by Galore
He said, You haven’t ever seen King-me’s bull mount the cows, maid?
She had not. She’d never seen anyone, not even her brothers, naked. She avoided the barns and for all her wild roaming she’d maintained a careful ignorance of the most basic facts of life. She’d had glimpses of the act, wood dogs or goats at one another, though it looked like a fight, a sickening intimacy to it that made her look away. She told Callum about the surreptitious trips to the Pond, the game she’d made of sneaking closer and closer to Ralph Stone’s shack, the shock of seeing him take a piss only a spruce branch from her hiding place. Nothing at all to hint at the truth of the matter before her encounter with Ralph Stone’s pizzle. She was beating at Callum’s chest to stop him laughing as she tried to explain herself. —Nothing, nothing, nothing, she said furiously. —And then to come face to face with the like of that.
—From the stories old Ralph told me, Callum said, you’re not the only woman he give a mortal fright with that oar of his.
They went quiet then, the man between them a moment, not two years dead. Passed in his sleep days before Jabez Trim walked out to look in on him. A miserable October, three weeks of a steady downpour and at some point after he died Ralph Stone’s long-suffering roof gave up the ghost as well. A three-foot hole cratered above him, the steady stream of rainfall soaking the bedclothes and the corpse and threatening to set the very bed afloat, as if the ocean he’d escaped had come to claim him after all.
Lizzie said, We wouldn’t ever have come to this if he hadn’t carted me down here.
Callum shrugged against her. —I expect that might be true.
They could hear Devine’s Widow snoring in the room Callum laid on the back of the tilt before the wedding and Lizzie nestled her forehead into his chest, thinking of the old woman’s face when she’d stared down at her, paralyzed on the table. A look of cold appraisal that made her helplessness seem irremediable.
They knew Selina had come to speak to the widow after Harry and George were lost. Within a week King-me offered a tortured blessing to his surviving child and her fiancé. Lizzie and Callum had never spoken about the role Devine’s Widow played in that sequence of events, refused even to acknowledge it. They were happier telling themselves love alone was responsible for their union. Love and blind chance. Love and the intervention of Ralph Stone’s bladder on a summer’s afternoon before they knew one another.
Lizzie reached down to cup Callum’s penis, the mysterious little creature spent and still wet, like something half-drowned and just clinging to life. The old woman’s snores echoing from the back room. —I hate your mother, Lizzie whispered to him. And she felt her husband’s cock stir in her hand.
Virtue Gallery was a woman who blossomed in marriage, as if she’d tapped some vibrant subterranean source of beauty. It was the sign of a happy match, people said. Virtue had never so much as kissed a man before her wedding night but she followed her husband’s lead as she did when they danced and she fell in love with him in the act, in the give-and-take of a physical pleasure she hadn’t considered possible outside some paradisical realm reserved for the virtuous dead.
The only shadow in their lives was the absence of children. Virtue was embarrassed by her trouble and Gallery, cavalier about the subject at first, was more and more taken up with the idea that his wife was defective. They’d shared the house he built in the droke of woods for five years and had both begun to think they might never have a child. Their discussions on the subject became increasingly unhappy, Gallery talking as if he’d been tricked into wedding a barren woman. Virtue subjected herself to long courses of sour teas and potions of sheep laurel boiled with tobacco and she observed a variety of superstitions that were said to ensure conception. She went so far as to ask Jabez Trim to pray for them, though Gallery scoffed at the notion, given Trim’s own childlessness. Virtue suggested they ask a blessing from Father Phelan instead but Gallery wouldn’t hear of it. He’d rather cut off his own balls with a rusty fish knife, he said, than have a child on the say-so of a mick priest.
—Oh Martin.
He turned on her with a flash of anger. —You’d love to have the bastard’s hands on you, I’m sure.
Virtue got up from her seat.
—No, he said. —It’s his mick cock a slut like you is after.
It was the first time he’d spoken to her in such a fashion since the night he’d come to her door at Selina’s House. She stared at him awhile, hoping to shame him without speaking, and then she went to her bed alone. She found him asleep on the flagstones of the fireplace next morning, wrapped in a coat. He woke meek and remorseful and newly in love with his wife and the couple enjoyed a period of sexual appetite unlike anything since their first weeks together.
She knew she was pregnant the moment it happened, felt it like a wick lit inside her. But she said nothing until she missed her second period. Gallery hadn’t touched a drop of liquor in the house since the wedding, never drank in Virtue’s presence and never came back to the droke until he was sober. But at the impromptu celebration for the pregnancy he toasted his wife and the child and his neighbors and returned the toasts offered by everyone else in the room. He was up half the night singing love songs to Virtue where she lay in the back room, pretending to sleep. It was late autumn, after the fall fish was in and before there was snow enough to haul wood from the backcountry, and Gallery carried on celebrating at every opportunity. Virtue felt he’d proved himself long enough to be granted a reprieve and she found small doses of the man when he was drinking surprisingly easy to take. He came to bed asking her if she might show him, once more, if it isn’t too much to ask mi’lady, the precise steps she’d taken to sow the infant in her belly. And they lay together afterwards with the impending glory of the child between them.
—Those were all the steps? he asked one night, his hand in the heat between her thighs. —You’re certain?
—Each and every one.
—You didn’t leave out a step or two?
—Those were all I remember.
—Perhaps we should go over it again to be sure.
She laughed at him, pushing his hand away. —Go to sleep, you fool, she said. And she’d almost drifted off when he spoke again. —You’re not leaving out a step are you, Virtue Gallery?
—What are you talking about, Martin?
He sat up in the darkness, struck by a doubt. —It seems strange, is all. Five years we’ve shared this bed and your belly barren all that time.
—I won’t be talked to like this, she said.
—You didn’t ask a blessing of that mick bastard, did you?
She let out a long breath, relieved by the ludicrous accusation. —Of course not.
—Well what did you do then?
—I just showed you.
—All the steps? he shouted. He was out of bed by then, knocking around in the dark after another drink, and she found him passed out beneath the board table in the morning, his dancer’s legs splayed across the floor. She made breakfast without waking him, too angry to speak to the man, stepping back and forth over the motionless body. He didn’t come to himself till noon, smacking his head on the table as he sat bolt upright from the floor. She was carding wool in a chair across from him.
—That’s the good Lord, she said. —Telling you it’s time to give up the drinking.
He rubbed his temples with both fists, still uncertain where he was. He stood up straight and held the table to steady himself. —All right, he said.
But Martin Gallery was taken with the notion his wife carried another man’s child and even stone sober it grew in his mind. Virtue lost her patience with his sullenness and silence and she ignored him as best she could. The child was all she thought of. Their child. The baby’s arrival, which she prayed would bring her husband back to himself.
His mood darkened with the first incontrovertible signs of the pregnancy, as if the distended belly and swollen breasts proved his worst suspicions correct. He drank next the fire eve
ry evening as winter descended and Virtue stayed in the bedroom to avoid his accusations. When he went out to find drinking company she barred the door and Gallery spent a portion of the early mornings screaming at his wife and her secret lover locked away in the house that he’d built with his own hands.
It was no secret that Martin Gallery was terrorizing his wife during his binges, accusing her of infidelities, threatening to take the lives of Virtue and any man he found in her bed. Jabez Trim once tried to talk some sense to him and succeeded only in placing himself first on the list of Gallery’s suspects, so most people avoided the couple altogether. The mummers passed by without calling at the house in the droke that Christmas season and Gallery drank most often with Saul Toucher who treated Gallery’s drunken tirades as a bit of harmless theater. Names of possible adulterers were discussed at length, scenarios which placed particular men in Mrs. Gallery’s company were explored. They agreed there was no man on the shore above suspicion, no woman alive who could be trusted completely. Saul’s wife was still nursing the new triplets. —How do you know for certain, Gallery asked, those children are your own?
Saul pointed out the cleft of his chin, as prominent as the cheeks of a baby’s arse. —They all got the same, he said.
Gallery shook his head. Even that seemed flimsy evidence to inspire so much confidence.
Sheila Woundy’s husband found Gallery passed out in a snowbank one January morning on his way into the backcountry after firewood with Daniel and James. He would have walked by the man in the predawn light if his wood dog hadn’t stuck his head off the path, his tail wagging furiously. Elias Fennessey couldn’t call his dog off whatever had its attention and when he tried to drag the animal back onto the trail he discovered Martin Gallery half-frozen in the bush, hair and eyebrows white with frost.
They strapped a length of twine under his armpits and the Newfoundland dragged him out the Tolt Road to his house in the droke. Elias knocked at the barred door, calling for Mrs. Gallery, and together they shifted him inside and set him near the fireplace, stoking the fire until it roared. Elias didn’t want to leave Virtue alone with her frozen husband and he sent Daniel and James on into the woods with the dog, saying he’d catch them up later in the morning.
When Gallery’s eyes opened an hour later he looked at Elias a moment before nodding his head in recognition. —Mr. Woundy, he whispered.
Elias was a widower himself when he wed Sheila Woundy. She had married into his name, but the change never took on the shore. Their only son, James, had been christened Fennessey but was commonly known by his mother’s surname. Even Elias was referred to as Mr. Woundy and he was too old to take offense. He nodded back at Gallery. —You give us some fright, he said. —Thought you was a dead man.
Gallery looked around the room until his eyes settled on his wife in a chair near the table. —Mrs. Gallery, he said.
Virtue was almost five months pregnant when Gallery killed Elias Fennessey, setting on the man as he walked to the outhouse in the early hours of the morning. Gallery slit his throat from ear to ear with a fish knife that had been stropped to a razor edge, then walked the Tolt Road to his own home, the blood on his cuffs freezing solid in the cold. The door was barred and he climbed onto the roof to lower himself down the wooden flue into the blackened fireplace. He caught Virtue as she was shifting the chair from the door to run, dragging her back into the room by the hair, slashing at her with the knife. He pinned her to the floor until she exhausted herself and lay still. —Please, she said. —Don’t hurt the baby.
—I killed him, Virtue, just as I promised I would.
—I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. —You’re drunk.
Gallery raised himself a little higher as if trying to get a better look at her in the near dark and he spat full into her face. He said, I killed the father of your bastard child.
Virtue turned her head away. —If that were true you’d be a dead man, Martin Gallery, and the world would be better for it.
Daniel Woundy came for Callum as soon as Elias’s body was discovered and they gathered half a dozen others to go after the murderer. They went straight to the house in the droke where the door stood open and Virtue lay as pale as sea ice on the floor inside. It was the bitter cold or blind luck that saved her bleeding to death when Gallery lost his certainty or his nerve, leaving her where she was, slashed at the neck and chest.
Virtue hovered near death awhile. Devine’s Widow replaced her dressings morning and evening, inspecting the state of the rough stitches she’d sewn in with needle and thread.
—The baby, Virtue whispered each time she opened her eyes. —The baby isn’t moving, Missus. I don’t feel him moving.
Devine’s Widow pinned Virtue to the bed against her panic, trying to keep the stitches in place. —The child is dead, she told her.
Gallery was found floating under Spurriers’ premises in the harbor a week after Elias was killed. He’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves before throwing himself into the ocean and had been dead in the water a long time. But his two hands were still black with soot.
Virtue birthed the tiny corpse on the eve of Valentine’s Day and she spent the long months of convalescence in her room off the kitchen in Selina’s House. Absalom Sellers was nearly seven years old and appointed himself Virtue’s nursemaid, bringing her water and clearing away her dishes and emptying her honeypot in the mornings. He knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding Virtue’s injuries and that particular silence was so familiar to him he thought for a time she might be his mother. The boy was never let alone outside Selina’s House, held apart from the larger community of Paradise Deep to spare him stumbling upon the details of his parents’ deaths. The slight stutter he’d always suffered multiplied in his isolation, like mold invading an abandoned house, and Virtue fell in love with the boy’s articulate reticence, his refusal to ask the first question about her torment. He made a habit of bringing her gifts, a piece of sea glass or an eagle feather or a finger of polished driftwood, and they carried on a subtle exchange after she took up her duties as housekeeper, placing scavenged presents in one another’s path through the house. They each found a salve for their separate losses in the other and as the months passed it looked as if they might escape their individual nightmares together.
After the first anniversary of Elias’s death Virtue began catching sight of her dead husband as she made her way to the henhouse to collect eggs in the morning, sitting in the highest branches of a tree to peer in the second-floor windows, occupying the darkest corners of a room beyond the reach of Ralph Stone’s lamps. She thought she was losing her mind until other servants began telling stories of a stranger on the property who couldn’t be seen but in glimpses, and eventually they refused to work alone in the barns or step outside their own shacks after dark. Two Irish youngsters in their first year of service woke to find Gallery standing at the foot of their bed one morning and they lit out for the Gut without putting on their boots.
Virtue went to Selina’s bedroom to speak to her in private that afternoon, Selina at her dressing table watching Virtue mirrored over her shoulder. —I thought you were happy here, Virtue.
—It’s not that, ma’am.
—Well where do you plan to go?
—There’s the house, she said. —In the droke.
—Don’t talk such nonsense, Virtue.
—I won’t be the cause of him harming another soul, ma’am.
—Who are you talking about?
—Mr. Gallery.
Selina turned in her chair to see the woman true. —Your husband?
—Yes ma’am.
There was a noise overhead and they both looked to the ceiling. —What is that? Selina whispered. She stood from her chair and reached a hand to hold the housekeeper’s arm. —Virtue? she said.
Mr. Gallery’s feet and legs came through the ceiling first, dangling there a moment before he came crashing through thatch and plaster and landed on the bed in a cloud of
debris, a wash of soot drifting out of the fireplace. Selina screamed and ran from the room, shouting the Devil himself had come through her ceiling. Virtue stood where she was, watching her dead husband stand amid the plaster dust. He was thinner than she remembered and there was something nearly opaque about his face, as if the light from the window at his back passed through him. —What do you want? she asked finally, but he refused to look at her, only stood with his head bowed like a servant awaiting instruction.
Virtue went downstairs to pack her few things in the room off the kitchen and left Selina’s House for a second time, walking across Paradise Deep to the stud tilt that had been sitting empty more than a year. Those who witnessed it swore they saw the figure of Mr. Gallery following at a distance and disappearing behind her when the door of the house in the droke was closed.
Jabez Trim made a visit the following day, holding his leather-bound Bible to his chest like a shield. He couldn’t bring himself to step over the threshold and he called to her from the doorway. —Everything all right here, Mrs. Gallery?
Virtue was in the tiny pantry where she’d been washing dishes unused since she left and setting them back on the shelves. The place was dilapidated and damp from sitting empty so long, broken panes in its one window. The fire burning in the fireplace had barely touched the chill of the place. In the gloom he could see Mr. Gallery huddling as close to the dog irons as a chair could be set. —Mrs. Gallery?
She came out to him, wiping her wet hands on her apron. He looked down at his shoes and whispered, not wanting to be overheard by the figure near the fire. —We’ve just been wondering, Mrs. Sellers most especially and the little one, Absalom. We were all of us fearful for your safety.
—A year too late for that I’d say, Mr. Trim.
Jabez nodded and motioned with the Bible in his arms. —Is there anything can be done for you, Mrs. Gallery?
She turned to look directly at her husband. —Can you send this one to hell?
