Michael Crummey

by Galore

  Lizzie entered the dance arm in arm with Virtue, sitting against a wall while the floor shook beneath them. There was no sign of Callum, but Virtue’s intended was waiting and he approached her with his hand extended. He was a good-looking man, there was no denying the fact. Dark hair and most of his teeth still and he looked like he had never gone hungry. Virtue hadn’t stepped on a dance floor in her life but he made her look a natural.

  Lizzie danced only once, forced to her feet by Father Phelan who seemed to have made a pledge to dance with every woman present. Bowed low when he returned her to her seat. —Your man Callum, he said, leaning close. —He asks you not to wait for him. The priest straightened and looked down on her while she searched his face. —I wish I had news more suited to the season, he said.

  Virtue stayed on the floor hours before she took note of Lizzie watching the dancers blankly from her seat against the wall. She excused herself from her partner and walked over to ask if there was anything wrong but Lizzie could only shake her head. Callum had given her up and she wished now she’d gone over the rail of the vessel after the porcelain brooch. Virtue helped her to her feet and the two women slipped out of the dancers’ heat to make their way home. The servant settled Lizzie into her bed and left her staring out the window, the stars being choked by frost creeping across the pane.

  Virtue’s intended came by hours later, begging to be let in. He was drunk and insistent, slapping at the door with his open palm, and Virtue stood a chair against the handle to keep him out. He sang half a love song and then hammered at the door awhile longer. Lizzie came in from the kitchen to ask if she was all right and Virtue shouted out to him that he’d woken the mistress. —The mistress is it? he said. —You sure it isn’t someone else I’m disturbing? Virtue begged Lizzie to go back to her bed and he demanded to know who she was speaking to. He cursed her for a lying whore and accused her of taking a stream of men to her bed while he sat demure in the kitchen and talked of marriage like a fool. —Who is it? he shouted. —Tell me the bastard’s name.

  —You’re drunk, Martin Gallery, she said. —You be on your way.

  He came to the house the next day, gray with a hangover and remorse. Fighting back tears as he explained it was only love of the woman that made him so heatable, that he had no doubt Virtue was alone last evening and her refusing to let him in proved only her worthy character. He would be a fool not to see she was a Christian woman and he prayed she might find it in her heart to have him still. He was standing near the fireplace, his head bowed in an attitude of abject contrition, and Virtue watched him a full minute, thinking of his hand at her back on the dance floor. It was the first time since she left her home in England she hadn’t felt lonely. —You will not drink in our house, she said.

  —I will not, he said.

  —You will not speak to me in the manner you spoke yester evening.

  —I swear to God.

  Virtue took a breath. She’d never mustered a tone of such authority in her life and having some say in the affair gave her the impression she’d consented to it all.

  After Gallery left the house, Lizzie came into the kitchen. She hadn’t cut her hair since she’d heard Callum sing for the first time, when she was still a child, and it had grown almost to her thighs. She’d been proud of the extravagance, the weight of it a constant reminder of him. She set a chair in the middle of the kitchen and handed the housekeeper a pair of scissors. Virtue weeping as the lengths fell away from Lizzie’s head, the dark scrolls mounding about their feet. —Burn it, Lizzie ordered before she left the room.

  Through January and February and March the foul weather made a prison of the house. Lizzie grew to despise everything in it, her minder not the least. John Tom White drank regularly in honor of the upcoming nuptials he seemed to feel single-handedly responsible for arranging. He was giddy with his little triumph. He came to Selina’s House direct from afternoons spent at Shambler’s tavern and he treated every meal as a kind of personal victory celebration. —A horse of a man Virtue have got herself there, he told them.

  He dropped dead in the middle of a toast in March, striking his head against the heavy table as he fell. Virtue thought he’d knocked himself senseless and she knelt over the bulk of him, laughing at the ridiculous man and shouting his name until Lizzie forced her to stop. —He’s not asleep, Virtue, for the love of God.

  She held the back of her hand to her mouth and laughed. —He’s not dead? she said. And she bit her hand to keep from laughing again.

  Virtue was sent to Barnaby Shambler who had become undertaker to the Protestants on the shore. John Tom White had been drinking on a tab for months, Shambler told her, and he refused to add to the uncollectible debt by burying the man. Virtue went to find Jabez Trim and when they returned to Selina’s House they found Lizzie sitting in a chair beside the corpse. Keeping John Tom company out of remorse for wishing ill on him so long.

  —We got no choice now, Jabez said, but to fetch Devine’s Widow from the Gut.

  The widow was already gone to her bed when Jabez arrived at the house. Callum woke his mother and he dressed to accompany them over the Tolt.

  —You oughten to come, Devine’s Widow said.

  —And who’s going to see you back after you’ve looked after John Tom?

  The old woman watched her son while he busied himself at his boots. —I thought your mind was made up to leave that girl be.

  —I’m only coming to keep you company, he said. He was out the door then, shouting at them to get a move on.

  Callum hadn’t known a moment of real peace since the afternoon he’d seen Lizzie perform in Spurriers’ storeroom as a girl. Mary the Mother of God speaking to the gathering as if she’d appeared out of a Lordly shaft of light through the roof. It was a witching he’d never heard tell of, that a child could conjure such a vision, his pulse so fierce as he watched her that each heartbeat rippled across his sight. When Mary fell to her knees at the Savior’s tomb his legs quivered and he thought he might drop where he stood. And then Lizzie surfaced through that likeness of rapture, collapsing up there in his stead. A hush in the room those few moments before the angel began screaming, Callum’s cock on end and his throat closed over with reverence and dread and wanting the strange little dark-haired girl for his own.

  He’d never learned how to quiet his head during the years without her. He was a regular fixture at Shambler’s for a time, trying to muffle the roar of the girl’s proximity with booze. But the hours of drunken respite guttered into a bitterness that threatened to kill him and he chose to bury himself in the dredge of all that needed doing instead, taking to it as though to a religious calling. Rinding lungers for wharves and stages, tanning sealskins in the fall, barking herring nets, framing boats through the long winters. He offered himself up to others on the shore, slut for work that he was. He spent several days each spring working on Ralph Stone’s pathetic roof. He adopted the childless and aging Kerrivans, helping William haul and split and stack their winter wood, trenching their potato garden and fertilizing it with seaweed or capelin, building a stone fence around the apple tree at the margin of their property. The endless physical labor was a hairshirt he wore next his skin, though it was only Devine’s Widow who named it for what it was. —No good ever come of pining, she told him.

  Callum had confessed his intentions to Father Phelan early on, but the priest had no patience for his vigil, thinking it an insult to God to live in such denial. He made a habit of plying Callum with drink, offering to take him to the home of a woman he guaranteed would make them welcome, dismissing Callum as a sodomite, a fairy, a eunuch in fisherman’s boots when he refused. —Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, he quoted drunkenly, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave. The priest slapped at Callum’s crotch. —With thy might, you useless tit.

  Father Phelan’s ridicule never bothered Callum as much as the relentless public speculation concerning Lizzie. Everyone had an opini
on about the girl to share, about her spells and the years spent skulking on the margins of their lives, all of which suggested some flaw at her core. Eventually Callum was forced to admit that what people said of her was true, that she was wild and twisted in some fashion. He couldn’t help thinking he was to blame, asking the girl to share a truncated life that was slowly deforming them both. And he became increasingly withdrawn and reclusive as that fact came home to him.

  On the evening of the Boxing Day dance organized by John Tom White, a crowd came to the house in the Gut, drunk and fed up with Callum’s cloistering himself away. They took his solitariness as an insult to their own company and decided to carry him if necessary to the festivities in Paradise Deep. Daniel Woundy and Saul Toucher and Father Phelan and several others dragged him to the door while he fought like a man being led to a lynching, elbows and knees and cursing, his shirt tearing along its seams. Saul Toucher punched at Callum’s ribs to get his hands off the door frame and Callum went down, grabbing legs as he went. The group moved off into the darkness with this strange crablike creature hobbling at its center. They made slow progress on the narrow pathways through the snow, Callum fighting every inch, and the hill to the Tolt defeated them altogether. Saul Toucher looked up to the night sky, his hands on his hips. —I won’t miss the dance for this faggot’s sake, Father.

  —All right Callum, the priest said. —Do you have a message you’d like passed on to Lizzie at least?

  Callum’s chest was a knot of pain, each breath like a fist against his ribs. He nodded. —Yes Father, he said. —I do.

  It was after midnight when they reached Selina’s House, Lizzie still sitting beside John Tom’s corpse on the floor. Callum and Jabez lifted the body onto the table. —I’ll be getting home to my own, Jabez said then. —If there’s nothing more I can do for you here.

  Virtue had to fight to repress her laughing fit whenever she was in the corpse’s presence, and Lizzie dismissed her. She sent Callum after the servant and he offered his infuriating little bow. —Make the gentleman at home, she said.

  Devine’s Widow was holding her hand over the eyes of the corpse, waiting for the lids to close for good. —I can manage this on my own, she said.

  —I’ve no doubt, Lizzie whispered.

  They began stripping the layers of shirts and undershirts, the foul socks. Rigor mortis still setting in and the head lolled as the body shifted left or right. The old woman pulled the filthy tunic over John Tom’s head in one abrupt tug, working with a cold efficiency, as if she were skinning a rabbit. The absence of life in the flesh she was handling made Lizzie’s stomach turn. John Tom’s chest and belly covered in a thick moss of white hair, the stink of his feet acrid. Callum sitting in the next room. She grabbed the table edge, one of her spells traveling down its black tunnel toward her, and before they managed to remove the man’s trousers she was dead asleep on the floor.

  The widow woman called for Callum and he carried Lizzie away to the kitchen, her body almost weightless in his arms, her close-cropped head like a child’s. Virtue stood back by the fire, the laughter finally choked out of her, and Callum sat beside Lizzie on the daybed while she struggled back to herself. He’d never been this close to her, never had the luxury to simply stare and stare. He’d been right to stay clear of her all this time, his hands shaking now he was close enough to touch her, his stomach in an uproar. He’d given her up and should have stayed at home, as the widow told him.

  Lizzie’s eyes slurred open, the spell still on her for all she was awake. Callum could see her taking him in, piecing together why he was there, remembering John Tom dead in the next room. He said, You cut your hair, and she managed a half-smile that made his chest ache.

  —Miss made me cut it off her, Virtue said, and told me to burn it all.

  —Burn it?

  —Virtue, Lizzie said, would you give us a moment.

  They watched one another as the housekeeper closed the door of the kitchen behind her. —Even Virtue has a man comes knocking at all hours and won’t take no for an answer, Lizzie said.

  —I never wanted to see you here, Callum said. —Like this.

  —We could have run off.

  He shook his head. —I didn’t want that either.

  —What did you want, Callum?

  He glanced at his boots, feeling foolish. He’d known all along that the grudge between his mother and King-me stood in the way of the match, though as far as he could figure the feud stemmed from a disputed hen, a trifle invested with weight by time and pigheadedness. A stubbornness of his own was all he thought necessary to overcome the squabble. Each year on the anniversary of Lizzie’s Easter pageant he had walked into Paradise Deep, standing before King-me’s desk to ask for the girl’s hand, thinking the man would eventually have to acquiesce to the obvious. But King-me’s one-word refusals insisted something illicit was all they could look forward to. And Callum was too pigheaded himself to allow the man to force that upon them.

  He looked at Lizzie squarely now, her wounded girl’s features, the ragged haircut. —I couldn’t let you waste your life waiting for your father to die, he told her.

  She said, Not even when we marry, Callum Devine, will you decide how I waste my life.

  Virtue Clouter gave her notice to Selina after Lizzie’s family returned from Poole in the spring. She married Martin Gallery within the week and Lizzie consented to be maid of honor. Gallery had expected John Tom White to act as bridesboy and he asked King-me to stand in John Tom’s stead. Sellers didn’t know Gallery well enough to refuse him though he disliked being set in a dead man’s shoes. He carried out his duties as the vows were taken, walking ahead of the couple arm in arm with his daughter when the ceremony was complete, and people said it was as close as King-me would come to giving his daughter away. The old man stood straight and true as a navy mast, he looked like he might live to be a hundred. Lizzie caught Callum’s eye as she passed, as if to reassure him, her gaze steadfast and certain.

  They endured three more years of their peculiar sentence after Virtue’s wedding, when another excursion to England was planned to find a wife for George. King-me decided to stay behind, unwilling to leave Lizzie with Callum still set for her and neither John Tom nor Virtue to watch them. Selina was afraid what might happen with father and daughter left alone in one another’s company so long and decided at the last minute not to sail. She begged Harry and his wife to leave Absalom with her, the child just weaned off the breast and learning to walk. Harry’s wife refused outright at first. But she was pregnant again and the second child would be born in Poole that winter, which Selina argued would satisfy her family’s desire to fawn over the offspring. After two days of needling and bartering and naked pleading the mother relented.

  They shipped out on the last crossing of the fall and it wasn’t until the following spring that any news reached Paradise Deep. The vessel never made port in Poole and was unheard of since departing St. John’s. The blinds in Selina’s House were drawn, the windows darkened for a period of attenuated mourning, months waiting for some final word though it was obvious there was no hope. For the first time in years stories of how Devine’s Widow left King-me’s employ made the rounds, variations of the curse she was said to have laid upon him discussed and debated. May the sea take you and all the issue of your loins was repeated often enough to take on the air of truth and was generally accepted as such by the fall.

  At the end of September Selina herself walked over the Tolt Road and into the Gut. She’d never stepped foot in the neighboring community and had to be directed to the stud tilt where Devine’s Widow lived. She refused the offer of tea, refused to sit down. Devine’s Widow expressed her condolences and she refused even to accept those.

  —You’ll leave her be, Selina said. —If I settle things with her father and she marries Callum. You promise me you’ll let her alone.

  —Mrs. Sellers.

  —Your Callum is set for her, everyone on the shore knows as much, and I will see
he has her. But you, you bitch. Selina took a breath to steady herself, a twitch about her mouth making it look as if she was trying to fight off a smile. —You will not harm a hair on her head, so help me God.

  There was something familiar in the woman’s tone, a sickening note somewhere between supplication and threat. The widow’s husband had died during an epidemic of measles that burned through the shore twenty-five years before. Seventeen deaths in the span of three weeks, Jabez Trim performing four funerals on one black day alone. Her husband and only child both suffering and Devine’s Widow lay awake the last nights of their illness in a fever of her own, offering all she had to offer. It seemed for a time she would lose them both and in her desperation she chose between them. —Spare the boy, she said. —Take my husband but spare Callum.

  In a way she envied Selena, believing there was someone other than God to bargain with. —My Callum is a good man, the widow said.

  —You give me your word, Missus.

  She picked up her apron to wipe at her hands, knowing it would be a cruelty to deny Selina the illusion of safety she was after. Knowing Callum would never otherwise have the bride he waited on. She said, I’ll do what I have in me for Lizzie if you settle Master Sellers on the wedding.

  —That’s no promise.

  —You take care of Master Sellers, Devine’s Widow said. —Let me worry about the rest.

  Callum insisted the ceremony be put off a full year out of respect for the dead. —I’ve waited too long to marry into grief, he told Lizzie. King-me showed his face at the service long enough to give his daughter away before cutting all ties with her.

  Callum came to bed the first night of their marriage with an erection that Father Phelan would have described as a decade in the making. His cock went limp so abruptly after he came that Lizzie thought for a moment she’d damaged or broken it somehow and Callum couldn’t disguise his amusement, his whole body shaking when the level of her ignorance came clear to him. —You wanted to marry a slut, did you? she asked.