“We’re not interrupting?” Hiram said.
“Not at all,” the man said. “The young courter is just on his way.”
Sadie got up from her rocker and kissed him on the cheek.
“Give up that foolishness and let him go,” the mother said.
Two chairs were offered to the new visitors. Wish sat heavily and looked to the fire in the stove as the young man went out the door. A slow collapse carrying on inside his chest after he came up hard on the seat. Not her brother, then.
Her father said, “We heard you coming out the path.”
“Where’s the young fellow off to?” Hiram asked.
“Hardy didn’t have his last forkful in his mouth, he was upstairs getting dandied up. Gone along the shore after Willard Slade’s youngest.”
“Is that right?” Hiram said.
“Can’t keep his mind on the fish long enough to bait a hook. We’ll starve to death the winter if he don’t soon marry the girl and have it done with.”
Wish glanced at Sadie, who was watching him steadily. He looked away again, hoping she wasn’t able to register his look of relief in the dim.
Her mother said, “You’ll have a cup of tea.”
“Grand, yes,” Hiram said. “We would.”
She stared at Wish a moment. “And you,” she said. “Do you have a tongue in your head?”
Sadie said, “He did this afternoon.”
She looked across at her daughter. “We know you’ve got tongue enough.”
“Now Helen,” her husband said.
“This is Aloysious Furey,” Hiram announced, as if it had just occurred to him to make introductions. “From Renews, on the Southern Shore.”
Helen sat back slowly in her chair. And it seemed to Wish that everyone else in the room shifted away from him in much the same fashion. Wish looked from Sadie to her mother. They had likely never had a Catholic sit in their kitchen before, he knew. Some people on the northeast shore had never met a Catholic before encountering Wish and it was always hard to say how things would go. Hiram appeared to be oblivious to the sudden change in the room, taking out his tobacco and papers to roll a cigarette. Though Wish knew he was paying attention and enjoying himself. Hiram took some kind of pleasure from observing the flustered civility, the consternation, the outright hostility of people unexpectedly confronted by Wish’s religious affiliation.
He said it was like throwing two strange dogs together to see how they’d get on.
He offered a cigarette to Aubrey, who got up to take it, then went to the stove and held a shovie through the grate until it was alight. He lit his cigarette from it and passed it along to Hiram. Aubrey sat back on the bed and lay with an arm behind his head, the hand holding the cigarette propped above his chest. Hiram took a long drag and leaned forward to tap ash into the wide cuff of his trousers.
Helen was staring at Wish, taking harsh little breaths through her nostrils. He put his hand into his pocket and fingered his mother’s rosary beads, considering whether or not to make a show of them.
“I’ll say this much for the Romans,” Aubrey said. “They got nothing against a scuff on the dance floor, or a drink.” He waved the cigarette he held. “Or a smoke. Not like we Methodist crowd.”
“Being Methodist don’t seem to have stopped you,” his wife said.
“I’ll let the Good Lord take it up with me when my time comes.”
“Don’t be tempting,” Helen said softly. “It’s all bad enough without that.”
A woman’s voice began calling from inside the main house. Helen turned to her daughters. She said, “Would one of you go see to her?”
“She doesn’t want anything,” Sadie said.
“Go on, Sade,” her father said.
Wish watched her as she went down the narrow hallway to the parlour. Agnes got up from the floor and settled into the vacated seat.
“That’s your mother, is it, Aubrey?” Hiram asked.
“It is.”
“She must be getting on.”
“Ninety-two. And three, providing she lives to September month. But she haven’t been well, is the truth of it. She’s lost her mind, most days. And can’t get up out of the bed to make water. Be a blessing to everyone when she goes,” Aubrey said to the ceiling. “For Helen especially, not having to watch after her every moment of the day and night.”
Wish was still watching down the hallway toward the parlour, set up as a sickroom to spare the old woman the stairs. Sadie came out of the dark finally and stood in the doorway. “She wants you,” she told her mother.
Helen stood up. “Make these folks a cup of tea, would you?” She stared at Wish a moment. “And see if you can’t drag a word out of this one before he leaves.”
He smiled at the woman but she didn’t notice or chose for some reason not to return it.
When Sadie set the tea in front of them she sat in her mother’s chair, close enough that Wish could smell the soap from her skin. Hiram tipped his cup to fill the saucer and blew on the surface to cool the tea, then drank from it in small noisy sips. The sun was well down and the room settled deeper into pitch, but no one moved to light a lamp, content to sit and talk in the dark.
Hiram said, “Have you lost many boys to overseas, Aubrey?”
“A scatter one is gone into St. John’s to join the Newfoundland Regiment.” Aubrey was into a second cigarette and it seemed that the man’s voice was coming from the red dot glowing in the corner of the room. “Clive Reid’s oldest is gone across to Halifax to join up with the Canadians. Wanted to get on with the air force.”
Wish said, “He can do that?”
“We’re citizens of the Commonwealth,” Hiram told him. “A fellow could go to Britain and join up there if he had a mind to.”
“If it weren’t for Will Slade’s girl I don’t know but we might have lost Hardy to it. By and by, we won’t have anyone left around here to fish. Is it as bad across the pond as the newsreels make it out, I wonder?”
“Be a job to make that stuff up.”
“I don’t know what it is keeping the Americans out of it so long.”
Hiram said, “They’re overrun by the Irish down there, is what’s wrong. But it’s only a matter of time. The Yanks already got their eyes on the land for a base in St. John’s, down along Quidi Vidi Lake. Canadians over on Buckmaster’s Field. All of them in uniform. Local boys haven’t got a chance with the girls any more. Have they, Wish?”
Sadie leaned over the table to bring her head closer to his. “Are you going overseas?”
He tried to picture her face again, to connect it to the sound of her voice. He couldn’t tell from her tone what she might prefer as an answer. “I don’t have plans,” he said.
Helen came back down the hall, one hand coasting the wall as a guide. “Is anyone going to light a lamp here this evening?” she said.
She shooed Sadie from the table and the girl sat herself on the mat in front of the stove.
“More tea?” Helen said.
“I think we’ll be off,” Hiram said.
Wish looked back to Sadie as he left, one side of her face in firelight. She was staring into her lap, as if listening intently to a conversation in another room.
Aubrey followed them to the door. “I’ll step out a minute, walk you a ways.” When they’d found the path and started down he said, “When do you push on?”
“The coaster comes back through day after tomorrow.”
“You’ll be getting back to St. John’s before long, will you?”
“A week or so, I’d say.”
“Back this way one more time before the winter settles in?”
“If the weather doesn’t turn early.”
“Sadie came on sixteen a couple of months ago,” Aubrey said. “Promised her a new dress if I lived to Christmas. Doubt I’ll see St. John’s before then though, alive or dead. Was wondering if you could stop into Ayre’s on Water Street. Get her something decent.”
“You don’t know what size she wears, do you, Aubrey?”
He fished in his pants pocket and hauled out a length of knotted string. “I was going to drop by with this before you left,” he said. He shook the string and held it at one end. “Double knot on this end,” he said. “Here to the first knot is shoulder to wrist. To the second knot is shoulder to waist. Second to third is the circumference of the bosom, third to fourth is her waist. No concern about the length, Helen can put that to rights when you carries it up.”
“Any particular colour she’s fond of?”
“Well now. Never stopped to think of that.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Golfman at Ayre’s what he recommends.”
Aubrey clapped his hands. “Cracker jack,” he said. “I’ll settle up the bill when you brings the dress along.”
He turned back then and wished them both a good night. Hiram continued down the hill and when he was sure Aubrey was out of earshot he fingered the knots in the string. “Second to third,” he said as he measured the distance, and he let out an appreciative whistle.
He balled the string and passed it along to Wish. “I imagine you’ll take more care with this than me.”
Wish said, “I don’t think her mother thinks much of me.”
“Well now, Mrs. Parsons is already taken, isn’t she,” Hiram said. “Unless you’re more reckless a man than I know.”
The morning dawned as breathless as the night before. Wish woke in darkness to the sound of men on the wharf and the rhythmic plash of oars as dories rowed out to the schooners anchored offshore. Engines of the trap skiffs coming alive in the distance, one after another, a muffled drone like bluebottles caught between the panes of a window. He drifted off again and slept until well after the sun was up. Not a sound in the house as he lay there, coming to himself, remembering where he was. The bedroom window was propped wide but the curtains didn’t stir.
He dressed and made his way to the kitchen, where the kettle sat warm at the back of the stove but no one was about. Hiram was still in bed asleep and could easily spend the better part of the morning there. Under a napkin on the table Wish found a plate of buns and cheese, which meant Mrs. Gillard didn’t expect to be back anytime soon. He added a scoop of coal to the fire and wandered around the downstairs waiting for the kettle to boil.
After he ate, Wish walked down past Earle’s wharf. Not a soul about, the men already out on the fishing grounds. The houses were strangely quiet as well, no movement through the windows, the air nearly clear of wood or coal smoke. It was almost as if the Cove had been abandoned between his first waking moment in the dark and the time he crawled out of bed. He did his best to keep his mind clear of his destination until he stopped outside Sadie’s house, and he stood there, watching it awhile. The front windows were open to the fresh air and he heard the old woman calling for Helen.
He walked around to the back kitchen, where the porch door was propped open with a broomstick. He stepped inside and cocked his head to listen. Just the old woman’s voice. No dishes on the table. The walls bare but for two small pictures, a portrait of Queen Victoria on her diamond jubilee, a line drawing of some ancient monarch fording a river on a horse. He walked up close to read the inscription.
King William III Crossing the Boyne
. King Billy. Prince of Orange, King of England. Driving the Catholic King James out of Ireland. Hiram used to amuse himself in St. John’s by bringing home anti-Catholic literature being passed out on the downtown streets, quoting them aloud to Wish. The pamphlets called Catholics enemies of social order and deluded slaves of despotism. “The simple institution of Christ is not to the taste of the ignorant multitude that form the serfs of the Popedom.” Wish had seen the Orangemen parading through the streets in bowler hats and salt-and-pepper caps, sashes draped over their coats, singing Protestant hymns. Catholics making their way indoors before the parade reached them, lowering the window shades so as not to have to watch them go by.
He walked to the stove and placed his hand along the top to feel the warmth. Not cold, but an hour and more since a fire had been laid there. He looked around the kitchen and placed both his hands on his hips. “Hello,” he called.
“Aubrey?”
He walked down the hall and stood in the doorway to the parlour, looking in on the sick woman. She was lying on a cot wedged in among a chair and a settle. The covers were tucked up to her chest despite the warmth of the morning. She faced the wall she was calling through, a long grey braid of hair across her shoulder.
“Hello, missus.”
Her cheeks were sunken, and the skin where it stretched over the forehead and cheekbones was unnaturally white and smooth.
“I wants Helen,” she told him.
“Have they gone and left you alone?”
“I’m all mops and brooms today,” she said. She patted a spot on the bed without taking her eyes from his. She took his hand in her own when he sat beside her. Her eyes were pale blue and discoloured with tiny flecks of darkness, as if old paint had flaked away from them. The room smelled faintly of urine and oil soap and lavender. “You’re Jenny Reid’s youngster.”
“I’m not from around here,” he said. “Where have they gone and left you?”
She smiled up at him sweetly. “Am I dead?” she asked. “Is this heaven?”
Wish felt his stomach turn and he leaned away from her but she refused to let go of his hand. “Is Sadie not around?” he asked her.
The old woman’s face darkened and she spoke something in a whisper.
“What did you say?”
“The little slut,” the old woman repeated. And in another tone altogether she said, “Can I get up out of the bed now?”
“No, Nan. You can’t get up out of the bed.”
Wish looked to the doorway, where Sadie’s younger sister stood with her arms folded across her chest.
“I must be in hell, then,” the old woman said.
“I come by and there was no one about,” Wish told the girl. “She was calling for your mother.” He pried his hand from the old woman’s grip and stood up.
“I was only out back for a few minutes.” The girl turned away toward the kitchen, meaning for him to follow her.
He started for the door, glanced over his shoulder before stepping out into the hall. The old woman said, “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”
The girl was standing by the stove, her hands held behind her back. A child’s body, thin as a stick. Hair cut short and parted on the side. Eyes like her sister’s, though not as deeply green and quicker—they settled on nothing for long, darting up and down him and then away like a skittish school of fish. He couldn’t recall her name.