2.
T
HE COASTER CAME BACK
into the Cove nine days later. A Sunday morning, the church service under way, and there was no one on the wharf to greet them as they came ashore. After they settled their things in at the boarding house, Hiram announced he was off to visit Mrs. Jones about a horse. He’d likely be half an hour or more in the outhouse, humming aloud to keep himself company. Wish went out the front door and looked up and down the path, relieved to be free of the man.
They hadn’t gone over to the Parsonses the night before they left the Cove, getting quietly pissed together instead at the boarding house after Mrs. Gillard went off to bed. Hiram had seemed altogether put out by Wish’s lack of interest in seeing Sadie.
“You had no chance with the likes of her anyway,” he said, trying to goad him. “A dirty little mick like you.”
“Leave off,” Wish said sourly.
They’d had much the same conversation the night before the coaster came back into the Cove from Twillingate, and it escalated into an exchange of taunts about balls and guts and nancy-boys that made Wish feel half his age.
Fucking Hiram.
Wish walked up toward the church, which stood on a small plateau above the harbour, backing onto the only trees left standing for miles in any direction, a stand of stunted spruce, the tops all trained toward the harbour by the prevailing wind. He heard the strains of the foot-pump organ, the nearly tuneless effort of the congregation as they made their way through “How Great Thou Art.” He walked along the side of the church and up the hill past the cemetery among a grazing herd of sheep, the animals complaining as they stepped out of his way. He went nearly to the ridge of the hill and sat until the service ended, watched the congregation file into the sunlight. Picked out Sadie and her family making their way toward the south side. Agnes wasn’t with them, left at home to watch the old woman, he assumed. Sadie looked back occasionally, scanning up and down the cove as if she hoped to catch sight of something in particular.
He had no desire to go back to the boarding house and sat on the hill until he saw the minister leave the building. Walked down to the vacant church. He had never been inside a Protestant church before and it felt like a lonely place to him, empty of the saints and their rows of votive candles. He sat in a pew at the back, taking in the smell of polished wood and cured leather. An altar on a low dais at the front, an embroidered purple banner hanging there. A plain wooden cross high on the wall behind it. There was no one nailed to the cross, just the naked arms of the wood. It seemed almost to miss the point of the whole thing, to his mind. He pictured his aunt then, stretched out on the floor of her little hovel like a crucifix of flesh and blood, the otherworldly look of transport on her face. Not peaceful, but fierce. The look of someone confronted with the inexpressible.
He’d never met his aunt Lilly before he was sent to live with her in Renews. A Presentation Sister was waiting for him as he came off the boat down at Gooderiche’s wharf and led him up to her house. Lilly was standing in the middle of the larger room, as if she had been waiting there for hours or days. He could see nothing at all of his mother in the woman and he found this a relief for some reason.
After their supper, Lilly knelt on the packed-earth floor near the stove to say the rosary and he joined her there without waiting for an invitation. It was a Tuesday evening and they were meditating on the sorrowful mysteries. Wish was using his mother’s rosary. She had been dead eleven days. Sorrow and mystery. Lilly prayed in the language the priests used in church, her face alight with some Godly thing he couldn’t feel in himself.
“I’ve learned this much about God,” Lilly once said to him. “He doesn’t trust us with the truth. He makes us work for it, so we don’t squander what comes to us.”
Wish had no idea what she meant by that. God was too much for people, is what he thought. Some wanted more than just to wet their feet and they walked out of their depth and drowned in Him.
He walked back up to the ridge, avoiding the horseshoe of buildings altogether, cutting down to the Gooseberry Cove path out beyond the Washing Pond. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and stopped along the way to pick handfuls of partridgeberries and blueberries. He went as far as a pond halfway to Gooseberry Cove where he stopped to drink and lay awhile on the bank. He took Aubrey’s knotted string from his pocket and worried it mindlessly, wrapping it around his wrist, looping it through his fingers. He counted off the knots over and over as if they were beads in a rosary. He looked out over the low-lying hills, the moss and berry bushes, the humps of pale stone raftered above the soil. A steady wind had come up and clouds scudded across the face of the sun so that the landscape shifted in and out of the light like some distressed creature that could not settle where it lay. When he closed his eyes he felt the same roiling in his gut. He was ravenously hungry and he thought of the feeling as hunger, though there was more at the root of it than that. Some furious little engine at work in him.
The Monsignor had come to St. John’s to visit the Archbishop in the spring and he’d called on Wish at Hiram’s place. “Lilly asked me to look in on you,” he said. Wish took him to his rooms on the second floor and made him tea while the Monsignor offered a little sermon on the creeping evils of all things ecumenical. “Don’t think,” Father Power told him, “there is no danger to your soul in living under the roof of a Protestant.”
“No, Father,” Wish said.
“It’s the humiliation of the Holy Mother Church they preach,” the Monsignor said. “And the degradation of every child of the Church is their goal.”
Wish could feel the priest watching him and he tried not to fidget.
He said, “Exposure to the diseased imagination of the followers of Luther can blight even the purest constitution.”
Wish stared down at his hands.
Father Power took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a silk handkerchief. “There are those that are lost to God,” he said. “And that makes them capable of anything.”
“Hiram, you mean?”
“Hiram Keeping and his kind.” The Monsignor replaced his glasses. “Remember who you are, Aloysious. Remember who you belong to.”
It all sounded like so much bullshit to Wish but the conversation unsettled him, made him fearful and angry. As if the truth of what the priest said was simply beyond his understanding, that his failure to fully comprehend the danger he was in somehow proved the Monsignor’s argument. And those words came back to him fresh at odd moments like this, filled him with the same humiliation, the same irritation.
He called up Sadie to push it all aside, imagining the girl’s hands under his waistband. He stripped out of his clothing, kneeling up on the moss with his legs spread, his head tipped back. Lifted her skirt over the white of her bare thighs where she bowed away from him, that dark cleft offered up, her face covered by a long veil of hair. Reached to grab a fistful as he slapped against her. Fell forward to catch his breath after he came, wiping his hand clean in the thick nap of the moss. That furious engine still running full-belt inside him.
The evening service had begun by the time he made his way back from the pond, the congregation’s singing reaching him over the sound of the wind. He expected that Agnes would be at church this evening and Sadie left home to watch her grandmother. He stood outside the back-kitchen door and called to her. The sun had dipped beneath the moving raft of clouds and was nearly below the hill behind him, the face of the house stained with the last light of the day, the windows reflecting gold. Three outbuildings stood in the back, a stable and a workshed and a cool house where milk and vegetables were stored. All three were painted with a mixture of red ochre and oil, all three surrounded by a riddle fence woven out of alder sticks. Two goats in the enclosure, cropping grass, a dozen chickens in a wire run behind the stable.
When Sadie didn’t answer him, he called again. She came to the door finally and stood with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her hair done up in plaits and tied into a bun at the back of her head. She said, “I thought maybe you were dead.” In the bronze light her skin looked tanned, as dark as cinnamon. Even the green of her eyes seemed another colour altogether, some shade between copper and rust.
“Delayed is all,” he told her.
“You’ll want to come in, I guess.”
“I was hoping.” He shifted on his feet, as if he was out in the cold of winter and freezing.
Sadie went back to the kitchen, leaving the door open, and he followed her inside.
“Have you had your supper?”
“Haven’t eaten anything but berries since breakfast.”
She went off into the pantry and returned with a plate of cold roast beef and pastry and sliced cheese that she set on the table. “A cup of tea?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“And what if I said it was?”
It hadn’t occurred to him that she might be angry. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have a glass of water, I spose.”
“You would, would you?” She busied herself making tea. He took off his jacket and folded it carefully across the back of the chair. He’d been planning on the same eagerness he’d seen in her at Gooseberry Cove, the reckless streak it hinted at. The delicacy of things between them made him uncertain how to act. He sat in front of the food but didn’t touch it, waiting instead for Sadie to sit beside him. He said, “How’s your nan?”
“You’ve seen her.” A note of accusation in her voice again. “She’s off her head.”
“Capo perduto,”
Wish whispered. He thought of what the old woman had said about Sadie. Considered telling her something about his aunt Lilly but stopped himself. “What did your mother say to you the other day?” he asked. “Out at Gooseberry Cove, when she was trying to keep you quiet. Mer-something.”
“That’s my name,” she said.
“What is?”
“Mercedes. I only hears it when Mother’s upset with me. Not another soul calls me anything but Sadie. Sade.”
“What kind of a name is Mercedes?”
“I don’t know. What kind of a name is Aloysious?”
“I haven’t ever heard of it before, not even in town.” He thought her mother was just the type to christen a child something so grand, so foreign sounding. It was probably a boat from overseas gave Helen the fancy, they all had names like
Mirandella
and
Amarante
and
Maria Christina
. He said, “It’s not Portugee, is it?”
She glared at him. “Do I
look
Portuguese to you?”
“Outside just now,” he said. “The way the light was.” He smiled helplessly. He said, “I was on a Portugee boat one time, out on the Cape Ballard Banks. The
Dona Amelia
, she was called. The crew only knew a few words of English so there wasn’t a lot said, mostly about the fish. The size of them and where they were keeping to. Never offered us a morsel of food but they had three casks of wine in the galley and we had as much of that as we could hold. I was fine while I was sitting down,” he said. “But when I stood up.”
She folded her arms and looked at him as if to say,
Do you have a point?
“A
few of those fellows had pictures of their wives they took out to show us. They all talked about how beautiful the women were back home in Portugal.”
It was a convoluted attempt at a compliment and he wasn’t sure if it had come across that way or not. He could see the girl thinking it through. “I like your name fine,” he said. “Mercedes.”
“Why didn’t you come by the house before you left?”
“I don’t know.”
She got up from her chair and took his plate into the pantry. Still furious, he could see. It wasn’t at all how he had imagined things happening between them, that there’d be so much finagling. When she came back to the kitchen he said, “I didn’t think I’d be welcome. Your mother,” he said.
She sat back in her chair and looked at him, the anger still there though he could see it shifting away from him.
“When she walked me off in Gooseberry Cove. She told me not to come by.” He waited a moment to let her sit with it. He said, “I’m going to join up when I gets back to St. John’s.”
“Join up?”
“I’m going to quit Hiram. Go overseas.”
“You can’t.”
“I turned eighteen this year,” he said, as if his age had been the only obstacle.
She seemed not to know what to say to him. She excused herself suddenly and went down the hallway and up the stairs. He listened to her footsteps overhead, was on the verge of taking his jacket and leaving altogether when he heard her coming back down. At the foot of the staircase she stopped to look in on her grandmother. He could see she had taken out the plaits to let her hair hang straight to her shoulders.
When she came into the kitchen she went to the windows and began closing the curtains. “We’ll light a lamp,” she said.
With the curtains down the kitchen seemed smaller and separate from the world outside. They might be sitting in the cabin of a boat miles from shore, he thought. She lit a kerosene lamp on the table and turned down the wick. Then she leaned over him and kissed him full on the lips, her mouth open. He reached up to touch her but she backed away quickly and sat in her seat. There was no shyness in her, just the same brazen look he’d seen from her in the doorway of the church hall.
“Where’d you learn to kiss like that?”
“I’ve seen it,” she said. “In the movies.”
“I hope you’re not done.”
She shrugged, in a way that made him think she hadn’t yet decided.
“You look fine, Mercedes,” he said. “With your hair.”
“Can I see your birthmark?”
She got up from her chair to stand beside him. She placed her hand at the back of his head, tipping it forward, then pulled the collar of his shirt gently away from his neck as if lifting a bandage away from a wound. She turned him in his chair to have more of the light. The mark was just below the hairline, smaller than the palm of a hand and scald red. He could smell her skin, that and a hint of vanilla that she must have dabbed behind her ears while she was upstairs. She was leaning against his arm, her breasts brushing his shoulder through the fabric of their clothes, and his cock was immediately, painfully erect. He shifted against the discomfort.