Michael Crummey

by Galore

  By the time he descended the Tolt Road the streets were busy with parishioners on their way home from evening worship. Levi and his wife were at Selina’s House when he arrived, seated in the living room with Ann Hope and Virtue while Adelina served tea. He took his seat beside Virtue as if he had just returned from a quick visit to the kitchen.

  —How was your father’s sermon? he asked Flossie, addressing the person least likely to ignore him.

  —If you are so interested in the theological musings of Reverend Dodge, Ann Hope said, perhaps you should have attended the service.

  —Fresh air was all the blessing I needed this evening. Walked out the Tolt Road as far as the Pond.

  Reverend Dodge arrived after dispersing the last of his congregation and once he was settled with a cup of tea he said, We missed you at church this evening, Absalom.

  —I converted to the Methodists, Absalom said. —Like everyone else.

  Dodge pursed his lips to say he understood the comment was meant to be humorous.

  —I expect you’ll be preaching to an empty church before long, Reverend.

  —The Lord works in mysterious ways, Mr. Sellers, he said.

  Levi was turning his cup in circles on its saucer during this exchange and he waited until he was sure it was done before he spoke. —I’ve heard reports from several sources this past week, he said. He used his most perplexed and innocent tone. —That Dr. Newman made a call at the house?

  —He came to have a look at my knees, Absalom lied.

  —They’ve been bothering you more of late? Levi had his mother’s nose and seemed always to be looking down that eagle’s beak as he spoke.

  —I’m an old man, Absalom said. —Everything bothers me.

  —And what miracle cure did the good doctor offer that made you want to walk out as far as Nigger Ralph’s Pond this evening?

  —Levi, Ann Hope said.

  Adelina set her cup in her lap and sighed. Virtue reached to take Absalom’s hand and she smiled across at him with her vacant look of affection. The old housekeeper was the excuse he gave when Levi or Flossie or Reverend Dodge raised the possibility of a retirement to the States. Virtue wasn’t well enough to leave behind or take with them, he said. And there was enough truth in it to give the claim some conviction. But everyone sitting in the parlor knew Absalom chose to stay for the sake of Mary Tryphena and for Henley, a man he’d never spoken to directly.

  Even to Absalom it made little sense, cleaving the family he had for an illegitimate son he couldn’t acknowledge. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave Henley behind completely, to vanish from his son’s life as his own parents had. Thinking an opportunity would come to make things right if he stayed close and waited.

  The Labrador crews began returning by mid-September and the Devines arrived home on the afternoon of the twenty-third. Patrick’s oldest boy, Amos, had grown half a foot over the summer. Mary Tryphena wouldn’t have recognized him but for the white hair and the pale pale blue of the eyes. Henley nodded warily to Bride when they reached the garden and she held the baby up for him to see. At the house the men stripped off their clothes in the yard where the lice and fleas would be boiled out of the seams. Judah stood a little off to himself and Mary Tryphena couldn’t help taking him in. He looked almost normal among the group of naked men, their torsos the same cold slug-white under the one change of clothes they’d lived in nearly half a year. The same hum of filth rising from each and everyone.

  It struck her that Judah had barely changed in the years since she’d first seen him naked on the landwash, his age still a mystery to judge by sight alone. Time had been kind to him, she thought, though the notion was a poor gloss for what she actually felt and couldn’t articulate to herself. That something in the man seemed to stand apart from time altogether.

  They were all in a fine mood. They’d made a good voyage of it, the fish cured to a high grade. No one was killed, there’d been no injuries beyond cuts and bruises. Amos was given his head with the rum bottle the season’s last Saturday and he’d thrown Laz’s wooden leg on the fire. And even that event was already reduced to anecdote, a story to amuse themselves and tease the youngster. Lazarus stood naked in the cool September air holding the new peg leg he’d carved during the voyage home, the straps fashioned out of leather salvaged from an old apron.

  —D-don’t let Amos near the stove, Mother, Henley shouted. —He’ll have every chair in the house b-broke up for f-firewood.

  Laughter all around. Even Judah managed a tired smile. And Mary Tryphena allowed herself to think perhaps it had been for the best.

  Years followed the same migratory pattern. Henley slept chaste beside his wife through the winter and took what pleasure could be found on the Labrador during the fishing season. Even Harold Callum Devine could sense his father’s habitual lean northward and he never warmed to the man, as guarded saying his goodbyes each May as when the stranger arrived home in the fall.

  Patrick and Amos followed the women into the Methodist fold. —We spends enough time apart, Patrick said, without going to separate churches every Sunday. Martha had inherited Callum Devine’s gift and she was a major attraction at the services, singing out over the congregation during the hymns. Her white hair like a saint’s halo shimmering with the palest colors of the northern lights, her voice like the voice of a creature only half human. She and Bride accompanied Reverend Violet on his summer mission trips along the shore, Bride witnessing to the change Jesus made in her life, Martha leading the motley congregations through half a dozen hymns.

  The Trim brothers volunteered their boat as transportation for the mission trips and the American doctor sometimes traveled with them to pull teeth and lance boils on the stagehead. Reverend Violet was leery of allowing a hardened apostate to accompany the evangels, but came to appreciate how physical relief and spiritual rebirth could follow one on the other. Bride became a kind of nurse during these trips, assisting during procedures requiring an extra hand, working with Newman until the service began. The sound of Martha singing “Rock of Ages” or “Amazing Grace” would steal the last of his patients and he followed them up to watch from the doorway. Bride and her youngster taking up a collection of pennies while Martha lifted her face to the wooden rafters. Those raw and unlettered congregations startled by the hint of grace in her voice, half of them in tears to hear it.

  Bride’s son had long ago been nicknamed Tryphie, in honor of Mary Tryphena’s legendary inquisitiveness as a girl. Bride could see Newman found children trying and she did her best to shield him from the boy. But confined aboard the Trims’ thirty-footer, there were inevitable interrogations.

  —You’re American, Tryphie said, staring at the doctor, and Newman admitted he was. The boy wanted to know if the doctor’s mother and father were American as well, did he have brothers and sisters and were they American, did he have a dog, a horse, a cow and were they all American? It was exactly the kind of child’s questioning Newman found exasperating though he did his best to hide it around Bride. —Yes, he said, my dog is American, my horse is American, my cow is American.

  Tryphie nodded his head slowly. —You don’t belong here, he said finally.

  —No, Newman sighed. —I don’t.

  —What is it brung you then?

  The doctor shrugged elaborately. —I have no idea.

  —You been called here by the Lord, Bride offered. —Me and Tryphie is all the proof you needs of that. And she quoted from Psalms. —By thee have I been holden up from the womb, thou art he that took me out of my mother’s bowels: my praise shall be continually of thee.

  Newman felt the heat rising in his face and he looked out to open water. —Your Reverend Violet is the expert on religious questions, he said.

  Bride said, If there was no one calling you, Doctor, you’d have left us for long ago.

  —Amen, the Trims said.

  Newman leaned in close to Tryphie, desperate to shift the conversation elsewhere. —I have a Spanish pig at home
in Connecticut, he said. Five minutes later Bride ordered the boy to stop pestering Newman with questions about the Spanish pig. She said, You may live to regret that fanciful creature, Doctor.

  Newman nodded. He thought of regret as Barnaby Shambler’s word. —Any regrets, Doctor? Shambler asked each time the doctor committed to yet another contract extension.

  —Not a one, Newman said and the answer felt more evasive every time.

  He lived alone in the clinic, the woman who occupied his thoughts in rare moments of quiet was married and born-again beside, the work relentless and most of what he could do for people provisional or useless. It didn’t amount to much of a life, looked at through his father’s eyes. He’d traveled home to the States on three occasions in the past five years, touring to raise funds for clinic equipment and medicine, trying to explain the place to industrialists and politicians and professional philanthropists. He spoke at colleges, at men’s and women’s clubs and churches, in the private drawing rooms of the wealthy. He brought along his medical pictures and wide-angle portraits of buildings perched over the ragged coastline, the images so outlandish they had the air of forgeries, like photographs of fairies in a garden. His audience intrigued and amused by his stories, peppering him with endless questions about the Spanish pig.

  He’d been called from the clinic to the shoreline one spring, pushing through a wall of spectators to find Matthew Blade kneeling in the shallows, cradling his intestines against his belly. His brother James was crouched beside him, both boys with bloodied faces. Someone reported the fight had started at Shambler’s before migrating to the landwash, as if this explained the state of things. Matthew was scooping careful handfuls of seawater, flushing away the sand that coated his guts when they’d spilled onto the beach. At the clinic Newman examined the intestine strand by strand before packing it into the stomach cavity. The incision made by the knife was almost surgical, slicing through the abdominal wall without causing any internal damage. He stitched the layer of muscle and then set about closing the surface wound. It was a miracle, Newman told the brother, that the intestine wasn’t perforated. —Will he live, Doctor? James asked.

  —If he stays out of Shambler’s and away from knife fights, he might have a chance.

  James was nineteen and the older of the two brothers by a year. —I’ll watch out for him, Doctor, on my mother’s grave.

  —Who was it cut him, James?

  The boy’s face went brick red. —I only said something about his girl as a game, to get his goat, Doctor. He got a fierce temper, Matthew have. I wouldn’t have used the knife if I didn’t think he meant to kill me.

  Matthew nodded out of the ether fog sometime through the night and he left the clinic with James in the morning, leaning on his brother’s shoulder for support. Newman found them sitting together when he stopped by Shambler’s that evening, Matthew showing off his stitches to everyone who came through the door. They toasted the doctor from across the room and stood him a glass of rum and went arm in arm into the dark when they left the pub.

  Hannah Blade came by the clinic two days later, taking her hands out from where they were hidden under her apron. The girl was only seven or eight, her adult teeth just coming in. Red hair and a ribbon of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She held out the eggs to him, two in each hand. —For patching up Matthew, she said.

  —Your father sent along half a barrel of salmon yesterday, Newman told her.

  She nodded, proffering the eggs again. —They’re awful good to me, Doctor, she said. —James and Matthew.

  Newman took them from her one by one, the shells still warm from sitting in the folds of skin webbed between the girl’s fingers. —How is Matthew doing?

  —No worse than James, she said. —Father hauls him out of bed first light every day, sets him to chopping wood. To teach him a lesson, he says. Matthew is only stacking, on account of the stitches.

  Newman turned away to hide his smile from the girl. —Thank you, Hannah, he said and she tucked her empty mermaid hands under her apron before going out the door.

  Even to Newman, the country he spoke of in Connecticut or Boston or New York felt impossibly remote. Newfoundland seemed too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real. He half expected never to lay eyes on the place again, as if it didn’t exist outside the stories in his head. A riptide of relief running through him each time he sailed back into Paradise Deep to find Barnaby Shambler with Ann Hope and Absalom Sellers on the dock, Azariah and Obediah Trim, and a choir of Sunday school children singing a welcoming hymn. Judah and Mary Tryphena and the rest of the Devines further up the landwash. Bride with her close-mouthed smile and the curious little one hanging off her dress. No regrets in that moment at least. And the crowd followed him up to the clinic where they presented the afflictions that had befallen them while he was away.

  ——

  By the time Tryphie was six years old Absalom was blind and too crippled to leave Selina’s House. Virtue Gallery passed in her sleep two winters before and Absalom lost the heart to fight his own slow decline with her gone. He retreated to his bedroom where he received the few visitors he was willing to see, his legs too weak to chance the stairs. He resigned his position as justice of the peace and gave up the business to Levi’s oversee, though he still vetted and approved all decisions. There was a weekly meeting in the sickroom where Levi provided updates on quintals and hogsheads and gallons. It was the only real conversation the two men had managed for years past. And even then there were disagreements, subtle insults, the most innocuous discussion dragged into their long-drawn-out struggle. Absalom could feel his son bristling across the room. —Will that be all, Mr. Sellers? he asked before leaving. Levi had his mother’s perfectly English accent, which felt willful to Absalom, one more way their son chose sides between them. He’d thought Levi would forgive him one day or simply grow tired of carrying such a single-minded hatred. But they were running out of time.

  Ann Hope tried to talk her husband into relinquishing the work altogether. —The meetings are too hard on you, she said.

  —It’s bad enough to have Levi trying to rush me out.

  —Levi isn’t rushing you.

  —He can’t wait for me to die, Absalom said.

  His wife insisted on a weekly appointment with the doctor, hovering in the background while Newman listened to his heart and lungs and inquired about the regularity of his bowel movements, about his appetite and how well he was sleeping. The questions seemed pointless to Absalom and he fired off inquiries of his own in response, as if he and the physician were involved in a wrestling match.

  —Why aren’t you married yet, Doctor?

  —Only death is inevitable, Mr. Sellers.

  —An insensitive remark to make to a man in my position, Absalom said. —And a falsehood besides.

  —I apologize on both counts.

  —A man will marry, Absalom said. —It’s in his nature. If not a woman, he’ll marry his work. Or the bottle.

  —Quite the philosopher you’re becoming, Mr. Sellers.

  —My mind wanders, Absalom said. —It’s all the legs I have left.

  —Deep breath. And exhale.

  —Have you had a drink already this morning, Doctor?

  —I’ll do the examining if you don’t mind.

  —Let me save you the trouble. I’m dying. And you’ve been drinking. I can smell it.

  —One more deep breath, Newman said.

  After the doctor let himself out, Ann Hope scolded her husband. —You shouldn’t provoke him so. He’ll refuse to see you if you carry on like this.

  —I’d be no worse off for that.

  —Don’t talk that way.

  Absalom sighed heavily by way of apology. —I married well, he said. —That’s as much as a man can ask of the world.

  Ann Hope straightened and took a step away from the bed, not willing to indulge him. —Reverend Dodge has asked to come by this afternoon.
r />   Absalom sighed again and turned his face toward the window, as if he might actually see something through the glass.

  —You’ve refused him three times now, Absalom.

  Dodge had talked of retiring back to England before he was widowed but appeared to see no point in the notion now. He’d officiated at his own wife’s funeral and carried on in the ensuing years with his insufferable single-mindedness, even as his congregation steadily dwindled. Just the sound of his octogenarian footsteps on the stairs set Absalom’s teeth on edge, the blinkered energy in them.

  —Have you noticed, he asked his wife, how often the reverend has taken to saying the Lord works in mysterious ways?

  —No, she lied, I hadn’t.

  —What was it he used to say? About Providence?

  —Providence takes care of fools.

  —He’s not as bold as all that anymore, Absalom said. —Now it’s all the Lord’s mysterious ways with him.

  —You make him sound like a real livyer, Absalom.

  He smiled and reached for her hand. It was the unlikeliest transformation to think Reverend Dodge a Newfoundlander at heart. Though the change made the man no more likeable. —I can’t suffer it, he said. —Not today.

  The only people Absalom never refused were Azariah and Obediah Trim. The three men reminiscing about the shore when they were young, wandering through the histories their lives intersected at different angles, Jabez Trim’s Bible and Judah born from the whale’s belly and the loss of the Cornelia. Az and Obediah growing up terrified of seeing Mr. Gallery in the droke or crossing paths with him in the backcountry, how they sometimes mistook Absalom in his wanders for the murderer’s ghost. Absalom pointed blindly to the ceiling, telling them Mr. Gallery had come through this very roof, feet first and the man dead a year by then. How he’d swept up the plaster dust himself after Virtue left the house with Mr. Gallery trailing behind her.