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 opinion 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 And he became increasingly withdrawn and reclusive as that fact came home to him.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 centre. 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 travelling 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 honour. 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 issu
e 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 neighbouring 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.
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 neighbours 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 w
as 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.
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