Michael Crummey

by Galore

  Captain John Withycombe almost missed the garden party altogether, retreating to his quarters following the disastrous proposal to Mary Tryphena, shutting himself away with a chair against the door and a bottle in his lap. He’d sat there in a daze, unable to understand what had made him behave like such a goddamn fool. He felt as if he’d been living under a spell the last months and before long came to the conclusion that his condition was the girl’s doing, that she’d bewitched him somehow and used him for her sport. He took his first drink before noon and did not stop until he’d fallen into a near coma in his hammock. By the time he was roused by a hammering at the barred door he’d all but lost the day’s events in the fog of sleep and drunkenness.

  His shipmates guessed how things had unfolded by his face when he first came back over the Tolt that morning, and they left him to his misery. But they were drunk themselves by suppertime and insisted on offering some distraction. He’d missed the parade, they shouted through the door, and he was in danger of missing the food and drink as well. He didn’t know what parade they were talking about. A sense of disquiet and offense pricked at him but he was damned if he could name its source, and the rush to deliver him to the party at Selina’s House pushed it aside.

  He saw the girl as soon as they reached the garden, sitting in the grass beside a pregnant cripple, and the morning rushed back to him, the bile of it closing off his throat. She was smiling up at a tall white bastard who was wearing John Withycombe’s tricorn and acting out a dumb show that could only have been at his expense. Mocking him with his own fucking hat. The captain’s legs shaking with a mortified rage and he started yelling over the noise of the crowd that his hat had been stolen. The man ran off when he saw the captain pointing him out, with young Arscott in pursuit. The soldier jumped onto his back to wrestle him down while a black and white dog savaged the soldier’s stockings.

  John Withycombe was buried then in the pell-mell confusion, tramped upon by the shoving crowd and half deafened by the cursing and the screams of the women, until a musket fired and the Irishmen scuttled for the hills. When he pushed himself up he could see his hat trampled to ratshit and the dog lying dead on the grass beside it. Arscott sat cupping a wound in his gut that leaked like a Portuguese trader, the poor little shagger as good as dead now, a virgin still and forever and ever amen.

  There was no prison in Paradise Deep and Judah Devine was locked in a fishing room, one soldier assigned to guard the entrance.

  Lieutenant Goudie interrogated everyone present at the garden party but the mash of conflicting detail made it impossible to settle events with any certainty. The dog was shot by Kinnebrook who couldn’t force the animal to leave off Arscott in any other way. Arscott died by a wound from his own knife which was found in the grass beside him and which he’d likely drawn to defend himself against the dog’s attack. No one admitted to witnessing the fatal blow but Alphonse Toucher’s name was mentioned several times as a likely suspect and four soldiers were sent off to arrest him. They came back to the fishing room with all three Touchers in custody, each accusing another of being Alphonse. Lieutenant Goudie brought in their parents and siblings and a handful of people from the Gut who failed to make a convincing case in any direction and he was forced to set them all loose in the end. Which left them with Judah as the principal.

  Callum thought a plea of self-defense might relieve Jude of the charge, but Devine’s Widow dismissed the notion. Judah was also being held for the theft of Captain John Withycombe’s tricorn and had been apprehended while attempting to escape a soldier of the crown, all of which spoke against self-defense.

  The subtleties of the argument were lost on Lazarus. He’d insisted they carry the dog back to the Gut to bury him near the Catholic cemetery and he was tormented by the thought of losing Judah as well. No court in Newfoundland was invested with authority to try capital crimes and Jude would have to be transported to England to face a judge, which was no different than a death sentence in the six-year-old’s mind. It seemed not to matter that John Withycombe had abandoned the hat of his own accord or that it was Lazarus who retrieved it. He threatened to confess to stealing the hat unless something was done to win Judah’s release and Devine’s Widow decided to go to Selina’s House herself in the end.

  It had been years since she’d been troubled by the dreams that preceded Laz’s birth, the blood in the wake of that separation, but the memory was still visceral and immediate and she carried it with her over the Tolt Road. She went to the servant’s entrance at the back of the building and waited in the kitchen while the mistress was called. Selina beckoned for Devine’s Widow to follow her and they went down the hall to the parlor where Lieutenant Goudie and Reverend Waghorne were drinking brandy and smoking. Devine’s Widow turned to Selina when she saw the men there.

  —I gave you my daughter, Selina whispered. —I can’t be any assistance to you in this matter. And she ushered Devine’s Widow in to sit with the other guests. —Master Sellers will be along directly, she said.

  The vicar and Lieutenant Goudie were boarding at Selina’s House while the investigation was carried out and they fell into silence so suddenly the widow assumed they’d been discussing the case. She took a seat near the window and they all three waited for King-me to join them from the office. Selina clearly hadn’t told her husband who it was waiting on him and he stopped inside the door as he entered, startled to come face to face with the old woman.

  Devine’s Widow looked up at him, then glanced around the room. —Just like old times, Master Sellers, she said.

  King-me didn’t follow her meaning for a moment but he straightened when he saw it. A naval officer, a clergyman and Master Sellers facing her. Devine’s Widow put on trial half a century ago. She smiled her lopsided smile at him. It was the wrong way to begin the discussion she’d come for, but the configuration in the room was so unlikely she couldn’t resist.

  —There’s no talking to be done where Judah is concerned, King-me said, guessing the reason for her visit.

  —There’s no one saw him raise a hand to that soldier.

  —There’s none will admit to seeing it, Reverend Waghorne said.

  —You was there, Reverend, did you see it?

  —My vantage point was not ideal, he said defensively.

  —Judah had no part in killing that soldier, no more than Master Sellers’ grandson.

  King-me turned to Lieutenant Goudie. —Pay no attention to this witch, he said.

  Goudie was slouched against the arm of the chesterfield, combing a hand against the grain of a massive sideburn. He had a lazy Scots inflection that made him seem disinterested in life in general. —These soldiers, he said. —They’re sentimental men, understand. They’ll have blood for young Arscott. We might be able to do something for Judah Devine if someone could help us identify the Toucher lad.

  Devine’s Widow waved a hand. —It was the soldier’s own knife killed him, people are saying.

  —I’m not at liberty to discuss the details.

  —He fell on his own knife trying to get at the dog is what happened and everyone knows it for the truth, whatever else they might be telling you.

  The officer nodded thoughtfully a moment. —There was no Toucher involved, was there.

  Reverend Waghorne stared at Goudie. —I don’t follow, Lieutenant.

  —We can’t distinguish the Toucher in question from his brothers, Goudie said slowly, still piecing it together. —And there’d be hell to pay if we hang all three. So. It would appear that witnesses named a man they were reasonably sure would not be convicted.

  —Judah has no family you’ll have to answer to, the widow said. —That’s the only reason he’s locked up now. He got no one belonged to him.

  —He has you, Missus, King-me said without meeting her eyes.

  She stared at Sellers standing stock-still at the door, as if on guard. —How long before you leave, Lieutenant? the widow asked.

  —We’ve delayed the Spurriers vessel a f
ortnight already, he said. —We’ll have to sail within the next day or so.

  She stood abruptly and left then, not waiting to be shown the door. She stopped in to see Father Phelan at Mrs. Gallery’s, the priest half-drunk and delighted by the proposal she made until he realized the widow had yet to broach the subject with any of the principals. She told the priest to be sober enough to perform his office when they came for him and she would look to all other concerns. —A wedding, Mr. Gallery, Father Phelan said to the husband in the darkest corner of the room. —God’s covenant made flesh between man and wife. Will you have a drink to celebrate?

  The widow said, A priest isn’t meant to relish the sufferings of others, Father.

  —We choose our own hell, Phelan said, and he smiled at her.

  She stopped at the peak of the Tolt on her way back into the Gut. Dark water and ragged patches of pale blue over shoal ground. As a younger woman she often thought of Ireland gone under that horizon and swallowed by the waters. But it had been a lifetime since she’d felt that regret, knowing it was useless to ask questions of the past.

  She wasn’t much above a girl when she first came to Paradise Deep, indentured to Sellers for two winters and a summer, and she’d nearly worked herself free of him before his marriage proposal led to her dismissal. The harbor settled by a handful of English and all of them tied to King-me’s operation, so she walked to the Gut where she expected a more sympathetic welcome among the Irish and the bushborns. The Tolt Road only the barest hint of a path and rough walking with snow still down among the trees. She made a tour of the cove but no one would chance the merchant’s wrath by taking her on. Sarah Kerrivan at least offered a bed but she refused to sleep under another’s roof again. She fashioned a lean- to of spruce boughs next the Kerrivan’s scrawny apple tree, sleeping with their wood dog to avoid perishing in the cold. The following spring she raised a one-room tilt with logs she’d cut through the winter, but she had no better prospects for employment. There were nine or ten men to every woman on the shore in those days and any single man would have wed her if she showed the slightest interest, if it wasn’t common knowledge she’d spurned young Sellers who lived in Paradise Deep like some feudal lord, drinking tea with fresh milk from his own cow. No one could imagine what they might offer to turn her head and they left her alone.

  The same had been true of King-me while she worked for him. Before he proposed he never spoke a word to her except to give instructions or request a specific meal from the kitchen, though it was clear to her how besotted he was. King-me had no experience or interest in love and he seemed incapable of recognizing what had struck him. He blamed fevers and ague and indigestion for his feeling so out of sorts. He consulted her on a cure for worms he suspected as the cause of his distress. He ordered Tincture of Sage and Essence of Water-Dock from quack physicians in England who promised relief of the sullen headaches, the poor appetite and swollen stomach, the spirits funk. In desperation he had her brew a colonic of molasses and cod-liver oil to clear his system of its bad humors.

  In April of their second winter in Paradise Deep, only weeks from losing his right to order her around the property, he came into the shed where she was milking the cow, standing out of sight on the far side of the animal as he proposed. She didn’t lift her head from her work, smiling down at the pail. —Marriage, is it? she said.

  —You have no husband, he said. —And I need to take a wife.

  She could tell he felt it was a simple business decision about property and standing and knew she could never expect anything different of him. The thought of marrying a man so ignorant of his own motives seemed no different than indentured servitude. —You need to take a wife, is it? she said, and King-me nodded helplessly, out of his element altogether. —And I need to take a piss, Master Sellers. Is that for or against we two getting married?

  She could simply have said no and they might have carried on as though nothing of consequence passed between them, instead of her being turned out of the house before she could collect her few possessions or her wages. She could have left the premises without raining curses down on his head, half of which she had no memory of now, something about death to his household and the fruit of his loins and his livestock, though she never mentioned the skinny cow in particular. The words were flung about in the fury of the moment and she couldn’t have known they would tie her to Sellers as tightly as any wedding vow.

  ——

  As soon as Devine’s Widow left the house, King-me slipped out to the barn where the cows were in from the meadow to be milked. He took a bucket off its peg to join the two hired men already at work. He loved the smell of a barn, the rank closeness of it. He sat next the udder of a cow and leaned his forehead against the heat of her flank, hoping it might ease the ferment that seeing the widow brought on.

  It wasn’t enough that she had refused to have him those ages ago, an Irish girl who’d come from nothing and owned nothing. She had to ruin his livestock and poison half the household besides. The cow shifted away from him as he latched on to the teats and he whispered to settle the animal down. It made him look a fool to blame Devine’s Widow for the state of his cows, he knew, but no one had been able to offer any other explanation. The milk of his one milch cow dried up within a week of the woman leaving his employ and she was never the same mild creature, not even after the milk came back in. All his stock descended from that first cow, each one just as unpredictably skittish, kicking down the stalls at the slightest provocation, knocking pails of milk across the barn. —Explain that, he demanded of the doubters.

  And he was supposed to think it coincidence, was he, that four of his servants took sick the very month she was dismissed, their faces gone red and puffy after a particular meal of cod, his own head swollen to twice its natural size? The look of it in the glass like some livid pillow from a whore’s chesterfield. He was like to die the better part of a week and knew who to blame for the affliction, but he bided his time, let her think she’d got away with it. There were no magistrates in those days and he had to wait almost a full year before a naval ship stopped into the harbor.

  Given the charge, Captain Churchward insisted on having the ship’s chaplain present for the trial and they sat in a bare store appointed as the courtroom, the naval officer and his clergyman behind a table, plaintiff and defendant in wooden chairs before them. King-me had no memory of the men’s faces, just a vague recollection of the red and black of their outfits. The Irish servant girl who refused him sat her hands in her lap, soft-spoken and polite through the whole procedure, and she still with every goddamn tooth in her head when she smiled. That face still vivid to him, so many years on. The naval officer asked for King-me’s evidence and he offered it as calmly as he was able. The milk drying up overnight and he had seen the defendant sneaking away from the property on the evening in question and believed she was there decidedly to take away the milk of the cow by force of witchcraft. The naval officer making notes in a booklet, then leaning to the chaplain to conference in whispers. —Did anyone see the defendant in the presence of the cow, the officer wanted to know.

  Not as far as he was aware, King-me told the man, but he suspected no person other than the defendant for the loss of the cow’s milk.

  The captain pursed his lips, as if puckering for a kiss. —So there is no one who might have seen the defendant placing a spell on the cow in question?

  —Never mind the bloody cow, King-me shouted. —We was all nearly poisoned to death by this creature.

  —Ah, the officer said.

  Fucking Ah!

  —Do you have any evidence to support this claim, Master Sellers?

  —I had my head swell like a pig’s bladder and turn scarlet. And most everybody in my employ afflicted to a lesser extent.

  —And what makes you think the defendant was responsible for this?

  He listed the curses she’d thrown about as she left his property as best he remembered them but there was no one he could call to con
firm what was said. Not a soul among the servants who knew the woman would speak against her. He had to haul out of the courtroom and grab a fifteen-year-old taken on the spring he fired the servant girl, a stranger to the witch’s influence and more likely to listen to reason. He gave the youngster a quick study in the evidence required as they walked back to the storeroom and let him know what would become of him if he refused to give it.

  Yes, the boy testified, he’d seen his master’s sorry condition and other people ill around him, though he’d not taken sick himself. He looked to King-me a moment before he went on. Yes, he’d seen the defendant down at Spurriers’ Rooms of a night before the sickness struck them and she was putting out Sellers’ fish to cure in the moonlight. And she was saying some words over the flesh besides to poison it.

  The chaplain said, You heard her speak?

  —Not that I could understand, sir. She were talking some black language that were beyond me.

  The youngster managed an admirable job of it to start, adding the bit about the black language of his own initiative. The captain and his clergyman were whispering on each other’s shoulders and King-me had a moment of premature elation come upon him, to see the servant girl at his mercy suddenly, certain the game was won. He straightened in his chair as the captain turned back to them.

  The captain said, You observed the defendant place a black spell on the household’s fish?

  —I did, sir, yes.

  —Did you tell anyone about what you’d seen?

  The boy glanced at King-me, a look of uncertainty creeping into his face. —I don’t believe so, sir.