Mrs. Henderson said, “We get the cheese sent in from St. John’s. Richard drives over to Gander twice a week for the produce and even then there’s no guarantee of anything fresh.”
“The air’s always fresh though,” Mr. Henderson said. The joke felt practised and awkward at once. “That’s why we moved here in the first place,” he said, and laughed again.
The Hendersons knew of a man up in Tilting who’d been carting his sheep across to the Cove on Little Fogo Island for years, letting them graze free over the summer. He was due to make the trip any day, they said.
Agnes picked over her salad, leaving behind as much of the cheese as she could without being rude. When the Hendersons were out of the room she said, “Only people who never grew up around goats would eat the like of that.”
Late the next morning, they stood watching Gerry Foley tie the feet of twenty-five sheep, lifting them one at a time aboard his longliner. A squat, broad-shouldered man, a full beard tufted with grey.
“Haven’t been a soul living out at the Cove this thirty years almost,” he said. “What is it you wants with going out there?”
Mercedes said, “I grew up out there.”
“Is that right? What’s your name, then?”
“Parsons, I used to be. Sadie Parsons.”
He repeated it under his breath as if he were rubbing a lamp. “Sadie Parsons, Sadie Parsons.” He hefted another sheep aboard and looked back at her suddenly. “You’re not the one run off after that Catholic fellow during the war?”
“What, did it make the paper or something?” Isabella asked.
“We didn’t have a paper,” Gerry Foley said. “Kept a good many gums flapping around here, though. That fellow got killed overseas, didn’t he?”
Mercedes looked at Wish.
“Is this him?” Gerry Foley said. “Well, Jesus comforted Mary. She found you after all? Surprised we never heard that up this way. Is this your youngster?” he said.
“No,” Isabella said. “I’m not.”
Bella looked uncertain about getting aboard. The sheep bleating and rustling underfoot, as if the floor of the boat was a living, breathing thing. The smell of shit rising off them. She sat in the stern, as far from the animals as she could manage. Mercedes picked her way past the cuddy to the bow. It was another cool day but the fog had cleared off. Little Fogo Island a speck in the distance.
Agnes decided at the last moment not to go with them. “When I closed the door of that house in 1966 it was just the same as when Mother and Father lived there,” she said. “That’s how I want to keep it in my mind.” She watched them pull away from the dock. “Say me to everyone,” she shouted.
They were hardly clear of the harbour when Bella put her hand over her mouth and leaned forward over her knees.
“She’s going to be sick,” Wish announced to no one in particular.
Gerry shouted at her from the wheel. “Over the side, missus. Don’t throw up in the jesus boat.”
She leaned out over the gunnel and vomited into the ocean.
“Get it up, my love,” he said. “Good for the fish.”
Wish leaned his back against the cuddy. “Seems an awful lot of trouble,” he said, “hauling the animals out this far every year.”
“Got to keep them fenced in home. Eating up people’s flower gardens, council says. Everyone with carpet on the floor and they’re afraid of tracking a bit of sheep shit into the house.” He rolled his eyes. “You take this boat now. Out after the cod in her since nineteen and seventy-two. Till the government closed the fishery two years ago. They got nothing better to do but make my life miserable with their by-laws and decrees and moratoriums.” He smiled across at Wish. “That’s why we fought the war, I spose.”
An hour later the boat shimmied up to a pier in a shallow area on the north side, below the Spell Rock. It was the only wharf in the Cove still standing and it was obvious that Gerry Foley had gone to a fair bit of trouble to keep it up. They stepped off as he began carrying his sheep out onto the dock by their feet. Bella was pale and shaking and she sat down at the Spell Rock, saying she’d catch up with them later.
Mercedes and Wish walked along the path, which was hard-packed by Gerry’s sheep. Mercedes pointed to each building they passed and named the people who’d lived in it, as if they were still eating and sleeping under the staved-in roofs. There was no sign of the church hall, and Mercedes told Wish it had burnt to the ground during the war. The church was still standing, though the doors were gone, and they walked in through the open archway. The sanctuary had become a kind of barn, the pews uprooted and stacked along one side of the building, the open floor space covered in straw and old sheep shit. A breeze of wind blowing through the glassless windows. The plain wooden cross gone from the wall behind the altar. Mercedes walked across to a window and looked up at the cemetery behind the church.
“You ready to go up there?” Wish asked.
“Not yet. No. Let’s head over to the south side first.”
They walked slowly down the bowl of the harbour. A dozen sheep had begun making their way along the path toward them but there was still no sign of Bella. On the shoreline all the fishing rooms and twine lofts and drying flakes were gone or lying in a shambles of grey wood. The remains of half a dozen stone cages that had been the bases of wharves rising out of the water.
Wish picked his way through a pile of lumber, lifting sticks aside to clear away a criss-cross of rough-hewn beams, running his hand along the length of them.
“What are you looking for?”
“This was someone’s twine loft. Thought maybe.” He straightened from the beams and went along a ways, clearing boards from another. “Here you go,” he said, running his hand along letters carved into the beam with a knife. Ledger, calendar, diary, the entries made haphazardly over the years. He started reading aloud.
Put out the trap 24 June 1953
Making a window March 17 1959 wet day no ducks
Size of coffin 5ft 9in
22 ins from head to shoulders, depth 12 ins
21 ins wide on shoulders
Came home May 12 1946
Snowy day April 4 1962, finished planking punt
The Hood in the harbour landing salt
June 17 not a fish yet
29’th of June took up a trap from a piece of ice
set it out again July 1’st 1953
Down in the store June 17 1961
Sep 7 Clive Reid drowned this morning
The familiar name brought him up short and he stopped there, straightening from the beam. Mercedes was already walking away from him, back up to the path. Wreckage all around her.
Wish sat on the beam he’d been reading from, facing out toward the harbour. He could hear the sheep complaining as they roamed in over the paths. Looked up toward the Spell Rock to see Bella coming toward him.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She headed up the south side.”
They both looked in that direction and could see her moving slowly toward the house where she was born.
Bella sat near him on the beam and watched the harbour a few minutes. She said, “You were the reason she left here, is that right?”
“Did Mercedes tell you that?”
“My father. He said Mom left her life behind for you.”
Wish smiled at her, surprised. He couldn’t imagine why the man would tell her such a thing. “Me and your mother were just kids then, both of us.”
“Huh,” she said, in a way that suggested dissatisfaction or doubt. Deciding whether or not to say something more on the subject. She looked up and down the beach. “It’s like someone dropped a bomb on this place.”
“We should follow your mother up,” he said.
He led Bella along the wall of the house, the branches of spruce and alders scraping at their arms and legs as they went. They leaned in the back-kitchen doorway, an odd smell of rain and wet grass inside. There was no sign of Mercedes. The riddle fence around the backyard had disappeared and the outbuildings were gone as well. Only a two-seater outhouse with the doors off the hinges stood among the trees that had grown tight to the back kitchen. Wish excused himself and made his way over the bramble, picking out the rough squares of shale that had been used as foundations for the cold room and storehouses.
The outhouse was farther back than any of the other buildings had been and it was almost buried in brush. He pushed through the branches to step into the doorless stall. An incongruously sweet smell of moss rising up to him as he pissed into the darkness. He stepped out and sized up the tiny building as he zipped his fly. Not the outhouse that stood there in 1940 obviously, but he was ambushed by the thought of leaning young Mercedes against the sidewall, of kneeling under her raised skirt to kiss the sweet of her. Felt an uncanny echo of what he’d felt at the time. Ridiculous and reckless and completely certain. Realized he’d forgotten that. He could always recall fabrics and colours and tastes but he’d forgotten what it was to suddenly decide he was in love with Mercedes. That he would love her. He leaned a hand against the rotting frame, looked up at the grey sky. Even the memory of it made him unsteady.
Bella had already gone inside when he came back to the house. The floor uneven and fragile with rot under his feet. The ceiling rafters almost touching his head. The frame of the daybed still in its corner, a board table in the same spot under the window. Dark squares on the walls where the two pictures used to hang, Queen Victoria and King Billy crossing the Boyne. He was about to tell Isabella that he and Mercedes had kissed for the first time in this room when he heard footsteps overhead.
Wish walked down the hall to the foot of the stairs. “Mercedes,” he shouted. The steps were tilted on a severe angle, as if they were on a boat that was taking on water and listing heavily to one side. He used a hand against the wall as he went up, not trusting the rail to hold his weight. He stepped carefully along the hallway. In places he could look through the floor straight into the rooms below. “Mercedes,” he said.
“In here.”
She was in a bedroom wrestling with the head of an old iron bed frame. A bureau with two missing drawers stood against the wall. A blind over the window, glass still in the frames.
“I can’t get it free,” she said. “Have a go at it, will you?”
He jimmied the post back and forth, inching it out. He stopped when he had it halfway to catch his breath, the palms of his hands stained red with rust. He went back at it, grunting as he twisted and pulled, the ancient bed frame squealing.
Bella called from downstairs: “Should I leave you two alone up there?”
“Oh be quiet, Bella,” Mercedes said and she smiled at Wish. “I spose you can’t even get it up any more.” She put her hand to his shoulder. “Poor old Johnny was limp as a rag for years before he died.”
Wish reefed angrily at the post, struck by the easy affection in her voice, the years of uncomplicated intimacy it implied. When the post came free, Mercedes leaned past him to stare down into the frame, reaching a single finger into the open space to fish at something inside. She brought up a small parcel wrapped in cloth, shook it gently to rattle the coins. The string was brittle and broke in her fingers as she untied it. She unrolled the cloth on the dresser. She said, “This is where I got the money to go to St. John’s.”
He picked up a bill and held it up to the window. Two dollars. 1931. Newfoundland tender.
Mercedes picked out a plain gold ring among the coins, held it in her palm.
“Nan’s wedding band,” she said. She rewrapped the package and set the fold of muslin into her shoulder bag. “She tried to give it to me before I left the Cove to come after you.”
The wistfulness in her voice stung him, and he moved several steps away from her. He said, “You remember I almost ran off before your father drowned?”
She nodded.
“Agnes said there had to be something to bring me back, remember?”
“When did she tell you that?”
“You told me,” he said. “It was something she said to you.”
“All right.”
He could see she had no memory of those conversations but was willing to go along, to find out what he was getting at. “I came back to make something up to you. Something to do with the night you kissed me downstairs. You remember that.”
She smiled. “I’m not dead yet, am I?”
“Do you remember what you said? When I touched you?”
“I went to look in on Nan and then everyone came in the door, back from church. And you left before I got to say a word to you.”
“Before you went to look in on your grandmother,” he said. “You pulled away from me.”
“I never.” A look of disbelief on her face.
He smiled at his feet. “You pulled away and you said, ‘Don’t make a whore of me.’”
She shook her head, but he could tell from her expression that it was coming back to her. Her hesitation and the way those words set him on his ass in the chair. She said, “I never.”
“Hiram had money on it all, did he ever tell you that?”
“On what?”
“Don’t be stupid, Mercedes.”
“On
what?”
Wish leaned his weight against the bed frame. “Every little place we went into with the movies, he’d give me odds on bedding some missus. Usually someone with a husband off on the Labrador for the season.”
“You bet with him?”
“I was a youngster, Mercedes. I was pissed at your mother, is most of it. The bet was just an excuse.”
She adjusted the straps of the shoulder bag, as if it was falling away from her.
“I was just a youngster,” he said again. “I would have screwed a knothole in a fence post for fifty cents.”
She smiled and didn’t smile and smiled again. She drew her head back to take in a breath of air. “A knothole,” she said. Every breath seemed to be striking her like a slap in the face.
“Mercedes.”
She went out the door with both hands clutching the straps of the shoulder bag.
He went as far as the rail, calling after her, but she ignored him and he let her go. He walked into the bedroom and stood at the window, swearing under his breath. The window was so old that the glass had settled and pooled near the bottom, the striated panes distorting everything he could see out across the Cove, sheep appearing and disappearing like pennies in a water glass. The two women came around the side of the house below him and started down the path, their figures wavering like a mirage through the ancient glass.