Agnes wept all the way to the church and through the funeral, where Willard Slade led the hymns and Mrs. Gillard read from the Psalms. She was still crying now as her father was set into the ground, the casket scraping at the earth walls, the weight of him arching the backs of the pallbearers as they lowered him down. Mercedes felt strangely empty of emotion herself. She looked down across the scrabble of houses and sheds and stages of the Cove, the buildings balanced over bald rock on wooden pilings and stilts. None of it looked substantial enough to stay upright in a decent wind. If a wave swept them away, she thought, there wouldn’t be so much as a foundation to leave a mark on the place.
As they filed out of the cemetery she saw her father’s trap skiff come into the harbour, a rowing punt attached by a line at the stern. There were two figures aboard of her but she knew in her heart that Wish wasn’t one of them.
In the days after the funeral Hardy slept a good part of every day and complained of headaches and became nauseous at the slightest physical exertion. Helen sat beside him on the daybed and catered to his every need, but Mercedes wouldn’t so much as bring him a glass of water. She refused to ask either of them what had happened or where Wish had ended up, though at night she plied Agnes for whatever information she might have.
“They don’t tell me anything, Sadie. You know that.”
“You must have overheard something, Agnes, for God’s sake, have you got ears?”
“I’m only in the same house as you.”
“You’ve never heard them mention his name?”
Agnes turned onto her side away from her sister.
“I knew it,” Mercedes whispered. “I knew it.” She grabbed Agnes by the shoulder and shook her. “What did they say?”
“He took some money off of Hardy.”
“What money?”
“I don’t know, Sadie.”
“What was Hardy doing over to Mrs. Gillard’s that morning anyway?”
“He was supposed to take Wish to Fogo. But he don’t remember anything after going upstairs at Mrs. Gillard’s to get him out of bed.”
Mercedes rolled onto her back and lay there with her hands folded over her chest. “Why did he take the boat and go on his own?”
“I don’t
know,”
Agnes said, almost in tears.
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was only thinking.”
Agnes wormed all the way to her edge of the bed. “Think in your head then, would you? Not out loud.”
After supper the next evening, Mercedes walked across the Cove to Clive’s house. She found Clive’s wife at the dishes in the pantry.
“Come in, my love,” Jenny Reid said. “Come in.”
“Where are your boys?”
“Down at the Spell Rock, I imagine. Looking for trouble.”
“I was after Clive. Is he not around either?”
Jenny wiped her wet hands in her apron. “Clive is up at the still.”
She went along the path that ran between the neat square of outbuildings and on up to a tiny shed beyond them, half hidden in a swale. She found Clive stoking a fire under a large copper pot held together with rivets. When he caught sight of Mercedes in the door he glanced past her a second. A look something like dismay crossed his face when he realized she was there to see him alone. But he waved her toward a low bench set against the wall. She didn’t speak, letting him carry on at the fire.
Clive stood straight after a few minutes. He said, “There’s nothing I can do for you, Sadie.”
“I got no one else to ask, Clive. You were good to him.”
“He was a nice young fellow, you wants my opinion.”
“Do you know where he got to?”
“Went back to St. John’s, I’d say.”
“But
why?”
She slapped her thigh to emphasize the word.
“You’re afraid he give up on you.”
She nodded.
“He didn’t strike me as someone who turned that easy.”
She had been holding her breath and let it out suddenly. “So whatever sent him away,” she said, “will keep him away.”
“I imagine.”
“What should I do?”
Clive stepped to the door, looked down the path and then out across the hill toward the opposite side of the Cove. “The walls have got ears around here,” he said. He smiled at her a moment, but couldn’t hold her eye.
It was the first time they’d been alone in one another’s company since the previous fall, a soft September evening when they crossed paths near the Spell Rock. He’d been drinking, but only enough to feel giddy with it. He’d bowed to Mercedes and called her Missus, danced her in the grass, singing a few lines of “The Tennessee Waltz.” She could hardly stand for laughing at him. He stopped suddenly, still holding her, and the way Clive looked at her made Mercedes want to pull away. He leaned down to her face. Smell of alcohol and chewing tobacco, a rough brush of whisker. He backed off and they stood watching each other another moment before he stepped in again, kissing her for real this time. Mercedes opened her mouth to him as he seemed to want, slipping her arms around his neck. His tongue touching hers and she was surprised and appalled and afraid she might buckle to the ground if she let go.
Clive came up for air finally, hauling her arms from his shoulders. “Jesus, Jesus,” he said. He walked away from her, his gait intent and peculiarly hunched, as if he was trying to disguise a wound. Mercedes stood watching him go, her belly a wasps’ nest. She spent weeks afterwards wondering if she liked being kissed by Clive. Decided eventually she did not, though she had to admit it was Clive and not the kissing itself she had reservations about.
They’d never spoken of the incident, though it coloured every word that passed between them. She could see now that Clive had been relieved to see her with Wish. As if it might absolve him of some responsibility or debt.
She said, “I have to get to St. John’s.”
He took up a wooden ladle, poking half-heartedly at the liquid in the pot. “The minister was up to see me after we buried young Willard Slade. He warned me off interfering.”
“Tell me how I get to St. John’s. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I got to live here after you go, Sadie.”
“Please.”
He walked to the door and stood looking out at the Cove as he spoke. “You have to get across to Fogo. Steal the boat is your best bet, same as Wish.”
“I don’t know how to get to Fogo, Clive.”
“You come over with us to the shows last summer. It haven’t moved anywhere. Make way round the headland for your father’s trap berth. Keep her steady sou’east from there and you’ll hit Fogo Island by and by. Keep close to the shoreline, first place you’ll see is Barr’d Islands at the head of a bay, next along after that is Fogo. Someone over that way can bring the skiff back. You’ll need money to get a coastal boat into town.”
“How much?”
“A dollar fifty for steerage, last I heard. But it could be more by now. Everything’s gone to hell since the war. Do you know anyone in St. John’s, Sade?”
“I knows Hiram.”
Clive looked at her. “Jesus loves the little children,” he said.
That night she confessed her plan to Agnes. She suspected her sister was a little in love with Wish herself and decided to trust her on that possibility alone.
Ag lifted up on one elbow. “How are you going to get to town?”
“Leave that to me. But I need your help, Ag. In the morning when they miss me, tell them I went off to Gooseberry Cove before light.”
“Why would you go there?”
“I was in a state, tell them. Woke up from a bad dream. Just wanted to be off on my own awhile.”
Agnes lay back on the bed and snuggled into her sister’s shoulder. “They’ll miss the boat, Sadie. First thing.”
She was about to deny the boat was part of the plan but knew it was useless. It was always a surprise to her, that the girl was smarter than she was.
“You could head out on a Sunday,” Ag suggested. “That’ll give you an hour or two longer before anyone is likely to be on the water. No one might take note till after church.”
“Sunday,” Mercedes said. “That’s when it’ll be.”
“Have you got any money, Sade?”
“Shut up, Agnes,” she said.
“What’s wrong with you, child?”
Mercedes had thought her grandmother was asleep or drifting in her own world and she looked up quickly at the sound of her voice. They hadn’t exchanged so much as a hello since she sat down with the pan of warm water and untied the ribbon at the front of the old woman’s nightdress.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.
“You’re a shocking liar.”
Mercedes tipped her head to the ceiling a moment. “S’pose I am.”
“What’s your name, my duck?”
“Sadie,” she said. “Mercedes.”
“Mercedes,” Sarah repeated and tossed her head at the strangeness of it.
She could feel her grandmother watching her as she carried on washing the pale grey arms. The body in her hands was limp, lifeless, and it seemed as if the old woman had for the moment retreated entirely into the unblinking blue eyes.
Sarah said, “I knows what’s wrong with you.”
“What’s that now?”
“You’re in love.”
“You think so, do you?”
“You’re like a waterlogged punt, you are. Plemmed tight with it.”
There was sometimes a disconcerting coherence to the old woman’s delusions. She mistook family for strangers or thought herself decades younger than her age and yet somehow managed to be uncommonly lucid and perceptive, almost by way of compensation.
“You don’t let it go by,” she said. “That’s my advice to you. Look at me now. I knew love, though you’d never say it by the sight of me.” She dipped her chin toward her naked torso, the breasts gone away almost to nothing, the dark nipples facing opposite points of the compass. “You’ll lie here one day too,” her grandmother said, “guaranteed.” It was a simple statement of fact she was making and there was nothing self-pitying in it. “Don’t let love go by if it’s close enough to grab ahold to.”
Mercedes looked behind herself to the bedroom door. “I need some money,” she said. “I have to get to St. John’s.”
“Is that where your man is to?”
She nodded.
“Does he treat you right?”
“Yes.”
“Is he willing to marry you?”
“I think he is,” she said. “Yes, he is.”
Sarah smiled at her. “This was our bed, you know. Mine and Gasker’s. I stayed in it years after he died. Until Aubrey got married.” She looked up over her head as best she could, toward the wrought-iron frame. She pointed unsteadily to the left bedpost. “You have a look up there.”
The knob came free, and stuffed in the hollow bedpost was a parcel tightly wrapped in brown paper. Her grandmother tapped the covers. “Set it here,” she said. “Take off the string.”
Inside was a roll of Newfoundland bills, ones and twos, a five. A handful of coins in wax paper. The wedding ring her grandmother had taken off the day her husband was buried and never wore again.
Sarah looked at her with a coy pride. “I adds a note or two whenever I manage to scrounge one.”
Mercedes imagined the old woman was happy to keep this one piece of her daughter-in-law’s marriage bed to herself, that it gave her some perverse pleasure to claim a piece of that privacy. Her grandmother’s dislike for Helen was exhaustive. She disapproved of her cooking, her dress, her manner with company, her lack of attentiveness in church. Helen was no limp rag of a woman and even Sarah had to credit her on that account: she never whined. But she was a newcomer to the Cove, and even after years in the community Mercedes could sense that her mother kept to herself in some significant way. It was her solitariness that made her seem vulnerable, and her grandmother picked at that scab relentlessly. Until the illness overtook the old woman and her mind shifted. Almost overnight she began demanding Helen’s attention and was dissatisfied with other company. She could turn on anyone else without warning, using a tongue so foul that Agnes would run from the room in tears.
“That woman is possessed, is what she is,” her mother said one evening while they sat in the back kitchen, Sarah shouting obscenities through the wall.
“Don’t be talking any papist foolishness in this house,” her father said.
“I’m only saying.”
Mercedes couldn’t help but agree with her mother when the old woman was in one of her states. But this morning she was sanguine, buoyant, eerily reasonable. She pointed at the roll of bills by her side on the bed. “You take what you needs,” she said. “And the ring. You tell your man who give it to you. Sarah Parsons, you tell him. From Little Fogo Island.”
Mercedes counted out ten dollars—seven in bills and three in change—and returned the rest of the roll without counting how much was there. She turned the ring over in her hand—a simple gold band, engraved with her grandmother’s initials.
“Try it on,” Sarah said.
“Are you sure you want me to take it, Nan?”
“What did you say your name was, child?”
“Mercedes,” she said. “Sade. Your granddaughter. Don’t you know me?”
“When I gets up out of this bed,” Sarah said, “I’m going to have some feed of potatoes.”
“Nan?”
But the old woman was somewhere else already. Mercedes tucked the ring into the bundle and set it all in the hollow of the bedpost where she’d found it. Then she took her handful of money and the pan of water off the floor and left the room.
It was hours to daylight still when she walked out on the stagehead and brought the trap skiff in off her mooring, hauling the wet twine hand over hand. Not a whisper of wind, as if the Cove was holding its breath for her. A sliver of moon on its back overhead, one star hung beneath it like a hook drifting on a line. She couldn’t start the engine before she cleared the Cove, put out the oars instead and pulled against the weight of the boat, taking her head around and moving for open water. The skiff was a fourteen-footer and not built for a single hand to row. But for the tide being with her she’d have made no headway at all. It felt to her like the world’s slowest escape.
She had gone up to the cemetery the previous afternoon to visit her father’s grave, to say a second goodbye in the space of a week, and it surprised her by feeling more final. “I’m going,” she said aloud. “I’m leaving the Cove.” As if she had to give him a chance to show some sign he objected. Her father had never offered Mercedes much in the way of advice on any subject. Her grandmother gave enough of that to do them both. As a rule, he made his views known with the subtlest change in his posture, inching a mug of tea right or left on the table in front of him, tipping his head, pursing his lips.