“She’s not herself,” the girl said. And after a pause she said, “Don’t mind a thing she says.”
He didn’t know whether the girl had heard what the old woman had said about Sadie and didn’t see how he could ask.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked him. “A cup of tea?”
“Just had breakfast. Where’s everyone gone today? There’s not a soul about.”
“All the women are over in Gooseberry Cove after the winter’s berries. They won’t be back before dark. I had to stay behind to watch out for Nan.”
“How far is Gooseberry Cove?”
The girl looked up at him from under the frill of bangs that fell to her eyebrows.
Wish smiled at her. “Can you tell me how to get there, do you think?”
“Sure it’s only the women goes over after the berries.”
“Maybe it’s only the women I’m wanting to talk to.” Her eyes darted away from him again.
Agnes
, her name was. “Can you tell me how to get there, Agnes?”
She smiled to herself, not looking at him.
“Agnes?” he said, wanting her to hear her name aloud a second time.
“Do you know the Washing Pond?” she asked him. “Out past the Spell Rock?”
“The big rock on the other side of the cove?”
She nodded.
“I know it,” he said.
The women were spread out across the bare hills on the far side of Gooseberry Cove, bent double, filling the metal dippers they carried with them, emptying those into pillowcases when they were full. He stopped on the ridge where he came in sight of them and picked out Sadie among the group, and her mother working a little higher up the hill. On the beach an older woman was tending pots over a driftwood fire. Mrs. Gillard.
She glanced up at him as he approached. “You must be lost.”
“Just out for a wander.”
She looked at him as if to say she wasn’t as stunned as all that. “Did you and Hiram manage all right for breakfast?”
“I had a bun and a bite of the cheese you put out for us. There was no sign of Hiram before I left.”
She bent over the pot of baked beans. “How a hangashore like that keeps body and bones together is a mystery to me.”
There was something in her assessment of Hiram that Wish felt was directed at him. As if Hiram’s habitual laziness had a spiritual as well as a physical side and this explained his keeping company with Romans. Wish said, “I’d kill for a drink of water.”
Mrs. Gillard straightened and poured a glassful of warm water from a container, then stood beside him as he drained it.
He glanced up the hill. “Have you got a spare dipper?”
“What do you want with that?”
“I thought I might try to make myself useful. Seeing as I’m here.”
Wish walked up the hillside toward Sadie, bending now and then to throw a handful of blueberries into his pot. A low murmur moving among the women as one after the other took note of him there, though no one raised their heads to say hello. It was like swimming in a pond on the barrens, striking spring-fed pockets of water so cold they stole his breath. He saw it as if from a height then, a slow pan of the cove. A young Catholic boy set loose among a group of Protestant women grazing for berries.
The trap of priest-craft
, Hiram’s pamphlets said,
the trickery of Satan
. No man of theirs for miles.
For a moment he considered turning back the way he came. But knew he would only look more the fool for that. He settled in at a likely-looking berry bush across from Sadie and began picking in earnest. He could feel the attention of everyone on him as he worked. Only Sadie seemed not to have noticed his arrival. He worked his way up the bush to have a fairer view of her. Hair over her shoulder, her face and neck red from bending forward. A halo of blackflies danced around her head in the stillness and she waved a hand absently to clear them from her eyes. The curve of her breasts down the front of the blouse.
She said, “How did you know to find us out here?”
“Just luck,” he said, turning back to the berries. “Took a walk out past the Washing Pond.”
Sadie sat back on her haunches to look at him, pushing the hair out of her face, waving the blackflies away. “You went up to the house, didn’t you. Talked to Agnes.”
“Maybe I did.” He smiled to tell her he wasn’t about to admit more than that, and she smiled back.
“Who knit you, I wonder? I never seen the gall.”
One of the women across the hill stood up and shouted across to them. “Have he got his bottom covered, Sade?”
There was a scatter of laughter, though most of the women didn’t seem to see anything funny in the situation.
Sadie reached across and tipped his dipper far enough she could see into it. “Mostly leaves,” she shouted back. “Leaves and green berries.”
Her mother stepped between them. “He’s a dab hand at picking, is he?” Helen looked down at him without smiling and turned to her daughter. “Go on and give Mrs. Gillard a hand setting out the dishes.”
Sadie opened her mouth but Helen cut her off. “Go on like I told you,” she said.
Sadie dumped her berries into the pillowcase and walked down toward the beach. Helen took the dipper from Wish’s hand and glanced into it.
“I don’t have the woman’s touch with this,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I expect you’re all man.”
He half expected her to tell him to push off, could see her weighing her instincts against common courtesy. She went back to the berries finally, didn’t bother returning the dipper he’d been using. He looked down to the beach after Sadie. Weighing his options in much the same way.
He sat on the sand, holding his ankles, watching Sadie take stacks of plates and cutlery out of a hamper.
“Aloysious,” she said.
“Most people calls me Wish.”
“Wish,” she repeated. He could tell she liked it, the feel of the word in her mouth, its connection to him. “You’re from the Southern Shore.”
Mrs. Gillard lifted out a platter of tea buns wrapped in towels. She handed it to Sadie, who offered the tray to Wish. He took one but didn’t taste it, only held it as they talked. It was still warm with the heat of the oven though it had been sitting wrapped in the basket for hours.
“I’m from Lord’s Cove, over Burin way. Moved across to the Southern Shore when I was a boy.”
Three crows pitched on the shoreline ten yards from the fire, and Wish crossed himself three times. Looked up to see Sadie and the older woman staring.
“Can’t be too careful,” he said.
“Where did you get that mark?” Sadie asked him. “On the nape of your neck.”
Wish reached to touch himself there reflexively, surprised she’d taken note of it. She seemed not even to glance his way when he was stooped near her, picking berries.
“It looks like you were burnt,” she said.
“It’s only a birthmark.”
“Can I have a look?”
Before he could answer, Mrs. Gillard said, “Finish what you were at, Sadie.” A moment later she said, “Watch yourself around that one.” She was speaking into the pot of beans and Wish couldn’t tell if the warning was meant for Sadie or for him.
By the time the women came down to their dinner the sun was directly overhead, and even on the shoreline the heat was stifling. Mrs. Gillard said grace before ladling food onto the plates, and Wish crossed himself when she Amened, knowing it was expected of him. Everyone sat well away from the remains of the fire, where a blackened kettle steamed. The group of them tired and subdued, quieter than Wish expected a gathering of women to be. He leaned toward Sadie and whispered as much to her. She slapped his shoulder. “You saucy black,” she said.
Wish smiled at the girl. It was the same word they used for Protestants on the Southern Shore.
Blacks
. It was the state of their souls they were referring to.
Mrs. Gillard said, “What did you do in Renews before you hooked up with Hiram Keeping?”
“Ran a list for Gooderiche’s store when I was a youngster, setting out cod to dry. Spent a couple of summers on the Banks after the fish with Tom Keating. A bit of salvage.” He shrugged. “I’ll take St. John’s over all of it any day.”
“What’s St. John’s like?” Sadie asked him. She quoted the crofter’s wife from the movie she’d seen the day before. “Do all the ladies paint their toenails?”
“Have you never been to town?”
“Gooseberry Cove is as far as I’ve been. Except for the one trip to Fogo last fall to see the shows.”
Wish tried to recall his first sight of the place, coming through the cliffs of the Narrows on Tom Keating’s bully boat. Long flat flakes for drying cod built over the Battery, a crowded row of finger piers on the north side of the harbour moored tight with schooners. Up the hill behind them the bustle of buildings set among thick stands of trees. The Kirk, the twin towers of the Basilica looking down to the sea. A handful of young Salvation Army officers were witnessing to a crowd on Water Street, red epaulettes on their dark uniforms. The place stank to high heaven, salt fish and rot and maggots, exhaust and coal smoke. It smelled to Wish like life at work.
He glanced at Sadie. He didn’t want to belittle her or the world she knew so he said, “St. John’s isn’t much. Horse shit and taverns, mostly.”
“And which one is it keeping you there?”
He looked at her, surprised. And then he said, “I’m not about to tell any tales.”
“Then why am I sitting here talking to you, I wonder?”
He leaned slightly in her direction again without saying a word.
“What kind of things did you bring in,” Helen asked him abruptly, “salvaging?”
“Just about anything under the sun,” he said.
“Name some for me.”
“Doors and windows. Lumber. Jam and fruit and meat. Cans of ketchup. Soap. We came into a load of twenty pound hams once, bobbing around the wreck, had to use casting nets to get them aboard. A wheelbarrow, shovels. Copper pipe. We got a few Portugee coins one time and we drilled them out for washers. There was a statue off a Spanish boat, Jesus on the cross, all in bronze and big as life. A couple of alky wrecks.”
“Alky wrecks?”
“A schooner full of Black Horse beer out from St. John’s. They put the constable on that one where she went aground, to keep an eye on her. We got paid so much a dozen to bring the beer ashore. There was an English boat loaded down with gin. Sold most of it up in Ferryland, although we kept a little to help get us through the winter.”
“Alcohol,” Mrs. Gillard said, “is the milk of the devil.”
Wish nodded, doing his best to look contrite. Half the people on the northeast shore were teetotallers. Hiram carried his own emergency supply to avoid being caught dry. Drank on the sly at the boarding house. Wish said, “I expect the devil don’t mind a drop now and then.”
“Makes you wonder,” Sadie said, “why the Lord’s first miracle was turning water into wine.”
“Sadie,” her mother warned.
“Hard to know whose side He was on there, isn’t it?”
“Mer
ced
es,” her mother said and she got to her feet, started collecting empty plates.
Mrs. Gillard shifted noisily, her lips moving, as if she was singing a hymn under her breath.
Wish watched Sadie out of the corner of his eye. The voice of the Salvation Army preacher on the St. John’s street corner chimed in his head and he leaned toward her. “The wisdom of God is foolishness in the eyes of the world,” he said, quietly enough that only she would hear him.
“Amen to that,” she whispered.
They wandered back up to the hills after the meal was cleared away. The heat seemed to rise from the ground beneath them and not a breath of wind for relief. Wish stayed near Sadie but not as close as her mother, who seemed determined to keep by her daughter’s side for the rest of the afternoon. Sadie told her to clear off and find her own bush to pick but Helen ignored her.
It was clear he was making no friends by staying. “Got a bit of a walk ahead of me,” he said finally. “Best be on my way.”
Sadie said, “We can carry you back when Sam Rose comes across for us in his boat.”
Helen turned a look on her daughter.
“I’m all right,” Wish said. “Don’t mind walking.”
“You leave tomorrow?” Sadie asked.
“Heading over to Twillingate.”
“Do you stop in on your way back to St. John’s?”
“If the coaster comes in this way.”
“Why don’t you and Hiram drop over this evening?”
Helen handed her dipper to Sadie. “I’ll walk you along a ways,” she said.
They went down to the beach together and past Mrs. Gillard at the fire. They climbed up the ridge he’d crossed over earlier that morning and Helen said, “How old are you, Aloysious?”
“Eighteen.”
“You don’t so much act eighteen,” she said.
He didn’t know what she meant by that but was afraid to ask.
“Sadie is a headstrong girl.”
“I know it.”
“She likes the look of you.”
He nodded.
“She don’t know anything outside the Cove, haven’t been anywhere to know anything. She looks at you, all she sees is a door.”
“A door to what?”
“She haven’t got a clue. Maybe that’s why she likes the look of you.”
They went on without talking then until they topped the ridge, where Helen stopped, letting Wish walk a few yards down the opposite side before she spoke again.
“Aloysious.”
The sun stood behind her head and he had to shade his eyes with his hand.
“You seem a fine young man.” Helen took a breath and looked away out over the ocean. “My daughter is not going to take up with you,” she said. “Or anyone of your kind.”
“My kind.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You oughtn’t to come by this evening.”
The sun made his eyes water and he had to look away.
“It don’t have anything to do with yourself or how you are,” she said.
He walked away from her, not looking back until she called to him. She was still standing at the height of the ridge.
“Safe trip,” she shouted. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching until she disappeared down the opposite side of the hill.
Silence all around him then. The sky cloudless and the surface of the ocean as smooth as a tablecloth below him. Blood pounding across his ears.