Michael Crummey

by Galore

  God spoke to no one, he knew that. God was scattered in the world and the word of God was a puzzle to be cobbled together out of hints and clues. He sat far longer than he needed to, pondering Mrs. Gallery’s questions. It was the thought of losing the country he’d been fighting against with his sanctuary on the Tolt, the church meant to lay claim to these few of his flock, this one bit of coastline still left him. It was vanity, plain and simple, trying to hold what you loved a moment longer than God granted it. But he’d always been a vain man.

  He walked back through the droke of woods and stood a moment staring out at the shoreline crowded with wharves and flakes and slipways, fishing rooms and storehouses and twine lofts. Only the hundred feet of waterfront reserved by King-me Sellers stood vacant, a straggly meadow of uncut grass above it. Sellers satisfied his expansion requirements by foreclosing on the properties of debtors and legally the plot remained public land, but the merchant refused to allow anyone to build on it. A view of the entire harbor from that patch of ground, the meadow a midden pile of fish bones and maggoty cod and broken pike handles, wood scraps too rotten to burn. The whitened bones of Judah Devine’s whale scattered about like the ribs of a wrecked vessel. A shit heap of garbage at the head of the bay.

  The priest made his way up to the Tolt where a forlorn band of searchers picked through the ruins for iron nails that might be reused. Father Phelan called Judah and Callum up to the chancel and they unearthed what was left of the altar from beneath the cindered remains of timber and shingle. They found the pyx containing the Eucharist in its cubby there, the container unmarked, the wafers inside as white as the white of Judah’s face.

  —I’ve seen the error of my ways, Callum, the priest said.

  —You’re giving up the drink, Father?

  —I’d sooner be dead. Call everyone round, he said and he began praying in Latin, the searchers making their way up the blackened nave to receive the last Eucharist ever celebrated on the Tolt.

  There were two late-summer arrivals on the shore that season which, added to the loss of the Roman church, made it the most memorable in years.

  Ann Hope traveled from Poole to marry Absalom Sellers, sailing into Paradise Deep in mid-August. The two had met during Absalom’s years as an apprentice in Spurriers’ accounting offices in England and they maintained a correspondence after he returned home, her letters full of books and theater and politics. She was five years Absalom’s senior, sister to a fellow apprentice at Spurriers and just returned from eighteen months traveling on the continent when they met. —I expect I will be a spinster, she admitted in their first conversation. —I am too homely and too intelligent to warrant a proposal of marriage.

  It was her nose, he thought, that made her face such a trial to look at. Her eyes beady and wide-set on either side of that imposing cliff, which gave her obvious intellect an unfair whiff of treachery. Their friendship was rooted in Absalom’s belief that friendship was all she expected. She was the only woman who failed to reduce him to a helpless spurt of stuttering.

  Her letters were Absalom’s only link to the wider world he’d briefly known. They filled him with a sick nostalgia he mistook for passion and he’d proposed to her by mail the previous fall. She sent news of her acceptance on the first vessel out in the spring, outlining her plans to leave England at her earliest convenience, but the letter went astray en route.

  Absalom assumed from her silence that he’d insulted the woman. As the summer wore on with no word from her he’d even begun to feel a measure of relief at the rejection. No one in Paradise Deep knew she was coming before she disembarked on the wharf and asked to be taken to Selina’s House. —Where shall I have my trunks put? she asked him.

  King-me took an immediate dislike to the woman. —She haven’t the look of someone with the inclination to be a mother, he told his wife, but Selina wouldn’t allow him to speak another ill word of her. The wedding promised to be the grandest affair on the shore since the Episcopal church was dedicated, though planning the event was left entirely in Selina’s hands. Within a week of her arrival Ann Hope was badgering King-me for space that could be adapted to use as a school. She spoke to Barnaby Shambler and Jabez Trim and Callum Devine and a dozen others on both sides of the Tolt for contributions to cover the materials necessary to such an enterprise. —You see, Selina told her husband, how much children mean to her.

  —She’s a schemer, King-me said. —She haven’t got a maternal bone in her body.

  —They’ve got a school in Harbour Grace, Selina told him. —And in St. John’s and in Bonavista.

  King-me looked afresh at the woman every time she demonstrated this knack for political maneuver. Cavalry charge or subtle manipulation, axe or razor edge, that and all between were in her bag of tricks and he couldn’t help but admire her for it. A school it was then, supposing he had to fund the entire thing himself, and he nodded angrily to signal his defeat.

  Days before the September wedding, Father Cunico arrived on the shore. He carried letters of appointment from the prefect vicar apostolic in St. John’s naming him priest of Paradise parish. Cunico was sent with instructions to reverse the ecumenism that threatened the extinction of Catholicism on the shore and his first official act was to forbid his parishioners attending the wedding at the Episcopal church. The Italian priest went door to door to present his credentials and make his wishes known, though he spoke no Irish and his English was so heavily accented that people made a show of not understanding him. Phelan dismissed the new priest as a milksop and a zealot, a shameless bootlicker whose grandest ambition was to be appointed arsewiper to His Holiness the Pope. —He won’t be with us long enough to shave, Phelan predicted.

  Cunico’s only ally on the shore was the Reverend Dodge who fed him and found him a place to sleep and provided what advice he could. He insisted the Italian pay particular attention to the widow’s crowd, and Cunico spent an evening in Callum Devine’s kitchen, trying to bring the family back within the bosom of the true Church. Lizzie was handed the letters of appointment and she read them aloud to the room. She hadn’t converted before her wedding and Cunico denounced the union, like Dodge before him. Their children and their children’s children were stained by it, Cunico told them. There was a quick back-and-forth between Lazarus and Callum in Irish and the Italian hammered his walking stick against the floor to quiet them. Before coming to the shore he’d been warned to expect indifference, even insolence, and he was determined to nip it in the bud. —You hide your thoughts from me? he asked.

  —Forgive us Father, Callum said.

  Cunico looked at Michael Devine, Little Lazarus, the boy almost thirteen and already the height of his father. —And you? the priest demanded.

  Lazarus turned to his father to speak again in Irish and Callum cuffed him so hard he fell from his chair. Lazarus smiled as he picked himself up from the floor. He genuflected toward the Italian with an attitude of false deference inherited directly from his grandmother. He left the room and was followed quickly by Lizzie, then Mary Tryphena and the strangely livid child in her lap walked out as well.

  Cunico stood from his seat so he might look down on Callum and the widow. —God appoints a man the ruler of his household, he said, just as Christ is the head of the Church.

  After he left them Devine’s Widow said, He’s sent us by the archbishop, Callum.

  —I don’t know your archbishop, Callum told her and he walked down to the Rooms to be alone awhile. He opened the doors onto the water and sat looking out at the still pool of the cove, the wide flat tables of the flakes on the waterline where the summer’s fish had been set to dry. His hand was still pulsing from striking his son and sitting there he was overtaken by a puzzling nostalgia for Eathna. He could barely picture her now, a little redheaded girl climbing into his lap, insisting he pay attention to some childish secret. He used to set her aside, calling to Lizzie to occupy the girl so he could get on with knitting his twine or hear the end of Father Phelan’s foolish story. A
nd she was gone now, her childish secrets with her.

  There was no neater sum of how life unfolded, he thought, and he was ambushed by a crying jag, sobs tearing through him as ragged and relentless as a seizure. Judah found him huddled over his lap with his arms wrapped about his chest and went to fetch Lizzie, leading her to the Rooms like a dog trying to alert someone to trouble. Callum was as helpless as Jude to tell her what was wrong and in the end she simply stood beside her husband while he cried himself out, a hand to his bowed head, the tangled mat of his hair. Beloved.

  —Was this all a mistake do you think? he choked out finally.

  —Hush Callum, she whispered. —Hush now.

  On the afternoon of Absalom’s wedding, Father Cunico stood on the path to the church in his clerical gown and surplice as if standing at the gates of hell, turning Catholics back to their homes. James Woundy and Lazarus and Judah holding Patrick’s hand walked past his warnings without so much as a nod. The priest chased after them, waving his wooden stave and shouting like some lunatic highwayman. He came too close to Patrick for Judah’s liking and he shoved the priest away.

  Cunico was apoplectic to be treated so roughly, swinging blindly with his cane. Jude was struck in the face and spat one of his front teeth into the grass beside the path. The three men fell on the priest together then, dragging him to the harbor where they threw him into the bitter cold, Cunico twisting free of his vestments as he fell. Lazarus Devine standing with the sacred habiliments of the priest still in his hand.

  Jabez Trim and one of Peter Flood’s youngsters fished the priest out before he drowned and the scandal cast a shadow over the wedding. No one spoke of anything other, not the bride’s dress or the extravagant spread of food laid on or the money spent. King-me took a moment before the ceremony to swear in half a dozen constables who were sent to track the perpetrators down while the wedding went ahead.

  At the reception Barnaby Shambler told Reverend Dodge the Romans were a crowd of savages who would eat their young if left to their own devices. Dodge suggested Shambler was being unchristian in his assessment, though privately he nursed the same opinion not just of the Romans but of practically every soul on the shore. At times he felt all civilization had been bred out of the livyers by the climate’s extremes, by the implacable barrens and bushland and bog. By the ocean’s stark. Dodge was no fan of Mrs. Ann Hope Sellers’ unwomanly mouthiness, her insistence on having opinions regardless of the topic. But the school she was proposing, he thought, might actually be of some value to a population so unremittingly backward.

  Father Cunico took sick after his dunking and lay prostrate in bed a full week with a fever, attended there by Devine’s Widow who applied cow-manure plasters to his chest. Judah and Lazarus and James were arrested by King-me’s constables and held for several nights in the same fishing room where Patrick Devine was conceived, but they were released after Cunico publicly absolved them. No one doubted they had the widow’s intervention at the priest’s sickbed to thank, though the cost of the bargain remained a mystery. Cunico left the shore for St. John’s in mid-October, citing the need to regain his health and to spend time in spiritual retreat to undo the damage inflicted upon him by the parish.

  —That’s the last we’ll see of that milksop, Phelan told Mrs. Gallery. He was still making plans for the new church and laid them out before her in their bed. The land lying fallow on the waterfront at the center of his scheme and she shook her head against his shoulder.

  —King-me won’t ever let that land to you, she said.

  Phelan lay still a moment. He and Sellers had never spoken except when the priest was begging food for starving parishioners, the merchant niggardly and resentful of the imposition. —No, he said, I expect he won’t. But he devoted the fall and winter to cutting and standing timber to dry for the church, taking a crew of twenty-five men into the bush and working them until dark.

  Ann Hope Sellers’ one-room school opened its doors in January and three dozen children carried in a junk of wood for the fire and took seats each morning to be taught their letters and sums and the basics of hygiene, and nursery rhymes that they chanted in unison. Even James Woundy came to take instruction to avoid conscription into Father Phelan’s work parties. Ann Hope put aside her initial reservations about the man’s attendance when she saw he was slow enough to enjoy practicing his letters on a slate and reciting the juvenile poems. He fancied himself her assistant and helped keep the students in line if they got restless. She took to leaving him in charge if she was called away from the school, until the morning she came back to find a row of boys standing with their pants around their ankles and James Woundy measuring their hairless peckers with her wooden ruler. The girls writing numbers in careful rows on their slates as James called them out. It was the end of James Woundy’s academic career and Ann Hope felt compelled to burn the ruler in the fireplace.

  The raw wood for the church had to be hand-milled with saws and axes and planes, and Father Phelan had crews at work as early as possible in the spring, James Woundy entertaining the men with nursery rhymes laden with obscene substitutions. Hickory dickory dock, the louse ran up the cock. Old King Cole had a hairy old hole and a hairy old hole had he. He offered up the details of his going overboard after a merwoman years ago, taking her underwater and the cunt on her as cold and wet as March month, he pissed ice for a week afterwards. James didn’t do a tap of work but he was diverting enough to be tolerated.

  The finished lumber was laid in the droke behind Mrs. Gallery’s house and the priest directed every Catholic man to meet him there before light on the day after Pentecost. The assembly numbered nearly one hundred, and in the first gray glim of dawn the church was carried in planks and beams to the midden above the shore. Mary Tryphena was watching from the Tolt with Lizzie and Devine’s Widow and a handful of other women. It looked to them as if a column of ants was marching spruce needles and sticks from one nest to another. The work began in earnest before smoke showed in a single chimney on the shore, the corner posts laid and framed and the floor joists fastened across them. By the time King-me got wind of the project and roused his constables, badgering ahead of them to the waterfront, the wall studs were up and the ceiling trusses all but hammered into place.

  The women came down from the Tolt to stand with their men when they saw King-me approaching. The two groups squared off on the waterfront, the priest flanked closely by Judah and Callum and Lazarus, by Daniel Woundy and Saul and the Toucher triplets and a dozen others not at work on the roof of the church. Absalom had followed his grandfather to the shoreline and he watched the faces railed across from him. Every one of them looked ready to hammer the first man to touch the priest.

  Lizzie and Mary Tryphena stood at the front, their childlike features set off by the dark bounty of their hair, though Lizzie’s was veined with gray now. The shock Absalom felt the first time he laid eyes on Mary Tryphena’s bare head pricked at him again. Her hair the same blue-black sheen as the lock Mrs. Gallery gifted him when she left Selina’s House. Jabez Trim slipped him the square of cloth when they had a moment alone and Absalom kept it under his pillow, sleeping with a hand wrapped in the coil. He felt it was his life he’d been handed in secret, if only he were able to decipher its meaning. The day they’d carted Judah up to Selina’s House from the landwash, Mary Tryphena inched near to clutch at the hem of his coat with her bonnet in her hand and he’d glanced down at the coal-black hair of her head. A lock. A key. He was right to see his own story tied up somehow with the girl’s, though he misread the markers childishly, falling in love with her as if the stars themselves had ordained it.

  Absalom couldn’t take his eyes from her still, her face set and ready to spit on anyone who stood against her men. King-me was directing the handful of constables to arrest the priest but they weren’t willing to risk life and limb in the undertaking. He cursed them all for cowards and moved to take Phelan into custody himself until Selina came between them. She managed to talk King-me int
o relenting to avoid bloodshed and they retreated up off the landwash. Back at Selina’s House the old man stood at a window, watching the Roman sanctuary shingled and sided and hung with doors oddly marked with crescent moons. —We’ll have the Navy in to haul it down, he said. —And arrest every man jack who stands in the way.

  Ann Hope said, I doubt that would do much to improve the situation.

  King-me turned from the window to gape at her, but left the room before speaking another word.

  A Mass was held in the bare church by the light of Ralph Stone’s lamps that evening, Father Phelan decked out in the fine clerical vestments once the property of the Italian priest. When he made his way back to the droke, he found Mrs. Gallery sitting at the fire beside her husband. He went straight to the bedroom and called her to join him but she only came as far as the doorway, her outline dark against the fireplace light.

  —You’ll get yourself killed at this foolishness, she said. —And I’ll be left alone with that creature out there by the fire.

  —Come to bed, he said. —We’ll make the angels jealous.

  She didn’t move and he could feel the weight of her considering him. —You’re just like him, you know.

  —Like who?

  —Mr. Gallery, she said. —You think of no one but yourself.

  The priest swore under his breath. He’d come to the house pleased with himself and with the events of the day, the speed with which the church was raised, the Romans facing down Sellers and his henchmen, the beauty of the sacrament celebrated within the bare wood walls, and he wanted to toast it all with an evening between Mrs. Gallery’s legs.

  —Make him go, she said. —Before you leave me, promise you’ll make him go.

  He was afraid for a moment she might cry but there were no tears in her. It was anger that made her voice quiver and he was surprised to see it, undiminished after all these years, a shape as black and bottomless as her outline in the doorway.