Michael Crummey

by Galore

  —Did you or did you not?

  —I didn’t, sir, no.

  —You observed the food of your master being poisoned by a witch and told no one, is that correct?

  —I suppose that’s the truth, sir.

  The captain smiled then and King-me felt the floor fall out of his stomach.

  —You allowed your fellow servants and your employer to partake of flesh you had seen being poisoned?

  The youngster only gaped. He was shaking so severely King-me thought he might soil his trousers.

  —One might conclude from this evidence, the captain said, that you consented to the misfortune that befell Master Sellers.

  —No sir, the youngster said.

  —One might even argue that you were a conspirator in the event, a party of equal guilt to the defendant.

  And with that the boy commenced to bawling. —I never saw it but from a long ways off, he sobbed. —I never heard a word, I was that far off. I don’t know for certain if it were she were out there in the dark, that’s the truth of it. It might be it were someone else were out there. I might have seen shadows and thought it a person on the wharf.

  —Thank you, the captain said. —That will be all.

  The officer turned his attention to the defendant after the Irish youngster left the room and King-me stared at the floor, not willing to see the look on her face. She spun some yarn about being owed wages upon dismissal and helping herself to a laying hen as payment while Master Sellers was at his store, but she denied doing anything to cause the cow to lose her milk. She denied curing his fish in the moonlight or speaking black words over the flesh or even setting foot in Spurriers’ Rooms after her position was terminated.

  —Are you in any wise responsible, the captain asked, for the afflictions described to us by Master Sellers?

  There was a pause before she answered and he could feel her staring at him. —If I caused Master Sellers’ head to swell twice its normal size, she said, it was through no deliberate action on my part. And I’d wager it was not the head on his shoulders that was so afflicted.

  King-me pulled furiously at the cow’s teats against the memory of that moment, the milk coming sharp against the pail. Maddening bitch of a woman. Even the chaplain smirking into his chest. Maddening, maddening bitch of a woman. The cow bucked suddenly and knocked him off his stool into the filthy straw and he had to crawl clear of the stall to come away without his head smashed in, the milk spilled over the ground. One of the hired men came to help him but he cursed him away, hanging the empty pail on its hook where he’d found it. Back at the house he offered his apologies to his guests and made his way upstairs to bed.

  He stripped out of his clothes and lay naked on the cold board floor of the bedroom, hoping some mortification of the flesh might clear his mind of the woman’s poison. There was a time after he’d brought Selina to Paradise Deep that King-me considered himself more or less clear of the widow’s trouble, married as he was to a half-sensible girl whose childlike stature suggested she could do him no harm, his work going well and a small brood of youngsters to will the business to.

  He should never have gone to her for help when his wife took to her bed and refused to leave it. In some recess of his mind not crammed with ledgers and sums he was sure this request had cost him his children. Lizzie, for certain, a loss he had never rightly recovered from. His girl married to the witch’s son, she and her children, his own flesh and blood, living like savages in that woman’s house. He’d vowed to let it all lie, for Selina’s sake. But this trouble with Judah had simply fallen into his lap. The Great White, sea orphan, St. Jude. He was the widow’s work and no one could convince King-me otherwise.

  Sellers had paid off a vessel in Newfoundland at the age of eighteen after several years apprenticing to the ship’s chandler and he became a small-time lender in St. John’s, fronting cash to fishermen and sailors to buy their drink. It was a job that required a minute attention to detail alongside a measured ruthlessness and he was perfectly suited to the undertaking. His success brought him to the attention of the town’s merchant community and he took invitations to meals and small entertainments among the quality, but the squalor of St. John’s depressed him. Still a young settlement and infested with all the old vices, TB and syphilis, petty crime and drunkenness and an inflated sense of its own importance. He took the position with Spurriers & Co. when he was promised a pristine posting, a merchant operation on a virgin shore that he could set to his own liking. For years they’d been supplying a crowd of bushborns up there and were ready now to make a push into the country. He’d sailed out of St. John’s on a May morning with thirty hogsheads of salt, two muzzle-loaders and three Irish servants, a crate of hens, four sheep, a single cow and a bull. A checkerboard that he was assured would help get him through the winters. A fortnight beyond sight of any human habitation he confronted the captain who had been sailing back and forth a wild stretch of coastline for days. —Ten years I been coming out here, the captain said, and the bloody place sits somewhere different every time.

  Eventually they anchored in a harbor a full league in length, the bay with fathom and width enough for Spurriers’ ships to deliver provisions in the spring and to take on salt fish in the fall. A steep horseshoe of hills rising around them, the densely forested spruce crowding down to the landwash. The silence of the place was implacable, and King-me felt a panic rising through him in the face of all of that nothing, the shoreline a mute angel he was meant to wrestle a name from. He settled on Paradise before he’d stepped off the boat, thinking anything less would be an admission of weakness. The bushborns in the Gut knew the harbor simply as Deep Bay and the name was too apt to abandon altogether—Paradise Deep, they insisted on calling it. As if to tell King-me that something of the place would always be beyond his influence.

  Watching Judah emerge from the whale’s guts, King-me felt the widow was birthing everything he despised in the country, laying it out before him like a taunt. Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness that could drown a man. King-me was happy enough to think of that carted off to England and hung.

  His mind was spinning despite the cold board beneath him and he doubted he’d sleep at all that night. It was uncanny how the widow arranged that little tableau in the parlor to mock him, to make him doubt the strength of his position. As if it could all turn her way just at the moment he was certain the game was won. Maddening bitch of a woman. Out there this very minute, he knew, plotting against him.

  It was long gone to night at the peak of the tide when the wedding party rowed for the fishing room where Judah Devine was being held. Father Phelan and Devine’s Widow in the bow and Callum at the oars, Mary Tryphena facing her father where she sat astern. Lizzie left at home in the grip of one of her spells, and time to weep in solitude at the sudden loss when she came to herself.

  They’d walked over the Tolt Road from the Gut to fetch Father Phelan, and Mrs. Gallery stood in her doorway when they left for the waterfront. —Be strong, she’d called. They went along the east side of the harbor opposite Judah’s prison and climbed into Jabez Trim’s half-shallop where it was tied to the stagehead. The soldier guarding Jude’s door was asleep at his post and they made a silent procession across the harbor so as not to disturb his rest.

  Callum was watching his daughter’s face as he rowed her toward her wedding. She seemed strangely serene for a girl who only hours earlier had no notion of marrying Judah, of sharing a bed with a man. He wanted to offer her a blessing or some encouragement, as Mrs. Gallery had, but he was too ashamed to open his mouth. Jabez Trim’s story of Abraham and Isaac was in his mind and he felt himself playing out the scene himself now, about to sacrifice his own child with no hint of a reprieve at hand. Callum held the pilings to keep the boat steady underneath the fishing room, the shimmer of Jude’s face appearing at the offal hole as if he’d been expecting t
hem. Father Phelan lifted Mary Tryphena through the hole and dragged himself up behind her, then reached back through to take the hands of the old woman.

  Callum waited in the darkness there, the whispered ceremony performed overhead by the light of a single candle. The priest and Devine’s Widow climbed down to the boat when it was done and they left the newlyweds to their first night together. The light of the candle was visible in the room’s one tiny window as Callum rowed away. He helped his mother climb up onto Jabez Trim’s wharf and glanced back across the harbor one last time but by then the light was out.

  Lizzie was already in bed when they got home, lying with her face to the wall. Callum placed a hand on her back as he climbed in beside her, his palm snug between the shoulder blades. He sang softly in the black, a song about his love for a dark-haired girl, as Lizzie wept silently, each shudder traveling the length of Callum’s arm. —She’ll never have this, Lizzie whispered when he was done. —Not as long as she lives, Callum.

  —Hush Lizzie, he said. But he knew exactly what she meant and he was awake all night with the thought.

  Devine’s Widow lay sleepless likewise, thinking of her long-dead husband, preoccupied with his memory for the first time since Callum married. The image of him so vivid it made her hands shake, as if she was the one approaching her first night in a conjugal bed.

  After the naval officer declared her not guilty of all King-me’s charges and ordered her released from custody she walked the path back toward the Tolt. She felt ill at ease for all she’d seen Sellers put in his place, thinking it was impossible to make a life for herself in the man’s shadow. As she crested the Tolt she saw the Irish youngster who’d stood witness against her sitting with his legs dangling over the cliff edge. A moment of black fury rising in her throat, seeing how easy it would be to send him headlong to the rocks below. —You’re not thinking of jumping, are you? she asked finally and he started at her voice. He was lank and bone, a boy of fifteen who shaved twice a week and sang at his work and by his own report had been drunk only once in his life. Patrick Devine. —I can’t go back to Master Sellers now, he said, on the verge of tears. —He’ll throw me out.

  The boy was three years her junior, an orphan indentured to the fishery by his parish church in Cork. He had nothing to his name, much as herself. And there was something in that arrangement she found to her liking. She said, You knows how to fish do you, Paddy Devine?

  He looked at her as if she’d spoken some bushborn nonsense.

  —Would you have a woman in the boat with you?

  —I got neither boat, he said.

  —One bloody thing at a time, she told him.

  They walked together into the Gut and he kipped down in her one-room tilt, crouched in a corner like a stray dog. There was only the one bunk along the back wall and that night she undressed there while he watched what he could in the gloom. She stood before him naked. —We got nothing now, she said, but what we can make together. She could hear him breathing in the dark and he stood up from his seat finally. She said, You don’t come over to me unless you plan on staying, Paddy Devine.

  There was a long moment’s hesitation as he worked through the implications. He said, Are you really a witch then?

  —That’s no way to ask for a woman’s hand, she said.

  He felt his way across the room to lay with her, led by his lack of options or led by his cock, she still didn’t know which. The time would come soon enough when he could make her wet with a word in her ear, lift her hips from the bed with the lightest brush of a finger, but that first night was brevity and discomfort and doubt, to have the youngster on her and rutting like a dog humping a leg, followed by an awful stretch of silence, both of them sleepless and terrified.

  —So we’re married then? the boy said finally.

  Devine’s Widow already working through the obstacles ahead, getting wood cut and dried for their boat, convincing King-me to front them credit for the summer fishery. The opportunity to ruin them completely if they had a poor season was the only angle she could imagine might work. —I expect we are married, she said distractedly. —You and me.

  And he must have felt obligated to make an offering of some sort. —I love you, Missus, he whispered.

  —Shut up Paddy, she said.

  ——

  Callum was first out of the bed before light the next morning and he and the old woman walked back over the Tolt before the stars disappeared. They rowed across the harbor where Mary Tryphena waited for them at the offal hole and Callum dropped both women on the stretch of shoreline where Judah’s whale had surrendered itself, the bones of the creature bleaching white among the beach grass. Devine’s Widow walked with the girl to Selina’s House then, Absalom answering the door when they knocked at the servant’s entrance. He nodded to them both. —Hello Mary Tryphena, he said.

  —We need to speak with your mother, Devine’s Widow said, and they waited there while Absalom went to fetch her. Selina holding the door only halfways open to watch them, her ancient child’s face apprehensive, resigned. —This here is your grandchild, Devine’s Widow said.

  —I know it.

  —You ought also to know she is married to Judah Devine.

  Selina stared at Mary Tryphena while she processed the information and the girl looked away at the outbuildings. —Is this true, Mary?

  She nodded. —Yes ma’am.

  —Are you? Selina cleared her throat. —Are you?

  —She is, Devine’s Widow said with more certainty than she felt. —And Master Sellers will have them haul the father of her child off to some foreign country and hang him. Leave her a widow before she gives birth.

  Selina slammed the door shut before another word was spoken and Mary Tryphena looked at her grandmother. She was thinking of Absalom hearing the news of her marriage inside, of the odd fact he hadn’t stuttered over her name when he said hello. —Am I pregnant then? she asked.

  —It doesn’t matter, child, Devine’s Widow said. —We’ll just hope for the best.

  { 3 }

  KING-ME SELLERS REMAINED A BACHELOR years after proposing to the Irish servant girl who eventually became known as Devine’s Widow. The condition had long since taken on an air of permanence the fall he closed up his tilt and sailed for Poole to find a wife. His one previous proposal in the New World made him feel safer testing the waters across the pond and he spent the winter keeping company with the eligible daughters of merchant families. He told no one his intentions before he left and none who knew the man could have pictured the taciturn bit of misery attending teas and fashionable dances and engaging in stilted small talk with young women regardless.

  He asked permission of Selina Moore’s father over a checkerboard and a glass of brandy on Shrove Tuesday. They settled on an April wedding and the newlyweds sailed for Newfoundland through wild spring weather, the masts and sails encased in ice by freezing rain mid-crossing and the weight nearly capsized the vessel. Wind and lightning and St. Elmo’s fire in the rigging two days short of St. John’s and not a word of complaint from Selina the entire journey.

  King-me fathered three children in the next five years, a girl, and two sons to carry on the trade he was building. The children arrived healthy and they were intelligent, curious creatures, affectionate with one another and as well behaved as a parent had a right to expect. Selina taught them to read and write and do their sums in the main room of their stud tilt until the spring she took to her bed and insisted on the completion of her wedding home. Lizzie was six when they moved into Selina’s House, a fireplace in each room, cod-oil lamps fixed to the walls of the hallways. Every spring that followed, the children performed an Easter drama in the parlor for their parents and a handful of friends and servants, a three-act opus penned by Lizzie which she revised and refined each winter in consultation with Jabez Trim and his Bible.

  In the spring of Lizzie’s twelfth year, John Tom White convinced her parents the play should be performed for the entire community. John T
om was a Harbour Grace man who’d shifted to Paradise Deep after losing his wife to a chimney fire. He worked for Sellers as a culler, assessing and grading the quality of salt fish brought in each fall by the crews on the shore. He bragged often of the seasonal entertainments in Harbour Grace—skits and songs and recitations in the church hall—and he felt Paradise Deep was in sore need of the same. King-me had no interest in the children’s play or songs and skits, but the lack John Tom pointed to pricked at his pride. He had the store that once served as a courtroom set up as a theater, barrels and tools shifted along one wall and an old mizzen-sail hung for a curtain at the far end. Selina helped Lizzie sew costumes, and word made its way along the shore that an entertainment was to be seen at Spurriers’ Rooms at the end of Lent.

  The whole affair promised to be grander than anything the playwright imagined for her creation. She slept poorly for weeks ahead and anticipation kept her awake most of the night before the performance. An audience of fifty souls crowded into the building and the show went off without a hitch until Mary the Mother of God approached the empty tomb on Easter morning and young Harry Sellers appeared as the angel bearing news of Christ’s resurrection. The play’s climax was Mary’s poem of thanksgiving recited upon her knees and Lizzie fainted dead away three parts through, her head lolling back mid-word and her body slumping to the floor. The audience thought her swoon part of the show until the angel began screaming at the top of his lungs. Even after being shaken awake Lizzie’s arms were limp and her eyes vacant and once she came to herself she was unable to explain her brief absence. She was aware of the room and the crowd, she said, but couldn’t move or speak. The spells continued in the months that followed, the girl dropping asleep as she brushed her hair or ate or laughed with her brothers. People were divided as to the cause, some suggesting the theater was a sinful institution and a provocation to God, while others considered the girl possessed by some spirit in need of casting out.