“Don’t we owe it to them to learn what we can of their ways before they disappear altogether?” Truss said. “To keep something of them alive?”
They’d reached the boat, the oarsmen up to their knees and holding the gunwales to steady her.
Evered said, “If it was me, I expect I’d want to be left alone out of it.”
Truss stared at the youngster as if the sentiment surprised him. Evered stood aside to allow the Captain to step in and he took a seat at the transom.
“Perhaps that’s all they ever wanted,” Truss said. “To be left alone. But we will likely never know for certain now.”
Evered knelt at the bow and watched the coast as it passed. They approached the cliff cave and its gravesite and he expected any moment to hear Truss order a landing to investigate. But when he finally spoke up Truss said, “We’ll make a little detour up the river on our way along. Perhaps we’ll find something to shoot and the day won’t have been a total loss.”
And he nodded yessir without looking back to the stern.
* * *
—
Ada woke that morning to a relapse of infirmity. Dressing and sitting up for the meal, walking down to the brook with Mrs. Brace, even that little had asked too much of her. She’d slept poorly, awake half the night with violent coughing spells and was too weak to leave the bed. Mid-morning Mrs. Brace offered a concoction of Labrador tea laced with a medicinal helping of brandy and Ada travelled the rest of the day through swampy dreams that she had trouble distinguishing from the waking world when she stirred.
At times she thought she had climbed from her bunk and called to Mrs. Brace for help and then came to herself still lying in the bed, all of her senses swollen and logy. She woke to the sound of the woman crying at some point and lifted her head to see Mrs. Brace sitting on the lap of a man, her arms about his neck, her face pushed into his shoulder to muffle the mewling sound of her weeping. All she could see of the man was the bald crown of his head. She drifted off again when she laid back, trying to puzzle who he might be and what grief was being consoled.
It was near dark when she sat up, fully awake for the first time in hours, shaky and parched. Mrs. Brace was sitting alone by the hearth and brought her water when she called. Ada had forgotten the man in the chair and Mrs. Brace made no mention of his presence. It was hours later that the image came back to her, too precise and unambiguous to be from a dream she decided, though Mrs. Brace offered no hint and showed no trace of that sad encounter. It made Ada think the heartbreak was too private a concern to raise and she never asked after it.
* * *
—
The river was forty to fifty feet wide at the mouth and fathoms deep in the middle. They rowed almost a mile inland where the first whitewater rattle made it impossible to go further by boat. “We’ll have a wander,” Truss said, “and see what we shall see.” He and Evered were landed on the eastern shore and they walked up beyond the rapids where the river turned sharply west and deepened again. The trees grew almost to the water which forced them to walk single file. There were signs of otter on the banks and rainbow trout in the deepest pools. But no game crossed their path and Truss was about ready to turn back when he held his hand in the air, signalling for Evered to keep still.
The Captain was blocking his view ahead and it was a minute later before he saw them, two black bears in the river and riding the current downstream. Truss unslung his Hanoverian and dropped to one knee on the bank. “Bitch-bear and cub,” he whispered. “The young one is a yearling at least to judge by its size.”
He passed the rifle to the youngster. “Your game, Mr. Best. The mother first,” he said softly. “You’ll want to aim for the head, just behind the eye.”
They were six feet above the water and the bears were directly below them when Evered fired and the animal went slack in the water. The cub was startled by the shot and bewildered by the dam’s unresponsiveness as it pawed at her hind quarters. It glared up at the two men on the bank and seemed to come to some understanding of its mother’s condition and those responsible for it in the same moment.
“You’ll want to reload,” Truss said evenly.
Evered took a ball from a compartment in the rifle’s stock and wadded it home with the ramrod as the cub came out of the river thirty yards below them, roaring as if it had been wounded itself. The sight put Evered into a panic and he snapped the rod in the barrel.
“God’s nails,” he said.
Truss stepped in front of the youngster and raised the shotgun. “What have you loaded her with?”
“A bit of small shot. Enough to kill a bird is all.”
“It will have to do.”
Truss fired at the bear’s face and sat the creature back on its haunches, the left eye riven and extinguished in its socket. It turned in circles, howling and pawing at its forehead and snout which were covered in blood. “And if thy right eye offend thee,” Truss said as he poured powder into the barrel. He rammed a handful of shot without wadding as the bear shook itself and surged toward them. “Pluck it out,” Truss said, “and cast it from thee.” The second shot blinded the creature and it pawed at its ruined face again, turning wildly before it struck the ground with its front legs and blundered into the woods, bawling helplessly and smacking its head off every rock and every tree in its way.
Truss took the Hanoverian from Evered’s hands and managed to free the ramrod from the barrel. He reloaded it as best he could with the broken instrument.
“I made a shaggery of that,” Evered said.
“A lot of men would have turned tail and run,” Truss said. “And you have meat enough to get you a ways through the winter. That is some consolation.”
And Evered nodded yessir.
The bitch-bear had floated a hundred yards downstream before bringing up on the near shore and they walked down to it, past the noise of the cub bellowing as it knocked blindly through the woods. They had as much as they could manage with the mother and Truss decided against wasting a ball to dispatch the yearling, unsure if he would be able to reload a second time. The carcass had rolled in the water’s current and was lying on its back. They each grabbed a limb and tried to haul it further from the river but they couldn’t budge the massive weight of the animal.
Truss sent Evered to collect the men waiting with the boat and together they shifted the bear a little ways out of the water. The cub was still crying in the woods behind them, floundering through the trees as Truss measured its mother’s body from nose to tail and the span of its limbs. “She’s as big as the white bears I’ve shot in Labrador,” he said. And they fell to gutting and quartering the animal on the riverbank.
Truss worked a blade up through the paunch and he tipped the offal in handfuls into the moving current. He picked out the kidney and liver and set them on a rock. “In Scotland,” he said to Evered, “they have a tradition for a hunter who makes his first kill.” And without warning he brought both his hands up to the youngster’s face. Evered reared back but couldn’t escape the reach of the Captain’s arms, his head disappearing in the grip of those huge mitts as they smeared his cheeks and mouth, his white hair and forehead and closed eyes with the guts and blood of the bear. The two servants laughing and applauding the baptism as Evered spat the iron muck from his mouth. He shook his head like a wet dog, he wiped at his anointed eyes with a sleeve. The stink of the gore in his nostrils.
“You must wear that,” Truss said, “until we get the meat back to the cove.” And he smiled. “Be grateful it’s too late in the season for flies.”
It was all tainted a little by his breaking the ramrod in a green panic, by the transparency of his misdirection to steer the Captain clear of the Indian grave. But Evered was almost happy, standing knee-deep in the river with a rank skim of viscera drying on his face, hacking at the bear’s shoulder joint with a hatchet. Happier, he thought, than any time since his father and mother were alive.
They spent the rest of the afternoon butchering
the animal and transporting the meat to the boat. The quarters weighed over a hundred pounds apiece and they tied each to a line to float them one at a time through the rapids to the wherry. They tied up the creature’s humbles in a square of canvas and it took both oarsmen to cart the weight of the heart and liver and kidney and lights downriver. Truss made a last trip to the remains of the carcass with a hatchet as they loaded the spoils into the boat and he came back with the bear’s eye teeth for Ada’s collection.
And they abandoned the blind cub to the indiscriminate work of nature.
The Blind Cub. Her Cross Fox.
It snowed all morning and all afternoon of the day The Hydra left them, a solemn windless fall that gave a funereal air to the departure. It fell on the landwash and on the tilt and the farm garden and on the stack of blackened wood where Evered had collected the remains of the stage. It fell on him and on Ada where they stood watching the ship’s boat making for the skerries with Captain Truss and Mrs. Brace aboard. Both knowing they would never lay eyes on their chance benefactors again.
Truss had taken the bulk of the bear meat for the voyage to England but he left a quarter with the youngsters. When they’d arrived with the butchered carcass and Truss presented Ada with the prize teeth she’d asked if the bear was a dam and if there was a young one with her.
“A yearling or so, yes,” Truss said. “How did you know?”
Evered was washing the crusted blood from his face and hair in a bucket of water at the hearth. “She’s a bit of a witch that one,” he said.
Ada pushed the Indian pendant on Truss before they left. As trade for the bear teeth she said. Though she meant it as compensation for his missing the burial site which she never doubted Evered steered clear of deliberately. Truss insisted in turn on paying for the pendant with two gallons of powder, a box of twenty balls and three bags of shot. Even the youngsters could see it was an extravagance, a grant Truss presented in hopes of keeping them from starving through the winter. Mrs. Brace left them a long woollen gansey that the youngsters traded back and forth at intervals.
It carried on snowing for most of the week that followed as if to lay a muffle over the quiet that descended on the cove in the vessel’s absence. Ada and Evered so thrown by the rhythm of regular company that they couldn’t quite recover the kilter of being left to themselves. Ada was still suffering the lingering effects of the illness that had all but killed her and Evered went alone into the hills to haul out the season’s firewood. Ada set as much of the bear meat as could be fit into the brine that kept their pork and she salted the rest and hung it from the storehouse rafters. When Evered was done sawing and junking the firewood he spent most of his days in the backcountry with his father’s flintlock.
He was happiest that winter on his own in the woods. There was the simple pleasure of hunting. And there were the onanistic indulgences that the privacy of the woods afforded him, these latter activities focused now on the figure of Mrs. Brace, on the memory of her breasts cradling his head, of the lewd nickers he heard in the dark each night she’d slept at the tilt.
It was a relief to have an object for his attention that didn’t inspire a residual shame. But he couldn’t avoid the sense he was being an unfaithful servant to the Captain and edited all signs of Truss from his imaginings. Placing the housekeeper naked before the Beadle’s desk to hear her whispering helpless with that cadaverous hand upon her. Or lying back to take the Duke of Limbs between her legs, the cold slap of skin on skin as he’d heard it from the other side of the blanket. It was the one intimacy that everything between the siblings seemed a prelude to. But some hesitation had always stopped them short, a shared vertigo that stayed them at the edge. Though it was sometimes Evered and sometimes Ada alone who turned away from that sheer, sudden drop.
Even after it turned too cold and inclement to satisfy his prurient habit in the wild Evered was out the door at first light. He followed the brook upstream past the necklace of ponds, tailing rabbit slips along the way. He stopped an hour or two near the beaver house on Third Pond, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mythical creature, to get a clear shot at the thing.
Wherever he found a flat stone heavy enough for the job Evered set a deadfall trap, baiting the trigger with rancid strips of bear fat. But he had no luck. There were often fox tracks criss-crossing the snow around the sets and sometimes the ledge rock had fallen but the animal always managed to escape. Sometimes the bait was stolen, the rock still standing on the set post. And on occasion a fox left him a little gift in trade, a jay’s wing or the head of a ptarmigan laid beside the trigger stick. It seemed a deliberate taunt. Evered was judicious with the gun, husbanding the powder and shot to make it last the winter. But he sometimes sat vigil in a blind near a deadfall, thinking he would have to shoot a fox to take one. Keeping still until the cold and his own impatience forced him to move on.
It was a torment and a respite to be away from his sister, to escape the confines of time spent with someone he would have died for and could hardly manage to speak to anymore. All the days of his life had been inclined to her orbit and he canted toward her still though she seemed as distant as the moon. Even when they were together in the tilt she sat somewhere out of reach. Where Ada was concerned he felt he was the blinder in their childhood game, reeving around sightless with his useless hands before his face.
After the mid-winter freeze-up the snow was firm enough he didn’t need his Indian racquets and he was able to cut directly across the iced-over ponds. He expanded the range of his travel each time out, following the brook into a treeless stretch of bog where even from the low ground he spotted three beaver dams and the mounds of several houses. He stayed with the brook which broadened as he went and eventually it led him to a sprawling inland lake, the far shore miles across the surface. He skirted the beach westward until he struck a river that still ran free where it was deepest.
The sun was crossing mid-afternoon and he turned for home to avoid being caught out too long in darkness. But he considered he’d likely struck the head of Black Bear River as Truss had christened it that fall afternoon. And before he made it back to the tilt he was already planning to box the compass of that circle.
* * *
—
Evered laid out the scheme to Ada as he tucked into a stew of bear meat and root vegetables, ravenous and exhausted and surprisingly talkative. Describing the countryside beyond the beaver pond, the size of the lake in there, Sister, twice the breadth of the cove or more, and the riverhead he’d struck walking the northern end.
It was a relief to Ada to hear him talking, overtaken by a new enthusiasm and unselfconscious in her company for the first time since The Hydra left the shore. Since long before that, she thought. She felt a rush of affection for him as he shovelled food into his gob and waxed on about the minutiae of what he’d done and seen since the last time they spoke. As if he hadn’t fully experienced his own life until his sister was apprised of its every detail.
“Perhaps I could go along with you,” she said.
He glanced up from his bowl with the expression of someone who’d caught himself slipping off a cliff edge and was still falling in his mind’s eye. “You’re only just on your feet,” he said.
“I won’t hold you up,” she said. “A rank cripple like yourself.” She tried to smile across at him though her face felt wooden.
He shook his head again. “We’d be out in the woods one night the least,” he said. “And we’d be coming back to a cold house. I’d sooner there was a fire and a mug of tea waiting when I gets in.”
Ada nodded and watched him eat his food. He carried on discussing his plans but there was a muted air to his talk suddenly. And she could hardly hear him over the noise in her head. It seemed a frightening prospect, she thought, to spend any length of time in her company.
“When do you expect you’ll be going?”
“Day after tomorrow if the weather holds decent.” And as an afterthought he said, “You’ll be all righ
t here while I’m gone will you?”
“You needn’t worry about me,” she said.
His absences through the winter she’d taken in stride. She’d never spent as long a time alone and indolent but wasn’t well enough to go with him after The Hydra departed. And she was nursing her own small sense of loss that satisfied her to brood in private awhile. She puttered around the tilt aimlessly, repacking the log seams with moss harvested before the illness struck them, scrubbing and oiling the cast-iron pots. She filed a notch at the root of the bear teeth that she circled with fishing twine, ran leather strings through the knotted loop to make necklaces after the fashion she recalled from the Indian burial.
She spent time leafing through the curled and bleary pages of the cloth-covered book from the icebound ship. She raked the floor and mimicked some of the handwriting’s inscrutable patterns in the sand, that curious landscape of headlands and valleys and waves and trees and stones.
She went through the other contents of her shelf, culling the shells and rocks and feathers that had lost their lustre, objects that had once possessed a hint of magic or beauty or mystery and now seemed merely ordinary. It was confounding to see magic and beauty and mystery leach out of a thing, to think it could be used up like a store of winter supplies.
She watched Evered finish the last of his meal, wondering if the same might be true of a person, of how two people felt about each other.
* * *
—
Evered went to bed almost as soon as he was done eating but Ada sat up for a time, wanting to be sure he was asleep before she crawled in beside him.
Once the fire burned off she banked a circle of coals under ash and turned an iron pot over top to keep the embers alive through the night. It was already cold in the tilt, currents of frost sieving through the log seams, through the closed window shutter and the ship door’s frame. She stripped down to her shift in the black, the chill raising goosebumps the length of her arms. Evered was snoring softly as she lifted the covers and eased in beside him. She curled toward his back, close enough she could feel the radiating heat without touching him.
The Innocents Page 16