Galore

by Michael Crummey

  Mary Tryphena was the only person who never doubted the boy would survive and she seemed to recover her appetite for life through the child’s persistence. Hannah discouraged contact between the two, not wanting Abel exposed to the old woman’s talk. She was forced to ask Mary Tryphena to watch him while she was on the flakes or working the garden but warned her to keep a tight rein on her inclination to reminisce.

  Mary Tryphena was as ancient as Devine’s Widow by this time, a meagre, emaciated figure. Her movements were deliberate, almost mechanical, as if she’d been designed and put together in Tryphie’s workshop, and her reticence somehow enhanced that impression in Abel’s mind. He thought her kin to the imaginary worlds of the library, a character out of Gulliver’s Travels. There was something in her antediluvian bearing that made her seem immutable, and it never occurred to him that her place in his life was temporary. He was reading to her when Mary Tryphena took her turn, the ancient smiling oddly where she sat on the green leather chesterfield, as if she felt he needed encouragement.—Are you all right, Nan? he asked and she went on smiling in a surprised, pleading fashion.—Nan? he said.

  By the time he’d fetched Hannah from the garden Mary Tryphena had found her voice and insisted there wasn’t a thing wrong with her.—You scared me, Abel said and she laughed at him, as if his fear was a childish thing. She reached a hand to touch his face.—You loves your Nan, don’t you.

  —Yes, he said.—I do.

  She said, I waited all my life for you, Abel Devine.

  And there was something in the declaration that made the boy feel like bawling.

  —We should get you to the hospital, Hannah said.

  Mary Tryphena shook her head.—I’d kill for a cup of tea, she said. But she didn’t touch the mug when Hannah set it on the table beside her.

  —Do you want that tea or not?

  —Can’t move me arms, my love, she said. She shook her head and smiled at them in the same strangely apologetic fashion, the words gone again. Hannah sent Abel to fetch the doctor but the old woman was dead before they came back over the Tolt.

  Judah Devine had been so long out of people’s minds that no one thought to carry the news of Mary Tryphena’s passing to his lunatic cell until after the wake. There was no sign of the man inside and he’d clearly been gone from the place a long time. Bald strips of sky showed through the roof and salt-spray rimed the gaps in the lungers underfoot. People felt foolish to have accepted the fact Judah was living out his days in the godforsaken hole and they denied ever believing such a thing. Some claimed to know he’d left the waterfront shortly after the locks came off the prison doors and spent the remainder of his days on an old trappers’ line near the Breakers. Others that the escape was a recent one and Judah was still holed up in a woodland tilt near Nigger Ralph’s Pond.

  The greater mystery in it all was Mary Tryphena’s custom of walking the Tolt Road to keep the appointment with her absent husband. If it was meant to cover Jude’s departure no one could say why she considered such a thing necessary. Newman thought there was something mournful about the observance in retrospect, as if the woman was holding vigil at a gravesite. He tried to parse it out with Bride after the funeral but she simply turned to burrow into him on the bed.—She’s gone to the peace of Jesus now, she said.

  They fell into their oldest argument then, bickering back and forth. Bride’s willingness to surrender human questions to mystery so blithely was a kind of laziness, Newman thought. He didn’t understand why it appealed to a woman who despised sloth in any other guise.

  —You can’t bear the notion there’s more to the world than what your little mind can swallow, Bride told him.

  There was more to Bride than his little mind could swallow, that much he was willing to admit. He’d known from the outset that something of his wife would remain a stranger and his jealousy of that private corner kept his appetite for her keen. All their disagreements seemed to end with his face buried in her neck, his hands on her thighs to bring her close and closer again. Glory and mystery enough in those moments to shut him up awhile.

  Levi Sellers had Judah’s fishing room torn down after Mary Tryphena died. The rotten wood was tossed to a scrap fire on the waterfront—the pallet Jude slept on, the wallboards tattooed every inch with scripture as if the words offered some insulation from the cold. All of it set adrift on the wind, along with the ferocious smell that hung in the room until it came down, the unmistakable scour of blood and salt that Judah left behind him like a fingerprint.

  Abel was listless and inconsolable without Mary Tryphena’s company and his parents were at a loss to lift him out of his funk. Dr. Newman suggested that isolation and lack of activity was half the problem and Eli, who had been working one of Matthew Strapp’s inshore crews since the Trims’ sawmill shut down for lack of trees, convinced Hannah to let him take the boy out on finer days. Abel was surprisingly hardy on the water, cutting tail to identify the cod he jigged aboard, the marked fish set in store with his father’s share at season’s end. He proved himself a dab hand with a fish knife, though Hannah refused to let him stand in the cold and damp of the splitting room for long. The cod ran strong all summer which the fishermen credited to Abel’s presence in the boat and it was hard to keep him off the water then, despite Hannah’s misgivings. The Labrador crews came home with more fish than they’d seen in years and everyone on the shore was buoyant to see their fortunes turn.

  The same fool’s-gold story played out across the country, the same crushing disappointment. Prices collapsed with the glut of high-grade fish dumped on the European market and most hands were paid off with less than they’d seen since the bank failures of 1894. It was a bleak lesson, to be blessed with plenty only to learn that abundance could be a tool of destitution, and all through that fall people abandoned the shore. James and Matthew Blade left for the Boston States, and after three months at work they sent money to their families for passage and a little extra to ensure their children arrived in half-decent shoes. John Blade, who knew nothing but the ocean the length of his life, left with them. Two dozen more set out for Halifax and Quebec, for Boston and New York and homesteads further west. The sudden groundswell of movement had the feel of a natural disaster, something irresistible and ruinous bearing down on them. Tryphie was looking for positions in furniture factories in Connecticut and Maryland. Even Levi Sellers’ youngsters were going off one by one to join kin who were prospering in the milk-and-honey states of America. Given the shape of things, people said, he’d have no need of an heir on the shore.

  Eli and Hannah considered following after the Blades themselves before Abel took sick over the Christmas season and Newman diagnosed him with tuberculosis. There was little chance of recovery, the doctor said, and only a year of enforced rest offered any hope. Everything in the old servant’s quarters at the back of Selina’s House was shifted to an outbuilding, a small stove rigged up for heat. They moved in a bed and Patrick Devine’s library and Abel settled into the exile he’d been rehearsing for all his life. There were periodic visits from the doctor to take fluid off his lungs, and from Bride who brought his meals and took away his filthy sputum box. But his mother and the books his grandfather salvaged from the Atlantic were his only real companions. A veranda was built outside the back door as far as the southeast corner and Hannah set him up on a cot for the fresh air when the weather allowed, Abel drifting in and out of sleep as she read to him. He entered and left the stories by side doors and windows and found it impossible to distinguish one book from another. The complications and disappointments and modest epiphanies of those disparate lives seemed part of a single all-encompassing story that had swallowed him whole.

  Eli went back at the fish in the spring, on the water before light six days a week, clearing the last of the cod in the whorl of seal-oil torches before walking gingerly home in the black, half-asleep on his feet. And no clue if there’d be a copper to show for it come the fall. Hannah already in bed and pretending to sleep
when he came through the door, a plate of food kept in the oven. They never spoke of it directly, but he knew Hannah blamed him for dragging the boy out in all weather. And he supposed she might be right to think so. On Sundays he helped set Abel out on the veranda and then left them to the books, spending the duration of the visit in Tryphie’s workshop.

  The Sculpin still occupied the centre of the room. Tryphie declared it ready for a test voyage but his hunchback made it impossible to squeeze into the cockpit and no one else was willing to risk the job. Eli leaned against the Sculpin as they talked aimlessly about Tryphie’s latest undertaking or the state of Abel’s health.—He’s a tough little bugger, Eli said.

  Tryphie felt a particular empathy for the boy’s predicament and he took exception to Eli’s glib assessment.—You haven’t got a goddamn clue, Tryphie insisted, you know that?

  —That’s quite a claim coming from the inventor of the Sculpin.

  Tryphie reached for a screwdriver.

  —I was just leaving, Eli said, backing away with his arms in the air.

  Tryphie turned to the workbench to set the screwdriver down.—I’ve been meaning to tell you, he said over his shoulder.—Been offered a job in Hartford. Me and Minnie are heading up there come September month.

  Eli was at the door and he leaned against it.—When did you hear? he asked finally.

  —A few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to tell you.

  Eli nodded over the news awhile, his eyes on his shoes.—You’ll do well, he said.

  Eli lay awake a good part of that night and woke early to the wind beating at the house like a sledgehammer. His heart hammering against his chest in the same wild fashion. He got out of bed and Hannah called after him.—You won’t be going out on the water in this, she said.

  —I’ll just start the fire.

  He knocked around the kitchen awhile but couldn’t stay inside, pushing out the door into the weather. He walked into Paradise Deep while it was still dark, the wind so fierce on the Tolt he had to crawl on his hands and knees to stay on the headland. The sun came up a grey disc on the horizon as he walked to Tryphie’s workshop behind Selina’s House, the room empty but for the bulk of the Sculpin. Eli stood there as the day’s slow rise brought the machine out of the shadows. He hauled himself up top and swung the hatch open to peer inside. The entryway as big around as an outhouse hole and he stripped out of his pants and shirt to slither through, settling himself nearly naked among the pedals and gearshifts and tackle. Through the starboard porthole he saw Tryphie come in the door and Eli lifted his head above the hatch.

  —Jesus Eli, Tryphie said.—Don’t mess around with her.

  —Can’t let you leave and not launch this thing, he said. He squiggled back into the seat.

  —How does it feel in there?

  —Snug as a casket, Eli shouted.

  The Sculpin was wheeled to the shoreline the following Sunday. A huge crowd on the waterfront to watch the strange device being towed to the middle of the harbour on a barrel raft. Eli stripped to his skivvies and climbed inside, Tryphie leaning over the hatch to review the operation one last time.—You have to keep her trim when you let go the ballast tanks, he was saying. Eli looked up at his cousin as one esoteric instruction after another rattled his way, yaw and pitch, stern planes and rudder.—Shut up Ladybug he said.

  Tryphie reached to shake his hand and Eli held on awhile.

  —You’ll do well, Tryphie told him, not to worry.

  —I wish you were dead, Eli said.

  Tryphie sealed the hatch and stepped off into a dory where he set about hammering holes in the barrels to scupper the raft. The iron fish floated clear into the bay, the sea around her boiling with escaping air and the vessel descending gracefully enough until she was halfway underwater. She started rolling aft then, Tryphie shouting correctional adjustments that seemed no help to Eli. The keel broke the surface a moment and the capsized vessel sank slowly into the black.

  There was no plan for what in the aftermath seemed altogether predictable. Men scrambled to get boats on the water, half a dozen dories sculling to the spot where she went down. It was seven fathoms to the bottom and they tried to hook some part of the hull with grapples, casting where air bubbled to the surface. Two lines were rowed to shore and fifty men dragged the weight of the machine into the shallows where she lay on her side. A flood of seawater poured clear when Tryphie released the hatch, Eli extracted from the innards by the white of his hair. He was unconscious and his lungs waterlogged and the doctor worked him over for fifteen minutes on the beach before he could be brought to the hospital.

  He didn’t come to himself until the next morning, his eyes trolling slowly about the bed where Hannah and Bride and Tryphie stood watching him. Bride called for the doctor and Eli shook his head against the pillow.—This was all a mistake, he said.

  —Don’t waste your strength, Bride told him.

  He was home the next day and back on the water with Strapp’s crew two days later. But he refused visitors and never left the house except to work. He talked in monosyllables and ate his food with an apathy that verged on revulsion. No one spoke of the accident for what it was but Hannah could see that Eli was skewed somehow, as if his mind had capsized along with the Sculpin. For weeks she tried to pass Eli’s listlessness off as a kind of hangover, as if the shadow on his heart was a physical bruise that would fade with time. But when she could stand it no longer she went to see Reverend Violet, thinking a dose of the evangelist’s forcefulness and drive might be the tonic Eli needed.

  The minister came to visit the house on a Sunday afternoon.—I thought I’d drop in, he said.—I’m not keeping you from something? He sat on the edge of a chair, hitching his pants up at the knee. Violet was past sixty and just as relentless as the missionary who appeared on the shore forty years before. His wife had raised a family of seven children while he proselytized the coastline and he had installed sons in the pulpits of new churches in Spread Eagle and Smooth Cove. Half the shore flew the Methodist banner as a result of his tireless campaigning. He had no time for prevarication.—Your wife is afraid there’s some harm come to you.

  —I’m fine, Eli said.

  —You give yourself a good fright, he said.

  —Never felt better.

  They danced awkwardly back and forth the room this way for half an hour and neither man would surrender the lead. Violet stood finally and went to the door.—The Lord brings us low to lift us up, he said.—When you’re stripped bare, that’s the time to seek your true life, Eli. The minister pointed across the room with his hat.—Ye must be born again, he said.

  Eli watched Violet walk across the garden and pass Mary Tryphena’s empty house before he stood from his chair and set it carefully beside the table. He went upstairs and lay in his son’s bed and he didn’t budge before it was time to go out on the water the next morning.

  In the middle of August word of a visitor passed along the shore. Eli heard of him from the other men on his fishing crew while they rowed out to the cod trap. A fellow named Crocker or Croker was calling a meeting of fishermen at the old Episcopalian church. Out of Notre Dame Bay, some said, though others claimed he was born and bred in St. John’s, the son of a carpenter. Lost a merchant store in the bank crash and spent most of the years since running a farm on some island near Herring Neck.—A farm, Lord Jesus, Val Woundy said. The man had to be some sort of lunatic to persevere at the venture so long. He was supposed to have beaten his wife often enough to drive her away to St. John’s with their only child in tow. A union he’d come to speak to them about, that and his plans to reform the country’s fishery. From all reports Mr. Crocker or Cooker or Creaker—closet townie, failed merchant, crackpot farmer—had never caught a fish in his life. He’d worn the leather off his shoes gathering men in stores and church halls and kitchens across the northeast of the island.—Son of a carpenter, Val Woundy said, and fancies himself the fishermen’s messiah.

  It promised to be an entertaining
evening and Eli’s crew showed up at his house to drag him along, thinking the diversion might do him some good. Most of the men were away fishing on the Labrador which ensured a modest turnout, twenty or thirty scattered through the pews in the late-evening light. The hush in the damp church just enough to tamp down the undercurrent of ridicule they’d brought with them. At one minute past the appointed hour Thomas Trass suggested it was all a joke and no such man as Mr. Cracker ever lived.

  The door to the vestibule opened then and he came up the centre aisle without looking left or right, leaning his weight on a cane. He turned below the pulpit to face them.—Thank you all for coming, he said. He was thickset though he carried the weight like a working man. Face falling into flesh and a trim little moustache, a receding hairline that made him appear older than his years.—My name, he said, is William Coaker.

  He had the rhythm and demeanour of a preacher, the same bluff assurance. He began with an overview of the sad facts of a fisherman’s life, the deplorable conditions they lived and worked in, the parasites in St. John’s who bled them dry. A sycophantic tone to the presentation that made the men restless, the grievances so familiar they could have rhymed them off in their sleep. But Coaker paused at the end of the list, breeding anticipation with his silence, and they all leaned slightly forward in their pews.—You people, he said finally. He pointed with his sausage fingers. Grovellers, he called them. They were living the same miserable lives their fathers lived and their fathers’ fathers before them. The wealth of the nation made on their backs and every one of them content to beg at Levi Sellers’ door. They were backward and illiterate and happy to leave their children no hope of a better life.