Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [41]
“What kind of farm?”
“Mostly blueberries. We had some chickens.”
“You miss it?”
“Yes,” Alphonse says. “But the farm went bad. That’s why we had to come here.”
Alphonse can remember the sick, hollow feeling inside his belly. All the kids crying for food — even, to his great shame, himself. His mother crying while she was nursing Camille. His father standing in the open doorway just staring out at dead fields.
But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn’t know it was happiness and couldn’t have put a name to it then — in fact he’s pretty sure he never even thought about it — but now he knows that it was happiness. He would fish in the river with his father and collect eggs from the henhouse for his mother and hide with his dog in his fort under the front porch.
“My dad grew up on a farm,” McDermott says. He lights another cigarette and stubs out the first on the sidewalk. They are at the bottom of Alfred Street now, away from the mills and the mill housing. Alphonse turns his head for a quick look. He can hardly see the clock tower because the fog is so thick. Without the mills and their thick smoke, the world looks almost beautiful.
“It was in Ireland. Do you know where Ireland is?”
Alphonse thinks he might know but he isn’t too sure. He lifts his shoulders.
“It’s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,” McDermott says.
“Oh,” says Alphonse. “What kind of farm?”
McDermott has on a beat-up leather jacket with stains on it and a gray sweater underneath. There’s a hole in the sweater just below the neckline. He puts his hands in the pockets of his pants.
“Dairy farm,” McDermott says. “They had cows. The farm was on the ocean. The fields were high above the water and, Oh, wasn’t that a beautiful sight! my father used to say. You could walk across a field and just look out at the sky and the water, he said.” McDermott looks down at Alphonse. “He was almost your age when he had to leave. His farm went bad too.”
Alphonse nods. Almost everyone he knows came from a bad farm.
“When did you leave school?” McDermott asks.
“Last year.”
“How old are you really?”
“Eleven.”
“Thought so,” McDermott says.
* * *
“I’ve just the one pole,” McDermott says, putting a worm on the hook. “You start. When you get tired, I’ll take over.”
Alphonse takes the pole from McDermott’s hand. It isn’t too fancy a pole and it’s more or less like the one his father used to have. He wonders what happened to that pole. Probably his mother sold it.
“There’s a little hillock over there,” McDermott says. “You could sit on that, lean against that stump.”
Alphonse does as he’s told, but he feels uncomfortable holding the fishing pole while McDermott sits empty-handed to one side of him. Truth be told, he’d be content just to watch McDermott fish. Alphonse struggles to think of something to say, something that won’t make him seem stupid, but after a time he has to give up on that. McDermott hums occasionally or lies back and looks at the sky. He lights one cigarette and then another. The man smokes a lot.
“Your mother works the night shift, doesn’t she?” McDermott asks finally.
“Yes,” Alphonse says.
“I sometimes work the night shift myself. Not too often, though. Who takes care of all of you when she’s away?”
“We all kind of take care of ourselves,” Alphonse says, though that isn’t quite true. Camille can’t and of course Marie-Thérèse won’t. A family of ducks swims out of the fog in a line and then goes back into the mist again.
“You ever think about what you’re going to be when you grow up?” McDermott asks.
Alphonse shrugs. He hates this question, he just hates it. Sister Mary Patrick used to ask it of him all the time, and he would try to think up something noble and worthy. One time he said a doctor and she nearly fainted with happiness, and then another time he said a priest and he could see he had gone too far and that she didn’t believe him and because of that was probably having doubts about the doctor too. And then he had to be sure to remember, in confession, that he had lied about the doctor