The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  The store had stood the wind and when they untied the door they found all their supplies more or less dry and sound. But they both felt how close they had come to disaster. The Hope had passed through only a week before to collect their summer’s catch. Delayed a week they would have lost the season and the weight of that debt would have ended their time in the cove.

  They walked down to the boat and tipped it onto its belly to empty out the water. It had been smacked about and would need some work to be made seaworthy but there was plenty of time ahead of them. They’d planned to take the stage down before the snow so the loss wasn’t more than an inconvenience. They spent the day retrieving the spray of longers along the western arm, hauling them back to the tilt where the logs would be sawed up for firewood.

  The next morning they went back to the landwash, planning to collect the last bits of the stage and whatever lumber from the salt shack was still in the cove to use the following spring. They walked all the way out the western arm and started along the coastline beyond it. And it was Ada who stumbled on the first sign of the strange arrivals on that shore.

  There was a black leather shoe thrown up on the beach, a man’s shoe with a square brass buckle on its face. She turned it over to shake out the sand. She looked up the length of the shoreline and saw bottles, boxes, lumber, small mounds of unidentifiable materials. She called to Evered behind her. And then she looked back down at the unlikely article in her hand.

  But for a few things rough-stitched out of sealskin, they were still wearing the only clothes they owned when their mother and father were alive. Ada’s dress was barely a size to fit her then and the sleeves came halfway up her forearms now, the skirt nearly to her knees. It was as tight as a corset about her ribs and tortured her barely-there breasts and it was steadily coming apart at the seams. She still refused to put on the dress that Evered put by for her when their mother was buried though she’d relented on taking her mother’s shoes when the pair she had as a child went to pieces on her feet. She’d outgrown those as well, the toes separating from the soles with the pressure, but they were in no position to add new footwear to their debt in the Beadle’s ledger and she went about barefoot half the summer.

  “Martha,” she said aloud. “If you got any say in things atall.”

  They threw themselves into a feverish race back and forth the shore, dragging the materials into a pile and running off for more, as if another orphaned brother and sister was competing for the spoils. Through it all Ada was in search of the second shoe. At some point in the day their father’s story of the drowned sailor came to her and it seemed entirely possible she might find it on the foot of a dead man tossed up by the storm. Which was almost but not quite enough to put her off the notion altogether.

  They only stopped when it seemed dark would fall before they could get home and in the last shreds of daylight they picked through the salvage. Thirty or forty pounds of biscuit, ten pieces of salt pork, lamp oil, a small barrel of spruce beer, one demijohn of rum, five bottles of port wine. A full horn of gunpowder. A stack of lumber torn from the vessel. A woollen cassock, a door with an iron doorknob, an empty leather satchel. And in the midst of that splendour a thought brought Ada up short. “Brother,” she said. “This idn’t materials from The Hope is it?”

  “I don’t recognize that door,” he said. He pointed to the shoe she’d found at the outset. “And I never seen anyone wearing the like of that.” He shrugged. “I expect we won’t know for certain before spring one way or the other.”

  He picked up the pork and the demijohn of rum. “We’ll come out tomorrow for the rest of it. Could be more of this for miles along if we minds to look.”

  Ada took up the lamp oil and the woollen cassock and the one right-footed shoe and they started back in the arm toward the tilt.

  * * *

  —

  They were most of a week collecting the shipwrecked materials and hauling them piecemeal into the cove. As Evered guessed, the pickings were scattered miles along the coast beyond their little harbour and they walked further each day after salvage. It was mostly pieces of the doomed ship itself they encountered, a hold cover, a stretch of the masthead still roped to a rag of sail, anonymous scraps of worked lumber. But there were pearls among the dross that made them reluctant to stop. A full round of cheese, a high-smelling comestible they’d never encountered and fell in love with from the first tentative nibbles. A cylindrical leather case thrown far above the waterline that Ada discovered when she stopped among the alders to relieve herself. It was about a foot in length and as big around as a stage longer. Ada called to her brother as she untied the toggle that held the cap tight. The interior bone-dry. She slid the object inside into her hand, a tube of dark polished wood with brass fittings at both ends.

  “That’s a spyglass, Sister,” Evered said. “They had one aboard The Hope.”

  She looked at him quickly and he tried to reassure her. “The one I seen was altogether different than this.”

  He extended the three draw tubes and even that subtle mechanical adjustment seemed to Ada an act of magic. Evered took her elbow to turn her toward the cove and brought the eyepiece to her face but she ducked her head away defensively. He laughed and told her to hold still before bringing it to her eye again.

  The day’s last light was embering at the foot of the cove and the distant tilt and the store were on top of her suddenly. Ada jumped away from the telescope a second time. She held her hands to her face and laughed out loud.

  “That’ll be a dandy thing for spotting seals come March month,” he said, glassing out over the ocean.

  “Let me have another look,” Ada said and pulled at his arm. She blinked into the lens, not quite able to credit her senses. “It don’t seem like a real thing.”

  “More it don’t,” Evered said. “But neither did that storm.”

  Ada made a rope strap for the leather case so she could wear it across her back like a quiver when they went out beachcombing. And she wore the one salvaged shoe with moss chinked up into the toe to keep it from slipping off her foot. Happy to think she might never outgrow it. On the next to last day that they walked out the coastline she thought she’d found its mate floating in a tidal pool on the rocks. She had to stop herself screaming she was so delighted. She emptied the shoe of water and turned to hold it over her head, shouting to Evered who had gone by without seeing it. And as he made his way across the rocks to where she was standing she said a little prayer of thanks to Martha. She threw her arms around Evered’s neck and they jumped up and down in each other’s arms.

  “Let me see now,” Evered said. “I can’t believe the luck of it.”

  He turned the shoe in his hands and his smile faltered.

  Ada already had her mother’s blighted shoe off her left foot and was reaching for the new discovery when she saw the look on his face.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Sister.” He wished she’d been on her own to figure it out, to save him being the one with the news. He said, “It’s a right-foot shoe.”

  “That’s not so,” she said and grabbed the thing from his hands. It was infuriating how quickly the tears came on and she bit back on them. It was a right-footed shoe and much smaller than the one she was already wearing. She lacked the words to say how malicious the turn of events seemed. She let fly with the one curse she’d learned from her mother. “Piss and corruption,” she shouted.

  Evered turned his face away, trying to hide the spring of laughter rising up in him.

  “It’s not funny, Brother.”

  “I knows it’s not,” he said.

  Ada beat at his shoulder with the drowned man’s shoe.

  “It’s not,” he said, one arm raised to protect himself. “It’s just,” he said.

  She carried on whacking at him as he crouched under the onslaught and they were both laughing then. Both overcome. Two youngsters on a raw stretch of coastline among the pitiful wrack of human enterprise. The land at t
heir backs and the land east and west all but empty and only the dead in the firmament above for company.

  Not another living soul for days.

  * * *

  —

  Ada was able to wear the larger of the salvaged shoes on her left foot without much discomfort and she clodded around in the mismatched pair happily enough. They went out one more day to search the coastline though it took the best part of the morning to reach the spot they’d last left off and a river too wide to ford ahead of them. But they could see by the glass there were bits and bobs of wreckage scattered miles beyond it. They considered walking inland to find a spot that was narrow or shallow enough to cross.

  “Could be miles upriver,” Evered said. “And no guarantee then.”

  They turned back, a little despondent to think the adventure was over. But before they’d reached the cove Evered had decided to get the boat back in the water and take it coasting to satisfy themselves they weren’t missing some treasure beyond the river. He was the better part of two days hammering and tarring the seams and they loaded the fish box with food and materials to keep them if they had to stay out overnight. That possibility and the powder horn they’d found persuaded him to take a closer look at his father’s flintlock. The evening before they left he scraped half-heartedly at the accumulation of rust but it seemed a hopeless undertaking. The hammer spring came apart in his hands like a bit of rotten netting and he gave up the notion. They loaded the useless firearm in the boat regardless, thinking that even as a prop it might be useful to them on the unexplored shore.

  They started at the oars together but the hasty repairs weren’t quite equal to the beating the boat had taken and Ada shifted to bailing to keep the craft afloat. They passed the Wester Shoals mid-morning and the river mouth two hours later and by early afternoon they were sculling along a shoreline they’d never set foot upon.

  There was little enough thrown up on the rocks to suggest the outing wasn’t a fool’s errand. Ada wore the telescope in its case across her back and she scanned ahead now and then. Splintered wood, scraps of ship’s rope. She would have lobbied to turn for home if it didn’t seem Evered was so set on the venture. It was passing toward evening when she realized he meant to stay out till they had travelled beyond all sign of the wreck’s flotsam, which meant overnight in the open.

  “We needs to find a place to put up,” she said. “It’ll be dark before long.”

  “I knows it,” he said.

  The coast was rocky and steep and the ocean broke heavy on the ragged stone and they’d both started to doubt they’d get safe ashore before nightfall until they came around a point into the lee of a sandy beach below a sheer bit of cliff. There were featureless mouths of darkness at the base that suggested overhangs where they could sleep out of the weather. Evered nosed the boat into the shallows and they hauled it as far clear of the sea as the beach would allow.

  They’d brought a bottle of fresh water and had filled the leather satchel with bread and salt pork and thick slices cut from the round of cheese and they carried the food higher up the beach out of the wind. The coast went on in an unbroken line for miles beyond them and Evered took the glass to scan ahead.

  “How do it look?” she asked.

  “Same as behind,” he said. “I spose we might as well head back come morning.”

  They scrounged enough driftwood to make a fire to boil water for tea and Evered set about sparking a ball of tinder as Ada went along the rock face to find a dry place to sleep. The caves were shallow indentations, none large enough to allow a body to sit up straight beneath the low ceiling. She came to the largest of them last. It was farthest out toward open ocean and it overlooked the setting sun, that red glow illuminating the interior. She started to crawl inside but the gravel gave slightly under her weight and she backed away. She swept a patch clear with her hand and ran her fingers over the layer of birchbark below the dirt.

  Evered appeared at her side before she managed to make sense of what she was looking at. They were both on their knees which seemed right and proper after the fact. They shovelled out the gravel with their hands until the entire surface was revealed. Four sheets of bark sewn together with roots to make a panel almost the length and width of their bunks at the tilt, laid overtop of a wooden trellis.

  They both knew instinctively what lay beneath it and they could not resist the urge to confirm that suspicion. The shallow depression held a shroud made of animal skin with several dozen bone pendants and bird’s feet fastened along the edge. They recognized the ritual and intent and they hesitated a long time before touching the shroud.

  There were two bodies set inside it, both lying on their sides, the skin of the hands and faces wizened and dried tight to the bones beneath. It was hard to judge given the posture but the largest looked to be close to their own size, adorned with a bone-and-leather necklace and dressed in pants made of the same animal skin as the shroud. The second was an infant laid naked within the other’s skeletal arms. There were objects laid on either side of the bodies, small birchbark boats and miniature paddles, a wooden doll, a carved bird, a birchbark parcel in a basket made of rootlets that contained the desiccated remains of some kind of dried fish.

  There was a small leather pouch set next their heads that Evered picked up and held in his hand a minute, as if trying to guess the contents by its heft. He untied the brittle string and shook the contents onto the ground. A dried bird’s foot. A bone pendant carved into the shape of a feather, half a dozen bone pieces in diamond and rectangular shapes, all of them scored with intricate designs that made Ada think of the silver button and its engraving. She picked up each piece in turn, running a finger over the marks.

  Evered began gathering the materials and setting them back into the bag. He reached for the piece in Ada’s hand and she hesitated.

  “You can’t take it,” he said.

  She glanced across at him. “I knows that,” she said. She almost said something about the dead men’s shoes she was wearing and the food they had for their supper and the leather satchel they carried it in. The telescope across her back. But she knew those things were different even if she couldn’t say how exactly.

  She stared at the diamond-shaped piece a while longer before she surrendered it. Evered retied the bag and held it a moment as he had before he’d opened it. He returned it to the spot where it had lain and hauled the stiff leather shroud back over the bodies. They covered the grave with the sheet of bark and shovelled the gravel and rocks over the platform as best they could. They knelt a few minutes longer as if some solemnity they’d never been taught was expected in the circumstances.

  Evered went off in search of more fuel after they ate their supper and they sat in the small circle of heat until they had no more wood to feed it.

  “How long you think they’ve been set there like that?” Ada asked.

  “Time out of mind I expect,” Evered said.

  They knew nothing about the Red Indians beyond stories they’d been told by their parents about seeing them in the distance years ago, paddling in their strange craft made of bark. Rare on the water but for all they knew the backcountry was overrun with them and they had never strayed far from the coastline, going no further than half a mile up the brook after their winter wood. Evered remembered a time when his father carted the old flintlock to guard against being set upon. The man was too blinkered at distance to hit anything smaller than a schooner and he hoped the noise of the powder might sow enough fright to drive a party off. But it was years without the first sign of a threat and he’d set the firearm in the store before Ada had learned to walk and it sat there practically forgotten.

  “The little one up there,” Ada said. “She can’t have been much older than Martha.”

  It was impossible to tell in their condition if the bodies were male or female but they both guessed from the way they were laid out it was a mother and child. And they both, because of their lost sister, assumed the child was a girl. Evered th
ought of the graves in the cove, of Martha on her back underground and the dead stranger lying a few feet distant. It seemed an indifferent and comfortless provision in light of what they’d just uncovered.

  They left the fire when it embered out and walked up to the rock cave farthest from the burial site. Evered brought the flintlock and set it beside them where they lay under the salvaged woollen cassock for a blanket. They had never spent a night outside the cove or in the open air before. Evered lay listening for the sound of footsteps on the beach scrag, hearing voices in the wind until it began to rain hours later, a cold October downpour that he considered would force even a savage to look for cover and stay put. And he finally drifted off.

  Ada was thinking of the bone pendant, of its rows of intricate notching so suggestive of meaning she was convinced it would come clear if only she managed to hold the image in her mind long enough. But the details had already escaped her. She slid a hand into the front pocket of her dress to touch the object she’d sleighted from Evered’s view and smuggled away from the gravesite. She rubbed her thumb across the markings scored into its surface, inspecting it blindly, memorizing each exotic detail.

  It kept her awake the whole of the night.

  * * *

  —

  They settled in for the winter, making a final accounting of the shipwrecked materials they’d salvaged and setting the food in the store or the root cellar. Ada presented the full list aloud to Martha, including the cheese which she had no name for, describing the high smell, the irresistible rank flavour. She couldn’t help thinking the infant at God’s side had a hand in their wild luck but stopped short of thanking Martha outright for fear it was The Hope that had been lost, a possibility she couldn’t square with their good fortune. Her father used to say The death of a horse is the life of a crow, and Ada had never really taken in the meaning of the phrase. But she knew it in her bones now.