Galore (22 page)

She felt only compassion watching him now, a pity that felt biblical and maternal both. She knew as she hadn’t known anything in her life. She raised her free hand in the air and startled Henley awake when she wailed
Amen
over the noise of the congregation.

Henley stared at his new wife, leaning away from her in the pew. On the night Harold Callum Devine was born he’d been forced to watch the girl cut from stem to stern by the doctor, blood and shit on the table, the baby hauled clear like a tree stump uprooted with axes and rope. Seeing her so helpless and fouled spoiled the girl in his mind and he felt only revulsion at the thought of lying with Bride as a husband was meant. And he was terrified now, watching her overcome by some foreign spirit.

That night she placed the sleeping child between them as if she were drawing a line and Henley made no attempt to cross it. Bride intended the child as a temporary restraint, too raw still to allow anyone between her legs, her mind too full of the Lord’s light to think of more carnal pleasures. But Henley seemed to consider himself released for good. They spent years together in the same bed but the marriage between Bride and Henley Devine was never consummated.

Bride’s sudden conversion was as complete as it was surprising. She swore off drinking and cursing, she went to prayer meetings and attended church twice on Sundays, she sang hymns as she nursed and changed the baby, as she worked on the flakes and around the house. She took evening instruction at the church so she could read the scriptures on her own. Laz allowed Bride might bore Henley to death dragging him to the interminable Methodist services, but a bloodier murder no longer seemed likely.

Mary Tryphena knew the couple had been stealing time alone when Bride was pregnant and thought it a hopeful sign, but for all the couple was sharing in the marriage bed Henley might as well be sleeping next door with Laz and Jude. And the obvious distance between the newlyweds mirrored the lack at the heart of her own marriage. The house was quieter with Bride become such a gentle lamb of God and Mary Tryphena was thankful for that. But she couldn’t help feeling lonelier in their company.

Lazarus and Patrick came to the house to see her on a Sunday in April. She was watching the baby while Bride and Henley were at the evening service. Patrick took the youngster up, walking back and forth the kitchen with the baby on his shoulder while Lazarus sat at the table and removed his wooden leg, setting it on a chair and rubbing absently at his stump. Laz took a cup of tea and asked how the infant was sleeping and he speculated on the summer’s weather and spoke for a time about their mother’s habit of setting Callum’s place at the table after he died. When he was almost finished his tea he said, Henley wants a spot on the Labrador crew this year. As if it were just one in a series of unconnected notions floating through his mind.

Mary Tryphena glanced at Patrick who was humming into the baby’s ear to say the conversation was of no interest to him. They were like vessels tacking east and west in a contrary wind, traveling north in slow tangential increments. Both men born into the sly indirectness that made her childhood a torture.

Laz shifted in his chair. —He come and asked me straight out to hold him a place.

Judah and Lazarus were the first to give up on the local fishery, sailing for the coast of Labrador each May. They found fish galore there and for the last time Jude’s talismanic luck drew men from up and down the shore. Hundreds living the same migratory existence now, away from home all summer. Three decades they’d been making the trip, staying through September or October if the weather held, the Devine women left alone half the year to fend for themselves.

Lazarus drank the last of his tea and picked up the wooden leg, set about reattaching the leather straps. He said, You think it’s a good idea, him coming down with us?

—Why wouldn’t it be?

—He got the itch for Labrador awful sudden. Never showed no interest before. That don’t seem like a particular good sign for a marriage, does it?

It was a dodge meant to avoid stating his real concerns and Mary Tryphena snapped at him. —What would you know about what’s good for a marriage?

Lazarus stood up and tapped the floor several times with the peg leg, like he was testing the strength of ice on a pond. There was talk he’d long ago taken an Eskimo bride in Labrador, that there were half-breed children down there christened Devine. —I expect I knows as much as you do, he said, managing it somehow without a hint of meanness.

Mary Tryphena and Judah hadn’t touched one another in years by the time Henley came along. Jude arriving home from Labrador in the fall to find his wife pregnant. Henley’s birth in late February was a subject of much speculation on the shore, and even if the timing hadn’t aroused suspicion it was obvious there was nothing of Judah in the boy. His skin fair but not pale, his little tuft of hair black as sheep shit. There was an awkwardness to the welcome the new child received from family and neighbors, as if he’d been born with a deformity they were studiously ignoring. Jude was civil to the boy but there wasn’t a single moment’s ease or affection between them. Henley never ventured into the house next door and never found his footing with the men. Lizzie tended to the youngster hand and foot, as if to make amends for sending her husband to his death on the Labrador ice fields, and Henley settled among the women where he trusted he was welcome.

Lazarus was at the door when Mary Tryphena said, What does Judah think of Henley going with you?

He smiled at her, embarrassed to have the issue addressed so squarely. —Jude’s not saying one way or the other.

—Patrick will watch out to Henley if he goes, she said. And she nodded at her son, as if he might need to be encouraged in the undertaking.

—All right, Lazarus said.

Patrick settled the child on the daybed when Lazarus left, a straw pillow as a guard to keep him from rolling off the edge. He asked for the tea he’d turned down earlier and sat in the chair Laz had just vacated. Mary Tryphena puttered with cups and sugar and then leaned over the youngster to see if he needed changing. —You’re upset, she said to Patrick.

—I’m not upset, he said.

But there was no disguising the whiff, that telltale mark of his father rising up in him. —Don’t lie to me, Patrick Devine.

—Henley don’t know his arse from a hole in the wall, he said.

—Well if you haven’t got it in you to look out for your own flesh.

—Jesus Mother, he’s liable to get killed down there. Why are you taking his side in this?

Mary Tryphena couldn’t say, other than Henley needed someone to take his side where the men were concerned. Patrick was fifteen when Henley was born, old enough to do the math. He’d married Druce Trock at eighteen to get out of the house, to put that distance between himself and the truth about his brother, building a house on the edge of the Little Garden.

—You didn’t put the idea in his head to come? Patrick asked her.

Mary Tryphena looked into her lap. —I’m not that spiteful, she said.

Two hundred local men and boys loaded their gear and provisions aboard a Sellers vessel bound for the Labrador in mid-May. The clergy offered prayers to bless the summer’s enterprise before the men rowed out to the ship at anchor in a steady drizzle. Henley facing the ocean as he went, not so much as lifting a hand in farewell.

The American doctor was there to witness the exodus, shaking hands and trading stories and offering medical advice among the crowd. Mary Tryphena was at the waterfront with Bride and the baby, and Newman made a point of stopping to see them. He held his namesake in the air a moment, as if guessing his weight, before settling him back in his mother’s arms. —He’s as fat as a calf, he said.

Absalom and Levi Sellers were on the docks to oversee the loading of provisions and Mary Tryphena watched them discreetly. Levi stood with his hands on his hips, saying something to Absalom over his shoulder and gesturing out at the vessel where Henley clambered aboard with the rest of the Devines. Absalom staring off in that direction, his head weaving slightly. He turned to the crowd then, searching faces, and Mary Tryphena looked away to avoid him.

The rest of the month and the whole of June was relentless drizzle and fog. The women spent their time clearing the Big Garden of stones turned up by the winter’s frost and hauling in capelin and seaweed to fertilize the soil. Bride badgered Patrick’s wife and daughter into attending the Methodist services and they took to the faith like ducks to water, Druce and Martha converted by the time the potatoes were set. The three of them singing the seeds into the ground together.

It was gone the end of July before Absalom came to see her, though she’d been expecting him every day since the men left for Labrador. Mary Tryphena alone with Bride’s infant child while the other women were at Sunday evening service. He pushed the front door open just enough to peer inside.

—Come in if you’re coming, she said impatiently.

Absalom set his walking stick against a chair but refused to sit down, leaning to one side to favor the worst of his knees. He’d been a legendary walker in his prime, earned the nickname Mr. Gallery for the miles he covered on the roads through the country, for the sullenness he turned on anyone who crossed his path. But his legs had crippled up and he could barely walk the length of himself now without a cane. —What in God’s name is Henley doing down on the Labrador? he said.

—He asked for a spot on the crew.

—You know he’s not made for that kind of life.

—Patrick promised to look out to him.

—Hell’s flames, Absalom said, which was as close as he came to obscenity. He limped across the room to look at the baby on the daybed and shook his head. —How Henley got tangled up with the like of Bride Freke is beyond me.

—Judge not, Mary Tryphena said and Absalom winced as if from a physical cramp. They were both embarrassed to be dealing still with their one act of indiscretion, so ancient now it almost seemed to have happened to other people.

Mary Tryphena had never served as midwife to Ann Hope before being called to intervene in Levi’s birth. The infant stalled in utero after crowning and she spent half the evening dickering the baby’s shoulder past the bridge of cartilage between the pubic bones, Ann Hope so exhausted she drifted to sleep between contractions. Levi arriving blue and frail and Mary Tryphena stayed on to watch him until the moon had set. She left Virtue to keep an eye on mother and son then, making her way downstairs and along the hall toward the servant’s entrance. She assumed the rest of the house was asleep but Absalom stood from his chair at the sound of footsteps, turning to face Mary Tryphena as she came into the kitchen. —Did you need something, Mrs. Devine? he asked.

She glanced at the table where he’d spent the night and most of the evening before, flipping through ledgers by the light of Ralph Stone’s lamp, feeding wood to the fire to keep the kettle simmering over the dog irons. —I was just on my way, she said. —But for one thing. She walked past him to the cupboards, opening doors until she found what she was looking for, reaching for a teacup placed upside down on the highest shelf. Absalom stared at her with his head to one side. —I thought it might be some help to Adelina, she offered by way of explanation.

—This has something to do with her warts, does it?

—I had Virtue put it up there for me, she said.

—Does Ann Hope know about this?

Mary Tryphena passed the cup across to him. —I doubt Virtue would have come to me without your wife had sent her.

He looked down at the cup, turning it in his hands. —I guess that’s one more thing we’re in your debt for, he said. —There isn’t a mark on Adelina to say the warts were ever there.

The room was close with the fire’s heat, Absalom’s shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. They hadn’t enjoyed a moment as private since they were children in the branches of Kerrivan’s Tree, watching Father Phelan’s festival of debauchery on the Commons. Absalom set the cup on the table beside a draughtsboard he’d used to distract Adelina while they sat waiting for news the previous evening. Mary Tryphena reached a hand to fuss idly with the checkers. In a dark room at the back of her mind she could hear Devine’s Widow calling her a vain fool to have brought out the cup in Absalom’s presence, to be standing in the kitchen still. She stared at the table to avoid his eyes. —Is this King-me’s checkerboard? she asked.

—His board, yes. Most of the checkers were missing when I was a youngster. We used to play with stones.

—I remember watching you, she said. —On the beach that time. She stopped there to avoid mentioning Judah.

—I had the missing pieces replaced years ago, he said and held one up. —Would you like to try a game?

—I don’t know the first rule of it.

—Child’s play, he said. He placed the wart cup on the windowsill and pulled the board toward them, inviting her to sit. —White leads, he said when he finished explaining the mechanics of the game. They made their alternate moves in a slow dance, the white and black drifting into hybrid patterns, a competitive intimacy to it that felt illicit. Mary Tryphena moved a checker the last square to the far side of the board. —King me, she said.

Absalom placed a second checker atop the white, aligning it carefully with his index fingers. —Are you sure you’ve never played this game before?

—You’re letting me win, Mr. Sellers.

Absalom raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

—I should be getting on, Mary Tryphena said.

Absalom reached out to turn the lamp back, the room settling further into darkness. —You’ve the loveliest hair, he said.

Bride’s baby stirred on the daybed suddenly, the little limbs jerking in a spasm as he woke. Mary Tryphena crossed the room and lifted him into her arms.

—You’re certain this one is Henley’s boy? Absalom said.

—Motherhood is a certainty, she said, but fatherhood. She was quoting Devine’s Widow to make light of the situation, but Absalom only winced again as if she’d kicked him. She said, Henley married the girl, Mr. Sellers, he must think as much.