His father complained frequently in those early months about losing his son to a backwater of superstition and ignorance, but his tone thawed in the face of Newman’s unexpected passion for his vocation, in the carefully detailed histories the letters offered. He responded with advice and articles and requested follow-up on cases of particular interest. There were no questions about his son’s personal life or his plans for the future and as far as Newman was concerned, that was just as well.
It was during the long hours of travel with Obediah and Azariah Trim that the doctor learned most of what he knew about the people on the shore. The brothers’ knowledge of the coastline’s genealogy was biblical in its detail and they offered all they knew in a call-and-return that had the fluency of a catechism.
Obediah: James Woundy now, he was a lazy stawkins.
Azariah: Not quite right in the head, but sweet as molasses.
Obediah: Sweet as molasses and just as slow.
Azariah: He had the one daughter. And James Woundy had all he could do not to choke on his food so there’s no telling how he managed it.
Obediah: The child’s mother was Bridget Toucher and the Touchers was a hard crowd to grow up a girl among.
Azariah: They was never married those two but they had Magdalen between them. And Bridget Toucher, she finally settled with Lester Flood and they both come to the Lord last year, just before Les died of the consumption.
Obediah: Young Magdalen, James’s daughter that is, she jigged up with a fellow name of John Blade.
Azariah: Not John Blade from Devil’s Cove now. John Blade from Devil’s Cove, he turned Catholic and married Peter Freke’s widow and they lives up on the Gaze. The Roman Blades, they are.
Obediah: Magdalen married the John Blade whose father come over from Devon. John and Magdalen have got the three youngsters between them now.
Azariah: There’s James and Matthew. And the young one with the webbed fingers, Hannah her name is.
—Yes, Hannah, Newman said, relieved to have a face to cling to. He sometimes used a pad and pencil to map the spiralling connections but even then he lost his way. The roots of each family so intertwined they were barely distinguishable. Obediah’s first wife, Sara Protch, died in childbirth and he was married now to her younger sister. Azariah’s sister-in-law married her way through the Toucher triplets, the first fellow freezing to death on the ice, the second lost to a bout of typhoid. The third passed away not eight months ago, asleep on the daybed in the middle of the afternoon.
—Identical triplets? Newman said.
—You doubt it, do you?
—One in two hundred thousand. Never seen it myself.
—It was Alphonsus that Sandra married the first time round, Az Trim said.—And she called her husband Alphonsus regardless which one it was in her bed, they were the spit of one another in every particular.
Newman was surprised by their candour. There was no confidence, no family intimacy from the past century they seemed unacquainted with.
Obediah: Adelina Sellers now, she teaches the little ones up at the school. She’s the youngest of Absalom’s lot save Levi. She was afflicted with warts as a girl, Doctor. Used to walk around in a mourning veil, with her hands tucked up in her sleeves, half the shore thought she was born without fingers.
Azariah:’ Twas Mary Tryphena Devine cured her of the warts. She got the gift for such things.
Obediah: Adelina’s sister Nancy, she married a Yank and left for the Boston States. Thirty year ago. The two older brothers followed after her and they haven’t so much as cast a shadow on the shore since. Only Levi and Adelina is still with us.
—Absalom inherited most of the shore from his grandfather and once Ab is gone, Levi will have it all.
—He’s a hard man, young Levi. Money is all he thinks about. He’s married to Reverend Dodge’s daughter Flossie but he don’t have a thought for a soul except his mother.
—He got no time for Absalom at all.
—Well, I expect he’s got his reasons to dislike his father.
—Now Brother, Azariah said and the two fell silent. It was a rare instance that saw the Trims edit the catechism, stumbling on a subject too sensitive or scandalous to mention in the company of an outsider.—Crow boys! Az shouted to the dogs, as a way of ending the conversation.—Crow!
Each time they passed the droke at the foot of the Tolt the dogs bristled and growled at the trees and shied from the path. The brothers averted their eyes and kept quiet until it was well behind them, as if they were holding their breath against some poison in the air. There was a grown-over clearing in the trees and Newman was curious to know who had lived there and why it was abandoned.—You’d do well to keep clear of it, was all the brothers offered.
On Old Christmas Day the Trims carted him seventeen miles up the shore to see a man reported by a son-in-law to be on his deathbed. Newman drunk and running alongside the sled to sober up. Deking off the trail to puke into the spruce trees before catching up the Trims.—You’re having a fine old Christmas, I see, Az said.
Mummers had invaded the clinic the first night of the season and stayed until light the following morning. Newman didn’t know what to make of them or their antics, swinging him by the arm while music was played on fiddles and accordions, demanding he feed and water them, and all hands taking liberties with his arse as if they were testing the freshness of a loaf of bread. He sat them to glasses of rum and slices of the dark fruitcake patients brought in by the dozen and they left without ever revealing their identities. Each of the next eleven nights followed the same pattern though the troupe of mummers was always different. He guessed some of them from their limps or postures or physical tics and when the rum ran dry he sent around glasses of ethyl alcohol that they drank down honey-sweet.
The clinic was still crowded with mummers when the Trims came looking for Newman with news of the dying man. They left two hours before light and arrived mid-afternoon to find the elderly gentleman sitting with a glass of rum next to a fire.—I was feeling a bit nish when Sally’s man come by yesterday, he told the doctor, but I’m the finest kind now. Newman listened to his heart and checked his temperature and reflexes and there was, from what he could tell, not a thing wrong with the man. It was ten hours hard travel to reach him and after a meal of tea and bread and molasses they started for home, arriving after the moon had set and twenty-four hours without sleep for all three.
Newman insisted they stop at the Trims’ property to spare the dogs another half-hour hauling and he walked back to the surgery on his own, half asleep on his feet. There was a man sitting in the darkness of the front room when he arrived.—I let myself in, Patrick Devine said and he hurried out the door holding Newman’s sleeve.—I hope to God we haven’t lost them both.
He led Newman over the Tolt Road to a house in the Gut where a man with a wooden leg met them at the door.—Lazarus Devine, the man said by way of introduction. There was a sombre group at the kitchen table, a woman with an infant in her lap, and Amos Devine, the young Nordic boy he’d seen with the albino. There was a man at the head of the table smoking nervously and rubbing his knuckles across a weak chin.—My brother Henley, Patrick Devine said, nodding to the smoker who had nothing like the shock of white hair on Patrick’s head.
—You the father? Newman asked.
—I hope to be, the smoker said. He stuttered on the b and had to stamp his foot finally to move past it.
—That’s my wife, Druce, Patrick said, pointing to the woman with the child in her lap.
Lazarus took the doctor’s arm.—We’ll have time for all that now the once, he said and ushered Newman to a back room where the pregnant woman lay unconscious on the bed, her breath coming in long, ragged intervals. Newman turned the girl’s face toward the lamplight and saw froth speckled with blood at the corners of the toothless mouth.—Jesus Bride, he whispered. She must have been newly pregnant when he pulled her teeth his first day on the shore.
Mary Tryphena was sittin
g beside the bed.—The baby was coming along fine this afternoon, she said, but Bride’s eyes started rolling back into her head just after suppertime. She had a spell of convulsions then, before this come over her.
Newman swore under his breath. He couldn’t guess what kind of distress the baby was suffering but the mother had little chance of surviving the severe eclampsia. He looked around the tiny room and cursed again.
Mary Tryphena said, If swearing was any help, Doctor, Bride would be up and around this ages ago.
The bed was narrow and nailed to the wall and Newman called the men in to help carry Bride to the kitchen, clearing mugs and cutlery to lay her out. Patrick’s wife stood rocking her own crying child until Mary Tryphena ordered her home out of it. Amos went with her and Henley was headed for the door as well before Newman called him back.—You’ll have to help hold her, he said. He unpacked forceps and a scalpel and pushed the unconscious woman’s muslin shift high above her belly, cut the perineum from the vaginal canal all the way to the anus. Newman arranged the family around the table, each assigned an arm or leg. Henley weeping and whispering J-J-Jesus Jesus. Newman picked up the forceps and put one foot up on the table’s edge to brace himself.—Everyone hold tight, he said.
By first light the baby was washed and swaddled and asleep in a cradle beside the stove. Bride was back in her bed, drifting in and out of consciousness while Newman stitched the ragged folds of skin together as best he could. Mary Tryphena watching over his shoulder.—Do you think she’ll live, Doctor?
—With any luck.
—She’ve had precious little of that the last day or so. You’re a dab hand with a needle and thread, Doctor.
He guessed the midwife’s age at somewhere north of sixty. Small fine features, a thick head of grey hair shot through with filaments of the deepest black.
The men were sitting about the kitchen smoking as he came through. The table and floor already scoured clean. Lazarus had removed his wooden leg and Newman leaned over to examine the stump. A rough amputation from another lifetime.—Does it give you any trouble?
—Falls over every time I tries to stand on the bugger is all, Lazarus said.
Newman looked across at Mary Tryphena. His head swimming from lack of sleep and twelve solid nights of celebration.—Send for me if the girl’s no better by this evening.
It was a full week before he was sure of Bride and he engaged the Trim brothers for a call to Spread Eagle he’d put off to stay close to her. A day of still cold, clear skies and nearly windless, the sound of the dogs’ barking echoing crisp off the hills. They stopped in a sheltered valley to boil the kettle and Azariah said, So you been round to see the Devines.
—I have.
—Mary Tryphena says they’d have lost the girl and the baby both if you hadn’t come by.
Newman brushed the notion aside.—How did Lazarus lose that leg?
The brothers glanced at one another and shook their heads. They gave a brief account of the hard times that fell on the shore forty years ago, sneaking up on the details. How many seasons the new sealing vessel lay frozen in the harbour before it was able to make its maiden voyage to the ice. Everyone hungry and in debt and there was a fight for berths aboard the ship. The Devines with only two tickets and Lizzie insisted Laz be accompanied by his father. But Devine’s Widow wouldn’t suffer Lazarus to go to the ice without Judah, thinking it unlucky somehow.
Obediah said, We two was there when she come to the house to ask for Father’s ticket.
—We’re all fair gone here, Jabez told Devine’s Widow. Olive was lying on a daybed near the fireplace, the young brothers fussing over her like spinster aunts.—That’s a payment of cash money if we gets into the fat and enough pelts are taken.
—Jude will hand over whatever he makes on the trip. I’ll see to that, Jabez.
—I was never much for living off charity.
—That’s fine, the widow woman said.—There’s Laz’s death if he goes off without Judah, she said.—I’m telling you now.
Jabez sighed and got up to put more wood on the fire. There was no logic to the notion but that made it no easier to dismiss.
—I’d be happier having you home, Olive told him.—We’ll manage somehow.
The Devines loaded aboard the Cornelia the last of March, their boots hobnailed for the ice, a sealing box packed with salt meat and hard-boiled eggs and pork tongues. The Cornelia sailed north for the Front with a crew of twenty-nine men and the entire population turned out to see them off, waving and cheering as if they were at a carnival. And that mood persisted until the weather turned two days later. The harbour was blocked with drift ice pushed ashore by an unfavourable wind and in the first week of April two gales blew down from the Labrador. They heard rumours of ships wrecked by the storms, and no one slept for fear of what their dreams might tell them. By the tenth of April survivors from Bonavista and Conception Bay began trickling through on their way home. As many as fifty sealing ships were icebound and then wrecked, they said, the Cornelia among them. Some sealers were able to reach Belle Isle on foot but were stranded there without food or shelter for days. Those that felt strong and foolhardy enough struck out over the ice toward communities on the Northern Peninsula and from there hitched rides on coastal boats and fishing schooners that were ferrying them home.
The governor dispatched a vessel from St. John’s to collect the sealers still stranded on Belle Isle and eventually it arrived in Paradise Deep with most of the Cornelias crew aboard. Flags at half-mast and corpses stacked like cordwood on the deck, the bodies still frozen in the postures in which they’d died.
—We was all down on the waterfront to see the boat come in, Obediah said.—And not a sound for all the crowd was there. You could hear the chain let go when they anchored off in the harbour.
Boats were rowed out to collect the survivors and the dead and no one knowing still which of the two was being brought home to them. Eleven corpses all told. Seventeen haggard survivors.
Lazarus went through the ice as they made for Belle Isle and soaked himself to the waist, his feet frozen, and he was forced to lean on Judah the rest of the way. On the treeless island the sealers built snow walls to block the wind and trudged in endless circles through the nights, knowing they would perish if they lay down. Lazarus lost all feeling in his right foot and couldn’t walk without help. Their last day out he was too exhausted to stand and Judah stripped him of his clothes, wrapping the younger man under his gansey sweater next to his skin. He crouched under the snow wall then and covered them both in Laz’s coat. The rescuers found them there like that, huddled one around the other and Lazarus thought dead by all who looked at him. Couldn’t separate the two even after they got them carted aboard the vessel. The captain wouldn’t allow Judah to go below with the corpse in his arms so he sat out on the deck with a seal pelt for a blanket, a shroud of April snow settling over them. Lazarus didn’t so much as open his eyes before he was carried home to the Gut and set before the fire. Devine’s Widow cutting him free of Jude’s clothes with a knife.
Azariah said, Laz was frostbite to the ankle and the gangrene set in. It was Devine’s Widow took his leg off, a carpenter’s saw all she had for the job. Az paused at the thought of it.—That woman was a fierce creature, Doctor. Tied off the leg above the knee and reefed it tight, put a horse bit in young Laz’s mouth. Cauterized the wound with a poker hotted up in the fireplace.
—Same as she did with her four-legged chick, Obediah said.
The brothers shaking their heads, struck by the odd coincidence book-ending the woman’s life on the shore.
—What happened to Callum? Newman asked.
Azariah emptied the dregs of his tea into the fire and rinsed his cup with snow.—Callum never made it to Belle Isle.
—They left the vessel together, but Callum wasn’t with them when they reached the island.
—The weather was blowing and he must have fallen behind, lost sight of their tracks. Or just sat for a spell a
nd never got up.
—He was an old man, is what he was, Obediah said.—That gimpy leg of his. Shouldn’t have been to the ice at all probably.
—Lizzie went a bit strange after that. She set Callum’s place at the table every meal until the day she died.
—And she doted on young Henley when he come along a few years later. She ruined the boy if you ask me. Still wiping his behind when he was near old enough to vote.
—Lizzie wouldn’t have let Bride Freke get near the man, I guarantee.
—Why, Newman said, what’s wrong with Bride?
—A hard case, she is, Doctor. Hardest kind. Her mother was a Tibbo from over in the Gut, a bushborn she was. Died giving birth to Bride.
—And her father, Jim Freke, he married one of Henry Jolliff’s girls then. Loretta.
—Loll never took to Bride, her being another woman’s youngster.
—And a bushborn, Azariah said.—Called the girl a Jackie-tar. Treated her like dirt, if you wants the bare facts of the matter. And Bride, she more or less got raised up by her mother’s people in the Gut.
Obediah: They caught Bride trying to sneak off with a bagful of their garden soil last spring, Henley and Mary Tryphena did, and they had a row you could hear halfway to Red Head Cove.
—She was stealing a bag of dirt?
—People holds a bit of soil very dear in these parts, Doctor. Years turning in capelin and seaweed to make earth enough to grow a few spuds. There’s been blood spilled over half an acre of garden.
—There was no real blood this time, mind. Just Henley holding on to Bride while Mary Tryphena wrestled the soil away and Bride screaming her fool head off.
—Hard to see how they went from a scrap like that to living in the same house with a child between them.
—Almost as odd a match as Mary Tryphena and Judah, those two.
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