The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  * * *

  —

  Ada spent the earliest hours of each indistinguishable day hauling water from the brook and baking the day’s bread. When the sun was above the horizon she walked up to the farm garden where she harvested the rocks brought to the surface by last winter’s frost heave before setting the seed potatoes and turnips and cabbages and beets.

  From the Downs she could see the shoal ground Evered was working, and when he took in his line and turned for the harbour she walked down to help clear the morning’s catch. The two children wielding knives honed to a razor’s edge, up to their slender wrists in the blood and offal, their heads wreathed by galling halos of blackflies and mosquitoes. It took them hours longer to get through a boatload than it had with four at the splitting table which often meant there wasn’t light enough for a second haul out and they spent the evening working the garden together instead.

  When there was time enough for an afternoon run, Ada went out with Evered. They stood at the gunwale, bringing the hooked cod to the surface hand over hand like they were drawing up pitchers of water from a well. He taught her the marks for each shoal—the Black Dog close on the eastern head, the notch midway between the tilt and the Foxes’ Ears—and she rowed them to the top when they were drawing off the grounds. They caught what could be taken before the sky went duckish and they sat side by side to share the burden of the oars on the trip in.

  They ate before clearing the second run, standing up for fear of falling asleep if they sat, mopping their plates clean with bread and nodding over mugs of tea. It was dark by the time they walked back to the stage and they made the fish by the light of rot oil burning in a slutlamp. Midnight or later before they were done and they muddled up the rise in the dark, punch-drunk and mute. They slept together until the weather warmed enough to make the company a discomfort and they took to opposite bunks, surrendering to the leaden weight of sleep as soon as they lay down.

  * * *

  —

  Evered woke before first light and hauled himself to the hearth to uncover the coals, blowing them red-hot to start the fire. He wouldn’t wake Ada before the kettle boiled, wanting to give her those few minutes more to sleep. His wrists were atonic and sore, the fingers stiffened to claws. After hoisting the kettle over the fire he walked out behind the tilt to relieve himself and he pissed on his palsied hands, making fists under the burning salve to coax them to life.

  Ada was up when he came back inside, a panful of caplin over the fire. She still talked aloud to Martha when she was alone, offering up a distracted commentary on the state of the weather or the day’s catch or whatever physical affliction was causing her grief in the moment. But she and Evered barely spoke a word to one another, falling into the same taciturn custom their parents had kept. Once a week Ada fried a breakfast of toutons as a treat and she and Evered slathered the doughy cakes with molasses, licking their plates clean when they were done, each smiling to see the other do the same. And that was the only recognizable bit of childhood still in their lives. Martha’s rag doll was abandoned on the shelf above Ada’s bed, the display of shells and bric-a-brac up there ignored through most of the summer, unchanged but for a silver button Ada unearthed as she was picking rocks from the farm garden. It was an exquisite thing, fine and heavy with an elaborate engraved image that she nor Evered had encountered before. Evered guessed the thing had come from the clothes of the stranger interred beside their baby sister though it was hard to believe their parents would have buried a piece of clothing with buttons made of silver.

  The object’s practical function was obvious but the elegance of the graven image seemed so far from the raw austerity and moil of their lives that it almost hurt Ada to look at it. She couldn’t imagine an earthly realm where the utilitarian would merit the attention the silver artifact displayed and she thought of it as something dropped from the stars, a gift from Martha. It was the last image she saw before she slept at night and the first she thought of when she woke. There were days that tiny touchstone was all that kept her from lying in a heap and bawling.

  By the middle of July the cod began drifting off into deeper waters. Evered had to row further from the cove to find them and stay out longer to take a decent load aboard which meant only one trip of fish to clear and the work settled into a pace that made their lives seem less demented.

  In August Ada swept the beach clean, scraping mollyfodge from the rocks on the bawn to make an untainted platform for laying out the cod that had been sitting weeks in salt bulk. Evered helped Ada scrub the excess salt from the wet fish in a tub of sea water and they carted it to the bawn on the hand barrow where Ada laid them out head to tail like youngsters in a crowded bed. She stayed close to the bawn all day with an eye on the weather, piling the fish into yaffles against a shower of rain or the sear of too much sun. Before the end of the month most of the catch was cured, each splayed crucifix of flesh hard as a plank, all of it packed in the salt shed on the stage awaiting the Beadle’s stony appraisal.

  It was as much a mystery to them now as ever how that sentence was arrived at and handed down. The stacks in the bulkheads looked paltry compared to previous years and neither youngster could manage the complicated conversion required to factor their current state of affairs into the final accounting. That flaming sword hung over them all season and it burned brighter every passing day as the time for The Hope’s return drew closer.

  * * *

  —

  On one of the last bright days of August they renounced all work and walked to the brook. The water was running low that late in the summer and there was only one pool deep enough to submerge a body. They stripped off their ragged clothes, beating them wet on the rocks and spreading them in the sun, and then they scoured at themselves with homemade soap and with alder branches cut from the banks. Their hands and forearms and faces looked to have been dipped in burnt umber but their hairless torsos were a pale tuberous white like something just unearthed from a garden. After they had scoured their skin raw they settled back on the smooth stones, steeping in the moving water while they waited for their clothes to dry.

  They went into the berry hills as September came in, rowing a mile along the coast beyond the brook and hauling the boat up in the lee of a granite boulder their parents called the Black Dog before walking into the backcountry. The berry hills were a stretch of woods consumed by fire a lifetime past, the burn-over colonized by low berry bushes. They bent among them hours at a stretch, their hands darting like birds among the blossoms. They didn’t bring any food with them, eating from the bushes all day as they picked. They filled a brin sack halfway with blueberries and took turns carrying the deadweight of it down to the boat.

  In the morning they set out for more, leaving just after sunrise. They walked up into the backcountry, chatting aimlessly, and as they came up through the spruce trees into the berry fields Ada stopped mid-sentence, reaching a hand to Evered’s arm. A black bear was head down in the bushes a hundred yards off. Even from that distance the size of the animal made Ada’s scalp pull tight.

  “We should go,” she said just before the bear rose up on its hind legs, nosing at the air. Ada took Evered’s hand and squeezed hard enough to make him wince. “Brother,” she whispered.

  “Hold still,” he said. “She’s only after a few berries same as we.”

  “She looks like she’d eat more than berries.”

  “Shush,” he said, and they stood watching the bear wave its massive paws like it was asleep and dreaming itself adrift in a pool of calm water. It snuffed and grunted and fell onto its forelegs and turned suddenly, ambling into the trees away from them.

  “We could come back tomorrow,” Ada said then.

  “Might be raining tomorrow. Or worse yet. She’s likely gone on now.”

  They’d never encountered bears on the shore and Ada didn’t know where Evered had gathered his knowledge of their habits but she didn’t question him. They settled in on the edge of the field, staying clo
se together, picking without turning away from the spot across the clearing where the bear had disappeared. Half an hour later they heard a rustle in the trees behind them. That unmistakable snuff at their backs, the bear circling the burn-over to get downwind.

  When they turned they could see where the animal was watching them. Almost invisible in the brush but close enough they could make out the great head jigging at the air to take in their scent. Once it had satisfied its curiosity it seemed to lose interest, turning to walk back the way it came, swallowed up by the bush. They stood in silence a long time, afraid to move or speak.

  “She won’t likely bother with us now,” Evered said finally.

  “You said she was likely gone on the last going off,” Ada said. And when he didn’t answer her she said, “I don’t want to get killed over a few berries.”

  “No one’s getting killed here today,” he said though there was no real conviction in his voice.

  They started in at the picking again but couldn’t concentrate on the job, jumping at every noise, real or imagined. They decided to walk back to the boat before noon and a week passed before the thought of the fall without more berries convinced them to make another visit. They found the imprint of the bear’s paws among the trees where it had watched them and they measured their hands against the spread of it. But they never saw the animal again though they returned to the hills every day till the weather broke wet.

  Ada often spoke to Martha about the bear when she was alone and goosebumps rose on her arms each time she described the encounter, the soft explosion of its breath behind them in the bush. The further she got from the event, the more ridiculous it seemed to have stayed in the berry hills after the bear went off into the trees. But the sight of it occupied the same place in her thoughts as the silver button with its finely graven image. She often dreamt of the bear on its hind legs and idly waving its front paws. She dreamt of the animal asleep beside her, of stroking its wide wild head in her lap.

  * * *

  —

  The berry season was autumn’s equivalent of the caplin scull—a rare episode of plenty in their world, a seasonal windfall that tormented them with its brevity, with its attendant, inevitable waste. They had no way to keep the cache of berries from spoiling and they gorged themselves on the sweetness morning and evening. They were unaccustomed to that richness and were overcome with the flux. But even days of stomach cramps and the bedevilment of diarrhea weren’t enough to make them swear off eating the dark fruit, their lips and teeth blackened like the mouths of ghouls in a medieval painting of hell.

  Ada made pots of jam from what they didn’t eat, boiling the berries into a sugared confection that would keep weeks longer again in the cool of the root cellar. Come November they would be scraping the furred layer of mould from the last pots, the overripe jam spread on slices of fresh bread or spooned over flour dumplings. Even the tinge of rot was something they developed a taste for.

  There had always been a celebratory feel about the ritual of boiling the berries down for jam, coming at the end of the season when the catch was put up and before the Beadle’s evaluation undercut their parents’ hopes for its worth, when the work had slowed enough to allow for something close to leisure, for projects that didn’t touch in some way on bare survival. Their father brewed spruce beer while the jam was being boiled and it was the only time they saw their parents openly affectionate with one another. Bustling around the tiny space as if in competition for it, offering sly insults back and forth. Their father made repeated attempts to steal a taste of the jam, their mother defending it with a wooden spoon across his knuckles. The mock struggle escalated as the day progressed, Ada and Evered taking sides and adding their own racket to the contest and the whole thing devolved into shouting and wrestling and bouts of choking laughter.

  The two youngsters had gone months without mentioning their mother or father, instinctively avoiding direct contact with a grief so raw. But the smell of the berries conjured their parents so viscerally they were desperate to touch those gone people. Shying from the urge all the same, each afraid what they felt might be a one-sided craving.

  “Do you mind how,” Ada said. She was almost whispering, her eyes on the clay pot she was filling. “How they used to fight over the jam?”

  Evered nodded. “I minds it,” he said.

  Ada smiled down at the table. “The time I went after Father in the corner?”

  “He deserved the licking,” Evered said. “Every smack.”

  Neither could bring themselves to say more about it and they finished the work in silence, both feeling more alone for being taken over by that memory. It was the fall before Martha was born. Sarah Best would not surrender a sniff of the jam without it was taken by force and their father threw himself into the challenge with an ardent persistence. He was a smallish man and their mother just a skiver of bone and sinew, both of them tough as corded rope. Ada and Evered stood to one side, cowed by the escalating pitch of the struggle, by the rhyme of oaths flung back and forth. Their father stole the spoon away and their mother smacked him across the ear with the flat of her hand.

  “You lousy hedge whore,” he shouted, grabbing at her shoulders.

  “Muck-spout,” she said through her teeth. “Filthy beard splitter.”

  They wrestled nearly to exhaustion before he managed to corral her arms, cuffing her wrists together in one hand to give himself unfettered access to the cooling jam. He scooped a ladleful in his bare fingers and held their mother still a long moment then, trying to catch his breath, watching her as the thickened juice dripped from his hand.

  “Don’t you,” Sarah Best said, weak with laughter, almost too winded to speak.

  “Now my little blowsabella,” he said.

  “You dirty shag-bag,” she said, yanking with both arms, using the last of her strength to try to pull clear.

  “My bob tail,” their father said, reefing her closer.

  “Sennet Best,” she said, “you buck fitch.”

  And he brought the dripping hand to her face then, smearing the jam across her cheeks and her mouth and her squinted eyes as she squirmed in his grip and laughed and cursed him all she was worth.

  Ada had been fighting back a surge of tears and she charged at her father, wailing at the top of her lungs, beating at his back and his head. If she’d a knife handy she would have killed the man.

  “God’s nails,” he shouted, leaning into their mother.

  “Stop it now,” Sarah Best whispered. “You’re scaring the child. Stop it.” She wriggled free and mopped at her face with her apron-skirt while their father cowered in a corner under the barrage of his daughter’s fists.

  Their mother gathered Ada into her arms from behind, shushing her. “I’m all right,” she said. “I’m best kind. We was just playing about.”

  Ada turned into her mother’s chest, holding tight as she went on sobbing. Their father knelt a few minutes longer, giggling stupidly in the corner where he’d been pinned. He glanced across the room and pointed at Evered. “And where were you,” he said, “when the women ganged up on your poor old father.”

  Evered could barely hear the man over the noise of blood in his head. His face was so hot it felt swollen, disfigured. He had his hands folded in front of his crotch, his crupper standing on end and pulsing behind them.

  “We men don’t have a chance we don’t stick up for one another,” his father said.

  Their mother turned to him and said, “Take Ada down to the landwash, see if you can’t find her a wish rock or something.” She wiped at the stains on her face with her sleeves, still trying to catch her breath. “We’ll have bread and jam for supper when you comes back up,” she said.

  Their father knelt in front of Ada before she went through the door. “You’re a fine girl, Daughter,” he said. “You was right to act so. I deserved every smack you give me and so I did.”

  Ada and Evered spent the last of the afternoon scouring the landwash without speaking a
word about what they had witnessed. When they were called up for supper their parents were composed and serene as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened and both Ada and Evered acted the same.

  They acted the same now, filling the clay pots with jam and then setting them in the root cellar. They shared a meal of bread and jam and went to bed as soon as the sun went down. The weather had already turned toward frost at night but they were still observing the summer habit of sleeping in opposite bunks which Evered was grateful for, given the mucky agitation the memory of that afternoon had stirred up. He lay in the dark wondering if Ada was awake in her bed like himself but afraid to ask.

  * * *

  —

  The Hope appeared on the horizon the following morning.

  Ada and Evered spent the hours it took the schooner to reach the holding ground hand-barrowing the season’s catch from the salt shed to the front of the stage. It looked more substantial in the open air somehow and it gave them both a sudden optimism. They packed the boat full and Evered rowed out through the skerries to meet the vessel. The same three men were on deck to greet him and take up the cured fish. It was early evening when Evered left the stage with the last boatload and he told Ada to go on back to the tilt for her supper.

  “I don’t mind waiting,” she said.

  “I could be hours yet,” he said.

  Ada thought of the state of her father when he rowed back from those fall visits, the strange cast of his face, the sour smell about him. “You come home yourself,” she said and Evered nodded.

  “I’ll be back by and by,” he said.

  The three crewmen were standing around the yaffled stacks of cod with their hands on their hips when Evered climbed aboard The Hope. The Beadle was moving in a crouch like a man in a berry patch, lifting and setting down the stiff parcels of flesh, throwing fish after fish into an untidy pile to one side. He didn’t so much as glance at Evered as he went about his business.