There was only one occasion when Aubrey had given her a talking to. He’d come home drunk after the rest of the house had gone to bed. Mercedes was still awake and waited to hear him come up the stairs. Went down to the back kitchen finally to see what was keeping him. He was on the daybed, still in his coat and boots, snoring softly. She had never seen him drunk before, could smell the alcohol on his breath as she hauled the boots off his feet. He woke when she lifted him forward, trying to get his coat free of an arm.
“My darling girl,” he said.
“Be quiet a minute, I gets this coat off.”
His head drooped on his shoulders as she hauled at the jacket.
“Where were you tonight?”
“Down at Clive’s stage.” He giggled. “Having a chat.”
It wasn’t two weeks after Clive had kissed her and the mention of his name made her blush. She said, “You’d best sleep here tonight.”
“I’ll have a word.” He sat straighter, taking his coat off himself. “Before I sleep, I’ll have a word.”
“As long as it’s a quiet one.”
He rambled on a few minutes then, without ever stating his subject clearly. “You keep a fellow with that business on his mind at arm’s length,” he told her. “A man will say anything to a woman to get it, as sure as there’s shit in a cat. And the sweeter the words out of his mouth, the darker the hole they comes from. Mind I don’t know,” he said.
He stopped there awhile and his head drooped forward again.
“All right,” Mercedes said, thinking he was finished. “Lie back now.”
He lifted his head and said, “Don’t let a man make a whore of you, Sadie.”
She was a young woman before she began to see how effective her father’s more subtle approach had been, noticing how often she asked herself what her father might think before she made any decision, picturing how he’d bob his head to indicate approval or doubt. When she made up her mind to leave the Cove, she felt almost as if it was a choice she’d made in consultation with the man, with his blessing. But that certainty left her in the cemetery, standing over the mound of fresh dirt.
She faced the houses and stages as she rowed away from them, all of the buildings hunkered in the black of night, only the barest outlines visible to her. When she reached the mouth of the harbour she set the oars along the tauts and took a moment to catch her wind, the boat rocking on the heavier swell of open water. She stared hard at the south side where the house she’d grown up in stood, hoping for a last glimpse. But it was buried completely in the dark and already lost to her.
She stood over the trap skiff’s engine and set it running, the sudden noise of it in the stillness almost knocking her over. Sat at the tiller and steered into the open air away from the shoreline, making for the headland lying southeast.
2.
I
T WAS PELTING IN
S
T
. J
OHN’S
, the rain falling in drifts against the buildings on Water Street. She stood under a store awning that offered only intermittent protection. The shop window crowded with fresh apples. Inside she could see wood stoves, dishware, the rafters hung with cast-iron pots and buckets. Cars and trucks rattled past in both directions, throwing up showers of water onto the sidewalks. A coal cart stood nearby, the horse tethered to a light post, the blinkered animal shying from the rumble of the streetcar as it passed. A group of soldiers came half running along the sidewalk, their heads bent against the rain. No one paid her the slightest mind.
She’d marked the twin towers of the Basilica on the north side of the harbour as the coaster followed the pilot through the Narrows. Planned to use it like a compass in the city, taking her bearings from the spires, but it was invisible to her now. Clive had offered some rudimentary directions to Hiram’s storefront from a trip he’d made years before—straight up the hill from the water, he’d said, a little jog east from the Kirk, if you come up against the Basilica you’ve gone too far. They were exactly the kind of directions he’d given her to Fogo but they seemed useless by comparison.
She couldn’t see anything north or south but the buildings on either side of the street and she felt as blinkered as the horse beside her. All along Water Street roads rose away from the harbour. They couldn’t all lead to Hiram. Even if she found his place on her own there was a chance that he might be off on one of his trips along the coast and gone a week or longer. And Wish likely with him.
“Now, Mercedes,” she said aloud. She clutched her bundle of clothes to her chest. The shops full of people and for the first time in her life she was too shy to say hello to a soul. “What have you got yourself into here?”
She was too cold to stand still any longer and stepped out from under the awning, walking east simply because there was more of the street ahead in that direction. Her head down against the rain. She glanced up the hill at each cross street until she caught sight of the Basilica above her and turned up the steep grade. There was a massive red-brick church in sight that she assumed was the Presbyterian church, and she turned east again as she came near it, walking to a corner where half a dozen streets came together in a twisted clover. Rain ran out of her hair and she wiped at her face to keep her eyes clear. Cars stuttered through potholes beside her, soaking her already soaked clothing, the filthy rainwater flooding into her shoes. The maze of streets made no sense.
A man wearing an officer’s hat stood changing the lone traffic signal in a booth at the centre of the clover. She made several false starts out into traffic before she finally ran between the moving vehicles to reach him.
“You’ll get yourself killed like that,” he said.
“I’m looking for Hiram,” she announced. “He runs the movies along the coast.”
“Hiram Keeping?”
“You know him?”
“Everyone knows Hiram,” he said.
His directions made no sense to her. He was pointing and naming streets, intersections. “Your first time to town, is it?” he asked. He changed the lights, and cars began moving around them from opposite directions. He looked past her, frustrated. Called to a young woman hurrying along the sidewalk. “Amy,” he said, waving. “Amy, come here, I wants you.”
She was wearing a headscarf against the rain. Black hair and brown eyes. A hint of something foreign in the face, in the colour of her skin, which made Mercedes apprehensive.
The man in the hat said, “This young one is after Hiram Keeping. Drop her by his place, would you?”
Hiram’s shop was a house-front in Georgestown. There was no sign to say what the place was. A fusty acid smell inside, a permanent gloom from the barred windows. Mercedes could see a counter strewn with film canisters, several box cameras on tripods. A small office through a doorway beside the stairs, a crowded desk.
Hiram came down the stairs in a rush, looking like he’d woken from a nap. “Hello, Amy,” he said.
“I brought someone wants to talk to you, Hiram.”
“Who would that be now?”
“It’s Mercedes, Hiram.” She stepped forward. “Mercedes Parsons.”
Hiram dipped his head and began tapping his pants pockets front and back as if he was looking for glasses or tobacco. “Mercedes Parsons,” he said without looking up at her.
“Sadie. From Little Fogo,” she said. “Is Wish here with you? He run off in Father’s trap skiff as far as Fogo and got on a coaster for St. John’s. This was a week ago now. I come looking for him.”
Hiram walked through to the office. Mercedes followed after him and stopped in the doorway, watching as he poured a finger of whisky. She heard the water from her soaked clothes raining onto the hardwood floor and a clacking noise it took her a moment to recognize as her teeth chattering.
“Anyone else come down here with you, Sadie?”
“I come on my own.”
“I don’t know where he is.” He looked at her directly. “I’m sorry for your loss. But I can’t be no help to you where Wish is concerned.”
Mercedes was trembling with the cold.
“I haven’t got a thing to tell you,” Hiram said.
Amy came down the hall and took Mercedes’ arm. “Let’s go,” she whispered.
Mercedes pulled free. “Wish didn’t come to see you at all? He’s not upstairs, is he?”
Amy tugged at Mercedes’ arm again, headed to the front door holding the sleeve of her coat.
“I didn’t mean no harm to anyone,” Hiram called after them.
The two girls stood outside, the rain still coming down hard. Mercedes looking up and down the nameless street.
Amy said, “You don’t know a soul in town, do you.”
Mercedes shook her head.
Amy took her arm and headed back the way they’d come. Mercedes was aware of being led and paid no attention to their route, asked no questions. They walked to the back entrance of a dry-goods shop that led straight up to the kitchen and Amy sat Mercedes in a rocking chair beside a coal stove. Amy shooed away two children at the table and she followed them upstairs.
The kitchen was dominated by a table that seated eight or more. The air close with heat and the smell from a pot simmering on the stove. Mutton, though she couldn’t identify any of the spices that accompanied it. She rocked in her chair. She didn’t know what it meant that Wish hadn’t returned to St. John’s or had returned without visiting Hiram. Or that Hiram had lied to her. She’d imagined a straightforward reunion with Wish and had no clue what to do now.
A middle-aged man came into the kitchen from the storefront and stopped when he saw her. A large moustache and hair darker than any Mercedes had ever seen, so black it seemed to gleam. She was sodden, her hair loose, long strands of it lying flat against her forehead and cheeks.
“A terrible day,” the man said.
The way he said “terrible” struck her, it was as if there was something lodged under his tongue. The jet-black hair. There was something vaguely threatening in his manner, his peculiar accent.
“You must have come far,” the man said.
She nodded.
He shouted up the stairs in a language not English. He said, “Where do you live, miss?”
“Little Fogo Island.”
The man’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“I left,” she said by way of explanation. “I ran away.”
The girl and another woman came down the stairs. Amy was carrying a towel and an armful of dry clothes. She exchanged a few incomprehensible words with the man, who turned to Mercedes and said, “This is my niece Amina,” as if a formal introduction was required.
“That coat is sopping,” Amy said. Pure Newfoundland in her accent. “Strip it off.”
“She has run away,” her uncle announced. “A refugee, yes?” he said to Mercedes, smiling at her.
“What’s your name?” the other woman asked her.
“Mercedes Parsons.”
Amina was on her knees, wrenching off her shoes. Mercedes leaned forward and whispered, “Is he a Portugee?”
“We’re from Lebanon,” she said. She smiled up at Mercedes, her hands squeezing one foot to bring some warmth back into it. “This is my uncle Sammy.”
“It is not quite,” Amina’s uncle said. He wrote letters in the air. “
S-A-M-A-R
,” he said. “Samar. But in your country it is Sammy.”
At intervals children of various ages came into the kitchen to watch her where she sat.
“Are they all yours?” Mercedes asked the woman.
“Four of them are ours. The rest are nieces and nephews.”
“We hope for more,” Sammy said.
“You
hope for more,” his wife said. She was a strikingly tall woman, the same height as her husband. She was fair-skinned and nearly blonde, and though she spoke Arabic with her husband and Amina, her English was differently accented again.
“It is God’s will for us, Maya,” he insisted.
“Let God do some of the work, then.”
They were both smiling as they argued.
“I should have known better,” Sammy said, “than to marry a Jew.”
“An Irish Jew at that,” Maya added, to emphasize the severity of his mistake.
“It was the music,” he said. “I married my wife for these. You know these Irish songs?” he asked Mercedes. He sang the opening lines of “Carrickfergus” in a high, sweet tenor and every trace of his accent disappeared.
The smell of the room struck Mercedes again, the strangeness of it in relation to the music. Her grandmother had told her once that Catholic saints were identified by the sweet smell rising off the body after death. She’d meant it as another example of how ridiculous a faith it was, something to set alongside the notion of transubstantiation and limbo, all that kneeling and crossing yourself and dousing the church with holy water. But there was something in the idea that seemed true to Mercedes. That the soul of a thing existed in the scent of it. It was one of the ways she judged everything she encountered, the sense she trusted most. She was always lifting things to her nose to smell them, to place them.
The aroma from the stove was sweet and sour at once and altogether foreign to her. And that foreignness overwhelmed her suddenly. As if she’d surrendered her world for one so utterly different she would never understand it. She started to cry, and Sammy broke off mid-verse, his hands held in the air.
“You,” Maya said, pointing at him, “leave us women alone.”
And he went out the door to the storefront, muttering in his own language.
By the time they had dressed her in dry clothing and wrapped her in a blanket by the stove, the room had begun to fill with other adults, all with the same black hair, all speaking Arabic. She was introduced to each of them as they arrived, the men returning from the shipyard at the west end of the harbour, the women from custodial jobs at the Canadian army base. They greeted Mercedes as if they’d been expecting to find her there. They were all physically striking. Their skin seemed to shine as if they’d been dipped in oil.
Amina’s parents were both slender and fragile looking, though there was a palpable air of energy about them that contradicted that impression. Tony Basha was nearly bald and sported a pencil-thin moustache.
“This is the girl you reduced to tears, Sammy?” he asked.
Rania sat beside Mercedes and held her hand in her lap while Amina gave an account of her presence in the house. Amina seemed hardly more than a few years older than her daughter.