* * *
—
It fell on them suddenly in the first week of June, Ada waking to cramps and her water breaking as she hauled herself up ungainly and breathless from the bunk.
“Brother,” she said. She shook him by the shoulder. “Evered.”
“What is it?”
“I think it’s time,” she said.
He sat bolt upright. “Jesus, Sister,” he said.
A contraction buckled through her and Ada leaned over Evered in the bed, pressing her forehead against his shoulder.
“Jesus, Sister,” he said again.
Ada stood up straight and gulped buckets of air into her chest as the pain subsided, the relief so unexpected and complete she felt expansive, beneficent. She reached to touch Evered’s face. It was dim enough they couldn’t see but the barest outline of the other’s features. As if they were children again, waking partway through the night and grateful for the other’s company in that dark encircling wood. He nuzzled into her palm, into the foreign, familiar smell of her skin. He said, “You sure you can’t hold out till The Hope?”
She laughed then as if he was making a joke of the desperate circumstances and he added his own panicked laugh to hers.
“We should light a fire,” she said and Evered clambered past her to knock around at the hearth while Ada paced the tiny room.
“I was just dreaming about Mary Oram,” she said to him.
“You was?”
“She was dead,” Ada said. “Lying on her deathbed and gone,” she said. “But still talking away to me.”
“That sounds like Mary Oram all right,” he said.
He set a handful of shovies over yesterday’s coals and blew up a flame, set kindling crosswise over the new fire. He turned to look at his sister in that inky light. Surprised by the inhuman size of her belly showing through her small clothes. Terrified for the girl.
He said, “What did Mary Oram have to say for herself?”
“Just old foolishness,” she said. “I don’t remember a word of it. But for one thing she said the last going off.”
“What was that then?”
Ada pointed her finger as the dead woman had in her dream. “A body must bear what can’t be helped,” she said.
Brother and sister watched each other then until Ada was crippled up by another contraction, leaning on a chair back to keep from falling where she stood. At the tail end of it she said, “You’ll want to boil plenty of water.” She had straightened from the chair but was talking through her teeth. “And you’ll want a knife close to hand.”
“Jesus, Sister,” he said.
She walked her way into daylight, leaning on Evered’s arm as they circled, stopping only to wait out the iron clamp of the contractions. It was a violence so ruthless that Evered stood the window open and looked out at the ocean while the pain worked at the girl, to avoid the sight of Ada in the throes, for the mindless relief of that expanse.
Mid-morning he spotted a vessel on the horizon as Ada dug her nails into his arm, the girl bent double at his side. The speck too distant to identify though he knew it could be nothing other.
“That’s The Hope coming now,” he said as Ada caught her breath.
And for a moment he thought he might be spared yet, that the ship might haul up to the holding ground before the baby announced itself and he could pass off the duty to the Beadle or some other unlucky soul on the crew.
He had a rag in his free hand and he wiped the sweat from Ada’s neck.
“You think there might be someone,” she said. “Over to Mockbeggar,” she said. “Might teach me to read?”
“I couldn’t say for certain,” he said. He was confounded to see her occupied by such a trifle but desperate to ease her distress, to feel himself useful. “I expects they got whatever it is you wants over there,” he said.
And she nodded without glancing up from the floor.
* * *
—
Evered had given no real thought to what would become of them in Mockbeggar other than escape from their present circumstances. It still seemed a kind of fairy-tale destination and he couldn’t picture their lives transmogrified body and baggage into that improbable landscape. When it entered his head at all he was most concerned with what those strangers would make of them, brother and sister and the unborn child. How they would be talked about.
He was still rattled by the tale of the murderous brother who married the Irish servant girl somewhere on the shore. There was nothing to speak to its authenticity beyond the authority with which it was related. But when he picked through the few facts he knew of his parents’ marriage and who was buried at the farm garden he was forced to admit one story served as well as the other. He had only his father’s word on the drowned sailor with the eyes eaten from their sockets. And there was Ada’s question about half-blind Sennet Best teaching his son the distant catalogue of shore marks. Nothing conclusive enough to sway the ambivalent and it seemed plainly impossible to Evered still. Only his own feral instincts sowed a doubt about what his father might have been capable of in the long-ago and stopped him dismissing it altogether.
He couldn’t decide whether it bothered him most to think the sailors’ tale might be true or to think it was specious in every detail and passed around as God’s word regardless. The death of a horse is the life of a crow and a story was a rank scavenger from all he could tell, feeding on rumour and innuendo and naked confabulation where the truth was too nimble to chase down or too tough to chew. And making no distinction between one meal and the other.
He couldn’t know what fables had already attached themselves to he and Ada beyond the cove but he didn’t doubt some would be false in every particular. Even the credible few would never manage to say the half of things, would never set them down full and entire. And that lack would make little difference to how often they were told or how far they travelled in the world. It reminded him of how it felt to see his family splayed and picked over in the Beadle’s book, names and dates and fate. Helpless and oddly lonely. As if his life was not his own somehow.
It was how he felt now, tracing a shuffling loop the length of the tilt with Ada crippled and suffering on his arm. Evered marked The Hope’s progress each time they turned near the open window, though the vessel was still hours from the cove when Ada stopped still to say, “I think it’s time I lies down, Brother.”
He looked into her face, not comprehending.
“On the bed,” she said.
He nodded though his expression didn’t change. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “What do I do?”
“Just don’t leave me,” she said.
* * *
—
The last stretch yawed past in a breakneck slow-motion tumult. Evered lit the lamp against the gloom in the far end of the tilt and he laid out the rags he’d boiled and the splitting knife and he brought a pan of hot water from the hearth. Ada lay on her back with her shift pushed up over her massive belly, a ragged net of veins spidering across that pale distressed surface. He knelt between her naked thighs as she instructed, his eyes stinging with the cold sweat dripping from his forehead. Ada rising up off the bed with each contraction, one following on another without relief.
“Is anything happening?” she asked at intervals.
“I don’t know, Sister,” he said.
For the longest time it seemed nothing was. But eventually he could mark how she was being prised open like the jaws of a trap levered wide by a set screw. It was rupture he was witnessing, an uprooting, the unnatural sound of it in Ada’s mouth so tormented that his head rang like he’d been beaten across the ears.
When the baby’s crown finally appeared he nearly fainted, stars drifting across his sight. “There it is,” he said. And the words weren’t out of his mouth before it disappeared again.
“Is she coming?” Ada asked.
“Yes,” he said. “No. I don’t know.”
That appalling dance went on a whi
le, the top of the head showing a little ways into the open before it was swallowed up again as each contraction subsided. It seemed to Evered it might go on that way indefinitely, that it might kill his sister to carry on with the exertion. She was lying flat on her back and panting in shallow gasps like a creature shot and mortally wounded.
He stood up to lean over her face. “Ada,” he said. “You got to get that youngster out.”
She shook her head and started to weep. “I’m trying all I can.”
“Sister,” he said, a forlorn quiver in his voice. “Please,” he said.
She looked at him above her and she rose up on her elbows as if hauled aloft by a rope and she bore down with what felt to her like the last grain of her earthly resources. And the baby’s head came free of a sudden, eyes and ears and nose and chin, a ruffle of blood flowing around the tiny neck.
“Oh Jesus, Sister,” he said.
The tiny shoulders canted clear one at a time and seconds later the darkly mucid infant was in his lap and bawling all she was worth.
* * *
—
Ada instructed him to cut the cord with the knife and when that was done she told him to tie it off but he hadn’t left himself length enough to manage it. She asked him to hand up their mother’s dress and she spent a long time picking at the material in her exhausted state, trying to find the front pocket and then to fish out the string she’d found there. She passed it along to Evered finally and he undid the line of knots and tied the cord off with that.
He set the infant in the pan and scooped handfuls of water over the pale skin to wash away the mire and blood with which she’d been anointed during her arrival. He said, “It’s a girl, Sister.”
“I knows it’s a girl,” Ada said. “Martha her name is.”
Evered nodded over that without questioning how she knew what she knew. “Some set of lungs on her,” he said.
“Is she all right?” Ada asked, too drained to lift her head or hold her eyes open. “Have she got everything? Fingers and toes?”
Evered took up the baby’s feet and counted, and then each hand in turn.
“Evered,” Ada said, a note of panic creeping into her voice.
“Yes, girl,” he said, stalling. The left hand and arm was stunted, not half the size of the right, and there was a livid birthmark like a burn across the back. The hand had all its digits but there was a translucent web of skin between the fingers up to the second knuckle. For all their years in Mockbeggar the girl’s disfigurement would be put down to Ada’s accident at the hearth while she was in utero, the shock of the scald scarring her arm as it did her mother’s. No one they encountered there ever doubted the plain fact and Martha would always be regarded with a mix of shy suspicion and awe because of it. Evered couldn’t avoid seeing the blemished skin and webbed fingers as his unwitting mark upon the girl and the deformity bound him to the child from the moment he laid eyes on it.
“There’s something wrong with her,” Ada said and she tried to struggle up. “What is it?” she said.
Evered set a hand to her shoulder. “I’ll look out to her,” he said.
He laid the infant on a clean strip of cloth and wrapped her tight. Staring down into the child’s face, her eyes open but adrift and looking through him, not quite anchored yet to the world she’d entered.
“Now Little Bungs,” he whispered.
He would never call her by any other name and she would know him only as Uncle. He lifted the nearly weightless bundle and placed the girl on her mother’s belly.
“There you are now,” he said.
Ada looked down at her daughter. “She’s all right then.”
“She’s handy about perfect,” he said.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m grateful for the financial and moral support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
Thanks to The Innocents’ first readers/provocateurs/advocates—Martha Kanya-Forstner and Melanie Tutino @ Doubleday Canada; Lee Boudreaux @ Doubleday US; Shaun Oakey; Martha Webb @ CookeMcDermid; Julie Barer @ The Book Group; Holly Hogan @ sea.
* * *
—
A couple of characters in the novel bear a striking resemblance to historical figures. Most of the experiences and opinions of Captain Truss and John Warren were pilfered from Captain Cartwright and his Labrador Journal and The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner respectively. Some of their stories and conversation have been lifted more or less verbatim from those real-life antecedents. But I have changed more than just the names to suit the story.
Other incidents and notions were transmogrified from Bruce Whiffen’s history of Bonavista, Prime Berth; Barbara Reiti’s Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells; and Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters off Newfoundland, 1583-1893.
I was re-reading The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore while writing this novel and Ms. Moore may find a moment or two here strangely familiar. Details from conversations with Mark Ferguson and Zita Cobb also made their way into the book. Francis Grose’s 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue helped with the flash lingo. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English has been a long-time source of inspiration and information. This book would be a different and lesser thing without it.
* * *
—
Thanks again and always to Holly Ann. To Arielle, Robin and Ben. And to Mike Basha. My life would be a different and far lesser thing without you crowd.
* * *
—
Mary Bridget Fitzgerald (1943-2018)
The Innocents Page 25
