by Galore
—King-me! they shouted up at the windows, but it was only Absalom who peeked out finally, his hair flat on one side of his head and still shivering himself out of sleep. —Any mummers ’lowed in? the King asked as they pushed past him into the cold hallway and felt their way along the walls to the kitchen.
Absalom lit a taper from the embers piled under ash in the fireplace and brought it to the candles on the table, then set about getting a lunch of tea buns and old cheese and two pint bottles of spruce beer. The group stamped the snow off their feet and shouted for King-me to join them, though it was clear Absalom’s grandparents had retired hours before and the youngster was the only representative of the family they would see. They were all exhausted and half-asleep and finally let the issue drop. Absalom measured the beer into equal portions and stood back against a wall to wait, like a servant dismissed from table.
Father Phelan watched him through a fortnight’s haze of booze and sleeplessness. All night he’d been wondering if it was true that Absalom was in love with Callum’s girl and had somehow made it known in the world. He had never seen the boy outside Selina’s House except in King-me’s company, had never heard him string together more than three words. Even if the match wasn’t impossible, the priest thought, little Mary Tryphena would eat Absalom alive.
The King was on his feet again, goading the revelers into one more song and he was waltzing Absalom about the kitchen now, the boy stiff as a broomstick. —Horse Chops, the King whistled hoarsely. His voice was ruined by the hours of speaking as he inhaled and it was almost impossible to make him out anymore. —This boy, he said, still waltzing Absalom in a tight circle. —Is he in love?
Horse Chops clapped his jaw once and the mummers gave a half-hearted cheer.
—In love he is, the King said. A rabid blush colored Absalom’s face and he tried to pull away but the King held him tight. —Tell us Horse Chops, is his love true?
Clap.
—A true love, bless you and amen.
Horse Chops shuffled up close to the dancing couple and clapped his jaws wildly into the King’s ear.
—Don’t be talking so much foolishness, Horse Chops, the King said. The jaws clapped awhile again. —That can’t be true, Horse Chops.
—What did he say? Father Phelan asked when it was clear Absalom wasn’t willing to take the bait.
The King stepped away from Absalom though he kept hold of the boy’s arms. —He claims young Ab here is in love with his cousin.
The mummers offered their chorus of feigned disbelief.
—Is that true? the King asked. —Are ye in love with your cousin?
Absalom pulled to get clear of the King. —I don’t have a cousin, he said, stuttering fiercely.
—Do you hear, Horse Chops? He says he has no c-c-cousin to fall in love with.
Clap, clap clap, clap clap clap clap.
The King went still then, staring at the youngster through his veil. —Oh but Horse Chops here says you do, Absalom. You have two cousins in the Gut, he says.
Clap clap clap, clap clap, clap clap clap.
—Little Lazarus Devine, the King said.
—No, Absalom whispered.
—And Mary Tryphena Devine, your intended. A child of your own aunt. Lizzie Devine is your grandfather’s daughter, Absalom.
The boy tore his arms free finally and left them there, his feet on the naked wooden stairs echoing down to them in the kitchen. The mummers sat in a drunken silence awhile afterwards and some of them removed their brin veils and hats to allow their faces the open air for the first time in hours. The details of the room beginning to rise to the day’s first light. The King sat heavily in a chair and Horse Chops settled his rump into the King’s lap, leaning on the stick that held the horse’s head. —Well that’s that, I suppose, the King said.
Callum pushed his head free of Horse Chops’s blanket and scrubbed at his sweaty face with his hand. —I expect so, he said, speaking aloud for the first time. He smiled forlornly across the kitchen at the priest. —Morning Father, he said.
The King raised and lowered his knees under Callum like he was bouncing a child. —And how are you feeling now, Callum? he asked.
—Like a horse’s arse is how I feel, Jabez Trim.
—As is right and proper, the King said and he nodded under his bushy crown.
The Feast of the Epiphany was the end of the Christmas season and Father Phelan wandered off to another of his ghost parishes on the island within the week. People settled in for the coldest months of the winter, rarely leaving the narrow border of their own tilts and outbuildings.
The first vessel into Paradise Deep that spring made harbor when the ice cleared off in April, a Spurriers ship freighted with salt and hard tack and twine and barrels of nails. When she shipped out a week later, Absalom Sellers was aboard and bound for England. No one laid eyes on him again for the better part of five years.
{ 2 }
BY THE TIME MARY TRYPHENA was fourteen years of age she’d endured a dozen offers of marriage, serious proposals from men on the shore who courted through her parents, clean-shaven and dressed in their least dilapidated outfits. She sat with her mother and father as the men paraded their virtues, young widowers with a handful of youngsters and middle-aged virgins and Irish boys indentured to King-me Sellers, all promising fidelity and children of her own and what little wealth the coast provided. She won’t starve, they said. She’ll be looked after.
Mary Tryphena felt peculiarly helpless in it all and wondered if it was somehow a state of womanhood, to be sought and fought for and have only the act of rejection to make a mark in the world. No, was her answer each time, no, no and no. And with each suitor she rejected, her reputation as the rarest and most unattainable of women traveled further along the coast.
Devine’s Widow suspected the girl’s reluctance was fueled by an interest in Absalom Sellers and was anxious to see her granddaughter attached elsewhere. She suggested there were only so many offers a woman could expect in a lifetime and Mary Tryphena might exhaust hers before a bud had grown on the bush. —She haven’t even got a bit of tit to be mauled over yet, Devine’s Widow said, and she’ve turned away half the single men on the shore.
—She’ll take the man she’s meant for, Lizzie told her.
—Don’t be filling the child’s head with your foolishness, the old woman said.
The thirteenth and last marriage proposal of her life came from the skipper of a Spurriers ship just arrived with the Episcopalian bishop for the dedication of the new church. The skipper was an Englishman named John Withycombe who had been making the trip to Paradise Deep long enough to know everyone on the shore by sight if not by name. He himself had carried stories of the raven-haired Irish girl pursued by half the men on the coast to bars and kitchens through Conception and Trinity and Fortune bays and old country ports like Poole and Waterford. He had no personal interest in the child at first. He was in his fifties and had married as a young man, but it was said of him that he didn’t stay ashore long enough to wash his clothes and dry them on a line. He hadn’t laid eyes on his own wife in nearly twenty years and had spoken of her as though she was dead for so long that everyone thought her so. He had no interest in anything that tied him to the land and relieved his physical needs on the tired beds of the whorehouses that occupied so much waterfront real estate in his ports of call. But as he repeated and refined his story of the unattainable beauty that half the island of Newfoundland was heartsick for, the notion took root in his mind. —Imagine your life, he would say at the conclusion of each telling, in the bed of such a creature.
Eventually he lost his taste for food and drink to imagining just such a thing. He slept poorly or not at all and spent all his waking hours with his vision of the Irish maid. He forsook his regular visits to prostitutes so as not to sully the image of the girl he carried. His shipmates let him know what an arse he was making of himself but their ridicule only strengthened his resolve and he set himself to have Mary T
ryphena Devine when next he sailed into Paradise Deep.
He left the vessel after the vicar disembarked that morning and walked over the Tolt Road with the whistles of his crewmates echoing derision off the hills. He found the girl working in a potato garden behind the stud house and made his intentions known before he so much as told her his name. He was standing with a tricorn hat in his hands, turning and kneading it like bread dough as he waited for her response. —You won’t starve, he said. —And you can stay on in the Gut if you like, next your kin.
They had never been introduced, though Mary Tryphena knew something of John Withycombe by reputation. She smiled across at him, already at ease with the particular agony of a man in love, and the smile unnerved the sailor completely. The girl was not at all the picture he’d carried in his mind since the previous fall. She was tall for her age and pretty enough but her frame was still a boy’s, slender and tough as a whip of alder.
—What kind of a life would that be for me? she asked. —You off on the water most of the time?
It was all going askew. Before answering her question John Withycombe asked if she was the Mary Tryphena who was granddaughter to Devine’s Widow. —I’d have thought it would be just the sort of thing a woman might want, he said then. —To have a man and her life to herself besides.
The notion gave Mary Tryphena a moment’s pause and that pause inflated the man’s hope she might be considering him. She was thinking of her grandmother who lived by no rules but her own, who could claim the land their house sat on and the fishing rooms on the water, the privilege of ownership granted only to men and their widows. A life to herself. She smiled again at the ridiculous old sailor. —You’ll live too long yet to suit me, she said.
The Englishman kneaded his hat, perplexed, trying to comprehend the content of her refusal. —I haven’t been well is the truth of it, he said finally. He coughed into his fist, looking down at his feet. —On death’s door is what some says.
A rock struck him square in the chest and he startled backwards, dropping his hat to the ground as another sailed by him. He looked past the girl toward the stud house where her brother Lazarus was in mid-stoop, searching for another stone. As practiced as his sister in brushing off her unwanted suitors.
—You little bastard, the Englishman growled.
The youngster had an arm on him and was surprisingly accurate. He whipped a rock that clipped the old man’s ear. —Fly the fuck out of it, the little one said.
—Michael Devine, Mary Tryphena shouted and she went on yelling at the boy in Irish, chasing him around the corner of the house and all the way to the tiny outbuilding that had been given over to Judah. They both fell through the door and onto the bunk Jude slept on, rolling around with their hands over their mouths to stifle their laughter. By the time Mary Tryphena gained control of herself and tiptoed back to the house the Englishman was gone, though he’d left in such a muddled passion that he’d forgotten his hat where he dropped it. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. It was made of wool felt, a rosette cockade with a pewter button on the left side. She turned to Lazarus who had followed behind her and placed it on his head. It fell around his ears, covering half his face. —You little bastard, he said in his best West Country accent.
Mary Tryphena could see her father’s skiff coming through the channel, the gunwales low to the water with fish. Devine’s Widow already making her way to the Rooms from the big garden to help gut and salt the cod. Mary Tryphena took little Laz’s hand. —Come on then, she said. —See if you can’t make yourself useful.
When they came up from the fishing room hours later, the Englishman’s abandoned tricorn hat was on Judah’s head, Lazarus sitting high on the Great White’s shoulders, the dog going before them like a horse drawing a cart. Lazarus had come to love the animal and Judah in the same proprietary fashion. Before he’d learned to walk he began following one or the other around, pulling at the dog’s fur, clinging to Jude’s trousers. He crawled to the shed whenever his mother’s back was turned and Lizzie found him at Judah’s feet or on his lap and she dragged him out by the arm, slapping the youngster’s backside to warn him away from the man. But he rose from each savage trimming like the Lazarus he was, more determined than ever to follow his own inclinations. Judah became a kind of pet to him, a mute, good-natured creature who suffered the boy to ride his back or poke at his belly with a stick or force-feed him handfuls of spruce needles.
Lizzie swore the child was being corrupted by the company he kept, that he was growing wild and strange in his thoughts from spending so much time with Judah. Callum walked the thin line of defending his friend without drawing his wife’s anger squarely down upon himself, repeating generalities about the wonders wrought on the shore in the time since Judah had come among them—the fishery’s unprecedented run of luck, the steadily growing population.
Almost three hundred souls were settled on the shore by this time and each spring Spurriers’ ships brought planters and their families and young men and women who took positions as servants before striking out on their own. The abundance of Judah’s first year continued, though for most newcomers his talismanic appearance and stench were little more than oddities, the tales of his arrival and influence on the fish an entertainment. It seemed more likely the story of the whale was born from Jude’s strangeness than the other way round. Even people who had witnessed the events began downplaying the evidence of their senses, and each season saw Judah’s status dwindle slightly in the minds of fishermen who preferred to think their success the result of their own cunning and skill and hard work.
King-me Sellers’ operation expanded to meet the demands of the unexpected prosperity with a cooperage and smithy and a handful of new stores and warehouses, and additional clerks to keep account of the credit given to fishermen in the spring and the quintals of salt cod used to pay off their debt in the fall. A young Englishman named Barnaby Shambler opened a public house where he sold India ale and dark rum from the Jamaica trade. Some of the local planters—Callum among them—had done well enough that they were cutting and milling lumber each winter to build real houses with wooden floors and stone chimneys. A Church of England minister had finally settled in Paradise Deep, a flagpole out front of the new church in the absence of a bell, St. George’s cross raised to call people to Sunday worship morning and evening. All of it thanks to Judah, or so some believed.
—I don’t know how you can call that Reverend Dodge a good thing, Lizzie said.
—Now Lizzie, you can’t blame Jude for the preacher.
—If you can credit him for the fish, why can’t I blame him for the minister?
There was no talking to the woman, he thought.
—You aren’t going over there tonight are you, Callum?
—What, and miss the bishop’s parade?
Lizzie made a face. —Someone is going to get killed before this is all over, she said. She caught sight of Judah and Lazarus and the dog coming up the path from the Rooms, the tricorn on Jude’s head. —Where did his nibs get that hat? she asked.
—Lazarus brung it down to him this afternoon, Callum told her. —Said he found it on the ground.
—Found it on the ground, Lizzie said dismissively. —A little liar you’re raising, Callum Devine.
Mary Tryphena was just outside the open doorway, carding wool in her lap. She considered telling Lizzie how the hat came to hand but decided it was better to stay clear of the argument. She was planning to take in the celebrations as well and wasn’t willing to risk her mother refusing to let her attend. After the parade there was a garden party planned at Selina’s House and Mary Tryphena had yet to lay eyes on Absalom since he’d sailed home in the spring. Twenty now and a man to look at, is what she heard. She’d hardly thought of him while he was gone though each new proposal forced her to reconsider his letter and the autumn of gifts he’d treated her to. She was nostalgic for the innocence of the exchange, considering herself a worldly woman now. And she was interested to k
now, in an idle way, if he had thought of her at all in his years away.
King-me Sellers had lobbied the Church of England to send a minister to Paradise Deep for almost a quarter century. He felt the lack of a church was a mark against the village he’d built from nothing and saw as a mirror of his own success in the world. When he first settled on the shore he had visions of the place as a rival to St. John’s or Harbour Grace, and the church was simply one more benchmark in the progress of his ambitions. Jabez Trim was getting on in years, Sellers wrote every year for twenty-five years, and there was no telling when they would be bereft of even the amateur ministrations he provided. For twenty-five years the Church ignored him. It wasn’t until, in the flush of recent prosperity, Sellers promised to underwrite the expense of building a permanent sanctuary in Paradise Deep that they relented.
An archway of var branches decorated with wildflowers was built for the Reverend Eldred Dodge to walk beneath as he came ashore and the entire population turned out to welcome him, Protestant and Catholic alike. He’d been seasick the entire three-week voyage from England and the misery of it was clear in his ashen face. He was six foot tall and thin as a stick, his hair was wispy and sparse which made him look that much sicklier. The archway, which had been built to accommodate people of a more subdued height, confused him. He considered stepping around the thing before King-me directed him forward with a hand at his elbow. He staggered as he ducked beneath it, trying to steady himself with a hand to the flowered arch, and it tumbled to the wharf on top of him. It took King-me and Jabez Trim to get him to his feet and he leaned on Jabez’s shoulder all the way up the path to Selina’s House. As he stepped off the wharf a massively pregnant girl took his hand to touch it to her belly and the bizarre intimacy of the gesture made him flinch away.
