Annabel - Kathleen Winter [18]
Now Jacinta sat in her kitchen in Croydon Harbour holding her baby, Wayne. Instead of longing for her youth, the cinema, and the street life she used to know, she found herself bereft of the old wistfulness, and its absence was harder to bear than its existence. When there was another world to remember, a lost world, she could imagine visiting it again. She could imagine the comfort of being there for a week, then coming back to face her real life. But now her real life, her baby’s real life, had turned into something she did not know how to face. There was no ice-cream wagon, no music, no usher leading the way with a flashlight to the best remaining seat.
Jacinta was of two minds about Wayne’s christening at St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Croydon Harbour. A church, in her mind, was not what it claimed to be. Its beauty for her lay not in the meaning prescribed by the Apostles’ Creed or the liturgy, or in the banners of red, gold, and blue made by the Anglican Women’s Association proclaiming HE IS WITH US. The beauty of the building lay in its space and architecture, and Jacinta felt this beauty existed more fully at the great cathedral in St. John’s than it did in this little community church, although she tried to evoke it here by straining her imagination to its fullest limit.
The St. John’s cathedral had gargoyles, a crypt, magnificent windows brought to Newfoundland from England in barrels of molasses so the glass would not break. The windows had white lambs against sapphire skies, Egyptian goddesses in the guise of Christian icons of womanhood, pilgrims with staffs and scarlet robes straight out of the Torah and tarot, doves of hope and ravens of doom and heralds with golden trumpets. The pulpit’s eagle, towering over the congregation with its brooding stare and ravenous beak, had scared her when, as a child, she had gone for the blessing of the animals with her Aunt Myrtle, or placed hay in the crèche at Christmas with the other children, or smelled the Easter lilies, whose perfume mingled with the shade and atmosphere of the great stone walls to create a chalice in which each child sat in wonder like a small, bright, plump bee sucking mysterious nectar, intoxicating and unnerving and powerful.
In Croydon Harbour the eagle on the pulpit had been carved of pine by her husband’s father, and it had the smooth planes and lines of Inuit stone carvings, which to Jacinta looked open and closed at the same time. She could not get into those lines, into the myth and anger and spiritual flight and story of that Croydon Harbour eagle, and she did not like to look at it. It was golden, for the pine was unfinished, and this too seemed un-eagle-like to her, benevolent and untrue, not like the texture of her life.
Jacinta knew Treadway did not look at the Croydon Harbour eagle the way she did. He saw other things in it, things that had to do with his travels over the land, things he and Graham Montague and the other men of the cove, and many of the women, recognized as their own spirit, made of the energy that came off the land. There was an energy in the English eagle and another energy altogether in the Labrador eagle. They were so different that everyone knew — Treadway knew, and Jacinta knew in a different way — that the pine eagle did not belong in an Anglican church at all. But it was here, and so were the spruce-wood pews, and the plain windows, and the wooden nave, and the ordinary house carpet, and the glass jugs of flowers from patches of ground descended from the tender but incongruous gardens planted by Moravian missionaries along this coast in the early nineteen hundreds. There were pansies, poppies,