Helen came back down the hall, one hand coasting the wall as a guide. “Is anyone going to light a lamp here this evening?” she said.
She shooed Sadie from the table and the girl sat herself on the mat in front of the stove.
“More tea?” Helen said.
“I think we’ll be off,” Hiram said.
Wish looked back to Sadie as he left, one side of her face in firelight. She was staring into her lap, as if listening intently to a conversation in another room.
Aubrey followed them to the door. “I’ll step out a minute, walk you a ways.” When they’d found the path and started down he said, “When do you push on?”
“The coaster comes back through day after tomorrow.”
“You’ll be getting back to St. John’s before long, will you?”
“A week or so, I’d say.”
“Back this way one more time before the winter settles in?”
“If the weather doesn’t turn early.”
“Sadie came on sixteen a couple of months ago,” Aubrey said. “Promised her a new dress if I lived to Christmas. Doubt I’ll see St. John’s before then though, alive or dead. Was wondering if you could stop into Ayre’s on Water Street. Get her something decent.”
“You don’t know what size she wears, do you, Aubrey?”
He fished in his pants pocket and hauled out a length of knotted string. “I was going to drop by with this before you left,” he said. He shook the string and held it at one end. “Double knot on this end,” he said. “Here to the first knot is shoulder to wrist. To the second knot is shoulder to waist. Second to third is the circumference of the bosom, third to fourth is her waist. No concern about the length, Helen can put that to rights when you carries it up.”
“Any particular colour she’s fond of?”
“Well now. Never stopped to think of that.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Golfman at Ayre’s what he recommends.”
Aubrey clapped his hands. “Cracker jack,” he said. “I’ll settle up the bill when you brings the dress along.”
He turned back then and wished them both a good night. Hiram continued down the hill and when he was sure Aubrey was out of earshot he fingered the knots in the string. “Second to third,” he said as he measured the distance, and he let out an appreciative whistle.
He balled the string and passed it along to Wish. “I imagine you’ll take more care with this than me.”
Wish said, “I don’t think her mother thinks much of me.”
“Well now, Mrs. Parsons is already taken, isn’t she,” Hiram said. “Unless you’re more reckless a man than I know.”
The morning dawned as breathless as the night before. Wish woke in darkness to the sound of men on the wharf and the rhythmic plash of oars as dories rowed out to the schooners anchored offshore. Engines of the trap skiffs coming alive in the distance, one after another, a muffled drone like bluebottles caught between the panes of a window. He drifted off again and slept until well after the sun was up. Not a sound in the house as he lay there, coming to himself, remembering where he was. The bedroom window was propped wide but the curtains didn’t stir.
He dressed and made his way to the kitchen, where the kettle sat warm at the back of the stove but no one was about. Hiram was still in bed asleep and could easily spend the better part of the morning there. Under a napkin on the table Wish found a plate of buns and cheese, which meant Mrs. Gillard didn’t expect to be back anytime soon. He added a scoop of coal to the fire and wandered around the downstairs waiting for the kettle to boil.
After he ate, Wish walked down past Earle’s wharf. Not a soul about, the men already out on the fishing grounds. The houses were strangely quiet as well, no movement through the windows, the air nearly clear of wood or coal smoke. It was almost as if the Cove had been abandoned between his first waking moment in the dark and the time he crawled out of bed. He did his best to keep his mind clear of his destination until he stopped outside Sadie’s house, and he stood there, watching it awhile. The front windows were open to the fresh air and he heard the old woman calling for Helen.
He walked around to the back kitchen, where the porch door was propped open with a broomstick. He stepped inside and cocked his head to listen. Just the old woman’s voice. No dishes on the table. The walls bare but for two small pictures, a portrait of Queen Victoria on her diamond jubilee, a line drawing of some ancient monarch fording a river on a horse. He walked up close to read the inscription. King William III Crossing the Boyne. King Billy. Prince of Orange, King of England. Driving the Catholic King James out of Ireland. Hiram used to amuse himself in St. John’s by bringing home anti-Catholic literature being passed out on the downtown streets, quoting them aloud to Wish. The pamphlets called Catholics enemies of social order and deluded slaves of despotism. “The simple institution of Christ is not to the taste of the ignorant multitude that form the serfs of the Popedom.” Wish had seen the Orangemen parading through the streets in bowler hats and salt-and-pepper caps, sashes draped over their coats, singing Protestant hymns. Catholics making their way indoors before the parade reached them, lowering the window shades so as not to have to watch them go by.
He walked to the stove and placed his hand along the top to feel the warmth. Not cold, but an hour and more since a fire had been laid there. He looked around the kitchen and placed both his hands on his hips. “Hello,” he called.
“Aubrey?”
He walked down the hall and stood in the doorway to the parlour, looking in on the sick woman. She was lying on a cot wedged in among a chair and a settle. The covers were tucked up to her chest despite the warmth of the morning. She faced the wall she was calling through, a long grey braid of hair across her shoulder.
“Hello, missus.”
Her cheeks were sunken, and the skin where it stretched over the forehead and cheekbones was unnaturally white and smooth.
“I wants Helen,” she told him.
“Have they gone and left you alone?”
“I’m all mops and brooms today,” she said. She patted a spot on the bed without taking her eyes from his. She took his hand in her own when he sat beside her. Her eyes were pale blue and discoloured with tiny flecks of darkness, as if old paint had flaked away from them. The room smelled faintly of urine and oil soap and lavender. “You’re Jenny Reid’s youngster.”
“I’m not from around here,” he said. “Where have they gone and left you?”
She smiled up at him sweetly. “Am I dead?” she asked. “Is this heaven?”
Wish felt his stomach turn and he leaned away from her but she refused to let go of his hand. “Is Sadie not around?” he asked her.
The old woman’s face darkened and she spoke something in a whisper.
“What did you say?”
“The little slut,” the old woman repeated. And in another tone altogether she said, “Can I get up out of the bed now?”
“No, Nan. You can’t get up out of the bed.”
Wish looked to the doorway, where Sadie’s younger sister stood with her arms folded across her chest.
“I must be in hell, then,” the old woman said.
“I come by and there was no one about,” Wish told the girl. “She was calling for your mother.” He pried his hand from the old woman’s grip and stood up.
“I was only out back for a few minutes.” The girl turned away toward the kitchen, meaning for him to follow her.
He started for the door, glanced over his shoulder before stepping out into the hall. The old woman said, “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”
The girl was standing by the stove, her hands held behind her back. A child’s body, thin as a stick. Hair cut short and parted on the side. Eyes like her sister’s, though not as deeply green and quicker—they settled on nothing for long, darting up and down him and then away like a skittish school of fish. He couldn’t recall her name.
“She’s not herself,” the girl said. And after a pause she said, “Don’t
mind a thing she says.”
He didn’t know whether the girl had heard what the old woman had said about Sadie and didn’t see how he could ask.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked him. “A cup of tea?”
“Just had breakfast. Where’s everyone gone today? There’s not a soul about.”
“All the women are over in Gooseberry Cove after the winter’s berries. They won’t be back before dark. I had to stay behind to watch out for Nan.”
“How far is Gooseberry Cove?”
The girl looked up at him from under the frill of bangs that fell to her eyebrows.
Wish smiled at her. “Can you tell me how to get there, do you think?”
“Sure it’s only the women goes over after the berries.”
“Maybe it’s only the women I’m wanting to talk to.” Her eyes darted away from him again. Agnes, her name was. “Can you tell me how to get there, Agnes?”
She smiled to herself, not looking at him.
“Agnes?” he said, wanting her to hear her name aloud a second time.
“Do you know the Washing Pond?” she asked him. “Out past the Spell Rock?”
“The big rock on the other side of the cove?”
She nodded.
“I know it,” he said.
The women were spread out across the bare hills on the far side of Gooseberry Cove, bent double, filling the metal dippers they carried with them, emptying those into pillowcases when they were full. He stopped on the ridge where he came in sight of them and picked out Sadie among the group, and her mother working a little higher up the hill. On the beach an older woman was tending pots over a driftwood fire. Mrs. Gillard.
She glanced up at him as he approached. “You must be lost.”
“Just out for a wander.”
She looked at him as if to say she wasn’t as stunned as all that. “Did you and Hiram manage all right for breakfast?”
“I had a bun and a bite of the cheese you put out for us. There was no sign of Hiram before I left.”
She bent over the pot of baked beans. “How a hangashore like that keeps body and bones together is a mystery to me.”
There was something in her assessment of Hiram that Wish felt was directed at him. As if Hiram’s habitual laziness had a spiritual as well as a physical side and this explained his keeping company with Romans. Wish said, “I’d kill for a drink of water.”
Mrs. Gillard straightened and poured a glassful of warm water from a container, then stood beside him as he drained it.
He glanced up the hill. “Have you got a spare dipper?”
“What do you want with that?”
“I thought I might try to make myself useful. Seeing as I’m here.”
Wish walked up the hillside toward Sadie, bending now and then to throw a handful of blueberries into his pot. A low murmur moving among the women as one after the other took note of him there, though no one raised their heads to say hello. It was like swimming in a pond on the barrens, striking spring-fed pockets of water so cold they stole his breath. He saw it as if from a height then, a slow pan of the cove. A young Catholic boy set loose among a group of Protestant women grazing for berries. The trap of priest-craft, Hiram’s pamphlets said, the trickery of Satan. No man of theirs for miles.
For a moment he considered turning back the way he came. But knew he would only look more the fool for that. He settled in at a likely-looking berry bush across from Sadie and began picking in earnest. He could feel the attention of everyone on him as he worked. Only Sadie seemed not to have noticed his arrival. He worked his way up the bush to have a fairer view of her. Hair over her shoulder, her face and neck red from bending forward. A halo of blackflies danced around her head in the stillness and she waved a hand absently to clear them from her eyes. The curve of her breasts down the front of the blouse.
She said, “How did you know to find us out here?”
“Just luck,” he said, turning back to the berries. “Took a walk out past the Washing Pond.”
Sadie sat back on her haunches to look at him, pushing the hair out of her face, waving the blackflies away. “You went up to the house, didn’t you. Talked to Agnes.”
“Maybe I did.” He smiled to tell her he wasn’t about to admit more than that, and she smiled back.
“Who knit you, I wonder? I never seen the gall.”
One of the women across the hill stood up and shouted across to them. “Have he got his bottom covered, Sade?”
There was a scatter of laughter, though most of the women didn’t seem to see anything funny in the situation.
Sadie reached across and tipped his dipper far enough she could see into it. “Mostly leaves,” she shouted back. “Leaves and green berries.”
Her mother stepped between them. “He’s a dab hand at picking, is he?” Helen looked down at him without smiling and turned to her daughter. “Go on and give Mrs. Gillard a hand setting out the dishes.”
Sadie opened her mouth but Helen cut her off. “Go on like I told you,” she said.
Sadie dumped her berries into the pillowcase and walked down toward the beach. Helen took the dipper from Wish’s hand and glanced into it.
“I don’t have the woman’s touch with this,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I expect you’re all man.”
He half expected her to tell him to push off, could see her weighing her instincts against common courtesy. She went back to the berries finally, didn’t bother returning the dipper he’d been using. He looked down to the beach after Sadie. Weighing his options in much the same way.
He sat on the sand, holding his ankles, watching Sadie take stacks of plates and cutlery out of a hamper.
“Aloysious,” she said.
“Most people calls me Wish.”
“Wish,” she repeated. He could tell she liked it, the feel of the word in her mouth, its connection to him. “You’re from the Southern Shore.”
Mrs. Gillard lifted out a platter of tea buns wrapped in towels. She handed it to Sadie, who offered the tray to Wish. He took one but didn’t taste it, only held it as they talked. It was still warm with the heat of the oven though it had been sitting wrapped in the basket for hours.
“I’m from Lord’s Cove, over Burin way. Moved across to the Southern Shore when I was a boy.”
Three crows pitched on the shoreline ten yards from the fire, and Wish crossed himself three times. Looked up to see Sadie and the older woman staring.
“Can’t be too careful,” he said.
“Where did you get that mark?” Sadie asked him. “On the nape of your neck.”
Wish reached to touch himself there reflexively, surprised she’d taken note of it. She seemed not even to glance his way when he was stooped near her, picking berries.
“It looks like you were burnt,” she said.
“It’s only a birthmark.”
“Can I have a look?”
Before he could answer, Mrs. Gillard said, “Finish what you were at, Sadie.” A moment later she said, “Watch yourself around that one.” She was speaking into the pot of beans and Wish couldn’t tell if the warning was meant for Sadie or for him.
By the time the women came down to their dinner the sun was directly overhead, and even on the shoreline the heat was stifling. Mrs. Gillard said grace before ladling food onto the plates, and Wish crossed himself when she Amened, knowing it was expected of him. Everyone sat well away from the remains of the fire, where a blackened kettle steamed. The group of them tired and subdued, quieter than Wish expected a gathering of women to be. He leaned toward Sadie and whispered as much to her. She slapped his shoulder. “You saucy black,” she said.
Wish smiled at the girl. It was the same word they used for Protestants on the Southern Shore. Blacks. It was the state of their souls they were referring to.
Mrs. Gillard said, “What did you do in Renews before you hooked up with Hiram Keeping?”
“Ran a list for Gooderiche’s store when I was a youngst
er, setting out cod to dry. Spent a couple of summers on the Banks after the fish with Tom Keating. A bit of salvage.” He shrugged. “I’ll take St. John’s over all of it any day.”
“What’s St. John’s like?” Sadie asked him. She quoted the crofter’s wife from the movie she’d seen the day before. “Do all the ladies paint their toenails?”
“Have you never been to town?”
“Gooseberry Cove is as far as I’ve been. Except for the one trip to Fogo last fall to see the shows.”
Wish tried to recall his first sight of the place, coming through the cliffs of the Narrows on Tom Keating’s bully boat. Long flat flakes for drying cod built over the Battery, a crowded row of finger piers on the north side of the harbour moored tight with schooners. Up the hill behind them the bustle of buildings set among thick stands of trees. The Kirk, the twin towers of the Basilica looking down to the sea. A handful of young Salvation Army officers were witnessing to a crowd on Water Street, red epaulettes on their dark uniforms. The place stank to high heaven, salt fish and rot and maggots, exhaust and coal smoke. It smelled to Wish like life at work.
He glanced at Sadie. He didn’t want to belittle her or the world she knew so he said, “St. John’s isn’t much. Horse shit and taverns, mostly.”
“And which one is it keeping you there?”
He looked at her, surprised. And then he said, “I’m not about to tell any tales.”
“Then why am I sitting here talking to you, I wonder?”
He leaned slightly in her direction again without saying a word.
“What kind of things did you bring in,” Helen asked him abruptly, “salvaging?”
“Just about anything under the sun,” he said.
“Name some for me.”
“Doors and windows. Lumber. Jam and fruit and meat. Cans of ketchup. Soap. We came into a load of twenty pound hams once, bobbing around the wreck, had to use casting nets to get them aboard. A wheelbarrow, shovels. Copper pipe. We got a few Portugee coins one time and we drilled them out for washers. There was a statue off a Spanish boat, Jesus on the cross, all in bronze and big as life. A couple of alky wrecks.”
The Wreckage Page 3