Jabez once read the story of Abraham and Isaac during a Sunday service, Abraham leading his son into the mountains to sacrifice him as God demanded, but the verses that followed were blurred beyond reading and Isaac was left with his father’s knife poised above him. James Woundy was so taken by the truncated tale that he still retold it on the long trips to and from the fishing grounds, adding his own version of what he considered the inevitably gruesome conclusion. Jabez tried explaining that God gave Isaac a reprieve at the final moment, sending an angel to stay his father’s hand, but James was skeptical.—That don’t sound like the God we knows out here, he said.
Daniel was almost twenty years older than his half-brother, married with youngsters of his own by the time James came into the world. Everyone agreed James was slightly touched, a childishness about him he seemed unlikely to grow out of. Their mother was the oldest bushborn living, a woman more ancient than Devine’s Widow. Sheila Woundy had given birth to seventeen children by three different husbands, the latest of whom wasn’t yet fifty years of age and was only thirty when they married. She was rumoured to be the daughter or granddaughter or niece of an Indian woman herself and she spoke a pidgin of Irish and scraps of some other language known only to the bushborns. Some said it was Indians kept the bushborns alive when they first wintered on the shore with nothing to eat but salt fish and winkles and the bark off the trees, there was talk of marriage and children between them before the Indians disappeared off the coast some shadowy time long past. Though Daniel and James took offence at the suggestion and wouldn’t allow it spoken of.
The crew stayed on the water until they struck enough fish for a boatload, sometimes drifting three and four days without coming ashore, wrapping themselves in a square of canvas sail to sleep for an hour. The weeks of fatigue and hunger had them hallucinating voices and shapes and figures on the horizon or in the ocean. James Woundy came out of his skin one morning before the moon had set, shouting and pointing at the fugitive outline of a merwoman skimming beneath the surface near the boat. Golden surf of hair and naked arms as long as oars, a trail of phosphorescence in her wake. He had to be held back to keep from going over the side after her, Daniel and Callum pushing him onto his back in the bilge water. Daniel sat on him until he came some ways back to his senses.
They’d been out nearly three days and hadn’t had a morsel of food in twenty-four hours. Their fresh water was all but gone and they’d be forced to start the haul back to shore now, with or without fish to show. Daniel was staring off at the landless horizon from his seat on his brother’s chest. He looked to be near tears.
Callum said, I know he’s blood to you, Daniel, but that youngster’s a goddamn fool.
Daniel shook his head.—I saw her too, he said.—I saw her there.
—Sure fuck, Callum said.—So did I. But I’m not ass enough to go overside to try and grab her tit now am I?
The cod had never been so scarce, not in living memory. Even the capelin and squid and bottom-feeders like lobster and crab seemed to have all but disappeared. A season or two past they consoled themselves with talk of times before their own when grass was boiled and eaten and the dead were stripped of their rags to dress the living before being buried at sea. But those stories cut too close now to be any comfort.
By mid-July it was clear the season was beyond salvaging, that no one would clear the debt incurred in the spring to gear themselves for the fishery. Most were in arrears from one failed season aboard another and King-me forced the most desperate to grant him a mortgage on their land estates as a surety. He’d already taken possession of half a dozen fishing rooms and seemed determined to own both harbours entire. The spring’s whale meat was long gone and some families were surviving on winkles and mussels dug up on the beaches or the same meal of herring served morning, noon and night until a body could barely keep the fish down. The summer not half over and already there was talk of winter and how many would starve without help from God.
Father Phelan had little solace to offer on that question and tried to make himself useful as a drinking companion, offering reminiscences of the women he’d bedded on the southern shore of the Avalon or details of the sexual dysfunctions of the English monarchs through the centuries. He sang songs he’d learned from darkies in the West Indies, taught “native dances” from the South Sea Islands that had men leap-frogging one another with underpants on their heads, oinking like pigs. A night without worry was all he had to give them, a taste of God’s Heaven on earth.
He came to see Mary Tryphena once a week to school her in the catechism and the finer points of the faith. He was always miserably hungover and they sat in the open air on the shady side of the tilt. The shed where the stranger slept stood behind them, the pale face glimmering in the dark interior when the door was ajar. The man had lately found the use of his legs and for a few days he’d wandered about the Gut, peering in windows or standing to watch women hang out their wash or hoe the potato gardens. They chased him off when they saw him, brandishing rakes or sticks, and children followed after him, flinging rocks at his head. He didn’t leave the shed at all in daylight now, and Father Phelan expected he’d be dead if not for Devine’s Widow.
The priest stopped at the shed door before leaving and nodded to the man inside. He talked for a while about the fish and the strangely fine weather and his time in Africa, without knowing if a single word was understood.—Well sir, he said finally. The heat did nothing to help the man’s odour, the priest could hardly catch a breath for the reek.—There’s some people talking of making away with you, he said.—They think you’re bad for the fish, is what it is. It’s most likely just talk. Although there’s no telling what people might do if times get bad enough and times are not good. Father Phelan glanced over his shoulder to see if any of this news registered on the man’s face, but couldn’t make out his features in the gloom.—The peace of the Lord be with you, he said before he left.
They came for the stranger eventually, as the priest expected they would. Two dozen men drunk and armed with fish knives and hayforks and torches and rope, a ragged medieval tapestry descending the Tolt Road in the dead of night. Devine’s Widow shaking Callum awake.—They’re coming for him, she told him.
—Who?
—Get up, she said.
He heard their racket then, the men shouting to one another as if the dark affected their ears as well as their eyes. Lizzie put a hand to his arm, begging him to stay inside, and Devine’s Widow went out on her own while they argued. She was standing in front of the shed door when they arrived, her shawl across her shoulders, grey hair loose about her head and her sunken face trenched with shadows in the torchlight. No one was surprised to find her there and it was Devine’s Widow they’d gotten drunk to face. There was nothing to the woman but sinew, her body like a length of hemp rope. But she’d brought most of them into the world and delivered their children as well. She sat with the dying and washed and laid out the corpses. She seemed a gatekeeper between two worlds whose say-so they were helpless to carry on without. Someone at the back of the group asked her to stand aside, the deference of the request so comical in the circumstances that she laughed.
—I spose you wants a cup of tea with that, she said.
Callum came around the side of the house and walked up beside his mother.—What is it you wants? he asked.
The same polite voice from the back of the group said, We only wants to have a word with your man in the shed.
—The idiot haven’t got a word in he’s head.
—We’ll burn it down if we have to, Callum.
The door opened a crack then and slowly wider and in the light of the torches Mary Tryphena looked out from the shed to tell them the man was gone.
The mob forced their way past her and then into the house and they carried out a drunken search of the nearby bushes before heading to the waterfront. Callum stood watching the light of the torches dip in and out of the fishing rooms before he went back inside. He sat on
the edge of the children’s bed to speak to Mary Tryphena. She’d had a dream that woke her, she said, and went outside. Saw the lights coming and had gone to warn the man away, shooing him off as if he was an old cow trampling the garden.
—You went out to pee, did you?
—No, she said.
Callum shook his head. He didn’t know if the girl meant to say she’d dreamt the event before it happened or if it was simple coincidence, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He’d always thought Mary Tryphena had too much of the widow in her. Precocious and grasping after life in a way that made him afraid for her. Eathna had been his girl, gregarious and unserious. Dimples and a head of red curls and a lovely voice to accompany him when he sang around the house. He’d never felt the same ease with Mary Tryphena. There was more to the world than what could be seen or heard or held, he didn’t doubt the fact. But it was an invitation to trouble to put too much stock in such things, to cultivate them.—What else are you after dreaming? he said, but she only stared at him with a pitying look.
Lizzie was still awake when he came to bed and they lay that way the rest of the night, both of them rigid and fearful. She was angry with him for going outside, though he didn’t see how he could leave his mother to stare down a crowd of drunkards bent on murder.—She needs no help from heaven or earth, Lizzie said. A note of disgust in her voice, as if the old woman’s fortitude was something to be despised.
Callum was ten years older than his wife. He’d loved her from the time she was a child and spent much of his adulthood resigned to a life without her. It was thanks to some murky intervention by Devine’s Widow they were together now though they’d never acknowledged the fact. Lizzie wasn’t used to being in anyone’s debt and she never made peace with the notion.
It was still dark outside when he rose from the bed two hours later, the morning calm and warm as all mornings had been since summer began in earnest. The sharpest sliver of moon like a fish hook over the Tolt.
Devine’s Widow stopped him at the door as he left.—You’ll have a good day out there today, she said, and he nodded without looking at the woman.
Daniel and James were already on the stagehead. No one mentioned the night’s events and they climbed down into the boat carting buckets of bait and jigging lines. They loosed the moorings and shoved clear into the still water of the cove. James and Daniel sat to the oars and rowed through the narrows on the high tide while Callum cut and set the baitfish on their hooks. They were an hour out before they realized the standing smell of offal and fish guts from the splitting room was still with them. The stink drifting back from the bow. They found the stranger curled into the fore-cuddy under a bit of canvas sail, a half-naked stowaway. They guessed he made his way to the fishing rooms from the shed the night before, the only place in the Gut where his own stink wouldn’t give him away, slipping into the boat to hide when the torches came for him.—Which means he’s something more than an idiot, Daniel said. The three men argued about the wisdom of keeping him in the boat, about the time that would be wasted rowing back.—He’s a goddamn jinker, James insisted.—We’ll all be drownded out here with him aboard.
Daniel suggested they just send him overside and be done with it, but Callum couldn’t see what would stop him being carted ashore in the belly of another whale and they’d be back where they began. The stranger hadn’t moved a muscle since being uncovered, only his eyes flicking back and forth between them, and he was staring at Callum now as if waiting for a verdict.
—I’ll tell you this much, James Woundy said, I’m sick to death of carting the bastard all over God’s green earth. I’ll not row another stroke with him in the boat.
—What about it? Callum asked the stranger.—You want to take a turn at the oars? He held out his hand as a taunt but couldn’t refuse when the man reached to take it. James and Daniel both retreated to the stern as he made his way to the taut and set the oars, rowing cross-handed toward the new sun as if the sun was his destination.
They passed a handful of other boats that were having no luck at the fish. There was pointing and shouting when they saw who was at the oars and by the time the sun had come full into the sky there was a tiny flotilla in their wake, following at a discreet distance. Some among them men who carried torches into the Gut the night before. The stranger rowed on without a glance over his shoulder, shipping the oars on a nondescript bit of shoal ground known as the Rump.
—Now what? Callum asked.—You wants a spell, is it? But the man tossed the grapple and turned to the wooden buckets where the lines and jiggers were coiled. He looked to Callum a moment before letting a line run through his fingers over the gunwale and then began jigging, a rhythmic full-arm heave and release that he repeated and repeated while his floating audience watched silently.
—What do you think, Daniel? Callum asked.
—He’s off he’s head is all.
James said, I’ll bet the fucker won’t row us home out of it either.
The stranger struck in then, hauling the line hand over hand, arms straining with the weight. The first pale glove of flesh let loose a pulse of oily ink as it broke the surface.—Fucking squid, James shouted.—He’s into the squid. The creatures kept coming out of the dark water, the air webbed with strings of black that fouled the clothes and faces of the men in the boat. Every line in the skiffs around them went over amid a bustle of shouting and it took time in the confusion for Callum to make sense of what was happening. The squid on the line were coming aboard in an endless march, already piling up past their ankles and it was impossible he could have hooked so many in one haul. Callum lifted one out of the bilge water but they rose in a chain, one squid attached to the tail of the next. He looked back to the stranger and could see he’d dropped his line altogether and was bringing the squid in hand over hand in one continuous string, mouth to tail, mouth to tail, mouth to tail. He looked around at the other boats where men were jigging furiously although no one had managed to strike. Daniel had put out his own line and was having no luck either. Callum called to him and pointed. Eventually everyone stopped to watch Callum’s boat fill, the weight of the squid lowering the gunwales to the water.
Jabez Trim rowed in close and asked if he might have the chain when they were done and Callum cut it clean, handing it across the open water.—Don’t drop it for jesus sake, Jabez said. When the second boat was full the squid were handed on to a third. By mid-afternoon every shallop and half-shallop and skiff in the flotilla was weighted and the crews blackened and fousty with ink. The chain came back to Callum and he tied it to the stern with two half-hitches before they began the slow row back to the Gut, keeping head-on to the waves to avoid swamping in the swell. Callum thought of his mother’s words to him before he left the house that morning and a chill passed through him to think she’d foreseen such a thing. He was struck by the sensation she’d made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head. They stopped to let other crews take their fill as they made their way home and by the time the last squid came over the gunwales every boat on the water had taken a full load aboard.
The coffin built to bury Michael Devine was whitewashed and fitted with rockers and used as the infant’s crib during the warm summer months. He was an uncommonly pleasant child after his baptism, never crying for more than hunger and sleeping through the night by his second month. He was known on the shore as Little Lazarus, the child rising each morning from his casket with a smile on his face, untroubled by dreams.
The albino stranger came to be known as Judah, a compromise between the competing stories of who it was in the Bible had been swallowed by a whale. Jabez Trim complained that Judah was a country in the Holy Lands and not a sensible thing to call a person but he abandoned the argument once it was clear the name had taken hold.
In the weeks after the chain of squid was brought ashore the cod reappeared in vast numbers and no one could keep ahead of the fish. They couldn’t remember a time when cod we
re as plentiful or so eager to be hauled aboard and everyone credited Judah’s presence for the change. Boats followed in the wake of Callum’s skiff, staying as close as they could to their good luck charm. The fish seemed to float along beneath Judah’s feet as if they were tied to the keel by a string.
Jabez Trim closed a Sunday service by reading the story of Jesus instructing fishermen to put their nets down where all day they’d come up empty, how they came away then with more fish than they could haul, and no one failed to think of Judah. By the end of the summer they were calling him the Great White or St. Jude for the patron saint of lost causes. Catholics began crossing themselves in his presence as they would before the altar. The sick sought him out for a laying on of hands if all other cures had failed, sitting with Judah in the poisoned air of his shack and placing his hand against what ailed them. There was talk that one person or another had returned to the blush of health after an audience with St. Jude.
Despite it all, Lizzie refused to allow him across the threshold of the house. Devine’s Widow made a show of arguing he should be invited in to eat but the smell of the man was enough to stifle the appetite of a pig. He took his meals sitting on a stump of wood in the open air and Mary Tryphena studied him when she thought she wasn’t being watched. His brows and lashes so white his eyes seemed bald, like the lidless stare of a codfish. There was something at once stunned and slightly menacing about the man.
He recognized the name he was called by and followed simple orders or requests, though his life and work were so governed by routine that the simplest of hand gestures or a nod of the head communicated all he needed to know. Most were convinced he understood not a word of English or Irish. When boats worked close to Judah on the water, people spoke about him as if he were deaf.
Galore Page 3