The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  * * *

  —

  Evered had never encountered anything quite like the iron traps, cold appetite mechanized with springs and trigger pans. He set the larger contraptions among the beaver houses above Third Pond in the slips kept clear of ice by the animals’ steady traffic. The smaller he laid out along Black Bear River after fox but for two that he placed below otter slides into runs of open water. They were leg-hold traps and he set them deep enough that the beavers and otter drowned once they were taken but the fox were usually alive and watching as he came up to them. Pulling back to the limit of the stake chain without taking their eyes from him. Hauling to get clear of the iron jaw as he inched in with a wooden club, killing them by hand to save on shot and powder, to avoid ruining the pelt.

  He was on the move the length of the winter to check the sets, spending more nights at the halfway tilt on Black Bear River than in the cove. Staying with Ada long enough to skin the animals he’d carted home and leaving the pelts to be cleaned and stretched by his sister when he went back to the woods. By the end of December they had seven fox, three otter and five beaver cured and ready for trade. Evered thought they might cover more than half the cost of the traps in their first season if their luck held. It made the notion of someday pulling even in the Beadle’s ledger seem more than an irrational wish and their life on the shore less of a tenuous proposition. But it didn’t offer him the comfort he would have expected to think so.

  At the tilt he was attentive where Ada’s ruined arm was concerned, doting on her in those first weeks when the flesh broke out in blisters and scales and leaked yellow crests of pus. He made a bread plaster with molasses and rum and cod-liver oil and applied the concoction to her arm, wrapping it all in a strand of linen. Every evening he removed and washed the bandage and soaked the arm in cool water. The scald was too painful to touch and they let it dry in the open air before he bundled it up again.

  But there was a ripping undercurrent to their time together that made it feel like a sentence he was serving. Her scarred arm reminding him of how he’d pinned the girl to the door, licking at her face as if it was all a lark. Though he’d shed lark for another plumage altogether by the time he’d reined her in. Pulling her head back after she took a morsel of his shoulder between her teeth. Rutting against her, making sure she felt the swollen measure of that convincer. Until she said Brother, with that disarming quiver in her voice. Please, she’d said with her face turned to one side. And the next moment he was on the floor with Ada falling over him toward the fire.

  He’d hauled her off the hearth as soon as he found his feet, dragging her to the water barrel to shove her livid arm into the cool, holding her there as the shakes overtook her. Oh Jesus Brother, she’d said, her eyes wide but seeing nothing. Oh Jesus.

  He was too panicked to see it in the moment but those words came back to him on the trapline. His bare hands in the murderous cold of a beaver pond, his flesh as numb as the black iron as he set the trap below the surface. Thinking suddenly of Ada’s arm in the water barrel, the skin coming over a raging red. That same blank look on the girl’s face, the same words whispered as when they lay naked beside the fire in the wake of the squall that nearly drowned him. Her legs snared around his hips, urging him into her. Oh Jesus Brother. Oh Jesus.

  He’d stopped seeing what he was doing and something levered the trigger pan, the jaws of the trap snapping up out of the pond like a nightmare creature and he fell back onto the snow, his face soaking wet, his heart hammering.

  “God’s nails,” he whispered.

  They shared a bunk when he stayed in the cove, neither willing to aggravate the surface calm by breaking their winter custom. But Evered was overly protective of the injured hand in the bed’s intimate quarters. He woke with a start at intervals, afraid he might roll onto it or maul it accidentally. Or he woke to Ada shifting away from the weight of his arm as if the intimacy was causing her physical pain. Eventually she slept back-on to him, guarding against his tucking into her. They were both on alert when they were together, two creatures listening for footsteps at the door. And as the winter maundered on there was something increasingly secretive about her.

  He couldn’t blame his sister for the show of indifference. Admired it almost, the heartless cold brass of her.

  * * *

  —

  He went out to take up the traps for the season in the middle of March. There had been rain off and on for weeks and the snow in the woods was soft and rotten which made for miserable travel. There was still ice on the ponds but he didn’t trust it with his weight and skirted the shoreline instead.

  He went up past Third Pond and hauled the beaver traps from the water and he walked them home across his back, the scrape and clank of iron sounding like a line of prisoners travelling in chains along the brook. He and Ada spent the evening cleaning and greasing the works with cod-liver oil and Evered hung them in the store. The next day he went up Black Bear River and stayed a night at the halfway tilt, then climbed the falls and walked on as far as the lake where he’d laid the highest of the fox traps. He backtracked down the river then, taking up each set as he came to it.

  There was a cross fox in the trap just above the falls, a young bitch taken by the right forefoot. She’d been caught since he passed the set that morning and done a wild dance to the length of the stake chain in all directions, trampling the wet snow flat. She went still as he approached and he stopped a dozen yards shy of the chain’s perimeter, laying aside the two traps he was carting and his rifle and shot bag and powder horn. She had already started gnawing at the mud-black foreleg, a ring of raw flesh showing above the iron. He loosed the cudgel from where it was tied at his waist and stepped slowly toward her.

  The leg was taken at the first joint and from its crooked angle looked to be broken. He thought she might slip clear yet and he didn’t want to panic the animal more than necessary. She limped left and right before backing away from him, dragging the trap as far as the stake chain would allow. She stood still there, her flanks heaving. He crouched toward her with his arms spread wide and she turned her face away in an oddly human fashion, watching him with one yellow eye as he raised the club. She gave a single yip and hauled against the iron, wrenching the ruined paw clear as he swung. He lunged at her, grabbing uselessly at the tail as he fell, the fox gone as quick as that on her three good legs into the bush and Evered left on his hands and knees in the wet snow.

  He knelt back on his haunches. “Fair play,” he said aloud. “Fair play, Missus Fox.” He stayed there a while collecting himself before he got to his feet. He took up the set and knocked it clear of snow and hauled the stake, feeling foolish in a way that was familiar to him though it had been years since it came over him so sharply. That he was just a youngster playing at being a man.

  It was hours back to the tilt and past dark when he arrived but he hadn’t quite outwalked that old doubt. It hissed and spit in his stomach as he ate his supper and as he sat with a glass of callibogus before the fire in the evening. He told his sister the story of coming upon the fox, its desperate hauling to break clear and his stupid lunge and fall into the snow as it disappeared into the bush. Laughing at himself, hoping he might dout that smoulder by pissing on it.

  “She got the better of me,” he said.

  Ada seemed barely to be listening to him, hove off at an awkward angle in her chair. Lately fallen into flesh he thought, from all the fresh meat they’d become accustomed to eating.

  “Missus Fox is having a grand laugh for herself now I’d say.”

  “Her leg is broke,” Ada said.

  “I expect so. She wouldn’t have managed to slip free if it wouldn’t.”

  “She’ll starve to death then.”

  He looked across at Ada, surprised. He could see a play across her face in the dim light as if she was about to cry or laugh and trying all she could to keep it at bay. She pushed herself up from the chair and walked awkwardly by him toward the bunks. And she laid her
scarred hand on his shoulder as she went past.

  Whether she meant him to draw a connection he couldn’t guess. But he saw her again pinned to the door and twisting in his grip. Her face turned to one side as he leaned in. Brother, she’d said. Please. The quiver in her voice setting him back an inch and Ada breaking wild for the open the second he relented.

  And another thought dredged into the light behind it, a dark little facet he’d never set eyes on before. Ada sitting naked in his lap, kissing his face to comfort him. Evered bawling into her shoulder and the urge rising up out of that stew as unexpected and as feral as the storm he thought would be his end. Ada’s hips rising to meet his. He never doubted her inclination, then or since. But he saw now that was too clean and simple to be the whole truth of a thing.

  If he’d been mistaken when he lifted her from the chair and laid her naked on the floor? He would have relented, he was almost certain. But he’d lost sight of the girl in the moment. Ada. His sister.

  If she’d said Brother Please with that self-same tremor in her voice, it would have brought him to his bearings. In all likelihood. Though everything thirty or forty paces ahead was suddenly shapeless and indistinct and he couldn’t swear it was so without lying to himself. Ada was moving about behind him, settling into the bunk. And he sat there until the fire burned back and he was sure she was asleep. Less certain of himself with each passing moment. He went out the door and walked up to the store and he spent the rest of the night there, lying cold and comfortless on the dirt floor.

  He came down to the tilt in the early morning and lit the fire and set the kettle to boil. Ada waking to the noise.

  “You’re up early,” she said from the darkness at the back of the room.

  “Ada,” he said. He didn’t turn his head from the fire. “I was thinking,” he said. “Perhaps I might shift over to Mockbeggar with The Hope come the spring.”

  After a minute she said, “If you says so.”

  “It might be a better chance at things,” he said. “For you and me both if it suits you to come. You might,” he said. “I don’t know. There’s men galore over there looking to marry. You’d have your pick of the lot.”

  “If you says so,” she said again.

  And he set about making their breakfast with no idea what she thought of the notion.

  The Last Hope. The Scarred Arm.

  By the beginning of May Ada couldn’t make her way into the trousers, her belly protuberant and riding so low she wasn’t able to work the waist halfway up her behind.

  She’d hidden her mother’s dress under one of the wood-shaving mattresses after Mrs. Brace questioned her about it and she knelt at the bedside to retrieve the article. Stood holding it at arm’s length. She’d expected it to be sizes too large and was surprised to see it a little small for her frame. She had a flash of her mother throwing the skirt down over her legs after Mary Oram removed her stitches, of her vow to drown herself in the cove to be clear of it all. How much like a stranger she’d seemed in that moment. Though it occurred to Ada now the stranger might have been Sarah Best stepping forward to speak her mind true. That the years of reticence while the world inflicted itself upon her might have been the false view. Even the woman’s winded laughter as she tried to fight off their father at the hearth might have been a mask for all Ada knew.

  She pulled the dress over her head and tugged the skirt down around the expanse of her stomach. She picked at the shoulders to adjust the snug fit. Slid one hand into the front pocket, her fingers closing around the knotted string Mary Oram had given her mother those years ago. She turned the relic over in her palm, thinking it was too late to do either of them any good now. And she set it back where she’d found it.

  She went to the window and opened the shingle far enough she could see Evered on the landwash, picking at some inconsequential job. Killing time away from her. They hadn’t spoken of leaving the cove since that single conversation but her brother was already gone, she thought, abandoning her to the endless line of men waiting on a wife in Mockbeggar. He slept on his own each night and made no move to rind longers for the stage or mend nets or haul seaweed up to the farm garden. Biding for The Hope’s arrival.

  She didn’t know what to blame for the sudden change but the burgeoning evidence of the child she carried. Evered wouldn’t look at her directly or sit evenings in her company and it was his turning away that forced Ada to acknowledge the fact finally. She was pregnant and Evered was shunning her. Her gravid profile like a bell rung by lepers in the Holy Lands to warn away the unafflicted.

  When the sight of her brother began filming over with tears she pulled the shutter closed, took as deep a breath as she could manage. Got on to making something for their dinner, talking aloud to the child as she went about the work.

  She’d found her way back to those one-sided conversations as a last defence against the poisonous solitude of her life. She wondered if it was possible the baby might not come, if she might carry it indefinitely and never suffer being alone again. She had no way of knowing if choice played a role in such a thing. Her mother had threatened to cut the child out with a fish knife if its arrival was delayed. Ada hadn’t reached that level of distress but it was near enough she could make it out with her naked eye.

  The baby seemed no more contented than she was and it rolled and shifted and kicked within its constricted domain. “Now Martha,” she said as the child struggled for purchase, “settle in.” She thought of the baby as a girl and thought of the girl as Martha. She had one hand always supporting some part of her weight and she could make out an elbow or a knee pushing against her, the crown of the head or a foot grazing her palm through that nebula of flesh.

  She was standing at the hearth with one hand to her belly when Evered came through the door. He stopped still when he saw Ada there in their mother’s dress, the skirt tented out by her stomach. His face going pale at the sight of that ghost from the last days of his childhood.

  “Brother,” she said.

  They ate without speaking. Evered trying to come to grips with the fact of Ada’s condition. She is with child, he thought. He had even less a notion than his sister as to how such a thing might come to pass, of what paternity entailed. He was Sennet Best’s youngster in the same fashion that the boat he used was Sennet’s boat. What fatherhood signified beyond a proprietary connection to the mother he’d never been told and he assumed the baby was John Warren’s. Josephus Rex as much as said Bungs had taken Ada as a wife in some fashion. And that was as close as Evered could come to making sense of the staggering turn of events.

  He tried not to look at Ada or at her belly but it was impossible to ignore now that he saw it for what it was. The thin material of the dress pulled taut over that full moon. And a figure passed across the face of it as he stared, the baby somersaulting languidly in the womb, Ada’s stomach dipping and shifting as the hidden life turned beneath it. He looked up at his sister, her eyes likewise wide and terrified.

  “If she comes before The Hope,” Ada said, “you’ll have to help me.”

  The hair stood up at the back of his neck. “Help you how?”

  She started crying and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  They waited then, marking the anxious interminate days of that plodding race. They had a vague notion of when they might expect The Hope but the time of the child’s arrival was a riddle to them both and there were weeks still when that event could descend upon them while they were alone on the shore.

  Ada slept only in snatches of two and three hours at a time, too uncomfortable to lay in one position longer. She dreamt often of Mary Oram, of sitting at the strange woman’s deathbed while she spoke endlessly and aimlessly about the world. Her colourful knitted cap on her head and her childlike hands gripping the edge of the blanket.

  Who is it was the father? the dream woman asked her. One of them sailors on the landwash, she said without waiting for an answer.
Or that Labrador man who come through, she said, he was a randy old fecker, that one. Mary Oram pointed a nailless finger at Ada. You soaked your feet out picking berries, she said before drifting to some unrelated topic.

  The substance of the woman’s monologues was specific and clear while Ada slept but little remained of them when she woke beyond a vague feeling of blessing or unease. A word here or there. A finger pointed from the bed in a gesture that might have been accusatory or conspiratorial.

  It idn’t much, the woman announced from her imaginary deathbed. A life, she said. I put more into it than twas worth in the end. Mary Oram nodded across at Ada. She said, I expect mine was much like everyone else’s in that particular.

  Evered worked outside as much as he could through the month of May, stringing out one job or another to pass the days, packing up the few materials in the store that would accompany them when they left the cove. Though he never strayed further than a shout from the tilt. As they crept up on time for the caplin scull he started to think they might make it through to The Hope, that he would be spared delivering Ada’s child. He remembered raking out the sand floor of the tilt after Martha was born, the miry dregs of it, the astonishing volume of gore, and he had little desire to stand at the centre of whatever gruesome operation had produced that mess.

  But it was the intimacy of the process he had no stomach for. He couldn’t bring himself to revisit the questions that came up the day he lost the cross fox for fear the answers would be less ambiguous and more damning. Just being in Ada’s company stirred up the boggy shame that had picked at him ever since. The thought of facing his sister as the baby came into the world through whatever unlikely entrance was available made Evered feel lightheaded and faint. Deliverance was what he wished for and it was only The Hope that promised it.