Galore
Page 35
In the middle of March a woman stood at the foot of his bed in a surgical mask.—Do you remember me? she asked. She was waiting in London while her repatriation arrangements were made, she said, and was looking up boys from home still recuperating.—Just to keep myself occupied, she said. She sat in a chair by the window. She was booked to leave on a boat sailing for Newfoundland on the thirtieth, she told him. Three years she’d worked in France and she couldn’t wait for a home meal.
A doctor flashed by the door and backed up the hall to look in.—You know this man?
The young nurse stood up.—I was at the field hospital in Rouen. Does he still not remember who he is?
—Hopeless case, I’m afraid. Have you seen any of that crazy writing he does?
—A little, she said uncertainly, turning to look at the patient.
—We’re trying to figure out how to send him home.
The girl from Belleoram imagined it must be a ring of Dante’s Hell to remember not the barest scrap of the place you came from. As if all you loved, the world itself, had forgotten you existed. She turned back to the doctor.—You know I’m a nurse, she said.
He was booked on the steamer departing at the end of the month. The days were frigid and inclement but the girl wheeled him around the deck morning and afternoon.—Lots of fresh air for you, she said.—Doctor’s orders. He seemed impervious to the cold and wet, preferring to sit outside in the foulest weather, and he spent most of April month near the stern wearing a hospital johnny under an overcoat. She sat with him as long as she could stand the chill, talking about her family and her trip to New York on the way overseas and a man at home with such a sore throat the wine ran out his nose when he took Holy Communion. Something in it might stick, she thought, some meaningless detail could tip him into his life. She threw random questions at him, as if she might trick him into remembering himself. Do you have brothers or sisters? Do you know the words to “Whispering Hope”? Have you ever been to Port Union? Are you Catholic or Protestant?
The day before they were scheduled to reach St. John’s she said, Is there a girl waiting for you at home? He turned to her with a tortured look that she misread completely.—You remember her? she said.—You know her name?
But he only stared, as if pleading with her to stop.
He had no idea if there was a girl waiting at home and she could almost feel that absence yawing beneath him, the shadows flickering across blank space, nameless and unidentifiable.—I’ll tell you what I think, she said.—Something will come to you. You’ll see a face or a boat or hear someone’s voice and that one thing will bring it all back to you.
He stared blankly out at the water and she patted his hand.—I’m freezing, she said. She stood up and wrapped her arms tight about herself.—Are you all right here awhile?
He nodded.
—Tomorrow’s the Feast of St. Mark, she said.—Mean anything to you?
He smiled at her useless little ploy, shaking his white head. His life like something important he’d meant to tell someone and he couldn’t recall now what he intended to say or to whom. He watched her skitter along the deck toward steerage and disappear inside, relieved to be left to himself. The nurse’s endless questions served only to add depth and definition to what it was he lacked. Alone he could turn his back on the absence, look at the world as if there was nothing to it but surface, the endless present moment. A trick of shadow and light.
There wasn’t another soul out in the drizzle and bitter wind when he spotted the whale steaming clear of the ship’s wake, so close he could see the markings under its flukes, the white of them glowing a pale apple-green through seawater. The massive fan of the tail tipped high and disappeared as the whale sounded and he leaned forward in his wheelchair, expectant, as if he’d been told the humpback would breach, rising nose first and almost clear of the water, kicking up a wreath of foam as it fell back into the sea. The whale came full into the open air a second time and a third, it almost seemed to be calling his attention. And something in that detail turned like a key in a lock, a story spiralling out of the ocean’s endless green and black to claim him.
The face of a girl waiting at home flashed below the surface and he pushed himself onto the deck, dragging his dead legs to the rail. He shed his clothes as he went, returning to himself naked as a fish. Even as he fell he pictured her watching from across the room the next time he opened his eyes to the light.
THANKS
Holly Ann.
Martha Kanya-Forstner.
Anne et al. at the McDermid Agency.
Nit-pickers: Holly Hogan, Stan Dragland, Martha Magor, Janice McAlpine, Larry Matthews, Lynn Moore, Alison Pick, Degan Davis, Mary Lewis, Shawn Oakey, God love the works of you.
There were dozens of community histories, journals and memoirs, academic studies, websites, archival documents, collections of songs, tales and folklore behind the geography, incidents and characters in Galore. MKF won’t let me list them all, but here are some of the books I leaned on while writing the novel: Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland, E.R. Searey; A History of Corpus Christi Parish, Northern Bay, Edward Chafe; Vignettes of a Small Town, Robert C. Parsons; A Heritage Guide to Portugal Cove—St. Philip’s, Robin McGrath; Prime Berth: An Account of Bonavista’s Early Years, Bruce Whiffen; The Irish in Newfoundland, 1600-1900, Mike McCarthy; Fables, Fairies and Folklore of Newfoundland, Alice Lannon and Mike McCarthy; Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells, Barbara Rieti; Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: Merchant—Settler Relations in Newfoundland, 1885-1855, Sean T. Caddigan; A History of Health Care in Newfoundland and Labrador, Stephen M. Nolan; The Labrador Memoir of Dr. Harry Paddon, Ronald Rompkey (ed.); Doctor Olds of Twillingate: Portrait of an American Surgeon in Newfoundland, Gary L. Saunders; To Be My Father’s Daughter, Carmelita McGrath, Sharon Halfyard, Marion Cheeks; Theatre of Fish: Travels through Newfoundland and Labrador, John Gimlette; Your Daughter Fanny: The War Letters of Frances Cluett, VAD, Bill Rompkey and Bert Riggs (eds.).
Parts of Galore were written during a stint as Writer in Residence at Memorial University in St. John’s. Thanks to everyone in the English Department—in particular Danine Farquharson and Jennifer Lokash—for looking after me. Thanks as well to the staff of the Provincial Archives and Mark Ferguson of the Provincial Museum at the Rooms, and to Larry Dohey at the Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in St. John’s.
Copyright © 2009 Michael Crummey Ink
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
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Crummey, Michael
Galore / Michael Crummey.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37229-1
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PS8555.R84G34 2009 C813′.54 C2009-902771-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Thank
s
Copyright