He rubbed his temples with both fists, still uncertain where he was. He stood up straight and held the table to steady himself.—All right, he said.
But Martin Gallery was taken with the notion his wife carried another man’s child and even stone sober it grew in his mind. Virtue lost her patience with his sullenness and silence and she ignored him as best she could. The child was all she thought of. Their child. The baby’s arrival, which she prayed would bring her husband back to himself.
His mood darkened with the first incontrovertible signs of the pregnancy, as if the distended belly and swollen breasts proved his worst suspicions correct. He drank next the fire every evening as winter descended and Virtue stayed in the bedroom to avoid his accusations. When he went out to find drinking company she barred the door and Gallery spent a portion of the early mornings screaming at his wife and her secret lover locked away in the house that he’d built with his own hands.
It was no secret that Martin Gallery was terrorizing his wife during his binges, accusing her of infidelities, threatening to take the lives of Virtue and any man he found in her bed. Jabez Trim once tried to talk some sense to him and succeeded only in placing himself first on the list of Gallery’s suspects, so most people avoided the couple altogether. The mummers passed by without calling at the house in the droke that Christmas season and Gallery drank most often with Saul Toucher who treated Gallery’s drunken tirades as a bit of harmless theatre. Names of possible adulterers were discussed at length, scenarios which placed particular men in Mrs. Gallery’s company were explored. They agreed there was no man on the shore above suspicion, no woman alive who could be trusted completely. Saul’s wife was still nursing the new triplets.—How do you know for certain, Gallery asked, those children are your own?
Saul pointed out the cleft of his chin, as prominent as the cheeks of a baby’s arse.—They all got the same, he said.
Gallery shook his head. Even that seemed flimsy evidence to inspire so much confidence.
Sheila Woundy’s husband found Gallery passed out in a snowbank one January morning on his way into the backcountry after firewood with Daniel and James. He would have walked by the man in the predawn light if his wood dog hadn’t stuck his head off the path, his tail wagging furiously. Elias Fennessey couldn’t call his dog off whatever had its attention and when he tried to drag the animal back onto the trail he discovered Martin Gallery half-frozen in the bush, hair and eyebrows white with frost.
They strapped a length of twine under his armpits and the Newfoundland dragged him out the Tolt Road to his house in the droke. Elias knocked at the barred door, calling for Mrs. Gallery, and together they shifted him inside and set him near the fireplace, stoking the fire until it roared. Elias didn’t want to leave Virtue alone with her frozen husband and he sent Daniel and James on into the woods with the dog, saying he’d catch them up later in the morning.
When Gallery’s eyes opened an hour later he looked at Elias a moment before nodding his head in recognition.—Mr. Woundy, he whispered.
Elias was a widower himself when he wed Sheila Woundy. She had married into his name, but the change never took on the shore. Their only son, James, had been christened Fennessey but was commonly known by his mother’s surname. Even Elias was referred to as Mr. Woundy and he was too old to take offence. He nodded back at Gallery.—You give us some fright, he said.—Thought you was a dead man.
Gallery looked around the room until his eyes settled on his wife in a chair near the table.—Mrs. Gallery, he said.
Virtue was almost five months pregnant when Gallery killed Elias Fennessey, setting on the man as he walked to the outhouse in the early hours of the morning. Gallery slit his throat from ear to ear with a fish knife that had been stropped to a razor edge, then walked the Tolt Road to his own home, the blood on his cuffs freezing solid in the cold. The door was barred and he climbed onto the roof to lower himself down the wooden flue into the blackened fireplace. He caught Virtue as she was shifting the chair from the door to run, dragging her back into the room by the hair, slashing at her with the knife. He pinned her to the floor until she exhausted herself and lay still.—Please, she said.—Don’t hurt the baby.
—I killed him, Virtue, just as I promised I would.
—I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said.—You’re drunk.
Gallery raised himself a little higher as if trying to get a better look at her in the near dark and he spat full into her face. He said, I killed the father of your bastard child.
Virtue turned her head away.—If that were true you’d be a dead man, Martin Gallery, and the world would be better for it.
Daniel Woundy came for Callum as soon as Elias’s body was discovered and they gathered half a dozen others to go after the murderer. They went straight to the house in the droke where the door stood open and Virtue lay as pale as sea ice on the floor inside. It was the bitter cold or blind luck that saved her bleeding to death when Gallery lost his certainty or his nerve, leaving her where she was, slashed at the neck and chest.
Virtue hovered near death awhile. Devine’s Widow replaced her dressings morning and evening, inspecting the state of the rough stitches she’d sewn in with needle and thread.
—The baby, Virtue whispered each time she opened her eyes.—The baby isn’t moving, Missus. I don’t feel him moving.
Devine’s Widow pinned Virtue to the bed against her panic, trying to keep the stitches in place.—The child is dead, she told her.
Gallery was found floating under Spurriers’ premises in the harbour a week after Elias was killed. He’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves before throwing himself into the ocean and had been dead in the water a long time. But his two hands were still black with soot.
Virtue birthed the tiny corpse on the eve of Valentine’s Day and she spent the long months of convalescence in her room off the kitchen in Selina’s House. Absalom Sellers was nearly seven years old and appointed himself Virtue’s nursemaid, bringing her water and clearing away her dishes and emptying her honeypot in the mornings. He knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding Virtue’s injuries and that particular silence was so familiar to him he thought for a time she might be his mother. The boy was never let alone outside Selina’s House, held apart from the larger community of Paradise Deep to spare him stumbling upon the details of his parents’ deaths. The slight stutter he’d always suffered multiplied in his isolation, like mould invading an abandoned house, and Virtue fell in love with the boy’s articulate reticence, his refusal to ask the first question about her torment. He made a habit of bringing her gifts, a piece of sea glass or an eagle feather or a finger of polished driftwood, and they carried on a subtle exchange after she took up her duties as housekeeper, placing scavenged presents in one another’s path through the house. They each found a salve for their separate losses in the other and as the months passed it looked as if they might escape their individual nightmares together.
After the first anniversary of Elias’s death Virtue began catching sight of her dead husband as she made her way to the henhouse to collect eggs in the morning, sitting in the highest branches of a tree to peer in the second-floor windows, occupying the darkest corners of a room beyond the reach of Ralph Stone’s lamps. She thought she was losing her mind until other servants began telling stories of a stranger on the property who couldn’t be seen but in glimpses, and eventually they refused to work alone in the barns or step outside their own shacks after dark. Two Irish youngsters in their first year of service woke to find Gallery standing at the foot of their bed one morning and they lit out for the Gut without putting on their boots.
Virtue went to Selina’s bedroom to speak to her in private that afternoon, Selina at her dressing table watching Virtue mirrored over her shoulder.—I thought you were happy here, Virtue.
—It’s not that, ma’am.
—Well where do you plan to go?
—There’s the house, she said.—In the droke.
—Don�
��t talk such nonsense, Virtue.
—I won’t be the cause of him harming another soul, ma’am.
—Who are you talking about?
—Mr. Gallery.
Selina turned in her chair to see the woman true.—Your husband?
—Yes ma’am.
There was a noise overhead and they both looked to the ceiling.—What is that? Selina whispered. She stood from her chair and reached a hand to hold the housekeeper’s arm.—Virtue? she said.
Mr. Gallery’s feet and legs came through the ceiling first, dangling there a moment before he came crashing through thatch and plaster and landed on the bed in a cloud of debris, a wash of soot drifting out of the fireplace. Selina screamed and ran from the room, shouting the Devil himself had come through her ceiling. Virtue stood where she was, watching her dead husband stand amid the plaster dust. He was thinner than she remembered and there was something nearly opaque about his face, as if the light from the window at his back passed through him.—What do you want? she asked finally, but he refused to look at her, only stood with his head bowed like a servant awaiting instruction.
Virtue went downstairs to pack her few things in the room off the kitchen and left Selina’s House for a second time, walking across Paradise Deep to the stud tilt that had been sitting empty more than a year. Those who witnessed it swore they saw the figure of Mr. Gallery following at a distance and disappearing behind her when the door of the house in the droke was closed.
Jabez Trim made a visit the following day, holding his leather-bound Bible to his chest like a shield. He couldn’t bring himself to step over the threshold and he called to her from the doorway.—Everything all right here, Mrs. Gallery?
Virtue was in the tiny pantry where she’d been washing dishes unused since she left and setting them back on the shelves. The place was dilapidated and damp from sitting empty so long, broken panes in its one window. The fire burning in the fireplace had barely touched the chill of the place. In the gloom he could see Mr. Gallery huddling as close to the dog irons as a chair could be set.—Mrs. Gallery?
She came out to him, wiping her wet hands on her apron. He looked down at his shoes and whispered, not wanting to be overheard by the figure near the fire.—We’ve just been wondering, Mrs. Sellers most especially and the little one, Absalom. We were all of us fearful for your safety.
—A year too late for that I’d say, Mr. Trim.
Jabez nodded and motioned with the Bible in his arms.—Is there anything can be done for you, Mrs. Gallery?
She turned to look directly at her husband.—Can you send this one to hell?
—Would I was at liberty to make such arrangements, he said.—What is it the creature wants of you?
—I would have thought you might be able to tell me such things, she said.—You and that Book of yours.
—I am the dullest instrument of the Lord, Mrs. Gallery, and that’s the sorry fact of the matter. You don’t plan to stay here?
—You can ask Mrs. Sellers to send along what wages she owes me, Virtue said and then held up her hand to ask Jabez to wait, disappearing into the bedroom. She came back, folding a coil of jet-black hair into a square of cloth.—This is for Absalom, she said.—Tell him I meant him to have it when he was older. And Mr. Trim, she said.—If you could find a private moment to pass it on.
Jabez nodded and turned the strange gift over in his hand.—You’ve precious little wood to keep that fire, he told her.
—Whatever you can offer, she said, I’d be grateful.
The charity of the communities kept her fed and provided enough fuel to heat the house but no one came near the droke other than to drop potatoes or salt cod or a turn of wood in the clearing outside the door. Absalom Sellers occasionally escaped his grandparents long enough to place a keepsake on the window frame or at the door of the outhouse, and that single sign of affection was all Virtue had to sustain herself. Mr. Gallery was seen at times perched like an owl on the roof of the house and people occasionally crossed paths with him on the trails in the backcountry, though he took no note of other travellers, muttering fiercely to himself as if in argument with the universe itself. They crossed themselves or whispered the Twenty-third Psalm and walked as quickly as they could in the opposite direction.
Father Phelan spent Lent and the holy days of Easter in other parts of the country and it wasn’t until the Labrador pack ice moved past the coast and the first buds appeared on Kerrivan’s apple tree that he came back to them. Jabez Trim searched him out as soon as he heard word of his return, tracking him down at the widow’s home. The priest had a weakness for stories of hauntings and unclean spirits and ritual exorcisms, recounting them in all their arcane and nauseating detail. He was full of questions for Jabez, wanting to know what Mr. Gallery was wearing when he saw him and if his features appeared changed and what language he spoke.
—No language what can be made out, Father.
—You buried him, Jabez.
—Myself and Callum there, we dug the grave away out past Nigger Ralph’s Pond where no one would have to look on it. Never left a stick of wood or a stone for a marker.
Lizzie said, He’s out there looking for his grave is what he’s doing, wandering all over God’s creation like that.
—Hush Lizzie, Callum whispered. He considered it bad luck even to speak of the man and wished the conversation were going on in someone else’s house. Mary Tryphena was in his lap and he leaned down to hum a tune into the child’s ears, as if it might protect her from the conversation.
The priest turned to Devine’s Widow.—You’ve an opinion on this, Missus.
—He wants something of that woman, I’d say. And there’s no one else alive or dead can give it to him.
—Do you not know what to do, Father? Lizzie asked.
—The dead are more like mortal creatures than we know, he said.—Each one rises to a different bait.
The priest set out early the next morning and walked to the house in the droke. Mrs. Gallery didn’t get up from the table, calling him in from where she sat. Her husband occupied his usual chair by the fire, huddling close to the flames, as if against a draft.
—He’s forever cold, Mrs. Gallery said.—I think sometimes he might sit his arse right in the fire to try and get warm.
—There’s fire galore awaiting him elsewhere, Father Phelan said.—Does he talk to you at all?
—He talks only to himself. And I can’t pick out a word of it.
The priest sat at the table and watched the two awhile. It was difficult to say which of them looked lonelier or more forlorn.—Why do you think he’s here, Mrs. Gallery?
She slammed a hand on the table and even the ghost startled in his chair by the fire.—Isn’t it your job to tell me such things, Father?
He smiled at her.—I don’t want to tell you what you already know, is all.
—I won’t forgive him, she said.—May he burn in hell, I won’t.
The priest walked across to the figure by the fire, crouching to look up into the face.—Would you like to make confession, Mr. Gallery? he said, but the spectre’s mouth only went on working at its indecipherable monologue.—It’s not forgiveness he’s after, Father Phelan said.
—Well what then?
—It seems to me, Mrs. Gallery, your husband thinks you know exactly what.
They fucked on the dirt floor beside the fireplace, Mrs. Gallery’s skirts hauled to her waist, the priest’s black cassock unbuttoned and his drawers at his feet, and the woman’s dead husband kicked at the fireplace crane to drown the feral noise of them together, the cast iron clanging like a church bell, his stricken face raised to the ceiling.
—I thought he’d come to kill me, Virtue said afterwards.—To finish what he’d left unfinished.
—He’s not here to hurt any but himself, the priest said, watching her straighten her skirts matter-of-factly, as if she were laying a tablecloth for dinner.—It may be a long penance he’s after, Mrs. Gallery.
—I’ve no
pressing obligation elsewhere, she said.
Father Phelan visited the house every morning and led Virtue through the most varied and perverse acts of love his years of lechery had taught him. Her husband’s ghost a tortured witness to it all. Virtue sat over Phelan’s cock to take the length of it inside her, reaching behind to cup his balls in her hand.—He used to call you a dirty mick priest, Father.
—Oh sweet Jesus, Phelan whispered.
—Said he’d cut off your nuts if you laid a finger on me.
—Oh Christ help us.
The ghost appeared to weep at times, though the tears were dark as soot on his face.
No one was privy to the goings-on at the house in the droke, though there was plenty of speculation about the rituals being performed to rid Mrs. Gallery of the cross her husband had become. Father Phelan was uncharacteristically reticent about the details, though he stayed longer than was his custom. After two months of parading the basest carnal pleasure before Mr. Gallery, Father Phelan asked again if he wished to make confession, but the spectre simply muttered in refusal. —He’s a stubborn devil, the priest told Virtue.—It could be years of this ahead of us.
—I trust I can count on you to fulfill your ecclesiastical duties.
—I am the Lord’s servant, he said, and he paused at the door. He said, It’s hard to fault your husband wanting to keep you to himself, Mrs. Gallery.
—He had me to himself, she said.
From that visit forward, the priest stayed at the house in the droke whenever he was on the shore and no one doubted a match of some sort had been made between Father Phelan and Virtue. They were never seen together outside the house, but to Mary Tryphena Devine and every child born after her, Mrs. Gallery was “the priest’s woman.” And Mr. Gallery took his place in a crowded netherworld the youngsters came to know as well as their own, a realm populated by charms for fetching lovers or curing warts, by fairy lore and the old hollies which were the voices of the drowned calling out of the ocean on stormy nights. They inherited their parents’ aversion to the house in the droke, taunting Mr. Gallery as they ran past the little patch of woods or daring one another to sneak close enough to touch the door. That spectral figure on the margins of their lives seemed as ancient and abiding as the ocean itself, and generations after Gallery was sighted for the last time he occupied a dark corner in the dreams of every soul on the shore.
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