The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  He shook his head. “You’re a queer creature, Ada Best.”

  “Me and you both,” she said.

  They sat up a while longer. The deep dark strangeness of the country, the black amphitheatre of hills topped by a glittering strip of stars, made them feel new to the world. They slept side by side, the ground beneath them alive with the rumble of the falls. They woke to the cold whenever the fire burned low and one or the other would add wood to the coals and breathe it to life and they fell immediately back to sleep.

  In the morning they boiled water for tea and roasted the trout fillets for their breakfast. Evered said, “You carrying on upriver?”

  “That’s what I had in me mind.”

  “That’s the worst of the walk right ahead,” he said. “You gets above the falls there and the rest of the way is pretty much clear.”

  Ada looked toward the noise of the cataract. “I could come back down with you,” she said. “If you wants.”

  He took a moment to think through the offer. Sensing it was a test of some sort. “Best you goes on,” he said finally. “You could look in on the deadfalls on your way down the brook. See if that molasses is doing any work.”

  The sun was up but the valley still sat in a dusky twilight. Evered described where she should look for the deadfall traps and about where she might find his snares. He handed off the telescope in its leather case to her and he stayed at the fire to watch her climb the falls. Picking her slow way up with all her gear on her back. That bear skull in her pack. She paused on the face two or three times, considering a way ahead. And Evered had to force himself to sit still at the fire.

  Once she’d topped the falls she turned back to the campsite and waved her tricorn hat and he raised an arm to see her off. He stood to pack his materials and when he glanced back upriver she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  It snowed off and on through the morning but not enough to slow the travel. He stopped twice in likely spots and set deadfalls in both locations. Just past noon he built a fire over the remains of Ada’s fire in the lee of the boulder above the first rattle on the river. And he carried on then to the coast and along the shore to the cove. Trying to guess how far along Ada might be on her twinned journey.

  It was still daylight when he made it home and he set a fire going in the hearth to take the chill out of the room, then skinned and cleaned the rabbit. He baked the haunches in a covered pot with potatoes and onion and carrot and turnip. He was planning to wait for Ada before eating but the evening was gone to dark with no sign and he ate his meal alone. Listening for some sound of her on the snow outside. She had the harder haul of travel, he knew, and might have kipped down somewhere as the night closed in. It might have snowed heavier inland and forced her to hole up around the lake. She had never seen a deadfall trap and could have crushed a hand or foot trying to reset a downed rock ledge.

  He should have asked her to travel back with him when she offered. Or gone up the river with her himself. But he knew that was not what she wanted.

  He should at least have shown her the use of the flintlock and sent it on with her.

  He was hours in bed without so much as shutting his eyes when she stamped through the door, shedding snow from her boots and trousers. He could feel the frost steaming off her clothes when he came up beside her at the hearth to light the slutlamp.

  “I waited awhile before I eat me supper,” he said.

  She’d glassed what she guessed were deer out on the lake, she told him, and tracked after them a couple of hours which set her behind.

  “And what did you plan to do if you come abreast of them?”

  “I just wanted to get close,” she said.

  Neither of them had laid eyes on the creatures except in Truss’s stories of hunting in Labrador and Ada described the implausible spread of antlers on their heads that looked as if they were carting a load of deadfall branches to a fire.

  “I thought about putting up somewhere after dark,” she said. “But the sky was clear by then and I had no trouble following the brook with the moon out. So I come on.”

  Evered uncovered the coals and stirred up a fire as she stripped away the layers of her kit. He was absently singing My Thing Is My Own under his breath, unaware he was singing until Ada took up the chorus with him. He set the kettle over the new heat to boil and warmed the rest of the rabbit stew.

  He could see the body of a fox laid among the shadows of her materials and he brought it out into the lamplight. A cross fox, its coat a mix of red and silver but for the muzzle and breast and the legs which were black, like some hand had dipped the animal so far in ink and lifted it out before the eyes went under. The face crushed askew by the weight of the ledge rock hammering down.

  “That was at the last set,” Ada said. “Almost walked past it in the dark.”

  He stroked the animal’s plush winter coat. “Spose you was right about the molasses,” he said.

  “I had a go at resetting the thing but couldn’t figure it.”

  “I’ll show you the works of it,” he told her. “Next time out.” It was too late to pelt the animal and he went up to the store in the moonlight to hang the fox from the rafters. When he came back Ada was sound on the bed in all her clothes and she didn’t stir when he worked her boots free of her feet and covered her with the blankets. He banked the coals and douted the lamp and then he lay beside her and fell asleep himself.

  * * *

  —

  They travelled together the rest of the winter before the ice on the brook gave way and the snow began to rot. They expanded the sets on the trapline to eleven and they went out twice a week to check them. They built a halfway lean-to below the falls on Black Bear River where they spent their nights on those rounds. They snared rabbit and shot ptarmigan and marten and three otters and, on their last trip of the season, a forty-five-pound beaver they stumbled on in the woods a hundred yards from the water. They trapped four more fox, three red and a silver, and they spent much of their time at the tilt scraping and curing the pelts.

  They seemed more or less content with their lives. They spent all their time in each other’s company and slept innocent in the same bed. Nothing at all was resolved between them but they both felt they’d reached a truce in some undeclared conflict. That they had returned to neutral corners and settled into an equilibrium that might last them.

  They turned their attention to the fish and the farm garden when the mackerel started running and fell into the relentless round of work they’d known their whole lives. When The Hope arrived in the middle of May Evered brought out the cured pelts of the fox and otter and marten and the lone beaver and the Beadle paid for them with powder and shot, with extra flour and twine and calico and two demijohns of rum and a promise to set them up with iron traps come the fall.

  And as they lay one evening in the mulish sleep of overwork, before the sun had even set, they were startled awake by a stark rap rap rap that went on a long while before they managed to sort out what was happening and how they were meant to respond.

  Someone was knocking at their door.

  Bungs Forever! Josephus Rex. Noah’s Ark.

  Evered presented himself in his undershirt and drawers and the man standing outside smiled at the youngster’s state of undress.

  “We’ve woken you,” he said. He apologized and introduced himself, John Warren, he said, of HMS Medusa. He glanced past Evered and saw the girl standing slack-jawed in her shift and he turned away, his face blushing crimson so quickly it seemed to glow.

  “We are unexpected company,” he said and he apologized again for the interruption without ever taking his eyes off the hills behind the tilt. The man had a queer rolling accent that made it difficult to follow his meaning. He suggested he give them a few minutes to make themselves presentable and they could return to their introductions then.

  “All right,” Evered said and he watched Warren walk up the path to the store where he stood with his hands at
his back. Evered closed the door and went to the window across the room, unlatching the shutter to open it a crack. There was a thirty-foot bully boat tied up at the newly raised stagehead, the crew of oarsmen loitering on the landwash.

  “What do he want, Brother?” Ada whispered.

  “He wants us to get our clothes on.”

  “After that,” Ada said. “What is it he wants of us?”

  “We won’t ever know we don’t get dressed,” he said. He threw her trousers to her and pulled on his own pants and shirt, his boots. He took the flintlock from its corner and poured in a charge of powder. He debated a moment whether to load it with shot or ball and came to the conclusion they would be equally useless if things went badly. But shot offered a wider swath of damage and confusion and he rammed in as large a load as he thought the barrel could manage.

  “What do you want with the rifle?” Ada asked.

  “There’s a crew of them down below, Sister.”

  She felt something the size of a fist clench at the crown of her head, a numbing heat there that made her scalp contract. “How many?”

  “A dozen or more,” he said. “We could make a run for the brook, head into the country.”

  Ada went still under the weight of that number. There would be no outrunning twelve or more. She conjured the man at the door, the calm lilting tone of his voice, the crimson shade of his face as he apologized for the intrusion. “We’ll be all right,” she said with a conviction born of knowing there was no contemplating the alternative. She finished pulling on her clothes and went to the hearth to start a fire. There was a knock at the door again and Evered looked to Ada.

  “All right,” she said.

  And he set the gun back in its corner before he opened the door.

  * * *

  —

  The Medusa had been laid up in St. John’s harbour since the previous June. She was a twenty-gun vessel, an old East Indiaman fit more for use as a prison hulk now than for Navy service, Warren said. Her mainmast had split in an Atlantic storm and they’d limped into port looking to replace it. They’d sent crews four miles into the woods around the town but found no materials fit to the purpose and the trees for twenty miles north and south had been cut back to bare scrub. Warren was engaged on shore for the summer months brewing spruce beer for the Navy ships in the harbour but in September he was sent north with the bully boat to find a suitable column of pine. They’d sailed as far as Fogo Island in the fall without sighting anything passable and they put up there over the winter, starting northwards again after the pack ice ground through. For two months since they’d been sculling into every bay and tickle and likely-looking river mouth without luck, coming as far as Mockbeggar and on the verge of abandoning the quest altogether before they were told about a river valley beyond Orphan Cove that might offer what they were searching for.

  “Is this it then?” Warren asked. “Is this Orphan Cove?”

  The youngsters looked at each other.

  “Was never no name to it,” Evered said. “But there’s a river a ways to the west. Black Bear River. Biggest kind of trees in there.”

  Warren bowed his head slightly as a thank-you for the information. “You two now,” he said. He blushed again in anticipation of a delicate inquiry. “You don’t have children?”

  “Children?” Evered said.

  “You’re not?” Warren said uncertainly and his face glowed darker again. “Are you two wedded?”

  Ada covered her face with her hands, mortified by the suggestion.

  “She’s me sister,” Evered told him.

  “Well bless me for a fool,” Warren said. “Yes, I see it now. Your hair,” he said to Evered, “made me think you the older by a stretch. And I’m under the influence of my time in St. John’s. Nothing,” he said, “surprised me more than the early marriage of girls in that town. I encountered twelve-year-olds who were already mothers to children of their own. Are your parents not with you?”

  “They both passed,” Evered said. “Years since.”

  “Ah,” Warren said and he nodded over the name of the cove as it had been given him in Mockbeggar.

  They could see something in his bearing shift slightly, a barely discernible acknowledgement. It reminded Evered of the first time he rowed out to The Hope, that moment when the crewmen all seemed to doff their caps in their minds.

  “I’m an orphan myself,” Warren said and he smiled at them. “My mother died giving birth to my youngest brother. And my father died after I went to sea, when I was eleven. I have no family at all to speak of anymore,” he said. “Two brothers were taken as infants. And a brother in the Navy succumbed to his wounds in the West Indies. And the last went off to America before the war and I’ve not heard a word of him since.”

  They had no idea what war he was referring to. “How long ago was that?” Ada asked.

  “What, the war?” He smiled at her in a way that made her want to kiss his cheeks. He had a gold ring in one ear and a blue kerchief about his neck. “Before you were born, I’m certain. I don’t know if Brother Lewis is alive or dead. But that’s as good as dead to me, I suppose.”

  They were all quiet a moment then.

  “Did you say,” Evered said, “you brewed spruce beer?”

  “That is one of the tasks set for me, yes.”

  Evered had brewed a batch in the fall the first two years he and Ada were alone but he’d fouled the concoction somehow. Both times it made him feel bloated and nauseous and he’d poured the bulk of it away. He abandoned the undertaking then though there was still a bag of hops in the store. “I’d give my right hand to know how to go about the job,” he said.

  Warren laughed. “Well now. There’s no cause to go to extremes. First thing tomorrow we will head for Black Bear River. And if we find what we need, we’ll be back this way within the week. A long haul to St. John’s ahead of us and the crowd below wouldn’t say no to a few days’ rest before we start.”

  * * *

  —

  The crewmen slept that night above the landwash, huddled in a shelter manged together with a tarpaulin to keep them out of the wind. Ada offered John Warren the bunk across the room but he declined for the delicacy of sharing a room with the girl. Evered crawled into the bunk they’d been roused from an hour before and turned to the wall, sound asleep before Ada had her boots and trousers off.

  It wasn’t until after the caplin rolled and sometimes on to July that warmer weather forced them into separate bunks. But something in Warren’s blush to have thought she and Evered were wed made Ada shy about lying beside her brother. She settled opposite him and she was awake much of the night. Trying to guess how old their mother was when she took up with their father. Orphans, Warren had called Ada and her brother. It was a peculiar feeling to learn there was a word for it. That they were not the only people in the world to suffer the condition.

  She imagined Evered lost to her forever in some far-flung corner of the earth, not knowing if he was quick or dead, and that seemed worse somehow than the thought of her parents adrift in the waters off the cove, of Martha lying in her grave of peat on the Downs. She thought for a long time about the fist-sized clutch of terror that had come over her after Evered announced the strangers on the landwash. That sense of dread absolute and amorphous though there was nothing vague about what lay at its root.

  She’d only been asleep an hour or two when the chorus of men’s voices woke them. It was still dark and Warren knocked before they’d managed to get a fire burning. Evered lit the lamp as Ada greeted him at the door.

  “You’ll have breakfast,” she said.

  “Already had our victuals below, Miss Ada.”

  “You’ll have tea then,” she insisted. She took him by the forearms and sat him in a chair over his protests and she turned back to the fire, stacking kindling for a quick heat.

  They heard voices from the landwash calling “Hallo, Bungs! Bungs ho!”

  “They’re anxious to set out,” Warren said.


  “What is it they’re shouting? Bungs?”

  “That’s me,” he said. “I’m Bungs. Every vessel’s cooper is called the same.”

  “We’ll walk down,” Ada said, “to see you off.”

  Warren tried to talk them out of the courtesy but they insisted. Ada put on her waistcoat which she had almost grown into and the drooping tricorn and they set off. It was a cool morning with a fair wind off the water and she thought she could smell the men below. The rising sun threw a little light into the cove as they walked out on the stagehead with Warren, the sailors already aboard the bully boat and waiting.

  “Ho, Bungs!” one of the sailors shouted at the sight of him and there was a general round of catcalling.

  “Easy, ye nest of vipers,” Warren called. “Hush up.” He extended a hand to Ada and Evered. “Our hosts were kind enough to come see us off.”

  The sailors sat in neat rows at the oars, a sour garden funk rising from the boat. Brother and sister struck dumb in the presence of that thewy squalid audience and they could only nod their hellos.

  “That’s a fine pair of madge culls you set on, Bungs,” one of the men said and laughter exploded up at them like a flock of birds flushed from cover.

  “Is that why you want a stop here on return, Bungs?” another shouted. “A voyage up the windward passage?” And the laughter ticked a notch higher.

  Ada took half a step behind Evered in the face of the strapping racket and he put a hand to her hip to tuck her further in. The exact meaning of the words were beyond them though there was no mistaking the tenor, the implication. Warren stepped in front of them both, nodding and smiling, a rabid blush turning his earlobes purple.

  “A sauce box at every oar is what I’ve got here,” he said. He had the beleaguered air of a parent embarrassed in public by his offspring. He climbed down to the stern and they cast off. “We will see you before long, God willing,” Warren said to them.