by Galore
Absalom resumed work on the sealing vessel and it was completed late the following summer. She was christened the Cornelia for Absalom’s long-dead mother, sails and equipment and provisions were laid in for a maiden trip to the ice in the spring, and that promise was the one source of optimism on the shore. There were only thirty-odd berths available and men paraded to Absalom’s door, pleading for tickets for themselves and their brothers and sons. The fishing had gone poorly for a third straight season and steady rain through July and August ruined the gardens. The winter fell early with heavy snows, the harbors were iced in by Christmas and stayed that way till mid-June, months too late to sail after the seals. Some households had not enough wood laid in to last the length of the winter and they burned furniture and the timber and walls of outbuildings to avoid freezing to death. Even in Selina’s House the milk froze solid in the jug and had to be chipped with a knife and dropped in slivers into their tea. By the end of May cows and sheep and dogs were falling to starvation and the foul meat of those animals sustained people until a straggle of capelin finally spawned on the beaches at the end of June.
Judah Devine became a subject of much speculation on the shore through those dark days, Protestant and Catholic alike making pilgrimage to Jude’s shack to sit awhile in his presence, as if some of his old luck might accrue to them just by breathing in the smell of the man. For the first time in years his boat was followed around on the water as if he were an Old Testament prophet trailing a retinue of acolytes and hopeful doubters. But the cod seemed to have vanished from the waters and everyone finished the season deeper in hock to Spurriers.
Years of extravagant misery and want followed one on the other. Even the smallest luxuries were beyond them. Men smoked wood shavings or spruce rind or mollyfudge off the rocks for lack of tobacco. What little cod oil they put up through the summer was doled out in spoonfuls to the young, leaving Ralph Stone’s lamps dry, and the winters passed in darkness and shades of gray. Snow sifted through fine cracks in the stud walls and people woke to white drifts spread like an extra blanket over their bedclothes. Their shoes so stiff in the mornings they couldn’t be put on before being thawed next the fire. The sap of backcountry spruce froze solid and exposed stands shattered like glass in the winter winds, the noise of the chandelier disasters carried for miles on the frost. Ice locked the coastline solid each winter and in March Absalom set a crew to hacking a channel clear for the sealing vessel. But they never managed to reach open water and the ship sat unmaidened in the harbor year after year. In the last months of those winters whole families survived solely on potatoes and salt, young and old occupied with days of dead sleep. And each night the sky alive with the northern lights, the roiling seines of green and red like some eerily silent music to accompany the suffering below.
When the ice finally lifted in May or June, Reverend Dodge engaged Jabez Trim to take him to the outlying tickles and coves. No priest had come to replace Father Cunico, and Dodge added the isolated Roman charges to his travels. The visits had once been pastoral in nature, a celebratory air about them, to be welcomed by people who’d endured months of isolation, to bring the small gifts of news and tobacco and prayer. But it was a grim undertaking to arrive in those tiny outports now, a handful of buildings perched over bare rock and little sign of life as Jabez rowed them in.
They carried several bags of flour from Sellers’ stores and soft turnips and carrots scrounged from root cellars for the starving. But at times they found no one to feed. Three children lying in a slat bunk between their parents, all huddled under a raft of blankets and dead for weeks. Dodge could see where they had torn up floorboards to burn when they ran out of firewood. A midden of mussel shells in a corner, the corpses of half a dozen starfish boiled to make a broth. He could hear a shovel rasping earth as he stood in the darkness of the room, Jabez already at work on the grave outside.
—The four of them is it, Reverend? Jabez asked when the minister stepped into the open air.
—Five, Dodge said.
—There’s another one born since last summer?
—Born and died, the minister said.
Jabez nodded as he nosed the spade into the ground. —We live in a fallen world, Reverend, he said.
Every autumn, premises were lost to public auction to clear unsustainable debts, and Absalom Sellers, suffering a barely sustainable debt himself, was unable to front provisions to households on the verge of bankruptcy. He organized letter-writing campaigns and once led a delegation to St. John’s, badgering the island’s governor for a relief program that never materialized. The population on the shore ebbing under the weight of hard times, tilts and wharves abandoned and falling into ruin.
Daniel Woundy had long since taken up with his own youngsters to fish, and Callum crewed with Jude and Lazarus. But in the spring of Patrick’s twelfth year Callum suffered an infection in his leg, the limb too swollen and sore to hold his weight. And Patrick took a full share on Jude’s boat in his stead.
Mary Tryphena couldn’t look at her son that summer without a needle pricking at her heart, the boy’s head oversized on his spare frame like a poppy on its stem, the pale face discolored by hunger’s fatigue. A youngster on the verge of becoming a man and there was a faint, lingering smell of decay about him. He was an unlikely marriage of contradictions, introverted and resolute, solemn and studious and the water in his blood besides. Lazarus ridiculed Patrick’s interest in Ann Hope’s school lessons as an affectation not far removed from Father Cuntico’s silk hankie, but the youngster knew how to handle a set of oars and bait a hook. And he was the first one awake in the household every morning, eager to head for the boat.
Devine’s Widow and Lizzie saw the men off at the door each morning and Callum hobbled down to the fishing rooms, badgering them about lines and bait and the weather before they rowed out the Gut. But Mary Tryphena refused to leave her room until she knew they were gone. There was a hint of something final in the most casual farewell during those savage days. And despite all she’d seen of the world, she believed it impossible to lose her son if she hadn’t said goodbye to him.
Callum puttered around the Rooms awhile after the boat went out, until the leg forced him to limp home and put it up the rest of the morning. He could feel his pulse throbbing in the swell of it, his heartbeat a steady torment. Absalom Sellers had set aside two berths on his new sealing vessel as a peace offering to his estranged blood, and if the ship ever managed to escape the harbor some spring Callum promised Lizzie he would go to the ice to watch over Lazarus. Devine’s Widow insisted Laz would be safer with Judah for company and the two women bickered the issue for months. Lizzie still hadn’t forgiven Callum giving away Mary Tryphena’s hand at the widow’s instruction and he felt forced to side with his wife, though his body was a worn thing, a tool held together with twine, cross-braced with wood and nails. He could feel the two women ignoring one another in the tiny house and he sat with his rosary to keep clear of the strife, praying the chain of beads through his fingers.
—You’re a fine Episcopalian, Devine’s Widow told him. She thought their defection to Dodge’s church was a meaningless gesture. —Catholic you’re born, she said, and Catholic you’ll die.
—In that case, Callum said, it makes no odds where we goes to pray.
The only real religious affiliation Callum knew was a personal one, and Father Phelan’s absence cut deeper each season. He never shared Phelan’s weakness for drink and women and the sacraments, but Callum was a child of deprivation and there was comfort in the priest’s insistence that feeding an appetite was at the heart of a proper life. —The Word was made flesh for a reason, he’d said. Callum thought it was the priest’s lust for life he was grieving as his own body faltered. But it was the certainty of Phelan’s calling he missed most, its suggestion that the people on the shore were something more than an inconsequential accident in the world.
No one heard anything of Father Phelan but for rumors of his nomadic work in the fur
thest reaches of the country where the Church held too little sway to bar him gathering congregations of six and seven in a kitchen. The priest living itinerant in the isolated realms of his parish like a thief, baptizing and wedding and burying as he passed through. Callum was years dead on the Labrador ice fields before the only shred of real news reached the shore—that Father Phelan had drowned while traveling among the northernmost islands of the coast. The priest’s corpse was found afloat on its back in open seas, decked out in the threadbare remains of Cunico’s clerical robes, his arms crossed over his chest. The fishermen who recovered the body found the pyx nestled safe in Father Phelan’s hands, the Blessed Sacrament inside it still dry.
{ PART TWO }
{ 5 }
THE DOCTOR WAS SCHEDULED TO ARRIVE via packet boat out of St. John’s and the entire population crowded the landwash to watch him come ashore. He was greeted on the wharf by Barnaby Shambler, publican, undertaker and member of the Legislature for Paradise District since elections were first held in Newfoundland thirty years before. Shambler had courted other doctors and nurses to serve his constituents, two or three of whom had made it as far as Halifax or St. John’s before illness or belated discretion sent them packing. People doubted his most recent recruit would get any closer and they’d been waiting with a skeptical anticipation. Even Shambler was surprised to see the man step off the boat with his leather medical bag in hand, as if he were ready to see patients on the wharf.
The Honorable Member’s official words of welcome were slurred and the doctor thought him drunk at first, the swelling on the right side of his face disguised by the handlebar moustache and beard. —If you would be so kind, Shambler managed, rubbing his cheek.
The surgeon was an American, fresh out of medical school in Baltimore. Harold Newman. Granny glasses on a young face, his smile like a whitewashed fence. —I hope there’s no underlying message, Newman said as he pried the infected molar loose, to the fact the district elected a mortician to government.
—Uhnrh uur hhunnrhu, Shambler replied.
Newman’s father was a doctor, as was his father before him. —It was passed on to me, Newman told Shambler, like a disease. He preferred fishing, mountain climbing, big-game hunting and sailing to anything he encountered at home in Hartford or in medical school. He’d spent a summer away from his studies in Alaska and almost stayed for good. Not yet twenty-six, lanky and athletic, he’d come to Newfoundland to avoid the stultification of an urban practice, the straitjacket of Connecticut manners and expectations. Days before he left the States he’d broken off an engagement to a distant cousin brokered by his mother. —My parents, he said, have all but disowned me for coming here. He stuffed cotton into the crater that surrendered Shambler’s tooth. Wild country was what drew him to Newfoundland, rivers and lakes, caribou and black bear and ocean. Half a world away from his father was also a draw.
The relief Shambler felt after the extraction made him giddy. —A drink, he muffled through the mouthful of cotton. —A drink to welcome the good doctor.
He was working in a corner of Shambler’s tavern, a long line of people who followed him up from the wharf waiting their turn at the door. Shambler set a bottle of dark rum on the counter and parceled out a shot to patients before their turn in the chair.
—You see now how he gets elected, the next in line told the doctor.
Newman had never encountered mouths in such a state of decay and sorry misalignment. Everyone he saw was in need of dentistry and he spent the afternoon packing gums with cocaine before reefing with the forceps, his forearms flecked with blood, white shards of enamel under his feet.
A girl sat in the empty chair and smiled up at him. —I wants them all out, she said.
—All what?
—Me teeth, she said. —I wants them all pulled.
—How old are you, miss?
—Sixteen.
She said some more then that was incomprehensible to Newman, though Shambler laughed and slapped his hand on the bar. She was tall and barefoot, the part in her brown hair as sharp as a blade. Not beautiful, Newman thought, but handsome. Something non-European in the features, in the fullness of the nostrils and lips, the olive skin. —Open wide, he said. The tendons in her neck pulling taut as she tipped her head back. The delicate line of the clavicle. —There’s two that may need to come out, he said.
—I won’t get out of this chair till they’re every one gone, she told him. Or so he guessed.
—There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the rest of your teeth.
She went on awhile in response, Newman trying desperately to pick words from the rushing stream. He glanced across at Shambler.
—She says they’re only going to cause her grief later on, Shambler translated. —And she’ll as like be somewhere she got no one to pull them. The Honorable Member shrugged to say he had no argument to counter the girl’s insistence. She got up from the chair an hour later, her mouth packed with cotton and her bloody teeth in a handkerchief.
Shambler called Newman to the counter. —You’ll want a little pick-me-up, he said and handed the doctor a tumbler of rum. Newman took a mouthful and shook his head. Startled to have disfigured so pretty a face. —I should have refused her, I suppose.
Shambler spat a clot of blood into an empty glass. —She can watch out to herself.
—She’s hardly more than a child.
—Bride was never a child, is the truth of it, Doctor. I minds the time Thomas Trass tried to come aboard of her when she wasn’t much above twelve. Trass was drunk and pawing at her and he said, Bride, I’d love to get into that little dress of yours. Shambler ducked his chin to his chest, trying to head off a spurt of laughter. —And Bride said, Sure there’s already one asshole in there Mr. Trass, why would I want another one.
Newman turned his head to the door as if he might catch a glimpse of her still.
—What a saucy little bitch, Shambler said when he’d caught his breath. —It’s two years you signed on for is it, Doctor?
—That’s right.
—Any regrets now you had a look at the place?
Newman downed the last of his rum and rolled his shirtsleeves another turn up his arms. He felt bizarrely elated. —No, he said. —No, I think I’ll be quite happy here.
He took over an abandoned house near the public school, setting up an examination room and a surgery in the front rooms and sleeping on the second floor. Half the men on the shore were away at the cod fishery on the Labrador for the summer and he saw mostly women and old men and children in those first months. He set broken limbs and pulled teeth, he treated swollen glands and apoplexy and typhoid, gangrene and pneumonia and asthma. When the fishermen returned in September he dealt with strains and sprains and boils, water pups, bones rotten with tuberculosis, cuts from fish knives gone septic under a foul poultice of molasses and bread.
The patients he saw were virtually incapable of articulating their troubles, offering only the broadest, most childish descriptions of what ailed them. I finds me side, they told him. I finds me legs. I got a pain up tru me, they said. Bad head, bad back. Bad stomach, which sometimes meant trouble breathing. Even under questioning they had difficulty presenting specific symptoms, which made them sound like a crowd of hypochondriacs, but it was rare to root out a malingerer. People on the shore were unable to distinguish illness or injury from the ordinary strain and torment of their days until they were crippled and it was only the desperate who braved the clinic, and only after they’d exhausted every quack potion and home remedy available. No one had money to spare for treatment. They paid the doctor with potatoes and cabbage and salt fish, with a turn of split wood, with pork hocks and herring and dippers of fresh blueberries and bakeapples, with a day’s work on the roof or help digging a well, with spruce beer and goat’s milk and eggs, with partridge and turr, with live hens.
Newman’s company was actively courted by the town’s quality and he suffered their attentions with a curt politeness meant to keep them
at bay. He ate at Selina’s House where Ann Hope Sellers offered lectures on a variety of political subjects while Absalom and their youngest daughter occupied themselves with the needs of an ancient aunt. Ann Hope was a long-time abolitionist and had written some two hundred letters to the House of Lords and to the Congress and president of the United States on the matter. —You’ve undoubtedly become acquainted with Nigger Ralph’s Pond, she said. The name, she felt, was a black mark on the shore.
—A black mark, Mrs. Sellers?
Ann Hope set down her soup spoon. —You know what I mean, Doctor, she said.
Ann Hope had long since retired from teaching, but she’d devoted the last five years to having the new public school built near the Episcopal church. There was no money for desks or books or fuel to heat the building and she meant to make it an issue in the next election.
The daughter was past thirty, with the guarded look of someone trying to hide a permanent scar. Insular, he could see, but not shy. She taught in the unfurnished school but showed little interest in the upcoming campaign or anything political. Everyone referred to the aunt as Mrs. Gallery. The old woman was suffering the advanced stages of senility and she spent the meal cursing a long-dead husband who haunted her still. The entire household seemed quietly lunatic and Absalom Sellers, who barely spoke a word all evening, offered the doctor a bashful look of apology now and then.
Newman refused all invitations to attend church and let it be known in an offhand manner that he was an atheist. Some thought the assertion would be the end of his appointment, but Reverend Dodge and the Catholic priest let the matter be. Dodge had served the parish nearly half a century, Father Reddigan more than a decade, and neither was willing to see the shore stripped of its sole medical professional. Only the Methodist evangelist took issue with the scandalous claim, pushing handwritten copies of his sermons on the doctor. He’d converted half the local Protestants and a handful of Romans in his two years in Paradise Deep and he considered the atheist doctor a personal challenge. —Since you’re too busy to join us on Sundays, he said, pointing to the sheaf of papers he’d laid on Newman’s desk. Reverend Violet sported a tidy navy-man’s beard, black strings of hair combed over the bald pate of his head. There was an agitated optimism about him that kept his hands in motion as he spoke. Newman glanced down at the sermons, the topmost epistle titled Sleep as the Urging of the Devil. —I prefer sleep to reading, he said, pushing the pile back across the desk.