The Wreckage (10 page)

Wish tipped the bottle up to his mouth but never took his eyes from the man.

He emptied the flask before he made his way back to the parlour, reeling off the narrow walls of the hallway. Feeling drunker by the second. Helen and Hardy were still sitting across the room but there was no sign of Mercedes. Everyone else staring at their shoes to avoid catching his eye.
Fuck them
, he thought. Mrs. Gillard sitting him alone at the table for his supper and the minister over from Fogo with his walleyed stare and the crazy old woman lying upstairs in her own piss and fuck King Billy crossing the Boyne out in the back kitchen. Every soul in the Cove stood against them. And Wish was struck by a moment of drunken clarity, seeing that truth made so plain there in the parlour. A line had been drawn that the girl wouldn’t be hard enough to cross once it came clear to her. And he had no right to ask her to cross it.

He stepped into the room, fishing the rosary from his pocket. He knelt in front of the coffin and began praying aloud. “Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

He could hear the rustle of people standing and leaving the room behind him and he raised his voice to be heard over the noise. Expecting any moment to be grabbed by the hair and thrown out the door. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” He went on praying until he was sure the room was empty and then he stood and put the rosary away in his pocket. Disappointed not to have provoked a decent fight, a shoving match, the tiniest bit of cursing.
Fucking Protestants
, he thought.

“You’re a devout one, Aloysious,” Helen said.

He spun around to see her sitting where she’d been before he knelt down. He bowed slightly in her direction, not sure where he’d picked up such a formal gesture but feeling it was right all the same. The proper mixture of deference and defiance. He thought for a moment she might understand what he was up to. But she only watched him, and he bowed again, drunkenly, before he went down the hallway. The people he’d driven from the parlour were packed into the back kitchen. Not even Clive was willing to look Wish in the eye as he pushed by to get through the door.

He was lying in his bed at Mrs. Gillard’s an hour later, a fierce pulse in his temples. He heard the door to the back kitchen open and footsteps track through the house, up the stairs to his door. “Mr. Furey.”

He didn’t answer, and Mrs. Gillard hammered at the door impatiently. “I knows you’re in there.”

He sat up on the side of his bed. “Come in,” he said.

She swung the door open and stood just inside his room. She was carrying a lamp and the light held below her face made dark holes of her eyes.

“Evening, Mrs. Gillard.”

“I give you a room in my house,” she said. “I fed you from my table.”

“At very reasonable rates.”

Mrs. Gillard straightened her shoulders. “I’ll be staying at the Slades’ tonight rather than sleep under the same roof as you. You feel free to make yourself some breakfast. I expect you to be gone by the time I gets back tomorrow.”

She closed the door before he could ask what time that might be and he sat on the bed with his hands in his lap, listening to her go back down over the stairs.

He was woken by the sound of the back kitchen door opening again and he lay still listening to the footsteps coming up the stairs. He had no idea how long he’d been asleep and he went to the window, peeking past the curtain to see the barest glimmer of first light on the horizon. He called to Mrs. Gillard before she knocked on his door.

“You can’t expect a man to have his breakfast eat by this time in the morning,” he said. He hadn’t undressed at all, falling asleep with his boots up on the bed. He hauled at his shirt and pants, trying to straighten his clothes. “I’ll be gone in an hour.”

The door opened without a knock and a figure much larger than Mrs. Gillard stood there.

“You got a few minutes to pack your things,” Hardy said.

Wish was struck by the bulk of him. Not as tall as himself but broad across the shoulders and thick through.

“I got the boat ready to go,” Hardy went on. “I’ll take you across to Fogo and you can catch a coaster into St. John’s from there.”

Wish scratched at his head and looked around himself, then back at Hardy. “You’ll miss your father’s burial,” he said. He didn’t understand exactly what Hardy was doing there.

Hardy took a step into the room. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small handful of bills and coins. “There’s enough here to get you to St. John’s and keep you a little while.”

Wish looked from the money to Hardy’s face. “You maggoty prick.”

“You don’t touch it till I cut you loose in Fogo.”

Wish stood still. So furious he couldn’t get his breath. That they could think a lousy little bribe would be enough to send him off.

“Are you going to pack up your materials,” Hardy said, “or do you want me to do it for you?”

Leaving was his plan but he wasn’t about to let her mother think she’d forced him into it. He said, “I think I’ll have myself a bite of breakfast.”

He stepped past Hardy and started down to the kitchen. Hardy hesitated in the room behind him but came after Wish before he’d gotten halfway down the stairs, leaning out over the railing to grab the collar of his shirt.

“Fuck off,” Wish shouted. He reached up and hauled Hardy by the arm, tipping him full over the rail on top of himself. And the two of them fell arse over kettle onto the landing below.

He chugged into Fogo in Aubrey’s trap skiff before noon and tied up at the stage farthest from the main wharf. Two boys were fishing for conners off the end and he asked them if they knew the Cove on Little Fogo Island and how to get there. The smaller of the two said yes, everyone knew the Cove. Wish took one of the bills from his pocket and held it in the air for them to see. “Would you be able to take this skiff to the Cove today?”

“We can leave right now if you want,” the smaller boy said.

“When’s the next coaster heading into St. John’s?”

They both pointed into the main wharf. “Earle’s got one about loaded and ready to go.”

Wish nodded. The Railway boats that Clive travelled on stopped in at every harbour and cove on the coast but Earle’s would sail straight into St. John’s. He put the dollar bill in the boy’s hand.

“Whose skiff is it?”

“Parsons’,” Wish said. “There’s a girl,” he said. “Mercedes. Sadie. Sadie Parsons.”

The boys both looked at him, waiting.

“Never mind,” he said. “Go on. Plenty of fuel to get you there.”

Earle’s coaster made St. John’s at five the following morning. He’d bunked down in steerage for a while but couldn’t sleep, his head travelling circles and he couldn’t take a decent breath. He came out on the deck finally and stood at the rail the rest of the trip, staring blindly at the water. The headlands of the Avalon as they neared St. John’s black against the night sky, like the dark height of that tidal wave coming after him years ago in Lord’s Cove, he could almost feel the tunnelling roar of it coming in over open water behind them. Glancing back as they ran, a long line of black on the horizon, travelling hard.

Wish stood at the rail of the coaster as they sailed toward the Narrows of St. John’s with that same panic churning in him. A voice in his head shouting
Run. Run. Run
.

MERCEDES

1.

T
HERE HAD BEEN A TREMOR
earlier that evening, Wish told her. Just before supper. The house quivering so that all the dishes shimmied off the table and the Sacred Heart pitched from the wall. His father said, “Signs and wonders before the end of time.” His mother picked up the Sacred Heart and put it back in its place.

After they ate, he and his father went down to the stage to see what damage had been done there. It was coming on to dark and his father opened the stage-house doors onto the water for the last of the sunlight and lit up two torches. They found a mess of nets and gear that had dropped out of the rafters and set about clearing it away. And then the water went out of the harbour, the same as if someone had taken the plug from a sink. Wet rock and thick beds of seaweed. Skiffs and a two-masted schooner sitting on the harbour floor, still on their lines. Quiet then, every creature on God’s earth gone silent.

His father turned to Wish and said, Run. Get your mother, he said, and run. He kept shouting that: Run, run, run. He’d hauled his boat up behind the stage weeks before and put her under a load of boughs for the winter and he started clearing those off, trying to get her back over on her keel, wanting to haul her far enough up the shore to save her. But he saw it was useless and gave it up, following after Wish toward the house. They met his mother on her way down to find them and looked back to the shoreline. Water sluicing into the empty harbour ahead of a dark wall bearing down on them. They lit out for the high ground among the trees, trying to outpace the roar smashing up over the wharves and houses and gardens.

She woke early to the sound of someone talking aloud in the room next to her own. Three nights in a row now she’d dreamt of the tidal wave Wish described to her—something about the blind surge of it had taken hold of her—and each morning she woke with the same amorphous sense of dread. She pushed it aside, trying to identify the sound coming through the bedroom wall.

Her grandmother.

The old woman seemed rarely to sleep at night, only drifted somewhere further off the shore of consciousness and sense. Her soliloquies indecipherable and relentless, like the burble of a rattling brook. When the old woman was in her bed downstairs it was a low murmur that was almost soothing. But through the wall beside her now it was persistent as a toothache.

It took another moment to piece together why the sound was coming from her parents’ bedroom rather than downstairs. She remembered getting up from her chair when Wish left the room with Clive and all the blood draining to her feet. A smell of ammonia in her nostrils before the blackness swamped her. And now she was in bed, her grandmother mewling away in her parents’ room.

Her father flashed to her mind, boxed up in the parlour, and she covered her mouth with her hand to keep from crying out. A hint of lime and putrefaction crawling in under the door. She pressed her face into her pillow to escape the smell and to muffle the sound of her crying, trying not to wake Agnes beside her. It seemed obscene to have forgotten, even those few moments after waking, that the man was dead and about to be set in the ground.

She hadn’t seen Wish arrive for the wake the evening before, though she knew he’d entered the room by the pressure of her mother’s hand ratcheting hold of her. Like she was about to dangle her daughter over a cliff edge. Mercedes looked up to see him across the room by the casket, having a quiet word with Clive. Hardy stood straighter beside her like some guard dog, edging sideways to block her view, and she had to fight an urge to give him a good smack in the crotch.

Mercedes had stumbled upon Hardy early on the morning after young Willard Slade’s funeral. She almost fell over him in his chair as she came out the bedroom door on her way to the outhouse, his arms folded across his chest, his head crooked into the wall. She thought it was her father asleep there at first and in the few seconds it took to recognize Hardy her heart hammered oddly in her chest, as if it was operating in an empty cavity. She shook Hardy by the shoulder and called his name.

He came to his feet with a start, grabbed her by the arms. “Where are you going?” he said.

“To the backyard. To the outhouse. Where do you think I’m going this time of the night?”

He settled back, trying to overcome the startle she’d given him.

“I thought you were Father for a second.”

“Didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“What in God’s name are you doing asleep in the hall?”

“Nothing,” he said. He sat back in the chair and looked up at her. “Don’t you be too long out there.”

It started to come clear to her then. “What are you doing here, Hardy?”

Her mother came to the door of her room in her nightdress. “Hush up Sadie. Leave your brother alone.”

“This is your doing, is it?”

“Don’t wake your sister.”

“How long are you planning on having him stand guard on the door?”

“As long as it takes.”

Mercedes felt the tears welling up and she slapped Hardy’s shoulder. “He was sound asleep out here,” she shouted. “I had to shake him awake. A lot of good he is to you.”

“Shut up, Sadie,” Hardy said.

“I could be over to Wish’s place now with half my clothes off. And he’d still be sound asleep there with his mouth hung open.”

Her mother said, “Go back to your room, Mercedes.”

“I’m going to the outhouse.”

“You got a chamber pot to take care of your business.”

Hardy stood to block the way downstairs.

“Are you going to empt it for me, Hardy?”

He didn’t answer. She looked back and forth from her mother to Hardy, then went into her room and slammed the door. Squatted over the pot, her legs shaking with rage. Agnes up on her elbows to see what the racket was about. Mercedes carried the honey pot out into the hall, said, “This belongs to you, does it?” and dropped it in Hardy’s lap.

Hardy threw his hands up to his shoulders as if she’d set a feral cat on him. Mercedes went back into her room and slammed the door again.

Next morning at the Spell Rock she told Wish about her
confinement
.

“It’s a wonder they let you out alone at all if you’re as wild as that.”

“Agnes is supposed to be with me. I talked her into waiting back off the path a ways. Promised I wouldn’t be gone long enough to get into trouble.”

She could tell he was surprised by her wilfulness, and pleased by it, by her willingness to sneak him into her life.

“I thought Hardy was my father for a second,” she said. “I saw him in that chair outside the door once.”

“Your father?”

“The night he went missing.” She looked at him shyly. “Nan was calling for water downstairs and I got up to look in on her. And Father was sitting in the chair outside the door.”

“Did you tell your mother about it?”

“I haven’t mentioned it to a soul, till now. He was soaking wet, Wish. Every stitch of clothes he had on was dripping water.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I tried to talk to him but he was gone after a second.”

He surprised her by smiling then, although there was nothing dismissive in it. He had a strangely attractive face, large soft eyes, a long lower jaw and the chin just off centre. There was something vaguely equine about it, about the way his head moved as he listened, sudden sideways motions, an exaggerated lifting of the chin when she said something unexpected. Mercedes was uncomfortable around horses, she distrusted their size and slow walk, the crooked limb of their cocks almost touching the ground as they grazed, their wet eyes that seemed bottomless. She couldn’t explain why the look of Wish calmed her.

She said, “That was Father’s fetch, wasn’t it? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I expect he is.”

She realized she was crying and wiped at her face with her hands, then they sat with their foreheads touching. She loved the smell of his breath, the changing layers and undertones in it. Tobacco and ginger. Sugared tea. Raisins. She adjusted her breathing to take in his exhalations as they sat there, as if there was some strength she could draw from it.

She tried to recall that smell now with her face pressed into her pillow, trying not to wake Agnes beside her, not wanting Hardy to hear her outside the door. A tremor shook through her that she couldn’t name. Grief, for certain, and wanting to touch Wish and have him touch her, anger and fear and anticipation, exhaustion, she couldn’t separate the different strands and felt them corkscrew through her as one thing. She had never felt more alive.

When Wish and Clive left the parlour during the wake, she knew they were heading outside for a smoke and a mouthful of shine. Her mother yanked her back by the arm when she stood to follow them.

“Not while your father lies there,” Helen had whispered to her. “Don’t you dare.”

She was stung by the accusation in the woman’s voice. Felt for the first time that Helen’s decision to stand between her and Wish was somehow a dismissal of Mercedes’ love for her father as well. She pulled her hand free, intending to follow Wish out the door. And that sour stench of ammonia struck her, rising up through her head before she passed out on the floor.

It felt like a failure of nerve, a kind of cowardice to have fainted away when so much was at stake. She got up from the bed quietly and dressed. A line was drawn and she’d been too fearful to cross it. But she promised herself she wouldn’t waver after her father was buried.

When she opened her bedroom door Hardy was not in the chair. She stood and looked at it awhile, picturing her father there in his soaking clothes, his hair plastered flat against his head. He had nodded at her and half smiled. She had spoken his name aloud, and the sound of her voice in the empty hall had spooked her. She’d glanced over her shoulder toward her parents’ bedroom and he was gone.

She made her way downstairs and found her mother alone in the parlour, sitting at the head of her father’s casket. She was dressed in the same mourning clothes she’d been wearing the evening before and seemed not to have slept at all.

“Where’s the prison guard this morning?”

“Stoke up the fire, would you, Sadie? I’m dying for a cup of tea.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Her mother looked into her lap. She said, “You know it would never work, Mercedes. That boy here in the Cove.”

“It wouldn’t break my heart to leave.”

“You’d just wind up in another cove. No different than this one.”

“It would have him,” she said.

Helen smiled. “You’re just a child, Mercedes. I won’t let you throw yourself away.”

A panic kicked up in her stomach. “Where’s Hardy?”

“The boat went out of the harbour an hour ago.”

She spun away from the woman. “You
witch,”
she said. She went to the kitchen and straight out the door. A handful of men at the wharf nodded as she hurried past. Her father’s trap skiff gone from its mooring beyond the stagehead.

She burst into the back kitchen at Mrs. Gillard’s to find Hardy at the table, his head propped on one hand. He didn’t look up when Mercedes came in.

“What did you do to him?” she shouted.

Mrs. Gillard was standing over against the stove. “Sadie,” she whispered. She nodded at Hardy. “He was lying on the floor dead to the world when I come in. Couldn’t get a rise out of him before I put the salts to his nose.”

“What did you do to him, Hardy?”

“Sadie?” he said. It seemed to cause him pain to move even that much and he grimaced against it. There was blood on his mouth.

“That laddio of yours tried to kill Hardy,” Mrs. Gillard said.

Mercedes ignored her and leaned in close to Hardy at the table. “The boat is gone from the mooring.”

He turned his body to face her more directly. “What boat?”

“The trap skiff. She’s not on her mooring.”

Mrs. Gillard said, “He stole your father’s boat?”

“Hardy?”

Her brother’s face was blank and his eyes wandered about in an unfocused way. “He must have decided to go out after a few fish,” he said.

Mercedes thought he was making fun of her. She was so furious she felt light-headed. A rush of ammonia in her nostrils and she grabbed Hardy’s shoulder to keep from falling. “You did this,” she shouted.

Mrs. Gillard said, “He pushed your brother down those stairs, Sadie. And he stole your father’s boat and run off.”

She was already at the door.

“He tried to kill your brother,” Mrs. Gillard insisted.

“I only wish,” she said.

They had to take out the parlour window to carry the coffin from the house. A horse-drawn cart was waiting on the path, the piebald mare stamping her feet as the casket was settled aboard. Mercedes kept a little apart from her mother and Hardy, who walked arm-in-arm toward the church, the entire community in procession behind them. They’d delayed the funeral until Hardy was well enough to keep his feet and even now Helen appeared to be holding him upright against a persistent list in his step.

Mercedes had been watching from her bedroom window when Hardy was helped home late that morning and saw her mother run out to meet him. She greeted him with a stream of questions that Mercedes couldn’t make out, though the urgency and surprise in them was obvious. Hardy mostly shook his head and looked confused about what his own name might be.