The Wreckage by Michael Crummey Page A

your mother, he said, and run. He kept shouting that: Run, run, run. He’d hauled his boat up behind the stage weeks before and put her under a load of boughs for the winter and he started clearing those off, trying to get her back over on her keel, wanting to haul her far enough up the shore to save her. But he saw it was useless and gave it up, following after Wish toward the house. They met his mother on her way down to find them and looked back to the shoreline. Water sluicing into the empty harbour ahead of a dark wall bearing down on them. They lit out for the high ground among the trees, trying to outpace the roar smashing up over the wharves and houses and gardens.
    She woke early to the sound of someone talking aloud in the room next to her own. Three nights in a row now she’d dreamt of the tidal wave Wish described to her—something about the blind surge of it had taken hold of her—and each morning she woke with the same amorphous sense of dread. She pushed it aside, trying to identify the sound coming through the bedroom wall.
    Her grandmother.
    The old woman seemed rarely to sleep at night, only drifted somewhere further off the shore of consciousness and sense. Her soliloquies indecipherable and relentless, like the burble of a rattling brook. When the old woman was in her bed downstairs it was a low murmur that was almost soothing. But through the wall beside her now it was persistent as a toothache.
    It took another moment to piece together why the sound was coming from her parents’ bedroom rather than downstairs. She remembered getting up from her chair when Wish left the room with Clive and all the blood draining to her feet. A smell of ammonia in her nostrils before the blackness swamped her. And now she was in bed, her grandmother mewling away in her parents’ room.
    Her father flashed to her mind, boxed up in the parlour, and she covered her mouth with her hand to keep from crying out. A hint of lime and putrefaction crawling in under the door. She pressed her face into her pillow to escape the smell and to muffle the sound of her crying, trying not to wake Agnes beside her. It seemed obscene to have forgotten, even those few moments after waking, that the man was dead and about to be set in the ground.
    She hadn’t seen Wish arrive for the wake the evening before, though she knew he’d entered the room by the pressure of her mother’s hand ratcheting hold of her. Like she was about to dangle her daughter over a cliff edge. Mercedes looked up to see him across the room by the casket, having a quiet word with Clive. Hardy stood straighter beside her like some guard dog, edging sideways to block her view, and she had to fight an urge to give him a good smack in the crotch.
    Mercedes had stumbled upon Hardy early on the morning after young Willard Slade’s funeral. She almost fell over him in his chair as she came out the bedroom door on her way to the outhouse, his arms folded across his chest, his head crooked into the wall. She thought it was her father asleep there at first and in the few seconds it took to recognize Hardy her heart hammered oddly in her chest, as if it was operating in an empty cavity. She shook Hardy by the shoulder and called his name.
    He came to his feet with a start, grabbed her by the arms. “Where are you going?” he said.
    “To the backyard. To the outhouse. Where do you think I’m going this time of the night?”
    He settled back, trying to overcome the startle she’d given him.
    “I thought you were Father for a second.”
    “Didn’t mean to frighten you.”
    “What in God’s name are you doing asleep in the hall?”
    “Nothing,” he said. He sat back in the chair and looked up at her. “Don’t you be too long out there.”
    It started to come clear to her then. “What are you doing here, Hardy?”
    Her mother came to the door of her room in her nightdress. “Hush up Sadie. Leave your brother alone.”
    “This is your doing, is it?”
    “Don’t