Esther was born precocious and brazen and generally made her parents’ lives a trial. She avoided Minnie’s preoccupation with manners and chores by escaping to the Gut to sit with Mary Tryphena, listening to the old woman prattle on about the courtships and epidemics and wild winters she’d seen in her time, walking her over the Tolt to visit with Judah in his cell. It was obvious to Esther that her mother had no time for Eli Devine, and she went out of her way to cultivate a relationship with him as well, just to spite Minnie.
Eli saw early on that Esther’s talent was more than the shore could hope to hold to itself and he encouraged her nascent ambitions, as if some small piece of himself might escape into the wider world with her. She’d long ago outstripped what lessons Adelina Sellers had to offer and it was Eli’s idea to find an instructor in St. John’s, to have her board there several months of the year. Dr. Newman agreed to bankroll the venture and talked Tryphie and Minnie past their reluctance.
She was scheduled to leave for the capital city on the season’s last packet boat two weeks after Obediah’s funeral, and no one was surprised in the months that followed to hear Esther was singing at churches and concerts and weddings across St. John’s, that she received invitations to perform in Halifax and Quebec City. Three years later the governor himself would request she be featured at turn-of-the-century celebrations on Signal Hill. And in the spring of 1900 she would sail for France with letters of introduction from the Newfoundland governor and the organist at the Anglican cathedral.
Soon enough, all the shore would hear of her would come from newspaper reports of her performances in the great opera houses of Europe, the London papers referring to her as the Northern Pearl, as the Nightingale of Paradise. The early letters would trickle off to occasional postcards and even that callous dismissal of their place in her life would seem inevitable and understandable. They would all remember her as she was at Obediah’s funeral, when she made their grief seem regal and glorious, when she still belonged to them alone.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dr. Newman gathered the work crews in front of the cathedral’s main doors for a final photograph. One hundred and forty-seven men sitting on the steps of the building that was only days from completion, Eli in the back row beside Azariah Trim. Father Reddigan spoke to the doctor as the men wandered back to their work, asking for a print that could be framed and hung in the church.
No one could say who first took note of the anomaly and some who examined the picture in the vestibule dismissed the notion altogether. It was just a trick of shadow and light and wishful thinking, Newman said. But most swore they could see the dead man in the back row, his features indistinct but recognizable. Obediah staring out between the faces of Az and Eli. One hundred and forty-eight men on the steps of the cathedral they’d raised. Father Reddigan set a candle beneath the photograph that was lit all through Advent and there was a steady stream of visitors to see Obediah and bless themselves or whisper a prayer.
Eli had been at the foot of the scaffold when Obediah fell and he helped lift the shattered corpse into a cart. Every night since the accident the man appeared in Eli’s dreams with his marionette limbs akimbo, his broken jaw flapping uselessly east and west. The thought of Obediah standing beside him whole and unharmed seemed a ridiculous notion, but it was too great a temptation to resist in the end. He went to the cathedral just after dawn on Tibb’s Eve, hoping to find the place deserted. But Hannah Blade was there, standing at the photograph. He was about to slip out the door when she noticed him, backing away from the picture quickly, feeling caught out.
—Give you a fright, he said.
Hannah still had no man of her own. Eli heard of one or two fellows coming round to see her before Magdalen died but it seemed settled afterwards that she’d look out to her widowed father and wind up alone.
—First time in to see it? he asked.
—I been in a few mornings, she said.
Eli nodded.—Is it him there, do you think?
—Father will be wanting his breakfast, she said and she went by him with her head down.
—Say me to John, Eli called after her. He watched her awhile before he let the door close, turning toward the photograph across the vestibule, the candle alight beneath it. And without taking a step nearer it came clear to him why Hannah had been there. He leaned on the door, knocking his head against the wood, as if he might clear his mind of the realization.
He left without looking at the picture, making his way to Selina’s House and walking to the workshop Tryphie had set up in an old barn. There was a forge at one end, benches along the other cluttered with tools and wood and metal, jars of screws and nails, blueprints and sheets of paper littered with sketches and dimensions. Tryphie’s two half-brothers were both practising physicians, one working on the Labrador coast and the other in Montreal, which made it easier for Newman to accept Tryphie’s refusal to attend medical school. He eked a living from a stream of royal patents for new and improved wrenches, new and improved school desks, new and improved can openers, new and improved acetylene lighthouse lamps. Tryphie also made a few dollars as a carpenter, building small boats and puncheon tubs and other odds and ends. But all that activity was simply a way to avoid destitution. He devoted every moment he could afford to the fanciful creatures churned up by the endlessly turning gyre of his mind. Tools with arcane applications, many of them surgical in nature as requested by Dr. Newman; a method for fabricating and setting false teeth; coils of wire for conducting electrical current. The walls were hung with a dozen prototypes of his flying machine, one of which cost him a broken leg during a test flight off the workshop roof.—There are some things, Eli told him then, that are better left in your head, Tryphie.
Much of the floor space was occupied now by a great fish built of iron intended for underwater travel, the bowels of the creature just large enough to seat a man next to a series of levers and pulleys to operate the fins and rudder and ballast tanks. The Sculpin, Eli called it. They’d spent much of the previous year arguing the lunacy of the notion as the fish was framed out and took shape on the workshop floor.—You’ll have yourself drowned in that goddamn thing, Eli said during his last visit two months before.
Tryphie had flung a screwdriver at him.—Fly the fuck out of it, he shouted as he reached for a hammer.
Eli hadn’t come by the workshop since that argument and he had to make an effort even now not to ridicule the contraption.—How’s Minnie keeping? he asked.
Tryphie leaned against a workbench, wiping at his hands with a rag.—She’s after bawling herself to sleep every night since Esther left us.
Minnie had been dead set against sending her only child off to St. John’s to be moulded and coiffed by some stranger. She was alone in her opposition—Tryphie and the doctor, even Bride siding with the girl’s ambition—and she acquiesced in the end. But things were said between Minnie and Eli in the process that cemented their dislike for one another.
—I expect it’s hard for her, Eli said.
—You don’t know fuck-all about it is the very truth of the matter.
Eli nodded, not up to a fight. There were moments when he felt the weight of all that had passed between he and Tryphie on his shoulders. He was still waiting for something central and final to give way, to set him loose or kill him. He gestured helplessly, casting his hand as if he were throwing an imaginary line across the workshop floor. Tryphie carried on wiping his hands, not willing to pick it up.—I just wanted to look in, Eli said finally.—Wish you a merry Christmas.
—Same to you, Tryphie told him.
—That’s a fucking coffin you’re building there, he said as he left and a wrench slammed against the door behind him.
He spent most of the day tramping aimlessly along the roads in the backcountry, the spires of the cathedral rising up out of the harbour’s bowl as he walked back from Nigger Ralph’s Pond. He saw Mary Tryphena coming along the Tolt Road from her daily visit to the asylum cell and he walked
down into the Gut with her.—You coming over for supper tonight, Nan? he asked when they reached her door.
Mary Tryphena turned to look him full in the face. The blue of her eyes glaucous, like water caught over with a film of ice. It was hard to imagine what was keeping her alive.—Everything I eats these days, she said, tastes like a bucket of nails.
After supper he set out over the Tolt again. There was a light on at Hannah’s place and John Blade waved him in from the table. Hannah set about pouring a drink for them both as if Eli had made an appointment for the visit. John asked after Druce and Mary Tryphena and a handful of other people in the Gut and he was only halfways into his rum when he said, Matthew is expecting me next door. He got up for his coat.—I might just kip down on the daybed if I has a few snorts, he told his daughter.—Don’t wait up.
Hannah closed the door after him and turned back to the kitchen.—How’s your drink, Eli?
He raised the glass still half full.—John don’t mind leaving you alone like this?
Hannah walked to the stove, standing close for the heat, her hands hidden behind her.—If I had a mind for trouble I’d have got into it for long ago, she said. She was a plain-looking woman though the years of work in the gardens and on the fish flakes had made a virtue of her plainness. There was nothing delicate in Hannah’s face to be ruined by time, just a mettle and vigour that looked more and more like beauty as she aged. She stared down at her shoes.—What is it, she said, keeping you on the shore all this time?
He laughed and shook his head. He stayed because Patrick hadn’t come back to the Gut for years now and Druce had no one else to look out to her. Because Mary Tryphena was nearly as old as the century and bound to leave them before long. He stayed to spare Levi Sellers the satisfaction of seeing one more Devine pushed off the shore. He stayed because Tryphie …
—God knows maid, he said.—Why is it you never managed to get into trouble all this time?
She looked away, making a dismissive noise in her throat.
—It wasn’t Obediah you were at the church to see, he said.—Was it, Hannah.
—What else would I be doing?
—You’ve been going over there to look at me in that picture.
Hannah shook her head.—You don’t mind yourself, I know.
—Tell me I’m wrong, he said, and I’ll be gone.
—Eli, she said, I’ve been waiting for you to leave here since I was a girl.
—Jesus Hannah.
She straightened where she stood.—I am not going to beg, that much I will tell you.
He watched her awhile then, that little cauldron of doggedness and impotent distress, reflecting his own heartache back to him. Shadows and light and wishful thinking was all there was to the world, that much he could attest. He lifted his tumbler and finished his drink. He said, I’d have another, Hannah. But she didn’t move from where she stood next the stove.—If you can stand to have me, he said.
{ 7 }
KERRIVAN’S APPLE TREE WAS STILL STANDING on the far side of the Gut when Eli and Hannah Devine’s son arrived in the last year of the nineteenth century. The tree hadn’t borne leaves or fruit for so long it was nearly forgotten and none but the oldest livyers on the shore remembered anything of Sarah Kerrivan who carted the sapling across the ocean in a wooden tub. The branches were gnarled and brittle and stripped of their bark and they stooped to the ground where even the stones of Callum Devine’s rock fence had been scattered by generations of winter frost.
Hannah Devine was well on in her life to be carrying a baby for the first time and she was taken with cramps while working the garden in her fifth month. Druce sent Eli to borrow a horse and cart from Matthew Strapp and they clattered over the Tolt Road to the hospital with Hannah grunting through her teeth. The child was barely a child at all when it came into the world, a glove of translucent skin, dark clots of the organs showing through the flesh. The tiny cock like a thread unravelling at a seam. Newman clamped and cut the umbilical cord and handed the infant to Bride before he turned his attention to Hannah. She had still to pass the afterbirth and he’d all but forgotten the child when Bride called across the room to say there was a heartbeat.
A month later the infant weighed no more than a decent cod fillet and still wouldn’t latch onto his mother’s nipple to eat and few thought he would leave the hospital alive. Dr. Newman and Tryphie had fashioned a metal incubator with a glass cover, the little oven heated from below by cylinders of water suspended over kerosene lamps. A constant watch was required to monitor the temperature and the family took the work in shifts, Hannah and Eli, Druce and John Blade and Hannah’s sisters-in-law, Tryphie and Minnie and Bride.
Even ancient Mary Tryphena took her turn beside the child. It had been years since the old woman showed the slightest interest in the world, but she’d fussed over Hannah during her pregnancy, pushing concoctions of bog myrtle and gold-withy on the expectant mother. And she carried on with her doctoring after the child was delivered, opening the incubator when she was left alone to smear his chest with liniments and poultices that could be smelled in every room of the hospital. Newman warned her away from tampering and barred her from the room altogether when she ignored him.—Keep that old witch away from the baby, he told Bride, or he won’t live another week.
By his third month the boy was making a show of living through the ordeal when an infection took hold and even Bride was forced to admit there was no hope for him.—That’s a sin now, she whispered.—The child’s had enough torment.
—There’s no lack of that in the world, Druce said. She was thinking of the small garden of children she’d planted next her house, infants who’d never taken a breath before the earth stopped their lungs for good. And this one now in his metal coffin, waning under a pane of glass.
It was Mary Tryphena who suggested Kerrivan’s Tree. Hannah hadn’t left the child’s side in three days but to wash her face and she was exhausted watching the slow ebb of his life. She was ready for something decisive to happen, one way or the other.—The doctor won’t ever allow it, she said.
Mary Tryphena nodded.—You bring him by tonight, she said.—Once the house is asleep.
Eli considered himself an idiot to be humouring the women, but the child was lost regardless. Newman came in on his last round after midnight, listening to the tiny heart struggle through the noise of the lungs. He closed the glass cover and nodded to the mother and father in their chairs to say their time with the boy was all but gone.
After the hospital settled Hannah lifted the infant out of the incubator, wrapping him in a sheepskin blanket. He was paler than the palest Devine, the wisp of hair at the crown so blond it was nearly invisible. They carried him along the deserted roads and over the Tolt to the Gut. Mary Tryphena was sitting up when they came for her and she followed them back out the door. The tree shining silver in the moonlight on the far side of the cove.
Hannah and Eli had both been christened in the old way but the ritual had fallen out of use in their lifetime and they stood in silence when they reached the tree, unsure how to proceed. Mary Tryphena picked her way through the maze of branches and gestured for them to follow. They passed the nearly weightless package through the dead limbs in the dark, hand to hand to hand, the child silent the entire time. As she let him go Mary Tryphena said, A long life to you, Abel Devine. And Eli wept all the way back to Selina’s House with the helpless infant in his arms, the last child ever to be welcomed into the world at Kerrivan’s Tree.
There was no change in his condition the next morning but Abel survived the day.—Tough little bugger, Newman said each time he found the infant still breathing.
It was a sentiment that followed Abel through his childhood. He was smaller than other youngsters his age and prone to fevers and infections that packed his lungs with fluid and threatened to drown him in his bed. A raw smell of decay rising with his temperature, as if the death he’d cheated was leaching from his pores. Mary Tryphena refused to leave Abel’s side
when he was ill. Hannah was forced to wear a rag across her face against the smell.—I don’t know how you can stand it, Mrs. Devine.
—The child’s no worse than Judah, Mary Tryphena said.
There were half a dozen occasions when Abel’s life hung in the balance and each time he pulled through when there seemed no chance of recovery. It was exhausting to live in hope until they gave him up, to live in hope and give him up, to live in hope. Druce eventually moved down the shore to Devil’s Cove where Martha was married to a Tuttle, abandoning her garden of dead youngsters to be spared the torture of watching Abel teeter on the brink.
For years before they married Eli held Hannah at a distance and something of the habit stayed with him afterwards, though he wished it different. Hannah’s pregnancy made him think they might find their way, that he could learn to properly love his wife through the child. But he was never able to wrangle his feelings for the boy into a manageable shape. For a time he shared Druce’s sense of impending grief. But Abel’s flirtations with death began to feel orchestrated, designed to pull them along in the youngster’s wake. He stepped a little further back from the boy after each successive trauma, and a little further from his wife as well. They were never more than fitful lovers but what intimacy they shared slipped away in the ongoing crisis of Abel’s health.
Hannah was increasingly protective of the improbable child. She barred Abel inside during inclement weather and through the entire length of the winters. She forbade activity that would overexcite or tire him. She refused to allow talk of politics or local gossip or the family’s checkered history in his presence, as if he might catch something fatal from such topics. He spent much of his early years in his grandfather’s library where he became a reader in self-defence, escaping his isolation in the worlds categorized and alphabetized and stacked on the parlour shelves. The youngster knew nothing of Absalom Sellers growing up ignorant of the most basic facts of his own life in Selina’s House or Lizzie’s years as a recluse wandering the backcountry, he’d never been told a thing about Judah Devine’s biblical isolation in his asylum cell. But everyone else on the shore could see Abel was being raised in a solitude that was a peculiar inheritance of his blood.
Galore Page 27
