The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  Advance Praise for

  THE INNOCENTS

  “A gripping and credible page-turner about children surviving in the wilderness, but more than that: this Adam and Eve struggle to make sense of a world that’s somewhere between Eden and Hell. Michael Crummey writes like an avenging angel, never putting a word wrong.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room

  “The Innocents is a dazzling and myriad achievement. Set against the unforgiving Newfoundland frontier, this harrowing tale of two siblings eking out a teetering existence is difficult to witness and impossible to put to down. But what makes this story timeless is Crummey’s rich depiction of the human heart in extremis, the unflagging beat of life in a world that is too much to bear. Set aside whatever you’re reading and pick this up—The Innocents is a masterpiece.” —Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek

  “The Innocents is a fantastic read. Written in graceful and evocative prose, Ada and Evered’s story blurs the boundary between the quotidian and the strange until it becomes a meditation on the curious fact of existence itself. A wonderfully provocative and insightful book.” —Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

  “Few novels have cast their spell on me as deeply as The Innocents. I am reminded of Dickens, not just the nineteenth-century setting and the imperiled children, but the artfulness: brilliant plot, unforgettable minor characters, perfect pacing. Yet Michael Crummey’s poetic voice and landscape are his own. The Innocents is brilliant.” —Ron Rash, author of Serena

  Praise for

  MICHAEL CRUMMEY

  “Michael Crummey is without a doubt one of Canada’s finest writers.” —The Globe and Mail

  “Crummey is a poet and a storyteller and he has an extraordinary way of pinning down even a squirming reader and charming them into submission. He’s wise in that old soul way. He explores human nature, charting the moral choices of his characters without passing judgment….Crummey’s gift is to write with compassion, imbuing the relationships with complexity and depth. He doesn’t make anything simple—or simplistic.” —National Post

  “It’s a rare writer who can fashion a vivid memorial to an all-but-vanished way of life; it’s a rarer one who can excavate the vernacular and raise it to planes so poignantly and viscerally true, the exquisite beauty of the apparently ordinary shimmers with a matter-of-fact clarity guaranteed to curl your toes.” —Toronto Star

  “Crummey’s craftsmanship is masterful.” —Maclean’s

  “Crummey’s elegant prose and storytelling prowess make abundantly clear [that] no man is an island.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Crummey’s poetics are like the landscape he describes: stark and sparse, but punctuated with a wild richness that creates the impression of something carefully controlled yet on the verge of bursting….In Crummey’s capable hands, the setting breeds magic, and the individuals that populate its rugged terrain are nuanced and real.” —The Walrus

  “Michael Crummey is a writer of enormous talent….Crummey writes like an old pro, and, not so incidentally, also like an old soul, who has borne witness to tragic tendencies of humans for generations, and views them with awe and sadness and a clear-eyed compassion.” —Ottawa Citizen

  “Crummey’s powers of storytelling and evocation are considerable.” —Vancouver Sun

  “Crummey forges unforgettable characters and fashions spectacular, riveting stories….He reminds us our stories, rather than being an entertaining diversion, actually reveal to us who we are.” —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Crummey knows how to write, period.” —The Telegram (St. John’s)

  “Michael Crummey’s move to the forefront of contemporary Canadian literature has been swift….Crummey is a master at weaving past and present, the particular and the universal….Crummey examines themes that are too often reduced to black and white, with disastrous consequences. In contrast, he creates powerful fiction through multiple shades of grey that produce a shocking spectrum of colour.” —Guelph Mercury

  “[Crummey] skillfully capture[s] the unique feel and voices of Canada’s rugged east coast.” —TIME

  “When you’ve found an author with the kind of power Crummey has, one of the first things to do is to head back to the bookstore looking for more.” —Atlantic Books Today

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CRUMMEY

  Sweetland

  Galore

  The Wreckage

  River Thieves

  Flesh and Blood

  Little Dogs

  Under the Keel

  Salvage

  Hard Light

  Arguments with Gravity

  Copyright © 2019 Michael Crummey Ink, Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The innocents : a novel / Michael Crummey.

  Names: Crummey, Michael, 1965- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190051620 | Canadiana (ebook)

  20190051639 | ISBN 9780385685412

  (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385685429 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8555.R84 I55 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover painting: Banded Gneiss, Hopedale, Labrador by Diana Dabinett

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  for

  Martha Kanya-Forstner

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Michael Crummey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  The Driven Snow.

  Mary Oram. Her Utensils.

  Pack Ice. A Whitecoat.

  The Hope. The Beadle.

  A Bear. The Beadle, Again.

  A Shipwreck. Her Visitor.

  The Ark of Malaga. A Blindness.

  The Duke of Limbs. The Beadle, Once More.

  A Bear Cub; Its Dam. The Abandon Hope.

  Captain Truss and Mrs. Brace. A Bitch-Bear; Her Cub.

  The Blind Cub. Her Cross Fox.

  Bungs Forever! Josephus Rex. Noah’s Ark.

  The Hope. A Marauding Army.

  A Dirty Puzzle.

  The Scarred Arm. His Cross Fox.

  The Last Hope. The Scarred Arm.

  Acknowledgements

  There are forty or fifty knots; less than twenty are in regular use. None has been invented at any known time, in any known place, by any known person. All are of immemorial antiquity.

  R. G. COLLINGWOOD, The New Leviathan

  The Driven Snow.

  They were still youngsters that winter. They lost their baby sister before the first snowfall. Their mother laid the infant in a shallow trough beside the only other grave in the cove and she sang the lullaby she’d sung all her children to sleep with, which was as much as they had to offer of ceremony. The woman was deathly sick herself by then, coughing up clots of blood into her hands.

  The ground was frozen
solid when she died and even if their father had been well enough to shovel there was no digging a grave for her. He and Evered shifted the covering of reeds and alders away from the overturned boat and hauled it down to the landwash before they carried the corpse from the house. They set it in the boat along with half a dozen stones scavenged along the shore. Their father slumped against the gunwale to catch his breath.

  “Will I come out with you?” Evered asked.

  He shook his head. “You stay with your sister,” he said.

  The two youngsters watched him row away from shore and out beyond the shoal water with his dead wife. They saw him leaning below the gunwales for what seemed a long time, his head and shoulders bobbing up now and then. He was working at something awkward and unpleasant it seemed though neither could guess what it was. They watched him wrestling the weight of the corpse with his back to the shore. He was far enough off they couldn’t see that their mother was naked when she was tipped into the black of the winter ocean.

  Their father tried to hand the clothes to his daughter when he rowed in but Ada held her hands behind her back and shook her head fiercely.

  “You’ll have need of these,” their father said. “Now the once.”

  Evered took them, folding the limp fabric against his stomach. The sour smell of a long illness and of his mother which he couldn’t separate in his head. “I’ll set them by for her,” he said.

  Their father nodded. He was too exhausted to climb from the boat and he sat there a long while. A dwy of snow had blown in across the bay and it turned the hair of his bowed head white as they waited.

  * * *

  —

  Their father died in his bed before the new year.

  Without speaking of it they acted as if he was only asleep and they left him lying there for the better part of a week. Hoping he might wake up coughing in the middle of the night, complaining about the cold or asking after a drink of water. During the day they dawdled about in the store and spent as much time outside as they could stand, cleaving and stacking wood or hauling buckets of water from the brook, picking along the landwash for gull feathers and mussel shells and wish rocks to add to Ada’s collection. Inside they tended the fireplace and drank their bare-legged tea and spoke in whispers so as not to disturb the man.

  On the fifth night of the vigil Ada woke from a dream of her parents. They were standing back on, holding hands and looking at her over their shoulders. Her mother was naked and soaking wet, her hair streaming water.

  “What is it you’re bawling over, Sister?” Evered asked.

  “He can’t stay,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be talking foolishness.”

  “He can’t stay there like that, Brother.”

  And he set to bawling with her then, the two helpless youngsters holding on to one another in the pitch.

  Before it was properly light he pulled back the one ragged blanket and hauled his father’s body to the floor. The heels smacking like mallets against the frozen ground. His sister moved to pick up her father’s legs but Evered wouldn’t allow it. The man of the house suddenly. “You sit there,” he said. “Until I gets back.”

  He gripped the shoulders of his father’s shirt. He expected it to feel like hauling a seine of fish but there was a rigidness to the corpse that made it surprisingly easy to drag through the doorway. Only once on the way down to the water was he forced to stop to catch his breath and shake the numbness from his hands.

  He rowed out to the deeps beyond the shoal grounds, as close to the same spot as he could guess judging by his distance from the shore. Their parents might be together down there was his thought or within sight of one another at least, though he knew nothing below the ocean surface sat still for long. He tried to strip off the man’s clothes for practical reasons but his father’s eyes were half-open and he lost his nerve for meddling.

  Before pushing off the beach he’d gathered a length of old netting and enough stones to keep the body under and he tied that improvised anchor around his father’s waist. The day was still and cold, the ocean flat calm. He did not want to watch once the body slapped into the water and the rocks were hefted over the gunwale to take it down. But he couldn’t make himself look away from that descent until long after his father had passed out of sight and into the black.

  * * *

  —

  He stared out at the spot where the man sank from view as he rowed in through the skerries. His teeth chattering helplessly, his mind swimming. Even after the keel brought up in the shallows he kept rowing at the water like a headless chicken strutting around the chopping block. He didn’t stop until Ada called his name behind him.

  “I told you to wait where you was till I come back,” he said, trying to set the oars and find his feet.

  “I was watching for you heading in,” she said.

  He stumbled as he climbed over the gunwale, his face like chalk. “I needs to lie down for a bit,” he said.

  Ada did her best to haul the boat out of reach of the tide, calling after her brother as he staggered up the path to the tilt. By the time she came into the room he was already asleep in their bed. He slept so long and in such a stillness that Ada considered he might have died on her as well. She sat across the room until dark and then climbed into her parents’ bed where she lay whispering to her dead sister to keep herself company.

  Evered didn’t wake until late the following morning. He sat bolt upright in the bed and seemed not to know where he was before he caught sight of her. She stared at him a long time without speaking.

  “What is it, Sister?” he said.

  She pointed then and he reached up to touch his crown.

  “Your hair,” she said.

  She thought of their father’s bowed head in the boat after he had committed their mother to the ocean’s deep, the drift that had settled on it like a veil.

  “What about me hair?”

  “It’s gone all white,” she said.

  As the driven snow, their mother would have said of it.

  * * *

  —

  They were left together in the cove then with its dirt-floored stud tilt, with its garden of root vegetables and its scatter of outbuildings, with its looming circle of hills and rattling brook and its view of the ocean’s grey expanse beyond the harbour skerries. The cove was the heart and sum of all creation in their eyes and they were alone there with the little knowledge of the world passed on haphazard and gleaned by chance.

  —The ocean and the firmament and the sum of God’s stars were created in seven days.

  —Sun hounds prophesy coarse weather.

  —The death of a horse is the life of a crow.

  —You were never to sleep before the fire was douted.

  —The winter’s flour and salt pork had to last till the first seals came in on the ice in March month.

  —The dead reside in heaven and heaven sits among the stars.

  —Nothing below the ocean’s surface lies still.

  —Idleness is the root of all troubles.

  —Their baby sister died an innocent and sits at God’s right hand and hears their prayers.

  —Any creature on the earth or in the sea could be killed and eaten.

  —A body must bear what can’t be helped.

  Mary Oram. Her Utensils.

  For weeks after their father died the youngsters did little but sleep, lying in bed all hours for the warmth, for the comfort of the other’s breathing beside them. The days were short and the one glassless window was shuttered against the weather and their time passed in cold twilight and bottomless dark.

  Every day Evered put in a fire after the sun was up. Once it had taken off the sharpest edge of the cold he lifted Ada out of bed as he did when she was but a piss-ass maid of two or three, sitting her on the slop pail and standing close enough she could lean shivering against his leg. She wasn’t far off his height but thin as the rames, still a child in every respect but for her hands which had been put
to adult work years since and looked like the asperous hands of a crone. She clutched a doll she’d made of rags for their baby sister and clung to now as a relic of a blessed time irrevocably lost. She leaned her head against her brother’s thigh until she was done, then he carried her back to bed where they held one another against the smothering silence.

  Neither child had an appetite to speak of or the heart to make a proper meal. Evered each day rewarmed a scurfy pot of pea soup and offered a bowl to Ada but he couldn’t convince her to eat it. She subsisted solely on cakes of hardtack that she gnawed to a paste as she lay in bed. They barely spoke. Evered sometimes woke in the dark to the sound of Ada whispering aloud but he was never able to decipher what she was saying or to who and he was afraid to ask.

  He ventured outside to empty the slops or haul up water from the brook or to split an armful of firewood. The woodpile closest to the tilt diminished steadily and he felt something in him waning at the same irremediable pace. He was lightheaded and unsteady from lack of food and lying in bed for so long and from a pooling sense of dread he could not shake. It sent him looking for his father’s flintlock, a rifle he’d never loaded or fired and had been sitting so long unused in the store that the iron works shone with rust. He set the derelict weapon in a corner near the hearth as if its presence alone might offer some protection or comfort.

  He stoked up the fire before he crawled back into bed, Ada lifting the covers to the heat underneath, tucking her arms around him. Every day it was harder to leave that cocoon. It struck him one evening as the light was failing that they might die there in each other’s arms and he said, “Do you think it might be we ought to shift over to Mockbeggar?”

  They’d never left the cove where they were born and neither could say if Mockbeggar was fit to eat. They knew Cornelius Strapp’s schooner sailed from Mockbeggar to anchor off the harbour spring and fall to drop supplies and load in their season’s catch of fish. They knew their father rowed over to fetch Mary Oram when their mother was near her time. Beyond that it might have been located in the Holy Lands or on the moon.