The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  “What about meself then?” Evered asked. “You got anyone for the likes of me?”

  “You’d only be put to the back of the line,” another man told him and they laughed together.

  The bottle made a second round and Evered asked, “How’s Mary Oram? Still wild as a goat, is she?”

  The men looked at their feet suddenly.

  “Mary Oram been dead this two months now,” one of them said.

  He would have thought they were making a joke but for the sombre look of them. “What become of her?”

  “Went to bed one night and never woke up is what it looks like,” the man said. “Was a day or two before anyone missed her gone.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Idn’t nobody knows the rights of it.”

  “It don’t hardly seem possible,” Evered said.

  “Every way’s likely,” the man said.

  They heard the voice of the Beadle calling from below decks and they drank another round in memory of Mary Oram before Evered went down.

  As well as the winter supplies he left The Hope with yeast and hops for brewing and two demijohns of rum, with powder and shot and a dozen iron traps to use once the snow settled in. The cost of the traps put them further in debt than they’d ever been. But the furs would go a long way toward digging them clear if the winter went well. If they held their nerve. If a bit of luck ran their way.

  Ada was on the stage when he came in and they carted the works up to the store but for a demijohn of rum which they brought into the tilt and poured two fingers to each, drinking the liquor straight. Ada made a pea soup with salt meat and flour doughboys and they both had more rum after they’d eaten. There was a celebratory air to the evening though neither was quite able to set aside the pervading sense of drift.

  “They wants to get you married off, Sister,” Evered said.

  “Who?”

  “The works of them. Talking about how hard up the crowd is over to Mockbeggar. And never a thought to how I’d fare with you gone.”

  “You’d get on best kind I imagine.”

  “Might be I would.” He shrugged. They were both a little drunk. He said, “I half expected old Bungs to ask after your hand before he went off the spring.”

  Ada could feel the heat coming into her face. “It wouldn’t like that, Brother,” she said.

  Evered almost asked what it was like then, if not like that. But he held his tongue. “You think you might want to someday?” he said. “Get married?”

  “I never give it much thought,” she said, which was a lie. She hadn’t come to a conclusion on the matter though it wasn’t for lack of consideration. Don’t be beholden to a man Mrs. Brace had told her and she still couldn’t say if it was meant to warn her away from marriage or if it was referring to something of another order altogether.

  They were lying on opposite sides of the blanket before it occurred to Evered to mention Mary Oram.

  “You are Josephus Rex,” Ada said.

  “Died in her bed they says.”

  She lay with that news a few minutes. “It don’t hardly seem possible,” she said.

  She thought of the woman in her knitted cap and her child’s hands without fingernails at work between her mother’s legs with the razor. Kneeling beside Sarah Best with the string of knots, chanting the one line over and over, what was it? May earth bear on you with all its something something. She drifted off still reaching for the words.

  * * *

  —

  Evered was out at the fall fish every day for two weeks after The Hope’s visit. He struck in handlining on the Wester Shoals late one morning, bringing the cod aboard hand over fist, as fast as he could shake one from the hook and drop the baited line overside. They were pooling thirty-five fathoms down and he was trying to raise them off the shoal ground, bringing them toward the surface a fathom at a time. He had the full of the fish pound and was loading the forward cuddy with more, the cod less than ten fathom then and still rising to his line. “Now Father,” he said aloud. He could hardly quiet his breath to have finally got the knack of it and he was lost in the medieval alchemy of the process. The day turning while he had his back to the weather.

  The waters darkened as the light left the sky, the schooling fish below him fading to black, and that warning sign finally forced him to lift his head. He turned to look east where a squall of billowing cloud and rain was stampeding across the bay. He brought up his line and set to the oars, the boat riding low and leaden with the cod he’d hauled aboard. He’d drifted to the far edge of the Wester Shoals and had to row directly into the streaming wind to reach the harbour mouth. Whenever he looked over his shoulder he could see the barrelling lop crossing open water, driving for him at a clip.

  Ada was at the farm garden when a steady breeze coming off the water stood her upright. The wind so implausibly warm it might have been blowing over a bed of hot coals. She looked to the ocean and saw banks of dark cloud on the eastern horizon bearing down on the cove. She scanned for the boat away out on the Wester Shoals, drifting with the current as Evered worked the ground. She waved her arms and shouted to him though he was miles off. She saw him draw in his lines finally and turn for the cove and she watched him make for shelter as the storm-edge sucked the last of the light from the sky, pushing whitecaps in a jagged line ahead of it. A few minutes later the wind turned suddenly cold against her skin, a sharp arctic edge to it.

  Evered’s only hope was to slip through the skerries into the cove ahead of the squall but he was rowing straight for the weather and Ada could see he would not make it. Evered seemed to have reached the same conclusion, letting go the oars and forking his catch overside to raise the gunwales high enough he might stay afloat when the worst of the storm collapsed on him.

  It was like watching a pantomime play out on the boards of the ocean’s monumental theatre, Evered alone upon it as the tempest’s slow-motion calamity crossed the surface like a marauding army advancing on a field. And nothing to be done but wait for the collision and stand witness. The crippling truth of it coming over her as the first heavy drops struck her face and her shoulders and seconds later the cold downpour whipped at her head and her clothes and she was soaked to the skin.

  Evered was still half a mile shy of the harbour when the rain fell in sheets and the wind shook the little boat like a bit of rag. He had managed to clear most of the fish from the pound and he took up the oars again, trying to keep head-on to the weather, waves breaking over the gunwale as he smashed through. The bilge was awash with sea water running forward and aft like a pendulum as he climbed each crest and careened into the trough, the suck of it sloshing past his calves. The boat lay low with that rolling weight but Evered couldn’t let go the oars to bail. He couldn’t look over his shoulder to watch for the harbour, blinded by the rain and the spume whipping off the whitecaps. He rowed for his life without making headway, managing only to hold his spot on the water as the endless string of waves lifted and cratered beneath him. He expected any second to be tipped face-first into the ocean with the boat crashing down on his back or the bow to drive under a crest and not shake clear. But each passing moment was so fraught with tumult, with his own feverish effort and the rain and the lethal wind ravaging his head that he didn’t feel anything as obvious or simple as fear until the storm tailed past him.

  The waves didn’t diminish through the rest of the day but the wind settled and the clouds skated over as suddenly as they’d arrived, the incongruous sun scouring the sky clean behind it. Evered was able to make his slow way to the harbour mouth then, steering the logy vessel past the skerries into the relative calm of the cove. He sat the oars, staring down at his boots under the knee-deep water in the bilge. He was dazed and wrung out, every muscle in his body trembling with exhaustion and with the rolling wake of terror that washed through him now that he was safe and sitting still. There were three codfish that hadn’t been forked overside or washed away by the storm and he watched them swim slow fi
gure eights around his ankles for a time before it struck him how odd a circumstance it was. He reached for the wooden bailer tied to the taut and began methodically emptying the boat a pint of ocean at a time.

  * * *

  —

  Ada ran down to the stage after Evered came through the skerries. She watched him bailing the boat, scooping and flinging with a distracted, mechanical repetition. He was close enough she could yell across to him but he seemed not to hear her. She was wet through from the pummelling rain and the steady wind blew cold across her and she started to shake in the open air. But she wouldn’t turn for the tilt before Evered was ashore.

  “Come in out of it,” she called.

  “I’ll be in directly,” he said without looking up from the bailing.

  “Brother,” she said. “Come in I wants you.”

  He swung his head toward her then and he glanced down at the bailer in his hand, considering. And after a time he set it down and took up the oars to row in to the stage. He climbed out of the boat and passed by his sister as if he wasn’t sure who she was. The same look on his face as the day he’d buried his father at sea when he was eleven years old.

  She followed him up to the tilt and she stripped him of his clothes, Evered raising his arms and turning and sitting and lifting his feet as she directed. Once he was stark she wrapped him in a blanket beside the hearth. She set the fire then and took off her own soaked outfit, wringing water from the material into a bucket as she stood naked in the chill, shaking helplessly.

  “You’ll catch your death so,” Evered said.

  She added more wood to the fire and spread their clothes on a line strung over the hearth and then took a chair beside him, wrapped in a blanket of her own. She’d set a demijohn of rum between them and she poured a generous shot into two mugs and they drank them back in a single mouthful. Ada doled out another round and the youngsters sat raw and shivering, waiting for the alcohol to hit their blood.

  “Some day out there,” Evered said finally.

  “I thought you was gone,” Ada said. “I thought you was as good as drownded.”

  “I thought the same,” he said and he half smiled at her.

  The heat of the rum brought him back to himself. He pictured his sister on the stagehead while he sat bailing the boat in the cove, as if recognizing her there for the first time. And it struck him that Ada would be standing on the stage even now, alone for good, if his luck had run an inch right or left of its course. Watching the sea for something that would never be delivered to her. That sense so strong in him it seemed almost a premonition and the same shrouding dread he felt in the worst days of her illness came over him.

  “Sister,” he said.

  Ada saw that darkness seep into his features and she stared at the half-starved look of desperation on his face. Asking after some reassurance or succour she felt helpless to offer. She’d had a thought to pray to Martha as she watched him row into the maw of the storm, to ask she keep Evered safe. But it seemed a vain bit of foolishness to think the child had any sway over the brawling forces at work out there.

  “Sister,” Evered said again and Ada went to him, taking his face into her hands.

  She said, “May earth bear on you with all its might and main.” Not knowing why those words came to her or even what they signified exactly. He started crying as she chanted them quietly. She kissed his forehead and his cheeks, crying herself by then, and he reached to put his arms around her. She straddled his lap in the chair, the blanket sliding off her shoulders as he bawled into her neck.

  They sat like that a few minutes, feeling beggared and solitary, each wanting back inside the other’s skin. Evered hefted Ada aloft and laid her on the ground in front of the fire, rocking against the naked sling of her hips. Ada rising up to the motion, a quiver running through her that she felt to her very toes. There was a sudden piercing nick then, a tearing at the fabric she was made of, and she closed her eyes against the stinging shock until the pain rolled unexpectedly, the submerged weight of pleasure breaking into the light.

  “Oh Jesus, Brother,” she said.

  She was just turned fifteen and she felt split open at the root of herself.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said.

  A Dirty Puzzle.

  They drifted off in each other’s arms and dozed until the creeping chill woke them. Evered spent but still inside her and they both felt queered by the cold clabbered uncoupling as he pulled away. They went to their separate bunks without eating any supper and they slept through the night without waking. None of their clothes was near to dry come morning but they dressed in the clammy material regardless to be covered in the other’s company.

  They were inward and quiet, moving as if there were others asleep in the narrow confines of the tilt, barely speaking for fear of blundering into the place where they were both feeling nish. Delicate and uncertain. And they chose to spend their day outside at separate tasks.

  Ada walked to the Downs, digging the last beets and cabbages and turnip from the farm garden. Sitting a vigil at Martha’s grave when she took a spell from the work, talking aloud to her sister as she always had. Though it felt now like listening to the ocean in an empty shell. Years believing the dead infant inclined to Ada’s every word from her heavenly anchorage. She couldn’t quite credit the notion now. But she had no one else to turn to.

  She described the marching storm and the terror of watching Evered rowing to stand still in the teeth of it, repeating the same horrific inconclusive moment for the length of the squall. The certain knowledge he was lost to her and how she surrendered to that conviction finally, wanting the boat to tip or swamp or founder and spare her the crushing wait, to get it over with. The sickening relief that followed on that betrayal as the weather passed over and he rowed safe into the cove. Calling Evered to shore and stripping his sodden clothes, sitting him naked before the fire with two fingers of rum. And she paused there on the cusp of what next had passed between herself and her brother.

  She heard a rifle shot in the woods above the brook, the echo of it billowing over the cove. Evered had mentioned taking the boat out but when she stood to scan the coastline there was no sign of him. Off hunting some creature instead, she guessed.

  “Some day out there it was, Martha,” she said. And she went back to the garden work without saying anything more.

  Hours later she sat beside the little grave and retold the story from the beginning and she faltered at the same place. “Now Martha,” she said. She turned her reticence in the light as if it was a creature she’d just drawn up from the ocean depths on a hook, razor-scaled and whiskered and loathsome. And it struck her she hadn’t revealed the first article of this one particular in all the years of talking to her sister, of presenting the freight and furnishings of her days in their mundane and gory detail. Her and Evered. Never once mentioned their wordless nighttime encounters, how she felt taken apart by them in the most unsettling, most provoking way. How nothing afterward seemed to fit in its proper order, as if she’d mislaid some essential element. All of it held behind a door that never opened a crack in Martha’s imaginary presence.

  And she had to turn away from her sister’s grave.

  * * *

  —

  Evered went down to the stagehead after Ada left for the farm garden. The boat sitting half-full of water and he untied the painter and led it along the side of the stage like an animal on a leash. When the keel brought up in the shallows he hauled it onto the landwash and tipped the water from the bilge. He’d planned to take it out to try for a few fish but the thought of being on the open ocean was making him feel qualmy and he left the boat lying face down on the rocks. He considered walking up to help Ada with the garden instead. But it seemed an imposition on her privacy to present himself unannounced. A thought so foolish and infuriating it made him want to go off into the woods and shoot something.

  He collected the flintlock and powder horn from the tilt and headed toward the brook, followi
ng the bank into the trees. He walked three hours through the country without crossing the path of a living creature but for a lone grey jay he’d shot at early on and missed. He went as far as Second Pond and lit a fire in a shallow clearing, licked out and more distracted than when he’d started. His wet gear had chafed him raw and he took off his shirt and trousers and propped them up on birch sticks near the heat to dry the damp from the seams and creases. And sitting in his small clothes he tried to mollify the seethe in his head by bashing the Bishop, as Josephus Rex would have put it. Imagining Mrs. Brace naked among the sailors on the landwash, to avoid thinking of something other, each man taking a turn between the woman’s legs. He rose up on his knees when he was ready and he came into the fire, his mettle spitting onto the coals. Falling to one side then like something shot, breathing hard, his legs quivering.

  The fire was still burning high when he woke. He couldn’t have drifted off more than a few minutes despite the dazed feeling he’d been asleep for hours. A sudden ridiculous conviction Ada was watching from the trees came over him and he covered himself, then walked to the pond to rinse his sullied hands. Wanting to bury his head in the water and clear his thoughts the same.

  He was at a loss to account for it. He’d no intentions as they sat in their blankets beside the fire or when she leaned in to kiss his face. An echo of himself in the boat with the squall breaking relentless came over him, the same sense of impending ruin. And that compulsion had risen up in him as he bawled into Ada’s neck, she repeating an old witches’ phrase Mary Oram had taught her, sounding vaguely like a curse to his ears. The earth bearing upon him with all its might and main as the girl sat herself naked in his lap and they hasped together, mortar and pestle.

  She’d been talking endlessly about Bungs since the sailors left the cove. Master Warren she called him, repeating his stories of ole Itchland and the exotic countries and alien people he’d encountered while at sea, as if she had some proprietary claim to them. But he could never bring himself to ask how she made that purchase. A blanket hung between the bunks all that stood between her and the cooper in the tilt. A dirty puzzle was what she’d been called and Evered had jumped the sailor who said so, wanting to kill the man for the slur. Because he couldn’t but suspect it was true of her. That she was the same in her way as his own beastly self.