“Oh, and is that what you’re thinking, that I’ll soon be getting a girl and burning me boat and buying a car? Well, sir—” and he broke off laughing.
His mother had turned her back, polishing and repolishing the already polished pickle jar.
He sobered, leaning sideways to see her face. “Christ, Mother, you knows I’m not going to move off somewhere—” He lapsed as a dab of water wetted the corner of her eye. Sweet jeezes, she wasn’t bawling, was she? “Mother, now, Mother, in the name of jeezes, you’re not bawling, are you?”
“Mind your mouth!” she ordered, flapping the dishrag at him as he tried turning her toward him.
“For gawd’s sake,” and he grabbed her by the waist. “You needs some fresh air, you do. Blow the nonsense out of your skull. Come on,” and ignoring her shrieks of protest, he swung her onto his shoulder like a sack of spuds, striding with her out of the house, across the path, and in through his stage. “Now, get down or be flung down,” he threatened, lodging her onto the stagehead, steering her toward his boat, bobbing alongside.
“I haven’t got time for this, foolish thing,” she cried, and started shrieking again as he lifted her off her feet, lodging her down into the boat, rocking it madly as he jumped in beside her. “Syllie, in the name of God, I got bread in the oven, and the goats are wanting—”
“Hey, buddy!” Sylvanus called out to one of Manny’s youngsters dawdling along shore, “go tell your mother to go turn Mother’s bread! Marry a Trapp,” he muttered, pushing her toward the seat in the stern. “Marry a goddamn Trapp!” Shaking his head, he hunched before the engine house, heaving hard on the flywheel. “Yes, now, that’s just what I’m about, leaving Cooney Arm,” and he tutted over her rebukes as he putted them through the neck, haranguing about her selfishness, that she’d rather have her boy shift in with the sly-looking Trapps over some nice family in Ragged Rock. “Now, there’s nonsense for you, Mother, there’s bloody nonsense,” he chided. Settling himself beside her, he cradled her resisting shoulders, pooh-poohing any and all else that she said. Finally, she settled back, enjoying with him the sun full on their faces, the wind waffling their hair, and the
clip-clop-clop
of the boat hitting on the waves curling toward them off the open seas.
By the time they returned home both mother and son were lulled into quiet. Which lasted about ten minutes after they were ashore. Then Sylvanus was grumbling again about the cramped quarters of his mother’s house, its peeling paint and sagging floors. Prowling outside, he started figuring how many quintals of fish it would take to lay a foundation and build his own house—and nearer the shoreline, it would have to be, he figured, sizing up the twenty, thirty feet or more his mother’s house held back on land, for wouldn’t the woman of his dreams like sitting on her stoop in the evenings, watching the tide washing closer, lifting the seaweed off the rocks and floating it before her like goldenrod, and the starfish fluttering amongst its blooms like butterflies? Her garden, he mused. The sea would be her garden, planting cockleshells and urchins upon her windowsill, weaving her pathways through the eelgrass, baring baby crabs and tommycod playing hide-and-seek amongst the rocks, lulling her with its waves washing up on shore.
Within the week he was feverish with a need to see her, to touch her. Damned were his nights as he thrashed his bed. And damned were his days as he tried to keep rhythm with his jiggers and the rocking of his boat. He paced the shoreline. He threw rocks at the ocean. He scaled the cliffs rising from the neck, trampling over nests and burrows of kittiwake and carey chicks. And he started cursing the head, the coves, and bights that separated him from her.
When, one Sunday morning two weeks after he’d first seen her, he found himself getting out of his boat in Ragged Rock and walking along the path leading to her door, he froze in his madness. What would she think of him—the thick mat of hair covering his body since before he was fourteen, his surly, black brows, his ability to read nothing but the clouds, his bowlegged walk?
He faltered, his knees buckling to his lowliness. Yet it was a thing that had to be done. Doffing his cap, he pulled back his shoulders, grateful for the extra scouring of his armpits with his mother’s scrubbing soap, and buttoning his top button to cover the hair curling out of his chest, he tensed his legs straighter at the knees and forced his feet along the rest of the path, raising his hand to rap on her door.
PART TWO
Adelaide
SPRING 1949 TO SUMMER 1953
CHAPTER THREE
DESTRUCTING A DREAM
H
ER NAME WAS ADELAIDE
and hers was the curse of the eldest, for from the first that she could remember she was her mother’s servant: bathing, diapering, and feeding the babies, and scrubbing, sweeping, and picking up after the toddlers trailing behind her. She hated them, hated their fighting, bawling ways, hated their grubby little hands forever snatching, picking, and scratching, and she hated her mother, too—how she was growing shorter and fatter with each youngster born, and how she hovered and tottered amongst their squabbling, never knowing where to lay a restraining hand till, she, Adelaide, leaped into the chaos, pinching, swatting, scolding till there was thrice the uproar and thrice the fighting. And it was upon Adelaide, then, that fault was assigned, and a new ruckus started as Florry floundered amongst her youngest, warning off this eldest with the cutting blue eyes and lacerating tongue. “
“You always blames everything on me—everything,” Adelaide was quick to yell, “and them brats gets away with everything.”
“Ah, you’re good for nothing,” cried Florry forever and a time, “always mouthing and pouting over a bit of work. You’d think, by gawd, you was worked to death— and mind you leaves them young ones alone; they’re not yours to knock around. Brazen as the black Irish, is what you are, and mind you takes that cross look off your face because I swear to gawd, Addie, you gets the look of the devil every time you’re told to do something.”
“No, I don’t!”
“Yes, you do—and always hove off in a corner, sleeping and dreaming—”
“I’m not sleeping and dreaming! I’m studying, is what I’m doing. Studying!”
“Studying! How you can study anything up to your knees in dirt is beyond me. Wait, wait, empty the ashpan before you goes,” she cried out one morning as Adelaide was rushing around in a flurry, trying to get herself and Ivy and Janie, a good five and six years younger than herself, out the door.
“But I’ll get my clothes dirty,” wailed Adelaide.
“You’ll get my hand if you don’t,” warned Florry, waddling to the stove, a baby grappled to her tit, and hauling out the ashpan, toppling over with ashes. “Here, name of gawd, Addie, don’t go mouthing now—not much I can do with the baby wanting feeding and the others wanting their oats cooked. Hurry on, take the pan, else I tells your father.”
“Tells your father, tells your father,”
mocked Adelaide, snatching the oblong pan by its wire handle and bolting for the door.
Her mother was fast on her heels. “You’re spilling the ashes, you young bugger.” But Adelaide was slamming the door, carefully holding the pan away from her skirt, her skinny, stockinged knees knocking against each other as she scrabbled carefully across the weed-choked yard, shutting out her mother now rapping at the window, bawling out warnings about telling her father.
“Tell him all you wants!” Adelaide screamed over her shoulder. And sticking out her chin, she flounced along her way, screwing up her mouth at the thought of her father and his ruddy-red face and ruddy-red neck and sickly white body each time he come home from the schooners and stood stripped from the waist up, scrubbing himself at the washstand.
“Tell your father, tell your father!”
Christ, as if he’d do anything—too wimpy to kick a cat, he was, and she wished to gawd he’d never come home again, crowding up the already crowded kitchen with his big fat gut and whiny, sickly ways as he
whined
at the youngsters and
whined
at her mother and
whined
at arse-up governments and fish-killers and markets. Christ, was there ever a thing he didn’t
whine
about?
Ouff!
A cloud of ashes blew into her face and she jerked her head sideways, nicking her knee against the tinny edge of the pan. “Damn,” she muttered, brushing a smudge off her stocking and stepping more carefully onto the beach. Her lip curled, twisting her tiny, pretty face into a caricature of a cross old woman as she looked about the kelp-cluttered shoreline, looking for a clear path to the water. She hated the water, hated its stink of brine and rot and jellyfish, and hated how all night long it shifted and moaned like some old crone hagged in sleep. And worse, she hated the briny smell of salt fish assailing her from the nearby flakes.
The school bell rang. “I’m going to be late again,” she wailed and dumped out the ashpan where she stood, racing away from the smoldering heap, back across the yard, and in through the door. Ignoring her mother’s shouts and the baby’s screams and the oats burning on the stove, she snatched her books off the plate-piled sink and bolted out the door and down the road toward the schoolhouse and salvation. For it was there her work was tallied, and her excellence in Latin, calligraphy, and reading raised her to the front of the class and above those others sitting and torturing over every simple little test.
Miss Proudy-Pants, she was mocked by the girls for always knowing the answers and sitting up front, tight to the teacher’s desk. Miss Stuck-Up, she was hailed by the boys for scurrying past them with her nose pinched as they stood near their fathers’ stages, slimed to their elbows in fish guts, cutting out tongues and cheeks.
She cared nothing of what she was called, only of being alone and sneaking into the church. This was where she loved to be—the church. Especially on weekdays when there was nobody about. She’d creep up front then, blessing herself and sitting on the front pew, laying her books beside her. Always she sat in this one spot, revelling in the quiet hush that befell her, for it was here that she dreamed her dreams of travelling over the sea someday to be a missionary and feed starving children. Only there wouldn’t be dirty, rotten floors and dishes to scrub, she vowed, or overflowing slop-pails and ashpans to empty. And nor would the youngsters be sour and grubby like her own clan, for they’d be grateful for the hand that fed them and as sweet-smelling as the little baby Jesus who lay in sweet hay at the church altar and was all wrapped in clean cloth, and pretty and pink as he gazed up at his mother and father who were tall and slender and dressed in clean, coloured robes and smiling gently. And perhaps she’d live in a place like this, she’d think, admiring the clean, polished floors of the church and the shiny, lacquered handrail before her, and perhaps, please God, she’d have her very own room, someday, with a door. That could lock.
“Oh, Lord,” she’d pray into the hushed silence that always permeated the house of God, even when it was filled with Sunday parishioners, “make me a missionary, make me a missionary.” And she’d fasten her eyes onto that holiest of figures, sculpted from wood and painted in the most loveliest, deepest of blues (the colour of her eyes, she once proudly thought), and bless herself with the sign of the cross. Then she’d sit back quietly on her pew, her eyes now lowered, for the church was the one true place in this ratty outport, a shrine of stained-glass beauty and elegantly robed followers, and where the purity of the air cleansed her of baby piss and puke.
And, too, as the years passed by and she grew older, she found that in such a house as the Lord’s there was an understanding of her dislike of her younger sisters and brothers, for hadn’t Saint Augustine, in that precious book she’d been presented with during her confirmation, said that the only reason babies were innocent was from lack of strength, not lack of will? That if they could, they’d strike and hurt anyone who wouldn’t pander to their whims? That even amongst brothers, jealousy and envy rioted within them for the mother’s breast, even though milk flowed in abundance for all?
Reason enough to feel dislike, she’d muse, when innocence was scarce, and gluttony and stinginess rampant around her. Fitting, then, that she’d rather serve strangers than her own crowd, for at least in the starving lands of the minister’s sermons, it was the failure of the earth that offered up hunger and strife, and not greed and envy.
But in this place of antiquity, where a woman’s worth was determined by the white of her sheets flapping on the line like an early-morning flag, announcing the hardworking souls inside, there was little thought for reading and writing and planning out dreams. Other than an act of leisure on a Sunday afternoon and the half hour set aside in the evenings, each moment’s study was a thing to be stolen, fitted in between the dishes and diapering, and the mopping and the sweeping.
And as Adelaide grew into those higher grades, and the youngsters kept coming and growing behind her, it became more and more difficult to get that extra time for that extra work the higher grades demanded. And even then, when she was able to worm away from her mother’s persistent singing out, and the youngsters competing over her cries, she had the neighbours to contend with. They weren’t without wagging their tongues, they weren’t, whenever they moseyed through, borrowing a bun of bread or returning a bag of blue, and caught her stuffed away in her room with her nose glued to a book whilst the table sagged with dirty dishes and the youngsters rioted in their half-nakedness and their mother sat amongst them, brandishing orders and suckling her babies.
“Lazy young thing,” she heard herself called, if not once, then twice a day, “get up, get up and make yourself useful. Only lords and Old Maid Ethel and her pigs heaves off on a weekday.” Lord, how many times was she called after Old Maid Ethel and her pigs! And how many times can you call a beaten man a dog before he starts barking back instead of talking back?