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 travelled 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.
—M
y 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.
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.
They had never been close as younger men, but their conversations created the illusion of a shared past that was a comfort to Absalom. The brothers brought Jabez Trim’s Bible to read aloud to him as he grew frailer. Obediah made his way through the truncated story of Isaac one afternoon, the child left tied and helpless under Abraham’s knife. There was a rare silence among them afterwards, all three thinking of Henley and Levi. Both sons bound in their way by Absalom and neither seemed likely to be spared.
—Father told us James Woundy liked to write his own endings to that story, Azariah said.—All of them bad.
—Perhaps James Woundy was a smarter man than he let on, Absalom said.
After the brothers left, Ann Hope came to tell him Levi was waiting downstairs. Absalom pushed himself into a sitting position, lifting his legs one at a time over the side of the bed as his son came up the stairs.—Hello Levi, he said.
—Mr. Sellers, sir.
—What do you have for me today?
Levi gave a clipped summary of the latest reports from Labrador on catches and weather, the price they might fetch for Labrador green and West Indie in the fall. He said, It’s been a wet summer, we’re likely to see a quantity of dun fish not worth the salt used to cure it.
—There’s no sense worrying about the weather, Absalom told him.—It’ll make you old before your time.
—Yes sir, he said.
—Don’t patronize me.
Levi turned the hat in his hands in an endless round.—Yes sir.
Absalom took a laboured breath.—You expect all this will be yours soon enough, he said.—The business.
—Soon enough, Levi repeated, yes sir.
—I’m afraid, Absalom said and he lay back on the bed, too tired to sit up any longer.
—You’re afraid, sir?
He shook his head on the pillow.
—Should I fetch Mother?
Absalom raised one hand and then coughed a rope of blood onto his nightshirt. Levi shocked into stillness by the obscenity of it.
—What is it? Absalom asked.—What’s happened?
Levi left Selina’s House after the doctor arrived, asking that any news be sent along directly. He went straight home and shut himself in the office, sitting among his account books and ledgers while he tried to quiet his breath, to stifle the tremor in his legs. His wife knocked at the door.—You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Flossie said.
—No, he said.—Not a ghost.
—Would you like some tea?
He nodded and after she left the room he thought on what exactly it was he’d seen against the white of his father’s nightshirt. The sight terrified him, but the fear was braided with something murkier—a kind of awe, to see his own heart laid bare before him. It was like a sign that his life was about to begin in earnest.
He couldn’t fix in his mind when he learned the truth about his half-brother. He’d singled out Henley for abuse long before the question of paternity arose, the youngster was a sook and a stutterer which made him an easy target. The sting of their fraternal connection came to Levi over time, knowledge he grew into like clothes handed down within a family. The reality of his mother’s humiliation, to be teaching her husband’s bastard son his letters and arithmetic.
When Flossie returned with the tea, Levi had recovered himself enough to smile up at her. She came around the desk and placed her hand against his forehead.—I’m fine, he said.
His wife was a mouse of a woman, brown-haired and slight. Levi had barely taken note of her before he turned twenty-one, when Adelina suggested they marry. His sister and Florence Dodge were kindred in their insular seriousness, in the isolation that was part and parcel of their families’ standing on the shore. It was only in Flossie’s company that Adelina was unselfconscious about the warts afflicting her and they swore a sisters’ fidelity to one another as children. It was the thought of losing Flossie that kept Adelina from following her siblings to the Boston States and she brokered the match with Levi to formalize the sisterly relationship between them. Levi had a house built in a far corner of the north garden above Selina’s House and Adelina moved into a spare bedroom a month after he and Flossie married.
—Where’s Adelina? he asked.
—She’s upstairs with the children.
—The doctor is at Selina’s House, he said.—Perhaps she should go sit with Mother.
By the time the Labrador crews returned in the fall Absalom was said to be on death’s door and the business turned over completely to Levi Sellers. Levi revoked credit to the most desperate debtors on the shore and sent constables to repossess what little materials the bankrupts owned. There were altercations and bloodshed and half a dozen debtors were jailed in the old fishing room while they waited for the governor to appoint Levi the new district justice.
Absalom recovered enough by mid-September to eat toast and tea and soft-boiled eggs and to sit at the window with a blanket across his legs, but he heard nothing of what was happening in the wider world. The doctor insisted that visits be kept to a minimum and Ann Hope refused to allow the meetings with Levi to continue.—This is not a prison, he protested.—You are not my warder.
—It’s worse than that, I’m afraid, s
he said.—I am your wife.
The notion was enough to tamp down what fight he had left and Absalom approached the end of his life in a state of enforced ignorance not unlike his earliest years in Selina’s House.
Ann Hope catered to his every need through the day and she sat up with him at night, wearing herself thin with the vigil. She refused her daughter’s offers to share the load.—You can’t carry on like this on your own, Adelina warned her.
—In sickness and in health, Ann Hope said.
There was something fearsome in her mother’s sense of duty that Adelina wasn’t willing to challenge. But she moved back into Selina’s House where she might at least put food in front of the woman, encourage her to drink tea, to nap.
Levi spent the fall leaning his full weight into the business, ordering his cullers to bump ten percent of the season’s catch to cheaper grades across the board. When the Devine men came to settle their accounts they were told two-thirds of their fish was West Indie and virtually worthless. Levi and Lazarus yelling at each other across a desk, half a dozen hired men throwing the Devines off the premises. A lamp was smashed in the process, one of the hired men required stitches, and Levi added the damages to the Devines’ account.
Levi’s vindictiveness was the talk in every household on the coast but for Selina’s House where the dying man insulated them from the daily round of news and gossip. When Adelina answered a knock at the servant’s door off the kitchen early in October she had no reason to expect Mary Tryphena.—I needs to see Mr. Sellers, she announced.
Adelina retreated behind the door.—You shouldn’t be here, she said.
—I’d be happy to wait at the front of the house if you rather, Mary Tryphena told her.
—One minute, she said, closing the door.—Please.
Ann Hope was half-asleep in the chair by the window and Adelina called her from the sickroom in a whisper. She had to repeat herself several times to make Ann Hope understand who was waiting downstairs. Her mother walked to the hall window and looked down at Mary Tryphena who was facing away from the house, taking in the row of outbuildings and barns that Absalom had put up in the past forty years, the gardens fenced and under cultivation, the sheep pens, the dozen horses grazing in the fields.—Go in and sit with your father, Ann Hope told her daughter.
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