Galore

by Michael Crummey

  After he left them Devine’s Widow said, He’s sent us by the archbishop, Callum.

  —I don’t know your archbishop, Callum told her and he walked down to the Rooms to be alone awhile. He opened the doors onto the water and sat looking out at the still pool of the cove, the wide flat tables of the flakes on the waterline where the summer’s fish had been set to dry. His hand was still pulsing from striking his son and sitting there he was overtaken by a puzzling nostalgia for Eathna. He could barely picture her now, a little redheaded girl climbing into his lap, insisting he pay attention to some childish secret. He used to set her aside, calling to Lizzie to occupy the girl so he could get on with knitting his twine or hear the end of Father Phelan’s foolish story. And she was gone now, her childish secrets with her.

  There was no neater sum of how life unfolded, he thought, and he was ambushed by a crying jag, sobs tearing through him as ragged and relentless as a seizure. Judah found him huddled over his lap with his arms wrapped about his chest and went to fetch Lizzie, leading her to the Rooms like a dog trying to alert someone to trouble. Callum was as helpless as Jude to tell her what was wrong and in the end she simply stood beside her husband while he cried himself out, a hand to his bowed head, the tangled mat of his hair. Beloved.

  —Was this all a mistake do you think? he choked out finally.

  —Hush Callum, she whispered.—Hush now.

  On the afternoon of Absalom’s wedding, Father Cunico stood on the path to the church in his clerical gown and surplice as if standing at the gates of hell, turning Catholics back to their homes. James Woundy and Lazarus and Judah holding Patrick’s hand walked past his warnings without so much as a nod. The priest chased after them, waving his wooden stave and shouting like some lunatic highwayman. He came too close to Patrick for Judah’s liking and he shoved the priest away.

  Cunico was apoplectic to be treated so roughly, swinging blindly with his cane. Jude was struck in the face and spat one of his front teeth into the grass beside the path. The three men fell on the priest together then, dragging him to the harbour where they threw him into the bitter cold, Cunico twisting free of his vestments as he fell. Lazarus Devine standing with the sacred habiliments of the priest still in his hand.

  Jabez Trim and one of Peter Flood’s youngsters fished the priest out before he drowned and the scandal cast a shadow over the wedding. No one spoke of anything other, not the bride’s dress or the extravagant spread of food laid on or the money spent. King-me took a moment before the ceremony to swear in half a dozen constables who were sent to track the perpetrators down while the wedding went ahead.

  At the reception Barnaby Shambler told Reverend Dodge the Romans were a crowd of savages who would eat their young if left to their own devices. Dodge suggested Shambler was being unchristian in his assessment, though privately he nursed the same opinion not just of the Romans but of practically every soul on the shore. At times he felt all civilization had been bred out of the livyers by the climate’s extremes, by the implacable barrens and bushland and bog. By the ocean’s stark. Dodge was no fan of Mrs. Ann Hope Sellers’ unwomanly mouthiness, her insistence on having opinions regardless of the topic. But the school she was proposing, he thought, might actually be of some value to a population so unremittingly backward.

  Father Cunico took sick after his dunking and lay prostrate in bed a full week with a fever, attended there by Devine’s Widow who applied cow-manure plasters to his chest. Judah and Lazarus and James were arrested by King-me’s constables and held for several nights in the same fishing room where Patrick Devine was conceived, but they were released after Cunico publicly absolved them. No one doubted they had the widow’s intervention at the priest’s sickbed to thank, though the cost of the bargain remained a mystery. Cunico left the shore for St. John’s in mid-October, citing the need to regain his health and to spend time in spiritual retreat to undo the damage inflicted upon him by the parish.

  —That’s the last we’ll see of that milksop, Phelan told Mrs. Gallery. He was still making plans for the new church and laid them out before her in their bed. The land lying fallow on the waterfront at the centre of his scheme and she shook her head against his shoulder.

  —King-me won’t ever let that land to you, she said.

  Phelan lay still a moment. He and Sellers had never spoken except when the priest was begging food for starving parishioners, the merchant niggardly and resentful of the imposition.—No, he said, I expect he won’t. But he devoted the fall and winter to cutting and standing timber to dry for the church, taking a crew of twenty-five men into the bush and working them until dark.

  Ann Hope Sellers’ one-room school opened its doors in January and three dozen children carried in a junk of wood for the fire and took seats each morning to be taught their letters and sums and the basics of hygiene, and nursery rhymes that they chanted in unison. Even James Woundy came to take instruction to avoid conscription into Father Phelan’s work parties. Ann Hope put aside her initial reservations about the man’s attendance when she saw he was slow enough to enjoy practising his letters on a slate and reciting the juvenile poems. He fancied himself her assistant and helped keep the students in line if they got restless. She took to leaving him in charge if she was called away from the school, until the morning she came back to find a row of boys standing with their pants around their ankles and James Woundy measuring their hairless peckers with her wooden ruler. The girls writing numbers in careful rows on their slates as James called them out. It was the end of James Woundy’s academic career and Ann Hope felt compelled to burn the ruler in the fireplace.

  The raw wood for the church had to be hand-milled with saws and axes and planes, and Father Phelan had crews at work as early as possible in the spring, James Woundy entertaining the men with nursery rhymes laden with obscene substitutions. Hickory dickory dock, the louse ran up the cock. Old King Cole had a hairy old hole and a hairy old hole had he. He offered up the details of his going overboard after a merwoman years ago, taking her underwater and the cunt on her as cold and wet as March month, he pissed ice for a week afterwards. James didn’t do a tap of work but he was diverting enough to be tolerated.

  The finished lumber was laid in the droke behind Mrs. Gallery’s house and the priest directed every Catholic man to meet him there before light on the day after Pentecost. The assembly numbered nearly one hundred, and in the first grey glim of dawn the church was carried in planks and beams to the midden above the shore. Mary Tryphena was watching from the Tolt with Lizzie and Devine’s Widow and a handful of other women. It looked to them as if a column of ants was marching spruce needles and sticks from one nest to another. The work began in earnest before smoke showed in a single chimney on the shore, the corner posts laid and framed and the floor joists fastened across them. By the time King-me got wind of the project and roused his constables, badgering ahead of them to the waterfront, the wall studs were up and the ceiling trusses all but hammered into place.

  The women came down from the Tolt to stand with their men when they saw King-me approaching. The two groups squared off on the waterfront, the priest flanked closely by Judah and Callum and Lazarus, by Daniel Woundy and Saul and the Toucher triplets and a dozen others not at work on the roof of the church. Absalom had followed his grandfather to the shoreline and he watched the faces railed across from him. Every one of them looked ready to hammer the first man to touch the priest.

  Lizzie and Mary Tryphena stood at the front, their childlike features set off by the dark bounty of their hair, though Lizzie’s was veined with grey now. The shock Absalom felt the first time he laid eyes on Mary Tryphena’s bare head pricked at him again. Her hair the same blue-black sheen as the lock Mrs. Gallery gifted him when she left Selina’s House. Jabez Trim slipped him the square of cloth when they had a moment alone and Absalom kept it under his pillow, sleeping with a hand wrapped in the coil. He felt it was his life he’d been handed in secret, if only he were able to decipher its meaning. The day
they’d carted Judah up to Selina’s House from the landwash, Mary Tryphena inched near to clutch at the hem of his coat with her bonnet in her hand and he’d glanced down at the coal-black hair of her head. A lock. A key. He was right to see his own story tied up somehow with the girl’s, though he misread the markers childishly, falling in love with her as if the stars themselves had ordained it.

  Absalom couldn’t take his eyes from her still, her face set and ready to spit on anyone who stood against her men. King-me was directing the handful of constables to arrest the priest but they weren’t willing to risk life and limb in the undertaking. He cursed them all for cowards and moved to take Phelan into custody himself until Selina came between them. She managed to talk King-me into relenting to avoid bloodshed and they retreated up off the landwash. Back at Selina’s House the old man stood at a window, watching the Roman sanctuary shingled and sided and hung with doors oddly marked with crescent moons.—We’ll have the Navy in to haul it down, he said.—And arrest every man jack who stands in the way.

  Ann Hope said, I doubt that would do much to improve the situation.

  King-me turned from the window to gape at her, but left the room before speaking another word.

  A Mass was held in the bare church by the light of Ralph Stone’s lamps that evening, Father Phelan decked out in the fine clerical vestments once the property of the Italian priest. When he made his way back to the droke, he found Mrs. Gallery sitting at the fire beside her husband. He went straight to the bedroom and called her to join him but she only came as far as the doorway, her outline dark against the fireplace light.

  —You’ll get yourself killed at this foolishness, she said.—And I’ll be left alone with that creature out there by the fire.

  —Come to bed, he said.—We’ll make the angels jealous.

  She didn’t move and he could feel the weight of her considering him.—You’re just like him, you know.

  —Like who?

  —Mr. Gallery, she said.—You think of no one but yourself.

  The priest swore under his breath. He’d come to the house pleased with himself and with the events of the day, the speed with which the church was raised, the Romans facing down Sellers and his henchmen, the beauty of the sacrament celebrated within the bare wood walls, and he wanted to toast it all with an evening between Mrs. Gallery’s legs.

  —Make him go, she said.—Before you leave me, promise you’ll make him go.

  He was afraid for a moment she might cry but there were no tears in her. It was anger that made her voice quiver and he was surprised to see it, undiminished after all these years, a shape as black and bottomless as her outline in the doorway.

  —Promise me, she insisted.

  —All right, he told her.—If you’ll come to bed. I promise.

  She waited a long time at the doorway and he thought for a while she might decide against the bargain. But in the end she stripped out of her clothes and settled under the blankets beside him.

  In late June Father Phelan departed to make his annual visit to the archipelago of tiny communities along the coast, baptizing the children born and formalizing the marriages undertaken in his absence, saying a funeral mass for those who’d succumbed through the winter.

  Father Cunico returned to Paradise Deep while Phelan was away, sailing into the harbour on a day of cloudless blue sky. The sloop he arrived on was a forty-footer built in St. John’s for the archbishop’s use. The vicar had spent the first weeks of the summer touring parishes on the Avalon before accompanying Cunico to Paradise Deep. The two men stepped off the vessel under the shade of umbrellas held by members of the crew and stood looking at the church before them. The walls painted with whitewash, the windows in place and a wooden cross fixed to the steeple.

  —They’ve built you a church, Father Cunico, the archbishop said.

  Word was passed house to house that the vicar had come with the Italian priest, that a Mass was to be held the next morning, and the church was full an hour before the service began. The vicar was a severe-looking Irishman, a cleric with an air of enthusiastic fasting about him, and he wasted no time in reprimanding the community for its treatment of Father Cunico. He reiterated the Italian’s appointment as the parish priest and outlined in detail the cost of defying him. Then he blessed the new sanctuary and held communion and at the end of the service when most believed he was done he opened the Bible to read from Galatians.—Even if we, or an angel from Heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be anathema. He listed Father Phelan’s crimes against the church then—heresy and schism which spread division and confusion among the faithful, as well as direct violation of the sacramental seal of confession by a confessor. Father Cunico tolled a brass handbell while the archbishop closed the Gospels and snuffed a candle that had been lit upon the altar and Father Phelan was excommunicated from the Holy Roman Church. Vitandis, the archbishop informed the congregation and warned them that a similar fate awaited anyone who ignored the Church’s will. On his return journey he stopped in every community between Paradise Deep and St. John’s to repeat the ritual of exclusion.

  Father Phelan arrived at Mrs. Gallery’s two weeks later and she offered him the news when he came to her bed.—What does it mean, Father? Vitandis?

  —Shunned, he told her.—To be shunned. The priest lay quiet a long time and she thought he might have fallen asleep.—Tell me that Italian shite hasn’t been saying Mass in my church, he said.

  He spent an inordinate portion of the next morning in the outhouse though it offered no solace. He went directly from there to Callum’s house in the Gut, the men already back with the day’s first boatload of cod and sitting to a second breakfast of tea and bread. Everyone stopped still when the priest came into the kitchen and he looked from one to the other without catching the eye of a single person. Patrick came out of the pantry and ran to greet the priest but Mary Tryphena grabbed him by the arm, lifting him into her lap.—God be with you, Father Phelan said, and Devine’s Widow stood to turn her back. One by one the others stood and did the same, Callum and Mary Tryphena and Daniel Woundy Even Lazarus turned away after his grandmother nudged his shoulder. Only Lizzie defied the old woman.—I’m sorry Father, she whispered.

  The priest nodded.—Say me to your family, he said.

  The same reception awaited him in every Catholic house on the shore. Doors barred against him, faces turned away, as if he were ringing a leper’s bell through the streets of ancient Jerusalem. The hundreds of children baptized by his hand, the dozens of love matches he’d solemnized, the ten thousand thousand sins he’d absolved, and not a soul would so much as say hello. Even the Protestants whose houses he’d once blessed, whose sick and suffering he’d prayed for, did little more than nod, embarrassed by a predicament they didn’t understand.

  No worst, there was none, and he sat the rest of the day at the fireplace beside Mr. Gallery.

  —What will you do? Mrs. Gallery asked him.

  —It will pass, he said.—All things pass.

  He waited the rest of that summer and long into the winter while Cunico said Mass and offered the sacraments in the church Phelan had built. He walked the paths of the outports, looking to catch even the slightest subversive nod from a parishioner but no one obliged him. Mr. Gallery followed him at a distance and the priest felt more and more that they were one and the same, pale shadows cast on the present by faces from the past. The contributions of the congregation that had sustained him and Mrs. Gallery came to an end and they survived on the charity of Protestants alone. It made the priest feel like a beggar and he refused to eat for days at a time, subsisting on a diet of strong drink and self-pity. He lost his nature and slept beside Mrs. Gallery as chastely as a saint.

  At Christmas he roused himself from his funk long enough to put on a mummer’s elaborate rags, wearing a veil of brin and a twine belt looped at the waist to hold the layers of dirty clothing and cast-off material in place, and he walked from h
ouse to house, taking drink and food and offering a few moments of foolishness before he was recognized and his hosts turned their backs or left the room altogether. Not even a man as apostate as Saul Toucher was willing to make him welcome, and the priest trudged back to the house in the droke to sit by the fire in his filthy costume, drinking steadily. Mrs. Gallery stood behind him but he shrugged away from her hand.—You can’t live this way, she told him.

  —Pray, what would you have me do?

  —There are still people with no priest among them. You say so yourself.

  —The back of beyond, he said.—Not even God knows they’re there. He took a forlorn mouthful of his drink.—I’m too old to live like a fugitive, he said.

  —I will not have the two of you in the house like this, Mrs. Gallery told him.—Do you hear?

  —Leave me be, woman, he said.

  —I will not have it, she said again.

  —You’ll heave me out on my ear, will you?

  —Mind but I don’t, she said. And she left the priest and her husband by the fire to go to her bed.

  The sound of an iron clanging woke her hours later, a frantic alarm, and it took her a moment to place the sound. She went barefoot to the main room and there was just enough light from the coals to see Mr. Gallery kicking at the fireplace crane and Father Phelan hanging from the rafters at the end his twine belt. She stood on a chair to cut the priest down and he lay weeping and choking on the frozen dirt while she stoked up the fire. She helped him to a chair and sat him up.—This is not how it will end, she said.

  The priest shook his head.—Leave me be, he begged her.

  Mrs. Gallery turned and spoke to her husband for the first time since he came through the ceiling at Selina’s House.—Kneel down, she told him.—Kneel down, goddamn you.

  Phelan looked up at her, then at the faint features of the spectre kneeling beside him.

  She said, Mr. Gallery would like to make confession, Father.