The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  “I don’t know,” Ada said. “You think we might bunk in with Mary Oram?”

  Just the mention of the woman was enough to put a misgiving in Evered’s mind. “I doubt she’d bother with the likes of we,” he said.

  “You think Mary Oram’s some kind of witch,” Ada whispered.

  “No more than you do,” he said. He regretted bringing the subject up at all. “I figures we can muck it out here we puts our mind to it,” he said. And a moment later he said, “I idn’t afraid of her.”

  Ada shook her head against his chest. “You’re an awful liar, Brother.”

  He pulled her into his neck. “Go to sleep out of it,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Mary Oram was the only person not related to them by blood they’d ever kept company with. This was during the last stages of their mother’s pregnancy when she was just able to get around the property, following behind her swollen belly like a cart awkwardly hauled about by a goat. She could barely reach around the bulk of it to set the kettle over the fire, she was out of breath taking the slop pail to the landwash in the mornings. She couldn’t sit or lie in any position for more than a few minutes at a time. A month before Cornelius Strapp’s schooner was due with the spring’s supplies their mother woke with cramps that made her keen.

  “It’s your time,” their father said.

  Another contraction ripped through her and she shook her head as if she was trying to clear her mind of some flash recalled from a nightmare. “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “I’ll have to go for Mary Oram,” he told her.

  “There’s no cause to be bothering Mary Oram,” she said through her teeth. “You can manage if it comes to that, Sennet.”

  “God’s nails,” he said. “What good am I going to be lying a cold junk on the floor? You’d have perished in the bed if Mary Oram wouldn’t here to look out to you last time.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said again.

  Their father turned away from her to gather up his coat, pocketing three cakes of hardtack for a lunch.

  “If you goes off in that boat today, Sennet Best, I swear to God,” she said.

  Evered followed his father down to the landwash. “Should I come with you?” he asked.

  “You watch after those two,” his father said as he set the oars and pulled away from the shoreline. He glanced over his shoulder toward open water where an easterly breeze was blowing up chop. “It’ll be a bit of a haul if the wind don’t shift,” he shouted. “I’ll be back late tomorrow or next day, God willing.”

  Evered watched his father lean into the steady cross-handed stroke. “I don’t know what to do,” he called. “What do I do?”

  “You stay with them,” his father said. And he said a few things more that Evered couldn’t hear over the wind and the rut of the surf against the shoreline.

  * * *

  —

  Their father made it back to them before dark the following day. He’d refused even to lay his head for an hour before starting the return leg and rowed through the night and he ran up from the shoreline ahead of Mary Oram, half expecting to find his wife or the new child dead. But she was sitting calmly next the fire with a mug of tea resting on the plateau of her stomach. He turned in a circle as if a full view of the little stud tilt might help him make sense of things.

  “Hello, Sarah Best,” Mary Oram said behind him. She had come in the door unnoticed and everyone turned to look at her. She was an imp of a figure, no taller than Ada, dressed in clothes made of calico and wool and a colourful knitted hat on her bald head, a leather satchel over one shoulder. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were so blonde and sparse her face seemed bald as well. She had the air of a badly made doll stuffed with sawdust that had suddenly come to life. Her hands were delicate and colourless and without fingernails. She nodded toward the youngsters sitting together on the edge of their bed. “You two is both mine,” she said and they were too terrified by the sight of her to ask what she meant. It occurred to Ada to wonder if everyone in Mockbeggar looked and moved and talked like Mary Oram.

  “I told him it wouldn’t me time,” Sarah Best said.

  The contractions had forced their mother from her bed after their father left them. She paced the length of the tiny hovel a hundred times and then she had Ada kneel to put on her shoes so she could walk outside. Within an hour the cramping had subsided enough she was able to eat. By the afternoon it was clear nothing would come of it and she spent the rest of the day hauling seaweed from the landwash to the farm garden on the Downs.

  Mary Oram crossed the room and slipped a hand under their mother’s clothes to prod at the baby. “Do you know how far along?”

  “Last September month,” their mother said. “That was the last time I had my visitor,” she said in a whisper.

  Their father walked past them and fell into his bed, covering his head with a blanket.

  “You’re not far off your time,” Mary Oram said. “No more than a fortnight, I’d say, unless this youngster has other ideas.”

  “I’ll be cutting it out with a fish knife if I has to carry it much longer.”

  Their father was already snoring under the blanket. Mary Oram said, “It’s just as well I stays on now I’m here. Spare the man another night’s rowing.”

  “Yes, maid,” their mother said. “You’ll share a bunk with the youngsters till we gets this thing settled.”

  “I can sleep up to the store,” Evered said and Ada dug her nails into his wrist.

  “Sure I don’t take up no room,” Mary Oram said. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

  * * *

  —

  For the next five nights the woman slept next them in their single bunk, Ada against the wall lying head to tail beside Evered and he head to tail beside the midwife. She wore her knitted cap and her shoes and she lay still as a corpse to morning.

  Those periods of dead sleep seemed to be the only time Mary Oram was quiet. Evered spent the days helping his father raise the fishing stage where the cod would be cleaned and salted the coming season, up to his bawbles in the bitter cold of the Atlantic setting footings for the platform where the cutting table and salt shack would stand, holding the poles in place as his father worked above. And still he chose it over hearing Mary Oram prattle on about the proper cure for chilblains or how a good fright to a pregnant woman left a permanent sign on the baby, listing the dozens of birthmarks and disfigurements she’d encountered alongside their likely causes.

  She could talk the bark off a tree, their father said, a note of awed disbelief in his voice.

  It made Evered think of how little his parents spoke of anything other than the work at hand or the vagaries of the weather. He’d assumed that was the way of adults and there was a suffocating weight on his chest in Mary Oram’s presence. It felt as if half the world had mobbed into the tilt in her wake and he was being trampled beneath that seething occupation.

  Ada avoided Mary Oram as well, sitting up on a thwart of the boat to watch her father and brother work, fetching them tools or holding longers in place as they were nailed down. There was something eerie about a figure that was in every particular a match for her own size and shape though the face and demeanour belonged to another creature altogether. She couldn’t avoid thinking she might suffer a similar fate, to grow old in her child’s body. She kept clear of Mary Oram for fear it was a condition that was catching, insisted Evered sleep between them.

  Down on the landwash Ada asked how long Mary Oram would be staying in the cove.

  “Till the baby comes,” her father said.

  She nodded over that non-answer a minute. “What if the baby don’t come?”

  He laughed. “Then she’ll be here till the world ends won’t she.”

  She didn’t know if her father was being serious but it was a novel notion to her, that the world they knew might not be constant and everlasting but something creaturely, something perishable. Ada glanced at Evered to
see if this was news to him as well. But he was bothered by something else altogether.

  “Could the baby not come?” he said. He was thinking of his mother up and pacing the length of the tilt when they crawled from their bunks to start the day, heaving massive sighs and chewing viciously at her bottom lip, one hand supporting the girth of her belly. He was thinking of her threat to take a knife to herself if the child delayed its arrival. “Why would the baby not come?”

  “God’s reeving nails,” their father said, “can we just get on with putting the stage in shape?”

  He looked past his children suddenly, squinting up the rise, and they both turned to see Mary Oram outside the tilt. “It’s time,” she called down to them.

  “All right,” their father said.

  “Send up the young one,” Mary Oram said before she disappeared back into the house. And an unfamiliar voice reached them in the stillness, a sucking guttural complaint that seemed not quite human.

  “What is that?” Evered asked.

  “I imagine that’s your mother,” their father said. “Go on now, Daughter,” he said.

  “What do Mary Oram want me for?”

  “Whatever it is needs doing up there I expect.”

  Ada looked to Evered but he wouldn’t hold her eye.

  “Go on,” her father repeated and she turned to make her way up toward the tortured sound of her mother’s voice.

  * * *

  —

  The door was propped wide as was the single window’s wooden shutter but the daylight barely touched the permanent dusk at the back of the tilt. Mary Oram had water on to boil in the fireplace and had lit the lamp and set it near where her mother was lying with her skirts lifted high around her thighs. The dirt floor was covered in a layer of dry sand and Ada could see where Sarah Best had used a stick to draw a pattern near the fireplace, an elaborate series of interconnecting circles at the hearth’s edge.

  “Come hold the lamp close,” Mary Oram said when she caught sight of Ada in the doorway.

  Ada had never seen her mother’s bare legs or the black patch of hair between them or the pulpy slash of flesh where it looked for all the world like the woman was coming apart.

  “Closer now,” Mary Oram snapped. “There’s nothing here will hurt you.”

  Ada stepped nearer with the light though the reassurance offered no comfort. She tried to look over the massive belly but her mother’s face was beyond the lamp’s reach.

  “Did you know you was having a sister?” Mary Oram asked.

  Ada gaped at her. She had forgotten for a moment there was a child at the centre of the bizarre state of affairs. She shook her head.

  “Well then,” Mary Oram said. “A sister you’ll have. I knew it the minute I come through the door and seen your mother sitting there. Please God this one don’t take her time like yourself now.”

  “Me?”

  “Two days we was strapped up in here like this, waiting on you. Me with only your father for help. And he fainted dead away in the midst of it all.” She reached out to guide the lamp in Ada’s hand to one side where she had laid out her utensils. A straight razor, Ada saw there. Mary Oram said, “I allow this one is some terrible size though.” She took up a needle and held it to the lamp to pass a length of thread through the eye. “Sarah Best,” she said, “next time you wants to have a youngster, have a youngster. Not a bloody cow.”

  Her mother came up on her elbows, rising out of a pool of darkness into the lamp’s dark light. Her face was half-hidden by her hair which lay plastered to the skin with sweat. “Shut up, Mary Oram,” she said. “For the love of God just be quiet.” And she descended into the black again. The look of the woman so wild and unfamiliar that it seemed to Ada a stranger was lying there in the approximate shape and form of her mother.

  “That’s just the baby talking,” Mary Oram said quietly. “She said some cruel things to your father the last time she was in the throes of it.”

  Her mother shouted out something wordless and profane, then set into keening again. Mary Oram laid the needle and thread back on the bed and when the contraction passed she forced the nailless fingers of one childsize hand inside Sarah Best’s body, her face turned to the ceiling as she rooted blindly.

  “You’re coming along, Missus,” Mary Oram said.

  “Is it almost over,” Ada whispered.

  “She’s coming along,” she said again.

  But nothing apparent happened for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, the recurring contractions like knots in an endless string unwinding through the day. They ate nothing and Evered and their father didn’t venture inside to check on them or to look for something to eat themselves. Mary Oram periodically sent the girl to throw out a basin of dirty water and refill it from the pot kept hot in the fireplace and Ada leaned in over the bunk with a cloth to wipe her mother’s tormented face.

  It was coming on to dark when some stay shifted and the day went sudden, Ada’s mother leaning into the weight of the unborn creature with a new resolve and Mary Oram calling for the light to be brought closer as the crown of the child’s head appeared, a sliver of pink skin and slick dark hair. Ada had guessed at the absurd truth of what was meant to happen hours earlier though it seemed a physical impossibility still. She felt a pressure on her bladder, acute and rising, but the urgency in the events at hand forced her to stay at her post.

  “We’re going to have to help it along some,” Mary Oram announced and she reached for the razor. The horror of what the blade was meant for passed through Ada’s body like a burning coal and she pissed onto the dirt floor, the liquid running down her legs and soaking her bare feet. But she did not cry and she managed to stand her ground as Mary Oram went about the awful business.

  After it crowned the baby came in a rush of blood and fluid and Mary Oram knelt at the bedside to catch the slippery infant in her lap. Ada staring at the ugly thing cabled to her mother, the eyes clenched tight against the new light, against the room’s chill. It looked like something not halfways completed, the tuberous head three sizes too large for the body. Mary Oram reached a finger into the tiny mouth to root out a plug of yellow mucus and lifted the child by the ankles to slap her behind. She set the bawling youngster on her mother’s stomach, then took up the straight razor to cut the umbilical cord and she knotted it off.

  “We wants a fresh pan of water,” Mary Oram said.

  Ada was afraid she would fall if she moved. Mary Oram glanced at her and turned to take the lamp from her hands.

  “You done fine,” she said. “Go get us some clean water.”

  Ada carried in the pan on her quivering legs, her feet wet with cold urine and the floor of the tilt a mess of blood and afterbirth, and she was careful not to spill a drop as she went as if some additional calamity would befall them if she did. She set the water on the bed beside her mother who was murmuring to the infant on her chest, then she sat on the opposite bunk listening to her sister bawl while Mary Oram carried on with her ministrations, lifting each of the baby’s limbs in turn, counting to make sure she had all her fingers and toes.

  Ada had no idea what she’d just witnessed. It didn’t seem possible what her mother had suffered was the normal course of things and not a drawn-out catastrophic accident from which she would likely never recover.

  “Bring in the light,” Mary Oram said over her shoulder and Ada got up to hold the lamp close to her mother’s traumatized flesh. Mary Oram took up the needle and thread and for a moment Ada thought she planned to stitch her from stem to stern.

  “Is it always like this?” she whispered.

  “Like what, child?”

  Ada gestured with the lamp as Mary Oram made three tidy stitches then tied off and broke the thread. “Like this,” she said.

  Mary Oram got to her feet and smiled across at the girl. “No, my love,” she said. She rinsed her hands in the pan of water and wiped them in the filthy skirt of her apron. “Sometimes it don’t go well at all.”

/>   * * *

  —

  Evered and his father kept clear of the tilt all that day, an agreement they came to without a word of discussion. For a while he tried to guess from his father’s face whether he should worry but there was nothing in the man’s expression to tell him. And as long as they were at work he managed almost to ignore what they were busy ignoring.

  It was a surprise to him that Ada had been called upon though she was still not much above a child. Whenever he happened to glance up at the tilt the bewildering enormity of what his sister was witnessing first-hand caught him unawares, like taking a gale of wind broadside to the boat as it cleared a point of land. Each time he had to fight to turn nose-on to that weather and ride it out. But he did his level best to mirror his father’s apparent indifference, going at the work with a steady mechanical rhythm that had its own numbing effect.

  Once they had finished setting the last of the longers on the stagehead his father collected shovels and brin bags from the store and they walked to the west end of the harbour, the only stretch where there was sand enough to shovel. They filled the bags with wooden spades hand-milled in Mockbeggar half a lifetime past, the hewn troughs worked smooth by the grain of steady use. They carted the sand back to the clearing below the tilt and left it there, walking out to the brook to be far enough from the woman’s distress that the wind covered most of the turmoil, though not quite all. They tried to satisfy their hunger by drinking water from their cupped hands, then they lit a fire and sat close to the heat and waited.

  “How much longer till they’re done?” Evered asked.

  His father shook his head. “We might have to sleep down here yet.”

  “What did you want with the sand?”