Sylvanus Now (22 page)

“They’re not fit,” she now said with a shiver, no longer faking the illness in her stomach. “Nobody should be allowed to use them awful things.”

“Unless it’s the only way left to them,” said Eva, and again Adelaide felt undone. She was spared a response by the door swinging open and Melita poking her dimpled face inside. But there were no smiles deepening those dimples this morning, rather a pinched look, as though she was being unnecessarily chafed.

“Should’ve known where you were!” she exclaimed to Eva, glancing sideways at Adelaide. “You let your fire go out. Elsie is over there now, lighting it. We can start hoeing your garden after dinner, if you wants.”

“No, never mind. Work on your own gardens,” said Eva. “I’ll start day after tomorrow. Addie’s working with me.”

Melita raised an eyebrow. “Like I said, we can start right after dinner.”

“Carry on, carry on,” said Eva, shooing Melita back out the door, “and tell Manny to look at my fence when he comes home,” she called after her. “The snow got it buckled in.”

Suze tutted as Eva shut the door. “My, she was looking some cross at you, wasn’t she, Addie? What’s you doing, robbing her eggs?”

“They always looks at me like that,” said Adelaide. “Hope they don’t think you’re here because I’m asking you to, Eva.”

“None of my business what others are thinking,” said Eva, fastening a bandana around her head and slipping her arms into her coat. “I’ll see you later this evening. I got a marrow bone broiling for supper. And goodbye to you, little man,” she said fondly to the youngster who was occupying himself by the stove, constructing tiers of squares out of splits. “Why don’t you bring him by for some molasses candy?” she invited Suze.

“Perhaps I will, maid. Addie, you should go take a nap. You looks tired.” Lumbering to her feet, Suze gathered up Benji’s coat and boots. “Mommy’s little man, that’s who he is,” she called out to her youngster. “Loves playing by himself, don’t you, my love? Come on, then, we goes to Grammy Evie’s and gets some molasses candy. Good for your asthma, that is. No, stay where you are,” she said as Adelaide made to get up. “We knows our way out. Come on, Benji, hurry on now. Put them splits back.”

“No, that’s fine, that’s fine,” said Adelaide, getting up anyway. “I can put them back, looks nice seeing that a youngster was playing here. No, don’t worry about that,” she hastily added as Suze’s face melted into a pained look of sympathy. “For gawd’s sake, I didn’t mean nothing.”

Finally the women were out the door, the youngster straggling behind. A quick check to ensure they truly were crossing over the footbridge, and Adelaide donned her coat and scarf and boots. Downing the last swig of her tea, she let herself out the door, another backwards check to ensure nobody was watching, and she darted across the meadow, all muddied and swamped, and started up the path leading to the head.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ROCKING HER MAN

T
HAT NIGHT
, after Eva and Suze’s visit, she took Sylvanus’s hand after he crept into bed beside her, and laid it on her breast, pressing it tighter as he tried to pull it away.

“I want to,” she said as he whispered, “Shh, no, it’s all right, Addie, it’s all right.”

Curiously, feeling the warmth of his hand on her breast, she did want him, wanted him now, and the closer she moved into the warmth of him, the smell of him, the more urgent her need became to feel his body around hers, warming her, cocooning her. And once he had himself knotted around her and was easing himself inside her, she lay back, motionless, as might’ve the bride of Adam before her first breath of life, for lo, she must’ve been dead! For now, with his penetration, it felt as though life was being stirred once more within her. Nothing of passion. She’d long since blown out the lamp in the hallway, obliterating any flickering shadows that might’ve prompted his tongue over her skin in their old, exciting manner. But life—to feel life again, even if it were his. And greedily she raised her haunches for more, wanting passion, too, now. Why not? Why not passion? And she strove harder and harder to reach it, hating his coming release, hating his shrivelling and dying within her as had so much else.

Later, as they lay back together, bodies quivering, hearts pounding, she thought with a grim satisfaction, There, now, Eva, your son’s been rocked. Yet, despite her momentary resentment about everyone coming to her, no matter her never asking nor wanting nothing from no one, there had been, in that moment of lovemaking, the stirring of something when she had thought all was dead.

His quiet drew her toward him, and she saw the tension with which he held his face from her and onto the whitish hue of the moonlit window.

“Looks nice outside,” she said.

“It’s cold,” he replied tersely.

“Not in here, though.”

“Feels like nothing in here.”

She was silent. “Then you knows what nothing feels like,” she said, and rolled onto her side of the bed.

“Is that what you feels like, Addie, like nothing?”

She never replied.

“Suppose you got pregnant just then?”

“Suppose I did?”

She felt him move closer. “I won’t put you through this agin,” he half whispered.

“You? What makes you think it’s
you
putting me through this?” she asked, twisting just enough to see the shape of him over her shoulder. “Perhaps there’s more than you and me living in this house, Syllie. Perhaps there’s a God that reigns here, and it’s through them dead babies that He’s talking. You ever think of that?”

He half rose in astonishment. “You think you’re being punished—that’s why our babies are dying? Christ Almighty, Addie, you’ve never done nothing to be punished for!”

“A thought’s as good as a deed!”

“Then we’d all be hanged if we were tried for our thoughts. That’s crazy. That’s plain crazy thinking, Addie— No, you listen to me,” he said urgently as she dropped her head back on her pillow. “You acts like it’s just you having and losing them babies. Well, what’s He punishing me for, if it’s you He wants? You never thinks that, do you—that they’re my babies, too? That I might be sick at heart, too?”

She bunched the blankets over her ears, not wanting his words, wanting only the oblivion of darkness, despite the flicker of life she’d just now felt, despite the tinge of hope such life must bring, and oh, sweet Jesus, she needed hope, she needed so very much to feel hope right now. But he was tugging too hard, wanting her back, saying things.

“Addie, I touched them, I touched them babies. One looked like Janie—your sister Janie—her cheek was cold.”

“Oh, gawd, Syllie!” She dug deeper into her pillow, her hands over her ears as he carried on saying things— things she’d not hear, not hear. “Stop it! You stop it right now!” she cried out, rising in a frenzy. “Don’t say no more! No more!”

“No more about what—no more about what?” he persisted as she dove back into her pillow. “The babies or me? What is it you don’t like talking about? Goddamnit, Addie, I’ve a right to know how you thinks about every-thing—about me!”

“It’s not about you,” she cried. “Go away, Syllie. It’s enough I rocked you already tonight.”

“Rocked me! What do you mean, rocked me? You mean—Jesus Christ, Addie, what kind of way is that to put it? And it was you wanting to—I never wanted to.”

“Ooh!” and she clung onto darkness, hearing nothing more of his words, only those still floating through her mind,
Like Janie, like Janie, one looked like Janie—

Forgive!
At some point during the night she awoke, the word resounding through her being.
Forgive!
Forgive what, she near exclaimed out loud, struggling to stay awake, forgive whom? She struggled for a while with the thought, then faded once again into darkness.

PART FIVE

Sylvanus

SPRING TO FALL 1960

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

STAYED IN HABIT

M
ISERABLY, SYLVANUS WATCHED
her coil away from him, bury herself within her blankets. He lay back with a groan, yearning to lie closer, to wrap himself around her tight little body. But never had she felt so distant. A great loneliness consumed him, more terrible than those wretched days after first seeing her through the window of Eb Rice’s partition, and he had paced the beaches and cliffs, pining after her. At least then there had been the anticipation of her. How he longed for her quick tongue, the startling blue of her eyes, the woman who once quivered beneath the passion of his touch. At some point during the night, he felt her stir, awaken, and he shifted a mite closer to feel something of her warmth through the blankets. But he might as well have slept with the folk on the other side of the brook—Tantalus, dying of thirst with the sweetness of a cool spring water forever welling, but never cresting his parched lips.

Unwillingly, his mind trailed back to that wretched morning in the kitchen, weeks ago, when she had leaned against him for comfort, and he had started kissing her, wanting her, and she had pushed him away, staring upon him with loathing. Even now, in the darkness of his room, his face reddened as painfully as it had that morning he fled from his house. Shutting himself up in the dusky light of his stage, he had sat on an overturned puncheon, snatched a tangled pile of fishing line from the summer past and started pulling it apart. Jabbing his finger with a hook, he cursed, then prayed for a thousand more jabs so’s to stave off the sight of himself trailing behind her like a love-starved dog, moping about her stoop like a scorned youngster, pining upon his pillow like the rejected lover, and then his boring down upon her in the kitchen like that—and he had jabbed himself again hard, almost deliberately, obliterating with pain the image of him, him, always him, battering himself against that door she’d barricaded herself behind.

He smothered his face in his pillow, cringing from the rawness of the memory, only to be besieged by those others: his moping, his begging, his pining repeatedly, one image spinning behind the other like the quickening ripples in a whirlpool dragging him farther and farther down till he was gulping for breath. Pathetic. He was pathetic in his need. Yet the following morning he was as helpless as a hungering babe at staying his eyes from her as she moved about the kitchen, washing her face, making tea.

She pitied him. He saw that as she kept glancing at him, wringing her hands as she trailed out of the house behind him, watching after him as he crossed over the footbridge on his way to his stage. Once inside, he peered through the doorway, watching as she trudged lifelessly back to the house, and he started feeling the same pity for her as he felt for himself. A fear colder than yesterday’s cinders gripped him, for in leading her out of bondage, he had imprisoned himself, and he bent beneath the weight of it, sometimes forgetting the things he held in his hands as he stood jigging his lines, leaning into the wind. Job’s comfort, he thought, glancing at the empty belly of his boat despite half an hour’s fishing. Normally he’d have thirty to forty pounds jigged and split by now. Things were wrong, horribly wrong this past year. He’d lied to Adelaide about the hundred quintals he had on hold. The fish had stopped running two weeks earlier last fall, leaving his puncheons bereft of the winter’s holdings. And he’d lied about his taking an extra week before starting fishing this spring, too. He’d already been a few mornings, and there were no fish running. None! And other inshore fishermen up and down the bay were reporting the same. No fish.

“She’s good midshore,” Am had said on the wharf in Ragged Rock a few mornings back. “All the liners are making good time, getting lots of fish.” He shook his head. “Hate to think I’m taking it away from ye fellows on shore, though.”

“Nay,” Sylvanus was quick to reply. “No harm with liners. Shooting trawl lines is not going to hurt the fishery. It’s them offshore killers, that’s the ones,” he added disdainfully. “The trawlers scraping the bottom, getting the mother-fish and all them not yet spawned.”

“Yes, b’ye. Agrees with you there,” said Ambrose.

“And the bloody factory freezers,” Sylvanus went on. “Jeezes, multiplying like caplin, aren’t they? Soon be more of them out there than trawlers.”

He looked toward the plant, all a charm on the inside with the clanging and banging of machinery, and noisier still on the outside with the half-dozen liners thudding alongside, shouts from the men unloading their fish, and the gulls swooping and screaming. Overtime. Everybody was working overtime this evening, he was told. Making more money. Now, that was a different thought—working overtime. He worked till his fish was done, sometimes long after dark in the fall of the year. He never thought of it as overtime.
Overtime
. He sniffed. What the hell is that, overtime? And so’s not to hurt Am’s feelings, he bade him good-evening and motored off from shore, staring back skeptically at the dozen or more fishermen, all running and hopping about within an arm’s reach of the other, singing and bawling out, making a game out of sneaking off for smokes, and one old-timer finding it funny how he fished every day but hadn’t touched a fish in weeks. An industry. They had been made into an industry: these men who had once worked their own lives were now paid to work
overtime
on another’s. “When the hell did they work their own lives, then?” Sylvanus muttered scornfully.

Turning his back on the lot of them, he had motored homewards. Back last fall, when the fish had stopped running two weeks early, a score of inshore fishermen in Hampden and Jackson’s Arm, and other fishermen up and down the bays, who, like him, were seeing the signs of overfishing, had started up meetings. They were too distant for Sylvanus to travel to, but he paid attention to the news and the few radio programs allowing the fishermen their voice. And he signed the petitions and letters that were circulating, calling for governments to do something, to bloody do something about the trawlers and factory freezers.

Thus far, they’d done nothing. Coddled them, was all. Travelling to a few of the bays, harping the same ole song, “Now, my boys, a bit soon to be calling it overfishing. We all knows there’s different lines of fish running out there, different fish swimming the offshore waters, different fish swimming the midshore waters, and different fish again swimming the inshore waters. Yes, we’re almost sure of it—and yes, undoubtedly, there’s them that swim the gauntlet, but not enough to make the difference to your catch. It’s the cold water this year that’s ruining the inshore fishery; you must know the cod don’t like cold waters. Give her time to warm up, lads, and she’ll be ashore, if not this week, then next. Fishery’s always been up and down, up and down; but she’ll be back, she always comes back, and worry you not about the foreigners. We’re working with them—not easy to police, you know, the North Atlantic waters; but we’re talking to them. Every day we’re talking to them and their governments, figuring what’s best for all, and in the meantime we’re building you more plants and boats to ensure you get your fair share of the catch. She’ll be fine, lads, and the fish will be running soon enough. Watch and see if they don’t, watch and see.”