“I’m fine. It’s been well over two months,” she said, as he tried to steer her back to bed.
“But you’ve still a lot of bleeding—Mother said.”
“Only normal. I wonder you haven’t started fishing yet?”
“Bit early still.”
“Others have been fishing the past two weeks.”
“I got a hundred quintal on salt in the stage, Addie. That’s a good start on the season. I can take a week if I needs to. Sit down. Will you please sit down and let me make you some tea?”
She sat, watching him as he emptied the dregs from the teapot into the trash box behind the stove, refilling it with more tea and water, and settling it on the damper to steep. A small dipper of water was boiling on the front top, and to it, he added a cupful of oats, gently stirring. His step felt fatigued, she noted, and his hands heavy. She averted her eyes, not wanting the burden of what his thoughts must be these days about her, her illness, the babies, the deaths.
“If it’s me you’re staying home for, I’m telling you I’m fine,” she said quietly.
“You says you’re fine. That’s not what everybody else says.”
“Everybody else!” She sighed, sinking deeper into her chair. “Oh, if they’d all just stay home. I’d get better faster if I had the place to myself.”
“Not for a while yet, then, you won’t have the place to yourself,” he said, laying a cup of tea before her. “Not till we sees some colour on that face.”
“Then I’ll put it there,” she cried, sitting forward with a burst of strength, pinching her cheeks. “There. Do I look fine now? Oh, I knows I’m still a bit under, Syllie,” she added at his pained look. “It’s just that, well, I’m fine for what I’m going through. It’s normal to be pale and tired and—and—all the rest of it.” She shook her head, sighing as he started back, stirred her tea, hearing nothing of what she was saying, seeing nothing of what she was doing, only that her tea needed stirring and she was weak and pale, and her body still bleeding. Was there nobody listening?
Or perhaps she wasn’t saying the words, she thought. Perhaps she was only thinking them, for that’s what it sounded like each time she spoke—her voice far away, distant. Cripes, perhaps that’s why they weren’t listening, merely nodding and smiling as she pleaded with them, “I’m fine, I’m fine, really, I am, and ye ought to be home, caring for your own crowd. I can wash a cup and make a stew, yes I can, yes I can.”
“Do you hear me?” she asked abruptly.
He glanced up, pushing the oatmeal to the back of the stove, his eyes mirroring the hurt of a forgotten child. And she was immediately burdened—doubly burdened—by her own load, and now his, unwittingly laid upon her.
“Oh, never mind.” Pushing herself up from her chair, she took the bread knife off the sink and started cutting into the loaf he had laid out. Her wrist buckled as though it were hollowed.
“You’ve been through a lot, Addie,” he said quietly, taking the knife from her hand.
“But I’ve got to start doing things,” she said. “How can I start getting better if everybody keeps doing everything for me?”
“They’re just trying to be helpful.”
“I don’t want their help! Let them stay home if they wants to help. Gawd, Syllie, everyday there’s two or three bodies sitting around my table, gabbing and yakking about the damn old weather and their gardens and never once talking about youngsters so’s not to upset poor Addie, poor Addie. Gawd, I hates their
poor Addie
look. I’d rather they were all busy making fun of me. Yes, I would,” she exclaimed as he looked at her skeptically. “Least then I didn’t have to sit, talking and smiling all the time. Bloody pretending, is all it is, and I hates it; I hates pretending right now.”
“Pretending what?”
“Pretending that I’m nice, that they’re nice, and everything’s nice,” and she broke off, stunned to find herself still hating and wanting to curse everyone after all she’d been through, and was still going through; that she was still the same old Addie, hating everything and everyone excepting for her own house, and she was starting to hate that too now with everybody coming, all the time coming, and talking and supping. Gawd! Her thoughts trailed off and she stood appalled by them.
“Oh, never mind,” she said as though she had spoken them out loud, and giggled as Sylvanus continued looking at her with a growing perplexity. And worried that he now feared she was losing her mind—as she very well might be—she threw down pretense and trudged despondently toward the window, looking out over the sunless sky, the dreary grey cliffs of the neck, and the grey waters of the arm. Leached. Everything leached of colour—the little dirtied bodies—at least the two she had seen—the first had been hidden beneath that awful caul, and her chest constricted in fear as the old midwife’s words shot through her mind: “Cursed! Cursed!’”
“Addie.” She sprang from his touch. “Addie,” he whispered, placing both hands onto her shoulders as though to keep her from escaping him. “I’ll stop them coming if you want. Let me take care of you for a few days.” His arms went around her, steadying, strong, and she rested against him, allowing him to rock her. In this manner, at least, he could be that pillar upon which she leaned. She gazed up at him, managing a smile, as tremulous as it was grateful.
He stopped rocking, his eyes having found hers again. And there in the bright morning light, in the sobriety of her solitude, they begged from her an intimacy that even when they had lain together as lovers she was able to enter only under the diffusion of shadow. And now, with her body cramping from a third dead baby, and the air sickly with the smell of blood, she tried to turn from him as he brought his mouth down on hers.
“Oh, gawd, Syllie,” she groaned, twisting from him, “how can you even think—” and she buckled onto a chair, her hands to her stomach, her mouth lined with self-loathing, which, from the sudden reddening of his face, he no doubt believed was for him. She reached for him, but he was lunging out through the door, leaving it swinging behind him. “Syllie!” She rose, stumbling after him. “Should’ve left me rotting in that damn plant,” she cried out, as though he were standing on the other side of the door, listening. Standing on the stoop, she watched as he hurried over the footbridge, past his mother’s, half walking, half running, like the fool who, unlike the wise man building his house on rock, had built it on sand instead and was now fleeing from the fall of it.
“Should’ve left me rotting,” she whispered more quietly. “Should’ve left me rotting.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WIDOW’S WALK
S
TUMBLING BACK INSIDE
the house after Sylvanus shut the door to his stage, Adelaide clung to the table edge and lowered herself onto a chair. Fatigued. Every bone, fatigued. A sound from outside and she raised her eyes—it was him, come back. But, no. It was Eva, a knowing look in her eyes and a commiserating murmur as she entered, giving Adelaide permission to sink back into her state.
“Perhaps you needs to get out and walk a bit,” said Eva, flitting about the kitchen, gathering the bread pan and flour can and yeast crock from a bottom cupboard.
“Oh, it’s just my stomach,” lied Adelaide, wishing that it was her stomach, wishing even for that lump of sickness back; anything over this hollowed-out emptiness, this nothingness!
She watched listlessly as Eva pinched butter into the flour, adding warm water to a bowl of sugared yeast
“Walks are always good,” said Eva. “After the drownings, I always went off by myself, walking.”
The drownings. First time Eva had ever mentioned them. Adelaide watched as she poured the yeast and a dipper of warm water into the buttered flour, and stuck in her hands, folding and mixing and kneading, the mixture turning the thin gold band on her gnarled finger a filmy white. Something that Suze said that time she gave her the shawl came back to her, something about another person’s misery bringing comfort.
“Must’ve been awful,” she exclaimed. “The drownings, I mean.”
Eva said nothing, her eyes dissolving into the glob of flour and water that was becoming a sticky ball of dough beneath her strong hands. Adelaide glanced away, shamed by her continuing self-serving notions, which sought now to feed on another’s grief so’s to alleviate her own.
“Perhaps I should walk,” she said, half angrily. “I got to do something—but then everybody will be calling out, wanting to go with me,” she added wearily, the mere notion of expending such energy already defeating her.
“I used to like it up on the head,” said Eva.
The head. Adelaide turned to her. She hadn’t been up there since that time with Syllie, looking at the carey chicks. “It’s like it’s haunted up there,” she said, and again, regretted her thoughtlessness, remembering that rotting piece of board with “Widow’s Walk” carved across its front. Eva carried on punching, turning, and kneading.
“Nothing wrong with haunts, my maid,” she said, a bit winded. “They’re only lost souls, like ourselves sometimes.”
“Widow’s Walk. That’s a hard name,” said Adelaide, quietly. “Why’d you name it that?”
“We raise stones in the earth to mark souls at rest,” said Eva. “Why shouldn’t we mark the steps of those still labouring?”
“You mean your soul, Eva?”
“That’s what I means, my maid. And every other widow watching out for her man’s remains.”
“Do you ever stop? Watching, I mean.”
Eva shrugged. “No doubt there’s them that never do. They wakes up simply to watch. And wait. That’s when you gets in trouble, when all of your life becomes the one small thing, the widow.” She held up a handful of flour from the flour can. “See this? Nothing ever comes of it, long as it’s sitting by itself.” She threw it into the pan. “So, thinks the head’s haunted, do you?” And with a grin like Syllie’s when something pleased him, she sprinkled a last handful of flour over the dough, now shaped into an oval loaf, and dotted the sign of the cross across its centre.
“There, that’s all you got to do to ward off haunts: flaunt the cross before them. They’ll leave you be then, unless you’re a restless soul like themselves.”
Long after Eva had left, Adelaide sat, watching the dough rise beneath the blanket she had wrapped around it. When it was time to knead it back down, she rose, peeled back the blanket and started punching, mauling, and squeezing the soggy mass. Standing back, she stared breathlessly at the deflated dough, punched flat into the pan. Hearing footsteps, she quickly tucked the blanket around the pan and ran to her room, pretending to be asleep should it be anyone but Eva.
“The haunts from the head,” she muttered as no knock sounded. She trudged back into the kitchen, all senses sharp for a footstep, ready to flee to her room.
Hell, why wait? she thought despondently. Wrapping herself in layers of wool, she hauled on her boots and stepped outside. The falls were churning madly from the winter’s thaw, spicing the air and spurning the brook wildly across the meadow. She yearned toward its wantonness; but Suze would come running with blankets and the rosary if she happened to glance through a window and saw her sitting by the damp of the falls, she thought grimly. Heeding Eva’s words, and wondering how she’d get the strength, she set off toward Widow’s Walk.
Pulling herself along by the branches of the evergreens, she climbed slowly and steadily, pausing every couple of minutes to catch her breath. Twice she thought she’d faint from the exertion, thrice she sat down, leaning against a tree trunk, winded. But finally the steep path broke out of the woods onto the tuckamores, the bald crown of the cliffs, and screaming winds. Cowering, she held tight to her scarf and cap and half crawled, half ran toward a suitable clump of tuckamores with a good rabbit run hollowing out the thickness in its midst. Lying beside it, she burrowed her back into this midst, the interlocking branches overhead forming a canopy that protected her from whatever might fall from the heavens.
“There, scream all you wants,” she bade the wind and the haunts. “And if I goes mad, I’ll scream with you.” Digging farther into this womb, she fashioned her shawl as a pillow and that’s how she spent the morning (and many others to come), lying comfortably amongst the tucka mores, sometimes dozing, sometimes gazing unseeingly out over the cliffs, immune to the moaning of the wind flying about her, to the roar of the sea below, to the smell of rot as the earth gave up those things entombed within it, to the acrid taste of salt upon the air, to the wet of the scattered raindrops falling heavily on her cheek. Cocooned. She felt cocooned, with no desire for anything outside herself and no will to act upon what others desired for her. As when a body lies still with fever, its energy consumed by the forces battling within, so she lay; a slight figure with a starkly white face, bundled in heavy woollens and tucked out of the wind amongst the tuckamores, staring vacantly out over the sea.
Several weeks, she managed to get in, several full weeks of solitude, of nestling on the head, of leaving the house soon after Sylvanus left for his fishing grounds and Eva had done her routine morning check-in. Most times, up there on the head, looking out over Old Saw Tooth and the expanse of sea, she saw Sylvanus motoring back around the headland from Little Trite, on his way home from the fishing grounds. She’d scrabble home then, throw some dinner together—leastways, those days she saw him. Sometimes she slept. Didn’t matter. Eva was always there with a hot pan of something made for all their dinners.
Having dinner ready for Sylvanus wasn’t the problem. It was his trailing about the outport, looking like a lost pup those times he motored home and she was still up on the head, that became the problem. And that piteous look he was taking on—was it for his own exile, she wondered, or hers? For certain he must be seeing her as something broken, a dandelion fluff waffling in the wind. And with Melita or Elsie or Suze, no doubt, taking advantage of his hungering ear, planting seeds of worry about her disappearing from her house each morning, he was starting to plague her about the size of their house, that maybe it wasn’t big enough, that she should have more room, and perhaps he should add on a piece come summer—yes, that’s what he would do, add on a piece, a nice sunroom with lots of windows so’s to cheer her and grow more things come winter. And when he wasn’t planning an add-on to the house, he was building upon his other little tasks of pleasing her, bringing more cups of tea to her room, mint berries, delicacies from the sea, the woods.