Donovan's Station Read Online Free Page A

families to Governor Prescott with the professed object of preventing the removal of the interred remains of some of their deceased friends from the chapel-yard to the new cemetery, but common sense prevailed. When the Bishop had first arrived the previous fall, there had been threedeaths from the pox and the graveyard, which was in the middle of the town, was already a considerable threat to the health of the inhabitants. Some of the graves were within three and four yards of the doors of the houses, virtually on top of some of the wells, and it was necessary to make a more hygienic arrangement.
    One of the first things the Bishop did, once he was settled with his medicine chest in a small waste house near the church, was to locate a piece of land half a mile distant where there was sufficient soil to cover the bodies of the dead. Those most recently interred were quickly removed to this more suitable place, a process I recall watching with a somewhat morbid fascination, and then of course the Cadigan baby and his family quickly joined them. As the temperature continued to drop and the critically ill grew less threatened, the Bishop convinced the men to move as many more of the graves as they could identify. He then, at his own expense, purchased a piece of ground adjoining the old cemetery and, by blasting the rocks, reduced it to a level that allowed him to begin the construction of our fine little church. The dear man had the heart of a cleric but the eye and ambition of an architect.
    The Protestant petition was motivated, I suppose, by sectarianism from the outside, for the Bishop was on terms of the best friendship with ourselves and all our Protestant neighbours, and the suggestion that he was interrupting the repose of the mortal remains of our relatives was nonsense. Most of us did not have close relatives in the Harbour, having emigrated to the colony only relatively recently. The majority of the graves in the community, some of which were scattered between and even under the houses—in any small ditch or hollow that afforded cover—were those of transient fishermen who had come out as servants or dieters. Unbaptized babies, of which there were a surprising number, were disposed of almost anywhere. In lateryears, on at least two occasions, I unearthed bones in my garden that I am quite certain belonged to humans.
    The little square of level ground that the Bishop had cut into the rock stood empty for several months through the winter while he waited for Governor Prescott to intervene with the Anglican clergy on his behalf, and as most work was stopped by illness and bad weather it afforded us children a fine new place for playing. There were hardly six square yards of flat ground in the entire district, so it was a great novelty for us to have somewhere we could run and gatch without fear of tumbling down a hillside or into the sea. Some of the boys played a game called tiddly, employing any sticks and stones they could find about the place—the rules of this game were and still are a mystery to me—but mostly we just used the space for running about.
    When the Catholics finally got a church, of course the Protestants had to have a new church too, but that made no odds to us. I preferred St. David’s to St. Andrew’s, perhaps because I knew the old church but never set foot in the new one. Our own had the superior bell, for St. Andrews bell came out of an old ship while ours was a gift of the Bishop of Hamburg, and it produced a fine, pretty sound that must have rung in the ears of Napoleon himself in his day. They say it came out of a pre-Reformation monastery.
    There was little division between the Catholics and the Protestants in Petty Harbour, other than a geographic one which was the result of when each group arrived rather than deliberate separation, but there was an awareness that the two groups were on two sides of a fence that was troublesome to cross over. It was a fence that the