“How could they rob him if they outright bought the houses?” asked Adelaide. She had laid the pies on her mother’s table and was looking around for Janie and Ivy.
“They’re out on the quay by the fish store, watching for the Trapps,” said Florry. “And you knows they robbed him. He could’ve got a lot more money for them buildings if he knew the government was paying, and that all ye from Cooney Arm would be moving as well.”
“Sounds like the Trapps got him before he got them. When’s the girls getting back? When’s the bake sale?”
“Not till two. Did you tell your father you wants the yard? There’s people looking for land, and if you’re not taking it, he might get a price for it.”
“I don’t allow we’ll want it,” said Adelaide. “Tell Janie—”
“Where you going to live, then, you don’t want the garden? Is that what Syllie said? Did you tell him your father wants to go partners?”
Adelaide was shaking her head. “I—oh—I don’t know—just tell him I’ll talk to Syllie tomorrow. And tell Janie I made the pies from medium stalk. Just tell her,” she insisted, as Florry exclaimed anew over the senselessness of such a thing. “Now, I got to go. Am’s at the boat, waiting.”
“Did you tell him your father wants to share his berth?”
“His what?”
“Sir, she don’t know nothing. Fishing spot, maid. You got to have your fishing spot.”
“I knows that. I just never heard it called anything before. Don’t forget to tell Janie.”
“I can’t see Syllie passing up a chance to get a good berth. He knows the good ones are all took. You sure you told him?”
Adelaide nodded, trying to close the door. Her mother kept it open, following her out in the yard. “That’s the problem with everybody moving here—there’s no berths for them. Everybody that lives here already got the spots—unless they goes off in a skiff or liner somewhere. Be sure and tell Syllie. Like your father says, there’s more and more people going fishing all the time. It don’t make sense to he, herding people together when they should be spreading them out, finding different berths and different fish. Sure way to clean out a fishing ground, everybody anchoring over the same spot. Anyway, that’s what your father’s arguing about these days.”
Adelaide let herself out the gate. “I’ll tell him. See you now.”
“But he’s willing to share with Syllie. He don’t like being by his self on the water. Makes him nervous, that far out in a small boat. His nerves is gone, your father’s nerves is. That’s why he’d take Syllie on with him. Mind you tells Syllie, that. My gawd, here comes the Trapps. Not the sight, are they?”
Sight, indeed, agreed Adelaide, joining Ambrose and Suze amongst a knot of people on the quay by the fish store, watching as the Trapps motored shoreward, looking like a bastardized version of Noah’s ark with their boats in line, two by two, and two heads to a seat, and the couplings of pigs and goats and sheep taking up the punts in the rear.
But that wasn’t the last sight that would keep her awake that night, and nor would it be the everlasting one. They were motoring near the bend beyond which Little Trite sat, when the first grey billows of smoke rose above the trees. Rounding the point, all three started in alarm as black smoke coiled out over the water beyond which flamed Little Trite, its houses, sheds, and wharves, all convulsing into an orange wall of fire.
“Oh, my gawd, get clear, Am,” cried Suze as the acrid smoke curled toward them, shedding black ashes onto the water. Ambrose swerved shoreward, motoring along the outer edge of the smoke, taking them closer to the fire.
“What’s you doing?” yelled Suze. “Don’t take us no closer, Am!”
“Sit down. I’m trying to see who’s that,” said Ambrose. Adelaide, her eyes watering from the greyish haze enveloping them, saw, as Ambrose did, a boat pulled upon the beach and several men milling about.
“Figures,” said Ambrose hotly. “Goddamn government men. Suze, sit down.”
“I can’t breathe in this,” cried Suze. “Get us clear. Don’t go no closer.”
“Just a second,” said Adelaide, patting Suze’s shoulder to calm her. “What government people?” she asked Ambrose, her eyes torn between the men, the fire, and what used to be Little Trite.
“They goes in burning houses after the people leaves,” said Ambrose, “so they won’t go back. I heard tell of them doing it few years back out Trinity way. Never saw them around here before. Jake heard something, though,” he said as an afterthought. “He was saying something to his mother about it this morning.”
“To Eva?” Adelaide asked, startled. “About the houses being burned?”
“I never got it all …” He faltered as the roof of one of the houses collapsed, silencing them with a roar of flames shooting upward, burnishing the heavens and sending a heat wave rolling over their faces. Adelaide gripped Suze’s shoulder, her awe of the fire overtaken by the image of Eva’s face, and that of her man’s, shooting out of every blazing window left in Little Trite.
No wonder she was all bothered this morning, thought Adelaide. Full of fear that her house was going to be burnt, and no place for either her or her man to come home to. Well, that’s not going to happen, she thought calmly. Eva’s house would remain standing. She had promised her that, and that promise now felt like the one good thing she had ever done. And like that good daughter, Ruth, she turned her attention back to Ragged Rock, pointing not to where her mother’s yard might be, despite its being so generously offered, but to the fish store out on the quay.
“Go back,” she said with a quiet determination to Ambrose. “To the fish store. I-I forgot something.”
“It’s getting on, Addie,” said Suze, her voice tremulous from the fire, “and we’re almost home.”
“You must,” implored Adelaide. She leaned against the side of the boat as though she’d jump overboard and start swimming if they didn’t listen. “I knows it’s a nuisance, but really I’ve got to go back. I’ve got to.”
Ambrose nodded. Turning the tiller, he steered them around and started them back the way they’d just come. Clenching the thwart beneath her, Adelaide ignored their questioning eyes till they arrived back in Ragged Rock.
“A gill net,” she said to Ambrose after they had motored past the plant, past her mother’s house, and were now tied up at the quay in front of the fish store. “Would you go in and get me a gill net? Please.”
“A gill net?” He stared at her blankly. “I don’t think—”
“You won’t get Syllie using a gill net, Addie,” Suze cut in, “if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s all out against them, hey, Am?”
“Just go get me one,” said Adelaide, her eyes fixed onto Ambrose. “That’s all you have to do—go get me one.”
“He’ll—uh, he’ll think I said something.”
“Syllie wouldn’t think that of you.”
Ambrose shifted uncomfortably, then raised his brow in acceptance. “If that’s what you wants,” he said. With a beseeching look at Suze, he climbed out on the quay, a disquieted look ruffling his smooth features as he went inside the fish store.
“I got nothing to say,” said Adelaide firmly as the door closed behind Ambrose, and Suze, fair busting with curiosity, turned to her.
“Not much to say, is there?” said Suze. “You got in mind to stay in Cooney Arm. You’re the case, Ad—I always said that about you.” She grinned. “I always liked that about you, too. I allows Syllie got some answering to do when you gets back. My Lord, I wish I had your nerve. I might’ve stood up more to Am if I did, back when he was buying the longliner. I knew he was making a mistake, buying that big thing. Now we’re so far in the hole we’ll never see the light of day agin.”
“Quit, then,” said Adelaide, and looked as surprised as Suze as the words left her mouth.
“Quit what? Fishing?”
Adelaide shrugged. “I don’t mean quit, quit! Just—I don’t know, find other ways of making more money, is all. We don’t have to go overseas to sell a bit of fish. Or be stuck doing what we don’t want to.”
“For sure it’s not what Syllie wants, then, dropping drift nets into the water.”
Adelaide fell quiet. For sure it isn’t, she thought. A tinge of discomfort dampened the growing sense of purpose in her breast—along with a tinge of fear as Ambrose came out of the store shortly after, dragging what looked to be two gill nets.
“He’ll need two,” he said. “Ties them together to make them big enough.”
Adelaide shifted aside her feet as Ambrose toppled the netting into the boat. She stared, the bulk of the netting bringing reality to the enormity of what she was doing— stepping over Sylvanus’s word, and about something she was mostly ignorant of.
Well, it’s done now, she thought as Ambrose unlooped the painter from the grump and started them off to sea. And her relief was as great as Eva’s would be, for it was as she had once said: she had grown into the soil of Cooney Arm and was now rooted in its garden, in Syllie, in Eva. She smiled. For the first time, since swinging her legs on a church pew, she felt a fit with those things around her, and with it came a buoyancy that near lifted her off her seat. Freed. This settling of her fate freed her from that darkened corner where she had sought refuge those past years. And she hadn’t even noticed at what point she’d started walking above ground again. We’re like time, she thought, clenching her hands urgently in her lap, too busy coming and going to take notice of the present. And was not time a thing of the earth—seeding a thought one day, then returning it some days, weeks, months later, bearing no resemblance to what it once was?
Undoubtedly, a thing forever blooming is the soul, no matter how barren the soil. And only through that frightening abyss of the unknown self does the mind root out the light upon which it nourishes.
She clung to her thwart as they motored past Little Trite, no more than a smoking ruin, a blackening scar against the cornsilk yellow of the autumn grass. Worry you not, Eva, she thought. You’ll always have your seat in the window, you and your man. And you, Syllie, put aside your false comforts, for that’s all your offerings are, false comforts so’s to please me and your mother. In the end they’ll please nobody, most definitely not you. And I’m not allowing you to do that.
It was toward this end she strained as they cut through the neck and entered the arm, and she saw Syllie standing on the stage, watching them draw near.
If the flushed look on Ambrose’s face didn’t give it away to him, then certainly Suze’s “My son, she’s the case” left no doubt in his mind who the gill nets were for, she thought, seeing the repulsed look marring his face as he caught the painter Am was tossing him, staring down at the nets.
“Before you says anything, let me say this,” she said clearly enough. “I’m staying in Cooney Arm whether you stays or not.”
Sylvanus beckoned toward his mother’s. “Go on in,” he said deeply.
“I means what I say, Syllie, you never listens—”
“And you do, I suppose. Oh, don’t argue with me, Addie, just bloody listen for once, and get the hell in. Mother wants a toddy.”
She rose, feeling suitably chastened, and allowed him to help her onto the stage. Unexpectedly, he squeezed her hand, dropping a kiss to the side of her mouth. She stood for a second, watching the back of his head as he helped up Suze, a flush of warmth foolishly flooding her face. Cutting through the stage, she waved at Eva, who was standing by her gate.
Waiting for me, I suppose, she thought, and hurried onto the path. Something across the footbridge caught her eye, and she stumbled, her mouth falling open. It was ripped out. The back of her house was mostly ripped out. Perched beside it was a window, a big window, bigger than the southern one overlooking the neck.
“Well, sir,” she whispered in some surprise. “Well, sir.”
T
HE SUN HAD YET TO RISE
the following morning, and the sea was white, without wrinkle, beneath a pearly sky. Just the nose of Sylvanus’s boat was onshore. Tipping it onto its keel, he put his shoulder to the bow, easing it into the water. Loath to disturb the mother’s quiet on this morning, he left his motor alone and drifted instead from shore, his boat slipping quietly with the current across the arm. Closer to the neck, the mother stirred beneath him, her swells rubbing lazily against the loins of that narrow opening. Outside the head, he kept drifting, his back to the open ocean. Old Saw Tooth passed his portside, and then the scarred remnants of Little Trite. He sat forward, jolted by her blackened grass, the trickles of smoke rising from her deeply smouldering coals.
He turned from the sight, toward the bend where Pollock’s Brook flowed out of the estuary into the sea. He remembered standing there, jigging, that first morning he’d finished building his house, and how he had wished his Addie was standing beside him, seeing how he had created himself out of the sea, out of his father’s stage, and how, if he were to constellate himself against the heavens, he’d be the swan in the Milky Way, his bowed legs its wings, and the sea of stars around him the milt from which his creation was spawned.
He grunted this morning at the unlikelihood of such a notion. He hove on his flywheel, opened throttle, and motored quickly past the brook, past Gregan’s Hole and Widow’s Inlet and Gull Rock and Peggy’s Plate, and then, upon approaching Nolly’s Shelf, he veered straight out to sea till he could look back and see a gorge cut deep by Petticoat Falls on top of the fourth rolling hill east of the head. Cutting his motor, he stood straddling his boat, seeing in the distance the dark shapes of five, maybe six trawlers hovering on the horizon. He couldn’t turn his back today as he’d done the days before. He couldn’t spit in disdain toward their presence, curse them, hate them. He turned instead to the bulk of netting filling his bow, and started lifting the lead line that would anchor it. It slipped from his hands and he cursed, snatching hold of it again, hauling it free from the hoard of netting resting beneath it. With a good ten, twenty feet of the netting bundled into his arms, he turned awkwardly portside. Taking a long look at the mother, he heaved it overboard and stood back, a lesser god than yesterday.
EPILOGUE
L
IKE A CLOT OF BLOOD
against the morning was the red cloth his mother stood waving furiously from the front of his house. Sylvanus, sitting motionless in his rowboat, drifting about the arm, sickened. Then, with a wildly beating heart, he snatched his paddles and rowed ashore. Leaping onto the beach, he bolted up over the landwash, across the footbridge, and stood breathing heavily outside his door. His mother opened it for him. He stepped inside, near buckling from the heat and the smell of raw blood. The infant lay swaddled on the oven door as still as death in the waves of heat brimming over it from the oven.