Michael Crummey

by Galore

  —He won’t last here long enough to shave, Daniel Woundy said.

  At Selina’s House, Dodge was put to bed in Absalom’s room like a child. He woke the following morning to the news that young Martha Jewer had passed away overnight while giving birth.

  —It was a breech, Selina explained to him. —She was there yesterday, Reverend. Did you see her?

  He nodded. —Is the baby with the father, then?

  —It was a moonlight child, she said.

  Dodge looked to King-me Sellers who was staring down at the table.

  —A moss-born, Selina said, trying to elaborate. —A merrybegot.

  —The child is a bastard, King-me said bluntly.

  The minister nodded again, contemplating a funeral for a woman of loose morals and a baptism for a bastard. He had a moment of real doubt then, not simple misgiving or hesitation but a profound fear that he’d been mistaken about himself or about God. He would live a long life—all of it from this day forward in the one and only parish of his ministry—before he experienced another like it.

  —The little one will have to trust to Providence now I suppose, Selina said.

  —Providence takes care of fools, Dodge said, trying to rouse himself to a challenge. —Where is the child?

  King-me had an Irish servant show him to the Gut where the infant was in the care of Devine’s Widow. Dodge had to bend nearly double at the waist to get under the lintel and the ceiling was too low to allow him to stand upright inside. Sellers had offered a brief sketch of Devine’s Widow before he set out and he’d planned to stand over her during the visit, but his stunted posture in the low room was too ridiculous to make a proper impression and he took a seat when it was offered. The baby was in Mary Tryphena’s lap and she was feeding him goat’s milk pap through a tit made of cloth, sneaking a furtive glance up at the minister now and then. No one in the room looked at him directly and there was the air of a smirk about them, as if they had just left off making fun of the pallor of his face when he stepped onto the wharf the day before.

  —You slept well I hope, Devine’s Widow said. She was a crone of a woman, as Sellers said, her face withered and fierce. She was missing all the teeth on one side of her mouth which made her entire body seem to list when she spoke. He didn’t answer the pleasantry, asking instead if he could have a moment alone with her, and she said a few words to Mary Tryphena in Irish. The girl placed the infant in Lizzie’s arms and went through the door without so much as a curtsy in his direction. Lizzie stayed in her chair and made no move to join her daughter but Dodge decided to let that go.

  —You’ve picked a busy time to come ashore, the widow woman said.

  —I am the Lord’s servant, Dodge offered. —I’m told there is no father.

  —You don’t think she found herself in this condition without help, Reverend?

  He couldn’t believe the gall. And the woman holding the baby seemed to have fallen asleep while he sat there. He raised his voice, hoping to startle her awake. —Do you know who fathered this child?

  —From what I seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate. Some say it was Saul Toucher or one of his young fellows. But that’s what some say whenever there’s blame to be cast.

  Dodge leaned away from the woman to collect himself. He looked about the pathetic shack, taking in the meanness of the lives it held. The sand on the floor was raked smooth and someone had used a stick to trace a pattern of ocean waves where the traffic of feet wouldn’t scar it. There was nothing else on view that suggested the slightest interest in elegance or beauty.

  —There’s worse off in the world, Devine’s Widow said as if she could see his thoughts. —What we have is ours.

  A witch, Sellers had called her, and there was certainly an argument to be made. Dodge said, That child will be raised in an English home.

  —The Lord’s servant you are, Reverend. We were wondering what would become of him. Devine’s Widow stood to take the child from Lizzie who was still dead asleep and she plopped the bundle into his lap. —His mother is being laid out at Shambler’s, she said. —You’ll want to look in on her.

  Dodge had the Irish servant he’d come with carry the infant back over the Tolt and he went immediately to Shambler’s premises, stood over Martha Jewer’s body on a wooden table in the back room. She was wearing her one filthy dress, her chin tied up with a length of twine and her feet bare. —She wasn’t fourteen, Shambler told him. —An orphan girl.

  —Was it one of the Touchers fathered the child?

  Shambler shrugged. —It’s all fellows out at Toucher’s, nine or ten of them but for Saul Toucher’s woman. They’re like a pack of dogs, that crowd.

  —That hardly answers my question.

  —It might mean the question’s better left, Shambler said.

  Reverend Dodge placed his hand briefly to the belly where the day before there’d been a child. —I should like to see the cemetery, he said finally.

  It was a thirty-minute walk up the Tolt Road and then further into the backcountry to the Burnt Woods where there was a meadow of soil deep enough to accommodate a body. Reverend Dodge was accompanied by King-me Sellers who went ahead of him to show the way. It was called the French Cemetery, King-me told him, because the first people buried there were sailors drowned when a French ship wrecked on the Tolt a hundred years before. Or because the land once belonged to a man named French who buried a wife and child during a typhoid outbreak before he was cut down himself. Sellers seemed to have no idea which story was the true source of the name and no obvious preference for one over the other. There was no fence to mark the graveyard, just a scatter of wooden crosses and three tall stone markers placed side by side. The meadow was high enough they could see the ocean and the boats of the fishermen on the grounds, and all the graves faced outward to the sea. —That’s a long way to carry a body, Master Sellers.

  —Every decent bit of ground is planted with potatoes, King-me said, or used to graze goats and sheep. This is all stone and boulders and plates of shale, not fit for growing. You gets two feet down into that and you’re liable to believe the land don’t want us here, alive or dead.

  Dodge leaned forward to read the stone markers. Sellers, each of them said. He straightened and looked across at his host.

  —All mine, King-me said.

  Dodge read more closely. Two sons and a daughter-in-law.

  —A ship headed over to England, Sellers said. —They’d gone with the youngest, to find him a wife. Harry’s woman was from Poole and anxious to have a visit and they made a trip of it. They had Absalom, he wasn’t two years old at the time, and Selina kept the youngster here. Told them she wanted to have something to make sure they’d come home to us. King-me smiled at his feet. —You say all sorts of things the world makes you regret, I find. There’s nothing in the ground there, being as they were lost at sea. Spent a king’s ransom to have those stones shipped over from Devon.

  A cold rain was falling, the wind picking at their clothes like the hands of beggars on a city street. Please sir. Please sir. Dodge wandered along the uneven rows of crosses, names scored or painted on the wood. Spingle. Codner. Bozan. Harty. Devine. Hussey. Toucher. Snook. Brazill. Woundy. Protestant and Catholic set down in a mash. He turned at the far side of the cemetery and shouted across to Sellers. —We will have a fence. The earth beneath him was solid enough but he felt as if he was still at sea, adrift on a gray expanse without demarcation or border. He was shaking with a rage that he mistook for certainty. —Before another body is set in the ground there will be a fence, and the ground will be consecrated.

  They built a riddle fence of narrow poles around the graveyard and Dodge himself spent hours each day helping to dig post holes and fix the logs in place to ensure it was completed before Martha Jewer was buried. The funeral was held in King-me’s largest storehouse to accommodate the same crowd of people who had come to meet the minister on the shoreline three days before, both Cat
holic and Protestant. Dodge stood before them on an overturned puncheon tub, decked out in his Episcopalian vestments, determined to turn the tide of local sentiment where he and the Lord were concerned. —Brothers and sisters in Christ, he began.

  King-me lost all interest in building a church after Reverend Dodge took up residence on the shore. The minister spent three years trying to wheedle the money promised for the project and he had to threaten to leave to get it. The foundation was laid the summer before Absalom arrived home from England and it was in use for holy services by Christmas, the building complete but for the stained glass shipped from Manchester and stored in St. John’s over the winter. It was scheduled to arrive with the bishop when he traveled to the shore for the dedication.

  Everyone expected there would be trouble of some sort during those ceremonies. Along with the bishop, Skipper John Withycombe had transported a Navy officer and a handful of soldiers who were meant to keep the peace, or at the very least ensure the vicar wasn’t stripped of his vestments and thrown buck-naked into the harbor by drunken Irishmen still nursing their resentments.

  At Martha Jewer’s funeral Dodge announced that the French Cemetery would be open only to the remains of Episcopalians, starting with the corpse laid out before them. And further that all sacraments in the Church of England would be made available only to those confirmed in the faith. People tried to shout him down but he pressed on with the funeral. Chairs were thrown. Half the congregation walked out in the middle of the service. The funeral procession was pelted with stones and curses, as was every Protestant funeral procession in the year that followed. Mourners were forced to carry wood staves and fish forks to defend their clergyman and brawls often erupted between the two groups on the way up the Tolt Road.

  Away from Dodge and his pronouncements most people did their best to carry on as they had, but the sectarian feuding spilled over from the funeral altercations. Boats and equipment were vandalized in a spiral of retaliation. It might have ended in bloodshed but for Peter Flood’s corpse being stolen in the confusion of a brawl one April morning. Flood had married a Protestant woman twenty years past but converted to the Church of England only weeks before his death, when Dodge threatened to dissolve the union and declare his children bastards. The thieves buried Flood in the new Catholic graveyard in the Gut without ceremony or prayer and his family were forced to disinter his remains at night, spiriting him away to the Burnt Woods for a proper burial in the French Cemetery. Every week or so the corpse was moved again, carted back and forth from one graveyard to the other. The bizarre tug-of-war went on through the spring and no one could say for certain where Peter Flood finally came to rest. But the episode engendered a revulsion so general that the funeral processions became quieter affairs and some semblance of peace returned to the shore.

  Dodge took it as a sign of God’s favor that the new church hadn’t been burned to the ground before the first services were held. The men who designed and raised the sanctuary were all boat builders and the structure looked like the hull of a ship flipped face down on the Gaze. The eight-foot stained glass window arrived on the vessel bringing the bishop, and Jabez Trim spent the day installing it behind the altar. Dodge had chosen the motif himself: the disciples hauling their nets under the watchful eye of Jesus.

  The vicar, the Right Reverend Arthur Waghorne, was an amateur botanist. He barely glanced at the new church before wandering off into the fields behind the building where he spent the better part of the day sketching and collecting specimens on the Gaze. He was accompanied by two soldiers who sat in the grass below him, speculating on their chances of bedding a woman before returning to St. John’s. Arscott was a fifteen-year-old private from Devon, a virgin who labored under the illusion that no one but he knew the truth of the matter. He was next to useless as a soldier, clumsy with his weapons, naive and harmlessly sycophantic in his relations. Arsewipe was his nickname among the enlisted men. Corporal Kinnebrook was four years the boy’s senior. —Paradise Deep, he said. —What does that make you think of, Arsewipe?

  —Heaven, is it?

  —No, jesus, Kinnebrook said, swiping at his head. —A man of your vast experience on the battlefields of love, Arsewipe. Tell me that doesn’t make you think of fucking. Paradise Deep, he said with a note of reverence. The name alone had given Kinnebrook high hopes for the expedition, but everything he’d seen of the place so far promised disappointment. —I expect we’ll have to jump in the harbor to wet our dicks in this shithole, he said.

  By the time Reverend Dodge came up from the church to collect them for the parade the two soldiers were asleep on the grass. —His Majesty’s finest, the vicar said as he kicked the men awake.

  The parade began at the steps of the new sanctuary and wound its way through the footpaths of Paradise Deep, past the stores of Spurriers’ Premises as far as Mrs. Gallery’s droke and back again to Selina’s House where food and drink was set up on long tables in the garden. The Reverend Waghorne was at the head of the procession on King-me’s piebald mare, Dodge walking at the horse’s shoulder. The Navy officer, a mutton-chopped Scot named Goudie, marched directly behind them. The clergymen led hymns for the people in their wake. Olive Trim aboard her truckley at the rear, holding Martha Jewer’s orphan boy in her lap, the wooden cart pulled along by a Newfoundland. The soldiers were marshaled in two groups at either side of the procession and they kept a wary eye on the Catholics gathered in clusters to watch the parade. They followed at a discreet distance when the turn was made for Selina’s House and watched their manners, not willing to miss a chance at the spread laid on for the celebration.

  A pig and two sheep turned on spits over an open fire outside Selina’s House and new potatoes roasted in the coals. There was partridge and rabbit stew and vegetables dipped in flour and fried with butter, roasted goose and turr, boiled puddings with raisins and fresh berries with cream for dessert. There was no fish of any description to be had and that absence was another sign of their newfound prosperity. That eating the bounty of the sea was a choice rather than a necessity.

  Reverend Waghorne said grace and people lined up in orderly rows to be served. The vicar turned to Dodge. —Your fears seem to have been overstated, he said.

  Dodge smiled at his superior. It was early yet, he felt, to judge.

  —I half expected, Waghorne said, we might lay eyes on the priest you speak of in your correspondence.

  —You can trust Phelan won’t show his face anywhere an English soldier would see it.

  —I had a most curious visit from the prefect vicar apostolic before I left St. John’s, Reverend Dodge.

  —The Catholic archbishop?

  —It seems the Romans are as anxious to be rid of Father Phelan as yourself.

  —Well, they make a poor showing of their anxiety.

  Waghorne pursed his lips. —He’s a rogue, I’m told. Defrocked by the Dominican Order after he was ordained. And gallivanting through the country all the years since as if it was ceded to him by God.

  —And how exactly does the archbishop plan to deal with the man?

  —As you are aware, Reverend Dodge, the Romans are not keen to discuss their internal problems. I’m surprised he spoke to me at all.

  —He must have wanted something?

  —Just an eye, Waghorne said casually. —A line or two now and then to say when Phelan is here, what he’s doing. Who he’s closest to.

  Dodge turned to set his plate on the table. —I hardly thought when I was ordained, he said, that I would be asked to spy on behalf of the Catholic archbishop.

  —Come now, Waghorne said gently. —Think of it as a neighborly gesture. A Christian duty.

  A tall girl wandered by with an empty plate, offering a cursory bob in their direction as she passed.

  —Mary Tryphena Devine, Dodge whispered.

  —Is that the young one half the men of Newfoundland are heartsick for?

  —The same.

  Waghorne tilted his head in appraisal, his lips p
ursed. —Well, the girl has fine posture, he said dismissively.

  —I expect you will have noted the relative lack of female company about you.

  The vicar glanced around the yard and even by that casual assessment he could see the women were outnumbered at least three to one.

  —Hunger is the best sauce, Your Worship.

  After Mary Tryphena had taken her fill from the tables she heaped a plate with food for Olive Trim, then entertained the baby so the woman could eat her meal in peace. Happy to be distracted from thinking of Absalom who was still nowhere to be seen. Olive was leaning back on a pillow of straw in her truckley beneath the weight of her belly, finally pregnant with a child of her own after taking in the orphan they’d christened Obediah. She was only days from delivering and looked like a creature trapped under some obstruction she was helpless to move.

  —Jabez is certain it’s a lad we’re having, Olive said. —Wants to call him Azariah.

  Mary Tryphena looked at Olive to see if she was meant to laugh at this. —Obediah and Azariah.

  Olive said, Too many hours with his head in the Good Book if you want my opinion, may God forgive me. She shifted slightly, reaching a hand to change the position of one of her lifeless legs. —Don’t know how I’ll manage to chase two of the little buggers around.

  Mary Tryphena was watching Selina’s House distractedly and only nodded.

  —Have you seen Absalom since he’s been home? Olive asked.

  Mary Tryphena smiled across at her and shook her head, embarrassed to be caught out. She saw Judah and Lazarus wandering through the crowd with the wood dog at their heels and she called them over to show off the youngster. Lazarus took the tricorn from Judah to place it full over Obediah’s head and the filthy darkness set the child to bawling. Mary Tryphena thought to say something to Olive about the ridiculous proposal from the sailor she’d turned down that morning but didn’t see how she could avoid more discussion of Absalom with the subject and let it lie. She took the hat off the baby’s head, tossing it back to Jude, and he offered up a fool’s dance to try and quiet the youngster.