All is Clam

by Hilary MacLeod

  “Never mind what.” Jared was poker-faced.

  “You’ll have to tell me, if I’m gonna let you in.” Fitz jerked his head towards the house. “It’s in there, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jeez,” said Fitz. “A fuckin’ Einstein.”

  Hy’s questions about the Sullivans tickled at Gus’s brain, until she hauled herself out of her chair to fetch the fat bicentennial folder.

  There was an article by someone from away. A brief history of the Sullivans and their house, a national heritage property in spite of its state of disrepair. But there was more, somewhere. She shuffled back to her chair, pages drifting onto the floor behind her. Hy darted down to pick them up, handed them to her, and Gus shoved them back in the file.

  She glanced at the article, then gave it to Hy.

  “Nothing much in there we din’t already know, including them bits that are wrong.”

  “Which bits?”

  “About the fire bein’ a accident. It was set apurpose. I was just a kid then, din’t even live at The Shores but everyone knew about it. The one brother started it out of spite. Jealousy, because the house wasn’t left to him. He kilt his brother, but went scot-free. It’s the last bit there.”

  That’s not what it said in the article. The fire had burned the back of the house and had killed the brother who owned it, but there was no suggestion of murder. The article’s interest was not in the death, but in the damage to the home.

  “Is the house the Sullivan legacy?”

  “Lord no. I don’t think there ever was a legacy, though that family allus fancied itself somethin’ special.” Gus slipped the folder onto the table beside her. Hy held up the article, backed by discoloured cardboard and wrapped in Saran Wrap. Hardly archival. The newspaper clipping itself was yellow and decaying.

  “Can I hold onto this for a bit?”

  “As safe in your hands as mine.” Gus picked up a quilt patch and started embroidering. White on white. Hard on old eyes. But it was only a crib quilt. Finished soon.

  “Did they have money?”

  “Not even when that house was built. Made out of bits and pieces, like a quilt.”

  “A pretty nice quilt.”

  “I’ll grant you that. He did all right, that one. Daniel Sullivan. Before my time.” Gus broke off a thread on the quilt patch with her teeth, fished it out of her mouth, and dropped it on the floor.

  Hy steered her back to her question. “In your time – was there talk of a legacy?”

  Gus put the patch down on her knees.

  “Mebbe. Mebbe there was. We didn’t pay much attention. We were too busy getting by day to day to worry about legacies – especially other people’s.”

  “Think, Gus.”

  Gus looked out the window, as if searching for the past through the glass, in the empty spaces where all the buildings used to be, where village life had once passed by her in a constant stream.

  “I don’t think it was money. They never had a penny, not two to rub together.”

  Hy wanted to know what it was, not what it wasn’t.

  “Jewels?”

  Gus slapped a hand on her thigh, knocking the patch onto the floor. She laughed.

  “No one ever had jewels in The Shores. Not more’n a string of fake pearls or a weddin’ ring.” She looked at hers, pointed at Hy.

  “You should get yourself one of them.”

  Hy screwed up her face, and looked down at her hands. Not a ring of any kind on them. Long, slender, fingers, thought Gus. Not red and thickened by work like her own, her wedding ring embedded in her flesh, unable to be removed.

  “Now, you watch it. Remember that woman last year.”

  Suki. Ian’s old flame from college. She’d moved right in on him the same night her husband was killed. It had looked suspicious.

  “That Jamieson, now, when she comes, she’ll be living right close to him. Not a bad-looking woman. A bit pale. A bit scrawny.”

  “Thin, Gus, thin. It’s Moira who’s scrawny.”

  Gus smiled. “Happen you’re right. Still too thin. Put a bit of beef on her, and she’d be right easy on the eyes. He’s seen it. I seen him see it.”

  So had Hy.

  She didn’t want to talk or think about that now. She steered Gus back to a more pleasant topic: murder.

  Rose could tell by the way Fitz drove the truck, weaving into the lane, that he’d already been drinking on the way back from town. He’d run out of liquor and had been sober for two days. Now he was drunk and he’d be all over her, no matter whether she wanted it or not. She hadn’t wanted it in years. Not since Jamie was born, and he had tried to do it to her while she was in labour. The midwife had come in and put an end to that. A huge woman with the strength of a heavyweight fighter, she’d hauled Fitz off Rose and dumped him on the floor.

  “She should be glad I can’t knock her up right now,” he grumbled, getting up and fastening his pants, unsteady on his feet. The midwife, who thought she’d seen everything, had never seen anything like this before – the child, fighting to get out; the father, fighting to get in.

  She’d pushed him out of the room with her sausage-fat arms, hairy like her black moustache, and turned to the mother. The child slipped out only minutes after the door slammed on his father, straight into the midwife’s waiting hands. She held the baby up so Rose could see, and then quickly, efficiently, wrapped the infant tightly in flannelette.

  “A son,” said the mother, taking the swaddled infant in her arms. “Just like his father.” Not like Fitz, she thought secretly, not at all like him, she hoped, but wasn’t that what new mothers were supposed to say?

  The midwife had looked at her quizzically, then at the baby. Like his father? Not at all. The child was like the mother – her hair, her eyes.

  “Yes,” she’d said, to humour Rose. New mothers took fancies.

  Gus had a satisfied set to her mouth as she watched Hy cycle up the lane. All the way up. Gus could see her clearly the full distance. The trees that used to line the driveway were gone. They had been beautiful spruce trees, with full branches all the way around, not scrawny and half-dead like others near the shore. But they were gone.

  “I cut them trees down because I could see nothin’, not a person, not the cars goin’ by,” Gus explained to anyone who asked. She hadn’t been able to see Ian’s house, or Moira’s house, and had to stand up and crane her neck to see who was coming and going from the Hall.

  “I can see trees out back when I want.”

  But she couldn’t, not on her own land. She’d had her husband Abel cut them down, too, to be clear of them, hiding her view of all the new cottages going up.

  He must have done it in the dark, thought Hy, as she passed the stumps on the way up the lane. No one had seen him do it. No one ever saw Abel. She was beginning to think he was a figment of Gus’s imagination and the rest of the village was humouring her. Then how the eight children? Hy had never seen them either. It was odd. It was Christmas. A time for family.

  At least Gus had one.

  Hy did not.

  Sometimes Rose thought about killing Fitz, about how she’d do it. He was stronger than her, so she’d probably have to suffocate him with a pillow when he was passed out drunk. When he really made her angry, she could see herself doing it. Drowning out his snoring, which filled her with rage, and made her want to kick him. Kill him. How else would she do it? Her thinking usually stopped there. Some chore, Fitz himself, or little Jamie would interrupt her. She would be doing it for him, Jamie, not herself. He worshipped his father. She was waiting for the day that illusion would shatter, wondering if she’d be able to pick up the pieces. It wouldn’t be long. A few years at most.

  She sighed, a deep sigh, as she continued unpacking, flitting from one thing to another, trying to find the broom to sweep the kitchen
. Her back ached. She arched it, hands on her hips, and, slim as she was in every other way, her belly swelled, like a Third World child suffering malnutrition. She hadn’t been eating well. Fitz always took the most and best of everything. Rose always sacrificed what little she had to keep Jamie healthy and growing.

  She looked out the window and saw him running around with Freddy. He was certainly healthy, in spite of the life they led. And growing.

  The tent. Where was the tent? Her mind skipped away, as it always did from the troublesome thought.

  Time enough. Time enough.

  For now, she had other things to think about.

  Back and forth to the truck she went, with Fitz nowhere in sight. Jamie was still playing with the dog in the front yard, and she hadn’t the heart to ask him to help – he’d been cooped up so long in that boxcar. That filthy, smelly boxcar. It was still in her nostrils.

  The broom was sticking out of the pile on the truck, and she grabbed it and went back inside. She sighed again. It was something she was good at. Fitz entered, just in time to hear it. It infuriated him.

  “Bitch,” he muttered under his breath, well-scented with rum. The rum he had brought back from town instead of the Warfarin.

  “I’ve put Jenny away,” he said, standing smack in front of the old wood range and blocking the heat from getting into the room.

  “Did you get the Warfarin?”

  He slapped his hand on his forehead, a gesture Rose knew well. It meant that the next thing she heard would be a lie.

  “Jeez, I forgot.”

  He had not forgotten. Money was tight. It had been a choice between a mickey of rum and the rat poison. He chose his own poison.

  She sighed again and turned from him.

  “The shed in the back’s in pretty good shape. I’ll fix it up so it’s a solid shelter for Jenny soon as I get the chance.”

  Rose, her back to him, wondered when that would be.

  “What about us?” she said. “The tent. Where’s the tent?”

  “Patience, woman. I’ll get it. Soon as I warm up a bit.” He pulled the rum from his back pocket, and sat down on one of the rickety chairs. A leg broke. He picked up the chair and flung it across the room. Sat down on another.

  He took a slug.

  Rose crossed the room, picked up the chair leg, and fed it into the stove. She shoved at the wood with the poker, and the thoughts returned. She saw herself smashing Fitz across the head with the poker, sticking it in his eye, thrusting it down his throat, red hot, warming up the rum as it went down.

  But that was another Rose. Not her. She’d probably miss – and then what would happen to her and Jamie?

  Chapter Four

  Oliver Sullivan was Buddha-fat and bald, his fingers weighted with rings. He was twisting the ones on his left hand in sequence, starting with the thumb, down to the little finger, and then from the little finger back to the thumb. Unlike most Buddhas, he did not have a beatific smile or Mona Lisa calm. His forehead was agitated into furrows, several V-shaped funnels diving down between his eyebrows – thick, white, bushy, containing all the hair his head did not – rising and falling as he sputtered into the phone.

  “Nothing? How nothing?” He stared at the cards spread out before him. He was sitting in the lotus position, his legs hidden under his robe, so that he looked less like Buddha, and more like Humpty Dumpty.

  The Magician…myself? The Castle…that would signify the house.

  He reached out a hand, the rings encrusted with precious stones, large and colourful like the cards, his robe, and the room around him. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds glinted in the flickering candles in their ornate silver candelabras, sending shadows shooting across the ceiling, which was domed and painted with the night sky, like an old ballroom he’d seen somewhere once and had recreated. He used it, not as a ballroom, but as a massive library, full of arcane knowledge.

  He tapped the cards prophesying Knowledge and Wisdom and Wealth. They were there every time he consulted the Tarot.

  It was a sign. Surely it was a sign. And it was obvious, wasn’t it? That’s where the legacy should be. The Sullivan legacy. In that house, as he kept insisting to this low-life he’d hired to conduct the search while the house was still empty.

  The cards had told him it would not be for long. He’d seen tragedy and death in them as well. His own? He tried not to think about that, but he’d seen death all around the Magician.

  “Have you looked everywhere? No? Well, then, keep looking. I’ll pay you when you find it.”

  So far, he hadn’t said how much he’d pay, just that it would be “commensurate with the value of the object.” Jared didn’t know what commensurate meant. He was as stupid as his father had been and his father before him. That’s why they’d been stuck in that backwater, while he was living the life of Riley. His lip curled at the thought that someone called Riley could inhabit his lifestyle.

  He looked down at the cards again. He knew the Tarot was trying to tell him something important – the cards from the Major Arcana kept showing up in the read in significant positions, the same cards appearing again and again. The Magician turned up in every reading. He flipped it over and laid it down in the second position in the layout of brightly coloured cards on the black silk cloth, the cloth he would wrap them in after the reading and bind with a velvet ribbon – all part of the careful and mindful relationship he nurtured with the cards.

  He also liked to think of himself as The High Priest. That card came up often, too, but not today. He laid out the now-familiar pattern, in only slightly different sequence from the reading a half-hour before. The pentacles were there. This must be a matter of money, wealth. Justice was there signalling what was to come. He took it to mean he would find gold, jewels, the Sullivan legacy.

  Whatever it was.

  Not that money mattered. Oliver’s bank account was as abundant as he was.

  Hy had left Gus’s house with plastic bags stuffed in her bicycle basket. There were blueberry muffins – “they won’t be good beyond today” – some preserves and two loaves of bread for “those poor souls up there.”

  Hy was a great preserver of gasoline, because it was a forty-kilometre trip to town to get it. The way her old truck used gas, she’d burn a third of a tank on the way home. It helped that there was no snow this year – she’d been able to cycle right into December.

  As she rode past Ian’s house on Shipwreck Hill, she was torn by her curiosity to see how the Fitzpatricks were making out at Wild Rose Cottage and by the desire to drop in to tell Ian what she’d found out about the Sullivans. Him and his history. Sanitized, architectural history. Whereas she had a story of murder.

  The hill was a long, low incline, and Hy was gasping by the time she got to the top. After that, it was an easy coast down to the house.

  A mess of weeds was growing up between broken clamshells, laid along the driveway fifty years before. A spire of black smoke was belching from one of the four chimneys.

  Hy wondered if it was safe to have a fire in there.

  She leaned her bicycle up against the house, took the offerings from Gus out of her basket, and, because these people were new to The Shores, knocked before she went in, yelling out a greeting. That was hardly necessary. The door opened right into the kitchen. Hy couldn’t believe what she was looking at.

  A tent. A large tent set up in the room, too close to the wood range, its flaps open to the heat.

  Rose was stoking the range. She interpreted Hy’s look immediately.

  “We’ve done this before. It’s obvious we had to do it here. You can’t live in any of the rooms, and it makes sense to conserve our heat. It’s a single storey here, and the roof leaks.”

  Hy looked up and down. Wet spots on the ceiling. Wet spots on the floor. Yes, she could see.

  She held out her offerings, and Rose beame
d, taking them into her arms.

  “Thank goodness. Jamie and I are starving. Fitz was supposed to bring food back from town, but he didn’t. He forgot. I don’t know where he is now.” That wasn’t true. He’d be out back with that donkey, drinking and singing to her. She was the only one who would put up with him in his state.

  “Let me fetch you something more. You can’t have bread and jam for supper.” That wasn’t true either. Hy often did.

  “Oh, we’ll be fine.” She didn’t look fine, her face pained as she put her hands on her hips and arched her back.

  That’s when Hy noticed the swollen belly. An unnatural lump on a thin frame. A tumour? The woman looked sick, pale, drained.

  “You’ll need something nutritious.”

  Rose put her hand on her stomach. She dropped it. “Grumbling stomach.” A weak smile.

  For a moment their eyes met. Rose’s flickered, but revealed nothing.

  “Are you…?” Hy didn’t know what to say next. Ill? Pregnant? None of it was really her business.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Rose shrugged her shoulders.

  Four or five months. I’d say she’s four or five months on, from the look of her. There I go – thinking like an Islander again.

  Hy looked around. Rose couldn’t have the baby here. If there were a baby.

  It could be that Rose was simply very, very ill.

  Chapter Five

  Oliver had laid out the cards more than twenty times, always getting the same satisfying signals, but not the answer. The pentacles were there in abundance, signifying wealth, but Oliver was a polished practitioner of the Tarot, and knew that might mean actual wealth or an abundance of some other kind. It might mean the very opposite – poverty. The cards indicating spiritual advancement were few. Oliver didn’t care – he didn’t associate the cards with spirituality. They were Black Magic to him. Spirituality he associated with religion, and he had no use for religion.

  He tapped each card with two fingers.

  And then it came to him. A book. The answer would be in a book. He of all people should know that. Something he had in abundance. The source of his spiritual and material comfort.