“Who are these people, Brother?”
“Angels from heaven you asks me,” he said.
In the morning Evered rowed Truss out to The Hydra and they returned with bags of shot and powder, a set of iron smithy tongs and a bottle of brandy. Truss poured Evered a full glass of the liquor and set about reaming out the barrel of the flintlock and oiling the works as the youngster drank. He poured Evered a second glass when the first was gone.
“I won’t be no use today if I haves another drop of this,” Evered said.
“I expect by the time we are done here this morning,” Truss said, “you will be stone cold sober.”
Truss replaced the lock spring and used the smithy tongs to fire the hammer red-hot to reharden it. When Evered’s second glass was empty he cooled the tongs in the water barrel and sat Evered in a chair beneath the open window for the light. “Mrs. Brace,” he said, “if you would hold his head steady.”
Evered was vaguely, drunkenly aware of her hand across his forehead, of his crown cradled in the valley between those remarkable breasts, until Truss straddled his lap and forced the tongs into his mouth and the searing clamp of it blotted out the world. The three of them locked in a hellish little struggle, Truss’s long face reddening with the effort, grunting inches above Evered’s wide eyes. Truss adjusted his purchase on the tooth as Evered tried to beg him to stop around the mouthful of iron. Mrs. Brace wrapped her forearm across the top of his head as Truss reamed back and forth, the molar clinging relentless to its place until the moment it surrendered completely, Truss falling off Evered’s lap with the tooth in the grip of the tongs.
Blood was pouring from Evered’s mouth but the relief was so immediate he paid no mind. He felt wildly, joyously sober. Mrs. Brace held the bowl that Ada had been bled into under his chin. She poured him another drop of brandy. “Swish that around,” she said, “and spit.” Evered grimaced against the burn but even that felt purifying, almost pleasurable. Mrs. Brace folded a piece of rag and reached into his mouth to stuff it into the gaping crater. “Bite down,” she said and she smiled at him, her hands on either side of his face. “Are you all right?”
“It wouldn’t so bad,” he said through his clenched teeth.
Truss had the molar in the palm of his hand. “What shall we do with this beast?”
“Ada,” Evered mumbled. “For her shelf.”
“Yes,” Truss said. “I wondered who was responsible for that. Quite the collection.”
* * *
—
They stayed another five days in the cove.
Truss took Evered into the backwoods hunting every morning but for the second day which he announced was Sunday. He sat the youngster and Mrs. Brace at the hearth and read prayers from a calfskin-bound book and then Evered rowed him out to The Hydra and listened to the man read prayers to those on board.
The enforced indolence made Evered itch to get back to the glory of shooting. He had a natural aptitude for the weapon, for leading a moving target, and he was already addicted to the sport. They shot grouse and geese, a handful of squirrels, two otters, a great horned owl. “There is plenty of fat on the owl,” Truss told him, “but it is tough eating.” They shot curlews and a raven and a handful of jays and nameless grassy birds. And the day after the Sabbath observance he took down a falcon that was circling the cove just as they were setting out.
The bird fell on the eastern arm and they walked out to retrieve it. Truss spent a few minutes examining the speckled plumage, the talons and hooked beak and the black black eyes. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “A beautiful creature.” He put a platter-sized hand on Evered’s shoulder. “A shame you weren’t shown the use of that flintlock sooner,” he said.
Evered looked down at the firearm in his hands, feeling his father was being slighted somehow. “Father couldn’t see proper,” he said. “Not past thirty paces. The gun wouldn’t much use to him.” He shrugged over the inadequacy of his defence. “I guess it fell from his mind,” he said. And as if to compensate for his father’s shortcoming he went on to talk about the mysterious blindness that came over him during their trek across the ice the previous spring, the days of torment with a poultice strapped to his eyes. The fear he might never recover his sight.
“Snow blindness,” Truss said matter-of-factly. “I suffered a bout myself our first winter in Labrador. It’s prolonged exposure to the ice glare that causes it.”
“It never bothered Ada none.”
“You were leading the way?”
“Till me eyes give out,” he said.
“She was watching your back as she followed behind. You were staring at the ice.”
Evered nodded, relieved to think there was an unremarkable explanation for the affliction that had come over him. That no less a man than Truss himself had once succumbed to it.
The weather was cold but fair and they walked into the backcountry along the shore of the brook, miles further than Evered and his father had ever dared. He kept his discomfort to himself for fear of calling his upbringing into question again, holding tight to the Captain’s wake. Truss striding brassy into the wastes of strangled bush, looking for open ground where caribou might congregate after the snow fell. They hadn’t seen any game large enough to warrant using the Hanoverian rifle and Truss was eager to show what it could do beyond the target practice Evered had taken to feel its weight and kick. He told endless tales of the deer and wolves and white bear he’d killed in Labrador as they walked.
They skirted the shorelines of three boggy ponds and at the last came upon a beaver house that they watched for an hour without making a sighting. “Keep this place in mind,” Truss said. He described the animal’s buck teeth and flat tail and ornery disposition. “An old one can weigh forty-five pounds or more,” he said.
On the way back down the brook he taught Evered to build and set deadfall traps for foxes that he baited with old Cheshire cheese and honey.
“What do you call that,” Evered asked. He was pointing to the bait.
“This?” Truss said. “Cheese?”
“We had a load of it wash ashore from a wreck last fall. Ada just about loved it more than the world. Never knew what it was called.”
Truss looked at the youngster steady though Evered couldn’t read his expression. “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” he said.
Evered nodded yessir, as he did whenever Truss said something beyond his understanding.
“You aren’t lonely out here, Evered?” the Captain asked. “You and Ada?”
The question struck him nearly as peculiar as the one about being naked. “We idn’t alone,” he said.
“Of course not, no.” Truss watched him a moment as if weighing how far down that road he wanted to travel with the boy. And he gestured it away with a wave. “Boiled fox is decent meat,” he said. “Not as good as beaver but better than owl by a long shot.”
They were licked out with the rough walking when they returned each evening, carting the day’s carnage over their shoulders. Truss fired a powder shot as a signal to The Hydra and the wherry was sent in to take the bulk of the catch. Before they ate themselves, Truss made an examination of Ada’s condition and pronounced himself encouraged by her progress. And then the man sat to a plate of meat so gargantuan as to beggar belief. Evered thought the housekeeper was making fun of her employer the first time she set food in front of the Captain. But Truss calmly ate the full of it and a second helping just as preposterous besides.
Mrs. Brace smiled at the look on Evered’s face. “The man is all appetite,” she said, a hint of mockery in her voice. But Truss did not dispute the claim.
Ada seemed to brighten by the hour and she was soon enough able to sit up for short spells and keep down solid food and she carried on a languid centreless conversation with Mrs. Brace between her bouts of sleep. She’d hired herself out as a housekeeper, Mrs. Brace told her, after her husband died of consumption fifteen years ago. They’d had no children. “I was young to be a widow,”
she said. “But not quite young enough to interest another husband.” She’d been in the service of Captain Truss a decade, coming over from England when he began his enterprise in Labrador.
“Will you stay with him?” Ada asked. “When you gets back to England?”
“If he will have me, yes.”
Ada nodded thoughtfully.
“What is it?” Mrs. Brace asked.
“I wondered if you and the Captain,” she said. She’d been hearing the same stricken intimacies across the room that Evered had. “I thought you two was married.”
“Because we share a bed?”
“Is there more to it?”
“Sometimes it seems there is and more times there does not,” Mrs. Brace said. “But the Captain,” she said, “refuses to tie a knot with his tongue that he can’t untie with his teeth.” She laughed to herself then though Ada didn’t see the joke exactly. “Don’t ever be beholden to a man if you can help it,” Mrs. Brace said and she pointed a finger to underline the lesson. “That is my advice to you, my maid.” And she smiled in a way that made it impossible for Ada to say if she was being serious.
* * *
—
On their next to last night Ada dressed in her trousers and waistcoat and sat with them to eat her supper. Truss had procured a half-pound wedge of cheese from the schooner and he laid it on her plate whole. “I understand you have a taste for this,” he said.
Ada covered her mouth with her hands, looking from one face to another and shaking her head as if the fruit of Paradise had been placed before her.
“It’s cheese is the name of it,” Evered said.
“I don’t recommend eating the thing entire this evening,” Truss told her, smiling. “In your delicate condition.”
She got up from her seat and went to the shelf above the bed. She came back and set the Indian pendant and the silver button in the Captain’s hand. He examined each in turn, nodding over them.
“Fleur-de-lys,” he murmured and the youngsters stared at him. He held up the button. “It’s French,” he said. “A fleur-de-lys it’s called.”
“I found it up to the farm garden,” Ada said. “Next the graves.”
“The French were great raiders on this coast during Queen Anne’s War.”
“It was off the clothes of a drownded fellow,” Evered said, “washed ashore when Father was first come out from Mockbeggar.”
“Well,” Truss said, “Queen Anne’s War was long before your father’s time. It could have been a sailor wrecked off a French vessel.” He made a skeptical face. “Though no common sailor would be sporting silver buttons. An officer possibly.”
Mrs. Brace said, “As with many things of the like I suppose we will never know for certain.”
“The voice of common sense as always,” Truss said, not unkindly. “Now this,” he said, holding up the pendant. “This is a relict of the Red Indians, of that I have no doubt.”
“We come upon a grave,” Ada said, avoiding Evered’s eyes. “A ways along the coast. There was lots more pieces the like of this one laid with them.”
“I’d been meaning to ask if you had any dealings with the Indians. I saw numbers of them when I first travelled along this shore but only from a spyglass distance. They were not keen to make our acquaintance.”
“Never laid eyes on a one of them ourselves,” Evered said. “Not on the hoof anyway. Father claimed to seen them paddling by in their queer little boats once or twice.”
“They paddled those little boats out to the Funks for bird eggs, did you know?” He looked up at Evered and could see he did not know. “A flat bit of rock sixty miles off of Fogo Island,” he said. “The middle of the Atlantic Ocean. How could they have known it even existed out there?” He shook his head, incredulous. “Remarkable creatures,” he said. And he went off on a lengthy treatise on the Indians, their habit of painting themselves and everything they own with red ochre, their expertise in the manufacture and use of bows and arrows of sycamore and Weymouth pine, their jerking of venison and seal meat and fish for times of scarcity. He was running his fingers over the markings on the pendant as he spoke. “And for all their cleverness they are the most forlorn of any human species I ever heard of. Excluded from all intercourse with the rest of mankind. And they are not even possessed of the useful services of a dog.”
“Captain Truss,” Mrs. Brace interrupted.
He came back to them then, looking up from the pendant. “Yes,” he said. “Well.”
Evered said, “I half expected we might run into some when we wandered up the brook.”
“Not at all likely,” Truss said quietly. “Up the brook or anywhere else. I predict the entire race will be extinct before many more years have passed.”
“Extinct?” Ada said.
“Eradicated,” Truss said. “Wiped off the face of the earth. Blotted from the Book of Life.” He passed both the button and pendant back to Ada. “I could not possibly take these,” he said. “But it would be a great privilege if Evered was willing to escort me to the burial site.”
Evered stared down at his plate. “Was only chance we landed on it to begin with. I doubts I’d spot it a second time.”
“I’m willing to take a stab. If you would indulge me.”
“I could go with you,” Ada said.
Evered glanced across at her. “It’s a fair haul, Captain,” he said, though he kept his eyes on his sister. “We was out overnight with the boat.”
“We will take the wherry of course. And two men to the oars. We’ll have you back before dark.” Truss turned to Ada. “You may have the nerve of a mule,” he said, “but I will not allow you to try it on my account. You will stay here and rest. If we are lucky enough to strike upon the burial I will bring you a few treasures to add to your collection. How would that suit you?”
“That would be the finest kind of a thing,” she said.
Before it had gone fully to dark Evered rowed Truss out to the schooner to prepare for the morning’s expedition. Mrs. Brace took the pots to the brook and Ada insisted on walking down with her though Mrs. Brace refused to let her help with the work. “Sit there and be still,” she said. And a moment later she said, “Your Evered seemed none too pleased to be talking about Indians this evening.”
Ada couldn’t say if it was a question or a simple statement of fact but she wanted no part of it either way. “Did you see any yourself back then?” she asked. “Red Indians?”
“I did not,” Mrs. Brace said. “But I saw enough of their like in Labrador to do me a lifetime.”
“Captain Truss seems right taken with them.”
“He’d sooner sup with savages than Christians is the truth of it. Trying to teach them to behave like sensible creatures when sense is not in their nature. Even the ones that go to church and say their prayers will still eat their meat raw.” And as if that uncivilized behaviour highlighted another she said, “I was wondering, Ada, have you not got something other than your brother’s trousers to wear in mixed company?”
Ada smiled at the notion a person might put on different clothes according to who they were sitting with. “They’re not Evered’s trousers,” she said.
“I found a dress tucked away when I was putting the place to rights,” Mrs. Brace said. “Is that not yours?”
Ada shook her head.
“Oh,” Mrs. Brace said and she turned back to the pot in her hand. “You never said what became of them. Your mother and father.” She scoured away at the perfectly clean surface awhile and when it was clear the girl wasn’t going to answer she said, “She would have wanted you to wear it I’m certain.”
“I’m happy enough with what I got,” Ada said.
* * *
—
Evered spent the night aboard the schooner with Captain Truss and they started out in the wherry before light. The wind was with them and Evered was stunned by the time they made with two hands at the oars. They passed over the Wester Shoals before dawn was fully upon them and
reached the mouth of the river before mid-morning. Truss scanned up-country with a pocket Dollond as they sculled past.
“What’s the name of this river?” he asked.
“Can’t say as I knows,” Evered said. “We never laid eyes on it before last fall.”
“If we have time on the return we might wander in a ways. See what we can see?”
It sounded almost like a request and Evered nodded yessir.
Within an hour they were rowing wide of the small beach where he and Ada had landed. Truss stood in the bow and glassed the cliffs, the low caves at the base. “That looks a likely spot,” he said.
“We had a gander in there,” Evered said. “The gravesite was further on.”
Truss pocketed his telescope and they travelled on in silence, the two men at the oars in lockstep and apparently tireless. An hour later Evered said, “I feels like we must have passed it. I doubt we come this far.”
Truss gave the order to come about and they landed at a stretch of low beach to make a fire for tea and to eat their lunch. The two servants sat a little ways apart, talking about England and what they would do when they set foot home in the Old Country. The Captain was uncharacteristically quiet and Evered could feel the man’s eyes on him as he ate.
“I can take a turn at the oars,” Evered suggested as they finished up and walked back to the wherry.
“No,” Truss said. “I want your eyes on the coastline. Perhaps approaching from the opposite direction will make the burial site plain to you.”
“Perhaps it might.”
Truss looked at him directly. “You don’t approve of this expedition.”
But Evered only shrugged.
“Speak freely,” Truss offered.
“You said that crowd was just about.” He searched for the word.
“Extinct. Wiped out.”
“What was it happened to them?”
“We happened to them.”
Evered let that notion hang in the air.
The Innocents Page 15
