Michael Crummey

by Galore

—God knows maid, he said. —Why is it you never managed to get into trouble all this time?

  She looked away, making a dismissive noise in her throat.

  —It wasn’t Obediah you were at the church to see, he said. —Was it, Hannah.

  —What else would I be doing?

  —You’ve been going over there to look at me in that picture.

  Hannah shook her head. —You don’t mind yourself, I know.

  —Tell me I’m wrong, he said, and I’ll be gone.

  —Eli, she said, I’ve been waiting for you to leave here since I was a girl.

  —Jesus Hannah.

  She straightened where she stood. —I am not going to beg, that much I will tell you.

  He watched her awhile then, that little cauldron of doggedness and impotent distress, reflecting his own heartache back to him. Shadows and light and wishful thinking was all there was to the world, that much he could attest. He lifted his tumbler and finished his drink. He said, I’d have another, Hannah. But she didn’t move from where she stood next the stove. —If you can stand to have me, he said.

  { 7 }

  KERRIVAN’S APPLE TREE WAS STILL STANDING on the far side of the Gut when Eli and Hannah Devine’s son arrived in the last year of the nineteenth century. The tree hadn’t borne leaves or fruit for so long it was nearly forgotten and none but the oldest livyers on the shore remembered anything of Sarah Kerrivan who carted the sapling across the ocean in a wooden tub. The branches were gnarled and brittle and stripped of their bark and they stooped to the ground where even the stones of Callum Devine’s rock fence had been scattered by generations of winter frost.

  Hannah Devine was well on in her life to be carrying a baby for the first time and she was taken with cramps while working the garden in her fifth month. Druce sent Eli to borrow a horse and cart from Matthew Strapp and they clattered over the Tolt Road to the hospital with Hannah grunting through her teeth. The child was barely a child at all when it came into the world, a glove of translucent skin, dark clots of the organs showing through the flesh. The tiny cock like a thread unraveling at a seam. Newman clamped and cut the umbilical cord and handed the infant to Bride before he turned his attention to Hannah. She had still to pass the afterbirth and he’d all but forgotten the child when Bride called across the room to say there was a heartbeat.

  A month later the infant weighed no more than a decent cod fillet and still wouldn’t latch onto his mother’s nipple to eat and few thought he would leave the hospital alive. Dr. Newman and Tryphie had fashioned a metal incubator with a glass cover, the little oven heated from below by cylinders of water suspended over kerosene lamps. A constant watch was required to monitor the temperature and the family took the work in shifts, Hannah and Eli, Druce and John Blade and Hannah’s sisters-in-law, Tryphie and Minnie and Bride.

  Even ancient Mary Tryphena took her turn beside the child. It had been years since the old woman showed the slightest interest in the world, but she’d fussed over Hannah during her pregnancy, pushing concoctions of bog myrtle and gold-withy on the expectant mother. And she carried on with her doctoring after the child was delivered, opening the incubator when she was left alone to smear his chest with liniments and poultices that could be smelled in every room of the hospital. Newman warned her away from tampering and barred her from the room altogether when she ignored him. —Keep that old witch away from the baby, he told Bride, or he won’t live another week.

  By his third month the boy was making a show of living through the ordeal when an infection took hold and even Bride was forced to admit there was no hope for him. —That’s a sin now, she whispered. —The child’s had enough torment.

  —There’s no lack of that in the world, Druce said. She was thinking of the small garden of children she’d planted next her house, infants who’d never taken a breath before the earth stopped their lungs for good. And this one now in his metal coffin, waning under a pane of glass.

  It was Mary Tryphena who suggested Kerrivan’s Tree. Hannah hadn’t left the child’s side in three days but to wash her face and she was exhausted watching the slow ebb of his life. She was ready for something decisive to happen, one way or the other. —The doctor won’t ever allow it, she said.

  Mary Tryphena nodded. —You bring him by tonight, she said. —Once the house is asleep.

  Eli considered himself an idiot to be humoring the women, but the child was lost regardless. Newman came in on his last round after midnight, listening to the tiny heart struggle through the noise of the lungs. He closed the glass cover and nodded to the mother and father in their chairs to say their time with the boy was all but gone.

  After the hospital settled Hannah lifted the infant out of the incubator, wrapping him in a sheepskin blanket. He was paler than the palest Devine, the wisp of hair at the crown so blond it was nearly invisible. They carried him along the deserted roads and over the Tolt to the Gut. Mary Tryphena was sitting up when they came for her and she followed them back out the door. The tree shining silver in the moonlight on the far side of the cove.

  Hannah and Eli had both been christened in the old way but the ritual had fallen out of use in their lifetime and they stood in silence when they reached the tree, unsure how to proceed. Mary Tryphena picked her way through the maze of branches and gestured for them to follow. They passed the nearly weightless package through the dead limbs in the dark, hand to hand to hand, the child silent the entire time. As she let him go Mary Tryphena said, A long life to you, Abel Devine. And Eli wept all the way back to Selina’s House with the helpless infant in his arms, the last child ever to be welcomed into the world at Kerrivan’s Tree.

  There was no change in his condition the next morning but Abel survived the day. —Tough little bugger, Newman said each time he found the infant still breathing.

  It was a sentiment that followed Abel through his childhood. He was smaller than other youngsters his age and prone to fevers and infections that packed his lungs with fluid and threatened to drown him in his bed. A raw smell of decay rising with his temperature, as if the death he’d cheated was leaching from his pores. Mary Tryphena refused to leave Abel’s side when he was ill. Hannah was forced to wear a rag across her face against the smell. —I don’t know how you can stand it, Mrs. Devine.

  —The child’s no worse than Judah, Mary Tryphena said.

  There were half a dozen occasions when Abel’s life hung in the balance and each time he pulled through when there seemed no chance of recovery. It was exhausting to live in hope until they gave him up, to live in hope and give him up, to live in hope. Druce eventually moved down the shore to Devil’s Cove where Martha was married to a Tuttle, abandoning her garden of dead youngsters to be spared the torture of watching Abel teeter on the brink.

  For years before they married Eli held Hannah at a distance and something of the habit stayed with him afterwards, though he wished it different. Hannah’s pregnancy made him think they might find their way, that he could learn to properly love his wife through the child. But he was never able to wrangle his feelings for the boy into a manageable shape. For a time he shared Druce’s sense of impending grief. But Abel’s flirtations with death began to feel orchestrated, designed to pull them along in the youngster’s wake. He stepped a little further back from the boy after each successive trauma, and a little further from his wife as well. They were never more than fitful lovers but what intimacy they shared slipped away in the ongoing crisis of Abel’s health.

  Hannah was increasingly protective of the improbable child. She barred Abel inside during inclement weather and through the entire length of the winters. She forbade activity that would overexcite or tire him. She refused to allow talk of politics or local gossip or the family’s checkered history in his presence, as if he might catch something fatal from such topics. He spent much of his early years in his grandfather’s library where he became a reader in self-defense, escaping his isolation in the worlds categorized and alphabetized and stacked on the parlor shel
ves. The youngster knew nothing of Absalom Sellers growing up ignorant of the most basic facts of his own life in Selina’s House or Lizzie’s years as a recluse wandering the backcountry, he’d never been told a thing about Judah Devine’s biblical isolation in his asylum cell. But everyone else on the shore could see Abel was being raised in a solitude that was a peculiar inheritance of his blood.

  Mary Tryphena was the only person who never doubted the boy would survive and she seemed to recover her appetite for life through the child’s persistence. Hannah discouraged contact between the two, not wanting Abel exposed to the old woman’s talk. She was forced to ask Mary Tryphena to watch him while she was on the flakes or working the garden but warned her to keep a tight rein on her inclination to reminisce.

  Mary Tryphena was as ancient as Devine’s Widow by this time, a meager, emaciated figure. Her movements were deliberate, almost mechanical, as if she’d been designed and put together in Tryphie’s workshop, and her reticence somehow enhanced that impression in Abel’s mind. He thought her kin to the imaginary worlds of the library, a character out of Gulliver’s Travels. There was something in her antediluvian bearing that made her seem immutable, and it never occurred to him that her place in his life was temporary. He was reading to her when Mary Tryphena took her turn, the ancient smiling oddly where she sat on the green leather chesterfield, as if she felt he needed encouragement. —Are you all right, Nan? he asked and she went on smiling in a surprised, pleading fashion. —Nan? he said.

  By the time he’d fetched Hannah from the garden Mary Tryphena had found her voice and insisted there wasn’t a thing wrong with her. —You scared me, Abel said and she laughed at him, as if his fear was a childish thing. She reached a hand to touch his face. —You loves your Nan, don’t you.

  —Yes, he said. —I do.

  She said, I waited all my life for you, Abel Devine.

  And there was something in the declaration that made the boy feel like bawling.

  —We should get you to the hospital, Hannah said.

  Mary Tryphena shook her head. —I’d kill for a cup of tea, she said. But she didn’t touch the mug when Hannah set it on the table beside her.

  —Do you want that tea or not?

  —Can’t move me arms, my love, she said. She shook her head and smiled at them in the same strangely apologetic fashion, the words gone again. Hannah sent Abel to fetch the doctor but the old woman was dead before they came back over the Tolt.

  Judah Devine had been so long out of people’s minds that no one thought to carry the news of Mary Tryphena’s passing to his lunatic cell until after the wake. There was no sign of the man inside and he’d clearly been gone from the place a long time. Bald strips of sky showed through the roof and salt-spray rimed the gaps in the lungers underfoot. People felt foolish to have accepted the fact Judah was living out his days in the godforsaken hole and they denied ever believing such a thing. Some claimed to know he’d left the waterfront shortly after the locks came off the prison doors and spent the remainder of his days on an old trappers’ line near the Breakers. Others that the escape was a recent one and Judah was still holed up in a woodland tilt near Nigger Ralph’s Pond.

  The greater mystery in it all was Mary Tryphena’s custom of walking the Tolt Road to keep the appointment with her absent husband. If it was meant to cover Jude’s departure no one could say why she considered such a thing necessary. Newman thought there was something mournful about the observance in retrospect, as if the woman was holding vigil at a gravesite. He tried to parse it out with Bride after the funeral but she simply turned to burrow into him on the bed. —She’s gone to the peace of Jesus now, she said.

  They fell into their oldest argument then, bickering back and forth. Bride’s willingness to surrender human questions to mystery so blithely was a kind of laziness, Newman thought. He didn’t understand why it appealed to a woman who despised sloth in any other guise.

  —You can’t bear the notion there’s more to the world than what your little mind can swallow, Bride told him.

  There was more to Bride than his little mind could swallow, that much he was willing to admit. He’d known from the outset that something of his wife would remain a stranger and his jealousy of that private corner kept his appetite for her keen. All their disagreements seemed to end with his face buried in her neck, his hands on her thighs to bring her close and closer again. Glory and mystery enough in those moments to shut him up awhile.

  Levi Sellers had Judah’s fishing room torn down after Mary Tryphena died. The rotten wood was tossed to a scrap fire on the waterfront—the pallet Jude slept on, the wallboards tattooed every inch with scripture as if the words offered some insulation from the cold. All of it set adrift on the wind, along with the ferocious smell that hung in the room until it came down, the unmistakable scour of blood and salt that Judah left behind him like a fingerprint.

  Abel was listless and inconsolable without Mary Tryphena’s company and his parents were at a loss to lift him out of his funk. Dr. Newman suggested that isolation and lack of activity were half the problem and Eli, who had been working one of Matthew Strapp’s inshore crews since the Trims’ sawmill shut down for lack of trees, convinced Hannah to let him take the boy out on finer days. Abel was surprisingly hardy on the water, cutting tail to identify the cod he jigged aboard, the marked fish set in store with his father’s share at season’s end. He proved himself a dab hand with a fish knife, though Hannah refused to let him stand in the cold and damp of the splitting room for long. The cod ran strong all summer which the fishermen credited to Abel’s presence in the boat and it was hard to keep him off the water then, despite Hannah’s misgivings. The Labrador crews came home with more fish than they’d seen in years and everyone on the shore was buoyant to see their fortunes turn.

  The same fool’s-gold story played out across the country, the same crushing disappointment. Prices collapsed with the glut of high-grade fish dumped on the European market and most hands were paid off with less than they’d seen since the bank failures of 1894. It was a bleak lesson, to be blessed with plenty only to learn that abundance could be a tool of destitution, and all through that fall people abandoned the shore. James and Matthew Blade left for the Boston States, and after three months at work they sent money to their families for passage and a little extra to ensure their children arrived in half-decent shoes. John Blade, who knew nothing but the ocean the length of his life, left with them. Two dozen more set out for Halifax and Quebec, for Boston and New York and homesteads further west. The sudden groundswell of movement had the feel of a natural disaster, something irresistible and ruinous bearing down on them. Tryphie was looking for positions in furniture factories in Connecticut and Maryland. Even Levi Sellers’ youngsters were going off one by one to join kin who were prospering in the milk-and-honey states of America. Given the shape of things, people said, he’d have no need of an heir on the shore.

  Eli and Hannah considered following after the Blades themselves before Abel took sick over the Christmas season and Newman diagnosed him with tuberculosis. There was little chance of recovery, the doctor said, and only a year of enforced rest offered any hope. Everything in the old servant’s quarters at the back of Selina’s House was shifted to an outbuilding, a small stove rigged up for heat. They moved in a bed and Patrick Devine’s library and Abel settled into the exile he’d been rehearsing for all his life. There were periodic visits from the doctor to take fluid off his lungs, and from Bride who brought his meals and took away his filthy sputum box. But his mother and the books his grandfather salvaged from the Atlantic were his only real companions. A veranda was built outside the back door as far as the southeast corner and Hannah set him up on a cot for the fresh air when the weather allowed, Abel drifting in and out of sleep as she read to him. He entered and left the stories by side doors and windows and found it impossible to distinguish one book from another. The complications and disappointments and modest epiphanies of those disparate lives seemed pa
rt of a single all-encompassing story that had swallowed him whole.

  Eli went back at the fish in the spring, on the water before light six days a week, clearing the last of the cod in the whorl of seal-oil torches before walking gingerly home in the black, half-asleep on his feet. And no clue if there’d be a copper to show for it come the fall. Hannah already in bed and pretending to sleep when he came through the door, a plate of food kept in the oven. They never spoke of it directly, but he knew Hannah blamed him for dragging the boy out in all weather. And he supposed she might be right to think so. On Sundays he helped set Abel out on the veranda and then left them to the books, spending the duration of the visit in Tryphie’s workshop.

  The Sculpin still occupied the center of the room. Tryphie declared it ready for a test voyage but his hunchback made it impossible to squeeze into the cockpit and no one else was willing to risk the job. Eli leaned against the Sculpin as they talked aimlessly about Tryphie’s latest undertaking or the state of Abel’s health. —He’s a tough little bugger, Eli said.

  Tryphie felt a particular empathy for the boy’s predicament and he took exception to Eli’s glib assessment. —You haven’t got a goddamn clue, Tryphie insisted, you know that?

  —That’s quite a claim coming from the inventor of the Sculpin.

  Tryphie reached for a screwdriver.

  —I was just leaving, Eli said, backing away with his arms in the air.

  Tryphie turned to the workbench to set the screwdriver down. —I’ve been meaning to tell you, he said over his shoulder. —Been offered a job in Hartford. Me and Minnie are heading up there come September month.

  Eli was at the door and he leaned against it. —When did you hear? he asked finally.

  —A few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to tell you.

  Eli nodded over the news awhile, his eyes on his shoes. —You’ll do well, he said.

  Eli lay awake a good part of that night and woke early to the wind beating at the house like a sledgehammer. His heart hammering against his chest in the same wild fashion. He got out of bed and Hannah called after him. —You won’t be going out on the water in this, she said.