Silent Time (10 page)

“Not at all,” said William. “It's just that the house up ahead belongs to the woman we're on our way to visit.” William was secretly gratified when Crawford eased up on the accelerator to take a look at the crumbling old house on top of Windy Point.

“No surprise that's falling down,” he said. “Who in their right mind would build in that wind?”

“Leona's father did. I got the impression from what little she's told me that he was a pretty hard man. He died some years ago, as I understand it, and her brothers have all gone to the States.”

William was relieved as Crawford, at reduced speed, safely executed the sharp turn past the point. The road toward the beach was easy going, straight and flat, keeping Three Brooks pond to the right of the vehicle. Still, William thought it best to keep the banter going.

“Actually, you seem a little preoccupied, John, if you don't mind my saying so.”

Crawford glanced at him and chuckled. “I am, as it happens.”

“How so? Care to talk about it?”

“It's my daughter, Nora. I think she's found a beau for herself at last.”

“That should be good news, John. She'll be the last of the girls to the altar.”

“She will indeed.”

“It could hardly be a question of suitability. If I know Nora, she's chosen well.”

“She has. It's Albert Pearlman.”

“The newsman?”

“Exactly.”

“I see.”

William briefly pondered this information. The problem was obvious. Albert, though a very fine fellow and from an excellent family, was Jewish. Even for the unconventional Crawford family, the marriage of a Christian to one “not of the faith” would raise eyebrows significantly in certain quarters of St. John's high society.

“I can't see stopping it, William. He's at the house continually now. Nora dotes on him and I've taken quite a liking to him myself.”

“If it's any consolation,” William added, “he's probably finding it just as difficult from his side.”

“I'm thinking of a long engagement to get everyone used to the idea, and then a quiet marriage, maybe even out of the country.”

“I think that's a good plan under the circumstances,” said William. “They'll be all right. They're both fine people and I've no doubt they're very much in love.”

“No doubt about that,” said Crawford, now building a head of steam as he approached the first of a series of very steep hills. “I briefly had hopes a few years back that you might take a fancy to one of the girls, but you steadfastly resisted their charms. Here you are still single at your age. What's your explanation?”

William trotted out his ready-made reply.

“Well, John, it's like this: the girls from home think I'm too sophisticated for them. I'm practically a townie politician, after all. I'd also be away
from home an awful lot. The townie women, on the other hand, suspect that a politician who isn't also a lawyer or a merchant could be a disaster waiting to happen. So, I'm caught in the middle, so to speak – satisfactory to none, and, despite that, still too willing to please myself.”

Crawford laughed. “A bit hard on yourself, William, but well done just the same. Stay as you are, my son. At this point you'd probably be better off.” Seeming satisfied with the exchange, Crawford fixed his attention on the road.

William knew it was a convenient answer, pat, but essentially untrue. The truth was he hadn't planned to be unmarried and without children at this time of his life. He had tried settling down at an acceptable age, but things simply hadn't worked out that way. Maria Downs had recovered from the experience, though. The grapevine informed him that she had just had her fifth child. He'd had no such luck. More and more these days, he wondered whether it was some insufficiency within himself that kept him alone; it surely wasn't due merely to the discriminating choices of the women he met.

Or maybe, he thought, his time had simply not yet come. In his opinion there were far too many people in the married state, anyway. He wasn't entirely convinced that it was natural for everyone to be sorted into pairs for life. But, at times, he recognized its attractions. The image of Leona Merrigan in her plain black dress slid almost imperceptibly into his mind. Over the last three years he, if not her, had felt at least a growing comradeship during the many hours they'd spent together. He'd noted their relative ease at being together despite the degree of silence that so often sat between them. Through stolen glances, he had quietly assessed her physical attractions and liked what he saw. But he also found her absolutely inscrutable and knew that he, too, was a long way from giving the slightest hint of what his intentions might some day be. On the one hand, he was afraid she would be horrified and reject him; on the other, he feared any such revelation might imperil the work he was doing to guarantee Dulcie's education. At least he would be one step closer to completing that goal by the end of this day's work.

It was William's first time down the Cape Shore in an automobile, so when the Fiat surged over the rise just past Three Brooks beach, he was amazed at the seemingly instant appearance of the lengthy coastline, the blue vista of sky and ocean that arose in one grand sweep. He noted again how the overlapping granite ridges that defined the Cape Shore were thrust into the ocean like the fingers of a giant stone hand. The day was
a spectacular surprise, and brilliant sunshine bathed the entire scene in a waxy luminous haze.

The Fiat soon came to the top of another hill so steep that, going down it, William actually felt the sudden drop in altitude in his groin. This brought them into Nelson's Brook, the first of the small Cape Shore settlements. A handful of houses and outbuildings flew by as skittish horses cantered in the meadows; stupefied cows stared at the dust tunnel churned up in the Fiat's wake.

The climb out was long and steep and Crawford, his forehead now beaded with sweat, put the Fiat through its paces, tramping on pedals and shifting gears, smiling with satisfaction each time he felt it grab and conquer the land's resistance.

“I could cross the goddamn Himalayas in this machine!” he cried, with a thump of his hand on the ebony steering wheel.

Not long after Nelson's Brook a roadside shrine came into view.

“That's Father O'Connell's Well,” William said. “I think I told you about that old priest who had a run-in with the devil here.”

Since Crawford had a taste for the macabre that William occasionally gratified with a ghost story from the Cape Shore, he quickly pulled to the side of the road and both men got out of the car.

“It's the little spring he scrambled to when he fell off the horse,” William said. “He blessed the water, flung it at the evil one and that, apparently, was all it took to send him screaming into the trees.”

“We should bottle the stuff and sell it,” Crawford said. He crouched and sized up the makeshift shrine. Someone had cut a hole in the bottom of a fish barrel, painted it white and placed it upside down on a loose cluster of rocks. A small wooden cross was mounted on the cover. Crawford lifted the cover and looked inside to see the tiny spring bubbling up into a small pool.

“Is the water still holy?” he asked.

“The locals certainly think so,” William said, leaning on the open door of the automobile. “Once and forever blessed. It is a spring, after all.”

Crawford walked to where the road fell off abruptly into a bank of loose rocks and twisted alders. It ran toward a cliff face that dropped sharply to the water. He fidgeted with his trouser buttons and soon sent a bright yellow stream arcing over the bank, leaving a dark grey path on the silvery stones. There was a surprisingly warm breeze. The ocean glittered into the distance.

“Maybe we should take a drop of holy water with us,” he said. “You never know, we might encounter the dark lord ourselves on the ride
home.” He chuckled as he climbed behind the wheel. “How far is it to Knock Harbour from here?”

“It's over that next rise, John,” William replied.

“Tell me that woman's name again. Merrigan, was it?”

“That's right. Leona.”

“And the deaf girl?”

“Dulcie.”

“Right. So you've made the arrangements for her to go to school. Well done.”

“Actually, the only thing I need is the mother's final approval.”

“She's not sure about it?”

“She definitely wants Dulcie to go to school, but it's hard for her to accept that they'll be apart for ten months of the year. I think she's been secretly grateful that it's taken this long to get things sorted out.”

“Why has it taken so long?”

“Elections, changing administrations, red tape; although, the problems in the Colonial Office have cleared up now that I'm back on the government side.”

“Naturally,” said Crawford. “It's scandalous, really, that party politics could get in the way of a child's education, but that's the sordid business we're in, isn't it? How old is the girl now?”

“She'll be ten this fall.”

“Oh well, that's a good age.”

William smiled. “It is, as it turns out. The school likes the students to be a little older, especially when they come from far away. But there's no more time to lose. Dulcie can only stay at the school for ten years, so she's got to get cracking if she wants to complete a high school education, which, if she goes, is what Leona wants. She's made no bones about that.”

“You did say it's her only child.”

“That's right.”

“Isn't that unusual, even for a widow, in this great Catholic district?”

“She lost three children and a husband some twenty years ago now.”

“Good Lord. That's terrible. So, she's remarried?”

“No.”

“Then, to put the question as delicately as possible, what explains the provenance of a ten-year-old child?”

“It's a bit of a mystery.” William thought it best to keep those matters to himself.

Crawford raised his eyebrows. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

“Leona is a good woman who cares deeply about her daughter,” William said. “We talk about that, but she's otherwise quite secretive about her personal life.”

“I see,” said Crawford, and took a pull from his flask. “Now, let's get going. I'm keen to know if the sea trout here are as fine as you promised.”

“They are,” William said. His taste for promise-making had made a cautious return in the last three years, hopefully with good cause. To reassure himself, he touched a sheaf of papers tucked securely inside his suit coat. He watched Crawford turn the key and push the starter button. His head flew back as the Fiat lurched into motion and made for the crest of the hill.

The special building on the far side of the bridge from Dulcie Merrigan's house had a little cross on top and windows: one, two, three in each side. The windows were not like any others she had seen. Her eyes could not penetrate the glass, some of it coloured prettily. There was a curve and upward sweep to them, like branches on the trees beside the river. For a time, she thought they concealed some secret joy. But they didn't. She had learned to hate that building. They weren't nice to her there. They held her hands, palms down, on a table and made her keep them there, even though every part of her wanted to run away.

Dulcie tried opening and closing her mouth to send her thoughts to the older girl, the one who kept forcing Dulcie's hands back on the table, but whenever Dulcie tried to send her thoughts that way, it caused unhappy faces all around her. The older girl would put a finger to her lips and blow at Dulcie, sometimes so hard that she felt the ugly wet gust of it on her face. Then Dulcie got mad. She hit and spat and smashed and ran from the once-magical building. After that, she stopped going there altogether.

Dulcie Merrigan had her own way of sending thoughts. Sometimes she released them with her arms and hands, like small birds, into the air. Sometimes she wrote upon her body and invited you to read.

There was Dan the horse, for example. Dan, whom she loved, who made her smile, who never bit her but who could be downright nasty to others, who was small and strong and loved to pull the load, but who had to be spared going up Knock Harbour Hill where Dulcie always walked beside him, whom she would not suffer to be struck, who took from her sweet-smelling armfuls of hay, who greeted her approach with deep approving nods and drank her in with dark luminous eyes. Dan, the horse, meant a world of things to Dulcie, but to send the
thought
of
Dan she traced her index finger down her own forehead right to the tip of her nose.

Dan had a white stripe down his muzzle.

Then there were people; especially the most important person. Mother wore her hair in a tight bun at the base of her neck.
Mother
, for Dulcie, was an open hand circling that spot. But even that name could not express the world of things that Mother meant to her. Mother was the hand that turned the lamp down low in her room, but always left a faint glow burning through the night, so Dulcie never had to be afraid when the sky came to lie upon the earth. Mother was the hand that cut the simple fishing rod, who showed her how to make a gad from an alder branch and how to string her catch along it by the gills.

When she fished, Dulcie saw the trout in the water sending thoughts with their mouths. She wondered what thoughts they were, or what thought the caught trout was trying to send before she smacked it off a rock and left it stunned and shivering for the gad. Of course, there was no word for trout. The cool creature from the brook was a hand waving through the air. The waving hand meant slippery touch, grey-brown burst of movement in the water, crisp, salty-tasting meat upon a plate.

Things always had some little mark, something about them that called out to Dulcie from the world. She used these to make signs. She showed the signs to Mother and Mother repeated them to her. Sometimes Mother made up signs, too, which Dulcie repeated. These silent echoes became her language.