When the fish were done he insisted on hiking into the backwoods after their winter wood alone. “You got enough to mind around here,” he told Ada. He went about the work with a ruthless focus that didn’t admit time or space for any other consideration on its face. But at some point each day he found himself kneeling in the snow with his pants around his ankles, the cold and wet adding a strangely pleasurable layer of discomfort to the undertaking.
The close quarters in the tilt compelled some restraint after the heavy weather set in though his dreams were no less insistent or troubling. Early in the winter he’d surfaced from a vision of the Beadle’s outstretched hand and he nestled closer to Ada to push it aside, still half-asleep. They tucked into one another, Ada lifting her leg across his hips and rocking against him. And he was suddenly, vibrantly awake. He leaned into the heat of her, barely moving, letting Ada work against him, moving his hand to the small of her back to add weight to that drowsy agitation. They didn’t speak or acknowledge one another at any point and Evered thought it was possible she was dreaming, that she was insensible to the waking world the entire time they were engaged. And that was his fervent hope in the aftermath.
He spent the days that followed outside at the chopping block or widening the snow paths or nosing some useless project in the store, enduring the bitter cold to avoid his sister’s company, to spare himself having to talk to her. Whatever might have been in Ada’s mind he didn’t doubt it was altogether different from the thoughts that consumed him. And he would sooner cut out his tongue with a fish knife than speak them aloud.
He slept with his back to her after that first rogue encounter, intending to shield the girl from more of the same. Expecting Ada would want nothing more to do with the base exchange. But it was not always Evered who tapped quietly at that door between them. He thought less of himself every time it opened. And without admitting as much to himself he thought something less of Ada as well.
* * *
—
He’d lost his nature altogether after the pilgrimage to the icebound ship. They were both at a low ebb, half-starved and dull on their feet, and he slept chaste beside Ada. He didn’t even feel the urge to touch himself and it was a relief to be clear of that turmoil awhile, until the gloom of the endless winter made him think it was a permanent state he’d fallen into. Waking to the slow rolling boil of a toothache or from dreams of the amputated limbs in that wretched abattoir, he rooted at himself while Ada slept, hoping to escape the pain a few minutes, hoping to blot out the sight of those naked corpses. But he was altogether dead down there. He tried to summon some semblance of life with the basest thoughts he could conceive, to no effect, and he drifted off despondent, his flaccid shuttle in his hand.
He examined it quizzically as he took a piss, wondering at the drastic change in its humour. “You’re as bad now,” he said, “as old Mr. Lucas’ goat.” And he laughed ruefully at the thing and at himself. It was hard to believe the wormy bit of flesh had wielded so much sway over him. And he mourned the loss as if a creature he loved had died.
He fell back into that habit now with a religious fervour, the old images playing through his head as he jigged at himself and the Duke of Limbs arrived unbidden among them. Evered came over himself as he pictured Ada astraddle the dusky youngster in the opposite bed, both of them naked as the day they were born. He lay still a long while afterward, his mettle going cold against his skin, stirred and repulsed by that image of his sister and the strange boy in raw congress.
By the Beadle’s count he was handy about fifteen years old. And more a mystery to himself with every passing season. He felt he was being slowly turned on a spit over an open fire and he suffered hours of that misery before he finally lost himself to sleep.
A Bear Cub; Its Dam. The Abandon Hope.
The summer was a season of sullen estrangement.
The barbed conversation about the Duke of Limbs and the Indian pendant picked at them both and they slept in opposite bunks and spoke only as much as was needed for the work at hand. Standing hours at the splitting table’s methodical drudge in silence and eating in silence and generally keeping their minds to themselves. And all their thoughts of the other. Both youngsters suffering and neither willing to raise the white flag. When there was a second run to the grounds in the afternoon Evered rowed out alone. When there wasn’t Ada asked for no help at the farm garden and he made himself busy with other things.
Ada had been hiding the bone pendant up there, secreted under one of the stones marking the border of Martha’s grave. It was carved to the shape of a feather, tapered near the top, with a driven hole where a person might run a string to wear it as a necklace. Every time she unearthed and held it a little chill ran through her. The beauty of the thing. And a nick of shame to have stolen it for its beauty. Ada could still bring to mind the figurines and toy boats in that grave, the elaborate necklace of shell and bone and animal teeth around the mother’s neck. If she’d been there alone she might have taken it all.
It felt like love, this hunger of hers. Though part of her suspected it was closer to greed at its heart and that suspicion chimed like a bell when Evered asked about the pendant. Even in her incessant conversations with Martha she’d never mentioned the object or how it came into her possession. To spare herself looking too closely at the shadow cast by her inclinations.
Past the shock of seeing what Evered had known all along it seemed natural enough she was an open book to him, that he would have a view of what she’d thought her most secret self. What stung was his blindsiding her. The realization he’d been holding that bit of information in reserve for some occasion when she needed to be knocked down a peg.
The guilt and resentment worked at her in tandem through the first weeks of the season, as if she was hobbling through her days with a rock in each shoe. Until she buried both guilt and resentment under a stone at Martha’s grave and brought the pendant down to the tilt. She set it up on her shelf of treasures. She raked the sand around the hearth clean and scored the pendant’s shape and markings there, daring Evered to say something. But he ignored the provocation. Which felt to Ada like a victory of sorts.
* * *
—
After the caplin scull the cod were unusually scarce on the shore. Evered spent hours rowing the empty boat between the Barrow Ledge and the Foggity Shoals and the Razor Ledge and even when he struck in there was hardly enough some days to fill the fish pound. The back end of the summer was cold and inclement and what they’d managed to catch cured poorly, laid out on the bawn in the scuddy intermission between showers. The flesh went slimy and maggoty and they carried dipping tubs to the bawn to rewash the fish and they laid it out in the same miserable run of weather. The garden fared no better. What didn’t go to rot in the steady rains was undersized and soft and wouldn’t keep through to March month in the root cellar.
They didn’t speak of it though the implications were obvious. And that impending disaster sobered them both, taking the edge off the animosity that had soured their time together. As if they regretted the petty damage in light of the scourge they’d shortly be facing. It wasn’t a reconciliation exactly but they managed to be civil in each other’s company.
Evered found himself filling the vacant time on those long fruitless rows between the shoal grounds reliving his visit aboard The Hope in the spring, the offer of the Duke of Limbs as a share hand and what possessed him to refuse. It seemed a lunatic decision in hindsight. He could still feel that fecal ooze in his gut, the panic to be clear of the ship. He knew the dusky boy was somehow to blame for his keeping Ada at a remove through the summer. But playing it over in his head left him none the wiser and made him feel no better about it all and he circled the outskirts of that maze against his will, chafing at every step.
He’d outgrown the childish habit of speculation and conjecture that had occupied himself and Ada in their wakeful hours and in this one particular he felt barely related to his sister anymore. Ada was one
not satisfied until she hammered every raised nailhead flush to the boards. Months after he taught her the shore marks on the water she’d turned to him one night to ask how it was he knew them.
“Father taught me,” he’d said.
She nodded in the darkness. “Who was it taught Father then?”
“What?”
“Sure Father’s eyes was too poor to make them out he’s self.”
“He couldn’t mark them from the water, no.”
“Someone must have taught him,” she said.
“What, out in the boat with him you mean?”
“How else is it he’d’ve managed?”
“Might be so,” Evered said and he shrugged away from it. The question had never occurred to him before and didn’t particularly interest him then.
He’d almost drifted off when Ada said, “Might be he’s eyes got worse.”
“What?”
“Could be Father marked them when he was younger and lost them before we come along.”
“God’s reeven nails,” Evered said. “Are we going to sleep here this night?”
Beyond figuring the province or works of some article or charge, he preferred to keep his head down and marl along. Puzzling over the Duke of Limbs and his own murky motivations was such a torture it was almost a relief to turn his thoughts to the winter’s looming privations instead.
* * *
—
There wasn’t a real break in the miserable run of rain and drizzle until the beginning of September, a mocking sliver of summer too late to be any use. Ada crossed the brook and walked the beach to the berry hills every day while the decent stretch lasted. The berries were sparse and small and sour but even so she persisted, stooping to the work and carrying on a long one-sided conversation with Martha until the afternoon showed late and she started for home. On her last trip out she stumbled on a bear cub as she came up through the spruce trees into the berry fields, the animal as startled and shy as herself, rearing to its full height twenty paces away. Even on its hind legs it was not much taller than Ada and after a brief stare-down it turned tail and scooted across the open ground.
“Now Martha,” Ada whispered. She caught sight of the mother on the far side of the clearing. Raising her head at the sound of her young coming in a rush, bulling into the open until the cub was behind her. The dam stood straight, making a growling racket that prickled the skin on Ada’s neck. The exhalation when she dropped to all fours like the wet chuff of a whale as it breaks the surface. Turning to the cub and shepherding it into the underbrush, glancing over her shoulder repeatedly before disappearing into the trees.
Ada remembered how the bear had circled on them the previous year and she backed into the spruce behind her, then turned and ran all she was worth. She didn’t stop until she reached the brook and fell to her knees there, winded, a taste of blood in her throat. “Piss and corruption,” she said, her hands shaking, an incongruous smile on her face. She turned and shouted her mother’s curse out over the ocean. For the first time in months she felt alive in every nook and cranny, all the lamps of her self trimmed and lit and burning bright.
It wasn’t quite mid-morning, almost warm out of the wind. She couldn’t imagine going back to the berry hills this day, maybe ever. She gathered a handful of alder branches and then stripped out of her boots, out of her shift and trousers and stockings, and she stepped into the brook, completely naked for the first time since she’d bathed there the year before. The water was running high and cold from the steady rains, it stippled her skin head to toe and she yelled against the icy shock of it.
“Piss and corruption!”
She took a breath and went under all at once and she stayed down as long as she could hold it.
Evered was on the stage splitting the few fish he’d caught in the early hours of the morning when he heard a voice yelling over by the brook. Their mother’s curse and sounding eerily like the dead woman. Ada was still in the tilt when he left before first light and she was planning to walk up to the berry hills, he thought. He cocked his head to listen but there was nothing more and he turned back to the fish on the splitting table until he heard her shout again, an edge to it this time, pain or fear.
He tore off the stage, running up the rise far enough to look down toward the brook. Her clothes in a pile on the bank and no sign of Ada until she erupted from the bathing pool, gasping for air. She stood knee-deep in the running current, reaching up to wring water from her hair. She crawled a little ways up the bank to grab the trousers and stockings and her shift and she pushed them under the surface, trampling them underfoot before beating each one against the rocks.
Evered stood considering he might walk down and join her. It might be the last halfways warm day of the year. He imagined it wouldn’t go astray to give himself and his clothes a scrubbing. But the sight of Ada made him hesitate. He did not recognize the youngster he’d bathed with in that same spot a year since. The thick patch of dark hair between her legs, her new breasts. A woman’s body he was looking at and he was embarrassed to be watching as if it was a stranger standing in the brook below him. Ada laid her clothes out on the rocks to dry and when she took up a handful of alder leaves to scrub at herself Evered turned away.
Ada had seen him standing on the rise, watching her. She half expected he would make his way down to the brook and was of two minds about the prospect so she ignored him there as she wrung out her clothes and scrubbed at herself with the alder leaves. Wondering which way things would settle, until it occurred to her Evered was likely waiting on her to raise a hand, to offer an invitation. She glanced up the rise then but he was gone.
She lay back on her elbows in the chill of the brook, letting the rushing water skin over her, surprised to see her breasts riding above the current like little dumplings in a pot. Ada pictured the bear cub at the berry hills, the animal coming up on its hind legs a stone’s throw in front of her. The dam on the opposite side of the clearing. She was likely the same bear they’d encountered the previous year, Ada guessed, though there was nothing she knew of bears and their habits to say so.
And the notion of sleeping beside Evered came over her unexpected then, a transparent hankering, as if her body was having a thought all on its wordless lonesome. She dipped her head back till it cradled in the water, staring up at the sky with the noise across her ears. Of two minds again though she could feel all her weight sliding wordlessly to one side of the scale.
When she lifted her head there was a slender line of blood flowing down the brook away from her and out to sea. Her visitor had arrived. The first time in months.
Evered was at the tilt when she made her way up from the brook, her clothes still wet on her frame, her hair dripping water.
“Thought you was going up after some berries,” Evered said to her.
“I guess I changed me mind about it.”
He watched her a few moments and then nodded. “Everything all right?” he asked.
“Everything’s best kind,” she said, with a dissenting edge she couldn’t quite keep clear of the words. Miserable in her soaking kit but not able to hang her trousers over the hearth for fear she had bled through the pad of moss between her legs. Angry with Evered for no clear reason. She’d already started resenting the urge that had come over her as she lay naked in the brook. It felt like something foisted upon her against her will and she didn’t know who to blame for it but him. Though she was not so ignorant of her own self to ride that thought all the way to the Promised Land.
Her visitor’s arrival had saved her surrendering to something she would likely regret was the truth of it. And she halfways resented being spared her own recklessness.
“Piss and corruption,” she said under her breath.
“You sure everything’s all right?”
She nodded. She considered telling Evered about the bear cub and its dam at the berry hills as a kind of peace offering but kept it to herself in the end. Too bound up in it all to offer even so pri
vate an apology.
* * *
—
It was pissing down rain the day The Hope anchored off on the Barrow Ledge.
Ada and Evered filled the boat with their meagre store of cured fish and Evered ferried it out through the skerries. Bailing the accumulated inches of rainwater from the bilge before the next haul could be loaded in. Both of them soaked to the skin. Every time Ada dipped her head forward water funnelled through the gutter of her soggy tricorn in a wave.
“This is all a mess of cullage,” Evered said before he shoved off with the last of the season’s work.
“Let’s see how the Beadle marks it down,” Ada said. They were shouting to be heard over the rain drumming on the water and the stage and their sopping clothes.
“I got eyes, maid,” Evered said. “Every bit of it is refuse. It idn’t worth the salt we set it in.” He looked up to her on the stage from where he sat at the oars. “I’m going to ask the Beadle if he might see his way to taking us into Mockbeggar. Set us up working for Mr. Strapp.”
Ada looked away across the cove a moment and then back down at Evered, water sluicing off the front corner of the hat.
“We got no choice,” Evered said. “As I sees it.”
“If you says so,” she said.
“I’ll ask then will I?”
“You says we got no choice.”
He nodded. “That’s what I says,” he said, “yes.” He pushed away from the stage and set the oars. And he watched her where she stood watching him all the way out the cove.
Ada stepped into the lean-to shelter over the splitting table. She took the glass out of its leather case and scanned the deck of The Hope. Without knowing it she’d been looking toward this moment all summer, that she might lay eyes on the Duke of Limbs again, his curly black hair, his gangly boyishness. But there was no sign of him aboard. There was no one visible at all on the deck now, the crew waiting somewhere out of the rain until Evered tied up alongside. It was possible the youngster was in Mockbeggar, she thought, if that’s where they were going to end up. Though she couldn’t imagine what would become of them there. She thought on Martha a moment, of her grave up by the failing farm garden. And then she forced herself to think about something other.
The Innocents Page 13
