The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  “Come on, Sixpence,” a sailor called. “Are ye fish or fowl?”

  And Evered got to his feet with the rest as they wagged their lobcocks in the dark light of the fire.

  “The pretty lad now,” someone shouted over the naked laughter. “Make a signal, young sir! Hoist your flag!”

  Warren was at her shoulder then and lifting her from her seat, turning her up the rise toward the tilt. A chorus of boos following after them. Ada half-sorry to be escorted away, the display too farcical to carry any real menace. It was the threat she’d felt radiating off the sailors when they first arrived turned on its head, tatted up in a fool’s rags to be ridiculed. And as long as Warren was with her she felt safe enough to laugh.

  Ada tried to imagine her protector with his pants at his ankles and casually waving his bits, a sailor like the rest, and the thought brought on a fit of giggles that she refused to explain. It seemed impossible to her that Warren would have joined in the exhibition at a different time in his life or under different circumstances. Though she was beginning to suspect a person might not be one simple thing, uniform and constant. They ate alone at the tilt the next evening, Warren not willing to expose Ada to the men in their cups again though it seemed a loss to her.

  On the last morning they had together Ada asked again about the convict ship and Warren’s time with Nance Phair.

  “You haven’t heard enough of my troubles?”

  “I can’t believe she was transported for borrowing a friend’s mantle is all.”

  “Why would anyone?” he said.

  She waited.

  He said, “When I went to see her mother and father in Lincoln I discovered she’d stolen six yards of black chintz cotton, a Coventry tammy gown, a quilted petticoat, a black silk hat, a pair of leather shoes.” He waved his hand. “A pair of stays, half a dozen silk handkerchiefs. I’ve forgotten the entire list. She was a thief, my Nance. Every finger a fish hook.” He looked across at Ada with a sad wry smile. “I’ve never told anyone the truth of that before,” he said and he seemed relieved to offer it up without prevarication finally.

  “Do you ever worry,” Ada said. “About how your daughter? I mean.” She trailed off, sorry to have raised the issue.

  “Nance used to read my Bible on the voyage out,” he said. “More than ever I did. Which is why I left it with her when I sailed away.” He shrugged helplessly. “It might be something in her was changed by what she read there. I pray it was so.”

  Ada was quiet then, long enough that Warren asked her if everything was all right, if he’d said something to upset her.

  “I was just wondering why it is some people come to read and not others,” she said.

  “I was taught from the time I was a little one. And my brothers the same.”

  “It was taught you?” Ada said.

  “Of course,” he said and he laughed.

  “I thought it was something you was born knowing,” she said. “Or not knowing.”

  He shook his head but knew better than to laugh a second time. “Anyone can learn to read,” he said.

  Ada got up from her chair and went to fetch the clothbound journal on the shelf over her bed. She said, “I wants you to read this. If you would. As a favour to me.”

  “Where did you come across this then?”

  “In the pocket of me waistcoat,” she said. “Out on the ship was icebound.”

  Warren turned it over in his hands several times before he opened it and flipped through. The pages were water-buckled and some stuck together and much of the writing was illegible with having been soaked sometime before. “Most of it is ruined of course,” he said. He turned to the opening page. “‘Joseph Knott,’” he read. “‘His Book. Consisting of A Journey from Saint John, New Brunswick to Limerick, Ireland aboard The Ark of Malaga.’” Warren smiled and shook his head. “I knew the vessel,” he said.

  “That idn’t true,” Ada shouted.

  “Sure and it is,” Warren insisted. “I could list half the British ships at sea, crossing paths with them in one port or another. When I knew her she was captained by a man name of Noah. Noah’s Ark we called her. But he’s long since dead now.” He turned back to the journal, whisper-read phrases as he turned the pages. “‘Departed Saint John, September 15th…passing through the Strait of Belle Isle, cold stormy weather…inclement, most passengers ill and myself among them.’” He turned past a number of indecipherable pages and then read silently a minute. “Mr. Knott records they struck a storm out on the Banks,” he said. “It blew the better part of three days and the Ark lost her rigging and her masts and most of the rail besides.”

  “She was in a sorry state when we went out to her,” Ada said.

  Warren turned a page, made a noise in his chest. “The crew thought the ship lost and abandoned her,” he said. “They took every boat and left the passengers to their fate.” He whisper-read again. “‘Still adrift and no sign of land or rescue…fall of snow for seven days and everything above decks encased in ice…this morning we buried five of our number at sea…as forlorn a Christmastide as ever a man could pass…two more have perished overnight.’”

  Warren looked up from the journal and took a breath. “When was it you walked out to this ship?” he asked.

  “April or May month a year ago,” she said.

  “And there was someone keeping a fire in the stove out there?”

  “Up to a week or so before we walked out.”

  Warren stared at the ceiling, his lips moving as he counted up the months. “Miss Ada,” he said. “I don’t think we should carry on with this.”

  “Evered saw something,” she said. “When we was leaving the ship. He’ve never said a word about it. But I knows it torments him still.”

  “You knowing what he knows won’t spare him that.”

  She said, “He wouldn’t be alone with it at least.”

  Warren considered her a few moments before reading silently ahead. “They drifted into ice in January,” he reported. “I imagine they’d been driven up around Greenland. I was icebound on a whaling vessel off that coast for seventeen days years ago. I expected we would die there like that, stuck fast.” He tried to separate several pages held together but couldn’t manage the delicate job and turned past them. “They were weeks in that condition when the ice cracked the timbers amidships and sea water filled the lower decks.”

  “We saw that,” Ada said. “Evered did. When he went snooping below.”

  “There were only ten of them left alive by this time,” he said. “They burned wood pried from the decks to keep warm.” He turned the page. “They ate the last of the ship’s provisions before the end of February.”

  “They still had food aboard,” Ada said. “There was a pot of food on the stove when we was there.”

  Warren reached a hand and placed it over hers. He said, “You didn’t eat any of what was in that pot did you, Ada?” His face was glowing red again, like a lamp warning off catastrophe.

  “No,” she said. “We. It wouldn’t fit from the look of it. We eat the bit of food we carried out with us.”

  Warren sat back in his chair. He looked exhausted. He flipped ahead a few pages and then closed the book on his lap. “Your man Mr. Knott,” he said and he tapped the journal with an index finger, “was among the last few alive. He saw the worst of it.” And then he said, “I think we would do well to stop there. If you will permit me.”

  She nodded without looking at him. “Could it be true?” she whispered. “They could do that to other people?”

  “I’ve heard the like,” Warren said. “In circumstances of similar distress.”

  “Distress don’t seem warrant enough for such a thing.”

  “We live in a fallen world,” he said. “And easy enough to judge anchored at a fire with a plate of food and a pocket full of tender.”

  Warren got up to place a junk of wood on the coals and he passed the journal to Ada. “You ought to burn this,” he said. “Why?” she said. �
��Would that change what happened?”

  “I suppose not, no. It wouldn’t. Not one whit.”

  He shook his head.

  “Still,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  There was a fire on the landwash the last night the sailors were with them though they were relatively subdued and judicious in their drinking with a full day’s rowing ahead and untold days beyond that to St. John’s. They roasted caplin over the open flame until they were blackened and ate them head and tail together. They had nearly run through their liquor supply and they broke into the smaller barrel of spruce beer Bungs had brewed, adding a shot of rum to each glass, a drink they said Americans called callibogus. Ada convinced Warren to walk down for a few minutes before it was gone to dark and they stayed an hour with the crowd, listening as the men traded songs and stories and insults.

  Ada watched Evered across the fire. Picturing him with his pants at his knees among the troop of half-naked men, the drunken grin on his face. And a queasy shudder passed through her, thinking of what it was he might have seen aboard Noah’s Ark that caught in his flesh like a hook. It hardly seemed possible both those experiences could inhabit the same frame at the one time. They should be different people, she thought, those two boys.

  Warren took her up to the tilt before the cove was dark enough to reflect the moon, Ada saying her good-nights to the men as they coaxed her to stay longer.

  “Pity us,” one sailor said. “We’ll have nothing to look at but Bungs’ ugly mug for days on end. Spare us a few more minutes.”

  Evered watched them as they left the fire, his sister walking close enough to the older man that their shoulders touched. He didn’t know if the sailor he’d fought on the Downs was only having a bit of fun or if there was some truth to his insinuation. He thought of their stories of the Sandwich Islands where the sailors took a wife among the local women while they were at anchor.

  “Ho, Sixpence,” one of the sailors said, “have you a song for us?”

  He shook his head and Josephus Rex groaned in disbelief.

  “One song, John-a-Nokes,” someone said.

  “Every nigmenog got a song in them.”

  And because it was the only one he knew beginning to end he told the sailors the story of old Mr. Lucas’s goat and offered up a rendition of My Thing Is My Own.

  Ada and Warren were at the hearth by then, listening to the voices below.

  “That’s your brother singing,” Warren said.

  “I think it is,” Ada said. Though it sounded to her like someone she barely knew. “You’ll be off early,” she said.

  “First thing,” he said. “Yes.”

  They heard the men below start in on Here’s to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen and they were quiet while it lasted.

  “You never mentioned,” Ada said then. “What was your daughter’s name?”

  “Sarah we called her.”

  Ada put a hand to her mouth.

  “What?” Warren said. “What have I said?”

  “Sarah was Mother’s name,” she told him.

  “Well,” he said.

  Ada could see he relished the weight that bit of happenstance carried between himself and the orphan girl who was the same age as his vanished daughter.

  “I wish,” he said, “when I gave my Bible to Nance that I’d written Sarah’s name beside her mother’s and mine. It seems a terrible oversight not to have done.”

  “Yes,” Ada agreed quietly. “So it do.”

  Before they douted the lamp she went to the shelf to retrieve the necklaces she’d fashioned with the bear’s teeth and she made a gift of one to Warren. He bowed his head to allow her to set it around his neck. And she handed him the second necklace and bowed her head to allow him to do the same for her.

  * * *

  —

  The cove was awake before light and the crewmen busied themselves packing the boat with the riveted copper pot and tarpaulins and the assorted gear they’d hauled ashore for one reason or other in the previous days. Setting about the work with a regimented ease so practised and complete it felt to Ada and Evered they had been left behind even before the boat cast off.

  The sailors set their oars when the sun stood a hand above the water and as they rowed for the skerries they sang out their goodbyes to brother and sister watching from the stage. The boat rounded the eastern arm and the youngsters ran the path to the Downs where they had a view of the ocean beyond the cove. Ada had her telescope and they passed the glass back and forth until the vessel and its crew were beyond the horizon and crossed to the other side of the earth. They were standing close enough to touch and eventually they did, leaning into the other’s weight.

  Ada said, “You wishes you was going off with them I imagine.”

  “Only half so much as yourself,” he said.

  They were heartbroken to see their visitors leave, as they expected. The heartbreak was an old familiar they’d long since learned to accommodate, making up a bed in the same corner where their mother and father did not sleep, placing an extra chair at the table next to Martha’s empty seat. But there was another blade at work that had never before touched them. It barely registered in the morning’s glaring loss but that sting would grow sharper and more distinct as the season passed.

  They had all their lives been the one thing the other looked to first and last, the one article needed to feel complete whatever else was taken from them or mislaid in the dark. But each in their own way was beginning to doubt their pairing was requisite to what they might want from life.

  The Hope. A Marauding Army.

  They fell into the heart of the season with the same regimented enterprise the sailors displayed as they readied to leave the cove. They rose in the dark and strapped themselves to the day as it lurched into motion, Evered on the water in all weather, Ada beetling through the interminable bog of shore work. They stood opposite each other at the splitting table through the middle of each day and through much of the long evenings as well, gutting and salting the endless parade of cod by the orange light of the slutlamp, nursing their fatigue and loneliness in the last hours with a mug of callibogus at their elbows.

  They were newly attentive to one another even as they were furiously treading water to keep ahead of the fish, burnishing their losses by recounting the antics of Josephus Rex, by walking through Warren’s journeys to the four corners of the earth. It was as if they had been away on separate trips and were trading stories of what they’d seen and heard while they were travelling. When they flagged too far for conversation Evered picked his way through a handful of the drinking songs he’d learned at the fire above the landwash.

  Once they’d cleared the last of the day’s catch they climbed the rise in the pitch black and the cold rain and the faffering wind, the little glow set alight in their chests by the rum all that kept them upright. They left the blanket that separated the beds in place and bunked on opposite sides of the room though they spoke a few minutes across that barrier before they fell into the void. The first to wake in the morning set the fire and boiled water for tea before disturbing the other’s rest to begin the next iteration of the season’s droning round.

  The only reprieve in those devouring days was weather too foul to chance the water, rain drifting sideways in a gale, foam clipping off the lip of whitecaps on the ocean. If it was too fierce even to be out at the garden or on the landwash or in the woods they turned to indoor tasks, tending the fishing gear, mending clothes or treating their leather boots with cod-liver oil, razoring the splitting knives on a sharpening stone.

  They both gave in to sleep through those rare sedentary days, drifting off in their seats with their hands still holding the materials they were working on. It was the only time through the season that they dreamt or remembered their dreams which were most often reflections of the labour that choked their conscious lives. The heavy chain of fish cranked across the splitting table one link at a time, the creak and smack of the boat’s
milling oars. Ada hauling water from the brook in her sleep, the weight of the buckets growing with each step and her feet sinking into the beaten path up to her knees, calling to Evered for help and waking herself with that throttled effort.

  Evered dreaming himself with two lines down on the shoal ground and raising the fish the way his father had, watching the swarming school drift upward with an eerie uniformity, languid but purposeful as it came out of the black into shadowy light. No wind, the ocean dead calm. And a fear rising in him at the same steady rate, a panic to draw in the lines though he stood paralyzed at the gunwales. The fish coming clear in the blue light and the corpses he’d seen aboard the Ark borne up on that writhing platter like an offering from the deep, the flayed limbs animate and reaching for the surface.

  He twitched and moaned in his chair, Ada calling his name and pinching his earlobes to bring him back to the world.

  “You was lost in the dawnies again,” she said. “What was it you was dreaming about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some old foolishness.”

  “You’re an awful liar, Brother.”

  He shrugged. “It idn’t for lack of practice,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  They clawed their way toward September.

  There was a week of prime drying weather in late August and they packed the cured fish into the bulkheads on the stage. The Hope sailed into view before the first of September, earlier than they could remember seeing it. They loaded the boat to ferry out the salt cod and when Evered climbed aboard he repeated his ritual greetings with the crewmen and they passed around a bottle of rum as they reacquainted themselves. Evered grown nearly the height of the crewmen now, despite the years of deprivation. They asked after the season’s luck and how the young maid was and whether it wasn’t time to find a man to marry her.

  “Lots of fellows down in Mockbeggar lacking a woman,” one of them said. “She could just about write her own ticket if she’ve a mind to.”