The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  Occasionally he caught sight of Ada moving about the property at the foot of the cove. He knew she was watching for him when she was outside the tilt, raising a hand to the point. It was the only moment of pleasure in those bitter uneventful vigils as the pack ice slow-wheeled on the currents.

  Evered was bound and determined to have a seal though for the first time in their young lives there was no real lack of food in the house come March month, their parents too ill through much of the fall to eat their share of the winter store. They still had dried peas and flour, they had salt fish and salt pork and a barrel of last summer’s vegetables in the root cellar. But every night he and Ada talked themselves to sleep with speculation about when the seals might come close enough to shore and how the fresh meat would taste and what use a tanned skin could be put to. It was life’s persistence those conversations hinted at, the world carrying on though their parents and sister were no longer in it.

  Every day Evered saw seals, featureless black dots in the distance. He had been his father’s eyes out there in springs past, the man myopic and turning one ear to the icy expanse, listening to their dog-barks drift in on the wind. “I’m hearing seven or eight,” he’d say. “Are they close enough to go after?”

  If the seals drifted handy to shore, Evered lead his father out over the swaying white field after them. But the ocean was a shifting jigsaw of pans and open leads and pressure ridges and his father wouldn’t set foot upon it if the animals were more than a few hundred yards off.

  Evered wasn’t willing to chance going any further himself now. A body could be caught out there for days if the wind tacked offshore. He might never make it back to solid ground. The cove sometimes emptied of pans in the space of an hour, the ice edge moving steadily out to sea as if some vessel beyond the horizon had hooked a line and towed it. And two hours on or the following morning the harbour was blocked again.

  It was a raw disappointment to him to give up the watch and begin the trudge back every day. His legs so wooden he had trouble keeping his feet, using the gaff as a walking stick. Ada went down to meet him on the landwash if she saw him coming. Putting an arm around his waist to help him up the rise.

  She had the fire built high and the kettle boiling and she sat him in front of the heat with a mug of tea. She knelt in the sand to unwind the stiff canvas around his shins and haul off the leather boots and she held his feet in her lap, rubbing blood back into the skin. The pain as feeling returned to his toes so exquisite that Evered had to chew on the inside of his mouth to hold off the tears. The cloth wrapped around his head was frozen to his woollen cap and his cap was frozen to his white hair. Ada waited until he’d finished his tea to work them off and hang them on the line above the fire to dry.

  Every day he said, “There was two or three almost in close enough.” He was wanting to keep her spirits up. “I was half a mind to go out after them,” he said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow they’ll come in.”

  “Please God and the weather,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Those two weeks were Ada’s first experience of solitary time. She had never in her life been more than a good shout from someone’s ear, never further than the width of the burn-over in the berry hills or the few minutes’ walk from the Downs to company. She watched Evered make his way to the point each morning, following his slow progress along the beach. She called luck to him along his route and he shouted back until he was out of earshot. The isolation she felt then was so unfamiliar she took it for a physical ailment that worsened when she sat idle.

  There was no shortage of work to distract her. She baked bread and hung out the stale bedclothes and boiled wood ash to make soap, she cut splits and filled the woodbox and fetched pots of snow to melt over the fire. She took any excuse to wander around the property or down to the landwash, keeping an eye for Evered. Each time she stepped outside she was afraid he wouldn’t be where she expected him, gone down onto the ice beyond the rocks. Part of her hoped the seals would never come close enough to tempt him off the point.

  When the wind forced him to coopy down in a cleft he was almost invisible. She stood a long time watching for the white flash of his face turning toward the bottom of the cove. Raising her hand when it finally appeared and waiting for a wave in return.

  When she was working inside she talked aloud to her dead sister as she had when Martha was alive, narrating her activities or offering up rhetorical questions to the child who sucked her fist and stared patiently. Her father had taken to calling Ada Young Mary Oram.

  “If Young Mary Oram stops talking long enough to spoon up some food,” he’d say. “If you can edge a word in around Young Mary Oram there.”

  Ada felt Martha listening now with the same forbearance. She never doubted she was being heard. Alone in the tilt or waking in the dead of night she felt her sister’s constant silent attention. That the infant might have been granted some sway in the universe as their mother suggested seemed a small compensation for her fate. Ada prayed to Martha to bring the seals in to shore or to keep them out to sea depending on whether desire or fear was ascendant in her heart. She prayed Evered would be kept safe. And her connection to the dead child felt more vital and sustaining the longer she was alone with her.

  * * *

  —

  By the middle of the month the ice field moved offshore and stayed out there, miles into open sea. Evered thought the ice was nearly done for the season which likely meant he’d missed his chance at the seals. He couldn’t avoid reading the failure as a judgement on their prospects in the cove, and the rekindled doubts made him reconsider shifting across to Mockbeggar. But Ada carried a red coal of guilt even to have entertained the suggestion weeks earlier and she refused outright.

  “We can’t leave Martha alone here,” she said.

  He sat with that notion awhile.

  “We promised we’d stay with her,” Ada said.

  Evered had a vague recollection of some such commitment being made in the long-ago before the sickness overtook the cove. He couldn’t see how it applied to their new circumstances but he didn’t have the acumen or the heart to argue it. If they were going to stay, he told her, he’d have to launch the boat to try for a seal as he and his father did when the ice was lying offshore or slobby enough to push through, rowing and poling and hauling their way to the seals on larger pans at the ice edge. But Ada knew it was a fool’s errand to take the boat out to the ice alone.

  “We got food to eat,” she said.

  “It idn’t that,” he said though he couldn’t explain what it was even to himself and that frustration made him more insistent on the venture. Ada wouldn’t hear of it unless he agreed to take her along.

  They were both surprised to be arguing. Their mother and father never bickered in their presence. They set to the daily round of work with the rigid single-mindedness required to keep body and soul together and the youngsters had adopted the same pliable way with one another. Their disagreements had been shallow and easily settled. And all the same it came naturally to them now to take up opposite ends of the rope and pull all they were worth. It felt as if they had discovered something new in the world, something exhilarating and unpleasant in equal measure. They lay awake in the dark a long time, only their shoulders touching, stewing in their separate pots.

  “If I don’t take the boat out there’ll be no seals here the spring,” Evered said.

  “The boat don’t go in the water but I’ll be in it,” Ada said.

  He guessed by her tone there was nothing he could say to shift her on the issue and he turned to face the wall, too furious to sleep. A little awed by her spine.

  “Perhaps the ice will come in tomorrow,” she said, “if the wind shifts.”

  “It don’t seem one bit likely,” he said.

  Twice during the night Ada woke and knew by his breathing Evered was awake beside her. Any other time she would have spoken to him to make the dark more hospita
ble and they would have chatted aimlessly until they drifted off again. But a fear kept her quiet, a sense she had that he might choose not to answer her and pretend to be asleep instead.

  When he made a move to climb from the bed she tried to talk Evered out of the vigil. The wind was up and they both knew from how it struck the tilt it was blowing offshore. But Evered crawled over her into the bitter chill and she followed after him, lighting the fire to heat their breakfast as he hauled on the buskins and wrapped his calves.

  She tried to draw him out with their usual talk as she worked over the fire, asking how he had slept and what he had dreamt through the night and what he thought the chances were of landing a seal. Evered answered with shrugs and grunts and wouldn’t meet her eye. The unfamiliar distance between them made her anxious to stay close and she suggested she might spend the day on the point with him.

  “We’d be coming back to a cold house,” Evered said. “I’d be happier there was a fire and a mug of tea when I gets in.”

  Ada recognized the truth of that. But it felt no less an evasion all the same.

  Evered left before it was fairly light. The cove was free of ice but the beach was still strewn with blocks pushed onto the rocks at high tide and stranded there. Ada watched him until he settled in his customary lookout on the rocks and when she saw the flash of his face turning back to the cove she raised her hand. Evered looked away out to the ocean and didn’t wave first or last. She stood there waiting until a drift of sleet drove her inside to the fire.

  All morning she turned it over in her mind. She’d gotten her way about taking the boat out to the ice and felt she was in the right. It was a riddle to see a person could get what they wanted and regret it, could even regret wanting it in the first place.

  She was so confounded by that strife the length of the morning that she didn’t give a moment’s thought to her sister until she heard the dead child crying outside. Ada stopped still in the tilt, her head cocked to one side, her heart hammering.

  Nothing, nothing.

  She was ready to dismiss it as the wind in the trees when it came again, a youngster bawling helplessly, the cry a long way off but unmistakable. She tore out of the tilt and stopped at the top of the rise, listening again. She had missed the wind coming around onshore. Miles-long stretches of pack were floating beyond the harbour skerries and the cove was slushed full with pans. She heard the crying youngster again, the voice coming up from directly below her. From the ice in the cove.

  Ada cupped her hands to her mouth and called. She was crying herself now as she bawled her sister’s name. The pans rose and fell on the swell, a long curved vein of slob in the heart of the cove circling with the tide’s pull. She ran headlong down the rise to the landwash, trying to pinpoint the voice though there was nothing to see out there but white, white, white.

  “Martha!” she shouted into the wind.

  * * *

  —

  But for that first glance Evered didn’t turn his head to the bottom of the cove all morning. He knew Ada was watching for him after he settled on the point, he knew she would wave to him when he looked her way. And he hadn’t waved back for spite. He sat alone in the cold then, the bitter seeping deeper every hour. He wouldn’t turn to look for her or make the short trek to the trees and back to warm himself for fear he’d catch sight of her and, against his own desire, refuse to return her raised hand a second time.

  He tucked into his food mid-morning, eating against the cold, against a faceless centreless disgust with himself. Before he’d finished the last morsel the wind had swung around and blew onshore for the first time in days. Evered shook his head at the sudden shift, torn between anticipating another chance at seals close to shore and a childish irritation to see the world at large siding with Ada.

  He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two the night before and the ice was still miles at sea. He moved behind a rock ledge that offered some protection from the wind and he dozed off there despite the freezing cold, jumping and muttering incoherently in his sleep like a dog chasing an elusive dream rabbit. When he started awake there were flotillas of ice drifting loose in all directions, the arctic field beginning to disintegrate and the wind driving it to pieces.

  The cove was chock full behind him and he turned to look across the breadth of it. On the opposite side of the harbour he saw Ada, bare-headed and wearing only her dress and apron. She was holding the heavy skirts away from her legs and stepping down from the western arm to walk out onto the swaying quilt of ice. He shouted across to her, the wind whipping the useless words inland. He waved his arms to warn her back but she was focused on something on the ice, skipping across the loose pans to avoid sinking up to her knees or tipping face and eyes into the water.

  Evered clambered down onto the ice and started across from the eastern shore to meet her, calling all the while. The vein of slob was too wide to jump and it forced him to head toward the bottom of the harbour and circle back up. He had no idea what Ada was doing and no time to consider it, watching the ice bobbing beneath his feet, kicking up salt water as he picked a way forward, glancing up now and then to be certain she hadn’t fallen through. He heard the crying once he was downwind of it and registered the sound in some far-off part of his mind though he didn’t connect it to Ada until he reached her.

  The seal pup was lying on the only pan in the cove large enough to support a person’s stationary weight. Ada was on her knees ten feet from the whitecoat, her chest heaving.

  “Sister,” he said and she turned to him, startled.

  She pointed at the animal. It was watching them intently, wide black eyes like wet coal. The spotless coat nearly the same white as the ice it lay upon.

  “That’s a young one,” he said. “Just born the spring.”

  It cried out to them in its sorrowful, nearly human voice.

  “I thought it was Martha,” Ada said. She wiped the snot and tears from her face with the sleeve of her dress. She laughed at the ridiculous notion though she was still crying. “I heard it bawling and I thought it was Martha.”

  “You thought she was out on the ice like this?” Evered said.

  She raised her arms helpless from her sides and let them drop again.

  “What if you’d gone through?”

  “I wouldn’t thinking,” she said. And then, “Where’s its mother?”

  “Lost her somewhere I expect. When the wind broke up the ice. Or could be some creature killed and eat her out there.”

  Ada was without a coat or cloak and Evered could see the tremors travel through her. He helped her to her feet and took off the cloth he’d been wearing over his hat, wrapping it around her bare head and tying it under her chin.

  “It really did sound like her,” she said to him.

  The whitecoat called behind them again as if to demonstrate the eerie similarity.

  “You misses her,” Evered said.

  She nodded and he wiped at Ada’s face with the tail end of the cloth around her head.

  “We got to get in out of this,” he said. “You’ll catch your death so.” He walked the ten feet across to the seal and struck it twice on the forehead with the blunt end of the gaff. The smack like the mallet-sound of his father’s heels against the frozen dirt floor when he pulled the corpse from its bed. He unwound the hauling rope at his waist and cut a notch through the animal’s tail for the hook. He handed Ada the gaff, then wrapped the end of the rope across his shoulder. He nodded toward the closest bit of shore. “Don’t tarry as you goes,” he told her. “Or we’ll both land up drownded here this morning.”

  The weight of the carcass slowed Evered enough that he nearly went through on every step but he yelled at Ada to keep moving, reeling on his feet behind her, scrambling on his hands and knees.

  They were both soaked through to the waist when they made shore. They straggled on to the bottom of the cove and Ada went ahead then to stir up the fire while Evered pelted the whitecoat on the landwash. He worked the knife up
the abdomen to the throat, then flensed the fur from the carcass. He guessed from the meagre layer of fat the animal had been abandoned a while and would have starved or frozen before long. But there was a fine meal in the flippers and enough meat besides to salt for later in the spring. And the perfectly white coat was ready to be scraped and stretched. It was too small for a full garment or a blanket but it would do to make a vest or a hat or a pair of mitts.

  When he finished dressing the animal he cut out the heart and carried it up to the tilt cupped in his hands. He set it on a plate and sliced it into sections like a fruit and they ate the flesh together, licking the blood from their lips. Ada’s pale face was raw and her eyes red with the crying she’d done in the cold but there was an unmistakable glim of light beneath the skin, a look that redeemed every interminable hour Evered had spent exposed to the weather on the point.

  She reached for another sliver of the heart. “Poor little thing,” she said. “It’s a sin to be eating it.” But she could feel the fierce goodness of it flooding her senses.

  She felt it right to her very toes.

  The Hope. The Beadle.

  After the pack ice passed through, the weather continued cold with periods of snow and sleet. But birds sang at the first sign of light and all day long, robins and other grassy birds they’d never been taught the names of. There were flocks of eiders on the cove in the evenings, a handful of lords and ladies, the drakes so flamboyantly adorned with white crescents and chestnut and slate-blue patches that Ada thought they might have been hand-painted.