Free Silent Time by Paul Rowe Page A

Merrigan only a few times, her dark figure shuffling from her house to the stable. She’d never shown the slightest interest in speaking to him, not even during the elections when his knock at the door went unanswered. He’d accepted the local view that she was an eccentric, perhaps disturbed woman who might well be left alone. He must have been too distracted by the war to have noted the arrival of a baby and the inevitable gossip that surrounded it.
    Maisie lowered her voice. “Paddy Merrigan’s younger brother, Jimmy, he did a bit of work for her over there a few years back. He went and got killed in the war afterwards, but everyone knows that’s where the little one come from.”
    Thomas raised his hand in a weak protest. “Maisie!”
    â€œOh, be quiet, b’y,” she barked. “All ya got to do is look at the youngster to see that! She’s got the Merrigans all over her.”
    Thomas looked at William. “Nobody really knows for sure.”
    â€œNo b’y,” Maisie cackled. “She was conceived by the Holy Spirit. You thinks I’m joking, Mr. Cantwell, but that’s what fools like him thinks.”
    â€œI don’t,” Thomas protested, “but the poor soul would deserve no less after what happened to her.”
    â€œIf it hadn’t been for her cubby-chus-ness those youngsters would be alive today!” Maisie declared this with unrestrained vehemence. “She went behind all our backs when she snuck out to the wreck that time.”
    â€œIt was a long time ago, Maisie,” Thomas said, “Time to forgive and forget.”
    â€œIt’s not my place to forgive,” said Maisie, then bit her tongue with a defensive glance at William.
    William recalled Leona Merrigan’s story more clearly now: a shipwreck and a salvaged trunk of clothing infested with typhus-carrying lice. Threeboys dead in one night. The thought of it. Some stories you were better off not knowing.
    Unable to contain herself, Maisie pointed emphatically toward the brook. “That poor little ghost of a child shoulda never been born. Think of the life she’ll have now, all alone over there in that house with a madwoman.”
    â€œMadwoman?” William looked to Thomas who gave a slight shake of his head.
    â€œNever speaks to a soul,” Maisie continued, “drifting around that old farm over there like a ghost. Pretty well the only people that goes there goes at night to get a bottle of rum, and she hands it over with never a word, they say. What kind of a situation is that for a youngster?”
    â€œI guess that’s how she makes ends meet,” William said, still struck by the severity of Maisie’s views.
    â€œOh, she’s cute enough when she needs to be. She sells a few vegetables out of her garden every fall, but it’s true, without the bootleggin’ I dare say they’d starve altogether.”
    â€œShe don’t make it or anything,” Thomas said. “There’s a fella from St. Pierre keeps her supplied, though nobody ever sees him either.”
    â€œDeeds done at night,” said Maisie, in some vague Biblical reference. William considered the many bottles of rum he’d killed in the company of Cape Shore men. Some might well have come from Leona Merrigan’s.
    â€œI can’t quite put my finger on it,” he said, “but there’s something about that child. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more lonesome creature.”
    â€œWell, you’re right there, Mr. Cantwell. She is so lonesome, sir, ‘tis a sin. All the time by herself. The poor thing goes to neither church nor school an’ there’s nothing to be done about it.”
    William looked puzzled. “I can understand, after what she went through, that the woman might have lost her faith, but why wouldn’t she send the child to school? The girl seems bright and healthy enough.”
    Maisie’s