But as happens when unselfish deeds are offered by a self fraught with fear, everything becomes uncertain except one’s own needs. And Sylvanus gave but for a short while, she noted, before he was trotting behind her like the lost pup again, wanting his ears stroked for his goodness. Receiving nothing but an impatient sigh or vacant look, he’d amble off again, pushing off his boat and spending long hours at sea, puttering about his stage till late in the evenings and then loafing around Jake’s firepit, drinking brew and bemoaning his fate to his brothers. Or, perhaps he didn’t complain to his brothers, she thought. Perhaps it was at his mother’s table that he sat, bemoaning himself. Whoever. It was Eva who sounded the call.
“Awful late thaw this year,” said Eva. “Should’ve had the seeds in before now.” She stood, gazing out through Adelaide’s doorway, sniffing the rot of last year’s meadow as though gauging its providence. It was middle of June, four months now since the third burial, and four weeks since Adelaide started abandoning her house for the tuckamores.
“I can do that,” said Adelaide as Eva lifted the broom out of the corner and started sweeping off the stoop. Her tone was without conviction and Eva carried on sweeping. Comfortable as an old robe was Eva as she puttered around the kitchen most mornings, washing the few cups and sweeping the floors, and Adelaide had grown perfectly content with lolling in the old woman’s early-morning visits before donning her garments and slipping out of the house for the head.
This morning, as Eva opened the door, sweeping the crumbs and bit of dirt outside, Adelaide was feeling more listless than usual. She watched moodily as Eva stood on the stoop, tossing a water-sogged doormat over a junk of wood to dry off. The falls trumpeted loudly from the spring thaw. Eva stood for a moment, staring intently at the swollen waters of the brook sluicing past, as though caught in its urgency. Adelaide remembered when she, too, stood in the doorway, carried away by the strength of a morning.
A stream of sunshine flowed through the doorway, gathering in a pool of warmth around her feet. It would be nice upon the cliffs. Eva ought to be leaving soon; it was already past the time she usually left.
“Yes, easy enough to smell the ground these mornings,” said Eva, breathing deeply. “Finally. Thank the Lord, I was starting to worry we’d never get the seeds in this year. Can you smell that ground?” she asked Adelaide. “Yes, sir, that’s the sign to start hoeing. Abruptly, she stepped inside and, shutting the door, crossed the kitchen with quick, little steps, as though having spoken the thought, it was now a deed to be accomplished. “Promising to be a good summer after all, don’t you think?” she added, shaking out the tablecloth into the wood box. “Be good to start gardening again, feel the air. Is your tea all right? I can make more.” Sweeping up the few more crumbs falling from the cloth, she opened the door again, flicking them outside, and started wiping down the bin she’d already wiped and filling the teapot she’d already filled.
Fussing is what the old woman was doing, thought Adelaide impatiently, and never one for fussing was Eva.
“Snow got part of the fence knocked down,” she was saying, rooting at the ashpan with the poker. “Syllie ought to fix it soon. I don’t allow Melita or Elsie can help with the planting this year—they’re taking over the old midwife’s garden. Too old she is now to be stooping over all day.” Eva grunted, straightening out her back. “Feels like I’m getting old myself,” she said, hanging the poker off the side of the stove. “Getting harder to bend over.”
“I could help, I suppose, ready the soil,” said Adelaide absently.
“That’s good, then. We’ll start day after tomorrow— give it another day to dry up. You want some bread toasted? I might have some bread toasted.”
Adelaide jolted. Was it time? Time to be well again? How long hadn’t she been well—six weeks? Twelve weeks? A hundred weeks? She couldn’t remember this dispiritedness having never been there, could hardly imagine its ever leaving her.
“Suppose everyone’s calling me lazy by now, are they?” she asked childishly.
“You’ve a right to grieve, child.”
“Yeah, ten, twelve weeks, right? Like a bout of arthritis.” She flushed as Eva paused, slicing the bread. “I gets a bit impatient sometimes,” she mumbled apologetically.
“You’re holding on better than most of us,” said Eva, laying the sliced bread in the oven.
Most of us? Who’s us? thought Adelaide, leaning sideways to catch the old woman’s face. But was it ever possible to read that startling mix of light grey eyes and black brow? “Eva, will you sit down,” she near snapped as the old woman circled the bin like a bird searching out a roost.
A child’s shriek, followed by a loud laugh from Suze, sounded from outside, sparing Eva a response and bringing a groan from Adelaide.
“Swear to God, I’ll cut out that wall myself,” she cried with such misery that Eva looked to her, startled. “Oh, you can never see who’s coming or going.”
Eva snatched the toast out of the oven, eyeing her sympathetically. “Go to bed if you wants,” she said quietly, “and make out you got the cramps. Morning, ma’am,” she said pleasantly as the door opened, letting in the rush of the falls and Suze. Her eldest, Benji, stood reluctantly on the stoop, his boots muddied and his face hidden beneath a mock sou’wester.
“Go on, get in. You’re not shy as that,” chided Suze. “Here, don’t go off the mat, take off them boots, my gawd, the mess he’s in. And how’re ye, the day?” she asked the room at large, face flushed from the exertion of walking and eyes bright as lanterns. “Caught you this morning, didn’t I?” She grinned toward Adelaide. “Wherever it is you been going in the mornings. Go ahead, eat your toast before it gets cold. My, Eva, you’re spry as a lark. No getting old with you—not like Am’s old mother. Cripes, I told Am we might as well move down here to Cooney Arm because she’s getting flightier every day and won’t leave her house at all now. Certainly, we might all be moving yet, if you paid attention to the news. Sir, that relocating—or location program, or whatever they’re calling it—that’s something else, that is, relocating people all over the place. Here, fall back on the floor,” she ordered her youngster. “I hauls off your boots.”
“Resettlement, that’s what they’re calling it,” said Eva, hurrying for the mop. “Let me wipe the water off the floor. This dirty old weather should clear up soon. Silliest thing I ever heard, people floating their houses from one place to another.”
“The government’s paying a good penny, maid. And like they says, they can’t be building roads and light poles to every cove and cranny on the island—and they’re promising lots more work for bigger places. I’m surprised there’s not more of it going on around here. For sure there’s enough people dotted about. Cripes, how hard you got that boot jammed on, my son,” she cried, giving the youngster’s boot a harder yank. “There! Now, take off that cap. You looks like old Wessy Noseworthy. My, look at his hair, frizzier than mine—better to look like Wessy, I think. Go on over with your aunt Addie—he loves to rock, Addie. How you doing, anyway, my love? My, she looks a lot better, don’t she, Eva? Getting some colour back in her face. Lord, no, Addie, don’t take him up like that; he stands on the rocker, that’s all. Well, sir,” she ended as Adelaide pulled the cumbersome boy onto her lap.
Easier to feign a smile and a rock than the cramps and endure more fussing, Adelaide thought resignedly. She tossed an appreciative look at Eva, who ordinarily was wrapping herself in scarves and heading for the door herself at the first sign of company, but who was now making tea for Suze and popping the lid off a cookie tin, offering Benji a gingersnap—as she should, thought Adelaide as sullen as she was grateful, for she’d be safely cocooned upon the head by now had the old woman stopped her fussing and gotten on her way earlier this morning.
With much coaxing and admonishing from his mother and Eva alike, the shy youngster finally whipped out a thick pink pad and stole a gingersnap, snapping it shut in his hand as his mother now coaxed him into saying thank you.
“You’d think, by Lord, somebody was going to snatch it back from him,” exclaimed Suze fondly, as the boy hid the cookie inside his pocket. “Great big baby, he is. Mommy’s boy, like his dad.” She rolled her eyes. “Up with the cough all week, Am was, and my Lord, it don’t take much to bring he down, I tell you. Slightest bit of a cough and he’s dragging the mattress out of the room and throwing it on the floor beside the stove, and that’s where he lies till he’s better. That’s right—bed only ten feet away, and he’s dragging out the mattress to get closer to the stove. Perhaps he thinks it’s the stove and not the heat that warms him. I allows he’d be crawled up me arms like one of the youngsters if I let him sometimes. Boys is worse than girls, I dare say. What you say, Eva? You had enough boys—you should know.”
“Lots of times I rocked the boys,” said Eva.
“And when he coughs! Oh, my dear, his old body shakes—one little cough and it’s like he’s having convulsions. True! A hiccup from somebody else is a full-bodied sneeze coming from Am. I suppose Sylvanus is the other way, is he?” she asked, turning to Adelaide. “Don’t show a thing.”
“He don’t show much,” said Eva, answering for her. “Hard to tell with the strain he’s under these days with the markets dropping like this.”
Adelaide, who’d been half listening, glanced at Eva, but the old woman was busy serving Suze tea and the buttered toast, nodding to another tirade of Suze’s about poor Am worrying himself to death over the trawlers or freezers or some darn thing.
“My Lord, I can’t even think about figures like that, can you, Addie?”
“What figures?”
“About what they’re hauling out of the water, maid, you was always the smart one. My Lord,” she exclaimed as Adelaide drew a vacant look, “I don’t believe she knows a thing were talking about. The trawlers, maid, and the factory freezers—and the three hundred tons they took from the water last year.” She paused, looking doubtful of her words. “Anyway, I’m sure that’s what they said. It’s all you hears on the radio these days: how much fish the factory freezers and the trawlers are catching in a year, and now the Russians are out there with two or three more factory boats. Frightened to death, Am is, that they’re sucking the grounds dry. He don’t say nothing, mind you, but he’s not good with hiding things, he’s not. Like he says now, once something like this gets started, there’s no stopping it. Am’s right nervous about it, he is, although he’s getting his catch! That’s not what they’re saying on shore—the inshore fishermen are always the first to feel it. How much fish did Syllie get on hold last year?” she asked Adelaide.
Adelaide blinked. “On hold?”
“In brine, maid. They always got fish in brine all winter. How’s they going to dry them they catches in the fall of the year when it’s all the time raining?”
“I knows that, Suze, cripes! I don’t know how much. Syllie don’t talk about them things.”
Suze tutted. “Not something you
needs
talk about— something you
knows,
isn’t it?”
“Something
you
knows maybe. My father fished on the Labrador—and it’s not like I hung around stages. A hundred!” she quickly threw out, remembering something of what Sylvanus had said a few weeks ago. “He got a hundred pounds on hold.”
“Pounds!” Suze grinned. “Not
pounds,
maid, he’d have
quintals
on hold. Well, sir, she don’t know a thing. Where’d you grow up?”
“A hundred quintal, then,” said Adelaide.
“He got none on hold,” said Eva.
Adelaide stilled, watching as Eva fussed at the sink, her comment hanging loudly in the air. A sense of disquiet filled the kitchen, and for once Adelaide was grateful when Suze’s clacking—if not her rashness—started up again.
“Well, maid, I don’t allow Syllie would burden you with his fishing problems. Enough you got on your mind as it is, and I don’t worry but that he’ll soon have his puncheons filled. Although he got a late start this season—but that’s it now; some things can’t be altered, hey, Eva?”
Cursed tongue, scorned Adelaide, sliding the youngster off her lap, her hand to her stomach. But there was no fooling those aged eyes now standing before her with the teapot, offering more tea, and no misreading their pointedness as they stared deeply into Adelaide’s whilst she said, “Syllie’s to himself, no doubt, but there’s some that needs to be rocked more than others, and I always felt that he was one.”
There. That’s what you’ve been on about all morning, is it? asked Adelaide silently, drawing her hand away from her stomach and proffering her cup. Looking away from the old woman’s eyes, she settled back in her rocker, Suze’s voice droning in her ears as she prattled on and on about gill nets and how Syllie should get one, seeing how he likes working by hisself, “because for sure he’d get more fish with a gill net than hand-lining, and they’re lot easier to handle, maid, a gill net is, because you can move them around to where the fish are. How come he won’t go get one, then, when things are getting so bad?”
This last question was directed at Adelaide, who was now rubbing her brow, a tight band forming around her head as she tried to think of something she’d heard Syllie say the other day—no, not Syllie, the radio, it was on the radio, she heard someone talking about gill nets. Oh, that’s right, she remembered now, it near sickened her what they were saying about how they hung like curtains in the water, catching fish by the gills in their mesh, and how they were made from a modern kind of fibre, from nylon, and never rotted—which was a good thing, except that they were always breaking from their moorings and then floating about for years in the sea, filling up with fish till their weight sank them to the bottom, and how, when all the fish rotted or were eaten by other fish, they rose again, fishing themselves full, till their weight sank them again, and again, fishing and rotting, fishing and rotting, and entangling other things in their mesh like sharks and seals, and becoming a floating larder for other fish to feed on as they drifted by with their fresh and rotting carcasses. It had nearly turned her stomach, it had, when some fellow came on saying how he come upon one, floated ashore, once, with a half-eaten shark in it, and hundreds of fish, their bellies bit out by seals. She had hurriedly turned off the radio as he started telling how the fish that was still living in the net was flicking and strangling amongst the dead and rotting ones, and how he and his buddy got enough live ones to make up a quintal that morning just by walking on the beach.