All is Clam

by Hilary MacLeod

  Delivering a dead half-formed baby.

  No water. No amniotic fluid. No hope. This would’ve been a bed-rest case. This baby couldn’t flourish in its mother’s dry womb.

  Hy was amazed at how much Gus knew about babies and birth.

  She ordered Hy about, and the mother, Rose, telling her to bear down. But this wasn’t a birth, was it? The baby would be dead, pray God the baby would be dead, for it wouldn’t live long, not at four or five months. Not having done what she knew it had done. Crushed its own umbilical chord. Unable to float freely in the desert of a womb. No oxygen.

  What else could an old lady bring into this world? A dead baby. Good for nothing, thought Gus. I’m good for nothing but dead babies and poorly patched quilts. Eight kids and not one I’ll hear from at Christmas. Eight kids and not one grandchild.

  Why women went through it, she didn’t know.

  Rose bore down again.

  The Diary:

  Elizabeth had a baby girl today. It was stillborn. I asked what she would name it. She said, “Rose.” She wants to contain the name, amongst the non-living. She thinks there’s a curse on the house, on the name. She fears that there’s a legacy of murder. The Sullivan legacy. Not great wealth. Murder.

  The Sullivan legacy – murder? Oliver shook his head. Surely not. He’d been re-reading the diary, looking for any clue, any small clue. He looked out the window. It was a blur of white, blinding, the snow tapping on the glass, the wind gusting, retreating, gusting, and making the metal storm windows rattle.

  He was comfortably cradled in the bed, atop the marvelous quilt, pillows supporting his back, one leg crossed over the other at the ankles, his jeweled slippers perched on his feet. Ginger lay on his lap. White, in his preferred place, circled the back of his neck, and Oscar was fast asleep on his chest.

  Oliver read on, but in just a few moments, was asleep.

  Jamie was rushing through the woods in the dark and wild night. In the woods, the storm was not so bad. He was sheltered from the wind by the trees, which held back the snow, so that it drifted down and landed softly. Here, in the woods, it was a winter wonderland, a deceptive beauty.

  A beauty that was marred by Jamie as he went crashing along, stumbling in the snow, colliding with trees, whipped by their branches, falling over stumps. His eyes were closed. But it didn’t help. He could still see the image of his father lying on the road, having forced Nathan, his hero, into the ditch. He’d protected his father on the road, with a strength that had come from somewhere, and then he backed away from the stench of liquor on Fitz’s breath, and watched the adults take over. Watched as Nathan was pulled out of his truck.

  Unconscious? Dead? Did my father kill him? I’ll kill my father. He hurts everyone.

  Jamie thought about Freddy. He kicked her. He tried to shoot her.

  Jamie was crying, crying from the gut, heaving sobs as he ran, the salt tears scouring his cheeks. A surprised rabbit, and a fox in pursuit of the rabbit, stopped as he passed, then began the chase again.

  “Just one more push. One more.” Gus was encouraging as Hy held onto Rose’s hand. Rose was gripping hard, her nails digging into Hy’s flesh. Hy was trying not to cry out from the pain, so much less than Rose’s.

  And suddenly, she was there. Gus held her in her hands, bloody and slimy – a tiny, tiny child. A little girl. But her skin was blue, and she wouldn’t cry, no matter what tricks Gus used from her vast experience. She had been born dead. If you could call it born. It was a miscarriage.

  “Dead. Of course she’s dead, isn’t she?” Rose’s voice was unemotional, resigned to losing a baby she hadn’t really wanted in the first place, looking away from it. She had known it – the baby had stopped moving. When Fitz had pointed the gun at her belly, she’d felt the baby go still, and not a movement from it since. She was sad for the unwanted child, but angry too, angry because she thought it was Fitz’s fault.

  “How did you know?”

  Hy felt helpless. She was still standing, still holding onto Rose’s hand, staring at the baby, which Gus quickly bundled up and put on Rose’s stomach.

  “That she was dead?”

  “No. That she was a girl.”

  “Oh, I knew that. I always knew that. I knew that she was gone, too.” Rose held the little thing, looking at her perfect nose and lips, and a tear slipped down her cheek. A single tear.

  Gus was cleaning up and setting things straight, and feeling herself foolish to think that she, at her age, could deliver a baby. That it was not her fault, she knew, but it didn’t alter the feelings of inadequacy. Her role would become a local legend, exaggerated over time into a heroic, desperate battle to save a doomed child.

  The child was doomed, born or unborn.

  “Thank God.” Rose drifted off to sleep on a whisper, the words barely escaping her lips.

  Gus and Hy thought they must have misheard. Did she think the child was alive?

  No. Rose knew exactly what she was saying.

  Hy drove Gus back down to her house, in spite of the bad roads.

  “I won’t be sleeping in any bed but my own,” she had announced when Hy asked what they should do.

  “And if I was to be sleepin’ somewheres else, it would not be here.” Gus looked with disgust at the tent.

  A mouse skittered across the floor.

  That sealed it.

  “I’ll put my faith in the Lord,” she said, as Hy started up the truck, having promised Rose to return. “That’s what I always do when Abel drives.”

  Hy smiled and shook her head. Abel was nearly ninety and his license had been taken away. With Jamieson now in the neighbourhood, she was bound to catch up with him, if she could find him.

  Hy had to weave from one side of the road to the other, zigzagging all the way up the hill, her driving style almost as erratic as Abel’s. She had four-wheel drive and snow tires, but the way she was sliding around on the hill made her feel as if her four-wheel drive wasn’t working.

  It wasn’t.

  Gus gritted her teeth and grabbed the door handle. The door came open. The snow blew in. Gus slammed it shut, and jammed her hand up against the dashboard for safety. Just at the top of the hill, the truck slid back, and Hy prayed with Gus to make it go forward. It must have worked, because the truck stopped sliding when it hit a drift. The back wheels found traction on a small bare patch created by the drift and Hy managed to crest the hill. They slid all the way down toward the Hall, Hy clutching the manual shift, changing into first gear, her foot slammed helplessly on the brakes, popping the emergency brake, none of it working, reminding herself she’d always meant to take a skid control course. But was this skidding?

  Gus was praying the prayer she always prayed when driving with Abel, and remembering the time sixty years before when their own car – the first one at The Shores, the pride of the community – had failed to make it up this hill. They’d had to get out and climb, in a blizzard as bad or worse than this. She had thought at the time that they would never make it. They’d even got lost part way. Imagine. Lost. In full view of home. But they hadn’t been in view, because they hadn’t been able to see a thing.

  The truck reached the bottom of the hill, Hy still out of control in the driver’s seat. The Hall loomed ahead of them, so close it was now visible through the intense snow. The truck leapt ahead, sliding straight at the Hall and the huge spruce tree, its sparkling lights slicing through the thick snow. Gus started praying again, and so did Hy.

  The lumpy grass underneath the snow slowed the truck’s momentum. It came to a stop just shy of the tree trunk, swallowed up in the branches, a couple of strings of lights on the hood.

  The two women sat a moment without speaking. Gus was first.

  “Close call.”

  “Yup.”

  “No one should be out on these roads,” said Gus.

 
“Unless they have to be.”

  They both thought of Lili and Nathan – safely over the causeway? Now Gus prayed, for them.

  If she’d been alone, Hy would have left the truck there, and walked home. But Gus had a hard time walking between her home and the Hall in good weather, so Hy got out, unstrung the lights from the truck, and tossed them back on the tree. She managed to manoeuvre the vehicle onto The Way and down the lane to Gus’s.

  “Abel’s got the place lit up like a Christmas tree,” said Gus.

  It is a Christmas tree. Hy looked at the icicle lights dripping from the eaves all around the house. The six shining penguins along the walkway, Santa and his reindeer on the lawn, cleverly executed in plywood by Abel, and all wearing strings of light. The Jolly Elf was also perched at the chimney beside a sleigh full of presents.

  But Gus didn’t mean the outside of the house. That was just as it should be. It was the inside. The place was ablaze. Every light inside the house was on.

  “He misses me when I’m gone.” Gus smiled, indulgent.

  Hy said nothing. Misses Gus?

  “He’s scared to be alone.”

  Scared? Alone is all he ever seemed to want to be.

  Gus eased her way out of the truck, puffing with the effort, her old bones cracking.

  Hy got out, too, and helped her up the walk and into the house, secretly hoping to get a glimpse of Abel in the kitchen. But no. No one. Just Toby the dog, in from the weather, unwilling to walk the few houses down to his own home at Ben and Annabelle’s. There were cookies here, real ones. The human kind.

  He looked up and smiled when the two women came in. Gus automatically went to the cookie tin and gave him one.

  “Cuppa tea?”

  “No, I’ve got to get back to Rose.”

  Gus opened her mouth to protest. But someone must be with the woman. “Happen you should. Be careful driving.”

  “Not driving. Walking.”

  “In this? You’ll lose your way.”

  “Nope. Got a hiking stick with a compass.”

  It was a dark stretch of road up to Wild Rose Cottage.

  Armed with a thermos of tea, Hy went into the wild night. The snow stung her face, snow that was half ice. She pulled her turtleneck up over her nose. She was wearing a classic Canadian trapper’s hat, its earflaps snugly fastened down. For the first time, she found herself using the forehead flap. She’d always wondered when a person would need that. Now she knew, as the snow scoured every bit of exposed skin. By the time she was up Gus’s lane, her toes were frozen, feeling like little ice balls sitting outside, not inside, her boots. Her hands, inside a double layer of wool mittens, were balled up into fists, to keep the tips of her fingers from freezing.

  Soon, the effort of walking up Shipwreck Hill began to warm her, just like it did when she was cross-country skiing. She wished she were now. Funny that, how a hill was easier to climb on skis than on feet.

  The north wind was at her back and helped propel her forward. And she had traction, special ice soles she’d pulled onto her boots as a precaution. She was glad she had. The hill was slippery and it took two steps to move ahead one. It was no better on the other side, going down. She had to prevent herself from sliding all the way, the snow was so greasy.

  She never for a moment lost her way. She was even exhilarated at times, safe and secure in the knowledge of where she was, where help was – the light on at Ian’s, the lights at the police house. On both, no Christmas lights. Ian and Jamieson shared that.

  And anything else? Did they share anything else?

  She was tempted to stop in at Ian’s, but she was compelled into the dirty night. She couldn’t leave Rose alone.

  But when she got to the house, Rose wasn’t there.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When Gus and Hy left, Rose stood over the sink, washing the child. Gus had offered to do it. So had Hy. But Rose had declined. She could still feel Fitz’s rifle pressing into her stomach. The moment she had stopped feeling the movement of the child. She touched her belly with a wet hand. Still distended, though she had lost its contents, the tiny human she cupped in one hand. She patted the child dry with the cleanest tea towel she could find. She wrapped her up, her little Angel, in her mohair scarf. Itchy, but the child wouldn’t feel it. She placed her gently in the basket she’d been using for bread. The little thing fit perfectly.

  She would lie down, stop this dripping from her womb. She opened the flap of the tent and leaned in. Jamie. Where was Jamie? She’d forgotten all about him. Instinct told her she was alone in the house, that he was nowhere inside.

  She looked up sharply at the window. Snow falling, the wind blowing, the house shuddering, the door creaking on its hinges, sounding as if it might be blown in at any moment.

  She’d lost track of time and of her son. He might have gone out, but surely he had come in? Had he seen – heard – the birth? Had it upset him? Her blood emptied from her veins, left her cold with fear. He must be somewhere in the rambling old house. Certainly not out – in this. White on dark. The white, white snow, caking to the window screen outside.

  “Jamie?” She called for him as she moved toward the window and peeked through it. Nothing. She could see nothing. She turned and crossed the room into the front hallway, the wind wailing through the door, sending the horse blanket she’d attached to the frame, flapping up into the hall. At the bottom of the stairs, she called again: “Jamie!”

  Could he hear her above the whine of the wind?

  Her back ached. So did her belly, her insides, her womb. She was wet with blood in her groin, trickling down her legs. But she took the stairs, pausing every few to call again.

  “Jamie.” Her voice was lost on the wind, taken up in its whistling. She had no force to call louder. She got to the top of the stairs and called again. She was silent for a long time, listening for him. She heard only the wind. That – and the mice and the rats scurrying inside the walls, disturbed by the wind.

  She went downstairs.

  Jamie was not in the house. She knew it, the same way she’d known the child in her belly had given up on life. Back in the kitchen, she grabbed her thick shawl from the hook by the door and went out into the weather, the snow, almost ice, whipping at her naked face like sand. Huddled in the shawl, she made her way, step by step, fighting for balance with the wind, past the back shed and into the woods, a trail of blood following her.

  The Hanged Man

  The card stared up at him. This reading was no longer about the legacy. With Death in the core position, that is most certainly what it was about. There were cards of loss, grief, abandonment throughout the reading, and so many from the Major Arcana, and they were foreboding: The Devil, The Fool and Death. Over and over again, death.

  Death was coming. Or had it arrived?

  Oliver stared out the window, and then he did the unthinkable. He put on his coat and went out into the night, leaving White and Ginger – even Oscar – behind. The rat was safely nestled into White’s fur, disappearing into the cat, so that when Moira went snooping in the room after Oliver left, she didn’t see it.

  Moira had managed to force Oliver into his big fur coat, but could not get him to stay in.

  “On such a night,” she said, thinking about what it would cost her to get her walkway shovelled, and wondering if she could get Billy to do it. He’d be home now, and in the morning that witch of a mother of his would have him shovelling her walkway.

  After Oliver had gone, Moira laid newspaper on her floors again, adding more layers than usual against the weather that would bring dirty boots into the house. She wondered if she could get Billy to turn the front porch into a mudroom.

  Oliver had always been surprisingly agile for his size and weight, but he was having a tough time getting up Shipwreck Hill. He was driven there by the cards, one card in particular. The
one he clutched in his hand. It impelled him forward.

  Oliver walked all the way up the hill, propelled not so much by his legs, but by determination, by a certainty that this was a night out of which no good would come, and that it was up to him to –

  To what? He stopped at the crest of the hill to catch his breath and to think for a moment. The cards had held death in them. In the reading, the critical one had been in the reverse. What did that mean? He realized then that there was a card in his hand. And there, on the top of the hill, where the wind blew most brutally, he stood and stared at it. The card. In reverse. He began the mental journey into it. He searched around it. He saw what he was meant to see, and slowly, very carefully, he came back out of the card, not feeling the biting wind, the snow accumulating on the shoulders of his coat, his bare hand aching with the cold and the razor edge of the card biting into it. He turned into the woods, and he walked to his certain destination. He knew exactly where he was going and he knew what he would find there. Or create there. That part he didn’t know. Either he – or someone close – Rose, the child? – was about to do something they might regret.

  Sometimes the cards told Oliver things he’d rather not know. This was one of those times.

  Then he saw the boy.

  First the boy.

  Then the woman.

  Whether they saw each other, he couldn’t tell.

  But it was playing out just as the cards had said it would.

  He crushed the card in his hand. Dropped it.

  The Hanged Man lay bright and dreadful on the snow.

  Jamie still didn’t know where he was going, what he was doing in the woods. He wasn’t lost, not physically lost. But his love for his father was lost. Gone. That’s what he was running away from, but he couldn’t get away, stop the thoughts about his father. His wretched father. Layer by layer, Jamie’s love for Fitz had been peeled away, until there was nothing left, until his soul was raw with disappointment, with his father’s failures, one after another, that had turned love to hate. Eye-shining admiration to disgust. The last layer had come off tonight, on a raw and unhealed spirit, reeling from the sight of his father lying in the road, of Nathan unconscious in his truck.