by Galore
—Promise me, she insisted.
—All right, he told her. —If you’ll come to bed. I promise.
She waited a long time at the doorway and he thought for a while she might decide against the bargain. But in the end she stripped out of her clothes and settled under the blankets beside him.
In late June Father Phelan departed to make his annual visit to the archipelago of tiny communities along the coast, baptizing the children born and formalizing the marriages undertaken in his absence, saying a funeral mass for those who’d succumbed through the winter.
Father Cunico returned to Paradise Deep while Phelan was away, sailing into the harbor on a day of cloudless blue sky. The sloop he arrived on was a forty-footer built in St. John’s for the archbishop’s use. The vicar had spent the first weeks of the summer touring parishes on the Avalon before accompanying Cunico to Paradise Deep. The two men stepped off the vessel under the shade of umbrellas held by members of the crew and stood looking at the church before them. The walls painted with whitewash, the windows in place and a wooden cross fixed to the steeple.
—They’ve built you a church, Father Cunico, the archbishop said.
Word was passed house to house that the vicar had come with the Italian priest, that a Mass was to be held the next morning, and the church was full an hour before the service began. The vicar was a severe-looking Irishman, a cleric with an air of enthusiastic fasting about him, and he wasted no time in reprimanding the community for its treatment of Father Cunico. He reiterated the Italian’s appointment as the parish priest and outlined in detail the cost of defying him. Then he blessed the new sanctuary and held communion and at the end of the service when most believed he was done he opened the Bible to read from Galatians. —Even if we, or an angel from Heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be anathema. He listed Father Phelan’s crimes against the church then—heresy and schism which spread division and confusion among the faithful, as well as direct violation of the sacramental seal of confession by a confessor. Father Cunico tolled a brass handbell while the archbishop closed the Gospels and snuffed a candle that had been lit upon the altar and Father Phelan was excommunicated from the Holy Roman Church. Vitandis, the archbishop informed the congregation and warned them that a similar fate awaited anyone who ignored the Church’s will. On his return journey he stopped in every community between Paradise Deep and St. John’s to repeat the ritual of exclusion.
Father Phelan arrived at Mrs. Gallery’s two weeks later and she offered him the news when he came to her bed. —What does it mean, Father? Vitandis?
—Shunned, he told her. —To be shunned. The priest lay quiet a long time and she thought he might have fallen asleep. —Tell me that Italian shite hasn’t been saying Mass in my church, he said.
He spent an inordinate portion of the next morning in the outhouse though it offered no solace. He went directly from there to Callum’s house in the Gut, the men already back with the day’s first boatload of cod and sitting to a second breakfast of tea and bread. Everyone stopped still when the priest came into the kitchen and he looked from one to the other without catching the eye of a single person. Patrick came out of the pantry and ran to greet the priest but Mary Tryphena grabbed him by the arm, lifting him into her lap. —God be with you, Father Phelan said, and Devine’s Widow stood to turn her back. One by one the others stood and did the same, Callum and Mary Tryphena and Daniel Woundy. Even Lazarus turned away after his grandmother nudged his shoulder. Only Lizzie defied the old woman. —I’m sorry Father, she whispered.
The priest nodded. —Say me to your family, he said.
The same reception awaited him in every Catholic house on the shore. Doors barred against him, faces turned away, as if he were ringing a leper’s bell through the streets of ancient Jerusalem. The hundreds of children baptized by his hand, the dozens of love matches he’d solemnized, the ten thousand thousand sins he’d absolved, and not a soul would so much as say hello. Even the Protestants whose houses he’d once blessed, whose sick and suffering he’d prayed for, did little more than nod, embarrassed by a predicament they didn’t understand.
No worst, there was none, and he sat the rest of the day at the fireplace beside Mr. Gallery.
—What will you do? Mrs. Gallery asked him.
—It will pass, he said. —All things pass.
He waited the rest of that summer and long into the winter while Cunico said Mass and offered the sacraments in the church Phelan had built. He walked the paths of the outports, looking to catch even the slightest subversive nod from a parishioner but no one obliged him. Mr. Gallery followed him at a distance and the priest felt more and more that they were one and the same, pale shadows cast on the present by faces from the past. The contributions of the congregation that had sustained him and Mrs. Gallery came to an end and they survived on the charity of Protestants alone. It made the priest feel like a beggar and he refused to eat for days at a time, subsisting on a diet of strong drink and self-pity. He lost his nature and slept beside Mrs. Gallery as chastely as a saint.
At Christmas he roused himself from his funk long enough to put on a mummer’s elaborate rags, wearing a veil of brin and a twine belt looped at the waist to hold the layers of dirty clothing and cast-off material in place, and he walked from house to house, taking drink and food and offering a few moments of foolishness before he was recognized and his hosts turned their backs or left the room altogether. Not even a man as apostate as Saul Toucher was willing to make him welcome, and the priest trudged back to the house in the droke to sit by the fire in his filthy costume, drinking steadily. Mrs. Gallery stood behind him but he shrugged away from her hand. —You can’t live this way, she told him.
—Pray, what would you have me do?
—There are still people with no priest among them. You say so yourself.
—The back of beyond, he said. —Not even God knows they’re there. He took a forlorn mouthful of his drink. —I’m too old to live like a fugitive, he said.
—I will not have the two of you in the house like this, Mrs. Gallery told him. —Do you hear?
—Leave me be, woman, he said.
—I will not have it, she said again.
—You’ll heave me out on my ear, will you?
—Mind but I don’t, she said. And she left the priest and her husband by the fire to go to her bed.
The sound of an iron clanging woke her hours later, a frantic alarm, and it took her a moment to place the sound. She went barefoot to the main room and there was just enough light from the coals to see Mr. Gallery kicking at the fireplace crane and Father Phelan hanging from the rafters at the end his twine belt. She stood on a chair to cut the priest down and he lay weeping and choking on the frozen dirt while she stoked up the fire. She helped him to a chair and sat him up. —This is not how it will end, she said.
The priest shook his head. —Leave me be, he begged her.
Mrs. Gallery turned and spoke to her husband for the first time since he came through the ceiling at Selina’s House. —Kneel down, she told him. —Kneel down, goddamn you.
Phelan looked up at her, then at the faint features of the specter kneeling beside him.
She said, Mr. Gallery would like to make confession, Father.
The priest leaned over his lap as if struck by cramps and he rocked back and forth in an idiot’s spasm, moaning helplessly. Mrs. Gallery yanked him upright by an ear. He wiped the snot from his nose and mouth with his sleeve and tried to tip his head away from her hand. —Please, he said to her. He grabbed the breast of the fool’s outfit he was wearing and shook it helplessly. —Please.
She twisted his head far enough he was forced to look at her. —Choose your hell, Father, she said and then she turned her back on them both.
The priest watched after her a long time, though there was nothing he could see in the black of the bedroom where she’d disappeared. The figure on the floor shook with the cold, and the
shivering finally drew Father Phelan’s attention. The priest’s savior kneeling there. His miserable little life preserved by one of the damned, the face streaked by its sooty tears. —Would you like to make confession, Mr. Gallery? he asked.
Father Phelan was gone when Mrs. Gallery rose from her bed in the morning and there was no sign of her husband besides, the fireplace black and cold. She stayed on in the droke the rest of that winter before returning to her position at Selina’s House a third time, nursing King-me and his wife into their doddering years while Absalom took on more and more of the ramshackle empire his grandfather had wrestled out of wilderness and fog.
Father Cunico lived three years on the shore before the animosity of his Irish congregation and the winters defeated him. He was a solitary figure within his parish, spending long hours writing melancholy letters to his family and the archbishop and his friends at the Holy See, complaining about the infernal Newfoundland weather and the insolence of the livyers that seemed congenital to the place. His only companion and confidant was God, who the priest thought of as an unhappy visitor to the country, much like himself—called to the irredeemable wilderness by duty and homesick for more civilized surroundings.
Cunico was a refined and delicate man in a world where delicacy and refinement were ridiculous affectations. He kept a silk handkerchief in the sleeve of his vestments that he produced to cover his mouth and nose whenever he walked near the fish flakes on the waterfront. The locals found it a chore to take him seriously and the Italian responded to their condescension with a show of ecclesiastical force, instituting a growing list of strictures. He saw the Irish language as a tool of sedition and refused to allow it spoken in his presence or within the sanctuary. He forbade Catholic children to attend Ann Hope Sellers’ school, running classes of his own where he taught Latin catechisms and forced students to memorize the labyrinthine hierarchy of the Church. He condemned the tradition of passing infants through the branches of Kerrivan’s Tree as a pagan rite, and Catholics, like their Protestant neighbors before them, were forced to carry on the practice in secret. He withheld the sacraments from families of mixed marriages until the Protestant spouse converted to the faith.
Callum Devine stopped attending Mass altogether at that point. He’d never forgiven himself for denying Father Phelan though the excommunication was all that kept Lazarus and Judah and James Woundy out of prison. He’d no doubt Devine’s Widow orchestrated the entire thing while she nursed the Italian priest and it was his mother’s shadow as much as the Church Callum wanted to leave behind. He and his wife and everyone else in the house but the widow were confirmed in the Episcopal faith and the Devines became the only Protestant household in the Gut.
Those Catholics who had no express argument with the priest had little time for the Italian’s manner. Cunico was a stickler for decorum, for religious formalities, as if he were already ensconced in the make-believe world of the Vatican. He became widely known as Father Cuntico in honor of his perpetual state of vexation. At every Mass he listed the congregation’s failings in their duty to the parish and its priest and threatened to abandon them if the situation did not change.
He took it as a personal insult when things did not and he left for good on a June morning of steady drizzle, his trunks packed and carried aboard a Spurriers ship bound for St. John’s. A small group of parishioners were there to see him off but he refused them a final blessing, offering only his assurance that their community would never prosper again, as if God were departing on the same vessel as His emissary.
Callum felt the story disproved the notion that Father Cuntico had no sense of humor. But in the wake of the Italian’s departure there was little enough to laugh about. The quintals of fish taken that summer declined for the first season since Jude had come among them and the extraordinary wet of the year rotted vegetables in the ground. Snow fell on the first of October and an implacable winter settled over the shore, icing in the harbors until the middle of May. Households ran low of provisions by the end of March and people survived on frostbitten potatoes and pickled herring. Selina Sellers passed unexpectedly in her sleep that June and the capelin came late to the beaches.
The price of cod in Europe had been falling for years and dozens of local men had taken to traveling to Harbour Grace and Wesleyville and St. John’s in the spring, taking berths on sealing vessels to supplement the fishing. Even Sellers was under strain and he convinced Spurriers to mortgage the Paradise Deep operation in order to break into the market for seal oil and pelts, commissioning a sixty-seven-ton double-hulled schooner. The frame of the vessel came together over two summers in a makeshift shipyard beside the Catholic church, the boards reinforced with stanchions to withstand the ice fields where seals whelped their pups. It was an enormous outlay of money for a venture fraught with risk and the old man lost his nerve as the project progressed. King-me worried a ledger of figures and percentages through the winter but he was unable to torture a moment’s comfort from the numbers. —We’ll all of us wind up in the poorhouse on account of that goddamn boat, he said, as if it had been someone else’s idea. He woke from dreams of the vessel in flames or set with full sail fathoms underneath the ice fields and he was so troubled by these visions that he walked over the Tolt to speak with Devine’s Widow.
Lizzie was alone in the house with Patrick when King-me sat himself in the kitchen, saying he wouldn’t leave until he saw the old witch. Patrick was sent to fetch the widow from Daniel Woundy’s house and he burst in out of breath. Patrick had never spoken a word to King-me Sellers but knew who he was. Mary Tryphena explained his connection to the dead woman and the pew of mourners at the front of the church during Selina’s funeral the year before. Three youngsters between Absalom and Ann Hope, King-me sitting nearest the aisle and following behind the casket as it was carried from the church. —Me great-grandda is at the house to see you, he shouted and it took Devine’s Widow a moment to get his meaning. —Old Man Sellers? she asked, and he nodded. —Me great-grandda, he repeated. —He wants to see you.
She followed Patrick back along the paths, the boy rushing and glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was with him. Held the door to let her in where King-me sat turning a hat between his knees. The moment the widow came through the door he started in to ramble about some dream that was troubling him, fire he told her and a ghost ship that was sailing under the ice with all its sails set. He was blind to the room as he described the visions that haunted his sleep, offering details from one and then the next and back again, as if they were superimposed one on another in his mind. The widow let him go on talking until he exhausted himself and he looked around slowly, surprised to find himself in their company. He lighted on Patrick standing three feet from him. —Who’s this one? he asked.
—You’re me great-grandda, the boy said.
King-me turned to Devine’s Widow in confusion. He looked half-starved, like everyone else on the shore, the long face staved in at the cheeks and the eyes black as cold firepits, though she knew his trouble was something other than lack of food. His mind rudderless and turning in mad circles and she was surprised he’d survived Selina even this long. —We don’t have much time left, Master Sellers, she said.
—No, he said uncertainly, a rheumy film of tears setting his eyes adrift.
Patrick turned to Lizzie and said, What’s wrong with him, Nan?
—Mind your mouth, Lizzie whispered.
Devine’s Widow glanced at the boy, that foreign face of his. She’d gifted him a set of rosary beads after Mary Tryphena began carting him to the Protestant church in Paradise Deep and she once or twice talked him into reciting the mysteries but the habit never took. Hardly a word of Irish in his head besides. She felt as if she was being erased from the world one generation at a time, like sediment sieved out of water through a cloth. —You spend your days trying to make a life, Master Sellers, she said, and all you’re doing is building yourself a coffin.
—A coffin, King-me repeated, nodding
his head. He stood from his chair suddenly and stumbled past the boy, Devine’s Widow watching after him as he went through the door.
—That’s your father, Patrick said to Lizzie, still figuring the connections that seemed as convoluted to him as the Catholic hierarchy.
—Go on outside now, Devine’s Widow said. —Leave us women be.
She and Lizzie stared across the table after the boy left. They had learned to travel adjacent to one another in the tiny world they shared, mastering an intricate dance that offered the illusion they lived independently. It was impossible to say the last time they carried on a conversation not mediated by someone else’s presence. But they were both struck by the same cold presentiment now and mirrored it each to the other.
—I won’t ever speak to my father again, will I, Lizzie said.
The widow shrugged.
Lizzie pushed at her eyes with the heel of her hand and lifted her apron to wipe her face, shaking her head angrily.
—I know you hates me, the old woman said.
Lizzie laughed then. —Yes Missus. I surely do.
—That’s all right, maid. It means you’ll always carry me with you.
——
King-me’s winter-long season of nightmares fed a growing sense in Selina’s House that the old man was veering into senility, and the trip to consult Devine’s Widow seemed a final proof. He was delirious when he came back into Paradise Deep, claiming it was a coffin they were building next the church and ordering it be left to rot. Absalom could tell that nothing short of a talking- to from Selina would settle his grandfather down. Selina’s influence on their world had been subterranean, almost imperceptible, and it was a shock to see the extent of the change when she left them, King-me on the verge of foundering altogether. The old man took to his bed mid-summer and didn’t leave it until he was carried from the house in a casket that September.