it seemed, nothing had changed in fifty years. How could this be? I had indeed changed, or so I thought, in this half century; how was it possible that nothing else had changed? Hadn’t we all moved through the years together? These are now different golfers on the distant course and these are newer sailboats in the harbor. The fish there are different fish and the lighthouse has burned down, probably arson; I know where the fingers are pointed.

I drove along the lighthouse road and headed toward the beach, but the road ended in a patch of sand that I remembered as a parking lot. There was no access to the beach, so I turned around - without getting stuck. This is where Sally used to live. Old Sally, she was called with respect because she was the oldest living member of the Micmac tribe, the first settlers here – before all the Macs. Some of this land is now populated by folks who built summer compounds along the shore road, but Sally and her tribe had not ceded the beach. She knew my father because his parents had a farm and a government contract to provide the reservation with eggs and milk. My father made the deliveries.

Uncle Charlie took me to visit her. Her hut had an earthen floor covered with a straw rug. Maybe there was an iron stove in the middle, but no table or chair. I remember her toothless smile and her weathered skin and the dyed straw she pulled from a vat and then stretched through her worn brown fingers. I was curious about the layers of clothing she wore on a warm day as she sat on the floor among her colorful woven baskets. Some were small with side loops for handles, some larger with woven rings on fitted tops like the one I have now, filled with spools of colorful thread.

A cluster of young boys came out to the road to look at me and my car. They were curious, not threatening, but I was glad to be leaving their turf. I drove to Pictou via the causeway, passed the paper plant where the emissions filled my car with the smell of rotten eggs. The causeway is a much more efficient route compared to the old ferry, The Ashagola, which once sailed in settled weather from the government wharf to the pier in Pictou. When the harbor froze the older kids walked across the ice to Pictou Academy, following a tree-lined path which guided them safely. But in spring, when the ice softened, they stayed home. Now the harbor seldom freezes and the students no longer trek to school across the ice, or travel on the sweet Ashagola. They go to a regional school on a big bus.

After the Ashagola and before the big bus, we walked to the two-room school up by the church and later went on a train to the high school in New Glasgow. The coal train no longer came to the pier because there was no coal being shipped anywhere. The passenger jitney came