The Wreckage (2 page)

1940

WISH

1.

H
E LOVED HIS TIME ALONE
in the church and fishermen’s halls before afternoon shows. Even on the hottest mornings of a summer the halls were shadowy, cool, which made them seem private and sheltered, like the gardens of the merchant houses on Circular Road in St. John’s. He’d carried the generator up from the harbour last and was sweating with the weight by the time he set it down. He stood the door open for the extra light and the breeze. Walked off two dozen paces from the Victor projector and set the movie screen down, raising the white sheet of it like a trap skiff sail. The surface catching what little sunlight came in the few windows and the open door. His shoulder brushed across the screen as he turned, the crushed-glass sparkle coming off in a powder on his shirt.

By this time word would have reached every household on Little Fogo Island that the shows were in on the coastal boat, whole families loading into punts and trap skiffs and bully boats to make way for the hall. By mid-afternoon fifty souls would be crammed into the room, sitting on the chairs or stools or wooden crates they’d carted with them. The heat of so many bodies so close together rising to the rafters, the air’s sweetness adulterated by the smell of kelp and sweat.

For now, though, he was alone with the machinery and the shadowy light. He threaded the celluloid from the front reel directly to the rear to revise it, letting the movie play backwards through his thumb and forefinger, checking for nicks or cuts from the last screening. He had his back to the open door, humming tunelessly to accompany the drone of the gas generator outside, and it took him a while to notice the change in the light, the slight darkening of the shadows in the hall. To look finally toward the figure in the doorway. He had no idea how long she’d been watching. The sun directly behind her made it impossible to distinguish any of the girl’s features, though her dress and the length of her hair were clearly outlined. He knew right away who it was, and though he’d arrived in the Cove hoping to lay eyes on her, he felt foolish to have been spied on.

“You’re too early,” he said. He almost shouted at her. “Come back after you haves your dinner.”

“Sure I was only having a look.”

“You’re too early,” he said again.

The girl and her mother had come across to Fogo with another family to see the shows the previous fall, his first trip out of St. John’s with Hiram. She and Wish hadn’t spoken a word together, though they caught one another’s attention. Hiram had leaned in close to him during the movie. “You’re going to wear out your eyes looking at that young one,” he said.

Wish walked across the hall to shut the door, still embarrassed and feeling peculiarly exposed. She stepped back from the doorsill into the light, and he could see she was more than just a girl now, all of sixteen at least. She wore her light brown hair long, unlike most every other woman on the shore, and tied it back in a ponytail. There was a suggestion of extravagance in the uncommon length of it, a hint of vanity. That her hair might be fine enough to be worth the trouble. A flower-print dress with a belt knotted loosely at the waist so he could make out the curve of her hips and her breasts under the material. Nearly a woman already.

He expected the girl to keep backing away as he approached but she only stood there, watching him come. Hands clasped demurely behind her back and everything else in her manner like a dare.

“What’s the show this afternoon?”

“The 39 Steps.”

“What’s it about?”

“Don’t want to ruin it for you now, do I?”

“I only wants a hint.”

“It’s about a Canadian gets in trouble with spies in England.”

She drew her head back skeptically. “A Canadian?”

“He’s from Montreal,” Wish said and she nodded, as if that fact was almost enough to sway her disbelief.

Her eyes were set so deeply the colour was hidden from a distance and he was surprised now by the emerald shade of them. Green as sea-glass. She was wearing yellow bobby socks and leather patent shoes with a buckle. She turned the toe of one foot over on the ground, the opposite hip jutting out slightly, and he started at the motion.

“No law against looking,” she said when he glanced away. She stepped toward him and brushed the powdery residue from his shoulder where he’d grazed the screen, then stepped back. She smiled up at him in exactly the way he remembered. As brazen as a cat.

It made him feel childish and uncertain of himself to have her touch him that way. He raised his hand to close the door and she said, “Could I watch what you’re at in there?”

“No,” he said and he nudged the door shut on her.

Her voice then, raised so he could hear it inside. “Don’t be such a sook,” she said.

She came late to the show with her mother and father and a young man who was older than her by several years.
Brother
, Wish assumed, and that assumption confirmed the feeling he’d tried to ignore all afternoon—watching, then not watching for her through the door where Hiram sat at a table with a moneybox open in front of him. He’d become increasingly agitated as the room filled with bodies and chairs and no sight of her among them. Men in long garnsey sweaters and salt-and-pepper hats left their seats to stand at arm’s length from the projector, pointing at the reels and the lens and the mechanical innards and asking him endless questions about how the thing worked. Invariably one of them turned his attention to Wish and to his unfamiliar accent. “Now where do you belong to?” he was asked.

Renews, he told them. On the Southern Shore of the Avalon, outside St. John’s.

“Catholics down that way, is it?”

Yes, he said. Good deal of Catholics on the Southern Shore.

“We got a few up this way,” one man admitted. “Most of them across in Tilting.”

He hadn’t been to Tilting, he told them. Hiram used to stop there but he’d heard talk of an army base, some kind of warning squadron, about to set up in Sandy Cove. Which would mean a different movie screened every week at the cookhouse. Which meant his audience over there was about to dry up. Hiram decided to come to Little Fogo Island this year, far enough to guarantee a decent audience even after the base went in. They didn’t stop on that side of Fogo at all this trip, Wish admitted.

“Missed your chance at confession then,” the same man said, smiling and nodding at the projector. Clive, his name was.

Wish allowed he wasn’t that great a sinner to be worried about missing the opportunity.

No one spoke to him of the war or asked what he thought of the latest news or whether he might end up overseas himself, although it was obvious he was old enough to think about signing up. Was it hard to operate the machine, they wanted to know. How did he end up knocking around with Hiram Keeping? How many times could he show a film before it wore out? Did he fish at all, or was Hiram paying enough he could make a go of the shows alone? Did Hiram know he was a mick before he was hired on?

They shook their heads at the improbability of the match.

It was Wish’s second time along the northeast coast and he’d gotten used to the interrogation. Most days he paid no attention to it, had his answers by rote and could carry on the conversation without thinking. But he was too riled up this afternoon to settle and was about to head outside to escape their curiosity when the girl stepped up into the doorway again.

Her father leaned over the table and counted out a handful of coins into Hiram’s palm, and the four of them carted their chairs into the hall, setting up in the only space still unclaimed, near the projector at the back of the room. She didn’t look in his direction or acknowledge him in any way, and he could feel the pull of that deliberate inattention, as if someone had hooked a cod-jigger to his sternum and let the lead weight of it hang there. The man who paid their way in might be her grandfather now that Wish had a closer look at him, a stringy wattle of flesh beneath the chin, the grizzle of unshaven whisker mostly grey. The mother had the girl’s green eyes and slight build. Her face had an anxious, almost angry quality to it, as if she was newly blind and uncertain of each step ahead. The man touched her shoulder occasionally, encouraging her, cajoling her forward, and she shot him a look back that he simply smiled at. An old conversation between them, Wish could see. A dailiness to it that said marriage. April and September.

Wish glanced across the room to Hiram, who was watching him and rubbing a knuckle along both sides of his moustache in turn. He was trying to suppress a smile and Wish looked away from him.
Randy old fucker
, he thought. When Wish had described her approximate age and her height and hair and green eyes earlier in the afternoon Hiram had looked to the ceiling, puffing his cheeks full of air, considering.

“Sixteen, you think is it?”

“Give or take. She was over to Fogo last year, came across with her mother.”

Hiram said, “You’re not going to be looking for trouble here tonight, are you?” He was already three parts drunk, his face red with the alcohol. He’d left the set-up and running of the projector to Wish and had been off all afternoon drinking swish or shine or dandelion beer, swapping gossip with the locals in a twine loft down on the landwash.

“I’m just asking,” Wish told him.

“Sadie Parsons you saw. Lives up the south side a ways, past Earle’s wharf.”

Wish repeated her name under his breath.

Hiram shook his head. “You know what they’ll do to a Catholic boy sniffing around the women out here,” he said. He was smiling, wavering slightly on his feet. An air of anticipation about him. “Don’t say I haven’t warned you.”

The girl sat straight in her chair between her mother and brother—he was certain it was a brother. He sat with his legs crossed and hands folded in his lap exactly as the mother did beside him, and there was something of the mother’s hard way about the young man’s face. He and Sadie ignored one another completely and casually, out of long habit. Which was different altogether than how he sensed her ignoring him.

The Victor had an automatic trip mechanism when the film began to tear or jam, shutting down to keep the celluloid from snapping or being set alight by the heat of the bulb. The trip stopped
The 39 Steps
half a dozen times and the audience shouted and whistled through each interruption. The longer it took him to clear the jam and rethread the film safely through the projector, the uglier the mood of the crowd. All of them standing or shifting to turn to him, yelling abuse. But Sadie didn’t move her head to the right or left through the length and breadth of the afternoon. And she left the hall without so much as a glance in his direction when it was done.

They were staying at Mrs. Gillard’s, a widow who took in the occasional visitor to the Cove. After their supper Hiram sat for a while in the parlour with his pipe. Wish stood at a small shelf of books over the fireplace mantel, taking them down one at a time to leaf through the pages, waiting on Hiram to set things in motion. The largest of the set was covered in green baize with laminated gold lettering.
A History of Art
. Colourless reproductions mostly, paintings by men with names he couldn’t pronounce.

Hiram came across the room and looked over Wish’s shoulder. “This is what people had before there were movies,” he said. “Poor buggers.” He stooped to knock pipe ash into the fireplace. He said, “How about a little stroll?”

The evening was uncharacteristically still, the harbour almost glass. They walked along a path rutted by carts near Earle’s wharf, nodding and saying hello to the few men they passed. They started up the hill on the harbour’s south side where only a handful of houses stood, their heads bowed under busy clouds of blackflies. The cart path narrowed to a walking trail, and Wish slipped behind the older man. Cows and sheep grazed on the hillside, and Hiram stopped occasionally to cluck stupidly at the animals. The man was a townie, born and raised in St. John’s, which to Wish’s way of thinking was a kind of ignorance in and of itself.

When they came to the house farthest out on the hill, Hiram stood a minute looking at it. The front of the two-story building was whitewashed and trimmed with green, though the sides were covered in red ochre, like every other house in the harbour. There was a false door nailed to the clapboard between the downstairs windows. Its only function was aesthetic, set there simply to make the front of the house look complete. From where they stood, the place looked empty. They walked along the side of the house to the back kitchen and stepped inside the porch, scraped their boots on the porch rug as Hiram called into the room.

A man’s voice shouted, “Come in, come in.”

The rafters were so low that both men had to duck their heads. It was still light outside but already dark enough in the small room to mask details. Wish could see four of them sitting about the kitchen—the father splayed out on the daybed, the mother at the table. Sadie was beside the stove, where a fire offered the only light through the grate. She was sitting in a rocking chair fashioned from an old flour barrel. A girl younger than Sadie sat on a mat directly in front of the stove. And then a figure Wish hadn’t seen stepped away from the doorway leading deeper into the house. The young man from the afternoon. Wish could smell a heavy tide of cologne rising off him.