by Galore
—Sit down, he said.
She pulled the chair close to the bed and took his hand.
—I need to speak with Henley, he said. Absalom squeezed her hand to keep her close. —I need you to bring him here without Levi knowing.
Ann Hope extracted her fingers slowly, folding her arms across her breasts. —You aren’t well enough for visitors, she said.
He reached in the direction of her voice. —I know it’s unfair to ask you, he said. He could hear the sound of weeping muffled behind a fist. —But I won’t die with this on my head. If you feel anything for me at all, Ann Hope.
She blew her nose and tucked away the handkerchief. —Let me think about it, she said.
His time passed in sleep broken by brief moments of consciousness, the quiet of someone in the chair beside him or an empty room. He had no sense of how many hours or days passed before Ann Hope knocked lightly at the door and announced, There’s someone here to see you.
He could hear the man breathing where he stood just inside the door. —Tell him to sit, he whispered to Ann Hope.
—He won’t sit, she said. —He didn’t want to come at all.
—Give us a moment alone.
Absalom turned his head toward the door when Ann Hope left. —Thank you for coming.
—What do you w-w-want?
Absalom nodded to hear his childhood affliction echoed in his son’s voice. He cleared his throat. —You know I’m your father, he said.
There was no response but Absalom could sense the silence in the room shifting, like colors turning in a kaleidoscope. —I don’t expect you to forgive me, he said.
—Wh-wh-why am I here?
—I have six children. Three live in the United States and each will receive an equal monetary inheritance. Levi is responsible for my wife and for Adelina and he will inherit fully two-thirds of my estate and business interests. Which leaves one-third for you, Henley.
—I don’t w-want your god-d-damn money.
Absalom raised his hand. —My wife will have the papers drawn up, he said.
—F-fuck you, you b-b-b—he stamped his foot to shift the word ahead—bastard.
Absalom heard the door. —Henley, he said. But the footsteps were already halfway down the stairs. He tried to call out to Ann Hope but didn’t have the breath for it.
He woke hours later, the house submerged in the stillness of early morning. —Who’s there? he asked.
—It’s me, Absalom. It’s Ann Hope.
—Did you talk to Henley before he left?
—He was in rather a hurry. He looked very unhappy.
Absalom repeated what he’d told his son then, outlining the changes he promised to make to his last will and testament. —He claimed he didn’t want my money but he’ll change his mind once I’m gone. I’ll be easier to forgive when I’m dead.
Ann Hope laughed then, a harsh little bark.
—Will you do this for me? he asked.
—I’ll have the changes made, if that’s what you want.
—We can’t use the company lawyers. Go see Barnaby Shambler, have him draw them up.
—All right.
Absalom took a quick breath. He said, I never deserved you, Ann Hope, I know that for a fact.
—Perhaps I’ll forgive you once you’re dead as well, she said.
Sleep seemed to drift down upon him from some great height, he could almost hear it as it approached, the weight of it like fathoms of ocean above him. He woke to the sound of a whispered conversation. —Who’s there? he asked.
—Mr. Shambler’s here to see you, Ann Hope told him.
—Hello Mr. Sellers.
—Did you bring the papers?
He could hear the man shifting in his chair. —I did, yes. He said, It’s not my place to tell you, Mr. Sellers, but I don’t see how this will help matters.
—You’re worried what Levi will do when he finds out you witnessed these papers behind his back.
—I’m too old to worry, he said. —And old enough to know that doing the right thing isn’t always advisable.
—Spoken like a true politician, Absalom said. He held his hands out in front of himself. —Show me where to sign.
Ann Hope spoke to no one at the funeral. She’d already packed the trunks she was taking to America and she was done with every soul on the shore but her husband who had only to be set into the ground.
The Episcopalian chapel was full to overflowing for the first time in years and the mourners talked of nothing but the length of Absalom’s illness and Ann Hope’s faithfulness, her unwavering vigil, which would have tried the nerve of a mule. She refused to leave the sickroom to eat or sleep or wash her face the last seven days of his life. Newman stopped in to see Absalom morning and evening though there was nothing to be done, he said, but wait. He lifted the bedcovers to examine the dying man’s feet, a mottled purple climbing past the ankles toward the knees. —Hours now, he said. —Days at best.
Ann Hope sat in the chair by the window and waited for Absalom to die. He rarely spoke or opened his blind eyes, but she was with him each time he came to himself. —Who’s there? he asked, though he was addled and sometimes uncertain who he was speaking with.
The funeral procession rimmed the harbor along Water Street and inched toward the Tolt Road. There was a carriage for Adelina and Florence and the children but Ann Hope insisted on walking to the French Cemetery. She kept her hand in the crook of Levi’s elbow, Absalom’s coffin an arm’s length ahead of them on the cart. She was still furious, though the anger that sustained her felt more diffuse now, its object less clearly defined. She felt an odd kinship with her husband to be saddled with the weight of an action so irreversible. She had listened outside the sickroom as Levi gave his flawless imitation of Henley’s stammer, reminded just how skillful a mimic he’d been in school. The little stamp to shake a particularly stubborn word loose. F-fuck you, you b-b-bastard. That part of the conversation, at least, had been genuine.
All that was left to do afterwards was guide her husband’s hand to the bottom of a blank page while Barnaby Shambler told Absalom he was a fool, though he admired the man’s moral fiber to be so concerned with what was right and proper. He went through the motion of signing his own name beside Absalom’s illegible scribble and left the room with a smile on his face.
It had been appallingly easy to orchestrate, and watching Shambler at work almost undid Ann Hope, his businesslike act of deceit setting a niggle of guilt to simmer in her belly. She came to see something of her husband’s long-time prison in herself after the fact and she felt unexpectedly sentimental toward him in those final days. She camped out in Absalom’s room, turned him one side to the other every hour, wet his dry lips with a cloth, refused Adelina’s offers of relief. Relief was the last thing she wanted.
Hours before he died Absalom stirred in the bed beside her, the dry, cracked lips moving a moment before he managed to find his voice. —Who’s there? he whispered. It wasn’t forgiveness exactly, but she found herself willing to set him free of what she knew was holding him still. She leaned forward to take his hand. —Absalom, she said. —It’s Mary Tryphena.
{ 6 }
ABSALOM SELLERS WAS BURIED in the French Cemetery in November. The following April, Tryphie fell into a barking pot on the beach while the fishermen were curing their herring nets for the season. Fir bark and spruce buds were kept on the boil in a large iron cauldron, the concoction ladled into half-barrels where the twine was soaked before being laid out on the bawn to cure. A handful of boys horsing around nearby, Tryphie and Patrick Devine’s eight-year-old, Eli, leading games of pitch-and-toss and tag while the men shouted at them to mind their step, to keep clear of the fire, to shag off home out of it.
The tubs stood only two foot high and Tryphie tipped backwards into the steaming water trying to avoid Eli’s tag. The men were spreading their nets on the rocks below and it was only Eli near enough to help. He grabbed Tryphie by the shirtfront and without thinking dipp
ed a hand under his back to pull him out. Neither boy felt any pain, just a sudden breathless shock that was almost pleasurable. Eli led Tryphie up off the beach to avoid having the men see the state they were in and they were halfway home before the scald kicked to life.
Martha was alone when they came through the door. She stripped Tryphie out of his clothes, the sweater still hot and clinging to the flesh of his back. The bald outline of the burn from his shoulders all the way to the left hip and buttock. She sent Eli to get Mary Tryphena while she tried to quiet Tryphie’s bawling with a spoonful of honey.
A crowd gathered at the house as news spread, all staring at the naked boy kneeling over Martha’s lap, his back lobster red. Bride gathered blankets while the boy’s father went after a handbar. They lay Tryph on his stomach and covered him and started out for the Tolt Road, the youngster wailing and begging for a drink of water.
Newman heard them coming and followed his patients outside. Saw Bride half running toward him, one hand under the quilts piled on the handbar, the other holding her skirt clear to keep up with the stretcher. A man at his shoulder said, I ’llow you’ll earn your keep today, Doctor.
Tryphie was unconscious when they carried him in. Layers of ruined skin peeling away when the blankets were lifted. There were two dozen people in the room and Newman had trouble locating a pulse amid the babble. He ordered everyone out but Bride and Mary Tryphena. —One-forty, he said aloud. There was severe swelling and capillary dilatation in the damaged areas and the boy’s blood pressure was bottoming out. —He’s in shock, he said, still talking to himself. —We’re going to lose him.
—He’ll live, Doctor, Bride said and he glanced up at her. —We got him here to you, he’ll live.
There was something distressingly erotic in her surrender to the compass of his knowledge and skill. —You’ll have to help me, he told her.
—Tell me what to do.
Newman thought it possible there was a God after all.
There was an extension built onto the clinic with an examination room, a crude operating theater, and six beds for in-patients. But after Tryphie stabilized, Newman had him moved upstairs in the main house, laying the boy on his stomach in a tent of sterile sheets. He jerried up a wooden frame to keep the sheets clear of the burn, a kerosene lamp under the bed for heat. The sheets and pillowcases were sterilized in gentian violet and at night the lamplight made the room glow like a Sacred Heart, the pale, unearthly purple visible through the window outside.
Tryphie was in a coma for seventeen days. Even after he regained consciousness Newman told Bride the risk of infection made his recovery unlikely.
—He’ll live, she said.
—It’ll be months yet before he’s out of danger.
Bride said, You know we got no way to pay for all this.
—Now Bride.
She raised her hand. —And you got no one here to help.
—Miss Sellers comes by three days a week when the school year is done.
—I knows all about Adelina Sellers, Bride said.
Adelina passed out at the sight of blood, the smell of urine and vomit made her nauseous, she was more nuisance than help. Newman occasionally lured medical students to Paradise Deep for internships and twice an American nurse spent a winter at the clinic, but the dark and cold and relentless work drove them off. Newman resorted to a regular cocktail of ethyl alcohol flavored with blueberries or partridgeberries to survive the grind alone. Twice in the past year men came by to pay him for birthing children he had no memory of delivering. It was a matter of time, he knew, before he maimed or killed someone.
—Everything happens for a reason, Doctor, Bride said.
The Devine men left for the Labrador in mid-May and Bride moved into the room across from Tryphie, Newman sleeping in an outbuilding with a bunk and stove for propriety’s sake. She cooked and laundered and assisted during procedures as anesthetist and scrub nurse. She had the stomach of a soldier and a nose for the rare shirker or hysteric, culling them from the doctor’s lineup with suggestions of an imminent amputation or enema. She saw patients when Newman was away on calls, triaging and performing simple dental procedures, admitting the truly desperate and keeping them alive until the doctor returned.
Tryphie wasn’t out of immediate danger until August when the threat of infection passed. Eli Devine started to make regular visits to see him as soon as he was allowed and Newman made a point of examining Eli’s scalded hand when they crossed paths in the hall. —That looks to be coming along fine, he said.
Eli helped Tryphie out of bed and they spent the visit kneeling at the window. Tryphie wore a johnnycoat that tied loosely across the back and Eli couldn’t avoid the sick sight of it. Ridges of black scab and pus and scarlet new skin. He could guess the torment Tryphie was suffering from his own injury and he did his best to divert his cousin’s attention, fabricating elaborate histories for the vessels at anchor on the waterfront. Even the most pedestrian flat-bottomed tub battled storms and pirates and giant squid that had to be fended off with axes and swords in order to make harbor in Paradise Deep.
At first he did his best to make Tryphie laugh as well, before he saw how excruciating laughter was. Eli staring out the window as his cousin bawled through the pain, a sick roil in his gut. It was an intimacy too adult for the boys, layered with guilt and frustration, with affection and pity and resentment.
At the end of that summer Bride asked the doctor when Tryphie might be well enough to go home. Newman had been gathering information from his father on advancements in skin grafting for burn victims which could ameliorate the disfigurement. It was experimental, he warned her, and promised to be torturous. But left alone, the scar tissue would make a severe hunchback of the boy. Bride surprised Newman by crying at the thought of what lay ahead for the child, it was as if she’d stepped out of her clothes in front of him, and he excused himself to offer some privacy. Though he would have cut off an arm for a few moments more in the presence of that nakedness.
He didn’t understand how living in close quarters with Bride could make the woman more exotic than she was at a distance. She was pious and demure and all spine, she was peregrine and aloof, a vulnerability about her that she could bury or wield like a stick. All summer he was sick with wanting her and dreading the return of the Labrador crews in the fall. Even if Bride stayed on as a nurse she would move back to the Gut with Henley Devine and that cloud followed him as September descended. He spent his free time in the backcountry with a muzzle-loader and a horn of powder and the thought of Bride in another man’s bed. He shot at anything that moved in the landscape, using his surgeon’s scalpel to skin fox and rabbit and grouse, beaver and lynx. He slept under the stars to prepare himself for the black void of losing her.
Newman was miles inland on the barrens when the Devines returned from Labrador with Henley’s corpse, the man dead since the first week of August. A seven-foot shark took his line as it was set, Henley hauled overboard by a boot tangled in the twine. He was dragged five fathoms under, half-drowned and unconscious when the crew managed to lift him above the gunwale. Henley never opened his eyes again, though he held on three days before he died. Judah Devine built a casket of spruce and they covered his body with the salt meant for curing fish to keep it long enough to be shipped home and buried.
Bride was on the wharf when Laz and Judah and Patrick angled the rough spruce box onto the stagehead. The men silent as they raised the coffin, a bashful look about them, as if they were sneaking home after a night of drinking. —Someone should go tell Mary Tryphena, she said.
The casket was set out in the parlor, doors and windows propped open against the smell. Mary Tryphena stayed with her son while Bride made arrangements for the burial and she felt gutted, sitting with a hand on the coffin, the cover nailed shut weeks ago. She couldn’t avoid cataloguing Henley’s failings as she sat there, he was juvenile and spoiled, selfish, self-centered, intemperate, he was a lousy husband and father, he was myopic and fee
ble and solitary. Mary Tryphena had loved him as compensation for all he lacked, fiercely and without reservation, knowing she was alone in her devotion.
Tryphie wasn’t well enough to attend his father’s funeral and was relieved to be spared the event, not knowing how he was meant to react to the stranger’s death. There was more awkwardness than grief among mourners at the church, an embarrassment to feel the loss so little. Judah helped dig the grave and waited alone there during the service, staying to bury Henley after the prayers were said and Bride had tossed her handful of dirt on the coffin lid.
No one spoke of it openly, but the Devine men expected Henley’s death would mean the end of their persecution by Sellers & Co. It was a surprise to find themselves screwed over a second time when they settled up their accounts in September. Levi refused even to allow Judah through the office door. —That white bastard stays outside, he shouted down the room.
By Christmas the Devines had exhausted their dried peas and flour and salt pork. They had a root cellar of potatoes and turnip and their fall fish and a barrel of pickled salmon and the charity of neighbors to see them through to Lent. Bride took up permanent residence as nurse and housekeeper at the clinic which offered some relief to the household in the Gut. She prepared Newman’s meals and washed his clothes, she cleaned the operating theater and disinfected the surgical tools and chopped firewood. She studied his medical books to learn as much as she could about adenoid removal, tonsillectomies, abscess drainage, amputation of the fingers and toes. She had the fire roaring before Newman rose in the morning and read three chapters of the Good Book by lamplight each evening before wishing him good night.
Newman lying awake hours in the darkness, wondering how long it was proper to wait before asking for a widow’s hand.
There was a general election set for the winter after Henley Devine was buried in the French Cemetery. The shore’s Irish population had long ago edged ahead of the English, but Protestant Tory Barnaby Shambler was the only member the district had ever sent to the House in St. John’s. The Irish vote was always split between the priest’s man and one or another mad-dog candidate, and Shambler rode that divide to victory like Moses crossing between the parted waters of the Red Sea.