Sylvanus Now

by Donna Morrissey

  She was sitting in her chair beside the window when he entered, reading, he noted, from her little red book.

  “Next time you’re visiting your mother, pick a spot where you wants to build,” he said upon entering. Without waiting for her response, he went into their bedroom, dropped his clothes and climbed into bed. Strangely, he felt good, as might one who makes a gift out of sacrifice. More strangely, he felt rested, ready to start building another house, another world, anywhere of her choosing. Wonder what God did on the eighth day, he thought idly, punching his pillow for comfort.

  PART SIX

  Adelaide & Sylvanus

  FALL 1960

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A WELL-LAID PLAN

  SYLVANUS HAD FEIGNED SLEEP the night before as Adelaide crept into bed beside him. She left him alone, simply because she wanted it that way as much as he did. There was much to be said, but she wasn’t sure yet what those words might be. And this morning he was up and out the door before she was awake.

  She stepped carefully across the footbridge, nearly slipping on its muddied planks; then, pulling back the hood of her long green raincoat, she studied the sky. It was cold and dreary, with a contrary rain that couldn’t decide whether to pour outright or dry itself out. A sharp breeze cut across her face, reminding her of the frost soon to come. Quickening her step, she neared the garden, spotting Eva already hunched over a bed, uprooting potatoes. A loud thump sounded from the stagehead, and she paused, catching sight of Sylvanus through its open door. Lingering at the gate, she watched, as she had several times this past summer. Black and formless, he stood in his oilskins, fading in and out amidst the shadowy interior of that fisherman’s grotto, his feet moving lightly amongst the rubble around him, his skinning knife flashing glimmers of silver as he slit open and split the meagre catch his morning’s efforts had brought him. Deftly he flicked the gurry down the trunk hole, the tongues into a bucket at his feet, the britches into a pan alongside the cheeks, and that fleshy poundage of fillet into a well-scrubbed puncheon, already partially layered and salted with his morning’s work.

  Decisively, she pushed away from the gate, made a rare trek along the path leading to his stage, and stood quietly in the doorway. With the light so dim he didn’t see her at first, busy as he was, laying out fish in brine and noisily lifting and sliding things around. But the murkiness halted nothing of his work, as though his hands and feet knew where each and every thing was strewn, and needed no light to retrieve and place them proper—like her in her kitchen, she thought. Hoisting onto his shoulder a coil of rope with a huge iron anchor attached, he stepped out onto the head of his stage, his eyes squinting into the light, his brow fiercely dark; and yet, curiously, that finely sculpted mouth was all set and calm this morning, as though nothing of the night before had touched him.

  Bending at the knees, he lowered the anchor by the rope into his boat, bobbing some four feet below. Stalwart as a frigate, she remembered thinking of him once. And he continued being that, consistently (if not patiently) tied to her landing, waiting. Even his uncertainty around her, his moping, had been a strong mooring, tugging against those times she might’ve strayed too far within that labyrinth of darkened thought.

  Guiltily, she noted the tap from which he scrubbed himself before coming home every night, and shivered from the dankness of the air around her—and around him, undoubtedly, as he had stripped on those cold, easterly nights before coming home to her. Perhaps she should put one by the footbridge so’s to scrub her own grimy hands and knees, she thought grimly, glancing at her broken nails and the faded, stained knees of her trousers, and her hair forever scraggly with the wind.

  Walking resolutely through the stage, stumbling over things made indistinguishable by the dark, she stepped out on the head, squinting, as he had, into the light.

  “It matters not to me where we lives,” she stated clearly. “So you don’t have to worry about moving from Cooney Arm.”

  He glanced up, a look of surprise on his face. “Now, aren’t you the prettiest thing to lean against a blubber barrel?”

  She stepped aside, and seeing nothing of a blubber barrel, looked to him, catching the ghost of a grin. “Oh, joking this morning, are we?” she said dryly. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yup, and that’s nice of you, Addie. Am’s taking Suze to Ragged Rock in the morning. Why don’t you go and get a ride to Hampden? Take a look around. Nice place, Hampden—good fishing, logging. Not far from Deer Lake, Corner Brook. Good place to build. We’ll take Mother with us,” he added, turning back to the anchor he was fiddling with.

  “Yup, and that’s nice of you, Sylvanus, but I doubt Eva’s moving anywhere after I asks her to stay on here with me,” she said calmly. “And if you plans on moving by yourself, you might want to know this—the government’s paying only them that’s moving to Ragged Rock, so you won’t get money by moving to Hampden, Deer Lake, or anyplace else you got in mind.”

  He struck his finger on something and swore vehemently. “Jeezes, don’t get me going on that,” he warned, rubbing at his hand. “I’ll eat with the gulls and then eat the gulls before I gives another man the right to tell me where I builds my house. You just pick a spot, and I’ll worry about how we gets there,” he ended angrily, tugging at the anchor.

  “And I suppose you never heard what I already said twice now, did you—that I’m staying in Cooney Arm? Will you look up from that stupid thing?”

  He rose, facing her, his eyes dark slits beneath an encroaching brow. “Like I said, it’s good of you, Addie. But you’d be living in a place with no minister, no lights, no roads—”

  “Never needed lights and roads before.”

  “Or schools—and yes, we will have need of them,” he said quietly.

  She hesitated. “Then you knows more than I do, Sylvanus Now.”

  “Then I knows more than you do.” He bent back over the anchor, tugging on a piece of rope beneath it. “And I knows, too, that you wouldn’t be satisfied for long,” he carried on, his voice straining as he shifted the anchor aside, freeing the rope, “living here with everybody gone. And I wouldn’t expect you to be.”

  “Still thinks you knows what I’m thinking all the time, do you? Tell me something, Syllie, if I’m so bloody easy to read, how come everybody’s thinking something different of me, then? How come there’s them that sees me as the grieving mother, and them that sees me as the dirty thing, or the spoiled thing, or the sweet thing, the poor thing, or—or the good worker and whatever the hell else one soul can think of another. Which serves me fine,” she said, holding up a silencing hand, “because most times I don’t know myself what I’m thinking. So God bless you for thinking you do, and I hope you’re right, my son, and you can keep on telling me and saving me the bother of figuring for myself.” She turned and marched angrily back into the darkened stage.

  “Not as if you’re chasing after me telling me what you thinks,” he yelled after her.

  She stumbled again, this time nicking her ankle on something pointed. Biting back a cry, she hobbled back out on the stage, her voice sharp with frustration. “Oh, you wants to hash up all that old stuff again, do you? A load equally carried, I say—you the dying fish and me the dying babies. Now I just told you what I wanted, and I’ve no doubt it’s what you wants, too. The only question is whether we can, and that’s for you to figure, Sylvanus Now—how to keep them bloody puncheons filled.”

  This time silence followed her footsteps back inside the stage. Skirting the damn things in her path, she exited through the other side, exhaling the dank air out of her lungs. Ignoring the questioning look with which Eva greeted her in the garden, she marched to a drill of cabbage and started yanking heads.

  An hour drifted by, perhaps two, then Eva was calling her to have tea. She straightened up, rubbing her lower back as the old woman stepped off the stoop and started back along her furrows, still munching on a biscuit, having already drunk her tea. It was always that way: Eva leavi
ng off her work, making tea and biscuits for them both, then calling out to Adelaide after she’d eaten—as though the crows would fly off with their seeds if they both left the garden at the same time, thought Adelaide. But Eva was like that: wanting quiet as much as she herself. During those first days that they had hoed the ground together, working loads of rotten sawdust and sheep manure into the soil, scant words had passed between them. And as they spent the better part of the day working on opposite ends of the yard, Adelaide had started feeling the same sense of seclusion as she had tucked amongst the tuckamores up on the head.

  Only she hadn’t felt like the fugitive down here, crouching amongst the furrows, screened by the broad rhubarb leaves flourishing alongside the fence, hiding her from the neighbours. They’d left off visiting anyway, once she had started working the garden and was no longer seen as the grieving mother—aside, that is, she would think resentfully, from her sisters-in-law, Melita and Elsie, who dropped by Eva’s yard to check up on her. But she made sure they’d have nothing to snit about, and as time passed and they continued seeing her out working the beds before they themselves even had their faces washed—well, their visits fell off as well. Except for their chats and cups of tea with Eva, and she gave them that as long as she was left alone. And gloriously, she had been left alone, embedding herself into that cool, dark earth, seeing only the seeds that rolled off her palm, feeling only her knees pressing into the grit of the furrows as she straddled the drills—like an opened grave, this unearthed soil, and she entered it willingly. Her thoughts she plucked like weeds, embedding them along with the seeds till all that remained were her hands, directed by purpose.

  Daily she had seeded, weeded, and trenched, her back long since strengthened by the habitual turning of the fish on the flakes. When finally the planting was done that first summer, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction overlooking those deepened furrows running neatly beside their beds, and the drills perfectly peaked and running as straight as corduroy across their field of brown. And she wasn’t too surprised when at some point during the latter part of that first summer, and now during these past summer months, she had felt her fingers, once numbed by the coldness of death, begin warming themselves in the earth along with the seeds she planted. Other parts of her started warming, too, as though the wind, its vengeance expelled against the cliffs of the head, were softer, more yielding as it swept over her down here in the lowland. And in time, as the glaze melted from her eyes, she’d seen the soft green of the first seedling push its head above ground and quiver upon the slightest breath. And she loved the creamy white petals of the potato blossoms, even more those tinted that delicate mauve that were so like the wild mallow she wondered they were without scent, and she would lower her nose instead onto the yellow lobes of the dandelions sprouting madly from her beds. It were as though she had planted herself, those long summer months, with Eva, and was now regrowing into a world with colour and with song, a world into which she could once again touch and be touched by gentle winds.

  She wondered, as she finished uprooting another drill of carrots this dreary, wet morning, why none of her anger or resentments followed her into the garden, even though she’d been summoned there the same as she had to the flakes. Most likely it was because the garden had saved her from her too-friendly neighbours, she supposed. Plus, work, no matter its stature, was sanctioned.

  Nothing like a good worker to earn the praise of the neighbours, she now thought scornfully, emptying her sack of carrots through the gaping black hole of the root-cellar door. She straightened, remembering that old choking anger she used to feel when reprimanded by her mother for lazing about like Old Maid Ethel, when it was studying she was doing and not lazing about at all.

  Eva was making her way up the hillock, dragging two sacks of potatoes. Her eyes were seeping water from the cold and her nose reddened with the sniffles. Tutting impatiently, Adelaide went down to meet her.

  “Here, give me that,” she said, taking the sacks from the old woman. Dragging them to the cellar, she lifted the door, emptying them down the hold. “You sure we didn’t wait too late to start uprooting, Eva? There was a bit of frost last night.”

  “Nothing to hurt a root vegetable,” replied Eva. She shivered, glancing up at the sky. The drizzle had ceased, and the clouds were thinning. “Might get some sun after all,” she added, wiping her nose with a rag she pulled from her pocket.

  “You taking anything for that cold? Here, let’s take a rest,” said Adelaide, laying the burlap sacks on the cellar door. “Perhaps we should go inside and sit; too damp for you to be out.”

  “Nay,” said Eva. She eased herself onto the sack. “Old fall weather, dirty as anything,” she grumbled, the cold siphoning a steady stream of water from her eyes. “We’ll go in in a bit,” she said impatiently as Adelaide kept fussing above her. “Sit. Sit down.”

  Adelaide grunted, sitting beside her. “You’ll wish you’d listened, you ends up with the flu. Glass of hot brandy is what you needs, and a warm bed.”

  Eva sniffed testily and Adelaide left her alone, looking down over the garden that, with most of its lush green foliage plucked, was back to looking like a grave again.

  “Did you get any sleep last night?” she asked as Eva yawned.

  “But for the wind beating at the door, I might’ve. And all this moving business. How’s Syllie this morning?”

  “Stubborn. Like he always is.”

  Eva said nothing, her silence prodding Adelaide into a shrug.

  “I don’t know what he’s thinking. I just told him I’d stay here in Cooney Arm, if that’s what he wants.” She paused. “He don’t believe me. Don’t blame him, I suppose. For sure I would’ve jumped at the chance years ago. But now—” She paused again. “Perhaps you grows into a place like you grows into a name, eh? Is that what happens, Eva?” she asked with a quirky grin. “I’ve grown into place like a turnip top?”

  Eva smothered a cough. “Elikum was like you,” she said, clearing her throat, “always off brooding on his own, even when there was nothing to brood about.”

  Adelaide’s surprise at Eva’s mentioning her drowned son’s name was overthrown by the slight she felt in the old woman’s comment. Surely she’d had lots to brood about, hadn’t she? And yet she’d found great comfort working in the garden these past two summers.

  “Always going to be leaving and working on the lakers the following year,” Eva carried on, her sight set upon the fog rolling through the neck. “I heard him say that for years: he was going on the lakers. He drowned saying it. That’s a problem with the young around here,” she added with nettle in her tone, looking at Adelaide, “too timid to go after something they wants.”

  Adelaide pulled back, feeling a sting. “I’m not harbouring desires, Eva. There’s nothing out there I wants to go after.”

  “Nothing now, perhaps. But there’s something gnawing at you. I seen that the first time you laid foot on my step. Same look about you as Elikum had—and not just Elikum, either. I had it in me once.”

  “Had what in you?”

  “Wants. And it don’t have to be a thing or a place, either. Most times we never knows what it is we wants— like Elikum. Wasn’t just a job on the lakers gnawing him. If it was, he would’ve went after it—not that hard to get a job on the lakers. But whatever it was, he took it with him. Perhaps that’s one of the things that don’t let me rest now, not having listened hard enough to him.”

  Adelaide snorted. “Cripes, if you got any quieter, we’d have to write a letter to reach you. And you seems awful rested to me. Is that true, that you’re not rested?”

  “Since I got my garden, I am. That was the one thing I craved, getting my own garden. Mightn’t sound very lofty,” she added defensively, “but if you was raised on the downs like I was—nothing but rock and tucka mores—a garden seemed a precious thing. More than one hour I whiled away planning that garden. Nothing but flowers, I had it figured, and perhaps a rose bush. Lord abov
e,” she sighed, “as if roses could grow out of rocks. But I’ll tell you something, my girl—that first summer I got my garden, I was out the door before sunup every morning, looking to see how much everything grow’d the night before. Swear to gawd, when time come to pull up all them pretty green plants, I wept over the hoe.”

  Addie grinned. “You wept over your hoe.”

  “Indeed, I did.”

  “Yeah, well, I was going to be a missionary and sail the seas.”

  Eva paused. “That’s lofty. How’d you come by that?”

  “Some Sunday school lesson once. Sounds foolish, but I always had dreams of it happening,” she added with a silly laugh.

  “It’s not foolishness once you carries it out, my maid; it’s a well-laid plan then. Like I said, that’s the problem with the young, too timid to go after something. By the time they figures they can do a thing, they got a brood of youngsters holding them back.”

  Adelaide sniffed. “That’s because they’re discouraged from doing anything but scrubbing floors and having babies and working fish.”

  “I don’t say it’s easy,” said Eva, “but wisdom is greater than might, the Scriptures says. So follow along with everybody and scrub till sundown, if you wants. But if you don’t see godliness in cleanliness, then what’s the use of your shiny floor?” she ended on a deep, wet cough that broke into a proxy of sneezes. “God above,” she gasped, rooting for the rag in her pocket.

  “That’s it. You’re going in,” said Adelaide, taking her by the arm. “Come on,” she insisted as the old woman protested. “That’s the problem with the old—never knowing when to take care of themselves.” And tightening her hold on Eva’s arm, she partially led, partially dragged her down the hillock and across the uprooted beds. Once inside, she bade her into her rocker, stoked the fire, and went hunting for the brandy in the small pantry off the kitchen.