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MARY TRYPHENA DEVINE BORE A CHILD by Judah, just as Devine’s Widow told Selina she would. At the time there was no evidence to support such a claim and Mary Tryphena felt it was the old woman’s certainty that set the world in motion, as if her telling a thing somehow made it so.—You’ll marry Judah, the widow woman said to her, and that will keep him with us.
Lizzie was the only person with gall enough to oppose the old witch but she fell into one of her spells as she tried to bar the wedding party from getting through the door. While they walked over the Toit, Devine’s Widow asked the girl had she seen the rams mount the sheep or the dogs on one another. Mary Tryphena nodded uncertainly.—Man and wife, Devine’s Widow said cryptically.
Judah helped lift them through the offal hole into his prison on the waterfront and nodded in assent when prompted by the priest during the ceremony. But left alone, Judah seemed as doubtful as Mary Tryphena what should follow.—We’re married you and me, she said.—You know what that means, Jude? The smell of the man was as strong as ever, though in the company of the room’s fishy stink it seemed less oppressive. Mary Tryphena turned away finally, kneeling and lifting her skirts over her waist to present her bare backside. Judah sat motionless and she glanced back at him.—Jude, she whispered. He was chained to the floor by an ankle but managed to shuffle toward her, leaning to one side to put out the candle. Cock the size of a snail, her father used to say, and she had her own memory of him naked on the beach, Devine’s Widow lifting his prick’s tiny blue head on the blade of her knife. He was groping blindly behind her and accomplishing nothing that she could tell. Mary Tryphena reached back and latched on to what she thought was his wrist.
King-me’s cows woke to the racket carrying up from the shoreline and they kicked at their stalls, lowing mournfully while it went on. The soldier standing guard scrambled away from the door with his musket at the ready, afraid for his life. Father Phelan leaned into Mrs. Gallery’s neck as the noise rose and ebbed and rose again.—From the sound of that, he whispered, Callum must have been mistaken about the size of Judah’s blade.
Mrs. Gallery shrugged away from him.—You’re no better than a whoremaster, she said.
Events unfolded then much as Devine’s Widow predicted. The machinations at Selina’s House occurred behind closed doors and they could only guess at the arguments presented, the threats and promises made between King-me and his wife, the promises and money exchanged between King-me and Lieutenant Goudie. Sellers called court to session in short order, the charge of capital murder dropped due to insufficient evidence and Judah convicted of theft on the testimony of Captain John Withycombe. He was fined fifteen pounds sterling and taken directly from court to the public whipping post where he received thirty lashes. Devine’s Widow soaked sheets in vinegar and strapped them to his back to cover the welts and Judah slept six weeks on his stomach.
Jude moved into the tilt when Callum completed the new house at the end of that summer, though Mary Tryphena and the baby stayed under her parents’ roof. Judah seemed to have no expectation that his wife share his bed or his home but he knew Patrick for his own and doted on the child.
Mary Tryphena ignored her husband as much as possible. She was tormented by the thought that everyone on the shore knew what they’d done in the fishing room, the same as if she’d raised her skirts to him in broad daylight on the Commons. She swore at the time it would never happen again and had rarely faltered since. Once or twice a year appetite got the better of her resolve and she slipped from her parents’ house in the dead of night to call Judah outside where the open air made the smell of the man less overwhelming. The same stew of release and regret in the aftermath, creeping to her room like a thief, the buzz of simple animal pleasure pulsing through her. The last time, she swore after each lapse. The very last.
When little Patrick Devine was five years old, Father Phelan announced plans to build a Catholic sanctuary on the shore. A cathedral, he said, that would put the modest Episcopal chapel to shame.
The work involved in such an undertaking ran so hard against the grain of the man that no one took him seriously. The bishop in St. John’s was steadily carving the country into parishes, resident priests were taking up duties once the province of itinerant clergy, and Father Phelan found himself with less and less territory to cover. He was bored staying so much in one place, people said, and the church was simply idle talk.
Phelan spent hours in the company of the shore’s best boat builders and carpenters discussing naves and arches, trusses, beams, windows. He chose a plot of land on the Tolt as the church’s location.—The wind up there, Callum Devine warned him, could strip the flesh off a cow. But there were almost as many Catholics living in Paradise Deep as in the Gut by then and the priest insisted the sanctuary sit between the two.
Jabez Trim and a handful of other Episcopalians worked with the Catholic men to raise the frame in September, Mass held within the skeletal walls that first evening. And the entire structure collapsed in a gale of wind before the roof was shingled or a single pew was placed inside.
—It’s like in the Book of Job, Jabez suggested to Father Phelan.—God sends trials to test us.
—God is a miserable bastard, the priest said.
Father Phelan had crews cutting fresh timber to rebuild through the next winter, Callum and Judah and young Lazarus, the Woundys and Saul Toucher’s crowd. They milled the wood in the spring and hauled it up the Tolt Road to set the church on the foundation of the one recently lost. They timbered the walls like a fortress and anchored the four corners of the building with ship ropes against the trials of God. The altar rail was fashioned from a gunwale salvaged off a Portuguese wreck, an iron cross forged in King-me’s smithy fixed to the steeple. The Romans had two months of services in the new building before a lightning strike set the church ablaze. The fire brought every soul to the Tolt, even the shade of Mr. Gallery walking the edges of the inferno.
The main doors were choked off by fire but the side door leading to the sacristy stood open. Callum Devine passed the window nearest the altar as he ran toward it and he saw a man backlit by the flames inside, trying feebly to break the glass. Callum smashed out the frame with his elbow and hauled Father Phelan through, the priest choking and retching, his hair and eyebrows singed.—Tried to get the Blessed Sacrament, he whispered.—From the altar.
The crowd milled helplessly while the roof fell in and the fortified walls burned to the stumps. Lightning had struck a flock of sheep on the Commons as well, five animals lying charred and bloated in the grass, the stink of burnt flesh lending the scene an acrid, apocalyptic feel.
In the wake of the storm the day was calm, the sky a scoured blue. Lazarus and Judah took the skiff out after a load of fish even though Devine’s Widow suggested they were tempting fate to go on the water in the wake of such an ill omen. Callum didn’t discourage them but stayed in himself and he sat at the kitchen table with the women while they waited. All of them speaking in whispers, as if at a wake for a child.
Mary Tryphena was watching her son half-asleep in Callum’s lap, his grandfather running his fingers through the boy’s hair. Patrick’s features hadn’t changed since the day he was born, the disconcerting look of an adult about him even then. After Devine’s Widow washed away the blood in a basin he was almost as pale as Judah, the eyelashes and the wisp of hair at the crown rabbit-white. Devine’s Widow placed the child in her arms and Mary Tryphena held him close, moving her face across the nape of his neck, relieved to find only the smell of new life there.
Callum looked out the window to guess the time of day by the sun.—They’ll be along now the once, he said. He set Patrick on his feet and stood up himself.—I’ll send the boy up for you when the fish are in, he told the women. Mary Tryphena caught the faintest scent of Judah drifting from her son as he passed by. She’d refused to let him go out in the boat with his father and during his little tantrum of protest the stink wafted from his skin like a squid
’s black ink.
It was only days after his birth that Mary Tryphena discovered how a crying jag or a good fright or a fit of infant rage would call it up in him, sour and fierce. She could barely stomach the youngster’s presence when he was upset and she felt cheated of something by his affliction. It was Judah or Lazarus he went to when he wanted comforting. And there was a distance between mother and child that felt unnatural to Mary Tryphena, an undercurrent of something like grief.
—You’d hardly believe that, Lizzie said, looking up at the ruins of the church still smoking on the Toit. Devine’s Widow suggested even Father Phelan would have to recognize the fire as a sign from God but Lizzie shook her head.—God give up talking to the likes of us, she said, a long time ago.
Father Phelan was taken to the house in the droke while the church was still burning. Mrs. Gallery stripped and washed him and settled him into bed and early that afternoon she joined him there. They were unusually gentle and patient with one another, staying in bed all that day and through the night that followed. They woke several times in the early hours to start in again where they’d left off, drifting back to sleep in a sticky haze. The priest was first out of bed the next day with breakfast ready by the time Mrs. Gallery joined him at the table. She glanced up from her plate suspiciously.—You aren’t after falling in love with me, Father.
—Mrs. Gallery, he said, I am married to the church.
She smiled for only a moment before the thought of the fire struck her. She said, You don’t think there’s a message being sent you?
—What sort of message?
—Perhaps the Tolt isn’t where the church belongs.
—Even Christ was denied three times, he said.
After his breakfast he walked the path to the outhouse. He felt remarkably peaceful sitting there, shut away from the world. He’d always thought of the privy as a holy place, a refuge from all but the most basic human concerns. As a novitiate he scandalized his superiors by claiming it wasn’t the church but the shithouse that was God’s true home in the world, the pungent effluvium as meditative an odour as incense, sunlight through the crescent moon carved in the door providing the dusky ambience of a monastery cell. He laughed at the thought now. Nearly an old man and more ridiculous with each passing year.
God spoke to no one, he knew that. God was scattered in the world and the word of God was a puzzle to be cobbled together out of hints and clues. He sat far longer than he needed to, pondering Mrs. Gallery’s questions. It was the thought of losing the country he’d been fighting against with his sanctuary on the Tolt, the church meant to lay claim to these few of his flock, this one bit of coastline still left him. It was vanity, plain and simple, trying to hold what you loved a moment longer than God granted it. But he’d always been a vain man.
He walked back through the droke of woods and stood a moment staring out at the shoreline crowded with wharves and flakes and slipways, fishing rooms and storehouses and twine lofts. Only the hundred feet of waterfront reserved by King-me Sellers stood vacant, a straggly meadow of uncut grass above it. Sellers satisfied his expansion requirements by foreclosing on the properties of debtors and legally the plot remained public land, but the merchant refused to allow anyone to build on it. A view of the entire harbour from that patch of ground, the meadow a midden pile of fish bones and maggoty cod and broken pike handles, wood scraps too rotten to burn. The whitened bones of Judah Devine’s whale scattered about like the ribs of a wrecked vessel. A shit heap of garbage at the head of the bay.
The priest made his way up to the Tolt where a forlorn band of searchers picked through the ruins for iron nails that might be reused. Father Phelan called Judah and Callum up to the chancel and they unearthed what was left of the altar from beneath the cindered remains of timber and shingle. They found the pyx containing the Eucharist in its cubby there, the container unmarked, the wafers inside as white as the white of Judah’s face.
—I’ve seen the error of my ways, Callum, the priest said.
—You’re giving up the drink, Father?
—I’d sooner be dead. Call everyone round, he said and he began praying in Latin, the searchers making their way up the blackened nave to receive the last Eucharist ever celebrated on the Tolt.
There were two late-summer arrivals on the shore that season which, added to the loss of the Roman church, made it the most memorable in years.
Ann Hope travelled from Poole to marry Absalom Sellers, sailing into Paradise Deep in mid-August. The two had met during Absalom’s years as an apprentice in Spurriers’ accounting offices in England and they maintained a correspondence after he returned home, her letters full of books and theatre and politics. She was five years Absalom’s senior, sister to a fellow apprentice at Spurriers and just returned from eighteen months travelling on the continent when they met.—I expect I will be a spinster, she admitted in their first conversation.—I am too homely and too intelligent to warrant a proposal of marriage.
It was her nose, he thought, that made her face such a trial to look at. Her eyes beady and wide-set on either side of that imposing cliff, which gave her obvious intellect an unfair whiff of treachery. Their friendship was rooted in Absalom’s belief that friendship was all she expected. She was the only woman who failed to reduce him to a helpless spurt of stuttering.
Her letters were Absalom’s only link to the wider world he’d briefly known. They filled him with a sick nostalgia he mistook for passion and he’d proposed to her by mail the previous fall. She sent news of her acceptance on the first vessel out in the spring, outlining her plans to leave England at her earliest convenience, but the letter went astray en route.
Absalom assumed from her silence that he’d insulted the woman. As the summer wore on with no word from her he’d even begun to feel a measure of relief at the rejection. No one in Paradise Deep knew she was coming before she disembarked on the wharf and asked to be taken to Selina’s House.—Where shall I have my trunks put? she asked him.
King-me took an immediate dislike to the woman.—She haven’t the look of someone with the inclination to be a mother, he told his wife, but Selina wouldn’t allow him to speak another ill word of her. The wedding promised to be the grandest affair on the shore since the Episcopal church was dedicated, though planning the event was left entirely in Selina’s hands. Within a week of her arrival Ann Hope was badgering King-me for space that could be adapted to use as a school. She spoke to Barnaby Shambler and Jabez Trim and Callum Devine and a dozen others on both sides of the Tolt for contributions to cover the materials necessary to such an enterprise.—You see, Selina told her husband, how much children mean to her.
—She’s a schemer, King-me said.—She haven’t got a maternal bone in her body.
—They’ve got a school in Harbour Grace, Selina told him.—And in St. John’s and in Bonavista.
King-me looked afresh at the woman every time she demonstrated this knack for political maneuver. Cavalry charge or subtle manipulation, axe or razor edge, that and all between were in her bag of tricks and he couldn’t help but admire her for it. A school it was then, supposing he had to fund the entire thing himself, and he nodded angrily to signal his defeat.
Days before the September wedding, Father Cunico arrived on the shore. He carried letters of appointment from the prefect vicar apostolic in St. John’s naming him priest of Paradise parish. Cunico was sent with instructions to reverse the ecumenism that threatened the extinction of Catholicism on the shore and his first official act was to forbid his parishioners attending the wedding at the Episcopal church. The Italian priest went door to door to present his credentials and make his wishes known, though he spoke no Irish and his English was so heavily accented that people made a show of not understanding him. Phelan dismissed the new priest as a milksop and a zealot, a shameless bootlicker whose grandest ambition was to be appointed arsewiper to His Holiness the Pope.—He won’t be with us long enough to shave, Phelan predicted.
Cunico’s only a
lly on the shore was the Reverend Dodge who fed him and found him a place to sleep and provided what advice he could. He insisted the Italian pay particular attention to the widow’s crowd, and Cunico spent an evening in Callum Devine’s kitchen, trying to bring the family back within the bosom of the true Church. Lizzie was handed the letters of appointment and she read them aloud to the room. She hadn’t converted before her wedding and Cunico denounced the union, like Dodge before him. Their children and their children’s children were stained by it, Cunico told them. There was a quick back and forth between Lazarus and Callum in Irish and the Italian hammered his walking stick against the floor to quiet them. Before coming to the shore he’d been warned to expect indifference, even insolence, and he was determined to nip it in the bud.—You hide your thoughts from me? he asked.
—Forgive us Father, Callum said.
Cunico looked at Michael Devine, Little Lazarus, the boy almost thirteen and already the height of his father.—And you? the priest demanded.
Lazarus turned to his father to speak again in Irish and Callum cuffed him so hard he fell from his chair. Lazarus smiled as he picked himself up from the floor. He genuflected toward the Italian with an attitude of false deference inherited directly from his grandmother. He left the room and was followed quickly by Lizzie, then Mary Tryphena and the strangely livid child in her lap walked out as well.
Cunico stood from his seat so he might look down on Callum and the widow.—God appoints a man the ruler of his household, he said, just as Christ is the head of the Church.
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