The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  Clinch watched him in silence a while longer before he pushed back his chair to stand beside his desk. “There was no funeral service for them, I assume?”

  Evered shook his head. “Not so’s you’d call it so.”

  “I will come ashore,” Clinch announced, “to read the service for the dead. And then we will deal with the business at hand.”

  * * *

  —

  The Beadle led them up off the landwash in a pathetic little funeral procession, Ada and Evered following meekly in the wake of his black cloak. At the top of the rise the Beadle turned to take the path to the Downs and he walked on with a shocking confidence, leading them to the garden and past the potato rows to the graves set at the edge of the bog as if he had dug them and buried the dead himself. It was an act of sorcery so astonishing that Ada reached out and pinched the flesh of her brother’s arm viciously. But Evered barely felt it.

  The Beadle stood at the head of the smaller, more recent grave. “What is the name of the deceased?” he asked.

  “Martha,” Evered told him.

  “Yes,” Clinch said impatiently. “Was that all? Just ‘Martha’?”

  Evered looked to Ada. “She was the one come up with the name.”

  Clinch stared at her expectantly.

  “We never called her anything but that,” Ada said.

  “Martha Best then,” he said. He opened the book in his hands and dove headlong into a soliloquy that cowed the youngsters with its practised fluency, its foreign rhetoric. “Your servants, Martha Best,” he said, “and Sennet Best and Sarah Best.” He asked pardon for Your Servants’ sins. He talked about baptism and the sacraments and a general want and deficiency in these respects, he discoursed awhile on the folly of couples being unevenly yoked, he spoke of the burden of unknown transgressions that lay on the heads of Your Servants, all of which and all of whom he surrendered to the Lord’s infinite mercy. He read periodically from the black book in his hands, his voice like a spadeful of gravel against wood. Ada and Evered stood with bowed heads through the service which was as much as they knew of religious manners. Evered took in almost nothing of what was said. He felt as if he was listening under water, holding his breath against the weight of his own ignorance, wanting only to escape the suffocation of the moment.

  After what felt like a small eternity Clinch said “Amen” with an air of finality that made Ada and Evered raise their heads. The three watched one another in silence awhile, as if it were sacrilegious to move too quickly back to the banalities of ordinary conversation.

  “Well,” Clinch offered.

  “Martha died innocent,” Ada said then. She didn’t speak directly to the Beadle, offering the statement up as a general announcement.

  “We are born into a fallen world,” the Beadle said.

  “Mother said Martha died innocent,” Ada insisted, “and she sits at God’s right hand and hears our prayers.”

  Clinch opened his crooked mouth and closed it again, considering. “O simple ones, learn prudence,” he said, “O fools, learn sense.”

  Evered broke in then to stop Ada answering back a second time. “It’s coming on dark,” he said. “We should see about getting you out to The Hope.”

  The Beadle took a moment, his folded hands holding the book at his waist. “Given the change in circumstances,” he said, “I will need to consider the best course with respect to your enterprise.” He looked to Evered. “You will leave me at The Hope and come see me again in the morning.”

  Clinch started down to the landwash and Evered followed after him. But Ada stayed beside her sister’s grave and waited there until she was certain the Beadle had left the cove.

  * * *

  —

  They sat facing one another as Evered rowed back to The Hope, within an arm’s length and neither speaking a word. He glanced over his shoulder after every stroke to be spared having to look steady at the Beadle’s expressionless face. It had never occurred to him there would be options to consider, that the enterprise in the cove was provisional and could be voided outright. He wished Ada hadn’t provoked the man at the gravesite with her talk of innocence and God’s right hand. He was a little fearful of his sister suddenly, the cold brass of her.

  He didn’t tie on at the schooner’s side when they arrived, holding the boat steady by hand as the Beadle climbed the rope ladder.

  Evered said, “Mr. Clinch, sir.”

  The Beadle paused to stare down at him from the deck.

  “We haven’t got hardly a morsel of food to our names,” he said. He waved listlessly toward the cove, already sorry to have revealed the extent of their want.

  “We will discuss our business come morning,” Clinch said.

  For weeks Ada had been husbanding a last cupful of peas against some desperate hour or special occasion and she had a thin soup waiting when Evered came up from the landwash. They were both swimming in the afternoon’s events and tried to talk them into sense.

  “He knew right where to go to find Martha’s grave,” Ada said. “Same as if he’d been up there thousands of times.”

  “Perhaps he read a service for the one that drownded,” he said. “Perhaps that’s how he knew the way.”

  “What do it mean,” she said. “Unevenly yoked?”

  Evered didn’t know what it meant.

  “He wouldn’t leave us without a lick of flour would he, Brother? I’d kill for a bit of fresh bread.”

  “I wish you never said something to knock him off he’s bearings so.”

  “Fools learn sense,” she said, disgusted. “I idn’t a fool.”

  No, Evered thought, that would likely be me.

  “I wish we wouldn’t writ down in his book,” he said. “It don’t seem right he can keep us barred up there like that.”

  They cleaned their bowls and then cleaned the pot with their fingers for the last taste of salt and they went to bed hungry.

  Evered was alone when he woke the next morning, Ada already up with a fire burning in the hearth and gone down to the stage after their breakfast. She came back with a conner too small to fillet and she fried the fish whole.

  “There’s already men about on The Hope,” she said as they picked the flesh from the conner’s thorny backbone. It was just enough food to make them feel how hungry they were.

  He said, “I’d best get out there.” He half expected her to offer to go with him again and was relieved she didn’t, not knowing what she might decide to throw in the Beadle’s face. “I’ll have a full boat when I comes in,” he told her. “Flour and peas and salt meat.”

  She nodded again but wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Tea and molasses?”

  “Please God,” he said.

  Ada stayed in the tilt when Evered left. Hours before the sun rose she’d startled from a dream of a Beadle-faced crow flying low over the cove with little Martha in its claws, her infant sister bawling with the same forsaken voice as the orphaned whitecoat on the ice. She turned in to Evered’s chest with her heart in her throat, taking in the comforting, faintly corrupt smell of his breath. His arm tucking her closer as he slept. But she could not clear her head of that image and lay awake whispering to Martha until she finally got out of bed and started the fire.

  * * *

  —

  The morning had risen clear but a thick fog rolled in by the time Evered made way for the skerries. The Hope was within shouting distance from there but sat invisible in the fog. He rowed toward the Barrow Ledge, listening for the sound of water lapping at the hull, for the voices of the men on deck. He came around when the vessel finally appeared, its dark shapeless shape looming in the grey. Thinking it was how his father saw the world all his days.

  He helloed to the crew and they called him in to the rope ladder.

  “I’m not getting Mr. Clinch from he’s bed I hope,” he said when he climbed onto the deck.

  One of the crewmen leaned in close so as not to be overheard. “Mr. Clinch don’t sleep,” he said. “So
far as we mortals can tell.”

  “He’s waiting on you,” the man who spoke to Evered the day before said. “You knows where to find him.”

  He glanced back to the three men as he went across the deck to the hatchway. He could see they were all watching after him but the fog made it impossible to know what their faces might be saying.

  The Beadle was at his desk when Evered stepped into the cabin, crouched over the ledger. He looked like a man gutting and cleaning a fish, the book lying open along its spine, the blade of the quill rasping across paper. Evered stood waiting in silence so long that for a time he thought Clinch hadn’t registered his arrival.

  “Mr. Best,” the Beadle said suddenly, without lifting his head from the book.

  “Yessir.”

  Clinch pointed to the spot beside the desk where the crewman had stood the day before, then leaned back in his chair. He gave the boy the same once-over and it was enough to remind Evered to remove his cap.

  “Is it your intention,” the Beadle said, “to run this enterprise on your own?”

  “I expect so,” he said. “Ada and me was planning to, yes.”

  “And you expect Mr. Strapp to underwrite the cost?”

  Evered didn’t know what the question meant. He kneaded the cap in his hands, feeling like he might faint.

  “Mr. Strapp,” the Beadle clarified, “provides the supplies you live on summer and winter. In return you sell the fish you catch to Mr. Strapp as payment.”

  “That was what me and Ada was planning for,” he said.

  Clinch turned to his ledger, tapping at the page. “At the end of last season your father’s account showed a deficit of nearly thirty-seven pounds sterling.”

  Evered nodded. “If you says so, Mr. Clinch sir.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  He shook his head.

  The Beadle looked down at his lap. “It means that last season, your enterprise, employing four people in total, was not able to cover the cost of the supplies Mr. Strapp gave on credit.”

  “We had plenty of fish,” Evered said. “It was too wet last August to dry it proper is all.”

  “Well you know something of the business. That is a mark in your favour.”

  “We got the stagehead up and ready for the season.”

  “You built that structure on your own I presume.”

  “Me and Ada, yes.”

  “That is not a mark in your favour, Mr. Best. And there are but two of you left to prosecute the fishery.”

  Evered stood with his mouth open, at a loss in the moment to answer the charge.

  “I can’t in good conscience ask Mr. Strapp to throw good money after bad.”

  “There’s fish galore out here, as much as you wants to catch. And Ada’s a dab hand with the knife, she worked header at the splitting table some last season. And she’ve the nerve of a mule, she don’t mind work.”

  The Beadle held up a hand but Evered pressed his case.

  “We could get by on not half the supplies we had last year,” he said.

  “Mr. Best,” the Beadle said. “The only sensible course is for you and your sister to come with us now to Mockbeggar. Mr. Strapp would see to finding a station for you both that over time would free you from the debt carried forward.”

  Evered shook his head.

  “After that time you could return here if you choose, in a far better state to carry on the venture.”

  “Ada won’t leave Martha,” Evered said.

  The Beadle almost smiled but stopped himself. “Your sister Martha?” he said. “The dead one?”

  “Ada won’t leave her alone here in the cove.”

  “I see,” Clinch said although it wasn’t at all obvious he did. He closed the ledger on the desk. “Then you must convince her to do so.”

  Evered shook his head again. “She got the nerve of a mule, Mr. Clinch.”

  “Have you ever seen a mule, Mr. Best? Do you even know what it is?”

  Evered shrugged. “It’s something like a horse, idn’t it?”

  “Have you ever seen a horse?”

  “No sir,” he said. “It was just something Father used to say. About the mule.”

  The Beadle closed his eyes and touched his fingers to his forehead.

  “Maybe Mr. Strapp,” Evered said. “He might find someone could come out to bunk in with us.”

  “You want to hire a hand to work shares with you?”

  Evered wasn’t completely certain what he had suggested but he nodded yessir regardless.

  “There is at present,” the Beadle said, “a dearth of servants on this coast. Mr. Strapp has barely enough hands to fill the positions at his various enterprises.”

  “One season,” Evered said. “If we has one season to try our luck.”

  “I have to answer to Mr. Strapp.”

  “If we can’t make a go of it come September month,” Evered said, “then Ada will have to see the sense in it.” He said, “We’ll shift our lot into Mockbeggar as you says and we will answer to Mr. Strapp ourselves.”

  The Beadle rested his hand on the ledger, clicking his yellow nails against the cover. “That abomination of a stage you have built there,” he said finally. There was a note of anger in his voice as if he already regretted the course he was setting. “I doubt it will stand to the end of June.”

  Evered tried to restrain himself but couldn’t keep the smile off his face. “No sir,” he said, “likely you’re right on that count. It was a first go for us. We’ll have to set it straight.”

  Clinch opened the ledger and scratched furiously at a page for several minutes. “I have one request of you,” he said as he wrote. “Your mother as you know would not submit to having her children baptized outside the Papist church. Had I known her intentions in this matter I would not have consented to perform the marriage ceremony.”

  “It was you married them?” Evered said.

  The Beadle inclined his head slightly. “Your sister Martha died without benefit of the baptismal sacrament. And I would ask you to consider it now,” he said. He turned to look at Evered. “You and your sister Ada. That your name be recorded in the Book of Life.”

  Evered had never heard the first thing about baptism before and he wasn’t at all clear what was being requested of him now. But he didn’t want to risk refusing outright. “I’ll have to talk to Ada about it,” he said.

  “Very well.” The Beadle held the quill toward Evered. “You will make your mark here,” he said and he pointed to the bottom of the page. He took Evered’s hand to pull him a step closer to the desk. He placed the pen in the boy’s fingers and enclosed them with his own, making two strokes on the paper. “Done,” he said.

  A Bear. The Beadle, Again.

  The caplin came in to spawn along the cove’s western arm a week after The Hope departed, each successive wave depositing a writhing mass on the grey sand like the half-drowned survivors of a shipwreck. Ada and Evered waded in the shoals with a landing net, hauling all they could lift onto dry ground. They set aside a barrel for breakfast food and two barrels to use as handline bait and as much again as they could drag up to the farm garden, turning it in with the seaweed to make something of the mean soil. And the beach was carpeted with the tens of thousands they left behind, the air clotted with the stench of that prodigal surfeit rotting on the landwash. The cod followed the caplin into shallower water, schooling in their starry numbers beyond the skerries. And the teeming downpour of the season’s work fell upon them.

  They were on the move hours before first light. Evered cut up his bait on the stage and rowed out through the harbour mouth into the maze of constellations reflected on the ocean’s surface or through the black morning under cloud. The boat almost too much for his boyish frame, his hands coming up around his ears on each stroke. But he had a line in the water as the day broke.

  He fished in fog and driving rain and in bald glassy sunshine so fierce it struck at him like a hammer. He wouldn’t turn for hom
e until he’d filled the fish pound and the little cuddy in the bow and sometimes the bilge at his feet as well, the gunwales standing barely a hands-breadth above the water. The boat riding low and sluggish with that much weight and he was next to foundering in crosswinds on occasion, his heart in his throat as he hauled for the cove.

  He worked the Barrow Ledge or the Foggity Shoals or the Wester Shoal or the Razor Ledge, choosing according to some guesswork as to where the cod might be feeding that day based on the wind and which direction the tide was running. If he didn’t strike within an hour’s time Evered moved to some other likely spot. But once he was into the fish he worked until he had the fill of his boat, running lines fore and aft.

  The ocean’s drift took him off his shore marks and every hour or so he’d row back to the top of the ground to stay over the fish. Even when his father was alive it was Evered’s job to watch the marks and judge when they had gone astray of them, Sennet’s sight too poor to make out the Black Dog below the berry fields or the notch in the Downs. It had always seemed a striking shortcoming in his father. But the man’s nearsightedness made his competence in every other sphere the more astonishing.

  The cod were up in the spring and early summer, feeding on caplin near the surface. But later in the season they often pooled near the floor, thirty or forty fathom down, a long way to send and haul a line. His father had a knack to raise the fish, leaving the bait just above their heads to draw them higher each time. Evered would watch that living school of flesh ascend out of the black toward their boat and you could almost pick the fish you wanted when he was done. It was a conjuring trick he thought Sennet Best had invented.

  Evered tried to raise the fish off the shoal ground himself now, once or twice saving himself a few fathoms of line though he couldn’t be sure if it was his doing or just the work of the currents below. He never managed to make the school rise from the darkness as his father had and the failure made him feel he’d never be more than a youngster in the world, that he was only playing at being a man.