Galore

by Michael Crummey

  Bride had always been able to tell what men wanted that way. Even as a girl of twelve and thirteen she could suss it out. It was a kind of weakness in them all and men distrusted her for knowing so much about their private selves. Newman, at least, seemed not to despise her for it.

  The chastity of her marriage to Henley Devine felt like a penance for her particular sins and there was nothing in lying with a man that Bride couldn’t live without if God required the sacrifice. She’d resigned herself to a life of abstinence before Tryphie’s accident set her squarely in the way of the doctor. Her son permanently scarred and her husband carted home in a box and she couldn’t escape the thought it was God at work in her life. She prayed over the blasphemous notion for months and still it made no sense to her. The Lord was the only man Bride ever felt helpless to figure out and that helplessness was almost a relief. She set to work at the hospital as if it was her vocation and left the question of the doctor to Jesus.

  She lay catching her breath after they made love, her face pressed against her husband’s back. She never tired of it, the afterglow of giving and giving and being fed in return. And there was something in Tryphie that made her worry he’d never experience anything like it. He was different than her two younger sons, there was an insularity pushed on him by his long convalescence, an attachment to the mechanical world that seemed unnatural. She thought at times he might be incapable of recognizing love.—You won’t deny Tryphie a chance for this, she whispered.—So help me, Harold Newman.

  The wedding was set for Old Christmas Day and Newman didn’t speak against it the rest of the season. There was a dry dance at the Methodist church hall that went on late into the night, drinkers slipping outside to nip at flasks before coming back into the crush of noise and heat. Eli sat with Druce and Mary Tryphena all evening, in a sulk. He was happy to see Tryphie married off, as if it relieved him of some debt. But there was a weight on his chest as the vows were traded and the rings exchanged, and the weight would not leave him. Druce was watching her son out of the corner of her eye.—It’ll be your turn next, she said.—To get married, have a family.

  —Perhaps it will, he said.

  Druce nodded across the hall where John and Magdalen Blade sat at a table with Hannah.—I’ve always thought she was sweet on you, Druce said.—Why don’t you ask her up to dance?

  —I think I’ll wander home out of it, he said.

  It was after midnight at the tail end of the Christmas season and it was a surprise to everyone when the crowd of mummers came through the door of the hall, King Cole and Horse Chops and a retinue in rags behind them playing spoons and ugly sticks. They looked to have been on the move most of the night, drunk and rowdy to the edge of violence, shoving their way onto the dance floor, stealing women from their partners, yelling their fool heads off. Eli started for the door as soon as they came in but Druce grabbed his arm.—Don’t leave me alone with those savages, she said, smiling and happy to see them.

  King Cole made a proprietary round of the hall, shaking hands and begging drinks from teetotallers while people guessed at his identity. A Woundy, some thought, or one of the Toucher crowd. The King bowed low to the newlyweds before touching their shoulders with his staff as a blessing. Eli was in a chair behind his mother and the King almost passed by in the dim light. Raised both hands above his head when he laid eyes on him.—Horse Chops, he shouted in his high falsetto.

  Eli bolted for the door but a handful of mummers fell on him, dragging him back to a chair set in the centre of the hall, the crowd urging them on.

  —This one, this one, the King said, shaking his staff at Eli. Horse Chops stood at the King’s side, draped in a brown blanket, the horse’s head rough-carved of wood, one brown eye and one blue painted on the face, the jaws on a hinge of leather.—Is this fellow in love, Horse Chops? the King asked.

  Clap.

  —In love, he is, King Cole shouted to applause and whistles.—Now tell us, Horse Chops, is his love a secret love?

  Clap.

  —Undeclared, friends. Is his beloved in the hall, Horse Chops?

  Clap.

  —Aha, aha, the King said, circling to survey the crowd, a buzz in the air. He held his staff out as a pointer and he let it come to rest on one girl after another, Hannah Blade and Az Trim’s youngest and Peter Flood’s great-granddaughter, Horse Chops galloping to stand over each in turn before he offered his judgment.

  Clap clap.

  Moans of disappointment following every denial, names of other hopefuls shouted from all sides. Eli tied to his chair by the room’s attention, wishing he was dead.

  The King knocked his staff on the floor in frustration.—Horse Chops, he said, are you sure the beloved is in the room?

  Clap.

  —Then go, the King shouted. He sat in Eli’s lap, an arm around his shoulders.—Show us, he said.

  Horse Chops trolled slowly from table to table, passing the newly-weds once, then a second time, chased by whistles of impatience. The mummer stopped suddenly as he passed Tryphie’s bride a third time, stepping behind her seat, the huge head swinging above her like a pendulum. She buried her face in her hands in embarrassment and the King jumped from Eli’s lap.—No, he shouted, it’s not our bride? Is the best man in love with the bride?

  Complete silence in the hall as Horse Chops deliberated.

  Clap clap.

  —Stop teasing us, Horse Chops, the King begged.—Out with it, man.

  Horse Chops wagged his head, as if catching a scent in the air. He shifted sideways to stand directly behind the groom, the hunchback, Tryphie Newman. Eli was out of his chair and aboard the King before another word was spoken, hammering at the man’s head with a fist, half the crowd rushing the floor to pile on. Az and Obediah Trim and the Reverend Violet waded into the mess, shouting for calm, and nothing much came of the altercation in the end. The mummers slinking out the door without ever revealing their identities and the dancing started up again as soon as they left. Eli disappeared after the mummers and no one laid eyes on him the rest of the night.

  The crowd escorted the newlyweds to the marriage bed when the dance ended, banging pots and pans and shouting behind the couple as they went. Eli heard the distant uproar from his perch on the Tolt, following the medieval wedding party along the harbour streets by the noise, the same as if they were carrying storm lamps in the dark. The well-wishers saw the couple through the door of Selina’s House and a few minutes later their racket fell silent.

  After the wedding party dispersed Eli walked back down into Paradise Deep, picking his way along the waterfront until he reached Judah’s asylum cell. He had only the vaguest memories of his grandfather and the man had all but disappeared from their lives in his mute isolation. Eli listened outside awhile but heard only the ancient sish of ocean on the landwash. The progress of time barely registered on the shore, he thought, circling on itself like that endless conversation of water and stone. They were bearing down on a new century and everyone Eli knew was still sleepwalking through the Middle Ages. All of them lost to the larger world no less than Judah was, shut away behind an unlocked door, scribbling nonsense on the walls. If he wasn’t half-frozen from standing out in the cold he would have wept at the thought.

  There was a light in the Blades’ window as he walked back through town and he let himself into the kitchen where John was sitting up with James and Matthew, a bottle open on the table. The two younger Blades were still dressed in the costumes they wore to the hall, Horse Chops’s head on the floor at Matthew’s feet.

  —Is Hannah about? Eli asked.

  John Blade stood to fetch him a glass.—She’s gone to her bed, he said.—She and her mother both. Sit down, he said.

  James was holding a piece of ice to the swollen side of his face and Eli nodded toward him.—You’re all right are you, Jimmy?

  —Hannah is some poisoned with us, he said.

  Matthew said, It was only a bit of fun we were having, Eli.

  John Blade brou
ght Eli a drink and they all sat in silence awhile.

  —I never meant disrespect to Hannah, Eli said. He was speaking directly to John, watching the girl’s father in the light of the candle.—I never said anything meant to raise her hopes. She’s a fine girl, Mr. Blade.

  John Blade nodded and refilled glasses all around and they carried on drinking. Hannah came into the tiny kitchen an hour later, woken by the racket. Her presence in the doorway shushed them and Eli watched in silence as she took her drunken father by the elbow to help him to his bedroom. As soon as she was out of sight, James and Matthew crept to the door. They lived in houses to either side of John and Magdalen and were suddenly anxious to get home. Matthew pushed James out into the cold and turned back to the kitchen.—Hold her off for us, Eli, he said.—For the love of Christ.

  When Hannah came back to the kitchen she was carrying a quilt.—You can lie out there, she said, pointing to the daybed near the stove.

  —I was just on my way home, he said.

  —That’s a long walk this time of night.

  He fixed her with a drunken look. Thick red hair, delicately freckled hands clutching the quilt. He’d held one of those hands an afternoon when he was ten, rescuing her from a pirate lair on the barrens, a simple childish affection between them. It was the first time she’d let anyone not her family touch the webbed skin between her fingers.

  —What is it you wants, Eli? she asked him.

  —Out, he said.—Elsewhere.

  —And what do you expect to find elsewhere?

  He gestured around the room, too drunk to censor himself.—Not this, he said.

  —Well then, she said and she settled the quilt closer to her belly.—You watch yourself going home, she told him.

  Barnaby Shambler died during an afternoon debate at the Colonial Building in St. John’s. He’d gained a reputation as a napper in his latter years, snoring quietly through the business of government, and to all appearances the Legislature’s most senior member had simply fallen asleep. But he couldn’t be roused when it came time to vote on the tabled bill and was pronounced dead by one of the handful of doctors who served as elected members in the House. His body was shipped to Paradise Deep for what turned out to be the last funeral officiated by the Reverend Eldred Dodge.

  Dodge was spry for a man in his nineties. He lived alone without an ache or complaint all the years of his widowhood but the wind of old age seemed to catch him broadside with Shambler no longer before him to bear the brunt. He took to his bed after the Honourable Member was laid to rest and never stood on his feet again. Adelina and Flossie Sellers attended him, the two women holding hands as they sat at his bedside. Adelina moved into the manse when it was clear he wouldn’t recover, reading from the Gospels or simply keeping watch as the man slept. The morning of the day he died, she suggested a visit from Reverend Violet and Dodge shook his head on the pillow.—Send the other one round, he said.

  —What other one?

  —Reddigan.

  The two men had little in common other than a shared distaste for the Methodist faith. It inspired a devotion too close to mania for the priest’s liking, too close to sex for the Anglican. The congregation singing and rocking on their heels and praying to the rafters. It was appetite Reverend Violet was feeding with his Glory Hallelujah, with his Ye must be born again. And both Dodge and Reddigan distrusted appetite as a moral compass.

  —Thank you for coming, Father.

  —You’ve seen to more than a few of my flock in your time, Reverend.

  Dodge lifted a hand.—I was all they had to look to, he said. He seemed to drift a few moments before he said, You never met the widow, Father. Devine’s Widow?

  —She was long gone by the time I got here.

  —I went to see her before she died. A hundred if she was a day. Dodge closed his eyes.—She was a loathsome creature, Father.

  —This wouldn’t be the time, Reddigan said, to dwell on such things.

  But it was too late to warn the dying man off standing one more time at the bedside to look down on that gaunt face, the bottomless black well of her eyes.—I’ve come to pray for you, he’d announced and the widow turned her head to the wall to dismiss him.—Pride goeth before a fall, he said.

  —I’d watch my step then, she said, if I was you.

  He was stung by the gall of her.—Don’t you have the slightest concern for your soul, Missus?

  —I don’t remember being born, she said, and I won’t remember dying.

  He’d left the old woman there without a word of comfort, wishing her dead and gone as he walked back over the Tolt. The strength of that urge surprised him, it was animate and vital, a feral creature he dragged around on a leash, it kicked and clawed and kept him awake half the night with its racket. Reverend Dodge had never experienced a hangover though something akin to it afflicted him when he heard the news of the widow’s death—a foaming sear of regret and a sick aftertaste in his mouth, the suspicion he’d made a royal ass of himself. That he’d been wrong about God or himself somehow.

  Dodge looked up at the priest.—I hated that woman, Father.

  —The Lord tests us, Reddigan suggested.

  —The Lord is a miserable so-and-so, Dodge said.

  After the priest gave a final blessing, Flossie and Adelina came to sit with him. They offered to read awhile but he sent them away.—You shouldn’t be alone, Flossie said.

  He shook his head.—I’m not alone.

  God, they thought he meant. And he allowed them to think as much as they rustled their heavy skirts through the door. He stared up at the ceiling after they’d gone, left alone with the widow woman’s shade. As was right and proper. He’d seen her at work through the years, sitting with the sick and dying. Not a comforting presence, but inexhaustibly patient. Days without respite sometimes before she could stand and weight the eyelids down. She was a little pool of darkness across the room now and he tried to raise a hand to greet her. But he’d left it too long and even that gesture was beyond him. When Adelina looked in an hour later he was gone, arms folded on the chest, the eyes drawn closed.

  Dodge’s death was the end of the Episcopalian Church in Paradise Deep, the congregation too small to warrant a new minister. The last adherents gathered for lay services a few months longer before they disappeared into the bosom of the Methodists, and Reverend Violet’s congregation eclipsed the Catholic numbers for the first time. Father Reddigan continued to suffer occasional losses to the evangelist, prompting him to write the archbishop about his concern for the Church on the shore. Monsignor, we are still celebrating Mass in a wooden chapel raised by an apostate more than half a century ago, one can hardly expect it to instill a sense of God’s majesty within the congregation, and perhaps it is time, Monsignor, to consider building a cathedral commensurate with the beauty and glory of the Holy Roman Church.

  Every Catholic fisherman on the shore gave over his catch on the feast days of the saints to help underwrite the project, and the cornerstone was laid in 1892. The black granite for the church was quarried in the hills above Devil’s Cove and shipped to Paradise Deep one half-ton block at a time, the stones dressed and raised under the supervision of two Italian masons recruited by the archbishop.

  In December of 1894 the Union Bank and the Commercial Bank of Newfoundland collapsed under the burden of overextended credit to St. John’s merchants and the entire colony descended into bankruptcy. Levi Sellers stopped taking fish altogether during the first year of the crisis and many Protestants joined the Catholic work crews on the cathedral for the single meal a day provided to volunteers. It was the largest stone building ever constructed outside St. John’s and almost every soul on the shore had a hand in raising the sanctuary before it was done. There was a nondenominational pride taken in the height of the twin spires, as if the sprawling cathedral were a physical extension of their will, a testament to what they were capable of in the worst of times. Even the atheist doctor took an interest, setting up his box camera on the
Gaze every few months to photograph the latest stage.

  Three months before the church was completed, Obediah Trim fell from a five-storey scaffold while installing stained-glass windows behind the altar. His body was carted to the hospital where the doctor set the multiple fractures to make him look halfways human in his casket. Newman wired the misshapen jaw in place and he stared at the face from one side and then the other, testing it against his memory of the man.—There you are, Obediah, he said. He touched his finger to the faint line below the Adam’s apple—the kinkorn, as Obediah called it—tracing the scar he’d left removing the egg-shaped fibroid in his first weeks on the shore.—There you are, he said again.

  Azariah came to the doctor’s office the day before the funeral, carrying Jabez Trim’s Bible. He placed the ancient text on Newman’s desk.—We thought you should have it, Az said.—Me and Obediah. Once we was gone.

  —You aren’t planning on leaving us are you, Az?

  —I wanted to be sure it got to you, is all. You seemed so taken with it. It’s not much for all you’re after doing for us crowd, he said.

  Newman nodded helplessly and the two men sat in silence a few moments.—I hear Tryphie’s girl is going to sing at the service, Newman said finally.

  —We’re grateful to have her, Az said.—She’s what now? Thirteen?

  —Just turned fourteen.

  —Where does the time go, Azariah said and the doctor shrugged.

  Newman left the Good Book where it sat on the desk, refused even to touch it. He couldn’t shake the sense that acknowledging the Bible’s presence would mean losing Azariah to some misadventure as well. It was Bride who rescued the book from the clutter months afterwards, placing it on a shelf in the storage room they’d made of the servant’s quarters off the kitchen.

  Father Reddigan gave his congregation leave to attend the funeral and the crowd of mourners spilled out the doors, circling the Methodist chapel to listen at the open windows. Esther Newman sang “Amazing Grace,” the hymn carrying all the way to the harbour where even the gulls fell silent to hear it. Old Callum and Martha Devine together couldn’t hold a candle, people said. Esther herself wasn’t always easy to take, but her voice inspired the same sense of proprietary awe as the new cathedral. As if it was the best of what they were, distilled into something elegant and pure and inviolable.