Michael Crummey

by Galore

  Mary Tryphena glanced at Patrick who was humming into the baby’s ear to say the conversation was of no interest to him. They were like vessels tacking east and west in a contrary wind, traveling north in slow tangential increments. Both men born into the sly indirectness that made her childhood a torture.

  Laz shifted in his chair. —He come and asked me straight out to hold him a place.

  Judah and Lazarus were the first to give up on the local fishery, sailing for the coast of Labrador each May. They found fish galore there and for the last time Jude’s talismanic luck drew men from up and down the shore. Hundreds living the same migratory existence now, away from home all summer. Three decades they’d been making the trip, staying through September or October if the weather held, the Devine women left alone half the year to fend for themselves.

  Lazarus drank the last of his tea and picked up the wooden leg, set about reattaching the leather straps. He said, You think it’s a good idea, him coming down with us?

  —Why wouldn’t it be?

  —He got the itch for Labrador awful sudden. Never showed no interest before. That don’t seem like a particular good sign for a marriage, does it?

  It was a dodge meant to avoid stating his real concerns and Mary Tryphena snapped at him. —What would you know about what’s good for a marriage?

  Lazarus stood up and tapped the floor several times with the peg leg, like he was testing the strength of ice on a pond. There was talk he’d long ago taken an Eskimo bride in Labrador, that there were half-breed children down there christened Devine. —I expect I knows as much as you do, he said, managing it somehow without a hint of meanness.

  Mary Tryphena and Judah hadn’t touched one another in years by the time Henley came along. Jude arriving home from Labrador in the fall to find his wife pregnant. Henley’s birth in late February was a subject of much speculation on the shore, and even if the timing hadn’t aroused suspicion it was obvious there was nothing of Judah in the boy. His skin fair but not pale, his little tuft of hair black as sheep shit. There was an awkwardness to the welcome the new child received from family and neighbors, as if he’d been born with a deformity they were studiously ignoring. Jude was civil to the boy but there wasn’t a single moment’s ease or affection between them. Henley never ventured into the house next door and never found his footing with the men. Lizzie tended to the youngster hand and foot, as if to make amends for sending her husband to his death on the Labrador ice fields, and Henley settled among the women where he trusted he was welcome.

  Lazarus was at the door when Mary Tryphena said, What does Judah think of Henley going with you?

  He smiled at her, embarrassed to have the issue addressed so squarely. —Jude’s not saying one way or the other.

  —Patrick will watch out to Henley if he goes, she said. And she nodded at her son, as if he might need to be encouraged in the undertaking.

  —All right, Lazarus said.

  Patrick settled the child on the daybed when Lazarus left, a straw pillow as a guard to keep him from rolling off the edge. He asked for the tea he’d turned down earlier and sat in the chair Laz had just vacated. Mary Tryphena puttered with cups and sugar and then leaned over the youngster to see if he needed changing. —You’re upset, she said to Patrick.

  —I’m not upset, he said.

  But there was no disguising the whiff, that telltale mark of his father rising up in him. —Don’t lie to me, Patrick Devine.

  —Henley don’t know his arse from a hole in the wall, he said.

  —Well if you haven’t got it in you to look out for your own flesh.

  —Jesus Mother, he’s liable to get killed down there. Why are you taking his side in this?

  Mary Tryphena couldn’t say, other than Henley needed someone to take his side where the men were concerned. Patrick was fifteen when Henley was born, old enough to do the math. He’d married Druce Trock at eighteen to get out of the house, to put that distance between himself and the truth about his brother, building a house on the edge of the Little Garden.

  —You didn’t put the idea in his head to come? Patrick asked her.

  Mary Tryphena looked into her lap. —I’m not that spiteful, she said.

  Two hundred local men and boys loaded their gear and provisions aboard a Sellers vessel bound for the Labrador in mid-May. The clergy offered prayers to bless the summer’s enterprise before the men rowed out to the ship at anchor in a steady drizzle. Henley facing the ocean as he went, not so much as lifting a hand in farewell.

  The American doctor was there to witness the exodus, shaking hands and trading stories and offering medical advice among the crowd. Mary Tryphena was at the waterfront with Bride and the baby, and Newman made a point of stopping to see them. He held his namesake in the air a moment, as if guessing his weight, before settling him back in his mother’s arms. —He’s as fat as a calf, he said.

  Absalom and Levi Sellers were on the docks to oversee the loading of provisions and Mary Tryphena watched them discreetly. Levi stood with his hands on his hips, saying something to Absalom over his shoulder and gesturing out at the vessel where Henley clambered aboard with the rest of the Devines. Absalom staring off in that direction, his head weaving slightly. He turned to the crowd then, searching faces, and Mary Tryphena looked away to avoid him.

  The rest of the month and the whole of June was relentless drizzle and fog. The women spent their time clearing the Big Garden of stones turned up by the winter’s frost and hauling in capelin and seaweed to fertilize the soil. Bride badgered Patrick’s wife and daughter into attending the Methodist services and they took to the faith like ducks to water, Druce and Martha converted by the time the potatoes were set. The three of them singing the seeds into the ground together.

  It was gone the end of July before Absalom came to see her, though she’d been expecting him every day since the men left for Labrador. Mary Tryphena alone with Bride’s infant child while the other women were at Sunday evening service. He pushed the front door open just enough to peer inside.

  —Come in if you’re coming, she said impatiently.

  Absalom set his walking stick against a chair but refused to sit down, leaning to one side to favor the worst of his knees. He’d been a legendary walker in his prime, earned the nickname Mr. Gallery for the miles he covered on the roads through the country, for the sullenness he turned on anyone who crossed his path. But his legs had crippled up and he could barely walk the length of himself now without a cane. —What in God’s name is Henley doing down on the Labrador? he said.

  —He asked for a spot on the crew.

  —You know he’s not made for that kind of life.

  —Patrick promised to look out to him.

  —Hell’s flames, Absalom said, which was as close as he came to obscenity. He limped across the room to look at the baby on the daybed and shook his head. —How Henley got tangled up with the like of Bride Freke is beyond me.

  —Judge not, Mary Tryphena said and Absalom winced as if from a physical cramp. They were both embarrassed to be dealing still with their one act of indiscretion, so ancient now it almost seemed to have happened to other people.

  Mary Tryphena had never served as midwife to Ann Hope before being called to intervene in Levi’s birth. The infant stalled in utero after crowning and she spent half the evening dickering the baby’s shoulder past the bridge of cartilage between the pubic bones, Ann Hope so exhausted she drifted to sleep between contractions. Levi arriving blue and frail and Mary Tryphena stayed on to watch him until the moon had set. She left Virtue to keep an eye on mother and son then, making her way downstairs and along the hall toward the servant’s entrance. She assumed the rest of the house was asleep but Absalom stood from his chair at the sound of footsteps, turning to face Mary Tryphena as she came into the kitchen. —Did you need something, Mrs. Devine? he asked.

  She glanced at the table where he’d spent the night and most of the evening before, flipping through ledgers by the light of Ralph
Stone’s lamp, feeding wood to the fire to keep the kettle simmering over the dog irons. —I was just on my way, she said. —But for one thing. She walked past him to the cupboards, opening doors until she found what she was looking for, reaching for a teacup placed upside down on the highest shelf. Absalom stared at her with his head to one side. —I thought it might be some help to Adelina, she offered by way of explanation.

  —This has something to do with her warts, does it?

  —I had Virtue put it up there for me, she said.

  —Does Ann Hope know about this?

  Mary Tryphena passed the cup across to him. —I doubt Virtue would have come to me without your wife had sent her.

  He looked down at the cup, turning it in his hands. —I guess that’s one more thing we’re in your debt for, he said. —There isn’t a mark on Adelina to say the warts were ever there.

  The room was close with the fire’s heat, Absalom’s shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. They hadn’t enjoyed a moment as private since they were children in the branches of Kerrivan’s Tree, watching Father Phelan’s festival of debauchery on the Commons. Absalom set the cup on the table beside a draughtsboard he’d used to distract Adelina while they sat waiting for news the previous evening. Mary Tryphena reached a hand to fuss idly with the checkers. In a dark room at the back of her mind she could hear Devine’s Widow calling her a vain fool to have brought out the cup in Absalom’s presence, to be standing in the kitchen still. She stared at the table to avoid his eyes. —Is this King-me’s checkerboard? she asked.

  —His board, yes. Most of the checkers were missing when I was a youngster. We used to play with stones.

  —I remember watching you, she said. —On the beach that time. She stopped there to avoid mentioning Judah.

  —I had the missing pieces replaced years ago, he said and held one up. —Would you like to try a game?

  —I don’t know the first rule of it.

  —Child’s play, he said. He placed the wart cup on the windowsill and pulled the board toward them, inviting her to sit. —White leads, he said when he finished explaining the mechanics of the game. They made their alternate moves in a slow dance, the white and black drifting into hybrid patterns, a competitive intimacy to it that felt illicit. Mary Tryphena moved a checker the last square to the far side of the board. —King me, she said.

  Absalom placed a second checker atop the white, aligning it carefully with his index fingers. —Are you sure you’ve never played this game before?

  —You’re letting me win, Mr. Sellers.

  Absalom raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  —I should be getting on, Mary Tryphena said.

  Absalom reached out to turn the lamp back, the room settling further into darkness. —You’ve the loveliest hair, he said.

  Bride’s baby stirred on the daybed suddenly, the little limbs jerking in a spasm as he woke. Mary Tryphena crossed the room and lifted him into her arms.

  —You’re certain this one is Henley’s boy? Absalom said.

  —Motherhood is a certainty, she said, but fatherhood. She was quoting Devine’s Widow to make light of the situation, but Absalom only winced again as if she’d kicked him. She said, Henley married the girl, Mr. Sellers, he must think as much.

  —Hell’s flames, Absalom said, lifting his face to the ceiling. —I wonder if we’d ever married, Mary Tryphena. Would I have killed you or you have killed me?

  It was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging the note he left for her when she was a girl. She was on the verge of asking what possessed him to use those bizarre biblical endearments, but Absalom seemed to regret the mention of marriage. —Ann Hope will be worried if she finds me gone after church, he said.

  —As she should be, I spose, Mary Tryphena said quietly. She’d expected the sting of shame would ease over time but just hearing Ann Hope’s name made her face burn. The new mother lying with her infant in an upstairs room as she shuffled to Virtue’s bed with the child’s father, Absalom falling on her with his pants around his ankles. They lay still after he came, both aware of the house suddenly and listening for voices or footsteps. Mary Tryphena’s arm was levered awkwardly behind her back and she’d lost all sensation in the limb beneath their weight. —Get up, she said, shifting under him. —Get up, get up. He rolled away and she pulled her clothes together as best she could, wanting out of the house.

  He tried to say her name but the ghost of his old stammer had come back to haunt him. It was the first thing people noticed when he returned from England, that he’d all but conquered his childhood stutter. He grabbed her wrist to make her wait, hauling his pants up with his free hand. —I have s-s-something, he said.

  She waited in the kitchen for him to come back from his office and he handed her an envelope. A kernel of something hard in the bottom, a stone or a dried seed or what. She shook it out and a shard of white clattered on the tabletop. She picked it up to take a closer look. A little wave of shock and revulsion rolling through her when she realized what she was holding.

  —I thought you should, he said. —I don’t know. It doesn’t b-belong to me.

  He placed the tooth back in the envelope and pressed it on her, as if it was payment for a debt, as if that tooth would free him of any claim she might have. He was God’s own fool, she thought. The spasm of revulsion galled the back of her throat and the sour flavor stayed with her for days afterwards. She could still taste it now as the events played over in her mind, these years later.

  Absalom turned away from Mary Tryphena and the baby to retrieve his walking stick, eager to be gone. There was something odd about him, Mary Tryphena thought, a vulnerability she hadn’t seen in him since he was a boy, and she felt the need to give him something before he left. —The youngster has your eyes, she said. But Absalom was unable to look at her directly, raising his walking stick in mock salute as he stepped out the door.

  He walked with his head down toward the Tolt Road, thinking, as he always did after seeing Mary Tryphena, about that tooth in its envelope. He’d gone looking for it the day after he married Ann Hope, walking back and forth along the path without knowing he was searching until he spotted it in the grass. Unable to explain that urge to himself even now. Kept it tucked away for years before he pressed it on Mary Tryphena, to make amends somehow. To have something more pass between them than a sordid little tryst in a servant’s bed. Her husband’s tooth. Hell’s flames. He was God’s own fool, and if ever proof were needed.

  He couldn’t avoid feeling watched as he walked to the Tolt but if there were faces in the windows, he was too blind to tell for certain. Only Ann Hope and Levi knew his sight was failing and not even Levi knew how quickly it was leaving him. He’d lately found it impossible to read or make entries in the account logs and he finally had the doctor come see him at Selina’s House. Newman turning Absalom’s face to the light of an upstairs window, moving a finger across his field of vision. He sat back and folded his arms. —How many fingers am I holding up? he asked.

  —Somewhere between one and five, Absalom said. He asked Newman how long he had before he was completely blind.

  —Months, the doctor said. —Years perhaps, but not many.

  —Don’t tell my wife.

  —I’m right here, Ann Hope said from across the room.

  It seemed to him his body was in open revolt, hot coals flaring in his joints as he walked down the Tolt Road. The path was wide enough now for horse and cart but it was studded with roots and stones and Absalom walked with his head at an odd angle, trying to watch his feet from the corner of his eye. He stumbled on the path, flailing to catch himself, and he felt exactly like the ridiculous old man he appeared. His entire life’s endeavor about to pass on to a son who despised him. —Hell’s flames, he said aloud.

  King-me was thought to be a wealthy man but the truth was he’d nearly bankrupted himself by the time he died, licked out by grief for the wife he didn’t know he loved and ranting about the nightmare fate of his
sealing vessel. Absalom put little stock in dreams but King-me unnerved him with sheer repetition, with his detailed litany of disaster. He overinsured the Cornelia and came through her loss with money enough to finance a larger vessel that enjoyed better luck on the ice. He added a second, then a third schooner to the fleet, and the annual harvest of seal pelts brought in just enough to offset the losses incurred in the cod fishery. It was a delicate balance that a single lean year could sabotage. And there was no way to make more of the operation with most of what the shore produced going directly to Spurriers.

  The firm was known as Spurious & Co. when Absalom worked as an apprentice in the accounting department in Poole. Cod prices collapsed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the undercapitalized business was kept afloat with one dubious financial sleight of hand after another. Ann Hope’s brother stayed on in the accounting office and his letters kept them abreast of the increasingly outlandish maneuvers. Absalom leveraged a purchase of the company’s assets on the shore months before a fraud investigation sank Spurriers for good. The transaction made a reality of King-me’s charade, leaving Absalom owner and lord of all he surveyed, though it wasn’t until the shift into the Labrador fishery that Sellers & Co. managed to post a profit. And by then Absalom had lost three children to the Boston States. The eldest married and gone before Levi was born, the two older sons following in quick succession. And all three lobbied their parents to sell off and come to the States as well.

  Ann Hope was uncharacteristically silent on the topic, though it was obvious what was in her heart. Most people on the shore were still dressed in rags, their children afflicted with rickets and consumption, only a handful could recite the alphabet, despite her lifetime crusade against squalor and ignorance. Nancy’s letters were full of music and theater and poetry readings, church bazaars and tea parties, market stalls filled with vegetables and meat of all descriptions. Fresh tomatoes. Pears. Just the words on the page brought a knot to her throat. But she never so much as hinted at her opinion, wanting her husband to do this one thing for her without being told. It made a sullen walker of Absalom in the last half of his life. To have so consciously disappointed his wife.