Sylvanus Now

by Donna Morrissey

  PART THREE

  Sylvanus

  SUMMER 1953 TO WINTER 1955

  CHAPTER NINE

  A GREATER MAN

  HE STARTED BUILDING her a house on the meadow, door facing the woods, windows facing the neck, and a solid wall facing the houses and flakes of Cooney Arm—not that she asked for a wall with no windows. No, sir, she never said nothing about that, but he knew how she hated the sight of the flakes, how she liked being by herself, feeling alone, and no doubt if he’d asked, she would’ve wanted it. Foolery, tut-tutted the folk, building so close to the neck, and twice as foolish placing one’s door direct to the wind. And what of this—a wall with no window? Sure, how you going to see anything?

  Cup after cup of tea was poured and emptied as the women sat through the fall at Eva’s table, peering out the window as Sylvanus, with the help of Manny and Jake and whoever else had time that day, sawed, hammered, and nailed, and she—the girl he married—all the time traipsing through the meadow or sitting by the falls, stuffing her mouth with a steady supply of blackcurrants she kept in her pocket. Glad they were that Eva’s clumsy galoot of a youngest had found himself a girl; but, gawd, she was standoffish. Aside from a few dalliances around the outport when Sylvanus first brought her home, she hardly poked her nose alongshore; a quick cup of tea with Manny and Melita, once, and not even that with Jake and Elsie.

  “Got to go,” Adelaide had said one evening, standing on Elsie’s stoop, “Sylvanus is waiting.”

  “Come as far as the door and wouldn’t come in,” said Elsie to her neighbours afterwards, “and she with the look of the devil then when she ran off, as though it were spit I offered and not tea.”

  Sylvanus is waiting! they scorned. Yes, for sure now, Sylvanus got some say about where that one goes or don’t go, the way she dragged him off to the United Church in Hampden to be married, and the both of them Anglicans. And inviting not a soul, except Suze Brett, for a witness. And Sylvanus, then, foolish enough to allow it. Yes, brother, he got himself a good one, there. Like Jake said now, she might have nice knockers, but that sickly white skin don’t hold promise, and they’d see how well she’d do, living by herself on the other side of the brook, her back to them all. And Sylvanus! Poor fool, they charged when one day after Adelaide had wandered up through the woods, he threw his hammer down and gathered a bunch of holly and heather, speckled with the pale yellow blooms of the honeysuckle shrubs growing beside the brook, and laid them on the rock where she always sat. And with the men watching. Foolish. He’d gone foolish.

  Sylvanus nodded, knowing their talk and thinking nothing of it. Adelaide told him what she overheard Jake saying that day she’d walked away from his wife’s invitation to tea. “Weaker than a cripple,” he’d said about her, and even though he hadn’t seen her standing in the doorway, Elsie had. Yet Elsie had said nothing to explain to the rest of the outporters why her guest had so quickly departed. Which left Adelaide arguing with Sylvanus that Elsie must think her weaker than a cripple too, and if Elsie thought her weaker than a cripple, then for sure that’s what everybody was thinking and saying. And for sure they would’ve heard the doozy stories from the folk up in Ragged Rock about how she was always lying about, up to her throat in dirt—no matter she worked like the dog on the flakes all them summers.

  “But they never heard no such talk,” protested Sylvanus after she went on so. “At least, I never heard any talk about you, and for sure I’d have it heard from Melita or Elsie by now, if they had. You always sounds so mad, Addie, when you’re talking about people.”

  “That’s what Mother said, how I was all the time mad, and why wouldn’t I be with everyone calling me lazy because I’d rather work my mind than my back? Ooh, don’t bother with it, Syllie, I knows it’s mostly in my head, but a lazy, grubby girl is how I feels when I’m amongst women, and that’s that.”

  “How come you thinks yourself higher, then? Yes, you do think yourself higher,” he argued as she opened her mouth to protest. “I hears it every time you talks about everybody else.”

  “Perhaps that’s what comes out of staying home and minding your own business, it makes you think yourself higher. For sure the lowest kind is them you sees out snooping through other people’s houses, sniffing out dirt and then going home yarning about it. Oh, don’t argue with me, Syllie, I knows how people’s talk takes on. They starts out on one thing, ends up on another, and plies everything in the middle to fit what they wants it to— which is fine if they’re trying to make you look good. But we all knows if it’s not shocking, it’s not interesting. So, believe me, it’s not ‘good’ they spends their time talking about. And”—she gave a short laugh—“everything they bad-mouths against is things I’d rather be doing myself than sitting with them. Besides, I likes being by myself, simple as that.”

  And that was her final say on the matter. No odds. She was quick to start talking about something else. Sure, he’d’ve liked it if she was more friendly with the folk in Cooney Arm, cut down on their talk. But aside from feeling like a misfit amongst neighbours, she really did like being alone, and what could he say about that when all he himself ever wanted was to be alone in a boat, jigging cod?

  Yup, she suited him fine, his Addie did. She had given over thought of living in a town to become his wife. If he could, he would’ve passed her the sun in return. Instead, he painted the walls of her kitchen yellow and heaped pots of creepers around the window, mimicking the green outside for those shortened fall evenings already starting and the meadow lying in darkness and she alone in their house as he worked late, making fish.

  A kitchen, bedroom, and porch ’twas all was needed to bide them till the following summer, and he worked with glee, studiously following Manny’s instructions and those of others taking time to show him about measuring, sawing, and hammering, and about joists, ground pins, and heaves, and about all those other things it takes to build a house. He brimmed with satisfaction as he saw it taking shape, feeling the worth of his being in those walls and floors and ceilings wrought by the calluses of his hands. It was the same as he felt that year he quit school for good and claimed his father’s stage as his own, stepping inside and rummaging amongst the coils of ropes and nets, and clamouring over barrels and puncheons and assorted boxes of jiggers and bobbers and oakum, and medleys of chisels and anchors and other half-rusted tools and objects that rested there. He had hunted out those pieces and bits, fitting one object into the other, into the other, till an order was woven. And now, with his house finally built, with the last plank laid and the last nail driven, he stood with the same full chest as he had had during that first fishing season when he worked his interrelated system of jigging, splitting, salting, and curing upon the sea and shoreline. Then, as now, he had stood looking around at his creation, seeing that he, Sylvanus Now, was its centre, the overseer of its harmony.

  His brothers chided him when, that first summer as a married man, he turned down their offer to buy into a third cod trap with them. With a woman to keep and youngsters soon on the way, they figured he ought to take the opportunity to make more money and spend less time at sea. Plus, it was safer to be fishing with two other men in a larger boat.

  Brushing them aside in that same lofty manner that provoked them as much as it provoked Adelaide, he ignored their taunts and shoved off from shore alone, as he always did, his jiggers at his feet and a satisfied look upon his face as he motored across the arm through the neck, a lingering look back at his house sitting proudly on the meadow. Cripes, it felt good. With a brimming heart he rounded the head, passed Old Saw Tooth, Little Trite, and the Trapp youngsters skidding rocks toward his boat. Motoring up to Pollock’s Brook, he anchored where the river poured out of the estuary into the sea, and he stood, a greater man than yesterday. Today he had a house. Triumphantly, he wrapped the twine around each hand, tossed his jiggers into the sea and, planting his feet onto either side of his boat, started jigging: right forearm up; left forearm down; left forearm up, right forearm do
wn; arm up, arm down; arm up, arm down; the twine glistening wet as he yanked it up from the water; legs stiffening against the rocking of the boat; hips loosely held, yet dead centre, rigid; shoulders erect; and twine-laced hands fisted toward the heavens; up down, up down, up down.

  His left line tugged, becoming taut. Slipping the other onto the thole-pin, he whistled, pulling in his line, hand over hand, till he was looking into the popped eyes of a good-sized cod. Dinner. His first dinner in his new house, and what better delicacy than this bird of the sea?

  He wished he could bring her here. He wished he could show his Addie how, in the beginning, when he was just turning a man, his father’s stage had beckoned him inside, sweetening him with its sharp, pungent smells of brine and fish. And then how, through his labours of jigging and gutting and curing, he had gained the grace of flight with his bowed legs. Perhaps then she wouldn’t be so quick to turn up her nose at a fish and at him as a fisherman. He wished she were standing alongside him right now, facing the estuary, seeing how, just as no man is an island, so an inlet like this one is the lungs of an ocean, inhaling the rising tide through its mouth, swishing it along the lushness of the shoreline, then filtering it through swaying eelgrass before exhaling it back out with the ebbing tide, enriched, cleansed. She’d see then what a thing it all was, that even as the tide was flowing inland, the rivers and brooks continued flowing outward into the sea, stirring up the ocean floor with its undertow, and flushing crab and shrimp and brittlestars and flounder into its upswell so’s to feed the cod that were feeding his jiggers till the belly of his boat was glutted and the table laid for tomorrow’s supper. She’d see then how this house he had built contained the land and the sea, as well as himself. And were she to constellate this piece of architecture onto the heavens, she’d see how he, Sylvanus Now, formed the swan in the Milky Way, his bowed legs its wings, and that luminous field of innumerable stars and nebulae surrounding him the milt upon which his creation was spawned. She’d want then a window on that back wall, he wagered, and a big one, too, if she were to see all he continued to make out here in his stage and on his boat, dressed in his father’s oilskins and sou’wester. Yes, sir, she’d want it then.

  He grinned, the mere thought of her looking out a back window and watching him engorging his loins. Tossing his jigger back into the sea, he followed himself home, stripping naked in the porch and posturing a bit as he lowered the length of himself into the tub of hot, soapy water she kept waiting for him in the kitchen each evening, the stove crackling out heat, and her fingers cool upon his nape as she streamed heated water through his hair, soaking his scalp and trickling hotly through the black, silken hairs of his chest, before gathering in a fevered pool within his naval. No doubt there was talk about how he wasn’t allowed into his own house without stripping and bathing the length of himself with the cold-water hose in his stage, each and every evening after a hard day’s work. But bugger their talk. He found nothing wrong with scouring his hands of blood and gurry before setting home each evening. And what man amongst them wouldn’t love to lower himself into a tub of hot, soapy water after sitting cold in a boat all day, and luxuriate in a figure such as hers, laying the table for supper, her hair neatly bowed at her nape, and her waist all trim and smart in a skirt he’d watched her learn to cut and sew for herself. What man wouldn’t?

  Sometimes she leaned over him, towelling his hair, her skin scented with evening’s dusk, and he desired to pull her closer, to lay his mouth upon that throbbing hollow at the base of her throat. But she was skittish about some things, even though her eyes often lingered on his, and she’d lean unbearably closer sometimes, her hands slowing as she towelled. It was in the bedroom where she allowed him to touch her. Despite her wanting it dark, he managed to keep a lamp burning softly outside their door, allowing just enough light to trace the curve of her brow, her cheek so perfectly fitting the round of his palm, the darkening of her eyes as her pupils widened onto his.

  “Like a bird,” he’d whisper, the width of his hand encircling a wrist, his thumb pressing against its frailness. And heaven was when she smiled as he sought out with his mouth the shadows flickering across her nakedness.

  He worried about babies. Not that he would’ve minded a youngster or two, but he knew how much she hated them.

  “I don’t hate them. Lord, I don’t know that I hates anything,” she said one afternoon to Elsie, who had invited herself for tea and was sitting, scrutinizing the polished floor.

  “Perhaps you hates that they’d dirty up your floors,” Elsie mused. “I was only joking,” she added when Sylvanus threw her a dirty look. And he heard in her impatient tone that she had been only joking. But he didn’t see his Addie believing any of that, and he smothered a grin, watching his strong-shouldered sister-in-law shrink beneath the cold blue of his wife’s eyes.

  “Joking about what—my shiny floor or my hating babies?” she challenged. “Didn’t I just say I didn’t hate anything?”

  Elsie reddened. “I just heard Suze say once how you hated babies.”

  “Suze!” snorted Adelaide.

  “I’m sure she was only joking, too,” said Elsie. “But I wonders now if you don’t hate them,” she added, keen enough, “given how mad you’re getting.”

  Adelaide sighed. “Well, I don’t hate them,” she replied. “Mother was always having them, is all, and they were always in the way.”

  Elsie’s eyes popped. “You don’t say—a youngster getting in the way. Now that’s shocking, that is—a youngster always in your way.”

  Adelaide wasn’t taking to the humour. “Not my way,” she said quite seriously. “It was Mother who had them. They could get in her way all they wants—”

  “So, you don’t want youngsters because they’ll get in your way.”

  “They won’t be in my way because they’ll be my way, once I haves them—if that makes any sense to you. Anyway, you want more tea?” she asked as Elsie locked her brow in puzzlement.

  “Did you mean that, Addie,” Sylvanus probed after Elsie had left and Adelaide was gathering up the dirty cups, “about not hating babies?”

  “Don’t mean I’m looking for them,” she replied. “But when that day comes—and it will—I’ll be fine with it. Like I said, least they’ll be of my making and not somebody else’s. Besides,” she said with a grin, “the trick is to have lots—that way the eldest feeds the youngest and the mother just gets to sit, ordering them about. That much I learned from Mother.”

  He appreciated her grin and her saying that, but he felt the weight in her tones and practised diligently the tricks he’d learned so’s not to have babies. He might’ve done and said more, but she was skittish talking about those private things. So he left it alone, filling his time with loving her instead.

  Over supper one evening, with the fishing season closed and him leaving the house in the dark hours of early morning to work cutting wood and not returning home till nightfall, he worried she might be lonely, being by herself all day long over here on the other side of the brook.

  “No!” she exclaimed, her face hardening as though unjustly accused. Then, shaking her head, she broke into a laugh, laying the tips of her fingers onto his hand. “Remember what I said? I likes being alone more than anything. It’s a joy having a place all to one’s self.” And he saw that it was—in the way that she’d pat a loaf cooling on the bin and raise it before his heartening glance, and how she relished keeping her kitchen as neat and tidy as could be with the arms of her chairs and centre of her table covered with every spare piece of cloth or rag embroidered with the coloured thread she begged of Eva. Hanging above the large picture window he had brought out from Corner Brook and built into her southern wall were bunches of aster and hawkweed, their mingled smells perfuming the kitchen—and killing his fishy smell, she said one evening as he jokingly complained the outer world was taking over their inner.

  He minded not. Her little quirks and wants endeared her further, giving him more ways with
which to please her. And as for the wall with no window, shutting out the rest of the arm and his stage and his boat and his flakes— what cared he? A different room is what his stage and his boat were, and he’d promised her different rooms. What cared he that she preferred some more than others? They were all within his house, even that small corner she’d curtained off for herself.

  She never told him about it, but he felt its presence the first time she pulled out a little well-read book about some saint she didn’t like to talk about and became lost in its pages for hours, sometimes brooding, sometimes smiling, oblivious to his lying and pacing about, wanting her attention. And, too, he was told by others often enough that she sometimes slipped into their little clapboard church during weekdays, glancing about first, as though making sure no one was watching her.

  “Can’t think what she’s doing there on a weekday with no minister or nobody about,” Elsie tut-tutted to him once, her eyes relishing the hint of another of his Addie’s oddities. He merely shrugged, saying something about God keeping no specific hours since the day creation was finished. Yet shamed as he was admitting it to himself, he was a bit jealous that she was doing things sly of him. And he’d brood a bit then, thinking perhaps it was the house, not him, she had married: a means of escape from her own wretched life. But so deeply did he feel himself a part of the walls encircling her, he figured that curtain would soon crumple, and she’d stand with all of herself bared before him. Besides, she always seemed so much more impassioned after one of her church visits, or after a good hour’s reading from her little saint book, that he started figuring the books, the church, and God were a prelude to that coming good moment.