Galore

by Michael Crummey

—You don’t have a single shred of integrity.

  Shambler raised his glass.—Preaching to the choir, Doctor.

  —You are an absolute pig of a man.

  Shambler drew his head back, a look of feigned hurt on his face.—I preferred you when you were being coy.

  —Judah Devine is no more danger to the King than the ass you’re sitting on.

  —Undoubtedly so.

  —Goddamn it, Newman said.—I don’t understand how you can be party to such a farce.

  Shambler raised his shoulders and dropped them in an elaborate sigh.—I live here, he said. He seemed genuinely exhausted.—Look, he said, play along and you’ll have the hospital you want. No one ends his days with his neck in a noose. And Levi gets some satisfaction for the loss of his ears, among sundry other complaints. It seems a perfectly reasonable course of action to the ass I’m sitting on.

  Newman finished his drink.—Damn it, he said.—Damn it all to hell.

  Shambler looked into his empty glass, hesitating over a question. Glanced up at Newman finally.—Any regrets, Doctor?

  The last of his patients was dealt with by mid-afternoon and Newman took his muzzle-loader into the backcountry, tramping through the first heavy frost of the fall. He wanted motion and silence, to let his mind skim out over the barrens like a stone across the surface of a pond. To see where it came to rest once it settled.

  He crested a rise a mile beyond Nigger Ralph’s Pond just as the sun was dipping behind the Breakers, three hills spooned one into the next like a run of waves curling onto a beach. He’d always loved those hills, the sculpted look of them mirroring one another precisely. They loomed on the horizon and regardless how far he travelled in their direction they always appeared the same distance off. The melancholy surge he’d felt in Bride’s presence that morning came over him again, knowing he’d never get closer to them than this. And his mind dropped into the edgeless black of what had been worrying him all day.

  None of this was his. He was being swallowed up body and bone by the shore and he didn’t belong here regardless. The place he loved would never return his feelings as he wished. The irrefutable fact of it made him turn on his heel like a soldier ordered about-face and he made his way back toward the coastline. The sky startling alive with constellations as he went, an orange moon lifting off the rim of the horizon. When he reached the Tolt he took the road down into the Gut and stood at Mary Tryphena’s door. There was a light through the window but he hesitated outside until she called him in.—You had no luck, she said and she gestured to the muzzle-loader under his arm.

  —Didn’t see a living creature out there, he said.

  She sat him to a stew of cods’ heads and potatoes and poured him a mug of tea. She asked no questions until he was done his meal and she’d cleared away the dishes, sitting across from him with her hands folded on the tabletop like she was awaiting some verdict.—I went to see Judah this morning, he said.

  —So I’m told.

  He said, I’ve been charged with making an assessment of your husband’s mental state, Mrs. Devine. Mary Tryphena nodded and Newman guessed there wasn’t a soul on the shore who hadn’t heard this news by now.—Do you have any idea why he’s covering the walls like that? With those scripture verses?

  —I didn’t even know the man had his letters, she said. There was a bitterness in her voice that surprised Newman.—Do you know the Bible well, Doctor?

  —Enough to dislike it.

  —I suppose I’m not as well versed in the Good Book, she said, being as I can’t read. But I’ve heard it most the way through a time or two. Do you know Proverbs?

  —I couldn’t quote you.

  —An open rebuke, she said, is better than a secret love. Now tell me, Doctor, why would a man keep such a thing from a woman?

  He opened his mouth to defend himself but couldn’t manage a word. He felt he’d been pulled wrong-side out like a wet sweater, that all his insides were in plain view.

  Mary Tryphena said, It’s the only thing the world gives us, you know. The right to say yes or no to love.

  A memory of stitching Bride together came to him, how Mary Tryphena hovered at his shoulder to watch. She spoke as if she knew something where Bride was concerned that he did not and it occurred to him she might carry enough influence to swing things in his favour. His career, the hospital, his credibility, every shred of personal integrity, all of it seemed a fair wager for that kind of help. He tried to think how it might be worded to not sound like a threat.—Mrs. Devine, he said, if I determine your husband is competent. Treason is a hanging offence, he said.—On the other hand if I make a finding of insanity.

  —Judah is never going to leave that room he’s locked up in.

  —That’s one possibility. But if you could do something to settle things, he said and he shifted in his chair.—With myself and Bride, he said.—I could perhaps arrange to have Judah placed in the hospital’s care.

  Mary Tryphena nodded at him, not following.—Judah’s mind is set.

  —I’m sorry?

  —They could take the locks off tomorrow, she said, and he won’t be moved out of there.

  Newman could barely hear her over the roar in his ears.—That makes no sense.

  —And I suppose that makes your report easier to write, Doctor.

  Mary Tryphena saw him to the door as he left, handing him his rifle from the corner where he’d laid it. He felt like a fool, like an absolute pig of a man. She said, I’ll have a word with Bride if you like.

  —No, he said, turning back to her.—Under no circumstances, he said.

  She shrugged.—You’re welcome any time, Doctor.

  He was still trying to slow the conversation down in his head, to understand what had passed between them. Denial and silence were his only defence and they were useless to him now. He might as well have declared himself to Bride from the roof of the clinic while the entire harbour trooped past on their way to Sunday services. He went over the Tolt Road at a run, as if there was a chance the news of how he felt might reach the clinic before him. He came into the kitchen out of breath and wild-eyed, like someone chased over half the shore by Mr. Gallery. Bride turned from the stove, taking him in with a calm stare of appraisal.—You’ve gone and missed your supper, Doctor.

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling to hide the emotion playing like a magic-lantern show behind them. He said, I don’t suppose you’d marry me would you, Bride?

  —I kept a plate warm for you, she said.—You’ll want to wash up.

  Newman ate the full of his supper a second time that evening while Bride was upstairs settling Tryphie for the night and he was still famished when he was done. He thought there was nothing in the world would fill him up. He could hear the crisp hammer-stroke of her heels overhead, each one a little explosion in his chest. He couldn’t stay here, that much was clear. There was Alaska on the opposite end of the continent, still unsullied by his stupidity. South America, India, all the ancient histories of Asia to fall into if he chose.

  Bride came back into the room and he swung around to face her. She let that appraising look linger on him.—You know you’ll have to give up the drink, Doctor.

  He had no idea what she was talking about.

  —When we marry, she said.

  —Of course, he said, nodding stupidly.—Of course I will.

  They were wed in the Methodist chapel that spring and Newman took Bride to Connecticut for the honeymoon. They spent most of the summer in the States where Newman attended fundraisers to outfit the new hospital while Tryphie was guinea-pigged through skin grafting and physical therapy. Bride came home that fall with a set of false teeth and pregnant with a second child.

  They moved into Selina’s House and set about renovating the rooms for wards and an operating theatre and an office, for waiting and examination rooms and storage for equipment and supplies. Barnaby Shambler was on hand for the official opening and he toasted the new facility and the generosity of Levi Sellers who sold Seli
na’s House for the sum of one dollar. He toasted the new couple and then led the local dignitaries in an assault on the tables of booze laid out for the occasion. He cornered Newman hours later, waving his glass of rum.

  —She’s a fine-looking woman with the teeth in, I’ll grant you that, he said.

  Judah Devine was officially placed under Newman’s care at the same time the title to Selina’s House was signed over. He arranged to move the patient to an outbuilding behind the hospital fitted with a proper bunk and a small woodstove but Judah could not be enticed or coerced through the door of the fishing room. Eventually he was left to Mary Tryphena’s oversee and she was the only person to lay eyes on her husband in the years that followed. Newman relied on her for news of any change that might require his intervention but there was never any change. From the upstairs windows of Selina’s House he sometimes caught sight of her on her daily pilgrimage to the waterfront, a solitary figure carrying her parcel of food. Widow in all but name.

  Every two years, Tryphie returned to Connecticut to undergo additional skin grafting while Newman scrounged after money and medical staff for a northern practice. Tryphie’s posture improved after each visit though he was never able to stand fully upright and his right shoulder was hunched at an awkward angle all his life. Twice Eli made the trip through Boston en route to Hartford with his cousin and he fell in love with the endless avenues of shops, the factories and train stations and opera houses, with the industry at the heart of the undertaking. It was a revelation to see that work could do more than strip a person of their health, that things might be created, that accumulation was possible. Tryphie grew up despising America for the pain it inflicted on him, but to Eli it looked like a fairy-tale kingdom.

  The youngsters spent most of their time on the shore alone together. They holed up in Patrick Devine’s library in the Gut, flipping through illustrations in the science and botanical volumes. At Selina’s House they worked on one or another of Tryphie’s inventions, a rotating contraption that toasted bread on two sides at once, a hand-held periscope fashioned from wood and mirrors that allowed them to spy around corners. Tryphie’s affinity for material and the mechanical was at the heart of each design but he lacked Eli’s nose for the pragmatic. The years of enforced rest had made him a bit of a dreamer. He spent months rigging canvas over a frame of intricate wooden hinges that he intended to strap to his back before launching himself off the Tolt. Newman confiscated the machine before Tryphie killed himself though it was too beautiful to destroy. It hung above the doctor’s bed like a crucifix, the eight-foot wingspan nearly touching the walls on either side of the room.

  When they weren’t locked away with Patrick Devine’s books or Tryphie’s tools the boys tormented the goats in the meadow and tore up rhubarb gardens. They copied across the pans of sea ice that clogged the harbour each spring. They ran behind Sellers’ barns at milking time, beating the walls with sticks to set the skittish cows bucking. They threw rocks at the fishing room where the Great White was shut away, hoping to rouse some response to confirm the man was still among the living. They wandered the backcountry to play out complicated scenarios involving pirates and English soldiers or cowboys and Indians. Occasionally web-fingered Hannah Blade or one of the younger Woundys was drafted into the action, but more often than not they were alone.

  Increasingly their friendship felt like a straitjacket, an attachment cemented by obligation and guilt, and an edge of cruelty crept into it. Tryphie’s hunchback made him an easy target, the livid skin stretched across his shoulders like a carapace. Ladybug, Eli called him, Monkey-man, Ape. They set tests of endurance to watch the other fail, holding their palms over a candle flame until someone surrendered, pushing the other’s head underwater for the panic and choking, the snot and tears. Both boys felt diminished by their attachment but couldn’t see how to escape it.

  When they stripped out of their clothes to swim in the backcountry ponds the wind on their bodies stood their hairless pricks on end. They poked at one another innocently enough for a while, sword fighting they called it. And one afternoon Eli dared Tryphie to touch his cock, knowing Tryphie couldn’t resist a dare.—Too chicken to put it in your mouth, he said a week later. For the rest of that summer they lay side by side on the moss to suck one another after swimming, a pale starfish surrounded by miles of wilderness. They never spoke a word about it and Eli sidled up to the act each time, looking for any hint of hesitance or judgment in Tryphie’s manner. There was something shaming in the wariness it forced on them and eventually they avoided the back-country ponds altogether to be free of it.

  On Sundays they went to church together, sitting in a pew with Bride and Tryphie’s two half-brothers. They never took in a word of Reverend Violet’s interminable sermons, Tryphie’s head full of gears, angles, torque, glue and bevels and sandpaper and ball bearings, Eli wandering the streets of Boston or Hartford or lying in the moss with a faceless man, the wind like a second skin on his skin. After the service he walked down the aisle with his coat buttoned and his hands folded in front of him while Tryphie rambled on about a watch that could predict the weather or a saw blade set into a table and powered by a foot-pump. There was no one else on the shore like himself, Eli thought, maybe no one in the whole of Newfoundland.

  The cod fishery followed its tidal rise and fall with implacable regularity, seasons of relative bounty followed by years of poor catches or poor markets overseas. The annual hunt for seals on the Labrador ice was lost to larger, faster steamships out of St. John’s and the bleak times made it hard to argue that anything less than Levi’s ruthlessness could keep Sellers & Co. afloat. Patrick Devine began travelling to St. John’s each spring in hopes of getting out from under the man’s thumb, spending the summer months aboard a schooner fishing cod off the Grand Banks.

  Eli lobbied to accompany his father on the bankers but Druce refused to surrender her youngest child, as if she knew Patrick was destined one year not to come home. Every spring mother and son descended into the same argument and found their crooked way back to the same conclusion. Patrick ignored the strife as best he could, though he sided with Druce when called upon directly.—There’s no besting her, he confided to the boy.—You want to save yourself some grief, he advised, don’t you marry a girl from the shore.

  When Tryphie turned sixteen he left to attend college in St. John’s in preparation for the inevitable medical degree. Eli was relieved to be free of his company but felt at a loss in his days without it. He knocked around on the waterfront and tramped over half the countryside, trying to fend off the hatred for the shore that grew in him like a black mould. It was a surprise to discover he despised the people closest to him simply for enduring their lives of want. The only venture on the shore not owned by or beholden to Levi Sellers was the Trims’ sawmill and Eli took a job there over the winter months, squirrelling away nickels and dimes toward a way out.

  He was seen in the company of Hannah Blade on occasion and people thought they were just odd enough to make a grand couple. But Eli was never known to set his cap for any girl in particular. There was a solitude about him, a whiff of secrecy that encouraged idle speculation. Every discussion of Eli eventually ran through his family tree, as if it were a list of symptoms. Devine’s Widow begetting Callum who married hag-ridden Lizzie Sellers. Callum and Lizzie begetting Mary Tryphena and peg-leg Lazarus, raised from the dead and father to Jackie-tars on the Labrador. Mary Tryphena wedded to the stench of the Great White, and they two begetting Eli’s father, Patrick, who all but drowned himself to bring home a stack of books.

  Eli was a queer stick, no one could deny it. There’s no escaping your blood, people said, and Eli Devine was saddled with more weight than most.

  In the winter of his eighteenth year Tryphie brought his fiancée home to Paradise Deep for a Christmas wedding.

  Newman had planned to send his stepson to school in the States but Tryphie refused. Even St. John’s he had to be bullied into. He spent two homesick year
s at Bishop Feild College, miserable even while he fell in love with Minnie Rose, a kitchen maid at the house where he boarded. The two carried on a clandestine courtship for a year before Tryphie proposed.

  The couple arrived at Selina’s House mid-afternoon on Tibb’s Eve. Newman was in surgery and didn’t lay eyes on his future daughter-in-law until he sat at the supper table. A girl Tryphie had rescued from the life of a scullery maid, a seventeen-year-old with no education and less ambition, an attitude of congenital deference about her that set Newman’s teeth on edge. He excused himself without taking tea and hid out in his office until he did a last round for the evening and went to bed.

  —That girl wouldn’t last thirty seconds into an appendectomy, he said to Bride.

  —Tryphie isn’t marrying a nurse.

  —Well maybe he ought to be.

  —Don’t you say a word, she warned him.

  —And what if I do?

  Bride waited a moment, considering how far she was willing to push.—Tryphie’s never wanted to go to medical school at all, she said.—You know that.

  —And this is his way of getting out of it? Marrying a maid who can’t manage a sentence without the word sir or ma’am tacked to the end?

  Bride said, You’re just like your father, Harold Newman.

  —Goddamn it, woman.

  —If you profane the Lord once more, Bride said.

  Newman raised himself on an elbow, exasperated and furious and just the barest niggle of something sexual beginning to turn in him.—Are you going to wash my mouth out with soap, Nurse?

  She turned away on her side to hide her smile.

  —Kiss me, he said.

  —I wouldn’t touch those filthy lips to save my soul.

  She tried to fend him off when he fell on her, slapping at his ears. He grabbed her wrists to pin her arms above her head.—You’ve ruined my life, he said, nuzzling her breasts.

  —Sure you never had it so good, you foolish gommel, she said, falling back into an accent so thick he’d thought it a foreign language the first time he encountered her. There was something in hearing it that Newman rose to every time.