“She haven’t been along yet,” Clive told him. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”
Wish nodded sheepishly. “Have you got the flask on you, Clive?”
They set their glasses on a sideboard and went back out through the kitchen.
“On your way already?” Willard said.
“Taking the young fellow out for a smoke,” Clive told him. Before he closed the door he leaned back into the kitchen. “Bloody Catholics, hey?”
They went out into the dark of the yard and Clive took the flask from an inside pocket. He passed it along and Wish swallowed a mouthful before he knew what he was getting himself into. Potato shine, gut-rot and raw. It cut his wind going down and the vapours sifted up through his head like some miracle cure for congested sinuses. He held the flask at arm’s length as if trying to fend it off. He shook his head violently and straightened up. He passed the flask back to Clive. “Fine stuff,” he said.
They heard footsteps coming up the lane and fell silent as the new visitors came around the side of the house. It was a clear night and Wish could see their silhouettes against the horizon, but it wasn’t till the door opened that he saw her in the spill of light from inside. Hardy was with her, and Agnes.
Clive tapped Wish’s arm with his forefinger. He called to the girl and she stopped on the doorsill, looking over her shoulder into the darkness. “Come over a second,” he said.
“Who’s that?” she said. “Clive?”
“Come here, I wants to talk to you.”
Hardy appeared in the doorway again.
“You go on,” she told him. “I’ll be right in.”
She came across the uneven ground toward them, a hand over her brow like she was shading away sunlight. Clive squeezed Wish’s elbow. “You be a gentleman now,” he whispered. “For Aubrey’s sake.” He stepped away into the dark.
“Clive?” she said as she came closer.
“Hello, Mercedes.”
She stopped, still ten feet from him.
“I’m sorry for your troubles,” he said.
“Where’s Clive?” She walked closer to him and he could just make out her features in the dark.
“How is your mother holding up?”
She said, “You were going to go off to St. John’s without saying goodbye, weren’t you.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “In the end.”
“Hardy said you were with them when they found young Will.”
“I was along with Clive. The youngster was some mess when they—” He stopped himself. He could hear Mercedes draw a breath.
“Has everyone given Father up, then?” she asked.
He could see she’d started to cry though she didn’t make a sound. He felt his cock begin to harden, inexplicably, and he tipped his head back to stare up at the constellations. “Jesus, Mercedes,” he whispered.
She moved into him and put her arms around his back and they held one another. And just as inexplicably the urge drained away from him.
“I like how you say that,” she said when she’d recovered herself.
“Say what?”
“My name.”
“Mercedes,” he said again. There was something illicit in using the mother’s name for the girl, making it their own. A private thing between them, a stolen intimacy.
She said, “You smell nice.”
He looked down at her, surprised. “It’s just soap, Mercedes.”
“No. I can smell the soap. It’s something else altogether.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s you. Cinnamon. Moss. I can’t say exactly.”
He had no idea what she was going on about but his scalp prickled and a queer sensation of vertigo came over him. The world seemed to be moving too quickly for him to keep his feet.
The door opened behind them and the dull rectangle of light fell across the ground. Agnes stepped over the doorsill. “Sadie,” she called quietly.
She stepped away from Wish. “I’ll be right there.”
Agnes came toward them, her head ducking against the darkness. “Mrs. Slade is asking after you.”
“I’m coming.” She looked up at Wish and whispered, “Are you coming back in?”
“I don’t think I better.” He saw Hardy step out behind his sister.
“Sadie,” Hardy said sharply.
“Oh for the love of God,” she said. “I’ll be there directly.”
Agnes was beside them and she said, “What are you doing out here with him?”
“Who is it you’re talking to?” Hardy said. He hadn’t moved beyond the patch of light from the door.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Go on, Agnes,” she told her sister. “Go
on.”
She began walking backwards toward the house. “Can you meet me tomorrow?” she whispered to him.
“Where?”
“The Spell Rock. After the boats go out.”
“Yes,” he said.
He watched her shoo her brother and sister into the house. She looked back into the yard where she knew he was still standing in the dark and waved before closing the door behind her.
Just after sunrise he left the boarding house and went across to the Spell Rock, where he watched the fishermen leave the harbour. A low fog rolled over the hills from Gooseberry Cove and settled thick on the land and the water, and he lost sight of the boats before they’d made open seas. He sat beside the pink granite stone and hauled his coat tight against the chill of the fog. Eventually he drifted asleep.
He dreamt of the dead boy sitting up in his coffin at the wake. The youngster was eyeless and mouthless and held a glass of syrup, he lifted a salt-white hand to greet mourners as they entered the room. His entire body seemed to be constantly in motion, a slow undulation, as if he was still trapped underwater and stirred by ocean currents. Mercedes came into the parlour and leaned into the coffin to kiss the corpse full on the dark hole where his mouth once was. She looked over her shoulder at Wish and said, “Don’t make a whore of me.”
He didn’t know where he was when she woke him.
“I’ve only got a few minutes,” she said.
“I fell asleep.” Trying to clear his head of the clinging accusation in those words.
She was kneeling beside him and he pushed himself up to a sitting position. She touched his shoulder. “Sorry I had to run off last night.”
He wiped at his face with both hands.
“Hardy was at me all evening to say who I was talking to.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Not a word. He can stew till his bones go to mush. And I told Agnes to mind her mouth around him too.”
“You don’t mind much, do you, Mercedes?”
“I minds what bears minding. The rest won’t ever hurt me to ignore.”
“I like that in you.”
“You like it now,” she said, smiling back. “It won’t wear so well once you’re stuck with me.”
She leaned forward to kiss him but he tilted his head away.
“It don’t seem right,” he said. “What with your father.”
“You didn’t mind when he was up at the church saying his prayers.”
“That was different.”
She wrapped the woollen shawl around her shoulders and studied him a moment. She said, “It wasn’t just me you come back for, was it.”
“It was you,” he said.
“But that wasn’t the only thing.”
“What makes you say that?”
She looked down a second. “Aggie says there must be something,” she said.
“Your sister?”
“She says there must be something in all that’s going on to have brought you back. And keep you here.”
He sat up straighter against the rock. There was a tinny buzz across his ears and the taste of Clive’s alcohol came back into his mouth, the burn of it right up through his head.
She only waited for him.
“I was born in Renews,” he said. “But we lived over in Burin. In Lord’s Cove. We lost everything in ’29, in the tidal wave, stage and the skiff. The house.”
“I heard of it.”
“Mother had an uncle living on his own in Calvert and we shifted over to stay with him. But we had nothing much to bring with us and we had a hard winter of it. Father and Mother’s uncle walked into St. John’s in March for a berth on one of the sealing vessels heading out to the ice.” He looked away again.
“You lost him,” she said.
“He was out with a crew in slobby ice. Blowing hard and snow coming up. They were making their way back to the vessel to get in out of it, all in single file. Everyone with their heads down and running to stay afloat on the pans. Father was at the end of the line when they started back. But when they got aboard the ship.” He made a helpless little motion with his hand. “We never did get him. His body. I thought I might help spare your crowd some of that.”
“Are you going to go overseas, Wish? Like you said?”
He took her hand. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Finally he said, “I told Hiram I was quitting him.”
She watched him as if she expected something more to follow, but he sat quiet.
“They’re expecting me home,” she told him.
Before she left him she pushed the shawl off one shoulder and slipped the hand she was holding inside her blouse, beneath the white shift to her naked breast. She watched him as he touched her there, the skin soft as down and the nipple against his fingers like a knot of wood.
She removed his hand and set it against him like some creature she was being careful not to wake. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Same time.”
“All right.”
He watched her go, cradling his hand in his lap. He called out, “You’re some beautiful, Mercedes,” and she looked back, her expression almost angry, he thought. “You don’t mind me saying.”
“You’ve said it before,” she said. “To other girls.”
“I never really meant it though. Not like I means it now.”
“Then I don’t mind you saying.”
Clive’s skiff came back into the Cove around ten o’clock that morning, and Wish made his way down to the stage to meet them. Clive and his two boys were plunging the long tines of their fish-forks into the black-backed roil around their legs, heaving the cod up onto the lungers.
“You had a good trip,” Wish said.
“The fish was maggoty out there this morning.”
“You’ll want a hand getting through them before dinner.”
“An extra hand wouldn’t go astray.”
Wish was set up cut-throat, passing the blade under the gills and down the length of the white belly. He sent the opened bodies along the table to Eli, who took off the heads, scalloped tongues from the mouths, separated livers from the offal and pushed them into a tub. Clive splitting at the end of the table, his knife flicking the spine clear, not an ounce of flesh on the bone. Their movements practised and casual, so effortless it looked as simple as buttering toast. David washed and stacked the fish meat at the end of the line, reaching elbow deep into a puncheon of sea water to scrub it clean. He was born with one hand smaller than the other, the fingers folded in on themselves like the claws of a bird’s foot.
Wish said, “He don’t mind I took his spot?”
Clive glanced toward the boy. “He hates all this. Rather be up at the school or home reading a book.”
Wish slipped his fingers into the gills of another cod, lifted it to the table. The knife through the seamless skin envelope making a sound like a piece of fabric ripped cleanly. He’d always hated making the fish himself. It was part of what he felt he was escaping in St. John’s. But he found the unremitting activity a blessing this morning. There was little talk, just the cold, ugly work of heading and gutting and time ticking him closer to seeing Mercedes at the Spell Rock the following morning. The thought of her like a kettle kept warm at the back of the stove.
They sat together on the water side of the Spell Rock, to be out of view of women hanging their washing or looking out their windows at the harbour. Mercedes between his legs and leaning back into him.
“Do you still miss them?”
He shrugged against the weight of her. “Sometimes. Yes.”
“Where do you feel it?”
He laughed into her hair. “Don’t be talking so much bloody foolishness.”
She reached around, touched an index finger to his shoulder. “There?”
“No.”
She touched his earlobe. His nose, his hip, the fly of his trousers.
“No,” he said.
She laid her hand flat against his breastbone.
“There.”
He held her eye to avoid looking down, afraid he would see her hand buried up to the wrist in his chest.
The first night he slept in his aunt Lilly’s house she’d stopped in the door of her little room to look back at him on the daybed. “There will come a day,” she said, “when everything that’s happened to you will seem purposeful.” The light of the lamp threw dark shadows on her face and she looked vaguely sinister. “If you keep your heart open to it,” she said, “the time will come. I promise.”
He felt himself on the verge of something that unlikely now, something that potent.
Mercedes said, “I’ll never not miss him, will I.”
He pulled her into his chest, wrapped both his arms around her.
“Don’t let go of me,” she said.
He held on to her without saying a word, which felt like promise enough.
He spent the rest of the day down on Clive’s stage and went back to Mrs. Gillard’s for his supper. Stepped out for a walk just as it was coming on to dark. He and Mercedes had kissed before she left him that morning and he let his hands drift over her, knowing she would have let him touch her anywhere he chose. And it was touching her he had in his head as he walked down behind Mercedes’ house to sit beyond the riddle fence. She wasn’t expecting him and he had no plan other than hoping to steal a word with her if she made a trip to the outhouse before bed, to bury his face in her neck, to let his hands wander.
He’d distrusted that urge their first morning at the Spell Rock but it felt pure and proper now, almost chaste. It was her father gone missing and wanting to offer solace that altered his sense of it. Recognizing the girl’s grief in himself made him believe in his ability to love her, made the physical attraction between them seem true.
Someone came through the back kitchen door and walked toward him. Outline of a long skirt, a woman’s gait. Too tall to be Agnes, so it was Mercedes or her mother stepping up into the outhouse, closing the door. When the woman came outside again he stood up and crossed himself. “Mercedes,” he whispered.
The woman froze.