The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  “I expect we’ll have to dredge the tilt clear,” his father said. “Lay down a fresh cover.”

  It was a ways to dark still but Sennet Best lay out by the fire and flung an arm over his face and slept. Evered wandered down to the landwash and hunted for a crab shell or piece of driftwood to add to Ada’s collection. She kept a shelf full of scavenged bric-a-brac over their bed, a tableau that she arranged and rearranged until the individual pieces were laid out to her satisfaction. It was always strangely satisfying to look at, as if there was a logic to where some shell or stone sat in relation to the whole. He’d tried to do the same himself on occasion but had no knack for it, the end result looking exactly like the pile of detritus it was.

  The tide was out and he clambered over the rocks, searching the crevices aimlessly, killing time. Now and again he stopped where he was to wonder what could be happening in the tilt that would require clearing every bit of sand off the floor when it was over.

  * * *

  —

  After the ugly work was done Mary Oram washed and swaddled the baby and that was enough to bring the child into the realm of the room and its inhabitants, to make her seem human.

  “She’s the spit of you, she is, Sarah Best,” the midwife said.

  Ada could see there was something of her mother in the shape of the infant’s nose and the cleft of her chin. And the face that had seemed alien and grotesque when it first appeared was completely changed by that recognition.

  “What is her name?” Ada asked.

  Sarah Best was half-asleep with her mouth to the newborn’s downy crown and she glanced across at Ada without raising her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “What should we call her?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Ada that a name was bestowed on a person and not something you were born with. The lack made the infant seem almost as naked and pitiable as when she first landed in Mary Oram’s lap.

  The list of Christian names Ada knew was short and all were gleaned from the handful of wayward Bible stories her mother had misremembered from her earliest years without church or priest to correct them. There was Ruth who was daughter- or sister-in-law to Naomi who lost her husband and two sons and the two women moved to a country called Boaz in the Holy Lands. There was Rachel who killed her sister Leah to marry her sister’s husband and died giving birth to a child. There was Mary who soaked her feet in the dew out picking berries one fall and so fell pregnant with Jesus.

  Mary Oram had already taken the name of Jesus’s mother. And Ada thought the stories of Ruth and Naomi and Rachel and Leah were too dark to shadow her sister all her life. But there was Martha, sister to Lazarus, who roused her brother from the tomb as if he was being woken from a nap.

  “You should go fetch the men,” Mary Oram said. She was stoking up the fire to set about making a meal in the gloom. “They’re like to be starved by now.”

  Ada reached to touch her sister’s cheeks, the perfect swirl of the ears so translucent that the dull lamplight shone through them. It hardly seemed possible such a delicate thing could have been at the centre of the appalling storm that had just passed over them. There was something dreamlike about the episode, behind them now and losing its immediacy already. One of the baby’s hands was curled into a fist and circled gently like some inanimate thing in a field stirred by the wind.

  “What about Martha?” she said.

  Sarah Best nodded. “Martha sounds fine,” she said. “Go on and get your father.”

  Outside Ada could see the low simmering light of the fire over toward the brook. Evered was wandering on the landwash directly below, a small dark figure against the darkening ocean. He straightened from the rocks when he saw her and raised a hand. But she hesitated before heading down. It was the first time in her life she knew something of real import that Evered and her father did not. They had been biding hours for the news she carried and keeping it to herself was unexpectedly pleasurable.

  She watched Evered watching her until he called up the rise and she started toward him then, trying to sort her news into a manageable list. She was within arm’s length before she could make out his face and even then she couldn’t read his expression for certain. He looked like he had done something to disappoint her.

  He held a hand out to her. “I found you this,” he said.

  She brought it up close to see it, a seabird’s skull picked clean and weathered to a white that almost seemed to glow in the dim. The bone so delicately fluted it looked to be carved by hand and so much like the whorls of her sister’s ears that Ada could hardly speak for the lump rising in her throat.

  “Mary Oram is cooking supper,” she said.

  “Father’s over to the brook,” Evered said. “I’ll fetch him home.”

  She nodded and started toward the tilt, cradling the skull in one hand. It hadn’t gone the way she’d thought it would at all. She turned back and called across to her brother in the rapidly closing darkness.

  “Her name is Martha,” she said.

  Evered turned toward his sister’s voice.

  “I give it to her,” Ada said. “Her name.”

  They stood that way a minute, not able to see more than the vaguest outline of one another.

  “We’ll be up the once,” Evered said.

  * * *

  —

  Mary Oram stayed on awhile to keep an eye on the infant and their mother. She lay beside Ada and Evered with her freakish hands folded over her chest, as still as the dead even when Martha woke crying to be fed. It felt to Ada like a blessed time, the winter behind them and the summer supplies aboard The Hope no more than a few weeks off, the infant healthy and mostly content. Though on occasion she woke to a low stifled sobbing across the room, a sound that was meant to be kept private and could only have been her mother.

  A week after the birth Ada was conscripted to hold the lamp again while Mary Oram took out her mother’s stitches, snipping and tweezering the thread clear.

  “There now,” Mary Oram said. “Good as new you are.”

  Her mother threw her skirts down over her legs. “God help me, I don’t feel like new,” she said.

  “You’ll have more youngsters running around here yet,” Mary Oram said.

  And Sarah Best surprised them both then, hiding her face and crying behind her hands. Martha was lying on the bed beside her mother and she started bawling as well. Mary Oram picked up the baby and handed her to Ada.

  “I swear,” her mother said in a whisper. “I won’t go through this again.”

  “Hush now,” Mary Oram whispered. “It’s just the shock of it. You felt the same after young Ada was borned.”

  “And how many did I lose between times?” her mother said. She seemed oblivious to her two daughters sitting across the room. “There’s been three since Ada.”

  Ada was trying to quiet her sister but she was watching her mother’s face. For the second time in the space of a week it looked as if a stranger peered out of those familiar features.

  “There’s something can be done,” her mother said. “You must know something to do.”

  Mary Oram shook her head. “A body must bear what can’t be helped,” she said.

  “I swear to God,” Sarah Best said. “I’ll drown myself in the cove.”

  “Hush now,” Mary Oram said again. She turned to Ada. “It’s just the shock of it,” she said. “You go on now, take the little one up to see your father.”

  Ada left the two women and walked to the store where Sennet Best and Evered had been hand-milling lumber with an eye to adding a room to the tilt. There was no one about and she sat inside with the inconsolable infant. She felt helpless to quiet her and it was all she could do not to join in. Thinking of her mother’s threat to abandon them.

  Evered poked his head in the door. “Some set of lungs on her,” he said.

  “I can’t make her stop,” Ada said.

  He lifted Martha out of his sister’s lap and settled the infant against his arm. He circled her
open mouth with his pinky until she latched on to the tip. He smiled at Ada as the youngster quieted. “You was the same way,” he said. “When you was a piss-ass maid.”

  She said, “We can’t ever leave her, Brother.”

  “Who? The little one?”

  “Promise me,” she said.

  Evered held his smile but without the same certainty. Nodded to say all right.

  * * *

  —

  The family’s farm garden was on a plateau toward the west end of the cove. It was set at the edge of a peat bog they called the Downs and was the only bit of ground within walking distance deep enough to plant. The earth was wet and black and barely arable but for the seaweed and caplin hauled up from the beach and turned into the soil each spring to feed the potatoes and turnip and cabbage and beets they set there.

  The garden was the women’s preserve, trenching and weeding the plot while Evered and his father were off in the boat after the fish. But as his mother was lying in and Ada occupied with Martha, Evered was sent up to turn the rotting seaweed into the soil. He was lost in that work when he heard his name spoken aloud behind him. He threw down the shovel and jumped across three furrows, his heart pounding in his throat.

  “Give you a scare,” Mary Oram said.

  “No,” Evered said. “I’m best kind.”

  She nodded and stood watching him. She’d lost her garrulous nature in the time she’d been with them as if the quiet in the cove had rubbed off on her. And the new reticence made the woman more mystifying and formidable. Evered walked back to the spade and picked it up as casually as he could manage.

  “I come to pay my respects,” Mary Oram said.

  She walked past the furrowed ground to where the bog began in earnest. The black earth there deep enough to harrow something close to six feet down. The plot was barely discernible, a small rectangular depression bordered with beach stones. There was no marker to say who lay there. Evered kept at the work but couldn’t help glancing up to where Mary Oram stood.

  “You don’t mind being up here alone?” she said.

  He shrugged, turned another spadeful of soil. He was thinking he preferred being alone, that it was Mary Oram staring down at the dead that was making his skin crawl. He didn’t know why she felt the need to offer her respects to the stranger or how she knew he was there, a fellow who’d washed up on the beach in the first years his father was fishing from the cove. The two eyes eaten out by sea lice his father had told him and as Evered was picturing the empty sockets of that ruined face Sennet Best added, “Don’t you be talking any of this old mash to your mother now, she don’t need none of that in her head.”

  Mary Oram turned from the grave and Evered stood straight, leaning on the handle. “That was all before your time,” she said.

  “First when Father come out here,” Evered said before he realized it wasn’t a question but a statement the woman was making. She watched him with an otherworldy stare that made him think she was hearing the words in his head before he spoke and hearing words he didn’t intend to speak aloud besides. “The little one seems to be doing fine,” she said finally. “I expect I’ll be heading back to Mockbeggar come morning.”

  He nodded, hoping not to show how welcome this bit of news was to him.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” she said.

  He tried not to watch her go, leaning into the work. But he snuck a last glance as she went down the rise. And without knowing for certain what it meant he made the sign of the cross at her back three times, the way his mother would at the sight of crows.

  * * *

  —

  They were up before light the next morning. The youngsters followed their father down to the landwash while Mary Oram took a final look at the baby and at Sarah Best. It was clear and very cold. Ada sat on a patch of snow still clinging to shadow in a rock crevice on the beach, watching her father and Evered haul the freshly tarred boat into the shallows and tying it off at the stage rails.

  When her father saw her there he said, “You shouldn’t pitch on the snow like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “The cold will go right up through you,” he said. “It idn’t good for your girl parts.”

  Evered said, “What girl parts?”

  “Never you mind,” their father said.

  “What girl parts?” Ada said.

  “We’re about set here,” their father said. “Go on and fetch Mary Oram.”

  She walked up the rise, her head swimming. She had no idea what the man was warning her against. She pictured her mother lying back with her legs spread and the infant splitting her wide. The story of Mary from the Bible came to mind, how she soaked her feet out picking berries and so fell pregnant with Jesus. She wondered if it was some exposure to the cold that caused babies to take hold in there.

  She was still picking her way through that conjecture when she stepped inside. The two women interrupted in the midst of some whispered deliberation as they turned to her.

  “Father’s ready,” Ada said.

  Sarah Best was nursing the baby and Mary Oram waved at her to stay in her seat. She went to Ada at the door but stopped there, turning back to the room. She rooted in her leather bag of utensils and came up with a hank of twine. She walked back to Sarah Best and knelt on the floor beside her, placed the string across the woman’s belly.

  “You’re certain,” Mary Oram said.

  Ada’s mother nodded.

  “All right,” Mary Oram whispered. She knotted the string three times and put her hand over top of it on Sarah Best’s stomach. She said, “May earth bear on you with all its might and main.” And she carried on repeating that line often enough that the words started to lose their meaning in Ada’s ears. When Mary Oram finally got to her feet she tucked the string into a pocket at the front of Sarah Best’s dress.

  “Is that it then?” her mother asked.

  “God willing,” Mary Oram said, “that’s it.” She turned to Ada and shooed her out the door ahead of her.

  * * *

  —

  Ada and Evered lay side by side that night and resumed their interrupted ritual of talking quietly to one another before falling asleep and whenever they happened to stir awake.

  They spoke of their father’s warning about Ada’s girl parts and they couldn’t but see Mary Oram’s influence on the bizarre concern. Ada felt herself unequal to the nightmarish details of their sister’s birth and even the removal of the stitches was too intimate and unaccountable to describe. But she told Evered about their mother’s demented spell when she threatened to drown herself in the cove, about the string Mary Oram had knotted three times and the strange incantation she’d repeated over their mother’s belly before she left. Evered told her about his encounter with Mary Oram at the farm garden, she standing silent at the stranger’s gravesite, and the sense he had of the woman looking into his head to see his thoughts before he spoke them. All these incidents they ran through the gauntlet of childish awe and speculation that created their shared vision of the world, that made the youngsters feel as close as rind on a tree.

  At the stagehead that morning their father had picked the woman up and lifted her down into the boat like a hogshead of flour, then rowed her through the skerries into open water. Ada and Evered ran out the eastern arm of the cove and stood on the farthest point to watch as her figure receded. They stayed there until the boat and its occupants disappeared completely, to be certain she was gone.

  Pack Ice. A Whitecoat.

  They holed up at the stud tilt in a grey limbo for the better part of two months, without desire or interest beyond the other’s mute company. Though as the days began to lengthen they felt a vague sense of expectation steal over them, both waiting without knowing what they were waiting for until the pack ice drifted down from the Labrador sea at the beginning of March and the youngsters woke one morning to the sound of it gouging at the shoreline.

  The little harbour was barred by rocks and skerries drawi
ng just a fathom of water at low tide and no vessel larger than a bully boat could sail into the cove. But that frozen armada choked the bay come spring. Their father had always taken down the stage in the fall to save it from the weight grinding against the beach. Pans raftered up on the landwash as the miles of pack behind it muscled in on the current, the leading edge buckling under that pressure. An intermittent round of concussions echoing in the air as if a brigade of freebooters was trying to break through the stone foundation of a fortress.

  The ice marked the start of a season beyond winter in the cove and the racket of its arrival filled Ada and Evered with a jittery energy that made it impossible to lie still. They went down to the beach where the ice field stretched as far as they could see, rising and falling on the ocean swell. They could feel the cold razoring off the frigid surface through the little clothes they wore and Ada shivered against it. The white was tinged blue and pink as the early light rose and the quiver running up her spine was almost a pleasure. She had come down to the shore without her sister’s ragdoll and she reached for her brother’s hand.

  “There’ll be seals coming in on that,” Evered said.

  For the first time since their mother died at the start of the winter they both felt ravenously, painfully hungry.

  * * *

  —

  Every day for the next two weeks Evered left in the early light to beat his way to the farthest point on the harbour. It was an easy stroll out the beach come summer but rough walking with the shore overrun by slabs and crags of ice. He had to pick his way in through the alder and tuck before breaking out onto the stretch of open rock at the point where he had a view to the horizon east and west of the cove.

  The point lay open to the weather which passed through spells of snow and cold rain and sleet and bouts of blinding arctic sunlight that offered not the barest hint of warmth. He owned only a single pair of breeches—every day he regretted not stripping his father’s trousers before tipping his body into the ocean—but he had the man’s leather red jacks and he wrapped his calves in strips of canvas against the rough ice and the salt water. He wore a worsted wool cap that he fortified with a length of cloth tied around his head, he had cuffs and sealskin mitts. Every hour or so he walked back and forth to the scrub trees to bring a hint of feeling into his frozen feet.