The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  * * *

  —

  Evered was late coming in from the woods. Ada waited for him and served up their meals and they ate in silence. They poured their tea in the same quiet and afterward they shared a quiet glass of spruce beer from the dregs of Warren’s brew before bed. The liquor was skunky and almost too foul to swallow even cut with a generous shot of rum but they persevered for the relief of the alcohol.

  Ada said, “You was going out after a few fish today you said.”

  “Me outfit was still sopping from yesterday,” he said. “Figured I could give myself long enough to dry out proper.”

  “You had no luck up in the woods.”

  “I had bad luck. Do that count for something?”

  “Not for anything much, Brother,” she said. “No.”

  They both smiled then, to see how hard the other was trying to hold to the old rhythms.

  Evered looked into his mug. “This stuff is almost enough to choke you,” he said. “I expects I’ll have to try me hand at a fresh brew.”

  “I was thinking I’d go up for a few berries the week if the weather holds half-decent,” Ada said.

  He nodded. The sun had long set and the only light in the room was from the fire and Evered watched his sister in that darkling. Just able to make out her features though he could have touched her without moving from his seat. Her ebony ponytail only visible in motion, when she turned her head or tipped her face back to drain her mug. And he thought it was a genuine picture of Ada, that it was as true a sight as a person could hope to take of another in this life. That anything more was gossip and fairy tale, umbrage, wishful thinking.

  “Sister,” he said.

  She looked across the little distance between their chairs. Seeing the same vague silhouette of her brother there, he realized.

  “Did you ever?” he said. “You and Bungs?”

  She stared down into her lap.

  “Like Josephus Rex was saying?” he said.

  She turned to face him and seemed about to answer. But she only watched him, her face too indistinct to reveal what she was thinking. She got up from her chair and went to the back of the room. He could hear her moving about behind him and moments later the ringing stream as she pissed into the slop pail. As if to say There’s your answer and may it serve thee. The unhurried rustle of her undressing then and settling into her bunk.

  He sat until the fire burned back and he banked the livid coals under ash and went to bed himself.

  * * *

  —

  Ada made the pilgrimage to the berry hills in the morning. There was work still to be done at the farm garden but she was avoiding Martha in her little grave. As if all her unconscious prevarications were buried there now and could be ignored anew by keeping clear.

  The berries were prolific and falling from the stems, some already touched by the early frost. Ada’s hands stained red and black among the bushes, the long hours of picking tactile and repetitive and just consuming enough to make her feel she was absent any other concern. Her mind at the oars without pause all the same and the tumult crossed into her line of sight now and then, like the bear’s tooth around her neck swinging free as she bent to the berries.

  It was Evered’s question about Bungs she was mucking through. There was nothing between herself and Warren to hide and still she suspected she was hiding something. In all her talk about his travels she’d never mentioned the Lady Julia or Nance Phair to Evered. She was being protective of the man, she thought. Though there was something other than the charitable at work in that oversight.

  She was about to tell Evered that Warren wanted nothing more from her than innocent affection. And the same was true for her as far as she could spy it. But the truth lately seemed to stretch past the point where she could make out details with any clarity.

  She knew what lay at the root of his asking. And she couldn’t settle with any satisfaction how to feel about what happened between she and Evered, about how it unfolded or if it was all her doing somehow. It was never her intention to offer anything but comfort. Leaving her chair and taking Evered’s face in her hands. The blanket falling behind her as she settled into his lap, as Mrs. Brace had straddled the unfamiliar man. That fact was not lost on her.

  “Piss and corruption,” she said aloud without pausing at the work.

  The entire episode was a changeling creature, its appearance altogether different according to how it caught the light. It seemed all for Evered one moment, for love and pity’s sake. The next Evered hardly figured in the equation and it was just herself at work, wanting to hold what she felt slipping through her fingers and clutching at the nearest thing within reach.

  It seemed impossible she might have done the same with Warren or the Duke of Limbs or any one of the sailors on the landwash if circumstances presented themselves so. But she couldn’t help thinking it would be foolhardy to make that claim for certain.

  She straightened from the bushes, her fists in the small of her back to work through the ache there. She had inched her way into the heart of the clearing, the hillside a knee-deep pond of berries she stood at the middle of. She could pick through here for a month on end and still most of that bounty would go to rot on the bush. It was a notion that crossed her mind every fall but the thought made her furious suddenly. As if she’d lost patience with the circumstances she was born into, with the cockeyed rules that governed all things.

  She started for the cove when the sun ticked toward late afternoon and the bone pendant from the Indian burial rose out of the ferment in her head as she walked. It was never far from her mind in the months after she’d gifted it to Captain Truss. But she knew it was more than a chance thought in the moment. It had been her one act of deliberate dishonesty in those years talking to Martha, keeping the stolen object from the ears of the innocent child. Because she was mortified to have taken it. Because she regretted wanting it in the first place and loved it with all her heart still. She knew now it was only herself she’d been lying to. But that seemed worse by far in the end.

  Pleasure and shame. Shame and pleasure. These were the world’s currencies. And it paid out both in equal measure.

  * * *

  —

  Evered waited until Ada was gone across the brook on her way to the berry hills before he went down to the stage. He’d suggested rowing her over but she shook her head and offered some evasion about the walk doing her good. Both of them unsure if he would be able to face going out, dry clothes or no.

  He climbed down the rails and untied the painter, set the oars. His hands shaking as he cleared the cove and turned toward the Wester Shoals. On the feral ocean aboard the little boat his father built and he was surprised to feel almost at ease once he passed over the skerries. At the mercy. But not entirely without assets or advantage, not altogether helpless.

  He played out his lines and settled into the work with the reckless calm of someone who expects he might very well die young and fair play should it come to that. Nothing below the ocean’s surface lay still for long and nothing upon it was much above a shadow. Vanity to think different of himself or his concerns and there was an unexpected edge of relief to the thought. As if it absolved him of all but the worst a man could descend to.

  The cod were rarely plentiful this late in the season but they were fattened on a summer’s feeding and he came in with a decent haul. Feeling lighter than he’d felt in months. He cleaned the fish at the splitting table and washed and salted the meat but for the fresh fillets he carried up to cook for himself and Ada.

  He sat out on the rise to wait for her as the afternoon passed over, lifting a hand when she finally appeared on the far side of the brook with her brin sack of berries. But she was lost in her own thoughts. Even from that distance he could see the grave look about her, as if she laboured under the weight of something more than the bag she was carting home. It was a bearing he couldn’t avoid feeling implicated in, a sight that erased whatever pardon he’d granted himsel
f on the water. And he made his way inside before she marked him there.

  They sat to their meal and talked through their days with a civility that belied the guarded distance they kept. They ate nearly half the berries Ada had picked, pouring a splash of rum over each bowlful. Lying on opposite sides of the blanket then and groaning through the surfeit of that annual indulgence, too full to turn on their sides, sated almost to nausea. Both relieved to be occupied by an animal misery without the slightest nuance or subtlety.

  * * *

  —

  They passed three more days at the same occupations, heading in opposite directions as they left the tilt and spending the balance of their time apart. All the while inching away from the cloying intimacy of what had happened between them, hoping they might find something of their old selves on the far side of that circle.

  There was a steady spell of rain then and for two days running they worked together at the farm garden in the cold fall, lugging the last of the vegetables down to the root cellar. Sitting at the fire in the evenings with their wrinkled slug feet bared to the heat, their boots and stockings steaming on the hearth.

  On the third day Ada set about making jam of the hoard of berries. Evered poured out the last skunky dregs in Warren’s puncheon and he put a mash on the boil and steeped spruce tea to brew a fresh batch of beer. They couldn’t but see themselves in their parents’ places as they went about the familiar tasks in that tiny space and they were wistful and hesitantly affectionate with each other. They tried recalling their mother and father with the odds and ends they held of them, bits of conversation, a handful of interactions that were blurring at the edges, and they were astonished by how little of those people was still in their possession.

  It wasn’t until Evered tried to dip a finger into a fresh pot of jam and Ada slapped at him with the spoon that their lost parents came alive for them, briefly, indelibly. He smiled at his sister who was ignoring him with the same casual menace their mother displayed at the outset of that ritual.

  “I’ll have a taste if I wants,” he said.

  “You values having two hands to work with,” she said, “you’ll keep your daddles clear of that pot.”

  He tried to reach past her and she smacked him across the knuckles again. “God’s nails,” he said. He shoved his hand into his armpit to tamp down the smart of it.

  “I warned you, Brother.”

  He shouldered her away from the table suddenly and she had to fight to keep her feet, reaching to tie up his arms before he could touch the jam. “Off it, you dirty shag-bag,” she said.

  They wrestled around the kitchen space then, laughing at their own foolishness. Evered almost a foot taller than the girl and three stones above her in weight and he bore on her with all his might and main. Ada levelling herself against that advantage, the effort sucking the wind from her lungs. And the laughter drained out of them as they knocked against the furniture and the walls in a hissing knot of limbs, the two of them in a roke and the struggle suddenly gone serious. As if a reckoning was at hand for every unspoken resentment and slight and small betrayal ever to worm its way between them.

  Ada wrenched an arm free and slapped Evered full across the face. He shook his head and bulled her into the shipwreck’s door, pinning her against the wood with his hips, her eyes lifted level with his. Ada pitched forward to bite into his shoulder, Evered growling against the shock of it. He levered one hand high enough to grab her hair, hauling her mouth clear of his flesh. Staring at her, their noses almost touching. The red mark of Ada’s slap like a scald across his cheek. “Now my little blowsabella,” he said. He leaned in an inch and licked her chin without ever taking his eyes from hers.

  “Don’t,” she said. She angled her face as far from his as she could manage. “Stop it.”

  “I’ll have a taste of that jam,” he said and he licked at her cheek and her bared ear.

  She shook and wriggled and kicked in his grip until she exhausted herself and she went limp against the door.

  “Brother,” she said. “Please,” she said.

  There was a forlorn quiver in her voice that made him relent a little, stepping back just enough to let her drop. The moment her feet touched the floor she pushed off with every ounce of strength left in her and Evered fell backward, clinging to her as he went down, hauling her over with him. One arm came free as she careened onto the hearth and her hand plunged into the pot of boiling mash trying to keep herself clear of the fire.

  The Scarred Arm. His Cross Fox.

  She knew she was pregnant before she knew it.

  Her body was a neighbour she’d cultivated only a nodding acquaintance with over the years, a creature she knew well but not intimately. She hadn’t had her visitor since late in the summer and she expected its arrival all through the fall. Her breasts so tender she couldn’t abide Evered’s arm lying across her when they began sleeping in the same bed against the cold. Plagued by the irritable sense of anticipation that always preceded the first sign of blood though it went on for weeks without relief.

  She spent much of that dark season alone, Evered off running the new iron traps once the snow settled in. He was away two and three days at a time depending on the weather and his luck, home only a single night before setting off again. Ada talked aloud to Martha through those solitary months, the illusion of conversation so familiar it was a comfort even if she’d given up the fantasy some invisible ear was taking it in.

  She talked about her arm and how it was healing. About the furious wrestling match with Evered, the look on his face as he pinned her to the door, his bony little gaff pressed against her. An unfamiliar twitch troubling his mouth. “It was like there was something I had belonged to him and he was going to have it,” she said. Licking at her face to show he could. It was the only time in her life she’d been afraid of her brother, of what else he might do just to show he could. A sailor like the rest. She described pushing him onto his arse and being thrown toward the fireplace and how all of it passed over in the panic and horror that followed.

  She talked about the weather and the state of the food supplies and the long separations when Evered was on the trapline, about the absence of her visitor and the persistent soreness of her breasts and the ache in her lower back, and when she ran dry of daily detail she retold Warren’s sailing stories. It was just idle diversion, the sound of her own voice making the space feel that much more human. But at some point early in the new year it struck her she was no longer talking to her dead sister or to the empty air. That she was addressing another entity altogether. Keeping company with an animate listening creature.

  “Now Martha,” she said, a hand cupping the little pot of her belly. And then she stopped talking altogether.

  A week later she woke to a migrant flicker in her stomach, a rippling agitation that she harboured but did not own. And she knew something momentous was upon her. Something so life-altering and incalculable that she turned all her resources to not seeing it as it came.

  She wore her trousers without fastening them at the waist, holding them up with a belt of rope, blaming a surfeit of beaver meat for the distending spread. She was bunged up for days at a time and the beaver served as the culprit again. She suffered searing heartburn and swore off the black rum.

  She was months at that tricky game, pretending not to know what she knew for a fact. She wished it all away with a religious fervour without allowing herself to name the specific thing she was wishing away. She covered her belly under the long woollen gansey when Evered spent nights at the tilt and she wore the sweater to bed, sleeping with her back to him. She wouldn’t let his arm circle around, not wanting to arouse suspicions that would complicate the delicate balance of her own denial.

  Ada had no clear idea what lay at the root of the event. She knew from listening to Sarah Best and Mary Oram talk there was some connection between pregnancy and the monthly bleeding, the onset of one cancelling the other though the how and why of it was a mystery. In the da
ys before her mother died, after she’d been told about the visitor she should expect down there, Ada had taken advantage of the woman’s candid turn to ask where babies come from.

  “Sure you seen it,” Sarah Best said. “With your own eyes.”

  “But where do they come from?” she said again.

  “From heaven above I spose,” her mother said. Though the forlorn sound of her made it hard to think she believed that.

  As far as Ada could tell a mother’s role was incidental at best, her body a passive vessel for the passing wildflower that was a child. The Virgin Mary had gotten her feet wet out picking berries and so fell pregnant with Jesus. It was a condition women caught like a fever or a cold, something that resulted from their own weakness or imprudence. Something vaguely shameful.

  When Ada glassed back over the fall it was impossible to settle on one incident or other as the obvious cause. There was surrendering to the sight of Evered adrift in the squall, the primitive terror of watching that loss play out in slow motion as the cold rain soaked her to the bone. There was lying with him on the sand floor afterward when she felt something in herself come asunder. There was the injury to her arm, the vital shock of that scald setting her insides alight, the limb pulsing with a sullen ache that she dulled with medicinal prescriptions of callibogus.

  Each was as likely as the others if genesis was as random and erratic as it seemed, the product of some innate abiding intent at the heart of chaos and chance.