—This is your sister Eathna, her mother said.—Found her in the turnip patch, naked as a fish.
It seemed too fanciful a notion to credit but she had to admit there was something vaguely turnip-like about the bruised and nearly bald head of the child, the vulgar purple and pale white of the skin.
Mary Tryphena understood the difference soon enough and felt she’d been made to look a fool. Watch and learn she was told a hundred times and she began following Devine’s Widow to the homes of the sick where the old woman treated fevers, impetigo, coughs, rickets, festering sores. Her grandmother said nothing to discourage the girl’s interest but she made a point of going out alone when a birth or death was imminent and the reality of those most elemental passages eluded Mary Tryphena. Entrance and exit. Eathna leaving them the way she arrived: suddenly and not a hint of warning.
There was no hiding Lizzie’s third pregnancy from Mary Tryphena and she was obsessed with the full bowl of her mother’s belly. She considered the entries and exits of her own body and there seemed no reasonable resolution to her mother’s predicament though she felt ready to stand witness, at nine years of age, to what promised to be an ugly, brutish struggle. But Devine’s Widow insisted she stay out of the birthing room when her mother went into labour and Mary Tryphena left the house altogether, wandering up onto the Tolt to sulk.
She felt she’d been delivered into a universe where everyone’s knowledge but hers was complete and there was no acceptable way to acquire information other than waiting for its uncertain arrival. She stared out at the water, the endless grey expanse of ocean below reflecting the endless grey nothing of her life. The nothing stretched for miles in all directions, nothing, nothing, nothing, she was on the verge of bawling at the thought when the humpback breached the surface, the staggering bulk rising nose first and almost clear of the sea before falling back in a spray. Mary Tryphena’s skin stippled with goosebumps, her scalp pulling taut.
The whale breached a second time and a third, as if calling her attention, before it steamed through the harbour mouth of Paradise Deep and drove headlong onto the shallows like a nail hammered into a beam of wood. Her throat was raw with shouting and running in the cold when she came through the door.
—You’ve a new brother, Callum said, trying to lead her to the bedroom where the infant was squalling through his first moments of life. But Mary Tryphena shook her head, dragging her father outside.
It was a childish conceit to think she was to blame that things stood as they did now, that her greed to know the world had brought the stranger among them and caused her brother’s illness. She felt her nose was about to be rubbed in something she’d have better ignored altogether.
The condition of both the stranger and the infant grew worse every hour, and the baby’s mother finally begged Callum to make away with the creature she considered responsible for the child’s turn, to take him out to open ocean and send him back where he came from. It was only Devine’s Widow that kept Callum from doing just that.
No one understood the old woman’s concern for the stranger except to say it was her way. In her first years on the shore, a chick with four legs was born to one of King-me’s hens. The grotesque little creature was unable to walk or stand and was thought to be a black sign by the other servants, who wanted it drowned. But Devine’s Widow removed two of the legs and cauterized the wounds with a toasting fork before daubing them with candle wax. She kept the chick near the stove in a box lined with straw while it recovered. Raised it to be a fine laying hen.
That story was offered up in the wake of every strangeness that followed in the widow’s life, as if it somehow explained the woman. And she was happy to let it stand in this particular case, telling no one about the dreams that troubled her before Lizzie went into labour, of delivering infants joined at the hip or the shoulder. She used a gutting knife to sever the children, slicing at the flesh in a panic and holding the two aloft by the heels, blood running into her sleeves. Both infants perished in her hands and she woke each time to the conviction that it was the separation that killed them.
The widow refused to let Mary Tryphena watch the delivery when Lizzie’s time came, expecting the worst. But the baby was born healthy and showed no obvious mark of her dream. And that absence disconcerted her. As if something more oblique and subterranean was at work in the child, something she was helpless to identify or treat. She couldn’t escape the sense now that the twinned arrival of her grandson and the salt-haired stranger was what she’d foreseen, the fate of one resting with the other. And she was relieved to have the foul-smelling thing under her own roof.
It was the widow woman’s property and there was no arguing with her. But when Lizzie threatened to take herself and the children back to Selina’s House in Paradise Deep, Callum sacrificed an outbuilding that was used for hay rakes and scythes and fish prongs to make a bunkroom for the stranger. The change didn’t improve the condition of either the child or the sick man, and for a time Devine’s Widow doubted herself, seeing they might both starve to death.
Jabez Trim walked out from Paradise Deep and stood in the widow’s doorway to speak with Callum. The child was still unbaptized and there was no expectation of Father Phelan returning before the capelin rolled. There was little chance of saving the infant’s life, Jabez said, but they had still to consider the soul. He was a tree stump of a man, limited in his outlook but rooted and unshakeable in his certainties. A decent sort and no sober person had ever disputed it.—I’d offer what we have on our side of the house if you have a need of me, Callum.
—What about the other one? Devine’s Widow asked.
—He’d as like be baptized already I imagine, if his kind were so inclined.
—He don’t deserve to die out in that shed like an animal, Jabez.
Jabez Trim didn’t understand what was being asked of him, though he could see the widow was at a loss and grasping.—There’s not much else I can think to give him that you haven’t tried already, Missus.
—We could bring him to Kerrivan’s Tree with the little one, she said.
Jabez glanced up at Callum to see what he thought of the bizarre suggestion but the younger man only shrugged.—If you think it might be some help, Jabez said.
The dead on the shore were wrapped in canvas or old blankets for burial, but Callum couldn’t bear the thought of settling the child so nakedly in the ground, so unsheltered. He built a tiny coffin of new spruce before the baptism, tarring the seams with oakum, and the box hung from a peg in the children’s room to await its permanent occupant. Jabez Trim performed the sacrament in the house and they walked with their neighbours to the far side of the Gut where Kerrivan’s Tree stood. Lizzie carried the child while James Woundy and Callum carted the stranger on the fish barrow, James insisting on taking the head.—I’ll not stand below that asshole again, he said.
The apple tree was marked with a rock fence, the bare branches hanging low and reaching nearly to the circumference of stones. Sarah Kerrivan brought the sapling from Ireland a hundred years before but it had never produced more than crabapples too sour to eat. Last year’s frostbitten fruit still lay on the ground where it had fallen months before. The tree would long ago have been cut down but for the fact that Sarah Kerrivan and her husband William were never sick a day in their lives, sailing unafflicted through the outbreaks of cholera and measles and diphtheria that burned through the shore. Their transcendental health conferred an aura of blessedness on everything in their possession, including the tree Sarah had carted across the ocean. Every infant born in the Gut and many born in Paradise Deep during the last half century had been passed through its branches to ward off the worst of what the world could do to a child—typhoid and beriberi, fevers, convulsions, ruptures, chincoughs, rickets. No one considered youngsters properly christened until they had travelled that circle.
It was a ritual usually carried out with laughter and shouted blessings, but there was only a melancholy silence among the gather
ing as the sick infant made his way over their heads. Mary Tryphena stood outside the low stone fence with Devine’s Widow, watching Callum and Lizzie weep as if the child were passing from their hands directly into the hands of the dead. And then the awkward negotiation of the white-haired stranger among the branches, the man so much like an infant in his mute helplessness. Skin the white of sea ice. The fish barrow caught up on an angle that threatened to topple the stranger onto the ground and he had to be held by the shoulders while they disentangled his sickbed, the men shouting at one another and swearing. It seemed a travesty of something sacred and Lizzie walked away with the baby newly christened Michael in her arms. When the barrow was extricated from the maze of branches, the nameless man was carried back to his shed and set down on his bunk, Devine’s Widow sitting silent in the doorway to keep him company. To watch him die, is how she spoke of it afterwards, a note of satisfied wonder in her voice, to say how impossible it is to predict the direction events will run.
The summer that followed was uncharacteristically warm and dry and Kerrivan’s Tree produced apples sweet enough to eat for the first time in its purgatorial century on the shore.
It was a month after the baptism before Father Phelan showed his face, coming to the widow woman’s house before anyone made their way to the Rooms on the landwash to start the day’s work. Devine’s Widow and Lizzie sat at the table with Callum, the kettle boiling over the dark fire, a single tallow candle making a cave of the room.—Come in Father, Callum said.—We were just about to say the rosary.
—You’re a shocking liar, Callum Devine.
Devine’s Widow said, We’ve been looking out for you, Father.
—Only just made it in, he said.
It was Father Phelan’s habit to arrive at night and no one knew how he managed his journeys, whether he travelled by land or sea. There were no roads anywhere on the shore but the Tolt Road and the rough paths to freshwater ponds and berry barrens in the backcountry. It was impossible to credit he walked the distances he claimed through wild country and less likely again that he went alone by boat around a coast as savage and unpredictable.
—How did you find your way back to us this time, Father? Callum asked.
—By the grace of God, the priest said.
He’d travelled over half the world as a boy before taking religious instruction. He often spoke of his time in the West Indies and the Sandwich Islands and in Africa and no one understood why he had given up the warmth, the trees laden with fruit, the women lolling nearly naked on the beaches, for a place where his trials were eclipsed only by those of Job. The Catholic Church and its practices were outlawed when he first came to Newfoundland and Phelan heard confessions in safe houses on the southern shore of the Avalon, celebrated clandestine Masses in the fishing rooms of Harbour Grace and Carbonear, offered the sacraments and last rites in the kitchens and bedrooms of the Irish scattered the length of the coast. He’d escaped arrest by the English a dozen times, once by slipping down the hole of an outhouse while soldiers searched a parishioner’s home thirty feet away. He told the story with a kind of manic glee, how he stood up to his knees in shit, praying that none of the English be taken by the call of nature.
Devine’s Widow thought him a fool and made no secret of her opinion. But she knew years on the coast without liturgy or sacraments and was happy for those comforts now, despite the package they arrived in. Father Phelan claimed she was the only person in the new world he lived in fear of, which she dismissed as base flattery.—You’d be a half-decent priest if you gave up the drinking and whoring, she told him.
—Half-decent, he said, wouldn’t be worth the sacrifice.
He was lean and mercurial and abrupt, the sort of man you could imagine slipping through an outhouse hole when circumstances required it. He was fond of quoting the most outrageous or scandalous confessions from his recent travels, he named names and locations, adulteries and sexual proclivities and blasphemies. He had no sense of shame and it was this quality that marked him as a man of God in the eyes of his parishioners.
—I hear you’ve blessed the house with another Devine, the priest said.
—He’s sound asleep back there, Father, Callum said.—Not a peep out of him all night.
They spoke English for Lizzie’s sake. She had enough Irish to discipline her youngsters and make love to her husband but lost her way in any conversation more general. She got up to fetch the infant from the children’s room and Mary Tryphena climbed out of bed to join the adults around the table.
—Let me look at you, the priest said, holding her by the wrists and leaning back to take her in all at once. Her face pale and sunken and the eyes dark with congenital hunger.—Is she spoken for yet?
Mary Tryphena pulled both hands clear.—No, she said.
—Now I’m not asking you to marry me, girl.
Callum said, We were thinking she might take communion this visit, Father.
—Well now. That’s a step no smaller than marriage.
—Stop trying to scare the girl, Devine’s Widow said.
Mary Tryphena watched the steady flame of the candle on the table, pretending to ignore the conversation, and the priest obliged her by turning his attention to the infant. He made the sign of the cross and offered a blessing.
—Jabez baptized him, I understand.
—We thought we were going to lose him, Father.
—Jabez Trim is a good man.
—I see you got the news from Mrs. Gallery, Devine’s Widow said.
Father Phelan nodded, the habitual blankness of his face unperturbed.—I managed to slip in for an hour’s rest when I got here.
—And how’s Mr. Gallery?
—I keep expecting him gone every time I come back. But so far, not. And he haven’t changed one jot all these years. Still won’t make confession.
—It might be him not being Catholic, Lizzie said, smiling into her bowl.
—That haven’t stopped others, Mrs. Devine. And not a one of those in the same need as Mr. Gallery. How are the fish this year, Callum?
—Please God we won’t starve, Father. That’s as much as can be said for the fish.
They carried on with the old introductory conversation awhile to settle back into relations as they stood when the priest left the shore months before.
—Is it true now, Father Phelan said, what Mrs. Gallery tells me about your sea orphan?
—Depends what it is she’s told you, Devine’s Widow said.
—White as the driven snow, she says he is.
—And the fiercest stench on him, Father, Lizzie said.—Would make your hair curl to smell it.
—You saw him born of the fish, Missus?
Devine’s Widow nodded.—Delivered him from the guts myself.
Callum took a breath, half afraid to speak.—Is it God wanting to tell us something, do you think?
—God give up talking to such as we a long time ago, the priest said.
Devine’s Widow stood up from her chair.—I’ll take you out to him, Father.
Mary Tryphena slipped off Callum’s lap and followed them along the side of the house. The stranger seemed to glow in the dark of his windowless shed. He was half sitting with his back to the corner, a square of canvas pulled to his waist as a blanket, watching them with the indolence of a creature that’s spent all its days tied to a stake.
—Is he a Catholic, do you know? the priest asked.
—He’s neither fish nor fowl, this one. But he could use a blessing, Father.
Phelan stepped into the fog of the tiny room. He leaned over the man, made the sign of the cross and prayed awhile in Latin. He took a brass vial from an inner pocket and anointed the white forehead with oil. He came back into the open air and shook his head to clear it.—Mrs. Gallery says there’s some would gladly have that creature drowned in Nigger Ralph’s Pond.
—There’s some would gladly have you drowned in Nigger Ralph’s Pond, Father.
The priest turned to Mary Tryphen
a.—Your grandmother is a miserable witch, do you know? He closed the door of the shed without saying another word to the man inside.—I’ll hear your confessions now. Callum will want to be getting out on the water.
Mary Tryphena still thinking about the man’s skin, the shimmer of it, his face like the flame of a candle you could snuff between your fingers.
——
Callum crewed a half-shallop with Daniel and James Woundy, an open boat decked at both ends, with twenty foot of keel. There was a poor sign of fish again that summer, and the men travelled further and further along the coastline and out into the Atlantic to search for them. They left hours before daylight and rowed ten or twelve miles into the currents, as far as the Skerries or Monks Ledge or Wester Shoals, where they drifted with hook and line over the gunwales, waiting.
They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.
It was true that a cod would swallow any curiosity that strayed by its nose and a motley assortment of materials had come to hand in the process of gutting them over the years. Lost jiggers and leather gloves and foreign coins, a porcelain hat brooch. A razor strop and half a bottle of Jamaica rum, a pinchbeck belt buckle, a silver snuff box, a ball that King-me claimed was used for a game called lawn tennis in France. The prize above all others was Jabez Trim’s Bible, recovered from the gullet of a cod the size of a goat. It was bound in a tight leather case but the pages were wet and stuck to one another and it took months of careful work to separate the leaves. There were portions so distorted by their soaking they were barely legible, but for many years it was all they had of the Word of the Lord among them.
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