Callum was watching his daughter’s face as he rowed her toward her wedding. She seemed strangely serene for a girl who only hours earlier had no notion of marrying Judah, of sharing a bed with a man. He wanted to offer her a blessing or some encouragement, as Mrs. Gallery had, but he was too ashamed to open his mouth. Jabez Trim’s story of Abraham and Isaac was in his mind and he felt himself playing out the scene himself now, about to sacrifice his own child with no hint of a reprieve at hand. Callum held the pilings to keep the boat steady underneath the fishing room, the shimmer of Jude’s face appearing at the offal hole as if he’d been expecting them. Father Phelan lifted Mary Tryphena through the hole and dragged himself up behind her, then reached back through to take the hands of the old woman.
Callum waited in the darkness there, the whispered ceremony performed overhead by the light of a single candle. The priest and Devine’s Widow climbed down to the boat when it was done and they left the newlyweds to their first night together. The light of the candle was visible in the room’s one tiny window as Callum rowed away. He helped his mother climb up onto Jabez Trim’s wharf and glanced back across the harbour one last time but by then the light was out.
Lizzie was already in bed when they got home, lying with her face to the wall. Callum placed a hand on her back as he climbed in beside her, his palm snug between the shoulder blades. He sang softly in the black, a song about his love for a dark-haired girl, as Lizzie wept silently, each shudder travelling the length of Callum’s arm.—She’ll never have this, Lizzie whispered when he was done.—Not as long as she lives, Callum.
—Hush Lizzie, he said. But he knew exactly what she meant and he was awake all night with the thought.
Devine’s Widow lay sleepless likewise, thinking of her long-dead husband, preoccupied with his memory for the first time since Callum married. The image of him so vivid it made her hands shake, as if she was the one approaching her first night in a conjugal bed.
After the naval officer declared her not guilty of all King-me’s charges and ordered her released from custody she walked the path back toward the Tolt. She felt ill at ease for all she’d seen Sellers put in his place, thinking it was impossible to make a life for herself in the man’s shadow. As she crested the Tolt she saw the Irish youngster who’d stood witness against her sitting with his legs dangling over the cliff edge. A moment of black fury rising in her throat, seeing how easy it would be to send him headlong to the rocks below.—You’re not thinking of jumping, are you? she asked finally and he started at her voice. He was lank and bone, a boy of fifteen who shaved twice a week and sang at his work and by his own report had been drunk only once in his life. Patrick Devine.—I can’t go back to Master Sellers now, he said, on the verge of tears.—He’ll throw me out.
The boy was three years her junior, an orphan indentured to the fishery by his parish church in Cork. He had nothing to his name, much as herself. And there was something in that arrangement she found to her liking. She said, You knows how to fish do you, Paddy Devine?
He looked at her as if she’d spoken some bushborn nonsense.
—Would you have a woman in the boat with you?
—I got neither boat, he said.
—One bloody thing at a time, she told him.
They walked together into the Gut and he kipped down in her one-room tilt, crouched in a corner like a stray dog. There was only the one bunk along the back wall and that night she undressed there while he watched what he could in the gloom. She stood before him naked.—We got nothing now, she said, but what we can make together. She could hear him breathing in the dark and he stood up from his seat finally. She said, You don’t come over to me unless you plan on staying, Paddy Devine.
There was a long moment’s hesitation as he worked through the implications. He said, Are you really a witch then?
—That’s no way to ask for a woman’s hand, she said.
He felt his way across the room to lay with her, led by his lack of options or led by his cock, she still didn’t know which. The time would come soon enough when he could make her wet with a word in her ear, lift her hips from the bed with the lightest brush of a finger, but that first night was brevity and discomfort and doubt, to have the youngster on her and rutting like a dog humping a leg, followed by an awful stretch of silence, both of them sleepless and terrified.
—So we’re married then? the boy said finally.
Devine’s Widow already working through the obstacles ahead, getting wood cut and dried for their boat, convincing King-me to front them credit for the summer fishery. The opportunity to ruin them completely if they had a poor season was the only angle she could imagine might work.—I expect we are married, she said distractedly.—You and me.
And he must have felt obligated to make an offering of some sort.—I love you, Missus, he whispered.
—Shut up Paddy, she said.
——
Callum was first out of the bed before light the next morning and he and the old woman walked back over the Tolt before the stars disappeared. They rowed across the harbour where Mary Tryphena waited for them at the offal hole and Callum dropped both women on the stretch of shoreline where Judah’s whale had surrendered itself, the bones of the creature bleaching white among the beach grass. Devine’s Widow walked with the girl to Selina’s House then, Absalom answering the door when they knocked at the servant’s entrance. He nodded to them both.—Hello Mary Tryphena, he said.
—We need to speak with your mother, Devine’s Widow said, and they waited there while Absalom went to fetch her. Selina holding the door only halfways open to watch them, her ancient child’s face apprehensive, resigned.—This here is your grandchild, Devine’s Widow said.
—I know it.
—You ought also to know she is married to Judah Devine.
Selina stared at Mary Tryphena while she processed the information and the girl looked away at the outbuildings.—Is this true, Mary?
She nodded.—Yes ma’am.
—Are you? Selina cleared her throat.—Are you?
—She is, Devine’s Widow said with more certainty than she felt.—And Master Sellers will have them haul the father of her child off to some foreign country and hang him. Leave her a widow before she gives birth.
Selina slammed the door shut before another word was spoken and Mary Tryphena looked at her grandmother. She was thinking of Absalom hearing the news of her marriage inside, of the odd fact he hadn’t stuttered over her name when he said hello.—Am I pregnant then? she asked.
—It doesn’t matter, child, Devine’s Widow said.—We’ll just hope for the best.
{ 3 }
KING-ME SELLERS REMAINED A BACHELOR years after proposing to the Irish servant girl who eventually became known as Devine’s Widow. The condition had long since taken on an air of permanence the fall he closed up his tilt and sailed for Poole to find a wife. His one previous proposal in the New World made him feel safer testing the waters across the pond and he spent the winter keeping company with the eligible daughters of merchant families. He told no one his intentions before he left and none who knew the man could have pictured the taciturn bit of misery attending teas and fashionable dances and engaging in stilted small talk with young women regardless.
He asked permission of Selina Moore’s father over a checkerboard and a glass of brandy on Shrove Tuesday. They settled on an April wedding and the newlyweds sailed for Newfoundland through wild spring weather, the masts and sails encased in ice by freezing rain mid-crossing and the weight nearly capsized the vessel. Wind and lightning and St. Elmo’s fire in the rigging two days short of St. John’s and not a word of complaint from Selina the entire journey.
King-me fathered three children in the next five years, a girl, and two sons to carry on the trade he was building. The children arrived healthy and they were intelligent, curious creatures, affectionate with one another and as well behaved as a parent had a right to expect. Selina taught them to read and write and do their sums in
the main room of their stud tilt until the spring she took to her bed and insisted on the completion of her wedding home. Lizzie was six when they moved into Selina’s House, a fireplace in each room, cod-oil lamps fixed to the walls of the hallways. Every spring that followed, the children performed an Easter drama in the parlour for their parents and a handful of friends and servants, a three-act opus penned by Lizzie which she revised and refined each winter in consultation with Jabez Trim and his Bible.
In the spring of Lizzie’s twelfth year, John Tom White convinced her parents the play should be performed for the entire community. John Tom was a Harbour Grace man who’d shifted to Paradise Deep after losing his wife to a chimney fire. He worked for Sellers as a culler, assessing and grading the quality of salt fish brought in each fall by the crews on the shore. He bragged often of the seasonal entertainments in Harbour Grace—skits and songs and recitations in the church hall— and he felt Paradise Deep was in sore need of the same. King-me had no interest in the children’s play or songs and skits, but the lack John Tom pointed to pricked at his pride. He had the store that once served as a courtroom set up as a theatre, barrels and tools shifted along one wall and an old mizzen-sail hung for a curtain at the far end. Selina helped Lizzie sew costumes, and word made its way along the shore that an entertainment was to be seen at Spurriers’ Rooms at the end of Lent.
The whole affair promised to be grander than anything the playwright imagined for her creation. She slept poorly for weeks ahead and anticipation kept her awake most of the night before the performance. An audience of fifty souls crowded into the building and the show went off without a hitch until Mary the Mother of God approached the empty tomb on Easter morning and young Harry Sellers appeared as the angel bearing news of Christ’s resurrection. The play’s climax was Mary’s poem of thanksgiving recited upon her knees and Lizzie fainted dead away three parts through, her head lolling back mid-word and her body slumping to the floor. The audience thought her swoon part of the show until the angel began screaming at the top of his lungs. Even after being shaken awake Lizzie’s arms were limp and her eyes vacant and once she came to herself she was unable to explain her brief absence. She was aware of the room and the crowd, she said, but couldn’t move or speak. The spells continued in the months that followed, the girl dropping asleep as she brushed her hair or ate or laughed with her brothers. People were divided as to the cause, some suggesting the theatre was a sinful institution and a provocation to God, while others considered the girl possessed by some spirit in need of casting out.
John Tom White came to King-me with the opinion there was a widow’s hand to blame, that someone had set the old hag on the girl. John Tom was a walking aphorism with a rhyme for every ripple in the weather, a charm for any ailment. Seven knots in a piece of string worn on your wrist to cure toothache. A potato carried in a pocket to relieve rheumatism. “If the wind’s in the east on Candlemas Day, there it will stick till the end of May.” It was the queerest case he’d ever seen of someone hag-ridden, he said, coming on so sudden in the middle of the day, and there had to be a witch at the root of it. King-me turned his face away and nodded.
—You wants to set things straight, he said, you got to put a bottle up, Master Sellers.
King-me pissed into a glass bottle and he stuck nine virgin pins in the cork as John Tom instructed.
—That’ll block the witch’s water up, John Tom said and he hung the bottle in the fireplace to set the liquid to simmer.—She’ll come around now the once, he said, begging to be relieved of that.
But the bottle boiled mad and shattered over the flames and a second bottle burst the same. King-me was hesitant to repeat the procedure a third time. John Tom had him place the bottle away from the heat in a corner of the pantry where the liquid came to a boil regardless and King-me smashed the works on the flagstones of the fireplace.
John Tom stared at the mess, running a hand in circles over the bald pate of his head.—You know who it is we’re working against, Master Sellers?
—Never mind, King-me said.
—There’s one way to escape the sleep hag, John Tom said, has nothing to do with the witch. You hammers nails through a shingle and sleeps with it on your breast. When the old hag comes to pin you to your bed, he said, she squats down on the nails and the fright drives her off.
For the better part of a month Lizzie was forced to wear a board of nails hung round her neck all hours of the day and night. She thought of it as a leper’s bell, a physical manifestation of her humiliation, and she refused to be seen wearing it. Eventually Selina threw the contraption into the fireplace. But by then Lizzie had developed an outcast’s habits, disappearing in the nooks and crannies of the house, slipping into the woods above the Gaze or out as far as the French Cemetery, solitude her only relief from the affliction that had stolen her life.
Occasionally she went past the cemetery to Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Except for the African who’d built a tilt near the waterline and worked there as a tinker, the Pond was quiet, too far a walk to be useful for water or washing. Lizzie pushed through the skirt of alders on the shoreline opposite the black man’s property, wading the shallows to catch spanny-tickles in her palms. Ralph Stone never paid the slightest attention to her there and it became her favourite excursion when the weather was decent. She spent hours sitting out of sight across the Pond for the sensation of being completely alone and still enjoying the company of the man pottering across the water.
She knew almost nothing about Ralph Stone. Callum Devine and Daniel Woundy came upon a lifeboat in a bank of fog off the Rump, the black man adrift with a crew of corpses, half a dozen fellows dead of hunger and thirst after three weeks on open water without provision. He was like to have died himself, lips swollen and cracked and his eyes wild, refusing the food and water offered him and carrying on a conversation with his dead companions as the boat was towed into the Gut. On his back by the fireplace, he was fed broth through a cloth tit until he could stomach solid food. Devine’s Widow thought his skin burnt or scorched black by the sun and for several days she covered him in a Jerseyman salve of Sea Doctors crushed and mixed with cod-liver oil before trying to scrub him clean with ashes and soap. He stared up at her on the third day, enough in his mind by then to see what she was about.—It won’t wash, Missus, he whispered. His name was Ralph Stone, he told her, and were his mates all right, the ones in the boat with him?
No one ever learned where exactly the man belonged, only that he’d sailed the tall ships from his earliest years and had seen the world half a dozen times over. His vessel went down in a storm eleven days out of Portugal and the men in the lifeboat died before his eyes, one by one. For days he had only corpses for company, facing them from the bow while they stared at him like an expectant congregation. His friends. Their faces every hour growing more tortured, more accusing.
He lost his nerve for the ocean after the rescue, refusing to leave the shore and going so far as to build on a piece of land out of sight of the sea altogether. He depended on the charity of others for a time, subsisting on cods’ heads and potatoes and wild berries and pond trout. Within two years he was cobbling a living with the cod-oil lamps he built in a tiny workshed and peddled door to door. Half the houses on the shore were lit by the work of his hands and eventually King-me Sellers shipped the lamps for sale in shops from Bonavista to Harbour Grace to St. John’s.
There were some who thought his blackness a sign of defilement or witchery and turned their backs at the sight of him. But he was easy to laugh and had more stories of exotic locales than Father Phelan, which made him good company. He kept to himself out at the Pond where the few who counted him a friend could seek him out. He lived in a tilt so poorly constructed a permanent maze of cups and bowls were laid out to catch the rain that sieved through the roof. The single table and chair and his low bed built with board salvaged from the lifeboat that carried him ashore.
Lizzie never laid eyes on him before her excursions to the Pond. F
rom across the water she couldn’t make out his face or any features besides the remarkable cast of his skin. If the wind was right she could hear him singing snatches of hymns or drinking songs. She felt herself completely invisible to him and she began sneaking closer to his property to test the illusion. Gold rings in the lobes of both ears, a pale scar on one temple where the tight curls of his hair no longer grew, a missing front tooth like an open doorway.
He was much smaller than her imagination made him out to be from a distance, and older besides. He did little more than tinker out of view in his shop or crawl around on the roof of the tilt to stop up the most insistent leaks, all the while repeating the same three lines of a song.—Some marry for riches, the proud haughty way, some marry for beauty, the flower will decay, but if e’er I get married. He stopped there, seeming not to know how or why he would marry, and skipped back to the head of the verse in an endless loop.
She’d all but decided to give up her game the day he left his workshed, shirtless and walking straight for the spruce bushes where she was hiding. A disgruntled look on his dark face. She jumped to her feet, stars pinging across her vision. He stopped at the trees then and took his cock from his pants to piss.
When she woke from the spell of sleep Lizzie was in his arms and being carted at a run down the slope of the Tolt Road into the Gut. He was slick with sweat, out of breath and whispering some disjointed story about his mother and father, as if trying to keep her entertained during the trip. The strange paralysis that followed in the wake of her sleep made it impossible to nod or call out or ask where she was being taken before he pushed through a door and laid her on a table in front of the widow woman.—She’s not dead is she, Missus? he asked.—Tell me she isn’t dead.
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