“It’s Wish.”
She spun on him, furious with relief. “Don’t you
ever
,” Mercedes said.
“I was only wanting to say goodnight.”
She rushed back to the outhouse, clapped the door shut, and he didn’t know what to make of that until he heard her peeing again from the fright. He jumped the riddle fence and was waiting when she came out the door. They walked awkwardly to the side-wall holding each other and kissing and he leaned her against the rough lumber. He could feel her heart against his chest. He lifted the skirt of her dress in handfuls until he was underneath it, fingers touching bare skin, the fine bristle of her pubic hair, and it came into his mind then to kneel in front of her.
It was something he’d only heard spoken of drunkenly or as a lewd joke and it was always meant to demean a man’s reputation, as if only a fool would put himself in such a position. And it was true he felt ridiculous, dropping to his knees, holding her skirt high with his hands. It was an act of surrender, a kind of penance he thought the girl was owed. She had her fingers in his hair and was trying to pull his head away, but he kissed her there. Her cunt. Salt and the tang of urine and folds of skin as smooth as. He didn’t know as smooth as what. He felt foolish and willing, and he saw it as a measure of proof, the willingness. He slid both hands under the cheeks of her ass and kissed her until she came down on top of him. Lay pinned beneath her in the long grass, so out of breath with certainty that he was dizzy.
He woke with the taste of her still in his mouth. Skipped his tea and breakfast, wanting to hold on to it as long as he could. Walked down to the Spell Rock and waited, but no fishing boats went out of the Cove and Mercedes didn’t come to meet him.
A bully boat he didn’t recognize came into the harbour mid-morning and tied up at Earle’s wharf. Two men stepped off and they reached back to help a third up onto the dock. The minister over from Fogo for the funeral.
Willard Slade’s youngest boy was buried in the graveyard in the meadow above the church that afternoon. Wish didn’t attend the service but he stood outside the fence as the mourners filed into the cemetery and watched while they prayed over the coffin. The minister read from the 23rd Psalm,
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me
. He thought briefly how Mercedes found something of that same comfort in his company, though he couldn’t avoid thinking of his cock in connection with
rod
and
staff
, and he wound up having to push the entire thing from his mind to keep the stupid grin from his face.
The coffin was let down into the earth, four men with ropes dropping the boy hand over hand, just the opposite of how he’d been salvaged from the ocean. After the interment the entire community passed by Wish again. Willard and Mrs. Slade and their other children in various states of undone. Mercedes wiping her face with a handkerchief and holding his gaze until she was past him, Agnes staring hard too, as if there was a riddle to him she might be able to figure just by looking. Their mother stone faced on Hardy’s arm, both of them refusing to acknowledge Wish.
Clive was one of the last out the gate and he stopped to talk, his eyes bloodshot and his mouth working hard. “Miserable old racket,” he said.
The minister came by them and nodded hello to Clive. He had one walleye that seemed directed toward Wish as he passed and its peculiarly wandering attention struck the younger man as malevolent.
Clive said, “How are things with the little miss?”
Wish was watching after the minister as he walked toward the church. “Things are fine with the little miss. The old miss, now. That’s a different quintal of fish.”
Clive smiled. “She’s as hard as a box of nails, that one. Hardly heard a civil word out of her mouth in all the years she’s been in the Cove.”
“She’s not from here?”
“Aubrey hooked up with her down on the Labrador one summer. She was working with a crew in Domino Run, cooking and cleaning, helping to make the fish. Not more than fifteen then and some says already in the family way when she got here with Aubrey. Not what you’d expect of the old bugger. But you know what men are like.”
Wish studied his feet to hide the flush coming into his face.
“Don’t even know for sure where she’s from,” Clive went on. “Somewhere in Conception Bay, I hear. She left all her people behind to come to the Cove with Aubrey and never shed a tear as far as I can tell. Although you can’t ever say what goes on behind closed doors.”
“She don’t think much of me or mine.”
“Being from the opposite side of the house, you mean?”
“She said as much.”
They both looked back at the gravesite, where two men were spading dirt into the hole. “Bloody old foolishness in the end. Don’t matter to that one who’s throwing the dirt down into his face, now, does it?”
Wish wasn’t sure that argument held where marriage was concerned. But he didn’t want to insult Clive by disagreeing.
“A mother won’t think much of any man sniffing around the daughter, I guarantee you that. It’s in her nature. But you be civil and keep the girl happy. Helen will settle.”
“I got me doubts about that.”
Clive grinned at him. “Would be no sport to it at all if you had no doubts.”
He was waiting for her at the Spell Rock three days later when he saw Clive’s trap skiff coming around the headland on its way back into the Cove. The engine’s raw racket travelling over open water and echoing back off the hills above the Cove. They’d been out barely long enough to get to their cod traps and she was riding too high in the water to have a load of fish aboard. Clive was sitting in tight against the tiller and both his sons were sitting aft as well, as close to the stern-board as they could get. Wish headed for the wharf at a run. Mercedes was on her way to meet him when they crossed paths.
“Where’s Agnes?”
“I made her wait behind on the path.”
“Take Agnes and go on up to the house,” he said. “Send your mother down.”
“What is it?”
He went down to the stage where Clive’s trap skiff was drifting in, the engine cut. As the boat came abreast he saw the bundle of canvas in the bow. Wish took the lines thrown to him from the skiff and fastened her to the pilings. Clive facing away from him, gathering up gloves and a jacket and his hat, then looking up to Wish standing above him on the wharf.
“What a fucking mess we got there,” he said.
Wish and Clive and the two boys carted the body up to the church hall, each holding a corner of the canvas shroud. David holding the bottom lip of his full, feminine mouth between his teeth. Clive told Wish the body had drifted into the leader of their cod trap and they’d found it there as soon as they tried to haul up the door.
By the time they reached the church, Mercedes and her mother were coming down the path toward them. Clive said, “Get him inside before they gets here.”
They shuffled awkwardly through the door and set their load in the middle of the floor, for some reason wanting to keep it as far from the walls as possible. They threw open the windows and then hurried back outside, away from the ballooning stench. Clive caught Helen and wrapped his arms around her to keep her from going inside.
“Now, Helen,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to see in there.”
“Is it Aubrey?” She was looking over one of Clive’s shoulders and then the other, as if trying to glimpse someone in a crowd. “Is it him?”
“Couldn’t be anyone else, Helen.”
“He was wearing his yellow garnsey and red vamps. He couldn’t ever keep his feet warm, you know how he was, Clive, wore his vamps winter and summer.”
“There weren’t a stitch left on him, maid,” he whispered. “He been out there a week. And hauled around something fierce it looks like.”
“He had his initials engraved,” she said. “On the inside of his wedding band.”
Clive shook his head. “The left arm,” he said. “The whole thing.”
“Blue eyes?”
Wish stood holding Mercedes a little off to the side. Sea lice would have taken the eyes, he knew. But neither he nor Clive had the heart to say it. Mercedes had buried her face in his chest and was wailing.
Clive said, “Get the child back up to the house, Wish. For the love of Christ Jesus.”
He sat Mercedes in her rocker and stood back as Agnes knelt in front of her and the two sisters held each other and wept. Then he did the only thing he could think to do. He put the kettle on the stove. He took down mugs and sugar and hunted about for tea. When he found everything he needed he stood by the door, waiting for the water to boil. The old woman started calling out from the parlour and he went down the hall to look in on her. She was lying in the exact same posture as before, shouting through the wall. He took her hand as he sat on the edge of her bed.
“I thought you might be Aubrey home,” she said.
“No, missus.” He had no idea how much she knew of what was happening.
“Is he dead and gone, then?”
“I’m sorry to say he is.”
“And gone to hell,” the old woman said. “To judge by the company he kept.” She looked toward the window and said, “What
is
that noise?”
There wasn’t a sound that he could hear. “What noise?”
She glared at him, as if an unpleasant odour was emanating from his body. “Where do you belong to?”
“St. John’s.”
“You’re not from town. Where’s home?”
“I should go see to the kettle.”
She held his hand fiercely. “You’re a
Catholic.”
He had to stop himself from laughing, caught off guard by the force of her disgust, by the bizarre fluke of being named for what he was. She was trying to sit up and he thought she’d go for his throat if she could find the strength. He shushed her back down into the bed. “Don’t be so foolish.
Catholic,”
he said. “Sure a Catholic wouldn’t be caught dead in this house, would they? They’d be struck down before they got in the door.”
She was out of breath and had lost her train of thought altogether, the fury evaporating as quickly as it had overtaken her, and she reached up to pat his face. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “You’re Jenny Reid’s boy, are you?”
“Can I bring you a cup of tea?”
By the time he came back into the kitchen, Helen had returned with several other women. She was at the windows, closing the curtains.
He said, “I’m sorry for your troubles, Mrs. Parsons.”
For a moment it seemed she might begin crying but she reined herself in.
“The missus was calling,” he said, “so I looked in on her.”
“I hope she was civil to you.”
As civil as I’ve come to expect of the women of the house
, he thought. But he only said, “She wanted a cup of tea.” And then he added, “If there’s anything I can do.”
She carried on at the blinds, ignoring him.
Mercedes was still in the rocker, her face red and bloated with crying. He said, “I’ll be on my way, I guess.”
She looked to her mother. “Can’t he stay awhile?”
“We got to get the house ready for your father, Sade.”
Wish said, “I’ll see you again before long.”
And Helen stepped away from the door to let him pass.
For the second time in less than a week, he stripped to the waist in front of the washbasin and scrubbed himself. He put on his one good shirt and cleaned his shoes.
He fell in with a sparse column of people heading to Aubrey’s wake, picking their way along the path in the dark. Inside the house he was offered a glass of syrup by Agnes and then he walked down the hallway to the parlour. The coffin stood where the old woman had been lying that afternoon. He guessed she was carried body and bed to one of the upstairs rooms where she’d stay until she died. Near the covered window Helen sat beside Mercedes, holding her hand in a fashion that suggested restraint more than comfort. And Hardy stood over them both, glaring across the room at Wish. Offering his sympathies would only make things worse, he knew, so he went to the casket instead.
Clive was sitting near the head of the coffin. “Looks pretty bleak for you across the room,” he said.
“I hope you got that flask with you.”
Clive set down his glass of syrup and got to his feet. As they walked out into the hallway there was a muffled commotion in the parlour. Wish went back to the door, saw a crowd of bodies in the centre of the room, all bending forward as if they were looking down a well.
Willard Slade put his hands up to Wish’s shoulders and backed him into the hall. “She’s only after having a little fainting spell.”
“Sadie?”
“She’s all right, Wish. You best go on out of it.”
Clive grabbed him by the sleeve and hauled him toward the kitchen and out into the night.
“You sure she’s all right in there, Clive?”
“She’s overcome is all, leave her be awhile.”
They walked into the enclosure of outbuildings away from the house and passed the flask back and forth between them. Clive told him how they’d strewn the body with lime and then sewed up the canvas it had been carried in. “They’ll have to bury him tomorrow, I allow. He’s fair to gone already. Can’t be waiting to get the minister back across from Fogo.”
“I got no chance with her mother,” Wish said. “Her mind is set.”
Clive said, “Back in my father’s day, there was a young one from over in Tilting came courting a girl on the other side of the islands. A few of the locals got together and lay for him down on the landwash and they put the boots to him. Father said the fellow had one eyeball hanging out on his cheek when they were done with him. Blood everywhere.”
“Jesus, Clive.”
“All I’m saying is, Wish, it’s not like it was.”
Wish let out an angry little laugh. He could feel the liquor seeping into his head and he took another mouthful. He thought of the picture in the back kitchen of King Billy crossing the Boyne. That army still on the move. He said, “Would you take us as far as Fogo? If she was willing?”
Clive reached for the bottle. “Maybe you’ve had enough for tonight.”
Wish hauled it free of his hand and glared at him.
“I’m going inside,” Clive said. “You take that flask and go on back to Mrs. Gillard’s.”