For the second time in less than a week, he stripped to the waist in front of the washbasin and scrubbed himself. He put on his one good shirt and cleaned his shoes.
He fell in with a sparse column of people heading to Aubrey’s wake, picking their way along the path in the dark. Inside the house he was offered a glass of syrup by Agnes and then he walked down the hallway to the parlour. The coffin stood where the old woman had been lying that afternoon. He guessed she was carried body and bed to one of the upstairs rooms where she’d stay until she died. Near the covered window Helen sat beside Mercedes, holding her hand in a fashion that suggested restraint more than comfort. And Hardy stood over them both, glaring across the room at Wish. Offering his sympathies would only make things worse, he knew, so he went to the casket instead.
Clive was sitting near the head of the coffin. “Looks pretty bleak for you across the room,” he said.
“I hope you got that flask with you.”
Clive set down his glass of syrup and got to his feet. As they walked out into the hallway there was a muffled commotion in the parlour. Wish went back to the door, saw a crowd of bodies in the centre of the room, all bending forward as if they were looking down a well.
Willard Slade put his hands up to Wish’s shoulders and backed him into the hall. “She’s only after having a little fainting spell.”
“Sadie?”
“She’s all right, Wish. You best go on out of it.”
Clive grabbed him by the sleeve and hauled him toward the kitchen and out into the night.
“You sure she’s all right in there, Clive?”
“She’s overcome is all, leave her be awhile.”
They walked into the enclosure of outbuildings away from the house and passed the flask back and forth between them. Clive told him how they’d strewn the body with lime and then sewed up the canvas it had been carried in. “They’ll have to bury him tomorrow, I allow. He’s fair to gone already. Can’t be waiting to get the minister back across from Fogo.”
“I got no chance with her mother,” Wish said. “Her mind is set.”
Clive said, “Back in my father’s day, there was a young one from over in Tilting came courting a girl on the other side of the islands. A few of the locals got together and lay for him down on the landwash and they put the boots to him. Father said the fellow had one eyeball hanging out on his cheek when they were done with him. Blood everywhere.”
“Jesus, Clive.”
“All I’m saying is, Wish, it’s not like it was.”
Wish let out an angry little laugh. He could feel the liquor seeping into his head and he took another mouthful. He thought of the picture in the back kitchen of King Billy crossing the Boyne. That army still on the move. He said, “Would you take us as far as Fogo? If she was willing?”
Clive reached for the bottle. “Maybe you’ve had enough for tonight.”
Wish hauled it free of his hand and glared at him.
“I’m going inside,” Clive said. “You take that flask and go on back to Mrs. Gillard’s.”
Wish tipped the bottle up to his mouth but never took his eyes from the man.
He emptied the flask before he made his way back to the parlour, reeling off the narrow walls of the hallway. Feeling drunker by the second. Helen and Hardy were still sitting across the room but there was no sign of Mercedes. Everyone else staring at their shoes to avoid catching his eye. Fuck them, he thought. Mrs. Gillard sitting him alone at the table for his supper and the minister over from Fogo with his walleyed stare and the crazy old woman lying upstairs in her own piss and fuck King Billy crossing the Boyne out in the back kitchen. Every soul in the Cove stood against them. And Wish was struck by a moment of drunken clarity, seeing that truth made so plain there in the parlour. A line had been drawn that the girl wouldn’t be hard enough to cross once it came clear to her. And he had no right to ask her to cross it.
He stepped into the room, fishing the rosary from his pocket. He knelt in front of the coffin and began praying aloud. “Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
He could hear the rustle of people standing and leaving the room behind him and he raised his voice to be heard over the noise. Expecting any moment to be grabbed by the hair and thrown out the door. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” He went on praying until he was sure the room was empty and then he stood and put the rosary away in his pocket. Disappointed not to have provoked a decent fight, a shoving match, the tiniest bit of cursing. Fucking Protestants, he thought.
“You’re a devout one, Aloysious,” Helen said.
He spun around to see her sitting where she’d been before he knelt down. He bowed slightly in her direction, not sure where he’d picked up such a formal gesture but feeling it was right all the same. The proper mixture of deference and defiance. He thought for a moment she might understand what he was up to. But she only watched him, and he bowed again, drunkenly, before he went down the hallway. The people he’d driven from the parlour were packed into the back kitchen. Not even Clive was willing to look Wish in the eye as he pushed by to get through the door.
He was lying in his bed at Mrs. Gillard’s an hour later, a fierce pulse in his temples. He heard the door to the back kitchen open and footsteps track through the house, up the stairs to his door. “Mr. Furey.”
He didn’t answer, and Mrs. Gillard hammered at the door impatiently. “I knows you’re in there.”
He sat up on the side of his bed. “Come in,” he said.
She swung the door open and stood just inside his room. She was carrying a lamp and the light held below her face made dark holes of her eyes.
“Evening, Mrs. Gillard.”
“I give you a room in my house,” she said. “I fed you from my table.”
“At very reasonable rates.”
Mrs. Gillard straightened her shoulders. “I’ll be staying at the Slades’ tonight rather than sleep under the same roof as you. You feel free to make yourself some breakfast. I expect you to be gone by the time I gets back tomorrow.”
She closed the door before he could ask what time that might be and he sat on the bed with his hands in his lap, listening to her go back down over the stairs.
He was woken by the sound of the back kitchen door opening again and he lay still listening to the footsteps coming up the stairs. He had no idea how long he’d been asleep and he went to the window, peeking past the curtain to see the barest glimmer of first light on the horizon. He called to Mrs. Gillard before she knocked on his door.
“You can’t expect a man to have his breakfast eat by this time in the morning,” he said. He hadn’t undressed at all, falling asleep with his boots up on the bed. He hauled at his shirt and pants, trying to straighten his clothes. “I’ll be gone in an hour.”
The door opened without a knock and a figure much larger than Mrs. Gillard stood there.
“You got a few minutes to pack your things,” Hardy said.
Wish was struck by the bulk of him. Not as tall as himself but broad across the shoulders and thick through.
“I got the boat ready to go,” Hardy went on. “I’ll take you across to Fogo and you can catch a coaster into St. John’s from there.”
Wish scratched at his head and looked around himself, then back at Hardy. “You’ll miss your father’s burial,” he said. He didn’t understand exactly what Hardy was doing there.
Hardy took a step into the room. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small handful of bills and coins. “There’s enough here to get you to St. John’s and keep you a little while.”
Wish looked from the money to Hardy’s face. “You maggoty prick.”
“You don’t touch it till I cut you loose in Fogo.”
Wish stood still. So furious he couldn’t get his breath. That they could think a lousy little bribe would be enough to send him off.
&n
bsp; “Are you going to pack up your materials,” Hardy said, “or do you want me to do it for you?”
Leaving was his plan but he wasn’t about to let her mother think she’d forced him into it. He said, “I think I’ll have myself a bite of breakfast.”
He stepped past Hardy and started down to the kitchen. Hardy hesitated in the room behind him but came after Wish before he’d gotten halfway down the stairs, leaning out over the railing to grab the collar of his shirt.
“Fuck off,” Wish shouted. He reached up and hauled Hardy by the arm, tipping him full over the rail on top of himself. And the two of them fell arse over kettle onto the landing below.
He chugged into Fogo in Aubrey’s trap skiff before noon and tied up at the stage farthest from the main wharf. Two boys were fishing for conners off the end and he asked them if they knew the Cove on Little Fogo Island and how to get there. The smaller of the two said yes, everyone knew the Cove. Wish took one of the bills from his pocket and held it in the air for them to see. “Would you be able to take this skiff to the Cove today?”
“We can leave right now if you want,” the smaller boy said.
“When’s the next coaster heading into St. John’s?”
They both pointed into the main wharf. “Earle’s got one about loaded and ready to go.”
Wish nodded. The Railway boats that Clive travelled on stopped in at every harbour and cove on the coast but Earle’s would sail straight into St. John’s. He put the dollar bill in the boy’s hand.
“Whose skiff is it?”
“Parsons’,” Wish said. “There’s a girl,” he said. “Mercedes. Sadie. Sadie Parsons.”
The boys both looked at him, waiting.
“Never mind,” he said. “Go on. Plenty of fuel to get you there.”
Earle’s coaster made St. John’s at five the following morning. He’d bunked down in steerage for a while but couldn’t sleep, his head travelling circles and he couldn’t take a decent breath. He came out on the deck finally and stood at the rail the rest of the trip, staring blindly at the water. The headlands of the Avalon as they neared St. John’s black against the night sky, like the dark height of that tidal wave coming after him years ago in Lord’s Cove, he could almost feel the tunnelling roar of it coming in over open water behind them. Glancing back as they ran, a long line of black on the horizon, travelling hard.
Wish stood at the rail of the coaster as they sailed toward the Narrows of St. John’s with that same panic churning in him. A voice in his head shouting Run. Run. Run.
MERCEDES
1.
THERE HAD BEEN A TREMOR earlier that evening, Wish told her. Just before supper. The house quivering so that all the dishes shimmied off the table and the Sacred Heart pitched from the wall. His father said, “Signs and wonders before the end of time.” His mother picked up the Sacred Heart and put it back in its place.
After they ate, he and his father went down to the stage to see what damage had been done there. It was coming on to dark and his father opened the stage-house doors onto the water for the last of the sunlight and lit up two torches. They found a mess of nets and gear that had dropped out of the rafters and set about clearing it away. And then the water went out of the harbour, the same as if someone had taken the plug from a sink. Wet rock and thick beds of seaweed. Skiffs and a two-masted schooner sitting on the harbour floor, still on their lines. Quiet then, every creature on God’s earth gone silent.
His father turned to Wish and said, Run. Get your mother, he said, and run. He kept shouting that: Run, run, run. He’d hauled his boat up behind the stage weeks before and put her under a load of boughs for the winter and he started clearing those off, trying to get her back over on her keel, wanting to haul her far enough up the shore to save her. But he saw it was useless and gave it up, following after Wish toward the house. They met his mother on her way down to find them and looked back to the shoreline. Water sluicing into the empty harbour ahead of a dark wall bearing down on them. They lit out for the high ground among the trees, trying to outpace the roar smashing up over the wharves and houses and gardens.
She woke early to the sound of someone talking aloud in the room next to her own. Three nights in a row now she’d dreamt of the tidal wave Wish described to her—something about the blind surge of it had taken hold of her—and each morning she woke with the same amorphous sense of dread. She pushed it aside, trying to identify the sound coming through the bedroom wall.
Her grandmother.
The old woman seemed rarely to sleep at night, only drifted somewhere further off the shore of consciousness and sense. Her soliloquies indecipherable and relentless, like the burble of a rattling brook. When the old woman was in her bed downstairs it was a low murmur that was almost soothing. But through the wall beside her now it was persistent as a toothache.
It took another moment to piece together why the sound was coming from her parents’ bedroom rather than downstairs. She remembered getting up from her chair when Wish left the room with Clive and all the blood draining to her feet. A smell of ammonia in her nostrils before the blackness swamped her. And now she was in bed, her grandmother mewling away in her parents’ room.
Her father flashed to her mind, boxed up in the parlour, and she covered her mouth with her hand to keep from crying out. A hint of lime and putrefaction crawling in under the door. She pressed her face into her pillow to escape the smell and to muffle the sound of her crying, trying not to wake Agnes beside her. It seemed obscene to have forgotten, even those few moments after waking, that the man was dead and about to be set in the ground.
She hadn’t seen Wish arrive for the wake the evening before, though she knew he’d entered the room by the pressure of her mother’s hand ratcheting hold of her. Like she was about to dangle her daughter over a cliff edge. Mercedes looked up to see him across the room by the casket, having a quiet word with Clive. Hardy stood straighter beside her like some guard dog, edging sideways to block her view, and she had to fight an urge to give him a good smack in the crotch.
Mercedes had stumbled upon Hardy early on the morning after young Willard Slade’s funeral. She almost fell over him in his chair as she came out the bedroom door on her way to the outhouse, his arms folded across his chest, his head crooked into the wall. She thought it was her father asleep there at first and in the few seconds it took to recognize Hardy her heart hammered oddly in her chest, as if it was operating in an empty cavity. She shook Hardy by the shoulder and called his name.
He came to his feet with a start, grabbed her by the arms. “Where are you going?” he said.
“To the backyard. To the outhouse. Where do you think I’m going this time of the night?”
He settled back, trying to overcome the startle she’d given him.
“I thought you were Father for a second.”
“Didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“What in God’s name are you doing asleep in the hall?”
“Nothing,” he said. He sat back in the chair and looked up at her. “Don’t you be too long out there.”
It started to come clear to her then. “What are you doing here, Hardy?”
Her mother came to the door of her room in her nightdress. “Hush up Sadie. Leave your brother alone.”
“This is your doing, is it?”
“Don’t wake your sister.”
“How long are you planning on having him stand guard on the door?”
“As long as it takes.”
Mercedes felt the tears welling up and she slapped Hardy’s shoulder. “He was sound asleep out here,” she shouted. “I had to shake him awake. A lot of good he is to you.”
“Shut up, Sadie,” Hardy said.
“I could be over to Wish’s place now with half my clothes off. And he’d still be sound asleep there with his mouth hung open.”
Her mother said, “Go back to your room, Mercedes.”
“I’m going to the outhouse.”
“You got a chamber pot
to take care of your business.”
Hardy stood to block the way downstairs.
“Are you going to empt it for me, Hardy?”
He didn’t answer. She looked back and forth from her mother to Hardy, then went into her room and slammed the door. Squatted over the pot, her legs shaking with rage. Agnes up on her elbows to see what the racket was about. Mercedes carried the honey pot out into the hall, said, “This belongs to you, does it?” and dropped it in Hardy’s lap.
Hardy threw his hands up to his shoulders as if she’d set a feral cat on him. Mercedes went back into her room and slammed the door again.
Next morning at the Spell Rock she told Wish about her confinement.
“It’s a wonder they let you out alone at all if you’re as wild as that.”
“Agnes is supposed to be with me. I talked her into waiting back off the path a ways. Promised I wouldn’t be gone long enough to get into trouble.”
She could tell he was surprised by her wilfulness, and pleased by it, by her willingness to sneak him into her life.
“I thought Hardy was my father for a second,” she said. “I saw him in that chair outside the door once.”
“Your father?”
“The night he went missing.” She looked at him shyly. “Nan was calling for water downstairs and I got up to look in on her. And Father was sitting in the chair outside the door.”
“Did you tell your mother about it?”
“I haven’t mentioned it to a soul, till now. He was soaking wet, Wish. Every stitch of clothes he had on was dripping water.”
“Did he say anything?”
“I tried to talk to him but he was gone after a second.”
He surprised her by smiling then, although there was nothing dismissive in it. He had a strangely attractive face, large soft eyes, a long lower jaw and the chin just off centre. There was something vaguely equine about it, about the way his head moved as he listened, sudden sideways motions, an exaggerated lifting of the chin when she said something unexpected. Mercedes was uncomfortable around horses, she distrusted their size and slow walk, the crooked limb of their cocks almost touching the ground as they grazed, their wet eyes that seemed bottomless. She couldn’t explain why the look of Wish calmed her.
The Wreckage Page 8