The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  Mercedes wouldn’t look at her.

  Her grandmother raised Mercedes’ chin with one hand, then drew back and slapped her face with all the force her ancient body could muster. “This is a godly house you live in,” she said. “You would do well to remember that.”

  Wish arriving in the Cove then, all limbs and long face, a conspiratorial smile that made you think he had something important to say to you later on, when he could get you alone. Crossing himself at the sight of crows. She’d heard her grandmother prattle on about his kind enough to know what the old woman would think of him. And something in Mercedes found that an irresistible draw.

  From a distance the house seemed solid enough, but she could almost feel it waver once she was inside. Pitch dark until she remembered her sunglasses and took them off. The walls peeling and water-stained, the floors rotting out. She went along the hall to the parlour, which was empty, the hand-built chairs and settee, the hutch and end tables gone now, sold or stolen by antique dealers who scoured the outports to supply shops in Quebec and Ontario and New England. She tried to recall the close, polished scent that had defined the room when she was a girl, but even her memory of smell seemed to have left her.

  Mercedes turned from the door to the staircase behind her. Went up one step at a time, testing her weight on each one. The naked bed frame still in her parents’ room. She pictured her grandmother lying there after Mercedes’ father was buried. When she offered Mercedes her wedding ring. She gripped the left post at the head in both hands but couldn’t budge it. Decided to wait there until Wish came up from the shoreline.

  The path from the house back down to the harbour was uneven and she had to concentrate to avoid stumbling as she went.

  She was taking long slow breaths and each one made her head ring. Spruce gum and new grass, the scoured-clean smell of salt water in the wind. It was like an air bubble popping in the inner ear cavity, a distant muffle of sound instantly dialled sharp and clear. Juniper and rotting lumber, the sour odour of alder bushes. She could smell Isabella’s shampoo wafting back to her, honey and yeast, and beyond that the barely perceptible smudge of the sheep taking over the Cove.

  A wager with Hiram, Wish told her, standing in the old bedroom, his hands filthy with rust. I’d have screwed a knothole, he said. She started to feel dizzy as he spoke and she gripped the straps of her shoulder bag with both hands. She was suddenly and for the first time afraid of the man, of what he could do to her memory of him. A whiff of ammonia in her nostrils and she thought she might faint until the smell of the house came rushing past it, mildew and old iron and the punky odour of rooms shut up with themselves for years, mouse droppings and mothballs. The cheap aftershave Wish was wearing, alcohol and leathery mint, and something awful beneath that. Sweat and old age and fear. Corruption. She wanted open air and she left him there, walking too quickly down the wonky stairs.

  Isabella was getting farther and farther ahead of her on the path. “Bella,” she said. She felt like lying down where she stood, stretching out in the grass beside the path and sleeping. “I need a second,” she said.

  Bella came back to her. “You okay, Mercedes?”

  “I just need a second.” She lifted the dark glasses with one hand and wiped at her eyes.

  “What happened up there, Mom?”

  “Nothing. Nothing much. It’s just,” she said. “Everything.”

  “Can we go now?” Isabella said. “Are we done here?”

  “I want to see the graveyard,” Mercedes said. “Then we can go.”

  The cemetery fence was down, the remains of the palings almost lost to the high grass and spruce that circled the clearing. A handful of Gerry Foley’s sheep had made their way into the graveyard and were grazing among the headstones, which were sunken and tipped, or cracked at the base and fallen into the grass where they were being swallowed by a slow green tide of moss. The oldest marble stones were worn bare by age and the elements, the carved lettering of names and dates stripped away and lost. Mercedes wandered around the space, trying to recall where her father was buried. She stood in the centre of the graveyard and turned a slow circle.

  Isabella pointed to a squat black marker of polished stone. “That’s got to be recent,” she said.

  They walked over together and found her father’s grave, her mother and grandmother laid to rest on either side. A small plaque at the foot of the plot in memory of Hardy.

  Bella ran a hand over Helen’s marker, the black stone as smooth as glass. She said, “You never considered coming back for her funeral, Mom?”

  “Johnny tried to talk me into it. Said I’d always regret it if I didn’t.”

  “And?”

  “What’s one more regret?” She waved a hand in the air. “I have to sit down.”

  Isabella helped her onto the grass and sat beside her. The sheep had congregated on the opposite side of the clearing, and they watched the animals work over the ground. They were lackadaisically methodical, the sound of them cropping the new growth on the graves like a glimpse of life at work in some secret place, the world’s subterranean appetite on display.

  Bella motioned her chin toward the church, where Wish was making his way along the path. “Prince Charming at six o’clock,” she said.

  “Call him up for me, would you?”

  Bella watched her mother a moment longer before she stood and called to Wish.

  “I’ll meet you over at the boat,” he shouted.

  “Tell him to come up,” Mercedes said.

  “Mom wants you a second.”

  Wish laboured into the clearing, out of breath and limping. He rubbed a finger under his nostrils. “Almost too old for this,” he said.

  Mercedes looked up at him, thinking he might be talking about more than the walk.

  He gestured toward the headstones. “This is your crowd, is it?”

  “It is.”

  “Your mother,” he said, pointing to the black marker.

  “What’s left of her.”

  He leaned toward Isabella. “Her mother never thought much of me, first or last.”

  “I’m not sure I blame her,” Bella said.

  Mercedes smiled at her daughter. Saucy as the black. It was the one thing Mercedes was certain had passed directly from her.

  Wish said, “I think it was more along the lines of a philosophical difference with me and Helen.”

  “That’s what I always thought,” Mercedes said. “No one told us youngsters anything in those days.”

  Wish crouched and leaned awkwardly on one arm to settle on the ground. “What do you mean?” he said. He seemed relieved to be talking about something other than what had gone on in the old house.

  “Mom got sick the year before she passed away. She was living with Agnes by then. Had a fever so high she was out of her mind half the time, didn’t recognize anyone, didn’t know where she was. Kept asking for the priest.”

  “The priest?”

  “Ag thought it was just the fever, you know, foolish talk. But she went on and on about it and it looked like they were going to lose her. Ag sent David across to Tilting and he carried the priest back. Left them alone in the room awhile.” Mercedes looked across at Wish, his mouth working hard. She said, “Mother’s people were from somewhere in Conception Bay but they had nothing to do with her once she came here with Father. I always thought it was just her being pregnant before she married.”

  “She was Catholic,” Wish said.

  “No one said a word about it all those years.”

  Wish made an attempt to get to his feet but began drifting awkwardly sideways. Bella jumped up to grab his arm.

  “You okay?” she said.

  He pulled his arm free. Used both hands to smooth the white hair ringing his head. “Mercedes,” he said, as if he was trying the word out for the first time. Tried to recall McCarthy’s phrase, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.

  “It must have been hard for her, all those years. She told Ag that Nan sat her down
with a hymn book the first week she was here and said, ‘You learn them, missy. Because there’s no micks in this house.’”

  Wish was still unsteady on his feet and Bella waited beside him, her hands ready. He was staring down at the black headstone. “Well, missus,” he said. He seemed about to say something more but turned away to look at Bella and then at Mercedes. He started toward the church and they watched him go, nodding to himself as he walked along the path toward the Spell Rock.

  Bella said, “Is that what you brought him out here to tell him?”

  “I guess so.”

  “She was afraid of losing you. Your mother.”

  “She wanted to spare me what happened to her, I imagine. She was afraid I’d lose my family altogether.”

  “She wasn’t far wrong there, was she.”

  Mercedes looked up at Bella, at the angry smile on her face. She could smell the chlorophyll of the freshly cropped grass drifting across the clearing. She reached for a hand. “Let’s go,” she said.

  2.

  BELLA DROVE THE FIRST LEG of the trip back to St. John’s. Mercedes heard Agnes whisper across to Wish in the backseat, “What happened over there?” But he didn’t say anything in response that she could make out.

  In Clarenville they stopped for gas and ate fried chicken at a Mary Brown’s that was empty but for them. Dusk when they walked back to the car, and they pushed on into the night, Wish driving, the tide of darkness settling over them as they travelled east. By the time they crossed the isthmus onto the Avalon Peninsula it was pitch outside, their world reduced to thirty feet of road in the headlights, no stars overhead. Agnes and Isabella nodded off in the back and Mercedes glanced across at Wish to make sure he wasn’t drifting. He seemed to feel her watching.

  He said, “The things the Monsignor used to tell us about you.”

  “Who?”

  “Your people. Protestants. Threw you all in together, Billy Sunday and Christian Science and the Quakers and Alexander Dowie, the Sally Ann. Trial marriages and prison reform and prohibition. A diseased imagination, he used to say, at odds with the genius of Catholicism.”

  “The what?”

  “The genius of Catholicism. Funny how I spent all my time at mass daydreaming about some girl’s tits and I can still quote him, chapter and verse.” Wish took a breath. “Father Power didn’t think much of you crowd,” he said.

  She could see he was furious.

  He said, “It’s Spanish, did you know that?”

  “What is?”

  “Mercedes. It means compassion or mercy or some goddamn thing.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t know that.”

  Wish wagged a finger in her direction without taking his eyes from the road. He said, “You wanted to know everything, is that right?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You haven’t changed your mind about that?”

  She hesitated, wondering if she wasn’t too tired for it. But in the end she said, “I’m too old to change.”

  He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel as if to get a better grip. He said, “There was a guard at the camp I spent the war in. He was an interpreter there the last six months. Nishino, his name was.”

  She shifted in her seat to watch him as he talked, his face lit by the dashboard lights. He went on for the better part of an hour, speaking levelly and without emotion, as if he was providing an affidavit, listing dates and events, victims and perpetrators and bystanders, answering questions to clarify, interpreting phrases, naming names when he remembered them. Osano, McCarthy, Spalding. Koyagi, van der Meulen. Nishino. Nishino. Nishino.

  He told her about losing Anstey and carrying the urn to the French Temple, happening on the interpreter asleep in the crypt. Like a gift. He said, “We busted in on him there the next night. Me and Harris and Spalding. He was sitting with his back against the far wall and the gun in his hand. Put it up to his head and pulled the trigger. Click, click, click, like that. Just kept pulling the trigger. Click, click, click. We all stepped in, me and Harris and Spalding following behind. And Nishino knelt up to meet us, his hands down by his side. He just give up. We had these wooden clubs the guards at the camp used on us and we started right in. He stayed upright a long time. Pushed himself up off the floor once or twice. Never made a sound.”

  She could tell he was fighting not to go under and she said, “It sounds to me like maybe he got what he deserved.”

  “I was called there, is how I saw it at the time. It was a righteous thing.” He cracked his window open, as if he was afraid of being overheard and wanted the noise of the wind to cover his voice. “But right and wrong never come into once we got going. It was just … His little piggy eyes, you know. It could have been anyone of his kind, is what I think now.”

  Mercedes reached a hand across but he shrugged away from her. Through the window lay the invisible sprawl of barrens and brush land she’d flown over leaving the island fifty years before. She could feel the massive splay of it ravelling through the darkness to either side of them, as if the countryside itself were shadowing his words. It seemed malevolent somehow, she thought. Or simply indifferent, which amounted to the same thing.

  Wish said, “It was hard work given the shape we were in. We had to take it in shifts, just to have breath enough to keep at it. We’d brought a couple of handguns and Spalding said we should finish him off and get out. But that’s not what we wanted.”

  Mercedes looked out at the road, at the stretch of pavement coming at them. They were less than half an hour outside St. John’s, a sallow glimmer of city lights reflected under clouds on the horizon, as if the place had been set afire when they left the day before and the ruins were still smouldering.

  Wish said, “Do you know what we wanted, Mercedes?” She didn’t answer, and he said, “You can change your mind if you like.”

  “Just finish it, Wish.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything more for a while, as if he’d changed his own mind about it.

  “Wish?”

  He said, “We were on our way out the door after we were through and Harris grabbed my arm, told me to hold the flashlight. I turned the light on Nishino and Harris went through his pockets. He had some American money, an old medal. When Harris was done I flicked the light over the corpse one more time. Over the face. There was blood running out of his ears and the eyes swollen shut.”

  “Jesus, Wish.”

  “I’m almost through,” he said. “We were all just standing there then, looking at what we’d done to him. And Harris. I don’t know. Harris stood over him and opened his pants and he—” Wish looked out the side window, then back at the highway. “He pissed on him. Right where I had the light shining. He was saying, ‘How do you like that, you yellow bastard.’ And then Spalding stepped up and joined him.”

  “That’s enough,” she said.

  “That’s what we wanted, Mercedes.”

  She rolled her window all the way down, leaning her head out into the roar of it so she wouldn’t have to hear another word. She filled her head with the cold and the noise until Bella woke in the back and told Mercedes to roll the window closed.

  WISH

  HE TURNED OFF THE HARBOUR arterial just outside the downtown core, taking the exit for the Southern Shore highway out to Calvert. Keeping a close eye on the speedometer. All the while he was talking to Mercedes he’d caught himself picking up speed and had to ease off the accelerator. They hadn’t said another word after Mercedes rolled up her window but he kept losing himself in the basement of the French Temple and the needle would climb above 100, 110.

  He’d driven in and out the Southern Shore highway in a similar state of distraction when he came home to Newfoundland to settle things for Lilly. He was in hard shape at the time, drunk most of the day and not able to function in any sensible way when he was sober. He often had no memory of the trip to St. Pat’s when it was done, on autopilot the whole way. He stopped for a coffee and a doughnut in Churchi
ll Square and ate half a container of Tic Tacs before going in to see Lilly, but there was no hiding the condition he was in. She could see it in the slovenly way he dressed, in his rheumy eyes and the sallow colour of his skin, in the perpetual three-day whisker. One afternoon she leaned toward him out of her chair and said, “You have to ask God for help with this.” She tipped her hand to her mouth to show him what she meant.

  He’d just that week spent half his life savings on a car and the house in Calvert and had no idea how he was going to get by. He was in a foul enough mood to argue with a crazy woman. He said, “There is no God, Lilly.”

  She said, “Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini qui fecit coelum et terram. Without Him,” she said, “we can do nothing. You have to say the prayer of a special intention to Our Blessed Lady, every day for thirty days, to ask for her intercession.”

  “I brought a crib board,” he said. “Interested in a game?”

  He’d quit drinking half a dozen times in his life, always to appease women who left anyway once they saw that sobriety made him no easier to live with. It had never occurred to him to quit when he was alone. But he poured a bottle of Screech down the sink when he got home from St. Pat’s that night. In the morning he brewed a pot of coffee and made a fresh pot every hour. Did the same every day afterwards, morning to night, black coffee strong enough to stand a spoon up straight. Drank it as fiercely as the rum. Just to prove Lilly wrong in the matter, to settle something for himself. He stumbled a few times, spent an evening at Mercer’s hammering back dark-and-dirties until he puked. Each slip goading him sober for longer periods. It had been years now since he last took a drink. And there was some small comfort in staying dry of his own volition.

  He’d hoped to receive some of the same comfort in telling Mercedes his story, some sort of release or relief, but there was none. It felt like an act of cruelty, almost a violent thing in the aftermath, to carry through as far as he did when he could feel Mercedes pulling away. And even then he was holding back, refusing to give up the one detail not even Harris or Spalding knew.