The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  “You’re too early,” he said. He almost shouted at her. “Come back after you haves your dinner.”

  “Sure I was only having a look.”

  “You’re too early,” he said again.

  The girl and her mother had come across to Fogo with another family to see the shows the previous fall, his first trip out of St. John’s with Hiram. She and Wish hadn’t spoken a word together, though they caught one another’s attention. Hiram had leaned in close to him during the movie. “You’re going to wear out your eyes looking at that young one,” he said.

  Wish walked across the hall to shut the door, still embarrassed and feeling peculiarly exposed. She stepped back from the doorsill into the light, and he could see she was more than just a girl now, all of sixteen at least. She wore her light brown hair long, unlike most every other woman on the shore, and tied it back in a ponytail. There was a suggestion of extravagance in the uncommon length of it, a hint of vanity. That her hair might be fine enough to be worth the trouble. A flower-print dress with a belt knotted loosely at the waist so he could make out the curve of her hips and her breasts under the material. Nearly a woman already.

  He expected the girl to keep backing away as he approached but she only stood there, watching him come. Hands clasped demurely behind her back and everything else in her manner like a dare.

  “What’s the show this afternoon?”

  “The 39 Steps.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Don’t want to ruin it for you now, do I?”

  “I only wants a hint.”

  “It’s about a Canadian gets in trouble with spies in England.”

  She drew her head back skeptically. “A Canadian?”

  “He’s from Montreal,” Wish said and she nodded, as if that fact was almost enough to sway her disbelief.

  Her eyes were set so deeply the colour was hidden from a distance and he was surprised now by the emerald shade of them. Green as sea-glass. She was wearing yellow bobby socks and leather patent shoes with a buckle. She turned the toe of one foot over on the ground, the opposite hip jutting out slightly, and he started at the motion.

  “No law against looking,” she said when he glanced away. She stepped toward him and brushed the powdery residue from his shoulder where he’d grazed the screen, then stepped back. She smiled up at him in exactly the way he remembered. As brazen as a cat.

  It made him feel childish and uncertain of himself to have her touch him that way. He raised his hand to close the door and she said, “Could I watch what you’re at in there?”

  “No,” he said and he nudged the door shut on her.

  Her voice then, raised so he could hear it inside. “Don’t be such a sook,” she said.

  She came late to the show with her mother and father and a young man who was older than her by several years. Brother, Wish assumed, and that assumption confirmed the feeling he’d tried to ignore all afternoon—watching, then not watching for her through the door where Hiram sat at a table with a moneybox open in front of him. He’d become increasingly agitated as the room filled with bodies and chairs and no sight of her among them. Men in long garnsey sweaters and salt-and-pepper hats left their seats to stand at arm’s length from the projector, pointing at the reels and the lens and the mechanical innards and asking him endless questions about how the thing worked. Invariably one of them turned his attention to Wish and to his unfamiliar accent. “Now where do you belong to?” he was asked.

  Renews, he told them. On the Southern Shore of the Avalon, outside St. John’s.

  “Catholics down that way, is it?”

  Yes, he said. Good deal of Catholics on the Southern Shore.

  “We got a few up this way,” one man admitted. “Most of them across in Tilting.”

  He hadn’t been to Tilting, he told them. Hiram used to stop there but he’d heard talk of an army base, some kind of warning squadron, about to set up in Sandy Cove. Which would mean a different movie screened every week at the cookhouse. Which meant his audience over there was about to dry up. Hiram decided to come to Little Fogo Island this year, far enough to guarantee a decent audience even after the base went in. They didn’t stop on that side of Fogo at all this trip, Wish admitted.

  “Missed your chance at confession then,” the same man said, smiling and nodding at the projector. Clive, his name was.

  Wish allowed he wasn’t that great a sinner to be worried about missing the opportunity.

  No one spoke to him of the war or asked what he thought of the latest news or whether he might end up overseas himself, although it was obvious he was old enough to think about signing up. Was it hard to operate the machine, they wanted to know. How did he end up knocking around with Hiram Keeping? How many times could he show a film before it wore out? Did he fish at all, or was Hiram paying enough he could make a go of the shows alone? Did Hiram know he was a mick before he was hired on?

  They shook their heads at the improbability of the match.

  It was Wish’s second time along the northeast coast and he’d gotten used to the interrogation. Most days he paid no attention to it, had his answers by rote and could carry on the conversation without thinking. But he was too riled up this afternoon to settle and was about to head outside to escape their curiosity when the girl stepped up into the doorway again.

  Her father leaned over the table and counted out a handful of coins into Hiram’s palm, and the four of them carted their chairs into the hall, setting up in the only space still unclaimed, near the projector at the back of the room. She didn’t look in his direction or acknowledge him in any way, and he could feel the pull of that deliberate inattention, as if someone had hooked a cod-jigger to his sternum and let the lead weight of it hang there. The man who paid their way in might be her grandfather now that Wish had a closer look at him, a stringy wattle of flesh beneath the chin, the grizzle of unshaven whisker mostly grey. The mother had the girl’s green eyes and slight build. Her face had an anxious, almost angry quality to it, as if she was newly blind and uncertain of each step ahead. The man touched her shoulder occasionally, encouraging her, cajoling her forward, and she shot him a look back that he simply smiled at. An old conversation between them, Wish could see. A dailiness to it that said marriage. April and September.

  Wish glanced across the room to Hiram, who was watching him and rubbing a knuckle along both sides of his moustache in turn. He was trying to suppress a smile and Wish looked away from him. Randy old fucker, he thought. When Wish had described her approximate age and her height and hair and green eyes earlier in the afternoon Hiram had looked to the ceiling, puffing his cheeks full of air, considering.

  “Sixteen, you think is it?”

  “Give or take. She was over to Fogo last year, came across with her mother.”

  Hiram said, “You’re not going to be looking for trouble here tonight, are you?” He was already three parts drunk, his face red with the alcohol. He’d left the set-up and running of the projector to Wish and had been off all afternoon drinking swish or shine or dandelion beer, swapping gossip with the locals in a twine loft down on the landwash.

  “I’m just asking,” Wish told him.

  “Sadie Parsons you saw. Lives up the south side a ways, past Earle’s wharf.”

  Wish repeated her name under his breath.

  Hiram shook his head. “You know what they’ll do to a Catholic boy sniffing around the women out here,” he said. He was smiling, wavering slightly on his feet. An air of anticipation about him. “Don’t say I haven’t warned you.”

  The girl sat straight in her chair between her mother and brother—he was certain it was a brother. He sat with his legs crossed and hands folded in his lap exactly as the mother did beside him, and there was something of the mother’s hard way about the young man’s face. He and Sadie ignored one another completely and casually, out of long habit. Which was different altogether than how he sensed her ignoring him.

  The Victor had an automatic trip mechan
ism when the film began to tear or jam, shutting down to keep the celluloid from snapping or being set alight by the heat of the bulb. The trip stopped The 39 Steps half a dozen times and the audience shouted and whistled through each interruption. The longer it took him to clear the jam and rethread the film safely through the projector, the uglier the mood of the crowd. All of them standing or shifting to turn to him, yelling abuse. But Sadie didn’t move her head to the right or left through the length and breadth of the afternoon. And she left the hall without so much as a glance in his direction when it was done.

  They were staying at Mrs. Gillard’s, a widow who took in the occasional visitor to the Cove. After their supper Hiram sat for a while in the parlour with his pipe. Wish stood at a small shelf of books over the fireplace mantel, taking them down one at a time to leaf through the pages, waiting on Hiram to set things in motion. The largest of the set was covered in green baize with laminated gold lettering. A History of Art. Colourless reproductions mostly, paintings by men with names he couldn’t pronounce.

  Hiram came across the room and looked over Wish’s shoulder. “This is what people had before there were movies,” he said. “Poor buggers.” He stooped to knock pipe ash into the fireplace. He said, “How about a little stroll?”

  The evening was uncharacteristically still, the harbour almost glass. They walked along a path rutted by carts near Earle’s wharf, nodding and saying hello to the few men they passed. They started up the hill on the harbour’s south side where only a handful of houses stood, their heads bowed under busy clouds of blackflies. The cart path narrowed to a walking trail, and Wish slipped behind the older man. Cows and sheep grazed on the hillside, and Hiram stopped occasionally to cluck stupidly at the animals. The man was a townie, born and raised in St. John’s, which to Wish’s way of thinking was a kind of ignorance in and of itself.

  When they came to the house farthest out on the hill, Hiram stood a minute looking at it. The front of the two-story building was whitewashed and trimmed with green, though the sides were covered in red ochre, like every other house in the harbour. There was a false door nailed to the clapboard between the downstairs windows. Its only function was aesthetic, set there simply to make the front of the house look complete. From where they stood, the place looked empty. They walked along the side of the house to the back kitchen and stepped inside the porch, scraped their boots on the porch rug as Hiram called into the room.

  A man’s voice shouted, “Come in, come in.”

  The rafters were so low that both men had to duck their heads. It was still light outside but already dark enough in the small room to mask details. Wish could see four of them sitting about the kitchen—the father splayed out on the daybed, the mother at the table. Sadie was beside the stove, where a fire offered the only light through the grate. She was sitting in a rocking chair fashioned from an old flour barrel. A girl younger than Sadie sat on a mat directly in front of the stove. And then a figure Wish hadn’t seen stepped away from the doorway leading deeper into the house. The young man from the afternoon. Wish could smell a heavy tide of cologne rising off him.

  “We’re not interrupting?” Hiram said.

  “Not at all,” the man said. “The young courter is just on his way.”

  Sadie got up from her rocker and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Give up that foolishness and let him go,” the mother said.

  Two chairs were offered to the new visitors. Wish sat heavily and looked to the fire in the stove as the young man went out the door. A slow collapse carrying on inside his chest after he came up hard on the seat. Not her brother, then.

  Her father said, “We heard you coming out the path.”

  “Where’s the young fellow off to?” Hiram asked.

  “Hardy didn’t have his last forkful in his mouth, he was upstairs getting dandied up. Gone along the shore after Willard Slade’s youngest.”

  “Is that right?” Hiram said.

  “Can’t keep his mind on the fish long enough to bait a hook. We’ll starve to death the winter if he don’t soon marry the girl and have it done with.”

  Wish glanced at Sadie, who was watching him steadily. He looked away again, hoping she wasn’t able to register his look of relief in the dim.

  Her mother said, “You’ll have a cup of tea.”

  “Grand, yes,” Hiram said. “We would.”

  She stared at Wish a moment. “And you,” she said. “Do you have a tongue in your head?”

  Sadie said, “He did this afternoon.”

  She looked across at her daughter. “We know you’ve got tongue enough.”

  “Now Helen,” her husband said.

  “This is Aloysious Furey,” Hiram announced, as if it had just occurred to him to make introductions. “From Renews, on the Southern Shore.”

  Helen sat back slowly in her chair. And it seemed to Wish that everyone else in the room shifted away from him in much the same fashion. Wish looked from Sadie to her mother. They had likely never had a Catholic sit in their kitchen before, he knew. Some people on the northeast shore had never met a Catholic before encountering Wish and it was always hard to say how things would go. Hiram appeared to be oblivious to the sudden change in the room, taking out his tobacco and papers to roll a cigarette. Though Wish knew he was paying attention and enjoying himself. Hiram took some kind of pleasure from observing the flustered civility, the consternation, the outright hostility of people unexpectedly confronted by Wish’s religious affiliation.

  He said it was like throwing two strange dogs together to see how they’d get on.

  He offered a cigarette to Aubrey, who got up to take it, then went to the stove and held a shovie through the grate until it was alight. He lit his cigarette from it and passed it along to Hiram. Aubrey sat back on the bed and lay with an arm behind his head, the hand holding the cigarette propped above his chest. Hiram took a long drag and leaned forward to tap ash into the wide cuff of his trousers.

  Helen was staring at Wish, taking harsh little breaths through her nostrils. He put his hand into his pocket and fingered his mother’s rosary beads, considering whether or not to make a show of them.

  “I’ll say this much for the Romans,” Aubrey said. “They got nothing against a scuff on the dance floor, or a drink.” He waved the cigarette he held. “Or a smoke. Not like we Methodist crowd.”

  “Being Methodist don’t seem to have stopped you,” his wife said.

  “I’ll let the Good Lord take it up with me when my time comes.”

  “Don’t be tempting,” Helen said softly. “It’s all bad enough without that.”

  A woman’s voice began calling from inside the main house. Helen turned to her daughters. She said, “Would one of you go see to her?”

  “She doesn’t want anything,” Sadie said.

  “Go on, Sade,” her father said.

  Wish watched her as she went down the narrow hallway to the parlour. Agnes got up from the floor and settled into the vacated seat.

  “That’s your mother, is it, Aubrey?” Hiram asked.

  “It is.”

  “She must be getting on.”

  “Ninety-two. And three, providing she lives to September month. But she haven’t been well, is the truth of it. She’s lost her mind, most days. And can’t get up out of the bed to make water. Be a blessing to everyone when she goes,” Aubrey said to the ceiling. “For Helen especially, not having to watch after her every moment of the day and night.”

  Wish was still watching down the hallway toward the parlour, set up as a sickroom to spare the old woman the stairs. Sadie came out of the dark finally and stood in the doorway. “She wants you,” she told her mother.

  Helen stood up. “Make these folks a cup of tea, would you?” She stared at Wish a moment. “And see if you can’t drag a word out of this one before he leaves.”

  He smiled at the woman but she didn’t notice or chose for some reason not to return it.

  When Sadie set the tea in front of them
she sat in her mother’s chair, close enough that Wish could smell the soap from her skin. Hiram tipped his cup to fill the saucer and blew on the surface to cool the tea, then drank from it in small noisy sips. The sun was well down and the room settled deeper into pitch, but no one moved to light a lamp, content to sit and talk in the dark.

  Hiram said, “Have you lost many boys to overseas, Aubrey?”

  “A scatter one is gone into St. John’s to join the Newfoundland Regiment.” Aubrey was into a second cigarette and it seemed that the man’s voice was coming from the red dot glowing in the corner of the room. “Clive Reid’s oldest is gone across to Halifax to join up with the Canadians. Wanted to get on with the air force.”

  Wish said, “He can do that?”

  “We’re citizens of the Commonwealth,” Hiram told him. “A fellow could go to Britain and join up there if he had a mind to.”

  “If it weren’t for Will Slade’s girl I don’t know but we might have lost Hardy to it. By and by, we won’t have anyone left around here to fish. Is it as bad across the pond as the newsreels make it out, I wonder?”

  “Be a job to make that stuff up.”

  “I don’t know what it is keeping the Americans out of it so long.”

  Hiram said, “They’re overrun by the Irish down there, is what’s wrong. But it’s only a matter of time. The Yanks already got their eyes on the land for a base in St. John’s, down along Quidi Vidi Lake. Canadians over on Buckmaster’s Field. All of them in uniform. Local boys haven’t got a chance with the girls any more. Have they, Wish?”

  Sadie leaned over the table to bring her head closer to his. “Are you going overseas?”

  He tried to picture her face again, to connect it to the sound of her voice. He couldn’t tell from her tone what she might prefer as an answer. “I don’t have plans,” he said.