The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  She missed her brother, missed the easy physical affection that had been the only constant source of comfort in her life. But all through the fall she’d felt Evered waiting, expecting Ada would be the one to make amends, to bridge what remained of the gap between them. His waiting was like a hand at her back and she bristled against the nudge. Against the part of herself that nudged in the same fashion, in the same direction. His refusal to take her into the backcountry seemed part of a long penance imposed as punishment for that.

  He was strangely unaware of his own nature. He liked to think himself constant and selfless but Ada knew him a moody creature, someone who could disappear from her life for days and weeks at a stretch. He was put out every time her visitor arrived and she took to the opposite bed for fear of the blood bespoiling him. He never said a word directly, retaliating for the unexplained absence with a sulk, a clipped note to all their interactions. It was almost sweet those first months to see he could be hurt so easily. She tried to make it up to him when she came back to the shared bed, drawing him into her heat, giving herself over to the small pleasure that seemed innocent and equal to each in the moment. But using it so brazenly added another sour note to the aftertaste of regret.

  If not for the arrival of her visitor as she lay naked in the brook at the end of the season, angling toward Evered, they might have found the old way back to each other. But that urge had ebbed away by the time her bleeding was done. And even after the weather forced them into the same bed that winter she refused the easy device.

  In some obscure way Mrs. Brace lay at the heart of her refusal. That fever image of the housekeeper in the lap of an unfamiliar man picking at her, details she’d been too listless to take in at the time asserting themselves. Mrs. Brace straddling the chair, her bare legs braced against the floor. The stranger’s hands high up under the skirt of her dress. The subtle steady rocking motion. Evered and the Captain had taken the wherry in search of the Indian grave and Mrs. Brace’s visitor had rowed Evered’s boat in from The Hydra, she saw now, to take advantage of their absence. Heartbreak there might have been between them. But Mrs. Brace was not weeping.

  The sound was altogether different from anything Ada heard behind the blanket. And recognizing that difference amplified something she suspected about the Captain and his housekeeper. There was a suffocating nakedness to their transactions that attracted and repelled her by turns. Something in it reminded her of the hitch in Evered’s breathing during the solitary ministrations she pretended to sleep through. Of her brother ferreting through her small clothes to find the place she was warmest and wet, her hips rising to his hand as he figured the works of her. Fiercely intimate and somehow impersonal still, as if it was a stranger opening her up. As if she was a stranger to herself in the moment.

  * * *

  —

  Ada was up and out of bed with a fire burning before Evered stirred the next morning.

  After his breakfast he set about preparing for the river trip. He tied up a sealskin blanket as a bedroll and picked through the salt fish for a half-dozen pieces that hadn’t gone green with rot, packing them with strips of dried bear meat and hardtack and a few potatoes. He added a handful of dried moss to his tinderbox. Ada sat with him at the hearth as he carved set and trigger sticks for deadfalls, trying to refine the points and notches to match the guile of the creature he was hunting.

  He’d told Ada about the gifts left behind by the scavengers who made off with his bait and she smiled at him now. “They seems too clever by half for the likes of you, Brother,” she said.

  “You thinks you might fare better is it?”

  She shrugged. “What did the Captain use for bait?”

  “Cheese,” Evered said. “But you got every bit of what he give us eat up.”

  “It idn’t that they don’t like the bear fat,” Ada said. “They likes it well enough to steal off with it. What stopped them making off with the cheese?”

  “He gobbed it on there with honey. So’s they had to work at it I spose.”

  “You wants to do the same you asks me.”

  “We got no honey, Sister.”

  “We got molasses.”

  Evered nodded at her. Feeling thick not to have thought of it himself. “Could be it might work,” he said.

  Ada watched him whittle at the trap sticks a few minutes longer and then hauled on her winter outfit and went to the door.

  “Where you off to?”

  “Thought I might say hello to Martha. Maybe cleave up some wood.”

  “I’ll look after the wood,” Evered said, in a way that might have been a veiled thank-you.

  “You carry on with what you’re doing,” Ada said. “I’ll look after mine.”

  And that was the last bit of real conversation they had before he left the following morning. They ate their supper in silence but for talk about what the weather might bring in the next few days and what Evered’s hopes for his traps were.

  “You’ll be all right here?” he’d asked her again.

  She was poisoned with him and was having trouble holding still in her chair. “I can look out to me own self, Brother.”

  He nodded and let it drop. He said, “I wish we had a splash of rum in the house.”

  “You and me the same,” she said.

  Ada went to bed ahead of him that night and turned her back when he crawled in beside her. A sick little roil in her belly as he tucked into her. The hatch lifting on the pit of her stomach where the echo of Mrs. Brace and the Captain writhed and twisted in the black.

  She placed her hand on Evered’s hip behind her and then down between them, finding her way to bare skin. He put an arm around her waist and moved to reach under her shift but she grabbed it with her free hand. She did not want to be touched. Or to turn toward him or to speak. She moved against the rigid bit of gristle in her hand, working toward that hitch in his breath, that spastic release.

  Afterward they both lay completely still. Ada waited until she thought Evered was asleep before she extracted her hand, the slurry across her fingers and the back of her wrist already crusting dry. And she didn’t move again through the night.

  * * *

  —

  It was clear but blowing fresh and cold when Evered started out, almost too cold for walking before he struck the brook and turned into the cover of the trees. An hour’s tramp to First Pond and another half-hour beyond it to the first deadfall on a flat outcrop of stone above the brook where the snow didn’t drift in.

  There were fresh tracks around the set and the ledge rock was down but there was nothing in the trap and he went about resetting it with the newly notched sticks. He took off his mitts to lather molasses from a little jar onto the bait and onto the trigger stick before angling the rock over the set post. The cold was so fierce that his numbed fingers fumbled about the delicate business and the thirty-pound ledge came down twice, almost catching a forearm both times.

  Evered shoved his hands up to the wrist into snow to bring the blood back into them. Thinking what a crushed arm would mean out here. He took a breath to steady himself and leaned the weight of the ledge rock onto the post, levering the trigger stick into its notch. Backed away like someone trying to exit a room without disturbing a sleeping dog.

  He hauled his mitts over his hands with his teeth and carried on upstream. There was a buck hare in a slip above Second Pond, the body stretched full out and frozen solid. He reset the snare and tied the rabbit by the feet, the carcass knocking like a junk of wood against his back as he walked on.

  There were two more deadfalls below Third Pond and both had been looted of their bait without tripping the trigger stick. The feathered leg of a ptarmigan placed under the ledge rock at the last. He reset them both with the molasses and bear fat and carried on to Third Pond where he built a fire in a droke of trees with a view of the beaver house. He opened his jacket to the heat and gnawed at a cake of hardtack as he watched the pond. Thinking all the while about Ada.

&nbs
p; He’d long ago given up the notion his sister could be told what to do or when or how simply because he was the older sibling, because he was the man of the house. She was the more clever of the two and Evered could admit that to himself if not to her. But he couldn’t escape the sense he’d relinquished all say in their affairs. Ada could offer or withhold at her whim was how it seemed and he took what came his way as it came. It made him feel like a green youngster being bidden about by a mother’s silent say-so. And he overstepped in other ways to counter the imbalance or he swung at shadows and fell on his face for his efforts.

  He was still galled by his refusing her offer to come with him. It was a thoughtless reflex, the same as pulling his arm clear of the ledge rock as it fell. Getting out from under as the sudden and unexpected clapped down. He regretted the words the moment they were uttered but didn’t know how to recant without looking foolish. The rest of his time at the tilt he was looking for a way to offer an invitation that wouldn’t seem servile or false. Trying to work up the nerve as he sat at the hearth with the trap sticks to say he’d thought it through and Ada might come along if she still wanted the jaunt. And then they fell into the business about the honey and molasses and he felt too much the idiot already to let Ada think he didn’t know his own mind.

  She’d gone to bed ahead of him and turned her back when he crawled in beside her. Poisoned, he could tell. Then the shock of her hand snaking into his small clothes. And even that managed to feel like an act of hostility, holding him at bay as she went about the business. A hum of choler rising from the stillness she settled into after he came and Evered too stunned and alarmed and uncertain to move himself.

  He spat into the fire, itching to move suddenly, to busy his head with something. Idleness was the root of all trouble, he could vouch for the truth of that right enough.

  * * *

  —

  He walked the brook’s frozen road into the boggy country above Third Pond.

  At the lake he cut for the head of Black Bear River and he had three full hours of daylight when he started north toward the coastline. The river ran through a valley of forested hillsides and there was almost no wind. The trees were spruce and pine and fir and they were the tallest living things Evered had ever laid eyes on, fathoms higher than the scrub trees near the coast that were stunted by the constant wind and the thin soil and the bleak weather. He walked most of the way on the river which was iced over except where it ran fastest, the rattles forcing him to scramble through the bush.

  There were signs of otter and marten and rabbit and fox along the bank and he scouted for likely spots to set deadfalls and snares as he went. Just as he was beginning to lose the light he flushed a brace of ptarmigan and felled them both on the wing with a single spray of shot. He tied them by the feet to the strap of the bag he carried, famished suddenly.

  He could hear the rumble of a falls ahead and was of two minds about stopping above it or making the climb down to look for a campsite below. The water ran free for a hundred yards to the falls and the shoreline rose steep from the bank. There was nowhere that looked flat enough to lie down for the night and he decided he would have to make the climb though the light was poor and failing fast in the valley’s shadow. The open water forced him up into the trees and he was on top of the falls before he got a glimpse of the height of it, a rocky drop of almost fifty feet. He looked downriver to see how the country below shaped up for a night’s shelter. And at the farthest bend where the ice caught over the moving water again he saw a fire burning on the shore.

  For a moment he was shot through with terror, thinking he might have stumbled on an Indian camp or some other wild unknown. But in the next moment he knew it was Ada down there, waiting for him.

  * * *

  —

  Ada didn’t move when Evered crawled from bed that morning. He didn’t light the lamp or kindle a fire, picking around in the dark to pull his materials together. He’d stopped at the open door and turned back to the room where Ada pretended to sleep.

  “Sister,” he said.

  She ignored him until he called a second time. She sat up to look at her brother in the new light through the door, the sun just rising.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow. Next day the latest,” he said.

  “All right.”

  He nodded and waited a moment longer as if he hoped she might say something more before he went on his way. She could hear the sound of his footsteps over frozen snow as he passed by the side of the tilt and headed down toward the brook. The room was bitterly cold and she got up to light a fire, to make herself breakfast. But she couldn’t eat when she sat to the food, her insides bound up by a chalky disgust. With Evered or with herself she couldn’t say.

  She’d set about packing tinder and a flint then, a blanket, fish hooks and a bit of line. Pulled together what she could find of her kit from the walk over the ice to the ship. She didn’t examine her motivation in any detail. For fear she would talk herself into being reasonable.

  She headed around the western arm of the cove and along the coast toward Black Bear River. Wind gusting out of the north and blowing almost face-on, strong enough at times she had to angle her head away to breathe. She knew it would take most of the morning to reach the river and the biting cold and the contrary wind convinced her to turn back half a dozen times. And in the end she kept walking.

  * * *

  —

  By the time she turned upriver from the coast the wind had dropped off and after the first bend she was well into the trees where the air was almost still. But she was too cold to stop and carried on past the first rattle before considering a place to make a fire. She crouched into the woods behind a massive granite boulder where the ground was mostly free of snow. She set her pack down and wandered further in after firewood.

  She stumbled on the bear cub’s skeleton about thirty yards from the river, frozen into the snow. Most of the flesh gone from the bone that was visible though there were ragged tufts of fur stuck to the spine, to the crown of the skull. The bared teeth of the muzzle angled up from the ground as if the cub was trying to keep its nose above the snow. Ada pried it loose, using the hatchet to break the ice that held it and then chopping through the dried ligaments running up from the spine. And she carried the skull back to the boulder with her armful of dead branches.

  There wasn’t enough light in the gloom of the trees to see the object clearly. She could feel a stubble of tiny holes across the forehead and she held it close to the fire. The bone around the brow thickly pocked and the bone at the back of the sockets as well. A scatter of lead shot embedded in the white.

  She packed the relic away in her bag with the rest of her materials and she walked on through the afternoon, stopping in the lee of a rock face below a waterfall at the first hint of darkness. She spent an hour gathering wood and while she was striking sparks into the tinder to start a fire she heard the clap of a rifle shot above the falls. She walked up to the open water below the cataract and she caught three trout in the deep pool there, covering them in snow back at the campsite and settling in to wait. She took out the bear skull and scraped away the last of the fur and dried fascia with a knife and she used the tip to pick the shot from the bone. She held it up in one hand to stare into the empty eyes and a shiver passed through her.

  * * *

  —

  It was a steep tricky climb down the waterfall. Evered tied up his rifle and pack, the telescope and shot bags and racquets and the rabbit carcass, and he lowered them to a ledge below with the hauling rope, then followed after. And he repeated the manoeuver three times more before he reached the foot of the falls.

  Ada was sitting with her back to a low rock face looking out over the fire toward the frozen river when he came up to her. It was nearly dark and he called out as he approached so as not to give her a fright though he knew she was expecting him. She turned her head toward the sound of his voice and waited until he came into the fire’s halo.

  �
�I almost give up on finding you tonight,” she said. “Till I heard the gun go off.”

  He held up the ptarmigan. “Bit of fresh craft for supper,” he said.

  He took off the rifle and shot bags and laid the frozen rabbit carcass out of the fire’s heat and sat beside her. They plucked the birds and cleaned them and Evered cut alder sticks to roast them over the fire, grease spitting as it fell into the coals. They roasted the potatoes in the same way and ate the meal with their bare hands, picking the last bits of meat from the rames with their fingers.

  When they were just about done Ada said, “You idn’t mad with me, Brother?”

  Evered considered the question a long time before he answered, unsure exactly what it encompassed. “I left it too long,” he said, “finding a place to set. Dark come on quicker than I expected.” He gestured at the night’s worth of wood she’d collected and stacked under the rock face. “I’d’ve had a cold time of it on me own out here.”

  It was a misstatement of what he felt, the sense of relief and reprieve that welled up when he realized who was on the river ahead of him. But it was all he could manage. It occurred to him then to ask if Ada was angry in turn but he was afraid of what her answer might be.

  “Run into any trouble on the way up?” he asked instead.

  “Fair going most of it,” she said. “I come upon this above the first rattle.”

  She took the skull from her bag and handed it across to Evered and he turned it in the firelight, glancing across at his sister. He rubbed his fingers across the pocked bone.

  “You plans on carting this all the way back to the cove?”

  “Thought I might.”