“What
Mother
done, what
Mother
done,” mocked Ivy. “Who gives a shit what
Mother
done?”
“You mind now,” cried Florry as Ivy flounced off, a twist of repulsion marring her face. “Brazen as anything, you are. Here, give it back,” she cried as Janie snatched the pot from her hands.
“Just leave it alone,” said Janie in exasperation. “For the love of God, Mother, what odds how I makes a few pies when you’re not the one eating them?”
“No, old Jordie Noseworthy, that’s all you’re thinking about,” said Florry, “and he scrubby-looking as anything, and Milly Rice crawling all over him.”
Janie’s cheeks stained red. Turning a murderous look onto her mother, she smacked the pot into the sink and marched to her room.
“Go on, you foolish thing,” Florry called after her.
The same red staining Janie’s cheek was staining Adelaide’s as she stood, confronted by her sister’s discomfort. “What difference do it make how a pot of rhubarb is cut?” she asked.
“Don’t
you
start! Bad enough with Mother flapping her gums,” flared Ivy from across the kitchen.
“No, I was asking Mother. Janie should do what she wants …” Adelaide trailed off, her words unheard by Ivy, who was now bellowing, “Janie! Janie, get your clothes on. We gets the jeezes out of here.”
And why wouldn’t she think the worst? thought Adelaide dolefully. For sure I was quick to cast blame and pounce on them both in the past. She sighed resignedly as Florry, throwing up her hands, overrode them all with her well-worn rant: “Ah, all of ye stop it, crowd of young women acting like babies. I wonder where ye gets the energy for it, I do. Here, where do you think you’re going, my lady?” she asked as Janie came out of her room, hauling on a long, wool coat. “You watch out now, Janie, you’re not following Ivy to no Deer Lake. Gawd knows what she’s doing there.”
But Janie was swinging through the door after her sister, buttoning her coat up to her chin. Twisting sideways, she managed a tremulous smile at Adelaide, and with a quickly whispered “Bye,” she was gone, the door shivering on its hinges as she slammed it.
Through the window Adelaide watched as a buttery yellow car pulled up and some curly-haired fellow reached over, pushing open the door for Ivy. Janie climbed in next, her face a blur of white through the side window as the car drove off, a glaring glance back at Florry, who was now hanging out the door, waving her hand and hollering and threatening, “Get back here, you get back here!”
“Trouble, nothing but trouble, that’s what they’re going to bring home, you watch and see,” said Florry, coming back inside, rooting at a boot that was blocking the door from shutting. “I allows her father will skin her alive she goes chasing after Ivy, because that’s the trollop, that Ivy is, and she’ll bring trouble on us yet. Watch and see if she don’t, prancing around the way she does and always driving off to Deer Lake. The worse thing they ever done was put that road through.” She toddled back to the table, sinking breathlessly onto a chair, her fringe of bangs scruffed off from her forehead, and strands of thick, cropped hair sticking to her face with the sweat she’d worked up.
Adelaide sat, anger working its way through her limbs. “You treat them as if they were still girls,” she finally said. “Janie’s near nineteen. Why wouldn’t you just leave her alone, make her pies whatever way she wants?”
“Ah, now, don’t you go starting, Addie, because that’s who they all learned it from, you—all the time fighting and bawling out.”
“I’m not starting nothing. I just wants to know why you wouldn’t leave her alone, is all. Why wouldn’t you just leave her alone?”
“Because she’d never get nothing done if I left her alone. Always up to foolishness, Janie is. And that Ivy, that’s worse again, that is. Lord above, Addie, wait till you gets a house full of youngsters and see then what happens when one wants Pablum for breakfast and another wants eggs and another wants boiled fish. Come back and tell me then what housework gets done if you leaves them alone.” She sighed in an overplayed moment of weariness. “More than once I wished they were babies agin. Only time they had any sense is when they were babies. That’s what I was always telling my own mother—give me the baby to look after, and you look after the rest. Swear to gawd I never touched a youngster after they was two till I had my own.”
Adelaide stared at this dumpling of a mother, her thoughts tripping in astonishment. “Did you never think we’d grow?” she asked incredulously.
“Like any mother with a house full now,” Florry replied, “if I had given thought, I wouldn’t’ve had any of ye. My, Addie, sit back; you’re like the cat about to pounce. As if anybody had time for thinking with a crowd of youngsters all the time bawling out! Cripes, by the time I learned to think, I was already carrying you. Too late then for thought. What’re you wearing the long face for? Would you rather you was never born?”
“I’ve sometimes wondered,” said Adelaide absently.
She was immediately drawn back by her mother’s own sense of frustration as she cried out, “Name of gawd, not that big, is it, you’d rather not be born than stew a bit of rhubarb all together? You knows you got to keep it simple, maid. If it weren’t for keeping things simple, nothing would ever get done. What’s you wanting to make a thing hard for when you can keep it simple? There’s no more difference in rhubarb than there is in grass, providing it all come from the same patch. Any fool knows that. Oh, my,” she wailed as the ball struck against the window again, hard. “Swear to gawd, I’ll tear me hair out yet. I bet you remembers that day, don’t you, when I fell on my knees in front of you, threatening I’d tear me hair out? That’s how bad you was one day, Addie. Swear to gawd, I almost done it, too. You remember that?”
No, thought Adelaide grimly as her mother creaked back in her chair, her feet scarcely touching the floor as she rocked, her chins sinking into the pudgy stem of her throat, some things may have escaped me, but their meanings haven’t. Sickened, she turned back to the rhubarb on the table.
The ball smacked against the window again, and Florry was on her feet, tutting and huffing as she toddled to the door. Adelaide watched through the window as Johnnie, a good head taller than she last remembered, dove ahead of the younger ones, grasped the ball and ran with it, the others screaming after him. They stalled as Florry appeared, shaking her fist.
“It was Johnnie, Johnnie,” the younger ones cried.
“Go on, you little liars,” cried Johnnie.
Catching Adelaide watching him, he grinned, swaggering toward where Eli was studiously kicking at a clump of weeds. And ignoring their mother’s ordering them inside, they both broke into a run, their heels kicking at their behinds as they shot onto the beach, out of sight behind their father’s old stage, racing upon the road again, a little farther on, their shoulders almost touching, as Janie’s and Ivy’s had when they stood sorting rhubarb.
A daring glance back at their mother, and the boys ducked behind the church. The church. Where she had fled. Alone. Finding her camaraderie amongst its quiet, its order, its sanctity, and in her need for acceptance, had reduced the altar to a world of her own making, and God into a cloth of her own fit.
Her mother came huffing in from bawling at the boys, saying something about the yard and her father. Mumbling something about getting home, Adelaide looked about for her coat, an anxiousness growing within her.
“Well, sir, I suppose you can say more than that,” said Florry, visibly offended. “It’s not every day your father offers somebody his yard!”
“His yard?”
“Well, sir, she don’t hear nothing. He’s offering you his yard to build on. There’s not much room anywhere else to build, leastways not near the water. And knowing Syllie, he’ll want to be near his boat. So your father’s offering you the backyard.” She sank into her chair, trying to catch her breath, pointing to the water bucket. “Give me some water, Addie. Swear to gawd, I’m wore out. Hector Rideout got his mother’s old place up for sale. Last year he wouldn’t have got a bed of spuds for that—boarded up for years. But he’s asking a nice price now, with all ye moving here. Who’s that? That’s your father now I hears. Look out the window, see if that’s your father. You can go talk to him about building a house in the yard.”
The dread of such a likelihood was offset by its offering. Glancing through the window, she saw her father dragging a gill net out of his shed, its mesh all cluttered up with the greenish-black slub that was a fisherman’s curse these days. Spreading it out over the beach, he kept hollering at the youngsters who were stumbling around awkwardly as they helped with the spreading. The smallest—Gilbert, or Gilly as he was called—darted across the net, getting his foot entangled in the mesh halfway across. He fell with a yelp. Adelaide more felt than heard her father’s oath of impatience, as he threw down the net and stomped toward Gilly. Swinging the youngster up over his shoulder, he lugged him, screaming and kicking, into the yard, dumping him into the soft mound of sawdust beside the woodpile. Like a shot, the youngster was on his feet, racing after his father, grabbing his leg and shrieking for another horsy ride, another horsey ride.
“When did
he
start disliking us?” she asked curiously.
“Who? Your father? Your father disliked ye? Well, sir, who said anything about anybody
disliking
ye! I just said ye were harder to get along with, that’s all I said! Sir, she’s like the robber, stealing your words, then making them her own. There was nothing your father never done for you when you was small. The little doll, he thought you was, and more than once wished he never had to go off on the boats all the time, or in the wood camps. Like coming home to strangers, he said often enough, with all of ye growing up, and he hardly ever seeing ye.”
Adelaide sniffed disbelievingly. “I don’t remember many horsey rides.”
“Well, sir, I just told you he was never home. Sure, the five years between you and Ivy I hardly seen him. Never thought I’d have another youngster. As if I was never married, I told him once. He started coming home more after that. But I tell you he never had much patience when the others started coming. He wasn’t around ye long enough to get any, I always told him. Like we’d all be, I suppose, if we weren’t used to a thing. But he’s been good this past while, especially with the younger ones. Ivy, now they’re at each other’s throats worse than you and he ever was. Certainly, that Ivy is at everybody’s throat, she is, wild as the cat.”
Adelaide watched a moment longer. He had swung the youngster over his shoulder and was lugging him back down on the beach again to where the others were scampering all over the net, picking off the slub.
“What’s he doing with a gill net?” she asked. “Don’t he work in the plant?”
“Nay. He quit that a few weeks ago—got on his nerves, working in all that racket. He was midshore for a while with Hector on his skiff. But he couldn’t even handle that—being fifty, sixty miles out on the water in a small boat. Nerves is gone. So he’s on his own now, if he can keep himself going in nets. That’s the third one he got this year. Them trawlers keeps tearing them up. Good thing the government’s giving them away.”
“He’s getting enough fish with the gill nets?”
“He’s not doing too bad with it, although he’d like to be working alongside somebody. Not young now, your father’s not.”
She turned back to her mother. “What’d you mean, the government’s giving them away?”
“Out at the fish store. They just gives you one whenever you wants.”
“But what about ghost fishing—all them fish it catches and rots.”
“My gawd, don’t get your father going on that. They took away his schooner and his flakes, and they’re letting all them foreign boats in here, robbing us. The gill net’s all he got left, and if they takes that away, he’ll be nothing more than a hangashore, because for sure you won’t catch him back in the plant agin. Anyway, like I tells him, them nets can’t be that bad, else the government wouldn’t be giving them away like they are. They’re not as stun as all that, are they? Go on out and talk to him. He’ll want to know about the yard, seeing’s you were here.”
“I’ll—tell him I’ll talk to Syllie. I got to go—Suze and Ambrose is probably waiting by now.”
Her father rose as he spotted her leaving through the back door, cutting across the yard. She gave a half-hearted wave and kept on walking, feeling a sudden need to be home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A LESSER GOD
C
LIMBING OUT OF THE BOAT
in Cooney Arm, Adelaide waved to Suze, and leaving Ambrose to unload and sort out their purchases, she started homeward. The wind was against her, rakish, and it swayed trees and saplings alike, rippling through the grass and battling with her skirt and hair. The graveyard appeared to her left, and her step faltered, her eyes fastened upon the three little mounds of dirt, all sodded now, with shorn grass, and with three wooden crosses looking over them, and seashells, bleached white by the sun, scattered about. Put there by Sylvanus or Eva, no doubt, for she hadn’t ever been inside except for the burials.
“Addie!” It was Suze, catching up with her. “Nice, isn’t it?” she said, glancing at the graveyard and the sun-bleached seashells. “Syllie put them there yesterday,” she added, dispelling Adelaide’s sudden notion that perhaps it had been she, Suze, who put them there. “It’s for the garden service on Sunday. Addie, you should come. No, wait,” she implored as Adelaide turned, brushing her away, “I think it’ll help you. I knows you don’t like me talking about this—and Am thinks I shouldn’t, either—”
“Then don’t,” cut in Adelaide, that old tightening back in her chest. Bending into the wind, she ploughed forward, trying to shut out Suze, who was chasing after her, her pipes bellowing louder than Gert’s.
“Perhaps I am interfering, Addie, but some things I just feels, and this never visiting their graves, I don’t think it goes well, especially since you’re their mother. They were awful pretty babies, Addie—even the one in the caul. I knows you hates that I looked, but I had to, along with Syllie, he was so broken, Addie, the prettiest little thing, I always felt you should’ve looked, seen how pretty your baby was, it was a awful thing to look at, the caul, but that baby—that pretty little baby—”