She signs to her father.
‘You want to speak to me outside? Sure, all right, honey. Just let me pay Florie. I’ll meet you outside in a minute.’
Chapter 60
Tippy’s Tickle – 25 September 1952
‘I’s the b’y that builds the boat—’ There’s a crash of tin as the empty milk can by the picket fence tumbles onto the dirt road.
‘Jaysus God, b’y! Watch where you’re goin’. Your mam will fry us up with scrunchions for supper.’
Thomas grasps a picket and steadies himself. ‘Do you figure Mam’s cooked up cod and scrunchions tonight? I’m gut-foundered.’
‘You gots a hollow leg, b’y.’
Thomas stares at his father. Grinning, he slaps him on his shoulder. ‘Well, you’re not blind there, Dad.’ He lifts his face to the darkening sky and belts out the next line of the ditty. ‘And I’s the b’y that sails her—’
Throwing his arm around his son, Ephraim bellows out the song with Thomas. ‘And I’s the b’y that catches the fish and brings them home to Liza!’
Ellie slides up the sash window in the kitchen. ‘They’re back, Agnes.’
Thomas’s mother wipes her floury hands on her apron. ‘I’m not deaf as a cod, girl. My sister could hear that racket all the way to Salvage.’ She picks up the old metal kettle and thrusts it at Emmett, who is sitting at the kitchen table assembling a set of thumb-sized stone bricks into a lopsided house. ‘Fetch some water down the pump, Emmy. I’ll need to be pourin’ tea down the likes of them when they gets in.’
Eight-year-old Emmett slides off the wooden chair and silently takes the handle of the kettle, exiting through the back screen-door.
Ellie opens the pantry and takes out two tin pails, setting them on the floor in front of the stove. Agnes eyes her as she lifts the lid off the pot of soaking hard tack and pokes at the softening bread with a wooden spoon.
‘Where’re you off to with those?’
‘To get water to heat up for a bath for Thomas. It helps him sober up.’
‘He’ll have to make do without the bath tonight. I’s got beer stewin’ in the tub. ’Course you’d knows that if you wasn’t off dilly-dallyin’ all the live-long day with your pencils. I can’t have Rod Fizzard takin’ all Ephraim’s money.’
‘I wasn’t dilly-dallying. I brought you bakeapples for the crumble. They were even ripe this time.’
‘It took you six years to finds me ripe bakeapples when the marsh I showed you is full of them. You’re as blind as a snow-blind Canadian in a blizzard. I’ll hardly give you a prize.’
The front door slams open and the men stumble down the hallway into the kitchen. Ephraim grabs his wife and plants a sloppy kiss on her plump cheek. He drags over a pressback wooden chair and slumps into it, shrugging out of his pea jacket. ‘What you got for the scoff, maid? I’m that hungry I could eat the arse off a low-flyin’ duck.’
‘You think I lives my life at your beck and call, old man? Maybe I was out with my fancy man in Gambo.’
‘Don’t you be teasin’ a hungry man like that, Nessie, or I’ll be back off to Rod Fizzard’s. His wife’s cookin’ up flipper pie.’
Thomas slides into a chair and leans his crutch against the freshly painted yellow wall. ‘I’d stop there, Dad. Mam’s gots a face on her like a burnt boiled boot.’
‘It’s fish and brewis tonight with scrunchions,’ Ellie says as she peels the papery brown skin off an onion. ‘We were waitin’ for you to get home before we fried up the fat and onions. The cod’s been soakin’ since last night.’
The screen door swings open and Emmett enters with the kettle. After handing it to his grandmother, he slips silently onto his chair and takes up the construction of the tiny house.
Ephraim pats his grandson on his head. ‘You’re a good boy, Emmy.’ He ruffles Emmett’s dark hair and tweaks his nose. Emmett fixes his steady blue/brown gaze on his grandfather and wrinkles his nose.
‘You’re a funny one with your brown hair and that brown eye, b’y.’ Ephraim bends over with a grunt and tugs at the laces of his boot. ‘You must get those from your mudder’s side. The Parsons and Mam’s Inkpen side are all blond and blue-eyed. It’s those Vikings hittin’ up the Brits all those years ago.’
‘He gets his dark hair from my mother,’ Ellie says as she chops up the onion. ‘She had dark eyes, too.’ Probably best not to tell them she was a half-French Catholic. Agnes would have a field day with that.
‘It’s a fairy blast,’ Agnes says as she hands out mugs of steaming tea to the men.
Ellie looks up from the pork fat she’s begun to cut into chunks. ‘A fairy blast?’
‘He must’ve got touched by a fairy when he was a baby. Some around here takes it as a bad sign, but I thinks it makes our Emmy special. The fairies gave him a brown eye to leave their mark on him, so the other fairies knows to leave him be.’
Ellie laughs. ‘Surely you don’t believe—’
‘There was that little girl went missin’ in Colinet back in ’Fifteen,’ Ephraim interrupts as he eases his feet out of his boots. ‘A year old or so. Disappeared out of the kitchen when her mudder’s back was turned. Showed up twelve days later six miles away sittin’ under a tree in the forest, not a mark on her. Happy as a duck on a fresh pond.’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘Someone must have brought her there.’
Agnes’s eyes narrow behind her wire-rimmed glasses. ‘T’was the fairies. They took the child and kept it alive. It couldn’t happen any other way.’
***
Ellie turns over in the bed and pulls the covers up to her neck.
‘Aren’t you getting into bed, Thomas?’
Thomas sits on the edge of the bed in his undershirt and his long johns, contemplating the dark room. ‘You didn’t believe the fairy story, did you, Ellie Mae?’
‘Of course not. It’s silly superstition.’
He looks at her over his shoulder. ‘The Rock’s a funny place sometimes. The fog rolls in, and the whale song drifts in on the breeze. It’s an odd sound, that. Clicks and groans. They say you can only hear it properly under the water, but I swears I’ve heard it out on the boat. Clear as a baby’s cry. Sometimes, something shifts out on the water. I can’t explain it. Then you hears it. The clickin’ and the groanin’. It’s like you drop through time into a different place.’
‘But you know that can’t happen. You’re just hearing sounds.’
‘It can happen, Ellie Mae. It happened to me once. I was out on the boat by myself. It’s before I signed up for the infantry. I had to tell Mam and Dad, but I didn’t know how to do it. I took the boat out and floated around the coast for a bit. It was September, just like now. There was a full moon and the stars shone like diamonds in the black sky.’ He leans back onto his pillow and looks over at Ellie. ‘Not that I knows what diamonds looks like, mind you. But you can imagine.’
‘Of course you know what diamonds look like.’ Ellie wiggles her finger with her engagement ring.