Sylvanus grinned. Hard to feel glum around Manny. He dodged toward home, sidestepping a swarm of screaming youngsters racing thither, shaking his head at wisps of his brothers’ arguing brought to him by the wind.
The instant he set foot on his stoop and his mother swung open the door, he sobered.
“Addie’s pregnant,” said Eva. “Quick, get in and close the door, she’s sick. Here, take this to her. Well, take it,” she said, shoving the towel into his hands as he stood there, gaping stupidly.
He moved woodenly toward his bedroom. Adelaide was leaning over their bed, retching into her chamber pot.
“I don’t remember Mother being sick,” she gasped as he entered. “I-I just don’t remember her ever being sick.”
“Seven youngsters, she never had time,” said Eva, bustling past him with a cup of what looked to be brandy whipped with egg. She paused, turning back to Sylvanus. “Here. Help her drink this,” she said, shoving the cup into his hands. Snatching back the towel he was holding, she passed it to Adelaide. “Syllie, are you listening?” she demanded as he simply stood there, watching his Addie pulling her hair back from her face as she continued retching.
He nodded and sat on a chair, his eyes fraught with concern as Adelaide weakly sat up and took a sip of the brandy he held awkwardly to her mouth.
“Not as though we didn’t know about babies, is it?” she said, her voice all a-tremble, yet her eyes grappling onto his as she lay back on her pillow. “So stop your worrying right now—unless you thinks I’m the princess finding her first pea. Is that what you thinks,” she asked as he stared at the paleness of her skin, the half-filled chamber pot, “that I’m going to start screeching and bawling like a youngster myself? That I’m without reason?”
“No, no,” he mumbled, clinging to the sparkling blue of her eyes, trying to shut out the damp, limp hair, her tiny shoulders. Lord, she was scarcely a wrinkle beneath the mound of blankets, and when, as if struck with a sudden rash of heat, she pulled the blankets aside, he stared at the narrowness of her shoulders, her tiny waist, her hips no more than two hand spans apart—
“Stop that!” she cried, struggling to sit up. “I’m well fitted for a dozen babies. Mother’s proof of that.”
“I promised you’d never have to.”
“Promises!” she scoffed. “Only fools make promises. You listen to me, Sylvanus Now, I already told you I’d be fine once this day come, and now it’s come. Ooh, Lord, and I would be fine, too, if my stomach ever stops heaving. Figures Mother never once puked.” She put her hand to her mouth and appeared she might throw up again; but as if by sheer will, she slid off the bed, holding her stomach as well as her mouth, calling out, “Eva! Eva, it’s bread I needs.”
He trailed behind, holding back from laying a steadying arm around her shoulders as she shuffled into the kitchen, her naked toes flitting amongst the folds of her cotton nightdress. Plenty of times during the weeks that followed he strived to hold himself back as her morning sickness persisted each and every day, sometimes well into the evenings, and she fought to stay upright, cooking a few meals and polishing her kitchen.
“Oh, bugger it, Sylvanus, I won’t be caught doing nothing. They already thinks I’m a cripple,” she argued of her in-laws and those other outport women coming to visit, as he tried to coax her back to bed.
“Oh, now, Addie, you’re not still thinking about Jake’s foolishness.”
“Jake or no, that’s how I feels with all them sitting around and me in bed—like a cripple. I told you all that before, how they makes me feel grubby, even when I got the place all cleaned up. Take a nap themselves if that’s all they got to do, flick around other people’s houses.”
“Cripes, Addie, you can’t look down on people who’re only wanting to help.”
“Help?! Help me do what—throw up? And that’s just what they does with their sitting around, chatting, looking for dirt—makes me throw up. Ooh, don’t argue with me, Sylvanus, I knows I’m not fit to listen to, it’s mostly that I’m sick, is all, and everything’s getting on my nerves, especially when there’s a bunch of women flocking at the table, hobbling and pecking like hens over the slightest little thing—” She whipped her hand to her mouth, gagging. “Ooh, see? One word about hens and all I sees is runny eggs.”
He traipsed after her, watching helplessly as she bent over her chamber pot, retching.
“Just go on out somewhere,” she cried one Sunday morning, sitting at the table, pushing away a cup of tea he was offering her.
“Some bread,” he urged. “It’ll settle your stomach.”
“Nothing settles my stomach—and get that stuff out of my sight,” she groaned, brushing aside a clutter of little brown jars and glass bottles that were sitting in the centre of the table. “No wonder I’m sick, drinking all that old stuff they brings me—ginger wine and castor oil. Turns my stomach just to smell that ginger wine. And that sweet spirits of nitre? If you never had cramps in your life, you’d have them after a cup of sweet spirits of nitre.
For the baby, for the baby.
Cripes, that’s all I hears. How am I suppose to have a healthy baby if I’m poisoned with their tonics? Shoo—is that somebody coming? Lord, make out we’re going to Ragged Rock, Syllie, and that I’m in the room getting ready.”
“It’s probably Mother.”
“Go let her in then; the stoop’s nothing but mud. Where’d the summer go, Syllie? I don’t remember nothing of the sun for ages, and it’s not your mother I minds, even though I know it’s just you she’s checking on. Don’t argue with me,” she cried at his protest. “Why else do she bring supper every evening, unless she thinks I’m not feeding you?”
“She’s making sure you’re eating.”
“How come she never brings breakfast, then, only supper when she knows you’re coming home? And how come she’s always bringing turnip when she knows I hates turnip?”
“Oh, Mother don’t think like that; she loves turnip, is all.”
“Bugger it, Sylvanus, it’s enough I got to keep a bit of porridge down and not to be smelling boiled turnip. And that Suze, ugh, I rather sit down with Old Maid Ethel and her pigs. Worse thing I ever done was stand to her youngster. Now she thinks she’s my mother—here most every day, preaching,
Move, move, you got to move, Addie, else the baby will grow onto your insides.
Mother of Christ, what do she think I does, lie in bed all day long? Certainly, that’s what they all thinks, anyway.”
“That’s a sin, Addie. She’s always trying to help and you does nothing but mock her—shh!” He rose as Suze pushed in the door.
“Not stopping,” she said, poking in her head, a rush of wind instantly drafting the kitchen, “just seeing if you’re going to church this morning. I thought I’d walk with you.”
Adelaide flashed a false smile. “Not this morning,” she said brightly. “But you’d better hurry on, else you’ll be late.”
“Phooey, I worries about being late now. Old Pastor Reeves is preaching this morning. I allows I’ll be asleep before he gets through his first prayer. How you doing, Syllie, b’ye? She got you wore off your feet yet, doing for her?”
“I does for myself,” cut in Adelaide.
Suze gave a loud laugh. “Not like me, then, when I’m carrying. I drives poor Am so hard he don’t know if he’s Angus or Agnes half the time. Well, then, you’re sure you’re not coming? Well, sir, you’re the strange one, going to church when there’s nobody there and staying home when she’s full.”
“Rather my own preaching on a Saturday than sleeping through the parson’s on a Sunday,” said Adelaide. “Well, come in or go, then,” she added. “The draft’s blowing out the fire.”
Suze’s smile faltered. “Well, I’ll see you, then,” she said, a flush tinting her cheeks. “See you, Syllie.”
Sylvanus nodded, a brief smile touching his lips as he helped close the door behind her. He turned to Adelaide, his mouth tightened with anger. “Cripes, no wonder they thinks you haughty. She was only wanting to walk to church with you. Nothing unreasonable about that, is there?”
“If my head wasn’t hung over a piss-pot, it mightn’t be. What the hell, Syllie, everybody knows I’m bloody sick, yet they still all keeps coming,” she ended up shouting, “and that’s your mother I hears coming there. Did you fill the buckets yet? How am I supposed to make her tea when you won’t fill the water buckets? Nothing unreasonable about that, is there, me wanting the water buckets filled?”
Clamping shut his mouth, he opened the door to his mother and slipped outside, carrying the empty water buckets.
S
YLVANUS WAS TO LEARN
lots about reasoning that fall as the fishing season drew to a close, pitting him more and more into the company of his ailing wife. Truth was, he no longer felt himself the creator of his own path, but more the lowly subject of another. Undoubtedly, since the first moment he saw her, he’d been tripping over terrain where laws unknown to him determined reason. But never had he felt so lost as during those first months, watching her sickness grow along with her belly, hollowing her cheeks and rendering those luminescent eyes to mere bruises upon her shrinking face.
Ordinarily, fighting his way through brush, struggling through knee-deep snow, couldn’t hold him as did standing in his boat and rolling on the wide, opened seas, listening to the ocean’s murmurings as she lapped around his boat like a coddling old mother. But after his boats were hauled up, and jiggers and puncheons stored, and close to a hundred pounds of fish soaking in brine for the winter’s eating, he eagerly sought the shelter of the woods, anything being preferable to her growing sullenness and the silence engulfing them both. Thankfully he still carried the newness of providing for his own house, and it was that—setting out his snare line, tracking caribou, and cutting firewood, along with his daily logging for the sawmills—that helped set his course through those darkening fall days, preparing for this, his second winter in his own house. For sure, it would be a lean winter indeed, if not for his prowess, he consoled himself one morning, smacking a surprised bull moose between the eyes with a bullet. After gutting, skinning, and quartering it, he cut a few meals off the carcass for himself and his mother before hanging the rest of it to freeze in the woodshed, then set off for home, feeling more calm than he had in months. And in the days to come, filling his Addie’s pots and roasters with the grainy brown meat of the boo birds and turrs (which she loved), and all those other saltwater ducks that flew low over the ocean and that he brought home by the boatload, and the plump white breasts of the partridge and grouse he shot in the back woods, and the eels he caught in the brook and pickled by the dozens, he started feeling again a sense of worth. Cripes, times he even felt himself lord of his manor again.
With great affection, then, as the winds came and the snow started piling up outside, he would stand beside Adelaide, calming her as she watched in fright the windows drifting over. He’d go outside then, trampling the snow so’s she could see the blue of the sky and the grey of the ocean, assuring her that all was fine; just a bit of snow, was all, and she could go visit Eva, her mother, or anybody else she cared to anytime she wanted.
“On that?” she once asked, staring at the wind-frenzied waters in the neck, crashing sheets of spray sometimes thirty, forty feet high against the cliffs. “Suppose somebody got sick, real sick, and needed the doctor?”
“Woods road, silly,” he replied. “The lakes are all froze; easy to cross over. Wouldn’t take more than an hour on horse sled. Or Alex’s dog team—faster than a horse. And parts of the bay will be catching over soon enough. She’ll freeze straight up to Ragged Rock—a nice sled ride.”
“I’m always scared walking on ice.”
“She freezes too thick to be dangerous. By the middle of December, it’ll take a half hour to chop down through to the water. Addy, you getting nervous? Perhaps you’d like to stay with your mother this last month.”
She turned from the window. “Nope. Nobody else leaves their house to have a baby, and I won’t either,” she replied, resuming her reign, leaving him fumbling behind as she shuffled through the days, her sickness never abating, her belly growing bigger and bigger, and her groans increasing as her hair grew limper and thinner, filling her hairbrush and coating her pillow in the mornings. It frightened him, it did, this ballooning weight upon her tiny frame, hunching her shoulders and crippling her lower back, sometimes making her hobble about the house, her hand rubbing her neck and spine. Yet other times she drifted ghost-like, the blue of her eyes lost in a shadow that foreclosed light as she wafted through it. Even her kitchen dulled, despite her attempts to keep up her daily polishing. But when finally she grew into her last weeks, and her horrible nausea appeared to be increasing, she became truly despondent, withdrawing to her bed.
“It’s the smells. Everything bloody smells,” she cried as he came home from the woods one evening, chilled from a wind-driven rain that had lashed him all day, and cuddled up next to her on the bed. “And you, too, Sylvanus, your hair’s sticky with myrrh. You never bathed, did you? Oh, don’t argue with me,” she cried weakly as he protested his hair was still damp from a soaking. “It’s curdling my stomach, the stink of it. Go wash it agin—and soap it good this time.”
“And I would if there was warm water,” he muttered, springing upright and heading back to the kitchen.
“Kettle’s on the stove—not much I can do if it won’t boil,” she called after him.
“You might fill it with water, Addie. It’d boil soon enough, then.”
“Oh, don’t argue with me, Syllie, I can hardly lift a thimble, let alone a dipper full of water. Why don’t you wear a cap to keep the myrrh off your hair—the stink of it.”
“I wears a cap every day, and myrrh don’t stink.”
“Bloody hell, it don’t stink—worse than gurry.”
“Perhaps you’d rather I sleep in the stage,” he said childishly, and checking that she wasn’t looking, he quickly ran his hand through his thatch, sniffing his fingers.
“If you’re foolish enough,” she said. “Else take yourself off to Jake’s—for sure he’s hovering over his pit and drinking by now.”
“Oh, you likes me smelling of smoke, do you? Perhaps I will, then.”