Michael Crummey

by Galore

  —You hear about William Coaker when he was here?

  —The farmer? Tryphie said. —Jesus loves the little children.

  —He’ve got a thousand men signed on in Notre Dame Bay, Tryph. Says another two or three thousand by next spring. I’m going up to Herring Neck the winter. See how the union locals work, how the coop stores are set up.

  —Does Levi know anything about this?

  —You should come with me, Eli said.

  Tryphie laughed and walked across the workroom floor.

  —This is going to change the country, Tryphie, top to bottom.

  —That’s a lot to ask of a fish dryer.

  Eli picked up the sheet of paper and folded it. —We could be part of this, he said. —Me and you.

  —Minnie’s set on the States.

  Eli nodded to himself awhile. He asked a few half-hearted questions about arrangements for travel and where in Hartford they’d be living and Tryphie answered with his back to Eli, picking at a trunkful of tools. —I’ll go on then, Eli said finally but he didn’t move from where he stood. He said, I rolled the Sculpin, Tryph. I sank her on purpose. He let out a long breath. —I thought you should hear it from me. In case there was a question in your mind.

  —You’re all right now, are you?

  —Never better, he said.

  Eli left for Coaker’s winter quarters in Herring Neck a month after Tryph and Minnie sailed for the States. Hannah moved over the Tolt to stay at Selina’s House while Eli was away doing God knows what in Notre Dame Bay. Bride set up a space for her in the upstairs room that Mr. Gallery had fallen into generations past, her cot set off from the hospital beds by a sheet hung from the ceiling. Hannah occupied her days with the tasks Minnie abandoned when she left, cooking and laundry and mopping floors. She read awhile to Abel each evening and drank a cup of tea with Bride while Newman carried out his last rounds. They discussed the day’s patients and weather and the minutest details of Abel’s condition. They talked often of the union, like everyone else on the shore. Coaker had passed through again at the end of October, speaking to three hundred men in the old Trim sawmill, making overnight trips with Eli to Red Head Cove and Spread Eagle and Smooth Cove where dozens more took the union pledge. Eli staying up half the night with Coaker to strategize, spending the days in clandestine discussions with fishermen, pushing the dream. It had been a relief to see him interested in the world again, if not in herself and Abel in particular. She thought he would come around to them soon enough. But there was a growing absence about her husband that was making her doubtful. —What do you think will become of it all, Bride?

  Bride stirred sugar into her cup, set the spoon on the saucer. She’d heard people speak of Coaker as a tonic for the ills of the world. A visionary, they said. It made her squirm, that sort of church talk applied to someone flesh and blood. Coaker had the manner of a born pragmatist which made her suspicious of his lofty notions. As if she expected they would come to a bad end on the shoals of some trade-off down the line.

  They could hear Abel coughing in the next room and both women turned their heads to the sound, waiting for the spasm to end.

  —I don’t know, maid, Bride said after the youngster went quiet. —I can’t help thinking there’s some lack in a man who would name a place after himself like that. Coakerville, she said. And the women laughed at the foolishness of it.

  Coaker insisted that all F.P.U. members be able to read and write and he tasked Azariah Trim with arranging instruction on the shore. The union’s night-school classes began at the end of November and forty-five men gathered in a lamplit room once a week to learn their letters. Az recruited Bride to teach and she nursed her students along with the same mix of temerity and charm that made her so invaluable at the hospital. By the time they left for the seal hunt in March most of the original forty-five were able to write their own names and read simple Bible verses and count by fives and tens.

  The regular union meetings preceded the school sessions and without Coaker’s guidance they degenerated into fractious free-for-alls. After those first heady weeks, a hangover of doubt set in. They had only Coaker’s word that such a thing as the Fishermen’s Protective Union existed. No one knew how the F.P.U. planned to outfit members for the fishery or sell their fish at the end of the year. Doubting Thomas Trass led a group demanding assurances, securities, but there were none to be offered. —We got nothing if we don’t hang together, Az Trim told the room.

  —Levi Sellers will see us all hang together if he gets wind of this, Trass insisted. —Make no mistake.

  The numbers at the meetings dwindled as the season crept closer. Thomas Trass stayed on despite his vocal reservations and it seemed that the schooling was all that held him. He was one of Bride’s slowest students, working at the lessons with a dull earnestness. He’d taken to tracing his name absently on the tabletop or his thigh during any idle moment, Thomas Trass, Thomas Trass, Thomas Trass, as if he had to continually remind himself who he was. Trass was past sixty and a lifelong bachelor. He was engaged to a girl in Smooth Cove as a young man and walked thirty miles down the shore the day before the wedding to find her dead. It was well after dark when he arrived, his fiancée laid out in the kitchen for her wake, and he’d turned to walk back to Paradise Deep without so much as taking off his jacket. There was something about Thomas Trass, people said, that was still out on that trail in the dead of night, somewhere between Smooth Cove and home.

  After each night class he and Val Woundy accompanied Bride to Selina’s House and saw her through the door. Val headed home to the Gut then and Thomas lay an hour on his daybed as he’d been instructed. Not a light on the shore when he slipped back into the cold, no sound but his footsteps over the snow. He walked along Sellers’ Drung toward Selina’s House, then beyond it to Levi’s property where he circled behind the house to the barn. Levi sitting on a stool at the rear, among the heat of the animals. —I was starting to think perhaps they turned you, Sellers said each time Trass picked his way past the stalls to offer a report on the night’s developments. It was all about to fall to pieces as far as Trass could tell and he’d be sorry to lose the schooling if it happened sooner rather than later.

  Levi handed the man his two dollars and sat awhile longer after Trass left, avoiding his bed to spare himself the hours of lying there insomniac. He tried to think of the last proper night’s sleep he had, sometime long before Mary Tryphena Devine passed on. Levi used to watch for her from his office window, the woman on her trek to the fishing room where Judah wasted away, and he developed a grudging admiration for the old woman’s mettle. He’d had to keep reminding himself who she was to his father, but it all seemed so distant he barely felt it. She was just a marker in his days at the end, like a clock striking the hours.

  It wasn’t until she died that he learned Judah was missing and Levi felt a surge of the old poison in his gut. He burned the white bastard’s crazy work scored on the walls of the fishing room, as if the absence of physical evidence might convince him the man had never existed at all. But he felt cheated of something by the disappearance. It was as if the old crone had made a cuckold of him. And that thought renewed his failing animosities.

  He had Trass go along to Coaker’s initial gathering at the old church out of idle curiosity. Sent inquiries to acquaintances in Notre Dame Bay and St. John’s who reported Coaker was a loner and a fool, possibly delusional, addled by his years trying to conjure a farm out of rock and bog, by a marriage he was ill-suited for. The notion of him building a union was a joke, they said. Levi engaged Trass to attend the clandestine weekly meetings and he compiled a list of the local men who had taken the pledge. He was particularly gregarious when he crossed paths with them at church or on the streets, asking after their health and the health of their families, thinking how their faces would look when the union foundered and they came begging for credit. The spring promised to be as good as a concert.

  He went to his bed after midnight and crawled out of i
t long before light. He was at the table when Adelina and Flossie came down to their breakfast. The women were virtually inseparable before the children left for the States and he never saw them but in one another’s company now, walking the garden paths arm in arm, sitting together in the evenings to knit or crochet or read. He tried to send them to America with the youngsters and it was still a mystery why they refused. —I made a vow, Flossie told him, her eyes averted. As if it was a life sentence.

  The women never spoke against him, but there were subtle acts of defiance he couldn’t miss. Volunteering at the hospital after he bargained away Selina’s House. Offering singing lessons to Tryphie Newman’s daughter, cutting clippings from the Evening Telegram whenever there was a mention of the Nightingale of Paradise. Sitting side by side at Mary Tryphena’s funeral in their best black mourning as if the woman were kin.

  —How did you sleep? Flossie asked him.

  —Adequately.

  His wife set her knife carefully across her plate and glanced at Adelina. The two women were unfailingly demure in his presence, but there was an air of condescension about them, the residue of whispered conversations when his back was turned. —Have you thought of speaking to Dr. Newman? she asked.

  —About what exactly?

  Adelina said, It’s been months of this now, Levi.

  —You’re exhausted, Flossie told him.

  There it was, the one thing he could not abide, the reason they refused to leave with the children. They pitied him. He pushed his chair back from the table. —Sleep, he said, is the urging of the Devil.

  In March the local men who’d secured sealing berths left for Harbour Grace and Brigus and as far as St. John’s en route to the ice fields after whitecoats. No union meetings were held while they were gone and it was nearly a month before the sealers made their way back, wearing the clothes they left in, sleeves and pant cuffs crusted with blood, the lot of them haggard and punch-drunk and carrying trinkets from the Water Street stores for their wives and children. The sealers collected Eli Devine on their way through Notre Dame Bay and on the night of the union’s first meeting back Levi went out to the barn as soon as the women retired, anxious to hear what Thomas Trass had to report.

  It was a wild night, the rafters cracking in the wind and the cows restless. The foul weather made time crawl and Levi took out his pocket watch periodically to glare at it in the dark, trying to guess the hour. He’d all but given up on Trass when the door at the other end of the building opened and was hauled shut against the gale. The gust stirring up the smell of piss in the straw. —I was starting to think perhaps they’d turned you, Levi said and even before he finished speaking he knew it wasn’t Thomas Trass coming toward him in the dark.

  —Hello Levi.

  —Not a very pleasant evening to be strolling about, Eli Devine.

  —Thomas asked me to tell you he won’t be able to make his appointment.

  The thought crossed Levi’s mind that Trass had been playing him all along but he dismissed it. The man didn’t have the imagination.

  —Val Woundy has been keeping a close eye on your Mr. Trass, Eli said, as if he could guess Levi’s thoughts.

  —Trass has been feeding me lies all along, I suppose.

  —Let’s just say the union meetings that mattered did not take place on the same night as Bride’s classes.

  Levi laughed out loud, slapping at his thighs. —Splendid, he said. —And this is the point where I claim to have a man attending the secret secret union meetings as well.

  —You don’t have the first clue what’s coming, Levi. But I wanted to come by to tell you to watch for it. So you’ll know I helped steer it your way.

  Eli turned to leave and Levi followed after him. —You had an enjoyable time in the company of Mr. Coaker, he said. —Mr. Coaker wouldn’t allow a man like yourself to go without the creature comforts. He took care of your needs while you were away from your wife?

  The door swung shut and Levi pushed out into the weather, chasing Eli as far as the road. He was shouting for all he was worth though he could barely hear himself in the wind. He carried on yelling uselessly a while, the words whipped back over the roof of the house and scattered across the Gaze.

  It was the Old Hollies that woke her, Flossie thought, the keening voices of some long-drowned sailors carried ashore by the storm, and she lay still in her room praying for them to pass. Heard the back door then, the entire house shifting to accommodate the weather’s push. And the eerie voice rose through the wind’s racket again, half-strangled and pleading, though she could swear now it was coming from somewhere inside the house. She rushed across to Adelina’s room, shaking her awake. —Listen, she whispered. —Listen, listen, listen.

  They went arm in arm down the hall, calling for Levi. The garbled voice going on as they reached the stairs and crept toward it one step at a time. —Levi? Adelina called again and the voice went quiet finally. They could just hear the muted sound of sobbing where Sellers lay helpless on the floor below.

  Levi learned to scrawl a signature with his left hand after the stroke but needed assistance to perform the simplest tasks, to dress and eat and go to the outhouse. His eye was nearly closed on the dead side of his face, the invalid flesh so shapeless and drooping that he looked like a wax figurine set too close to the heat. Two hundred and seventy-six men came off his rolls that spring, taking provision sent by schooner from Notre Dame Bay instead. The union members paid St. John’s prices for their gear which led to complaints from the fishermen still buying at Sellers & Co., and Levi lived in a state of perpetual vexation.

  It was only the intervention of the Catholic Archdiocese that saved Sellers & Co. from complete ruin. Father Reddigan had blessed the union’s first steps on the shore with his silence, though he’d heard murmurs from the archbishop’s office in St. John’s. Before the men returned from the seal hunt in the spring, he received a letter of instruction dismissing the F.P.U. as a secret society that bound its members by an unlawful oath and was ipso facto condemned by the Church. No Catholic can join it, the archbishop wrote, unless he means to incur the Censures of the Church. If he has taken any oath in the Society let him understand it is unlawful and not binding. Please act on this information to stamp out the Society at once if it has appeared in your Parish. Reddigan made the announcement at Mass four Sundays in a row and by the time the Labrador crews set out in June not a single Catholic on the shore remained a member of the F.P.U.

  Abel Devine spent part of each morning on the hospital veranda when the weather allowed. Everyone who passed would call or wave, as if it was bad luck not to acknowledge the Devine boy struck with consumption. The only person who ignored him was Levi, stilting his way past Selina’s House toward the offices of Sellers & Co. His right arm in a permanent clench against the chest, the nearly paralyzed leg swinging from the waist like a pendulum.

  Eli had been back in the Gut since March but Abel’s mother chose to stay on at the hospital. The three of them spent part of each Sunday morning on the veranda before church and that was all there was to them as a family. Hannah refused to have Abel stirred up and she protected him from any talk of the union or politics in general, though even a shut-in could sense the tide of change rising on the shore.

  Abel’s condition improved through the summer and on his better days he wasn’t content to lie in bed. He paced his tiny room or sat at the shelves to leaf through books he’d never opened before, just for the novelty of it. He stood on a chair to reach Jabez Trim’s Bible tucked away on the highest shelf. He had no memory of seeing the book in Patrick Devine’s library and didn’t know what to make of the artifact. The pages were leathery and thick, the hand-lettered text archaic and blurred. It seemed a foreign language he was looking at and he wrote out lines and verses, trying to imitate the baroque bells and curves as if he was sketching a landscape. He spent weeks writing his way through Genesis and Deuteronomy and Psalms and Ecclesiastes, figuring one letter at a time, making the strange scri
pt his own through repetition.

  There was a rush to join the F.P.U. in the fall. The union fish was sold in bulk in St. John’s, fetching fifty cents a quintal above the price paid by Sellers & Co. A circular letter from Coaker announced that His Lordship Bishop McNeil of St. George’s had approved a new wording of the union’s pledge, and Father Reddigan said nothing when three dozen Catholic men took the oath a second time ahead of word from the archbishop in St. John’s. Half the shore’s population ordered their winter provisions through Coaker’s wholesale outfit and Levi sold off a portion of his waterfront property to Matthew Strapp to keep the company afloat.

  Eli left for Change Islands to attend the annual session of the supreme council of the F.P.U. in late October. He was due home the first week of November with Coaker in tow and there was a flurry of activity in preparation for the great man’s arrival. The doctor pronounced Abel well enough to go home when his father arrived and he waited for the union boat with more anticipation than most. He browsed aimlessly through Patrick Devine’s library, opened books at random to read a line or two. He stood on his chair to bring down Jabez Trim’s Bible, to be sure it was a real thing and not just some figment of his consumptive imagination. Tracing the letters with an index finger as he mouthed the words.

  Out the window of his sickroom he’d watched a new building being raised near the Episcopal church through the fall. The letters F.P.U. painted a storey high over the doorway now. He was the only person on the shore ignorant of the acronym’s meaning. Friendly Priests Unfrocked, he guessed. Furious Partisan Utopia. Forgetful Pastoral Undertakers. Free Parcels Untied. Bunting was pinned to the front of the hall, an archway of fir branches and wildflowers waited on the new union wharf just acquired from Matthew Strapp.