“My, what’s wrong with you,” tutted Suze as Adelaide drew back from the shawl.
“It’s—it’s for you, not me,” cried Adelaide. “You take it!”
Suze tutted again. “Look some good on my dumpy shoulders now, that would. And like I said, it’ll look right nice with your eyes.”
“No. No, yours are nicer. Please—I—it must’ve cost you a fortune.”
“Money!” scoffed Suze. “What’s the use of that? It couldn’t keep Benji from getting sick or save you from what you went through. I should be shamed to bring it over, but Lord, you looks so white, Addie. If it brings a little bit of colour to your face, it’s worth it. And now I’d better get going, Dicky’s probably out there waiting for me—he said no longer than twenty minutes, and for sure it’s been that now. No, don’t get up,” she said with a no-nonsense shake of her head, thick hands clamping Adelaide’s shoulder as she was about to rise. “Stay off your feet as much as you can, that’s what you can do. I knows me way out.”
“But,” and her voice dropped to a low whisper, “I don’t deserve this.”
“Oh, pooh,” said Suze, climbing back into her snow-pants. “We don’t know half the time what we’re giving others. Might be a strange thing to say, but when I was missing Benji too much last evening, I thought about you and what you’re going through and it made me feel better. Might be the devil working through me, but there’s a comfort knowing others are suffering worse than you right now. Makes you think about them rather than yourself. I hears others say the same thing, so it must be the way of it if others are feeling it too. And I expects if anything happens to Benji tonight—pray sweet Jesus that it don’t—I expect you’d feel better because of my misery. It’s a hard thing to say—somebody else’s misery bringing comfort to another—but like I said, I’m not calling it, just naming it, is all because I hears others say the same thing. Strange how God works, isn’t it, maid?”
A hard stirring was taking place inside Adelaide. “Suze,” and she followed her guest to the door. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
Clenching the shawl, Adelaide crept to the window after Suze had let herself out. She stood watching her snowshoeing through snow so soft it sent clouds of flurries around her feet as she lunged forward, step after step, toward the frozen waters of the arm, Dicky Bennet, and his horse, black as tar against the white. A tear cut her eye, enflaming further the garment in her hands. Raising it before her, she bowed, trembling into its folds.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE ABYSS
S
HORTLY AFTER SUZE’S VISIT
, Adelaide started working toward a commonality with her neighbours. Crossing the brook almost daily, she took tea with Melita and Elsie, baked cakes for the old midwife, who was seemingly always down with a flu, and helped scrub the school floors and desks every Saturday. On those Sundays the weather was good, she made the trip to Ragged Rock, rocking Benji and chatting with Suze (always wearing the shawl, although after that one first time, Suze, as though sparing Adelaide the painful thank-yous, never noted it again), and visiting with her mother. She even attended a card game at the church, once whilst she was there, nodding to her father’s uproar with a bunch of other fishermen about the Russians showing up in St. John’s with a factory freezer built from the plans they “stole from under the Limeys’ stinking noses.”
“And now here’s our own government spending thousands, waltzing them straight across the country, wining and dining them,” whined her father, fidgeting with his cards as her mother trumped his ace. “Ve’re not here to vish Canadian vaters,” he mimicked in a bad Russian accent, “ve’re just here to vatch.” And Adelaide grinned and nodded along with everybody else, and nodded all the harder as Gert’s husband, Ro, latched on to her father’s talk, and with his eyes snarling onto hers over the kitty, exclaimed all the louder, “You hear the likes of that? ‘Vee got lozs ov vish, b’yes; jez zopping by to visit, is all.’ You ever hear the likes of that—our government listening to the bleeding Russians
and believing them?
They’ll be back, you watch and see if them damn Russians won’t be back, hey, Leam, b’ye?”
Ending off the card game with a round of handshakes to all, she settled into another game with another pair of opponents, listening and nodding and sometimes adding commentary of her own about the fishing and the long-liners and the trawlers and the factory freezers. Even chatting with women over tea became an exercise she faithfully greeted; smiling and thanking them as they exclaimed how well she was starting to look, no matter the paleness of her skin, and praising her house, its tidiness, and what a good worker she was—had always been, some testified, recalling those long, laborious hours of working the flakes and the assembly line at the fish plant.
Nice. No doubt everyone had their ways, but mostly she found everyone nice. And who knows but that she might’ve learned to enjoy this new rapport—the fussing her mother made each time she came, bringing bread and buns, and the ongoing bantering of the others as they furbished her table with thoughts and anecdotes—maybe she could have, had her second pregnancy brought forth a child.
But, no. Her second baby, born two years after the first, lived no longer than the minute it took to show the blue of an eye before dying upon her breasts. Two years again, and her third was readying itself for birth. This time Sylvanus insisted she travel the four-hour trip by train to the hospital in Springdale. Three days after a healthy delivery, an infection running rampant in the nursery rid it of life. She returned home, stone-faced and cold, the small white box in the coach behind her. She ordered Ambrose to motor it to Cooney Arm, while she motored with Sylvanus. And there she ordered it be taken to the church, whilst she sat at home, waiting for the service. Not once did she visit that little white bed. Not once did she look as it lay at the altar; nor when they lowered it into the ground before her, did she look at it fully. Frozen. Her eyes were frozen, and her blood ran cold as winter’s rain. For she still wore that thin wrap of vanity, the one stripped from her shoulders and flung onto her lap through the hands of Suze. Why else had she come to believe that the hideous birthing of the baby wrapped in caul was a summons toward her own salvation, and that a few jaunts across the bridge, caring for the sick, and a few hours rocking Suze’s youngster, were sufficient installments of retribution for her past sins? And come now, surely her second birthing would be the sweet, pretty baby of penance. And she would be smiled upon as she herself had smiled upon that flawless Mother of Divinity at the altar of her youth.
But there was no salvation, only her neighbours. And salt onto a fissure were their sympathies, for far was she from the grieving mother they thought her to be. Rather, it was the Christ child she grieved, believing it him she had sullied, first with her vanity, her haughtiness, and now with her self-serving nature. For her hours of rocking and scrubbing and serving the sick were never from a true sense of goodness; they felt more like bribes now, no matter she’d honestly wanted to make things right, to make folk like her. It was to save herself from this awful sorrowing that she really wanted them to like her, as though their affections could validate her goodness before the all-knowing God.
“Make them stop,” she whispered from her crumpled pillow to Eva one morning. “Make them stop coming.”
“It’ll just be another thing you’ll fret about, if I do,” said Eva, straightening her bedclothes around her.
“Why? Why do you say that?”
“Because these days you’ll fret over anything. I could say you’re sleeping, I suppose, but then you’d only be straining to hear what they were saying over their tea.”
She would’ve asked, had she the will, how it was the old woman knew so well the workings of her mind. But she already knew what Eva would say—that you don’t grow old without learning some things, my maid—so she said nothing, accepting the woman’s quiet administrations, trusting the gentleness of her hands as she quietly let herself in and out of her room, and grateful for her lack of need for words.
Yet she rose, her face stricken with fear one morning as Sylvanus crept in with her morning cup of tea, and cried, “I’ve never felt life, Syllie. Not even when they were readying to be born—almost as if they were already dead in the womb.” Her hands shook so bad he laid the cup on her night table.
“They’re not, though, Addie,” he said soothingly, coaxingly. “We knows that—at least with the last two—”
“I feels the same dead now, like there’s no life inside of me. It’s a godawful feeling, Syllie,” she said shakily. “It’s like my soul was expelled, too, this time—or maybe I only thought there was a soul—but what holds you up if there’s nothing in there?”
“Oh, Addie, the will of God is what holds you up. The simple fact you wakes up tells you that. Don’t—don’t think of such things,” he pleaded.
“How can I not?” she cried out, “when all the time I’m dreaming of a tombstone at the foot of our bed—and I wants to know the name on it, but I’m too afraid to look, scared there’s no name written—that it’s waiting for the next one, my next baby.” Her voice had risen, but she saw he couldn’t listen, couldn’t hear what might be madness, and she sank into herself as he buried his face in her breasts, pleading with her not to think about such things, that dreams were dreams after all, and like Grandfather Now always used to say, you’d lose your mind if you read them religious books too much; that life’s to be lived, not thought about, and religion is what you carries in your heart, and she’d nothing to worry about there, for her heart was as pure as those babies she lost.
“And never you mind nothing else,” he argued as she cried out in protest. “Good health is all you needs to pray for, and I’ll do the rest. Strong hands, I’ve got, and a strong mind when it comes to caring for you, so stop thinking about those things.”
She wished she could. She wished he could rip apart with his bare hands that hidden chamber within that was beckoning her more and more with each passing death. For as the days wore on, and her depression settled like lead, she despaired of ever finding her way out, that her worrying and penance and guilt were all for naught, that there never was a soul shoring her up, that God was simply the makings of her own creation, and the kingdom of heaven a construction in her limited world of thought, a ceiling onto the four corners of the room that contained her.
She nearly cried out to Sylvanus then, but could find no words, no thoughts defined enough to share. Instead she watched, his step heavy with his own thoughts, his hands busied with fixing things around her. She marvelled at the strength that built and buried those little white boxes, that kept their larder filled, that kept the fire burning in their stove. And it was nice, those gifts he kept bringing her, of snow crab, and scallops bigger than tea plates, and handfuls of last summer mint tea buried beneath the snow, and the paths he kept well shovelled so’s she could take walks around the house, along the brook, or across the footbridge to sit with his mother. He did well with all of that, as he’d done in the past, as he’d done with listening to her trite little tales of high marks and passed grades and fallen ashpans and wretched skullies and aprons and fly spit.
But some things she had never shared with him; some things were too deeply forged within to bring to the outside—like her sitting alone as a youngster before an altar, admiring the holiness of colour and quiet, the divinity of mother and child, and the lure of dreams before her co-conspiratorial God. Beauty. Those moments, those dreams had been the beauty in her young life, the magic, despite her subsequent judgments and brandishing of all else around her. And as does a snowflake dissolve upon touch, so does fantasy dissolve upon a tongue. So she hadn’t shared them with Syllie; had kept them in her private chambers. And now, with this darkness fallen upon her, and her thoughts so— In fact, there were no thoughts, not since the moment she had blundered into thinking there might be no God or Divine Mother or babe that had lain in a manger. The fright of such a discovery, or fear of its being, had struck all thought from her—even the tightening in her chest, and that wretched sense of befoulment sickening her stomach, had been struck from within her, forsaking, leaving her with a huge emptiness that sucked her attention inward as though it were a maelstrom, and leaving her as disconnected to Sylvanus and her outer world as if she were a babe in her own womb. Who can speak of such things?
Thus, she burrowed into her pillow, getting out of bed simply to wash and relieve herself, or to peck at whatever small morsels of food Eva was able to persuade her to eat. And only Eva. She was back to wanting no other around her, not even Sylvanus.
But to remain so was to bury Sylvanus as well. Those moments when he sat beside her bed, the brown of his eyes awash in the black of his pupils, and so deeply pitted with fear of this place she had gone, she felt him drowning in his effort to follow her. Eight weeks, then, after she had birthed and buried her third child, she started coming out of her bedroom, spending small amounts of time sitting at her table, delighting Sylvanus, delighting Eva, Suze, her mother, and all those others whose names she was too tired to think of, who traipsed through her kitchen, bringing stews, bringing buns, bringing salads, and their sweet spirits of nitre, and their ginger wine and tales of trite and woe. And grateful though she tried to be for their well-meaning gestures, she wished them gone, wished to be alone.
But, nay, nobody listened to her pleas of “I’m going to be fine now, I can do for myself. Yes, yes, it’s time I started doing for myself.”
“Nonsense, nonsense, you’re not fine, you’re weak as anything,” they rejoined. “Here, sit down and let me get you some tea, some sweetbread, and take off that nightdress; time to get it washed, and your sheets and pillowcases, too, and look, over there by the washstand, some nice clean towels for your wash.” Even Sylvanus was hanging around the house all day long, leaving only to bring in a bit of wood or a piece of meat.
One morning, early spring, after the ice had freed the arm and he ought to have been fishing, she crept into the kitchen as he stood making breakfast, her hands trembling as she pulled the kettle onto the front top.