Charis Cotter’s niche is the eerie, uncanny
Footsteps in Bay de Verde: A mysterious tale By Charis Cotter, illustrated by Jenny Dwyer Running the Goat Books & Broadsides $21.95 44 pages with 25 colour illustrations
There’s an attentive, multifaceted pedigree to “Footsteps in Bay de Verde.” Publisher Running the Goat has a strong history of commitment to original, Nl-sourced, quality children’s literature, from thoughtful, complementary pairings of writers and visual artists – Andy Jones and Darka Erdelji, Tom Dawe and Veselina Tomova – as well as skilled double-hitters like Lori Doody and her lively, playful animalsin-odd-places tales.
The press isn’t solely dedicated to kids’ reading; Mary Dalton, Joel Thomas Hynes and Michael Crummey are among its authors. But it’s a distinct part of its ethos that children deserve high calibre texts.
Author Charis Cotter has carved a rich, specific niche for her writing: the eerie, the uncanny, pitched to a younger audience. And the oral traditions shaping them are very important to her. She seeks out the storytellers, and listens avidly to telling after telling. A previous collaboration with Running the Goat, “The Ferryland Visitor,” came from an encounter Gerald Squires and his family had at their lighthouse (Squires also did the artwork). “Footsteps in Bay de Verde” is another such narrative of hand-me-down authenticity.
Bridie, 6, her little sister Theresa, 4, and her older brother John, 8, are nestled on the daybed in the kitchen, flanked by two older boys, unnamed. They “were squished. But they didn’t dare make too much fuss, or their mother would remember they were there and tell them to go to bed. And then they’d miss the stories.” Which “got better as the night went on. Wonderful stories about people who lived in Bay de Verde long ago – and shipwrecks, and pirates, and murder, and fairies and ghosts.”
The kitchen is where the neighbours gather. On this late November night, the cold wind blasts the house from outside, but the kitchen is heated by a woodstove and lit by a kerosene lamp. The children had enjoyed a treat of lassy bread and were waiting out discussions of politics and fishing because they knew the good stuff was coming – maybe even a yarn about Father Mackay, on whom much supernatural shenanigans had befallen.
What they don’t anticipate is that they will become characters in their own scary story.
Missing from those assembled is “Poor Keye,” socalled “because of his troubles.” These include a limp which gives him his noted step-shuffle-thump walking rhythm. Poor Keye likes to visit and listen as much as anyone, but three weeks ago illness took him to the hospital in St. John’s. The children also feel his absence as his pockets always hold candy for them.
Still, the children’s fortitude is rewarded and the stories start. “’Did I ever tell you how Billy Cotter went stark raving mad one night in Aunt Minn’s Lane and fell down in a fit?’ asked Mr. Fleming.” But before he gets too far into describing this event, the front door bangs open and they hear Poor Keye come in. He makes his way towards the warm, peopled kitchen, but, inexplicably, seems to pass them by and continue down the hall. Bridie’s mother takes the lamp to go and investigate, and …
Cotter’s collaborator here is visual artist Jenny Dwyer, and her illustrations cover full pages. These are realistic depictions of the characters, full of personality and expression, infused with a calibrated palette. There’s lots of black and white and blues and hotspots of bolder colours. One panel, for example, shows Bridie’s mother in a detailed, monochromatic portrait, holding the lantern aglow in yellow and red. Others show the children highlighted with touches of red in a hair ribbon, or the collar of a blouse. Dwyer’s imagery extends into background texture to the writing, a constant element.
Cotter also takes care to provide a foreground and background to the setting and events. She locates Bay de Verde “(which means ‘green bay’ in Portuguese)” in northwestern Conception Bay.
The story itself originated with Brian Walsh; Bridie was his mother.
“When I first went to the town looking for ghost stories, someone directed me to Brian’s house, telling me that Brian knew ‘all the stories.’ Indeed he did … Brian was a classic Newfoundland storyteller: he knew how to build suspense and keep his audience hanging on his every word with equal measures of humour and terror,” Cotter says.
She also explains how “Footsteps” fits into the broader genre of ghost stories, concerning a “token.” Altogether another worthwhile, welldesigned publication.