The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  “You two had a very good year of it,” one of the crew offered.

  “We done all right considering.”

  “Twas just the two of you?” the man said. “You and the young girl?”

  “Fish galore out here the summer,” Evered said. “We couldn’t hardly keep ahead of it.”

  The Beadle turned from them and walked off toward the hatchway, disappearing below without a word. Evered stared after him, uncertain if he was meant to follow.

  “You’ll want a little dawn of rum,” the crewman said and he picked up a bottle tucked under the rail, handed it across to Evered.

  He’d only ever had an occasional glass of his father’s spruce beer in his young life and the rum burned as he swallowed, the fire of it rising through his sinuses and he had to wipe tears from his eyes.

  “Go easy now,” the man said, reaching for the bottle. “You wants to be able to keep your feet when you’re standing in front of Himself.” And he told a story about a Mr. Lucas who kept a goat aboard his coasting vessel for its milk, how a gallon of rum in a bucket was left unattended on deck and Mr. Lucas’s goat drank almost the whole of its contents, the animal in a state of intoxication so complete as to be unable to get upon her legs. And for days afterward the milk she gave was strong enough that a glassful sent Mr. Lucas to his bed singing scraps of My Thing Is My Own.

  The crewmen laughed together in a way that suggested they’d heard the story a hundred times and never tired of it, passing the bottle among the circle and shaking their heads. “For my little fiddle,” one of the crew sang out, “must not be played on.” Which set them off on another round of laughter.

  Abraham Clinch raised his head through the hatchway behind them. “Best,” he shouted and everyone sobered immediately.

  “One more nip,” the crewman said, handing the rum across, “and we’ll see what the Beadle has to say about it all.”

  Evered choked down another mouthful and went off across the deck.

  “We’ll have another drop when you’re done,” the man called after him.

  Evered went down the stairs and stepped just inside the cabin’s threshold. He felt himself unsteady suddenly but for the first time since his parents died almost completely without fear. The Beadle was engrossed in his ledgers, the pen nib making its peculiar sniffing noise at the paper.

  “We had a very good season at it,” Evered volunteered.

  The Beadle stopped mid-stroke, the quill hovering in mid-air.

  “We had a fair time at the fish,” he tried again.

  “Mr. Best,” the Beadle said. He pointed to the spot beside his chair and Evered walked across the room with his hat in his hands. “You are pleased with yourself I take it.”

  “I expect so, sir.”

  Clinch nodded. He seemed younger than Evered had thought in the spring but no less severe, especially when he fronted the toothless side of his face.

  “Almost half the fish you have brought to us,” the Beadle said, “is dun or wet or broken and hardly saleable in the West Indies. A portion is refuse and not fit to feed dogs.”

  Evered stood with his mouth open.

  “Yes, Mr. Best?”

  “We was both standing in above our station. I only had a scatter day as splitter before the summer. And Ada was first time alone at drying the fish. It took us a while to get the hang of doing it proper.” A smile crept across the Beadle’s face as Evered spoke and it made him dislike the man. “We managed finest kind as we went along,” he said.

  “That is your studied opinion?”

  Evered nodded drunkenly.

  The Beadle turned back to the ledger, scratching hastily to the bottom of the open page. He said, “Your season amounts to forty-seven quintals of fish. Seven quintals are mudfish. A little more than fifteen quintals are West Indie.”

  “And the rest?”

  “The rest is Number Two at best. And will just about cover the supplies Mr. Strapp fronted in the spring. The winter supplies will have to be set against your account.”

  Evered tried to hold off smiling, not certain he understood the meaning of it all.

  “You are still,” the Beadle said, “intent on prosecuting the fishery out here on your own?”

  “I can’t think why we wouldn’t.”

  “It does not surprise me to hear you say so. I spoke to Mr. Strapp about the possibility of a hand to work shares on this enterprise and there is no one can be spared to join you. But that may change if you hold out long enough.”

  “I expect we’ll manage.”

  The Beadle turned in his chair to face the boy directly. “Have you and your sister made a decision?” he asked. “On the question of baptism into the church?”

  Evered shook his head. He hadn’t had the stomach to raise it with Ada, knowing she would rather eat fish hooks than break faith with their mother and Martha to satisfy the Beadle. And he’d all but forgotten the issue in the sleepless churn of the season’s work. “Ada won’t have it,” he said.

  “And the girl speaks for you both on this matter?”

  Evered shrugged. “She got the nerve of a mule, Mr. Clinch, sir.”

  The Beadle watched him silently for so long then that Evered was aware of himself wavering on his feet. He was on the verge of confessing the lie, admitting he’d never spoken to Ada, asking to be baptized there and then aboard The Hope before Clinch offered the quill. Evered stepped forward to take it, making his mark on the page. He surrendered the pen and stepped back to his spot.

  “You will be given your supplies as you leave,” Clinch said.

  Evered nodded.

  “I doubt it will be enough to keep you and your sister from perishing through the full of a winter,” the Beadle said. “But if I am wrong, we will see you again in the spring.”

  “Please God, sir,” Evered said.

  * * *

  —

  Ada raked the floor of the tilt clean while she was waiting. She had the button in her apron pocket and she took it out now and then to study. It was too elaborate to draw in a medium as coarse as the dry sand and she experimented with simplified versions that didn’t lose all sense of the thing’s elegance. She tried sticks and utensils with points of various sizes, she dampened the sand to help it hold the strokes. But it would not come. She spent half an hour on a single iteration and suddenly erased the disappointment, kicking at the sand. It was a peculiar irritation that something she loved could be so far beyond her capacity to engender and she moved on to an image of the bear’s paws instead, using the heel of her hand to make impressions in the wet sand.

  It wasn’t until she realized it was too dark to clearly see what she was doing that it struck her how much time had passed, that Evered hadn’t returned from The Hope. It was gone a ways past duckish when she went down to the stagehead and she couldn’t tell if anyone was about on deck or even if the boat was still tied on to the schooner.

  She’d once asked her mother what it was kept her father so long aboard The Hope. Sarah Best shrugged in a way that made Ada think the question was an aggravation. “That’s only men’s business they’re into,” she said. “I don’t pay no mind as long as they don’t bring it in here.”

  There was an edge to her mother’s voice that kept Ada from asking anything more. But she couldn’t imagine what the flesh and bone reality beneath that vague dismissal might be. Evered, for all he was a boy, had no more insight than herself. And he was out there now learning it first-hand. She could not sort out if she should envy that fact or consider herself lucky to be free of it altogether.

  It was closing in on fully dark when she saw the shape of the boat move clear of The Hope. There were lamps lit on the deck of the schooner and in the windows of the cabins by then. The sky was overcast and black and those lights glittered like a handful of dull stars on the horizon. Ada lit the slutlamp to guide Evered in, oily smoke spiralling off the wick. She heard the slap of the oars as he came closer and the sound of her brother singing some unfamiliar son
g about a fiddle.

  He came around at the stage sloppily, knocking against the rails and losing his balance, and he crawled to the bow to tie on below the spot where she stood with the lamp.

  “We got a winter’s supply out of it,” he said, gesturing at the cargo of barrels and burlap sacks in the fish pound and at the stern. Even in the poor light she could tell it was a fraction of what their father used to bring home from The Hope, that the winter ahead of them would be a thin stretch. Evered made several attempts to find his feet and fell on his arse each time. “Sister,” he said. “I’m so bad now as old Mr. Lucas’ goat.” He turned to the gunwale and retched his guts up into the water.

  She set the lamp on the longers and climbed down into the boat. Evered was rocking over his knees and she sat next to him and put a hand to his bare neck. She could smell the reek coming off him, the same foreign stink her father brought back from visits aboard. Men’s business. And her brother like the greenest youngster beside her, on the verge of tears.

  “You managed fine, Brother,” she said. “You done good.”

  “Don’t you ever leave me,” he said out of nowhere.

  “Why would I do the like of that?”

  “Just don’t,” he said.

  It was a cool night and much colder on the water and she moved in close to Evered for the warmth.

  “Just you don’t,” he said again.

  * * *

  —

  The season turned early toward winter, the first snow falling by mid-October, and they resumed their lifelong habit of sharing a bunk, huddling together after the dead fire’s heat leaked from the room and the wind whistled through the stud walls. Once enough snow was down they went together into the backwoods to drag out the logs Evered left standing in the spring and they spent weeks cutting and splitting junks for fuel.

  In the heart of the winter there were long hours of dark and enforced idleness and they passed the time with made-up games that featured elaborate rules forgotten and redrawn from one day to the next. They whiled away evenings with a call and response they knew as There’s Your Answer, asking the most ludicrous or inane or troubling questions they could think of in turn—Do the dead piss and shit in heaven? Why does the brook run downhill and never up? Where do the stars sleep during the day?—and replying with belches or farts or some invented animal noise. “There’s your answer,” the respondent concluded each time, “and may it serve thee.” They played a version of hide-and-seek within the cramped bounds of the tilt, the blinder covering their face as the other hid and keeping their eyes closed as they searched the room with their reaching hands. They sang the fragments of songs remembered from their parents’ days, they rearranged the materials on Ada’s shelf or drew elaborate designs in the sand near the hearth. They’d settled back into their shared sense of being of a piece and there was little enough happening in the world around them to disturb the illusion.

  Evered still woke to the sound of Ada whispering aloud on occasion and he finally worked up the nerve to ask who she was speaking to. “Our Martha?” he said when she confessed.

  “She’s here,” Ada said. “I feels her right with us still.”

  “Do she ever say anything back to you?”

  “Not in anything like words. But I hears her inside.”

  “A voice like?”

  “No,” she said. “Just a feeling. You don’t feel her with you?”

  He shook his head in the dark and lay quiet awhile. It made sense to him there would be a division of aptitude and skill between them and the envy he felt for her peculiar gifts was all admiration, devoid of pettiness.

  “Do you feel the same thing with Mother and Father?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just with Martha.”

  He was about to ask her why the difference when it came to him. “She died an innocent,” he said.

  Ada raised a hand to her brother’s face. There was a fuzz of blond hair on his chin and she brushed her fingers back and forth through the downy growth. “Martha sits at God’s right hand,” she said, “and she hears our prayers.”

  It made Evered wonder where exactly it was their parents sat in the firmament. He thought that heaven might be like the ocean, that the dead were set adrift within it and that nothing in that expanse sat still for long but for their infant sister anchored at God’s side. But not even Ada would venture an answer to that question. “You’ll have to ask the Beadle come the spring,” she said, mimicking exactly the dismissive tone their mother used when discussing the men’s business that went on aboard The Hope.

  “Perhaps I will then,” Evered said, knowing all the while he lacked the spine to raise any such thing with the man. He was every day more daunted by Clinch’s brusque manner, by the ledgers in which they were all of them pinned and held, by the ruthless calculations he wielded over their lives. He sometimes dreamt of the Beadle and he woke from those visions stricken, the images haunting him for days afterward. Standing naked beside the desk aboard The Hope as Clinch worked over his ledgers. The Beadle reaching out without turning his gaze from the page, touching him as he’d never been touched. Evered frozen to the spot as those fingers made their cold provoking inspection.

  Ada often shook him awake for the tortured noises he was making beside her. “What is it?” she asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said, feeling ambushed, cornered. “Some old foolishness.” He turned to face the wall to hide the state he was in, his ware unaccountably stiff and straining against his small clothes.

  He did what he could to push the agitation underground but it coloured whole swaths of that winter season. He never spoke to Ada about those harrowing dreams or the sense of fervent infirmity they left him with. And that was the only sliver that came between them for the longest time.

  * * *

  —

  The last of the salt meat was gone before the new year and they dwindled on the short rations, the weight dropping off their spare frames. But the Labrador ice brought the seals in numbers come March and Evered killed and flensed half a dozen before the pack broke up and drifted off. They ate the oily meat at every meal until the herring struck in a month later and they could see the flesh slowly coming back into the other’s face.

  By the time the caplin rolled on the beach they felt relatively hale and eager to get at the fish. They’d knocked together a stage and salt shack that was idiosyncratic but sound. The cod arrived early and stayed close to shore longer than any year in their lives. August month was mostly dry and they put away enough decent fish to be granted something close to a full ration of supplies for the first time since their parents died.

  And years passed in that same severe round with little variation but the ratcheting wheel of the seasons and nothing but the slow pendulum of The Hope’s appearances to mark time on a human scale.

  A Shipwreck. Her Visitor.

  The year Evered turned fourteen and Ada twelve.

  They had their winter supplies in and Evered had been two full weeks at the fall fish. The days changeable and unsettled. Every September wild storms of wind and rain lashed through and they were mindful of the skies, of the light on the horizon morning and evening, trying to augur the coming weather. He went out for one last day at the cod but came off the water early, talking about sun hounds. Ada shaded her eyes to see them, two paler circles ghosting either side of the sun. There was a hesitation in the day she hadn’t noticed till then, an uncertain silence. Even the gulls were quiet. They tied up the doors of the store and the empty salt shack on the stage and they hauled the boat clear of the landwash, tying it to a rock halfway up the rise. By the time they were done the sky had gone apocalyptically dark.

  They were housebound the better part of two days, torrential rain sluicing down the chimney and douting the fire in the hearth, working its insidious way through so many fissures in the roof that there was nowhere they could sit that was altogether out of the steady fall. The wind brayed and howled and struck the tilt in tidal gusts they f
elt in their bones and they could not sleep through the night for the relentless noise of the siege they were under.

  Late on the second day the window’s shutter ripped free, swinging manically a few minutes before disappearing altogether and the weather invaded the room unimpeded. They tried to bar the space with a sealskin but it belled and tore free and they were forced to venture out into the wilderness of the storm to retrieve the shutter. They held on to one another and picked their way through the wind’s whipping current as if they were trying to cross a flash-flood river. They found the shutter hung up in a droke of spruce trees halfway to the Downs and they managed to wrestle it back across the cove, their eyes screwed shut against the gale that threatened to take them off their feet at every step.

  They hammered it into place and as they turned to make their way along the side of the tilt Ada pointed down to the cove where the waves surged up the shoreline high enough to float the boat. The little vessel hoisted aloft on a gust then and it kited in mid-air at the end of its line. The stage was loosed from its footings in the cove and the platform rose and fell like a drawbridge over a moat. It seemed a kind of madness they were witnessing and they cowered against the house, watching as long as they could stand the thrash of it before fighting their way inside.

  They spent a second miserable night under the sealskin that had failed to hold to the window frame, expecting any moment the roof might be torn clear over their heads. In the early hours of the morning the wind finally moderated and the rain let up enough that the drumming was almost a soothe. They slept late and when they roused themselves they stepped out into sunshine and calm. The swaying surface of the cove dotted with storm detritus, with tree branches and driftwood, a litter of seaweed heaved thirty yards above the waterline. The stage was gone from its moorings, the longers broken up and scattered across the western arm of the cove. The boat lay on its side at the end of its line, half-filled with water. The blue of the sky and the air they breathed had a salt-scoured feel to it.