The Wreckage (26 page)

Lilly went back to the chopping block and set up a junk of birch, split it evenly with the axe, the cleft halves falling away to either side. “I’ll let you know,” she said.

Mercedes went off on her own afterwards, wandering out over the headlands above Aggie Dinn’s Cove. She wrapped herself in her coat and sat watching the ocean until near dusk and she was stiff with cold when she finally got back to her feet. She made her way by the church and walked behind it to the grotto with the statue of Mary. The Ocean Star. A rosary hanging from her left wrist, a brass halo over her head that read
The Immaculate Conception
.

In all the times she’d gone to the Basilica with the Bashas, Mercedes had never prayed to the Virgin, and she was surprised to feel the need to offer one now. She started to repeat the verse from the Book of Ruth she’d memorized while reading aloud to her grandmother.
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee
. But she wasn’t able to go further than that.

She prayed for forgiveness instead. Though she wouldn’t allow herself to think on what she was asking forgiveness for.

There was no sign of Hiram when she came back to the shop the next day. He sometimes slept in the afternoon if he’d had too much to drink, and Mercedes went up the stairs to her sitting room as quietly as she could. Heard him calling from the darkroom at the back of the house. “That you, Mercedes?”

She went back down the stairs and stood at the door.

“Any news?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

She heard him potter around for a few minutes before he came out into the hall. His face was pale and there were beads of sweat at his temples. He said, “I’ve been thinking.” He was wiping his hands on a rag and he looked down at them as he spoke. “Wish thought Hardy was dead when he left here, Mercedes. When he enlisted. He might have thought he needed to hide some things.”

“He used his real name. My letters wouldn’t have gotten to him if he lied about that.”

“He might have said he was from somewhere else than Renews, though. There was nothing on paper to say one way or another. He could have lied about kin.”

“So any official word from the army …”

“Could have been sent anywhere.” He let out a long sigh. “I’ve made a shag of all this.”

She touched his arm and then went up to her room, stayed there the rest of the day.

In the week before Christmas a small parcel arrived for Mercedes, addressed by an unfamiliar hand. Hiram was alone in the shop when the mail arrived. There was no return address, but it was postmarked in Halifax. He shook it side to side and guessed there was another envelope inside the larger one. He set it on the counter and pretended to work away at other things, glancing at it periodically while he waited for Mercedes.

She had sent a telegram to Johnny Boustani at the beginning of December and through subsequent phone calls had arranged to fly to Montreal before the New Year, where Johnny had been told it was easier to get an entry visa into the U.S. It was also a reasonable train ride from Boston, and Johnny was going to come up to meet her if she had any trouble at the consulate. In that case, they planned to get married in Montreal and travel together into the States on the train.

She hadn’t said a word about the reasons for these arrangements but it was obvious to Hiram that Mercedes was pregnant. And the package from Halifax caused him so much discomfort that he made regular retreats to the back office for a shot of whisky. It could only be one thing, he knew, and the envelope fairly glowed on the counter where he set it. It would catch his eye as he turned, as if it had jumped like a trout gasping on a rock. And that would send him to the office for another drink.

He was soused by the time Mercedes got home, sitting in the back office with his head on the desk, half asleep. Came to his senses enough to see her in the doorway and said, “Hello, Mercedes, my love.”

“Why don’t you go have a lie-down for yourself, Hiram?”

“Couldn’t chance the stairs.” He leaned back in the chair, his torso at an odd angle that he seemed helpless to correct. “Can’t hold the liquor like I used to.”

“What’s going to become of you after I leave?”

“I’ll get by.” He waved his hands theatrically. “Everyone manages, hey? Everyone carries on. Won’t even miss you, I wager. Barging in and waking me in the middle of a grand little nap.”

She turned to go out to the shop but he stopped her.

“Mercedes,” he said. “A question.” He placed both hands on his knees to steady himself. “If there was a way….”

“Yes?”

“A way to know what happened to Wish. If someone said he knew and could tell you. I’m just curious, you understand. None of my goddamn business, certainly. But, given your circumstances.”

“What are you going on about?”

“Would you want to know, is my question. One way or the other.”

She studied him then, the face swollen with alcohol and drunken sleep, the purplish nose veined like a tree leaf, a dark red welt on one cheek where he’d lain on the desk. The ridiculous moustache. “What’s this about, Hiram?”

“Just answer the goddamn question, would you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

He rubbed his face with both hands and looked at her again. “No, you won’t answer the question?”

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to know.”

He tipped his head to one side. “Why not, Mercedes?”

“I think,” she said. “I know he’s dead.” She stumbled there and bit her lip. “But let’s just say he’s alive and changed his mind about me. About us. That he was alive and decided he wouldn’t come looking for me. I’d rather not,” she said. She made a little motion with one arm. “I know he’s dead,” she repeated.

Hiram rubbed his face again, scrubbing hard.

“Your head bothering you, Hiram?”

“Killing me.”

She said, “I’ll get you a cold towel.”

Hiram waited until he heard her footsteps on the floor overhead and then went out to the front counter. He picked up the envelope and looked around, trying to decide where to put it. Scurried to the office when Mercedes started back down, stuffed it away in a drawer.

“Here you are,” she said.

“Thanks, my love.”

He leaned back in the chair and draped the towel over his face.

“Hiram?”

“Mm?”

“Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

He took the towel away slowly but wouldn’t look at her. “I hope you and Johnny are happy together, Mercedes. He’s a good man. He’s a lucky man.”

“Right or wrong, Hiram.”

“There’s no right or wrong,” he said, “only better odds or worse. I like your odds.” And he put the towel back over his face.

Two more tidal waves came into Lord’s Cove that night, Wish told her, though neither was as massive as the first. They waited up in the hills until they were certain it was over with and then walked back down to the shoreline, picking their way through the wreckage. His mother carried him on her back, to keep track of him. It was dark by then but the sky was clear and enough moon to have a sense of the devastation. Their house was gone, as were most of the houses near theirs. Down on the shoreline the stages and boats and every bit of equipment had been picked up and smashed, the beach a field of wooden debris. The carcasses of a dozen drowned cows lay half submerged on the landwash.

A few buildings had been swept right off their foundations and washed into the water. They could just make them out, hulking darkly on the surface, most of them tilting hard and halfways to going under. But there was one house, almost out of the harbour altogether. It was standing high up, Wish said, like she was built to float. The sea dead calm. There was a fire in the stove when the house was carried out to sea and the chimney came free from the wall or the stove itself had tipped onto the floor in the commotion. One side of the kitchen was on fire, the window lit up with a red and yellow glow that seemed to be pulsing, dimming and flaring like a massive heart beating inside the room. Not another spark on the shore, just that one light devouring the house out on the water. Wish said it was the loneliest looking thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

Before first light Mercedes climbed out of bed and dressed in a rush. She went up to the third floor, banged on Hiram’s bedroom door. She kept hammering, even after she heard him up and shuffling around the room, searching for his clothes.

“Jesus, Mercedes,” he said. “What is it?”

“You have something,” she said. “A letter or something. Where is it?”

He leaned his forehead on the doorjamb.

“Hiram,” she said.
“Goddamn
it.”

They went down over the stairs in the dark and Hiram lit a lamp in the office. He took the envelope out of the drawer but before he handed it over he said, “This is a mistake, Mercedes. You said so yourself.”

She held out her hand and he passed the envelope across to her. “I want to be alone,” she said. “When I open it.”

Hiram pushed past her, muttering under his breath, and she waited until she heard his footsteps on the stairway before she sat next to the lamp and looked at the envelope. A woman’s hand she thought at first, judging by the delicate lines. But there was too much of a scrawl to the letters for that and she decided it was a man, an elderly man or someone ill. Postmarked in Halifax. She turned up the lamp before she opened the package.

Another sealed envelope inside and a single loose square of paper. She unfolded the note. The same fragile hand as the address on the outside.

Dear Mercedes Parsons
.

She stopped there and folded over herself in the chair, her head on the desk. She stayed that way for a long time, breathing shallowly, her teeth set. When she sat back up she brushed the note flat with the palms of her hands.

Dear Mercedes Parsons
.

My name is Jim Harris, I was in the service with your Wish. Before we shipped out for the Pacific he entrusted the enclosed to me and asked that I send it to you in the unfortunate instance that he not make it back to you. I am very sorry to be sending it to you. He spoke of you often and only ever wanted the best for you. With deepest regrets, JH
.

Mercedes moved from the note straight to the second sealed envelope, not allowing herself to pause, to let the unambiguous finality of those words stop her. Her hands were shaking and she had trouble hooking a finger under the seal to rip it open. There was no paper inside, no letter or note. Only one item, coiled at the bottom of the envelope that she shook out onto the desk. It was a length of knotted string.

Her last sight of Newfoundland was from the window seat of her flight to Montreal. Morning and a grey day, sunlight occasionally breaking through the overcast. The noise of the motors so thick in the cabin it was nearly impossible to speak to the passenger beside her and she was grateful for that. The plane climbed steeply out over the fields at Torbay and banked hard to starboard, angling above the city. She could see the dark nipple of Cabot Tower on Signal Hill and southwards the lighthouse at Cape Spear. The ships at anchor in the harbour, the spires of the Basilica rising above the flat tarpaper roofs of the houses. And just as quickly they were beyond the city and still climbing over the snow-covered barrens of the Avalon. All that showed through the acres of white was granite ridges or shale and black spruce and scrub brush the colour of rust.

They were so high above the ground by then that she thought it would be impossible to make out the shapes of individual people if any were down there to be seen. And she decided she would remember the place just that way, an empty white landscape dotted with craggy rock and the black circles of ice on the ponds, all of it bordered by the cold blue of the ocean. She stared and stared, as if she might be able to burn that picture permanently into her mind to the exclusion of any other.

And then they were above the clouds.

1994

MERCEDES

1.

T
HE HARBOUR WAS WRONG
.

It was a beautiful June day over the Avalon. Mercedes staring out at the ragged coastline with its ruffle of white surf as the plane banked for its approach. She’d reached into the shoulder bag and taken out her sunglasses, putting them on over her eyeglasses against the glare. Cabot Tower above the Narrows. She touched her finger to the window. She said, “The harbour looks …”

Her daughter leaned across to peer past her. “What are you saying?”

“The harbour doesn’t look right somehow.”

Isabella eased back in her seat. She said, “It’s been nearly fifty years, Mercedes.” She called her mother by her first name when she was angry, to add that distance. And Bella still hadn’t recovered from the early start to the day.

Mercedes had insisted on getting to Logan International three hours ahead of time to be sure of a window seat during the last leg of the trip, hoping for a clear day and this view, the plane looping out over the ocean on its approach and swinging in low above the headlands, the Narrows, the harbour. Isabella tried to talk her into a more sensible departure time until Mercedes suggested she might drive the thirty-five miles to the airport herself. It was five in the morning when she picked up Mercedes, and Bella had never been a morning person. They sat for hours in the departure lounge, Bella sullenly sipping at a coffee while planes taxied down the runway. Mercedes ticking off each flight on the departures board as it left. “American Airlines Flight 11,” she’d say. “Los Angeles.” “Flight 175, United.” Isabella got up eventually and moved to sit out of hearing.

They’d changed planes in Halifax en route to St. John’s and after take-off Mercedes brought her black canvas shoulder bag out from under the seat, peered into it for the fifteenth time. Bella said, “He’s not going anywhere, Mom.” Mercedes ignored her, reaching a hand inside to touch the metal container. “Boustani in a box,” she said. Sat back with her eyes closed, listening to the voices around her. The first time in fifty years she’d heard a Newfoundland accent other than Agnes on the phone. She nodded off several times to the leisurely rustle of Bella flipping the glossy pages of a magazine, kept shifting her position to ease the ache in her hips and back, to take her swollen feet out of her shoes. “Would you settle?” Bella said.

“Wait till you’re old,” Mercedes said. “Then talk to me.”

She used to say the same thing to Bella about motherhood. “Wait till you have children. Then talk to me.” Now she threatened her daughter with age. Maybe Bella would never get old either, she thought.

Mercedes stared down at the city. The south side looked abandoned, the rows of wartime barracks, the houses and outbuildings and wharves wiped away. An elevated four-lane highway set along the Waterford River valley. The tiers of fish flakes along the Battery torn down and gone though the houses were still there, set higgledy among the rockface. On the north side of the harbour she could see the twin spires of the Basilica, the Kirk below it. New office buildings on the waterfront, ugly red brick and glass. For miles beyond what she’d known as the city, the countryside was parsed and sectioned by subdivisions and strip malls.

And the harbour had changed somehow, she was sure. The contour of the thing was different. Like a face pushed into an odd shape by the hands of the shoreline. And that obvious but unidentifiable difference lit the slow burn of anxiety that she’d managed to keep at bay up to then. She would have to find a bathroom, she knew, first thing. “What
is
it?” she said.

Bella said, “Think in your head, Mom. Not out loud.”

After the plane taxied in, they walked down the portable stairs and across the tarmac into the terminal. A crowd of people waiting in the dimness beyond the open Arrivals door. Mercedes looked among the faces as she approached them but couldn’t pick out a single feature. It was almost pitch dark inside, as if the windows were blacked out. “What in God’s name?” she said aloud. She held the straps of the shoulder bag with both hands and walked so close to Isabella their shoulders touched.

A woman stepped up to her, took her by the shoulders. “Sadie,” the woman said. “What have you got those things on for?”

“Oh Jesus,” Mercedes said. She took off the sunglasses. “I forgot I was wearing them.” She looked at her sister, saw a glimpse of their mother beneath the grey curls, beneath the puff and sag of the cheeks. Deep creases in the earlobes the same as their father. She leaned into her. “Hello, Agnes,” she said. A blur of powder and perfume obscuring the smell she was looking for. She straightened quickly and said, “I’m busting for a pee, Aggie. Where are the bathrooms in this place?”

They drove to the White Hills and down through Pleasantville, the rows of flat-roofed military quarters converted to civilian apartments and offices after the Americans left St. John’s in the 1960s. They went along the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake and turned up King’s Bridge to Military Road, driving into Georgestown. Mercedes sent them around the same block half a dozen times but she couldn’t say for sure where Hiram’s shop had been among the rows of houses. They drove down Duckworth Street and back along Water, Mercedes pointing out the location of every storefront and shop on the strip during the war. At the end of Water Street, Agnes turned left again onto Harbour Drive, a street that hadn’t existed when Mercedes left St. John’s. Tons of stone quarried from the south side hills and dumped into the harbour with old concrete and debris, the surface paved, a cement dock running the length of it.

“I could tell something was different,” Mercedes said. She craned her head toward Isabella in the back. “Didn’t I say something was different, Bella?”

“Yes, you did, Mercedes.”

Agnes said, “Did you want to go up to Signal Hill?”

“Bella?”

“Be a shame to waste the good weather.”

They found a spot in the Parks Canada parking lot below Cabot Tower. The wind blowing hard when they got out of the car and walked to the low stone wall to look over the city.

Agnes had her arm in Bella’s and was studying her. “She don’t look at all like you, Sade. She must be the spit of her father.”

Mercedes glanced at Isabella. An unfortunate face, she thought, pear shaped and all the features tightly clustered at the centre, it made Bella look permanently offended. She was twenty-nine years old and disappointed in life in some way. As if it had all been rehearsal so far and she was uncertain about ever making it to opening night.

Mercedes looked out at the city. “Never thought I’d lay eyes on this place again.”

Bella said, “Did you want to do it now?”

“I’m not ready,” she said. “Not yet.”

“He’s been dead three years, Mom.”

“I want him with me tomorrow,” she said. She let out a long breath of air. “Johnny never really thought much of this place. I don’t know why he’d want to be set out here for evermore.”

“He was just looking for a way to get you home,” Agnes told her. “That’s what I think.”

Mercedes saw the truth of it right away, though it had never occurred to her before that moment. “You always were the one with the brains, Agnes,” she said.

“I’d have traded them for looks any day.”

Mercedes laughed. “You see what can happen to looks.”

Agnes slipped off her sister’s sunglasses and touched the injured side of her face. “Where’s the plate?”

Mercedes drew a line from her left eye socket down across her cheek, then put the sunglasses back on. “I think myself and Johnny are going to take a little walk out past the tower,” she said. But she didn’t move from the spot where she was standing.

Agnes lived in an apartment building just off Torbay Road, across the street from a strip mall. A kitchenette and boxy living room downstairs. Photos of her three children over the television. Half a dozen pictures of her and David through the years and in every shot his lame hand was hidden in a pocket or behind Agnes’s back. Ag had married Clive Reid’s youngest boy while they were still living in the Cove, where David taught kindergarten through Grade 11 until the school was closed in 1964. Once their own children left for universities and jobs on the mainland David retired, and they moved to St. John’s from Fogo. David dead nearly a year now.

After their supper Agnes brought out a bottle of sherry. Isabella drank only a few mouthfuls before she went upstairs to bed. It was barely coming on to dark.

“Is she all right?”

“She had an early morning,” Mercedes said. Though in her mind the simple question rippled out into every nook of her daughter’s life.

Bella had been the most unexpected of unexpected children. Born almost twenty years after Marion, their
only
child as Mercedes had come to think of her. She had been calling her husband One-shot Boustani for the better part of two decades. And then Isabella.

“I can’t believe she’s not married yet,” Agnes said.

Mercedes rolled her eyes. Through Bella’s twenties half a dozen men came and went without making a dent in her aimlessness, her detachment. Mercedes rarely met the people she dated, sometimes knew nothing more than a first name. Which made her suspect some of them, at least, were married. Each unsuccessful affair left her daughter a little more contrary, a little sadder. There was an abortion when she was twenty-six, Bella talking about it as if it was nothing more than a toothache. Her nonchalance in matters of the heart was too practised to be sincere, Mercedes thought. The listless world-weariness in her bordered on self-hatred.

“Wasn’t she seeing someone just now?” Agnes asked.

Mercedes made a
pffft
sound through her teeth and lips.

“What a sin. She’s a sweetheart.”

“To you maybe.” Mercedes raised her glass of sherry. “To the rest of us she’s cold as a witch’s tit.”

Agnes put a hand to her mouth, appalled.
“Sadie,”
she whispered.

Mercedes’ face went suddenly serious. She said, “No one’s called me Sadie since I moved to the States.”

They looked at one another awhile longer.

“Welcome home,” Agnes said.

A crowd of several hundred gathered at the war memorial on Duckworth Street the following morning to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in Europe. Wreaths were laid under a steady drizzle of speeches and prayers. Mercedes and Isabella and Agnes stood across the street from the ceremonies, keeping to the outskirts of the crowd. She still disliked large groups, the mauzy whiff of them, how they made it impossible to isolate any individual smell. It was like white noise to Mercedes, an irritating hum.

Earlier that morning she had hugged her sister at the sink, before either of them had dressed for the day. She wanted to get to her before she powdered up, pushed her face into Agnes’s neck to breathe her in. “You smell exactly the same as I remember,” she said.

“Oh Jesus,” Bella said. “The Nose has found you out, Aunt Agnes.”

“What do I smell like?”

“Like you.”

“And what is that, if you don’t mind?”

“It’s—” she paused, “it’s a bit like toasted homemade bread.”

Bella threw her head back and laughed. “Buttered or not buttered?” she asked.

“Oh be quiet, Bella.”

Agnes smiled up at Mercedes, embarrassed by the peculiar intimacy. “Toast?” she said.

“I took her to a movie once, Aggie. And she kept moving her head back and forth, like a dog sniffing the air. ‘Do you smell that?’ she said. ‘Do you smell that?’ I thought she was losing her mind. ‘Baby poo,’ she said. ‘It smells like baby poo in here.’”

Mercedes stood with her arms tightly folded. Agnes looked from Isabella to her sister and back again. “What was it?” she asked.

“Popcorn.”
Bella threw her head back again. “She thinks theatre popcorn smells like baby caca.”

“While they’re
breast
feeding,” Mercedes insisted. “It
does.”

“What do you want for breakfast?” Agnes asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Have some toast, Mom,” Bella said.

Agnes gave her niece a look. “I could make you some oatmeal, Sadie.”

“Just tea,” Mercedes said coldly.

It was nearly impossible to see what was happening at the base of the war memorial from where they were standing. “Why don’t we try to get a little closer,” Agnes suggested.

Mercedes said, “Johnny would have wanted to stay a little out of the way. He was always embarrassed about serving here. Not making it overseas.”

“There was all kinds of ways to serve, Sadie. He was one of the lucky ones.” Agnes lifted her glasses to wipe at her eyes.

Isabella said, “It was the merchant marine Hardy was with, was it?”

Agnes nodded. “Ruthie wouldn’t let him—that was his wife, Ruthie—she wouldn’t let him join the forces. Merchant marine was the closest she’d let him get to overseas. Last part of 1943 he signed up.” She took a breath and let it out slowly through her nostrils. “He told some stories when he was home on leave,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Isabella,” Mercedes said.

“Like what, Agnes?”

“They went across in these huge convoys, you know, merchant marine and navy ships together. When a boat was torpedoed the convoys just kept moving. Even if there were survivors in the water, they couldn’t stop for fear of losing more ships. His first time across, two boats went down. The calmest kind of weather, not a breath of wind. Hardy saw a fellow out in open water, he had his life jacket on and was watching the convoy sail past him. A Brit he was. And he had his hand in the air, waving it around, and he was yelling ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ Making a joke of it.”