The priest leaned over his lap as if struck by cramps and he rocked back and forth in an idiot’s spasm, moaning helplessly. Mrs. Gallery yanked him upright by an ear. He wiped the snot from his nose and mouth with his sleeve and tried to tip his head away from her hand.—Please, he said to her. He grabbed the breast of the fool’s outfit he was wearing and shook it helplessly.—Please.
She twisted his head far enough he was forced to look at her. —Choose your hell, Father, she said and then she turned her back on them both.
The priest watched after her a long time, though there was nothing he could see in the black of the bedroom where she’d disappeared. The figure on the floor shook with the cold, and the shivering finally drew Father Phelan’s attention. The priest’s saviour kneeling there. His miserable little life preserved by one of the damned, the face streaked by its sooty tears.—Would you like to make confession, Mr. Gallery? he asked.
Father Phelan was gone when Mrs. Gallery rose from her bed in the morning and there was no sign of her husband besides, the fireplace black and cold. She stayed on in the droke the rest of that winter before returning to her position at Selina’s House a third time, nursing King-me and his wife into their doddering years while Absalom took on more and more of the ramshackle empire his grandfather had wrestled out of wilderness and fog.
Father Cunico lived three years on the shore before the animosity of his Irish congregation and the winters defeated him. He was a solitary figure within his parish, spending long hours writing melancholy letters to his family and the archbishop and his friends at the Holy See, complaining about the infernal Newfoundland weather and the insolence of the livyers that seemed congenital to the place. His only companion and confidant was God, who the priest thought of as an unhappy visitor to the country, much like himself—called to the irredeemable wilderness by duty and homesick for more civilized surroundings.
Cunico was a refined and delicate man in a world where delicacy and refinement were ridiculous affectations. He kept a silk handkerchief in the sleeve of his vestments that he produced to cover his mouth and nose whenever he walked near the fish flakes on the waterfront. The locals found it a chore to take him seriously and the Italian responded to their condescension with a show of ecclesiastical force, instituting a growing list of strictures. He saw the Irish language as a tool of sedition and refused to allow it spoken in his presence or within the sanctuary. He forbade Catholic children to attend Ann Hope Sellers’ school, running classes of his own where he taught Latin catechisms and forced students to memorize the labyrinthine hierarchy of the Church. He condemned the tradition of passing infants through the branches of Kerrivan’s Tree as a pagan rite, and Catholics, like their Protestant neighbours before them, were forced to carry on the practice in secret. He withheld the sacraments from families of mixed marriages until the Protestant spouse converted to the faith.
Callum Devine stopped attending Mass altogether at that point. He’d never forgiven himself for denying Father Phelan though the excommunication was all that kept Lazarus and Judah and James Woundy out of prison. He’d no doubt Devine’s Widow orchestrated the entire thing while she nursed the Italian priest and it was his mother’s shadow as much as the Church Callum wanted to leave behind. He and his wife and everyone else in the house but the widow were confirmed in the Episcopal faith and the Devines became the only Protestant household in the Gut.
Those Catholics who had no express argument with the priest had little time for the Italian’s manner. Cunico was a stickler for decorum, for religious formalities, as if he were already ensconced in the make-believe world of the Vatican. He became widely known as Father Cuntico in honour of his perpetual state of vexation. At every Mass he listed the congregation’s failings in their duty to the parish and its priest and threatened to abandon them if the situation did not change.
He took it as a personal insult when things did not and he left for good on a June morning of steady drizzle, his trunks packed and carried aboard a Spurriers ship bound for St. John’s. A small group of parishioners were there to see him off but he refused them a final blessing, offering only his assurance that their community would never prosper again, as if God were departing on the same vessel as His emissary.
Callum felt the story disproved the notion that Father Cuntico had no sense of humour. But in the wake of the Italian’s departure there was little enough to laugh about. The quintals of fish taken that summer declined for the first season since Jude had come among them and the extraordinary wet of the year rotted vegetables in the ground. Snow fell on the first of October and an implacable winter settled over the shore, icing in the harbours until the middle of May. Households ran low of provisions by the end of March and people survived on frostbitten potatoes and pickled herring. Selina Sellers passed unexpectedly in her sleep that June and the capelin came late to the beaches.
The price of cod in Europe had been falling for years and dozens of local men had taken to travelling to Harbour Grace and Wesleyville and St. John’s in the spring, taking berths on sealing vessels to supplement the fishing. Even Sellers was under strain and he convinced Spurriers to mortgage the Paradise Deep operation in order to break into the market for seal oil and pelts, commissioning a sixty-seven-ton double-hulled schooner. The frame of the vessel came together over two summers in a makeshift shipyard beside the Catholic church, the boards reinforced with stanchions to withstand the ice fields where seals whelped their pups. It was an enormous outlay of money for a venture fraught with risk and the old man lost his nerve as the project progressed. King-me worried a ledger of figures and percentages through the winter but he was unable to torture a moment’s comfort from the numbers.—We’ll all of us wind up in the poorhouse on account of that goddamn boat, he said, as if it had been someone else’s idea. He woke from dreams of the vessel in flames or set with full sail fathoms underneath the ice fields and he was so troubled by these visions that he walked over the Tolt to speak with Devine’s Widow.
Lizzie was alone in the house with Patrick when King-me sat himself in the kitchen, saying he wouldn’t leave until he saw the old witch. Patrick was sent to fetch the widow from Daniel Woundy’s house and he burst in out of breath. Patrick had never spoken a word to King-me Sellers but knew who he was. Mary Tryphena explained his connection to the dead woman and the pew of mourners at the front of the church during Selina’s funeral the year before. Three youngsters between Absalom and Ann Hope, King-me sitting nearest the aisle and following behind the casket as it was carried from the church.—Me great-grandda is at the house to see you, he shouted and it took Devine’s Widow a moment to get his meaning.—Old Man Sellers? she asked, and he nodded.—Me great-grandda, he repeated.—He wants to see you.
She followed Patrick back along the paths, the boy rushing and glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was with him. Held the door to let her in where King-me sat turning a hat between his knees. The moment the widow came through the door he started in to ramble about some dream that was troubling him, fire he told her and a ghost ship that was sailing under the ice with all its sails set. He was blind to the room as he described the visions that haunted his sleep, offering details from one and then the next and back again, as if they were superimposed one on another in his mind. The widow let him go on talking until he exhausted himself and he looked around slowly, surprised to find himself in their company. He lighted on Patrick standing three feet from him.—Who’s this one? he asked.
—You’re me great-grandda, the boy said.
King-me turned to Devine’s Widow in confusion. He looked half-starved, like everyone else on the shore, the long face staved in at the cheeks and the eyes black as cold firepits, though she knew his trouble was something other than lack of food. His mind rudderless and turning in mad circles and she was surprised he’d survived Selina even this long.—We don’t have much time left, Master Sellers, she said.
—No, he said uncertainly, a rheumy film of tears setting his eyes adrift.
Patrick turned to Lizzie and said, What’s wrong with him, Nan?
—Mind your mouth, Lizzie whispered.
Devine’s Widow glanced at the boy, that foreign face of his. She’d gifted him a set of rosary beads after Mary Tryphena began carting him to the Protestant church in Paradise Deep and she once or twice talked him into reciting the mysteries but the habit never took. Hardly a word of Irish in his head besides. She felt as if she was being erased from the world one generation at a time, like sediment sieved out of water through a cloth.—You spend your days trying to make a life, Master Sellers, she said, and all you’re doing is building yourself a coffin.
—A coffin, King-me repeated, nodding his head. He stood from his chair suddenly and stumbled past the boy, Devine’s Widow watching after him as he went through the door.
—That’s your father, Patrick said to Lizzie, still figuring the connections that seemed as convoluted to him as the Catholic hierarchy.
—Go on outside now, Devine’s Widow said.—Leave us women be.
She and Lizzie stared across the table after the boy left. They had learned to travel adjacent to one another in the tiny world they shared, mastering an intricate dance that offered the illusion they lived independently. It was impossible to say the last time they carried on a conversation not mediated by someone else’s presence. But they were both struck by the same cold presentiment now and mirrored it each to the other.
—I won’t ever speak to my father again, will I, Lizzie said.
The widow shrugged.
Lizzie pushed at her eyes with the heel of her hand and lifted her apron to wipe her face, shaking her head angrily.
—I know you hates me, the old woman said.
Lizzie laughed then.—Yes Missus. I surely do.
—That’s all right, maid. It means you’ll always carry me with you. King-me’s winter-long season of nightmares fed a growing sense in Selina’s House that the old man was veering into senility, and the trip to consult Devine’s Widow seemed a final proof. He was delirious when he came back into Paradise Deep, claiming it was a coffin they were building next the church and ordering it be left to rot. Absalom could tell that nothing short of a talking-to from Selina would settle his grandfather down. Selina’s influence on their world had been subterranean, almost imperceptible, and it was a shock to see the extent of the change when she left them, King-me on the verge of foundering altogether. The old man took to his bed mid-summer and didn’t leave it until he was carried from the house in a casket that September.
Absalom resumed work on the sealing vessel and it was completed late the following summer. She was christened the Cornelia for Absalom’s long-dead mother, sails and equipment and provisions were laid in for a maiden trip to the ice in the spring, and that promise was the one source of optimism on the shore. There were only thirty-odd berths available and men paraded to Absalom’s door, pleading for tickets for themselves and their brothers and sons. The fishing had gone poorly for a third straight season and steady rain through July and August ruined the gardens. The winter fell early with heavy snows, the harbours were iced in by Christmas and stayed that way till mid-June, months too late to sail after the seals. Some households had not enough wood laid in to last the length of the winter and they burned furniture and the timber and walls of outbuildings to avoid freezing to death. Even in Selina’s House the milk froze solid in the jug and had to be chipped with a knife and dropped in slivers into their tea. By the end of May cows and sheep and dogs were falling to starvation and the foul meat of those animals sustained people until a straggle of capelin finally spawned on the beaches at the end of June.
Judah Devine became a subject of much speculation on the shore through those dark days, Protestant and Catholic alike making pilgrimage to Jude’s shack to sit awhile in his presence, as if some of his old luck might accrue to them just by breathing in the smell of the man. For the first time in years his boat was followed around on the water as if he were an Old Testament prophet trailing a retinue of acolytes and hopeful doubters. But the cod seemed to have vanished from the waters and everyone finished the season deeper in hock to Spurriers.
Years of extravagant misery and want followed one on the other. Even the smallest luxuries were beyond them. Men smoked wood shavings or spruce rind or mollyfudge off the rocks for lack of tobacco. What little cod oil they put up through the summer was doled out in spoonfuls to the young, leaving Ralph Stone’s lamps dry, and the winters passed in darkness and shades of grey. Snow sifted through fine cracks in the stud walls and people woke to white drifts spread like an extra blanket over their bedclothes. Their shoes so stiff in the mornings they couldn’t be put on before being thawed next the fire. The sap of backcountry spruce froze solid and exposed stands shattered like glass in the winter winds, the noise of the chandelier disasters carried for miles on the frost. Ice locked the coastline solid each winter and in March Absalom set a crew to hacking a channel clear for the sealing vessel. But they never managed to reach open water and the ship sat unmaidened in the harbour year after year. In the last months of those winters whole families survived solely on potatoes and salt, young and old occupied with days of dead sleep. And each night the sky alive with the northern lights, the roiling seines of green and red like some eerily silent music to accompany the suffering below.
When the ice finally lifted in May or June, Reverend Dodge engaged Jabez Trim to take him to the outlying tickles and coves. No priest had come to replace Father Cunico, and Dodge added the isolated Roman charges to his travels. The visits had once been pastoral in nature, a celebratory air about them, to be welcomed by people who’d endured months of isolation, to bring the small gifts of news and tobacco and prayer. But it was a grim undertaking to arrive in those tiny outports now, a handful of buildings perched over bare rock and little sign of life as Jabez rowed them in.
They carried several bags of flour from Sellers’ stores and soft turnips and carrots scrounged from root cellars for the starving. But at times they found no one to feed. Three children lying in a slat bunk between their parents, all huddled under a raft of blankets and dead for weeks. Dodge could see where they had torn up floorboards to burn when they ran out of firewood. A midden of mussel shells in a corner, the corpses of half a dozen starfish boiled to make a broth. He could hear a shovel rasping earth as he stood in the darkness of the room, Jabez already at work on the grave outside.
—The four of them is it, Reverend? Jabez asked when the minister stepped into the open air.
—Five, Dodge said.
—There’s another one born since last summer?
—Born and died, the minister said.
Jabez nodded as he nosed the spade into the ground.—We live in a fallen world, Reverend, he said.
Every autumn, premises were lost to public auction to clear unsustainable debts, and Absalom Sellers, suffering a barely sustainable debt himself, was unable to front provisions to households on the verge of bankruptcy. He organized letter-writing campaigns and once led a delegation to St. John’s, badgering the island’s governor for a relief program that never materialized. The population on the shore ebbing under the weight of hard times, tilts and wharves abandoned and falling into ruin.
Daniel Woundy had long since taken up with his own youngsters to fish, and Callum crewed with Jude and Lazarus. But in the spring of Patrick’s twelfth year Callum suffered an infection in his leg, the limb too swollen and sore to hold his weight. And Patrick took a full share on Jude’s boat in his stead.
Mary Tryphena couldn’t look at her son that summer without a needle pricking at her heart, the boy’s head oversized on his spare frame like a poppy on its stem, the pale face discoloured by hunger’s fatigue. A youngster on the verge of becoming a man and there was a faint, lingering smell of decay about him. He was an unlikely marriage of contradictions, introverted and resolute, solemn and studious and the water in his blood besides. Lazarus ridiculed Patrick’s interest in Ann Hope’s school lessons
as an affectation not far removed from Father Cuntico’s silk hankie, but the youngster knew how to handle a set of oars and bait a hook. And he was the first one awake in the household every morning, eager to head for the boat.
Devine’s Widow and Lizzie saw the men off at the door each morning and Callum hobbled down to the fishing rooms, badgering them about lines and bait and the weather before they rowed out the Gut. But Mary Tryphena refused to leave her room until she knew they were gone. There was a hint of something final in the most casual farewell during those savage days. And despite all she’d seen of the world, she believed it impossible to lose her son if she hadn’t said goodbye to him.
Callum puttered around the Rooms awhile after the boat went out, until the leg forced him to limp home and put it up the rest of the morning. He could feel his pulse throbbing in the swell of it, his heartbeat a steady torment. Absalom Sellers had set aside two berths on his new sealing vessel as a peace offering to his estranged blood, and if the ship ever managed to escape the harbour some spring Callum promised Lizzie he would go to the ice to watch over Lazarus. Devine’s Widow insisted Laz would be safer with Judah for company and the two women bickered the issue for months. Lizzie still hadn’t forgiven Callum giving away Mary Tryphena’s hand at the widow’s instruction and he felt forced to side with his wife, though his body was a worn thing, a tool held together with twine, cross-braced with wood and nails. He could feel the two women ignoring one another in the tiny house and he sat with his rosary to keep clear of the strife, praying the chain of beads through his fingers.
—You’re a fine Episcopalian, Devine’s Widow told him. She thought their defection to Dodge’s church was a meaningless gesture.—Catholic you’re born, she said, and Catholic you’ll die.
—In that case, Callum said, it makes no odds where we goes to pray.
The only real religious affiliation Callum knew was a personal one, and Father Phelan’s absence cut deeper each season. He never shared Phelan’s weakness for drink and women and the sacraments, but Callum was a child of deprivation and there was comfort in the priest’s insistence that feeding an appetite was at the heart of a proper life.—The Word was made flesh for a reason, he’d said. Callum thought it was the priest’s lust for life he was grieving as his own body faltered. But it was the certainty of Phelan’s calling he missed most, its suggestion that the people on the shore were something more than an inconsequential accident in the world.
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