Michael Crummey

by Galore

  My sister, my bride.

  Judah keeping his counsel as she turned down one proposal after another, through the decades of their marriage. For fear or spite, out of reticence or doubt or some murkier impulse, he chose to hide the fact she had married into love. As if it was her job to guess the truth. By the time the first hint of morning appeared at the window Mary Tryphena was angry enough to spit nails. She thought she’d never manage to wash the cold taste of metal from her mouth in all the years that were left her.

  ——

  Patrick Devine was only three years married to Druce Trock when an English vessel bound for the Arctic wrecked on shoal ground off the Rump. Salvagers out of Red Head Cove and Spread Eagle had brought the crew safe ashore and ransacked the galley and cabins and most of the provisions in the hold by the time the Devines sailed down the shore with Az and Obediah Trim. The Trims stayed with the bully boat after setting the Devines aboard to collect whatever scraps remained. The hold was a deathtrap by then, already half filled with water. Lazarus and Jude picked through the remains in the galley while Patrick went off to see if anything had been overlooked elsewhere. The ship was tilted hard to starboard and Patrick spidered along the passageways with one foot on the floor and the other on the wall. The vessel rocked forward suddenly, pitching him face-first through a doorway and he fell into a pool of novels and books of poetry, tomes on botany and science and history, philosophy and religion, bound copies of Punch. Dozens tossed onto the floor by the storm and hundreds more behind the wooden barriers meant to keep them on the shelves.

  Only Ann Hope and the Reverend Dodge had more books to their names than Patrick Devine. He was always searching for strays on the shore or in Labrador and he bartered away tools and clothes and food and alcohol to take home any book he encountered. Lazarus more than once threatened to blind him to keep their materials safe from his bizarre obsession. But the wrecked library Patrick had fallen into was unlike anything he’d ever imagined. Worlds within the world and he sat there a moment, trying to take it in. Just the smell of leather and binding glue made him dizzy.

  The vessel shifted again, a tremor through the length of her, and Patrick pushed himself to his feet, slipping off his coat to lay it on the floor, stacking books side by side and tying them up by the sleeves. He crawled back to the passage and made his way toward open air, the vessel heeling on the shoals as he went. When he reached the rail off the breezeway he hailed Obediah and Az Trim and they eased near enough for him to throw down his jacket of books. On the way back he passed Laz and Jude pushing a green leather chesterfield toward the stern. —Give us a hand for jesussake, Patrick shouted, stripping out of his gansey as he went. He had tied up the neck and was already stuffing the woolen sack with books when his father appeared in the doorway. Judah’s fish eyes agog as he took in the foreign sight.

  —Come on then, Patrick said, this is all going under the once.

  Patrick went at the job pell-mell, desperate to pack up as much as possible, and Judah took off his own sweater to mimic his son. But he seemed only to wander aimlessly among the shelves, tucking away one random book at a time. The vessel let go, slipping three or four degrees more to starboard before bringing up, and his father’s retarded puttering was making Patrick furious. —You jesus idiot, he shouted, but Judah carried on as if he was picking the ripest fruit from a tree, all the time with the same terrified expression on his face. Once he’d stuffed his own, Patrick filled Judah’s sweater in the same blind panic, shouting at the man to hurry. The two of them went back along the passageway then, dragging their improvised sacks behind them. All hands were off the wreck by the time they came out into the open, Lazarus with the chesterfield lashed across the bow of the bully boat. The Trims eased in over the starboard side of the stern which had slipped underwater and Patrick slid the books down to them from where he and Jude held to the aft rail. Judah made a jump for it then, grabbing hands to be hauled aboard the boat, and the men were waving for Patrick to follow after. But he turned back to the library, scuttling along with a grip on the rail, the decks awash below him. He sloshed along the passageway as it filled with water, hauling his shirt over his head. Patrick clung to the shelves as he grabbed at the spines and stuffed the books into the sleeves of his shirt, the sea sucking through the doorway and rising around the room behind him. The vessel let go a long groaning sigh then as its weight hauled free of the shoals altogether and keeled into the depths.

  He managed to drag himself up into the passageway before a pintail of churning water swallowed him, the wild current turning and turning him until he lost track of up and down and east and west. His lungs burning in the black chill and he surrendered to the scald of it finally, taking in mouthfuls of cold salt just for the relief, knowing it was the end of him. A strange, narcotic peace flooding his limbs when he gave himself up to the notion. He wasn’t a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.

  He saw a gray flicker of sunlight beyond that image and the last candle still burning in him clawed toward it, kicking for the sky. He was shirtless and still holding a book in his right hand when he surfaced into wind and rain, thirty feet from the Trims’ boat.

  The Bible was the only book the Trims had an interest in and they refused to take any salvage from the trip. —He’d as like crawl into the house of a night and slit our throats to have them back anyway, Obediah said. Lazarus insisted Patrick take the chesterfield as well, a green leather monument to his lunatic stupidity, and it occupied pride of place in the house ever after.

  Druce was all of nineteen and pregnant for the first time. World within a world. Patrick sorting through the trove of books on the kitchen floor while Lazarus recounted the event. The ship pulled under in a matter of moments, Patrick breaking the surface with the book held above his head like a torch. Druce watched her husband pottering on his knees as if he were a toddler playing with blocks of wood. She said, Would you have done as much to save your wife and child, Patrick Devine? But he seemed not to hear her. She had never felt so helpless, watching her husband absorbed in the alien world on the floor, their baby moving under her hands, and an urge to violence took hold of her. After she killed her husband she planned to burn each and every book, feeding them one at a time to the fire.

  It was a momentary impulse but it filled her with a sense of dread that would not lift. She went into labor four months premature and the baby died before it saw the light of day. Druce suffered late miscarriages seven times in the next five years, a little graveyard of nameless children growing in a corner of the garden. She began hiding her pregnancies from everyone but her husband who dug the graves and set the tiny failures into the ground. They never spoke of the affliction, out of humiliation or superstitious fear, and Patrick filled the darkening silences between them by reading aloud from his library of salvaged stories. Druce listened to him hours at a time, the sad facts of their own lives suspended while he led them through those foreign tales. The end of every book left them feeling melancholy and sentimental and they lay awake half the night in bed, the sex charged with loss and helplessness and a furious, unjustifiable hope they lacked the means to express any other way.

  Amos was the first pregnancy Druce carried to term, followed quickly by Martha and then Eli. The children left her little time to sit still and Patrick seemed happy enough to have the library to himself. He could read through a gale, oblivious at the end of the chesterfield while the youngsters played puss-puss-in-the-corner, as the little ones rode Amos around the floor, squealing like donkeys. It was a private space he retreated to at every opportunity and Druce sometimes referred to herself as a book widow when company called, making a show of her grievance. But she never begrudged Patrick the pleasure, having spent the worst of the hard years there with him.

  Locked away in Sellers’ fishing room, Pat
rick passed his time reading the only book he’d been allowed and playing endless rounds of noddy with Lazarus and Amos. There wasn’t a shred of real evidence against them, he knew, but he’d resigned himself to the trial and whatever followed. It was almost a relief to imagine what might come out in a forum so public, the sordid history of whispers and innuendo and scheming that had determined the course of their lives. But then Judah gave himself up to Levi’s constables and the Devines were sent home. They walked over the Tolt without speaking a word, as if silence was a condition of their release. Once he reached the house Patrick took his seat on the leather chesterfield with the same Oliver Goldsmith novel and he’d barely moved in the time since.

  Patrick was certain his mother brokered the exchange with Levi. Druce offered up some story of Jude writing out his surrender in a code of Bible verses, but he couldn’t credit it. It was always the women at work in the back rooms of the family. He’d grown up in the shadow of the widow’s legendary machinations, watched Lizzie and Mary Tryphena pulling strings to set their men left or right. Bride was just alike in her way and he couldn’t avoid lumping Druce in with the lot of them. Judah given up like a sacrificial lamb and Patrick laid a portion of the blame at his wife’s feet.

  Still, he couldn’t escape the galling conclusion the fault was their own somehow, he and his half-brother Henley, his uncle Lazarus and old Callum before them. The Devine men. All they had it in them to do was to catch fish and haul wood, to cut off the ears of their persecutors and marry the same woman over and over again. He was poisoned with the lot of them. He read his way through one book after another, getting up only to walk to the outhouse or carry in a turn of wood or go upstairs to bed. His corner of the room smoldering with a telltale shadow of his father’s stink. The same fierce funk that seeped from him as he and Amos held Levi down, Lazarus flaying at his ears with the knife. Judah had been sound asleep in the Gut when it happened but he was paying for all of them now.

  Mary Tryphena was the only person permitted to visit her husband and she walked into Paradise Deep each day with bread and breakfast fish tied up in a square of cloth. Judah never touched a morsel and seemed to survive on the salt sea air alone. Lazarus went straight to Mary Tryphena’s to ask after news when he saw she was home but there was never any news. No official charges had been laid against Judah and Levi seemed in no hurry. He’d demanded a confession be part of the exchange and sent Barnaby Shambler with a written statement to read aloud to Judah. Shambler dipped a pen in the inkwell he’d carried with him before holding it out to the prisoner. He’d expected the man to place an X at the foot of the page, but Jude set the paper on his lap and affixed an elaborate signature. God’s Nephew, it read. And nothing more had happened since.

  Lazarus said, I’ve been thinking this year I might stay.

  —Stay where? Mary Tryphena asked.

  —Down the Labrador, he said. —Fly the fuck out of this for good. I’ve got people down there would take me in. I think Amos might do the same.

  —Does Amos have people? To take him in?

  —He won’t be left out in the cold.

  Mary Tryphena nodded. She said, Did Judah ever?

  —Now maid, he said.

  —I’ve a right to know.

  Lazarus shook his head. —Jude’s as true as the day is long, he said. His voice cracked and he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. —He’s not ever coming out of there, is he.

  —I don’t know, Laz.

  —And so you do, Lazarus said. —He got it in his head Levi will let us alone if he stays in that room and he won’t leave it now for love nor money. You knows that as well as me.

  Mary Tryphena nodded into her lap. —Jude’s as true as the day is long, she said.

  —I won’t stay and watch him rot over there.

  Laz started crying again and Mary Tryphena went away to her room for a moment. He’d pulled himself together when she came back into the kitchen with the tiny envelope in her hand. —I want you to take this with you if you goes, she said.

  Laz held the envelope up, shaking it to guess at the contents. —What in God’s name is it? he said.

  Stories of Judah’s biblical fast and his sudden gift for letters made their way along the shore. He’d taken to scratching verses from Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into the rough plank walls with an iron nail and some claimed the Word was being transmitted directly to Jude’s hand by the Lord. God’s Nephew, he was said to be calling himself. Older tales of Jude’s dominion over the fish of the sea, of the people healed by his presence, were revived and retold and the growing hagiography traveled on vessels heading north and south. Strangers made pilgrimage from outports around the island to stand vigil outside the prison and touch the walls on which the Testaments were being scribed.

  Even Levi Sellers was made curious enough to visit Judah, sneaking to the shoreline after dark with a storm lamp. He set the light on the floor between himself and Jude who was lying under a blanket of canvas. The man was awake but wouldn’t acknowledge him, staring at the black void in the rafters above the yellow glow of the lamp.

  —So, Levi said. —God’s Nephew, is it?

  He stood watching awhile, wondering what was to be done with him. The confession was more or less useless, signed as it was by a relative of the Lord, and Shambler convinced him there was little hope of proving the case on the testimony of his nose alone. The whole affair had been hanging in legal limbo long enough that Levi had grown to like the arrangement. He thought for a time he might skip a trial altogether, to deny the Devines any hope of resolution. Let the man rot in his cell. But letters had begun arriving from citizens as far away as St. John’s demanding Judah’s release in the absence of criminal charges. The governor had requested a complete report on the case. Even Shambler thought it inadvisable to hold Judah indefinitely. —Who catches hell, he asked, when Judah starves himself to death in custody? Hang him or let him go, Shambler said, those are your choices.

  Levi stepped toward the pallet. —We haven’t had the pleasure, he said, since our meeting Christmas last, Mr. Devine. Levi was wearing his black hair long to cover the sides of his head and used his free hand to reveal first one ear, then the other. —My wife tells me I look a little lopsided but none the worse, really, for that.

  Judah glanced at him and then stared back up at the darkness. Levi was close enough to the wall to make out the verses etched into the wood. All cribbed from the Old Testament, a wild tide of quotations thrown helter-skelter at the boards. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath We spend our years as a tale that is told A whip for the horse a bridle for the ass and a rod for the fool’s back Thy way is in the sea and thy path in the great waters and thy footsteps are not known Whoso stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor he also shall cry himself.

  Then in letters twice the size of any others on the wall: They have ears but they hear not.

  Levi reeled away from the pallet to the far wall. Judah turned his back and pulled the canvas up around his shoulders, as if he’d made his point and was done. Only the preternatural white of his hair visible in the gloom. They have ears but they hear not. Levi shook his head to sidestep the sensation of being spoken to by some otherworldly voice. His heart hammering. He went to the door to leave but a line of verse scored into the wood at eye level stopped him. Even as he raised the lamp he tried to convince himself not to read it.

  Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth and their seed from among the children of men.

  He swung around to face the figure lying in the darkness. It sounded vaguely like the threat Devine’s Widow cursed King-me Sellers with a hundred years ago and Levi felt the words had been placed there for him alone, that otherworldly voice announcing itself again. —You royal son of a bitch, he said.

  Flossie was still awake when Levi came into the bedroom. He undressed without speaking and she waited for him in the same silence. She knew he’d gone to see Judah and expected he was in need of reassurance or comfort
ing. But she was surprised to feel her husband sidle against her, his cock like a little brick heated in the oven and laid between them for warmth. They had three children in quick succession after they married and both Levi and Flossie seemed to feel they were released from their obligations in that regard. His foreign urgency frightened her and she kept her hands on his shoulders, willing herself not to think of his ruined ears under the long flaps of hair. She thought he might carry on rocking into the cradle of her thighs until daylight, her legs burning with fatigue and his forehead laid flat against her chest. She whispered the Twenty-third Psalm to herself but it seemed to goad Levi into more furious activity and she stopped. He was like a dog burying a bone out of reach of all other creatures, the same hunch and singleness of purpose, the same proprietary determination. He paused against her finally, holding his body rigid for so long she thought he might have suffered a stroke. Then he turned away and fell asleep.

  Flossie was already at the table with Adelina when Levi came down to his breakfast in the morning. After he settled into his seat she said, I’ve been thinking, Levi, that perhaps it’s time I move into a room of my own.

  He raised his head from his plate, looking first at his wife and then his sister. He could see they had discussed the matter before he came down the stairs and the obvious collusion was too much for him. —Has everyone on the shore taken leave of their bloody senses?

  —Now Levi, Adelina said.

  —Tell me, he shouted, how a sensible man is supposed to deal with this insanity.

  —We were only thinking, Florence said but she stopped there. Levi’s face had gone blank suddenly, as if he was listening to a voice in another room. He went out the door and then came straight back to them at the table. —Adelina, he said. —Do you know if the good doctor is still interested in turning Selina’s House into a hospital?

  A meeting was arranged for the following morning and Newman was a self-righteous prick about the entire undertaking, as Levi expected. He offered his condescending American smile when Levi hinted the fate of Selina’s House might be tied to whatever conclusions were reached. Newman insisted on examining the prisoner himself and implied he was above any incentive Levi might offer to sway him. Levi gave Newman the written confession with the lunatic signature as well as an affidavit freshly sworn out by Barnaby Shambler stating Judah Devine had threatened the life of His Majesty, the King of England, and claimed the throne as his birthright. —The governor has requested a full report on this case, Levi said, and I will be including the affidavit in that report. As I’m sure you know, Doctor, treason is a hanging offense.