The Wreckage by Michael Crummey Page B

wake your sister.”
    “How long are you planning on having him stand guard on the door?”
    “As long as it takes.”
    Mercedes felt the tears welling up and she slapped Hardy’s shoulder. “He was sound asleep out here,” she shouted. “I had to shake him awake. A lot of good he is to you.”
    “Shut up, Sadie,” Hardy said.
    “I could be over to Wish’s place now with half my clothes off. And he’d still be sound asleep there with his mouth hung open.”
    Her mother said, “Go back to your room, Mercedes.”
    “I’m going to the outhouse.”
    “You got a chamber pot to take care of your business.”
    Hardy stood to block the way downstairs.
    “Are you going to empt it for me, Hardy?”
    He didn’t answer. She looked back and forth from her mother to Hardy, then went into her room and slammed the door. Squatted over the pot, her legs shaking with rage. Agnes up on her elbows to see what the racket was about. Mercedes carried the honey pot out into the hall, said, “This belongs to you, does it?” and dropped it in Hardy’s lap.
    Hardy threw his hands up to his shoulders as if she’d set a feral cat on him. Mercedes went back into her room and slammed the door again.
    Next morning at the Spell Rock she told Wish about her confinement .
    “It’s a wonder they let you out alone at all if you’re as wild as that.”
    “Agnes is supposed to be with me. I talked her into waiting back off the path a ways. Promised I wouldn’t be gone long enough to get into trouble.”
    She could tell he was surprised by her wilfulness, and pleased by it, by her willingness to sneak him into her life.
    “I thought Hardy was my father for a second,” she said. “I saw him in that chair outside the door once.”
    “Your father?”
    “The night he went missing.” She looked at him shyly. “Nan was calling for water downstairs and I got up to look in on her. And Father was sitting in the chair outside the door.”
    “Did you tell your mother about it?”
    “I haven’t mentioned it to a soul, till now. He was soaking wet, Wish. Every stitch of clothes he had on was dripping water.”
    “Did he say anything?”
    “I tried to talk to him but he was gone after a second.”
    He surprised her by smiling then, although there was nothing dismissive in it. He had a strangely attractive face, large soft eyes, a long lower jaw and the chin just off centre. There was something vaguely equine about it, about the way his head moved as he listened, sudden sideways motions, an exaggerated lifting of the chin when she said something unexpected. Mercedes was uncomfortable around horses, she distrusted their size and slow walk, the crooked limb of their cocks almost touching the ground as they grazed, their wet eyes that seemed bottomless. She couldn’t explain why the look of Wish calmed her.
    She said, “That was Father’s fetch, wasn’t it? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “I expect he is.”
    She realized she was crying and wiped at her face with her hands, then they sat with their foreheads touching. She loved the smell of his breath, the changing layers and undertones in it. Tobacco and ginger. Sugared tea. Raisins. She adjusted her breathing to take in his exhalations as they sat there, as if there was some strength she could draw from it.
    She tried to recall that smell now with her face pressed into her pillow, trying not to wake Agnes beside her, not wanting Hardy to hear her outside the door. A tremor shook through her that she couldn’t name. Grief, for certain, and wanting to touch Wish and have him touch her, anger and fear and anticipation, exhaustion, she couldn’t separate the different strands and felt them corkscrew through her as one thing. She had never felt more alive.
    When Wish and Clive left the parlour during the wake, she knew they were heading outside for a smoke and a mouthful of shine. Her mother yanked her back by the arm when she stood to follow them.
    “Not while your father lies there,” Helen