The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  Evered spent his time in the backwoods cutting spruce that he limbed and stood to dry for next year’s winter fuel. At the end of each day he reefed together a small raft of ten-foot longers for the stage and dragged them out on the last of the snowpack. And as May came in he recruited Ada to help him frame up the stage on the landwash.

  It was a miserable undertaking. They worked at low tide, Ada with her skirts tied up around her waist, both of them sloshing through the freezing shallows. Evered had never been much more than his father’s kedger, holding logs and driving the occasional nail, and the job was bigger than he and Ada were fit for. The stage when they were done was like a child’s drawing of a stage, so ill-shaped and lopsided it was barely recognizable as the thing it was meant to represent. And still they were pleased with it, that it stood at all and was sturdy enough to hold their weight.

  The year’s last fall of snow dusted the ground in the third week of May, then the weather turned to rain and days of unrelenting fog. They hauled loads of bladderwrack and sugar kelp up to the garden and they spread the seaweed to let it rot before turning it into the soil.

  There was enough light in the evenings to pick away at handwork, mending the herring net or darning threadbare stockings. Ada hacked at Evered’s hair with a set of iron shears to keep it out of his eyes. She cut and sewed the whitecoat’s pelt into an approximation of a vest. By dusk they were nodding off in their chairs and the two of them crawled into the bunk together. And before falling asleep they talked awhile about when they might expect Cornelius Strapp’s schooner.

  Even more than the seasons, The Hope’s biannual visit was the fulcrum on which life in the cove turned though Ada nor Evered had so much as set foot on the vessel. It was too large to clear the skerries, anchoring off on the Barrow Ledge, and their father had always rowed out to meet it alone. In the spring he came back laden with barrels of flour and molasses and hard bread, with brown sugar and tea and butter and two hogsheads of pickling salt, with yeast and calico and twine and tar and fish hooks and nails. In the fall Evered and Ada helped their parents load the boat with salt cod and their father steered it away through the shoals. They could just make out the shape of men on deck lowering baskets on a line to hoist up the cured fish. Eight or ten trips to ferry the season’s catch and their father tied on to The Hope then, going aboard himself as the fish was graded and the Beadle set the figures down in his ledger. And he left the ship with all the supplies they would have to last the winter.

  Ada and Evered stood on the stage waving as The Hope weighed anchor and sailed off for Mockbeggar. But for a rare glimpse of some unidentifiable vessel passing on the horizon, they would not lay eyes on another living soul till Strapp’s schooner arrived the following spring.

  There was no predicting exactly when The Hope would appear, its visit one element in a seasonal cycle that varied just enough to cripple the notion of certainty. The ship could sail into view any time after the ice left in March and before the caplin spawned in June. And neither youngster could guess what would happen when The Hope arrived this spring. The nature of those transactions and their father’s obligations to Cornelius Strapp had never been discussed in the house and were completely opaque to them.

  Most of their speculation centred on the figure of the Beadle who was Cornelius Strapp’s man, fish culler and keeper of Strapp’s ledger. Their father spoke of the man with a mix of animosity and foreboding. He married couples and read scripture at baptisms and funerals and registered every birth and death that took place in Mockbeggar. And he likewise presided over their livelihood. Their season’s catch was not worth a half penny until the Beadle gave his verdict and made his mark in the pages of a leather-bound book. No supplies were loaded onto the boat without the Beadle’s say-so. “There goes the bloody Beadle aboard The Abandon Hope All Ye,” their father would say as the ship weighed anchor and left them each fall. They would never manage to work themselves clear of the Beadle’s ledger, he said, not if they lived to the age of Noah.

  Ada and Evered thought of him as a kind of bogey, a spectre who walked and worked among men, who governed the lives of others and lived eternally. His malevolence was the only explanation they had for their mother’s refusal to allow them to visit The Hope with their father. Evered insisted he would row out to meet the vessel himself when it arrived and Ada didn’t argue the issue for long, not willing to hazard a repeat of the rift only weeks behind them.

  “Should you tell him about Mother and Father?”

  “What? That they’re dead, you means?”

  “He might. I don’t know. If you lets on we’re alone here.”

  The thought had occurred to Evered but he hadn’t wanted to kindle talk of the mortifications the Beadle might inflict upon two children without guardians or benefactors.

  “Perhaps we should stay hid away when The Hope comes in,” Evered offered. “We could pitch up in the berry hills until they leaves.”

  Ada was quiet awhile. Then she said, “Every barrel we got is all but empty, Brother.”

  They lay silently weighing whether starvation might be worse than whatever the Beadle could visit upon them. They were quiet so long that Evered thought Ada had fallen asleep, until she said, “You could tell him Mother and Father is sick.”

  “Why would I do the like of that?”

  “You could tell him they’re struck down and lying in their beds here. That Father is too poorly to row out and he sent you in he’s place.”

  It seemed on first blush a bit of genius and they fell asleep full up with the notion. But Evered woke hours later, troubled by a doubt that he had to talk through with Ada. He waited in the dark the same as if he was walking in the woods ahead of her and sat by the path to bide until she caught up. Eventually she rustled beside him.

  “Sister,” he said. “What if the Beadle wants to come ashore?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After I tells him they’re sick and lying in bed home. What if he wants to come ashore?”

  She lifted her head. “He’ve never once come to shore.”

  “And I never once rowed out to The Hope now have I?” he said. “What if he wants to look in on them? Or wants to send for Mary Oram to see to doctoring?”

  Ada turned toward him, raising her knees to her chest and setting her icy feet between Evered’s thighs to warm them. He waited quiet, letting Ada sit with the problem, hoping she might offer some solution he could sleep with.

  “Sister,” he said but she didn’t answer him. “I think I’ll have to tell him the truth of it,” he said.

  “I expect so,” was all she said.

  Evered lay awake a long time after Ada drifted off, holding the cold of her feet between his legs, that chill rising up through him as he came to grips with the grim prospect of facing the Beadle alone.

  * * *

  —

  Weeks more passed without a sign of The Hope. They were surviving on the rind end of their salt provisions, on the bony flesh of sculpins and conners. They scavenged the first sign of green on the shoreline, chewing mouthfuls of Scotch lovage and goosetongue and oyster plant. They reused the last handfuls of tea, fortifying the miserable drink with the previous year’s juniper berries. Evered managed to net a few herring off the eastern point in April and they’d gorged on the baitfish for the short week they schooled close to shore. The cod were still miles out at sea. They’d been almost a month without a morsel of bread and had long finished the bit of salted meat from the whitecoat taken in March before The Hope finally appeared on the horizon. The relief Evered felt at sighting the vessel almost managed to overwhelm his fear of standing supplicant in the Beadle’s presence.

  She was hours approaching across the open water. Ada and Evered walked down to the stagehead as the schooner swung wide of the cove and came about, hauling in and reefing its main and foresail and dropping anchor on the Barrow Ledge which was the only decent bit of holding ground near the cove. It was coming on to evening when Evered climb
ed down to the boat and set the oars.

  “You hurry back,” Ada said.

  “I won’t linger,” he said. “You haven’t got a worry.”

  Evered glanced over his shoulder as he approached the vessel. Three men at midships watching him come. He rowed into the lee of The Hope and he came around to face the schooner instead of pulling alongside, unsure of the protocol. He sat staring up at the visitors, holding the boat steady in the swell. The vessel was even larger than he’d imagined seeing it from a distance all those years, a hundred feet from bowsprit to stern. He found it hard to credit The Hope was shaped and built and sailed by human hands.

  “You likes the look of her then?” one of the crew shouted across to him.

  “Yessir,” he answered. It was the first time he’d been close enough to men other than his father to see their features, to hear their voices. They looked altogether too ordinary to be the creature he was looking for. “Is one of you the Beadle?” he called.

  The crewmen glanced at one another with a look that suggested Evered had said something unintentionally comic. The one who’d spoken called out a second time. “We was expecting to see Sennet.”

  “I’m Sennet’s youngster,” Evered yelled up to them.

  There was a solemn pause then. The men didn’t move or speak though something in their manner shifted, as if at the same moment they had all doffed their caps in their minds. The one who seemed assigned to speak for the group said, “You’d best come on aboard.”

  Evered turned the boat and slid under The Hope’s shadow where he tied on. There was a rope ladder that he clambered up to the hands of the crew. They gathered around him a moment, nodding soberly. One of the three said, “You’re the very daps of Sennet you is.”

  His mother nor Ada had ever mentioned any resemblance between himself and his father but Evered recognized the sentiment intended. It made him feel a little less fearful. “I might be so,” he said.

  The man who’d spoken first said, “The fellow you wants is this way.” And he walked off across the deck beckoning Evered after him.

  * * *

  —

  Ada watched Evered all the way out to The Hope, a heaviness roosting in her chest. She saw him turn the boat shy of the vessel and idle there a minute before he rowed in and tied up. She watched the crewmen lift him onto the deck and that weight pressed bodily against her lungs. For months they’d been alone with the loss of their parents and Martha. Not another soul knew those people were gone from the world but that fact was about to change for good and all. And the thought of strangers carrying the news beyond the cove made it seem somehow truer.

  There was a short conference before Evered walked across the deck with one of the men and disappeared through a hatchway. Where he would be initiated into the arcane adult transactions she was not privy to. Or just as likely tied up and killed and possibly eaten by the Beadle who would then come into the cove after her. She had no notion which way it would go or how long she would have to wait before she learned her fate.

  Her father’s visits aboard sometimes lasted most of an afternoon and into the evening. Their mother never waited on him, walking back up to the tilt as soon as he tied on at the vessel. Ada and Evered hung close to the shoreline awhile but it was a rare instance that their patience outlasted their father’s business. And the longer he was aboard the more likely it was he would come back singing some maudlin song and stumbling about as he off-loaded supplies from the boat, calling up the rise for help. Evered ran down to meet him but Ada and their mother stayed clear. He smelled of something noxious and seemed a man bewitched, expansive and effusive and diminished somehow. Occasionally he’d returned so theatrically demonstrative, so unrecognizable, that Sarah Best insisted he sleep in the store. By morning their father had come back to himself though it often took him a day or more to recover completely.

  Ada was about to turn for the tilt to wait there when she saw movement on the deck. Evered emerged from a knot of men and climbed down to the boat and he turned to help someone else on the rope ladder, handing him carefully to a seat in the stern. They rowed away from The Hope without a sign of provision aboard. She thought Evered had lost his nerve and lied about their parents being overcome in their bunk, that the Beadle had insisted on coming ashore to visit the infirm. The boat crawled toward the barred harbour mouth and then inched across the cove to the stage where she stood.

  Evered’s back was to the shore as he rowed in but the man at the stern was watching her steadily. He wore a shapeless black cloak and a black skullcap and his arms were folded around a book that she guessed was the ledger their father had ranted against. It could only be the Beadle, she thought, bearing down upon her and upon the cove, moving at the agonizing pace of a nightmare. He held her eye as the boat drifted into the stage and she would have turned and run for the hills if she hadn’t been paralyzed by fear.

  Evered shipped the oars and tied the painter to the rails. He glanced up at Ada. “This is Mr. Clinch,” he said. He clambered up beside her and turned back to reach a hand to the man in the stern.

  “Abraham Clinch,” the stranger said to her once he was standing beside them on the rickety stagehead. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he said with a curiously lopsided mouth.

  Ada looked to her brother.

  Evered said, “He’ve come to say a service for them.”

  * * *

  —

  Compared to the rough log tilt and the bare furnishings that Evered was born to, the cabin below decks aboard The Hope was so finely built and finished that at first he didn’t take note of the man seated at the low desk. The place was lit by porthole windows and it seemed to the youngster they’d carted the sunlight inside in buckets. It wasn’t until the man who led him there stepped across the room to stand beside the desk that Evered registered the sitting figure, the massive ledger open in front of him.

  “Mr. Clinch,” the man said, “this is Sennet’s young one.”

  Clinch turned in his chair and gave Evered a quick once-over. “What’s become of Best?” he asked.

  “Father took sick and died,” Evered said. “He’ve been dead this months. Same as Mother.”

  The man who’d brought him said, “You wants to take off your cap.”

  “Me cap?”

  “Take off your cap,” the man repeated.

  Evered reached to pull the worsted hat from his head and both men bristled slightly at the sight of his preternatural white hair.

  Clinch cleared his throat. “Both your parents are dead you’re saying?”

  “Yessir,” he said. “Mr. Clinch sir,” he said. “Mother died before Christmastime. And Father, we lost him shortly after.” He wanted to ask if this was the audience with the Beadle he’d requested or another prelude to that event. He’d never heard his father mention anyone named Clinch.

  “The young miss,” the nameless man said. “The one we saw on the stagehead just now.”

  “My sister,” Evered said.

  “That would be Ada. Is that right?” Clinch reached for a second, smaller ledger on the desk and opened it, running his finger down a column. “Yes,” he said, “Ada.” He tapped at the page with a long yellow nail. “There was a third youngster. Another girl.”

  Evered nodded. “She was took by the same sickness that carried off Mother and Father. I’m sorry to say, sir,” he said.

  “The little one,” he said, “Martha. I see she wasn’t yet a year old.”

  “Hardly so much as halfways,” Evered said. There was something unsettling in seeing the intimacies of his family’s history at this stranger’s fingertips. He assumed he was in the ledger alongside his sisters and their parents. Like birds in a cage.

  “And they all passed before the new year?”

  “As best I can figure, sir.”

  Clinch dipped a quill and started scratching at the marks on the pages before him.

  “Do you know if?” Evered said. “I was looking to speak with the Beadle.”r />
  Clinch paused his writing and glanced up at the nameless man beside him who was staring ahead and would not meet his eye. He turned back to the open ledger and spoke without lifting his gaze from the page. “That was my office in the church at Mockbeggar before Reverend Fetter passed on, may he rest in peace. We have not managed to procure a replacement in the twenty-odd years since that loss. In the absence of ordained clergy I have done my best to administer the rites and sacraments of the faith.”

  Evered understood almost nothing of what Clinch was saying though the gist seemed to be that he was, in fact, in the presence of the Beadle.

  “Your people,” Clinch said. “They are buried in the cove?”

  “My sister,” Evered told him. “Martha. But Mother and Father. They was both buried at sea.”

  Clinch regarded him a minute and Evered stared innocently back. The Beadle had all his teeth on the left side of his mouth, and nothing but gums on the right, the cheek there hollow and wrinkled. It looked to Evered like there was a different man in the chair according to whichever way he turned his head.

  “How old are you?” Clinch asked.

  “I couldn’t rightly say,” he admitted. He expected it was a question the Beadle already knew the answer to and he was at sea in the conversation, a patch of water too dark to see the bottom of.

  Clinch consulted his ledger and his lips moved silently for a moment. “You are not yet twelve,” he said. “Not old enough to shave,” Clinch said. “It’s a tender age for a head of hair so white I would venture.”

  The Beadle’s comment was so unexpected that it threw Evered completely. He’d all but forgotten the freakish occurrence himself. Even to Ada it was an unremarkable event among the waterfall of singular events they had suffered.

  “It just come over me,” he said. “When Father passed.”

  “Your hair turned white when your father died?”

  He didn’t have it in him to describe dragging his father’s body down to the boat and rowing into open water, of muscling that awkward package over the gunwale and staring after its descent into the black. Of the long dead sleep he fell into afterward. All he said was, “I woke up one morning like it. So Ada tells me.”