Sylvanus Now (10 page)

He smiled, and when it was clear she would say no more, he took her arm, pulling her along, pointing out the heather fringing the meadow with its brilliant yellow blooms. And then there were the blackcurrant bushes, and a thick patch of mushrooms, which he loved fried in butter. “And look, here’s some more heather along the brook—Mother’s favourite, heather is, and blooming a week early this year. Must be a good summer coming on— everything’s early, even the leaves. Mostly middle of June before summer takes hold. See along here—like little stars, them blooms are, strewn everywhere. You like them? So does Mother,” he said as she nodded, and she shrank from his eagerness, wondering, as he touched her hand, urging her farther along the brook, what he would do when he ran out of things to intrigue her, for then he’d have no more reason to keep her.

He must’ve foreseen that. As if by prior knowing, the moment he’d finished showing her the heather creeping around the rocks near the brook, an old woman, as stooped as the junipers, crept out on her step, her black brows the final stand against encroaching greyness, her face weathered by time.

The old woman said nothing. A polite nod, then she withdrew back inside her house.

“That’s it, dinner’s ready,” said he. “Perhaps you can take your walk after, all right?”

She hesitated, not sure of the older woman’s welcome, but already he was holding her arm, leading her to where the brook widened the farthest and was most shallow, coaxing her along with more offers of tea and pie after dinner. “Two pies—she always makes two: one rhubarb, one blackcurrant. She bottled gallons of blackcurrants last fall. You likes blackcurrant, don’t you? Mother’s favourite, and dare say she can make a pie, too, brother. Nobody makes pies like Mother. You can take one home, if you like, to your brothers and sisters—” and as though hearing nothing of her protests, he swung her into his arms and sloshed through the brook.

He came every Sunday after that, using the meadow as his lure. And quick he was to displace himself, referring her eyes instead to a chocolate-winged butterfly perched atop a clump of thistle, or a spattering of water-doctors skittering across an isolated pool of water near the bottom of the falls. But always he was near, curling his fingers around her shoulders as he bade her sit down on the white, speckled rock, encircling her wrist before rolling a handful of blackcurrants onto her palm, then standing back, watching, as she cupped them into her mouth. Once, when she stood eavesdropping on a couple of finches quarrelling on a limb, he rustled amongst some alders and came back with a handful of last year’s Labrador tea berries, which he rolled onto her palm. Standing behind her, he cradled the back of her hand onto his palm and held it aloft, his other hand resting warmly on her waist till one, then two of the finches lit upon her fingers, pecking at the berries.

It was always like that—him touching her, drawing her nearer, then standing back, his hands dug into the pockets of his finely pressed suit as he watched her follow his direction. Even when she mocked him, tossing him haughty looks, he never seemed to notice, simply becoming more and more bent upon her comfort, upon searching out and intriguing her with little gifts, upon studying her, sometimes touching her, no matter his mother looking on. And those times Adelaide had been enticed to tea, he would fuss so over the scarcely used china cups, his fingers too thick for the little handles, so’s he’d end up holding the cup in his hand, nonchalantly (so he believed) blowing on his tea to cool it and spare his burning flesh.

“I
SAY ADDIE’S GOING
to marry that fisherman,” said Suze jokingly.

Despite the drizzly cold morning, Adelaide was huddling outside the new plant, a scant distance from a fistful of smokers who were sucking back the last of their butts before the buzzer sounded for work. Her mother stood chatting amongst them, and upon hearing Suze’s words, tossed a heedful look at her daughter. Breathing deeply of the cool, moist air, preparing her lungs for the closed hours inside, Adelaide hunched deeper into her collar, pretending she hadn’t heard. She was used to Suze’s forever trying to draw her into the crowd. And given that she, Adelaide, was Suze’s baby’s godmother (never mind Adelaide had seen the youngster but a half dozen times in the past three or four months since the christening), and given that Cooney Arm was where Suze’s husband, Ambrose, was from, and where his mother still lived, and where both Suze and Ambrose spent most of their spare time, knowing as much about the goings on in Cooney Arm as they did in Ragged Rock, it was only fitting for Suze to make such bold statements.

“The hard case, he is, that Sylvanus,” she went on as Adelaide appeared not to mind, “but he’s some good-looking, hey, Addie?”

“Good-looking all he wants,” said Gert, ex-boss woman now turned quality-control inspector, “a gander like all the rest is what he is—when he’s not cock-adoodling in that nice suit. Perhaps that’s what you’re marrying, is it, Addie, the suit? I say you’ll get some fright when he shimmies out of them nice pressed pants. You learns quick enough, then, how good-looking they are after they puts a bun in your oven. Dare say you got that one figured out, Suze,” she added, raking her eyes over Suze’s hefty bust, swollen with milk. “Bet you wishes now he never left his mother’s wing.”

“Left her! Right,” sniffed Suze. “Just as well he brought the old thing with him. When she’s not here, we got to be in Cooney Arm, looking after her. Spends as much time there as we do here. But I still likes him,” she ended with a flourish, “and that old thing ought to be dead soon.”

“Her lungs filling up agin, are they?” asked Florry sympathetically.

“Wish it was,” said Suze. “Might soon drown her if it was. Mostly spite what’s choking her, and that’s more apt to kill the rest of us before it kills she. But I’ll say this for her—she’s some help with Benji. Sitting up with him all last night, she was.”

“Poor thing. He haven’t outgrow’d that old croup, yet?” asked another.

“Nay. It’s not croup he got. I always said it was asthma. Could hear him wheezing right through the house last night. Poor little love. And not a sound—only the smiles.”

“Little dear.”

“Good thing you got the old woman, then.”

“Yes, least you’re getting some sleep—hard enough as it is, getting up in the mornings.”

“Yes, I gets some sleep now I knows,” said Suze, “with that little angel sitting up on his pillow all night long, his chest heaving with him trying to get his breath. Sits in the kitchen and cries, I do, till Am comes out and drives me to bed. And then there’s the baby to feed. And Am’s as weak-hearted as anything. One thing I can say about your man, Addie—kind as anything, he is. Took Benji with him, sir, when he come by last week to help Am fix his boat. He’ll be a good one with youngsters when ye haves some—”

Adelaide groaned, relieved as the buzzer sounded loud and harsh above her head, giving her reason to shove in through the heavy wooden doors and away from Suze. Irritably, she hauled off her coat, ignoring her mother, who was shuffling in behind her.

“Ah, you lets everything get to you,” Florry scolded, hauling off her coat as well and, along with Adelaide, exchanging it for one of the white frocks hanging on the dozens of nails lining the sparsely painted walls of the dressing room. “You knows she’s only joking, sure. Cripes, as if anybody could picture you having babies!”

“Oh, Suze gets on my nerves,” said Adelaide crossly.

“Ah, everything gets on your nerves, Addie.”

“How can it not when all they all talks about is babies, babies, having a man and having babies,” Adelaide flared. “Jeezes, I wouldn’t open me mouth if that’s all was coming out.”

“Haughty! By gawd, you’re haughty,” said Florry. “Whatever’s wrong with you, you been like it since the day you was born. Don’t go huffing at me,” she warned, stomping her foot in a spurt of anger as Adelaide, her frock buttoned, turned to go.

Adelaide turned back, her irritation vanquished by this childlike mother, staring up at her, all defiant and bristling. “I’m not huffing,” she said defensively. “Never mind.” She sighed, walking away. “As if I huffs more than the rest of the brood.”

“Brood!”
mimicked Florry and, in a rare show of quickness, leaped ahead of Adelaide, staring her down. “How come you says that now—
brood
. You’re not a
brood
to me, you’re Addie. And Janie. And I likes Addie so much I got it in mind to call this one coming Addie, as well.”

Adelaide’s eyes swung in surprise to her mother’s waist. Three months? Six? Nine? Who could tell with that short, stubby body, and the belly permanently rounded?

“Perhaps it’s wrong to keep having ye when we’ve no clear means,” whispered Florry, her face reddening beneath her daughter’s scrutiny. “But I’m only doing what feels right at the time. And even when I looks back, I’ve no clear mind where it might be wrong. It’s only when ye starts growing out of diapers that I’d like to give ye away.”

Adelaide raised her hands in exasperation. “Why do you keep having us, then?”

“Because I loves babies, that’s why. And nobody else in the
brood
”—she stopped for emphasis—“is all the time mad like you.”

“I’m not all the time mad.”

“Yes, you are all the time mad, and you always means it, too—whatever it is you’re all the time mad at. But that’s for you to figure, not me. I wish you would marry, I do. See if it might change you a bit.”

Change! From what into what? thought Adelaide dismally as the second buzzer rang, sending fifty or sixty workers jostling around her, assailing her nostrils with the stringent smell of tobacco and black tea as coats and caps got swapped for aprons and hairnets, and dozens of bodies pushed her along, fighting for a dip in the disinfectant water filling the trough before heading onto the floor. Marching past nine work stations laid out side by side before a long conveyor belt, Adelaide stood at the tenth and last, all thoughts about
change
evaporating as she fixed her hairnet in place, tied on the stiffly bibbed rubber apron that hung to her knees, pulled her filleting knife out of her rubber boot, and hauled a pan of fillets off the conveyor belt rumbling along in front of her. Slapping an ice-cold fish from the pan onto the piece of acrylic that marked her workplace, she slit the V-bone from the fillet, trimmed the tail, and hacked apart the flesh too soft or bruised, then flicked each section into a pan designated for different grading. One of the belts rumbling out of the holding room at the back of the plant started a low moaning that quickly accelerated into a shrill screech, sending her clamping her hands over her ears as the sound shivered through her teeth.

“Shut it down, shut it down!’ hollered somebody. ‘Sweet Jesus, shut it down!” The demonic sound subsided, and Adelaide let go her breath with relief. Four weeks! Four weeks she’d been standing here, and never had her nerves been more jagged. Hell is what this plant was, bloody hell with its ten stations to each side of the conveyer belt, and another belt rumbling behind her with another twenty stations, making for forty stations and forty women, arguing, cackling, and shrieking over the belts rattling along its pans of fish from the filleters to the skinners to the trimmers (of which she was one), and then on to the packers where it was wrapped in five-, ten-, twenty-pound boxes and nailed shut and jammed into freezers, steel plates clanging, doors slamming, steam hissing from the web of pipes snaking barely a foot over the tallest head. And despite its being the loudest, the station closest to the skinners and the holding door was the one she chose to work at, sparing herself the added aggravation of having to shout back at Suze or Gert or her mother or a dozen others all working around her, bellowing to each other over the ruckus of the machinery.

Most mornings she worked three hours steady, up to break time, without a word, without looking up. Yet, hellish as it was, she rested assured she’d never have to scrape another maggoty fish, for not even a mosquito ventured into this low, oblong cell of harsh overhead lights, of walls shaking from the clanging, vibrating generators, of air putrid with gut and gurry, and fishermen out-shouting each other over the clanging of the motors and winches as they tied up at the wharf in their longliners and skiffs and motorboats and punts, unloading their thousands of pounds of fish into the holding station.

Yet, despite the growing complaints of those working around her for more air, longer tea breaks, and a place to sit and have lunch, she liked it just fine to stand straight-backed, not hunched; to have her world reduced to a piece of acrylic with a light beneath it and five pans in an arc around it; to have her daily wardrobe consist of an oversized rubber apron dragging past her knees and a hairnet that rendered her and the rest of them—men and women alike—to caricatures of old women. What need to expend five minutes of caressing the yellowy petals of a buttercup, of gazing through the honeyed haze of the sun, of feeling last evening’s raindrops slide coolly down one’s cheek—of what use was anything when most of daylight’s hours were spent standing imbecilic amongst the maniac roar of machinery, hacking apart flesh already eating itself?

Marry the fisherman in the fancy suit? Humph. Not as if she didn’t think of it. Divine were those visions of grass and finches and clean, running waters. And she gorged herself upon reliving the sweetness of lazing beside the falls, her cheeks cooling to its mist, and the grass cushioning her bed, and the breeze lifting and fondling her hair with fern-scented combs. But to conjure the meadow without Sylvanus Now was like conjuring the brook without the falls, for dark was his figure upon that mantle of grass and wildflowers, and his presence, no matter how much he held himself behind her, was as commandeering as the foaming white waters plunging down the hillside.

Loneliness is what he evoked in her, a great, starving loneliness. She had always banished those around her, scorning their foolish games, seeking aloneness. Now he had violated that aloneness, pried apart the four corners of her world, inviting her to step outside, filling her with other needs and trading his meadow for them.