Galore (25 page)

His wife was a mouse of a woman, brown-haired and slight. Levi had barely taken note of her before he turned twenty-one, when Adelina suggested they marry. His sister and Florence Dodge were kindred in their insular seriousness, in the isolation that was part and parcel of their families’ standing on the shore. It was only in Flossie’s company that Adelina was unselfconscious about the warts afflicting her and they swore a sisters’ fidelity to one another as children. It was the thought of losing Flossie that kept Adelina from following her siblings to the Boston States and she brokered the match with Levi to formalize the sisterly relationship between them. Levi had a house built in a far corner of the north garden above Selina’s House and Adelina moved into a spare bedroom a month after he and Flossie married.

—Where’s Adelina? he asked.

—She’s upstairs with the children.

—The doctor is at Selina’s House, he said. —Perhaps she should go sit with Mother.

By the time the Labrador crews returned in the fall Absalom was said to be on death’s door and the business turned over completely to Levi Sellers. Levi revoked credit to the most desperate debtors on the shore and sent constables to repossess what little materials the bankrupts owned. There were altercations and bloodshed and half a dozen debtors were jailed in the old fishing room while they waited for the governor to appoint Levi the new district justice.

Absalom recovered enough by mid-September to eat toast and tea and soft-boiled eggs and to sit at the window with a blanket across his legs, but he heard nothing of what was happening in the wider world. The doctor insisted that visits be kept to a minimum and Ann Hope refused to allow the meetings with Levi to continue. —This is not a prison, he protested. —You are not my warder.

—It’s worse than that, I’m afraid, she said. —I am your wife.

The notion was enough to tamp down what fight he had left and Absalom approached the end of his life in a state of enforced ignorance not unlike his earliest years in Selina’s House.

Ann Hope catered to his every need through the day and she sat up with him at night, wearing herself thin with the vigil. She refused her daughter’s offers to share the load. —You can’t carry on like this on your own, Adelina warned her.

—In sickness and in health, Ann Hope said.

There was something fearsome in her mother’s sense of duty that Adelina wasn’t willing to challenge. But she moved back into Selina’s House where she might at least put food in front of the woman, encourage her to drink tea, to nap.

Levi spent the fall leaning his full weight into the business, ordering his cullers to bump ten percent of the season’s catch to cheaper grades across the board. When the Devine men came to settle their accounts they were told two-thirds of their fish was West Indie and virtually worthless. Levi and Lazarus yelling at each other across a desk, half a dozen hired men throwing the Devines off the premises. A lamp was smashed in the process, one of the hired men required stitches, and Levi added the damages to the Devines’ account.

Levi’s vindictiveness was the talk in every household on the coast but for Selina’s House where the dying man insulated them from the daily round of news and gossip. When Adelina answered a knock at the servant’s door off the kitchen early in October she had no reason to expect Mary Tryphena. —I needs to see Mr. Sellers, she announced.

Adelina retreated behind the door. —You shouldn’t be here, she said.

—I’d be happy to wait at the front of the house if you rather, Mary Tryphena told her.

—One minute, she said, closing the door. —Please.

Ann Hope was half-asleep in the chair by the window and Adelina called her from the sickroom in a whisper. She had to repeat herself several times to make Ann Hope understand who was waiting downstairs. Her mother walked to the hall window and looked down at Mary Tryphena who was facing away from the house, taking in the row of outbuildings and barns that Absalom had put up in the past forty years, the gardens fenced and under cultivation, the sheep pens, the dozen horses grazing in the fields. —Go in and sit with your father, Ann Hope told her daughter.

She stopped at the hallway glass at the foot of the stairs, trying to find a suitable face to present to the woman. Her pulse visible in the pale skin of her temples. She stepped through the kitchen to the back door. Mary Tryphena was still looking out over the property and Ann Hope had to clear her throat to get her attention, then stood back from the doorsill.

They sat at the kitchen table, facing one another for the first time since the night Levi was born. Ann Hope folded her hands on the tabletop.

—I needs to speak to your husband, Mary Tryphena said.

There was something infuriating in the nonchalance of the statement. Your husband. She’d been looking about the property with the same casual innocence while she waited, without the slightest inkling it was all down to her.

Ann Hope long ago recognized that everything Absalom set out to make of himself was for lack of Mary Tryphena Devine. Every quintal of fish, every pelt-laden schooner, every stick of wood in every vessel and building, every calf and foal and lamb, every egg laid by every hen. She thought it impossible the woman could be oblivious to the truth of that. But she saw now Mary Tryphena had no idea Absalom loved her still. Ann Hope felt something give way in her chest, a sudden spring of feeling like milk coming in after giving birth. Little rivulets of anger and despair seeping through her. Somehow Mary Tryphena’s ignorance made her betrayal less forgivable.

—Mrs. Sellers, Mary Tryphena said. —I don’t expect you’d be happy to see me. And I wish I could have spared the visit, given how Mr. Sellers is feeling so poorly. But I don’t know where else to go given what Levi have done to Lazarus and his crew.

—I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.

—We got youngsters will go hungry this winter. Your own blood some of them.

—Not my blood, Mrs. Devine.

Mary Tryphena took three deep breaths. She said, I didn’t come here to beg. I come to ask for what’s fair and proper. Levi got no right to change the culler’s grade of those fish and give us less than we deserve.

Ann Hope stood from her chair. —My son operates his business as he sees fit. I can’t help you.

—If I could have a word with your husband.

Ann Hope smiled down at her guest. She was angry enough she thought she might be sick. —Absalom and I did not marry for love, Mrs. Devine, you know that. But I’ve been a good wife to him. Better than you had it in you to be.

Mary Tryphena stood herself then and walked to the door before turning back to the woman at the table. —We’d been better off if I let you die in the bed, she said, you and Levi both.

Adelina came downstairs when she heard the door and found her mother still standing at the table’s edge. She eased Ann Hope into a chair, set the kettle over the fire.

—How is your father?

—Still sleeping.

Ann Hope nodded. She reached for Adelina’s hand, ran her fingers over the smooth skin. No sign of the warts that made her childhood such a torture, just the scars of the knife she’d used as a six-year-old to try and dig them free. From the moment the girl was born there was talk she was afflicted by some ancient curse laid on King-me Sellers, which made Ann Hope’s stomach churn. It was bad enough Adelina was forced to endure her singular disfigurement, she thought, without adding superstition and dread to the mix. Half a dozen people told her Mary Tryphena Devine might charm her daughter free of warts but Ann Hope dismissed the notion so coldly they felt obliged to apologize for the ridiculous suggestion.

Adelina gouging at herself with a knife then, the sleeve of the child’s dress red with blood. It made her daughter’s despair so palpable that Ann Hope sat up half the night with Virtue, bawling helplessly. —I know you don’t want to hear talk of it, Virtue said. —But I can go over to the Gut and see Mary Tryphena.

—You think this is some kind of curse too, I suppose.

Virtue shrugged. —If there’s some relief to be offered the child, why keep it from her?

Ann Hope was about to give birth to Levi and she cradled her massive belly in both hands, shaking her head.

—Mary Tryphena might not even have to step foot in the house, Mrs. Sellers.

The baby kicked against her hands and Ann Hope turned them palm up to stare at them. —You won’t tell her I sent you.

—I’ll take care of this, Virtue said.

The following evening Virtue made Adelina a cup of tea, as she was instructed. The girl was sent out of the kitchen when she finished, the dregs emptied into the fire and the cup placed upside down on the highest shelf in the cupboard. Ann Hope was standing at the door, watching. —No one touches that cup, Virtue told her.

In the morning Adelina found the warts lying loose around her in the bedsheets, each the size and texture of a raisin. Virtue gathered them up, enough to fill a teacup, and she burned the lot in the stove. Adelina was surprisingly subdued to find herself cured overnight, thinking she might just as easily wake some morning to exactly the opposite. And the relief Ann Hope felt was followed by a stubborn uneasiness. As if she’d surrendered some part of herself to the shore for good.

She went into labor three weeks later, the baby stalling as he crowned, and after several hours without progress Virtue gave her an ultimatum. —I can’t be any more help to you or that infant, she said, and I won’t be the cause of the child’s death, may God help me.

A hired man was sent to the Gut to fetch Mary Tryphena and things went as well as could be expected once she arrived. Ann Hope even managed to feel a grudging admiration for the woman’s impersonal effectiveness, her discretion.

She was supposed to lie in a week after the delivery but never could stand the enforced idleness. She hobbled downstairs when she woke the next morning, walking gingerly along the hall toward the servant’s room where Virtue was watching Levi. She stopped to catch her breath in the kitchen, one hand on the back of a chair. Saw the single cup on the windowsill where Absalom had set it. She couldn’t explain it to herself still, how seeing the cup there told her what she had no other way of knowing.

That evening Absalom came up to the bedroom where she lay with the baby. He stood at the bedside and held out his hands, but Ann Hope made no move to pass the child to his father. —You will not see that woman again, she said.

Absalom let his hands fall back at his sides.

—Promise me, Absalom Sellers, or so help me God.

He took a step back. —I never meant, he said.

—That will be all, thank you, she told him and she settled Levi closer to her breast.

They never spoke of the incident again, though it circled their lives like a moon, its tidal pull sucking at their heels. Henley Devine coming into the world nine months later, his hopeless stammer in her classroom. Ann Hope treated him like any other student, to protect Levi from the truth as long as she could. Strapping her own son when she caught him mimicking the bastard child’s stutter.

Adelina put her free hand over her mother’s. —What was it Mrs. Devine wanted?

—You don’t mention that woman to your father, Ann Hope said.

In the last weeks of Absalom’s life, Ann Hope closed off the sickroom to everyone but the doctor. She thought there was something purposeful in her husband’s tenacity, something in particular that was keeping him alive. A declaration to be made, some duty unfulfilled, and Mary Tryphena’s unexpected appearance at Selina’s House filled Ann Hope with dread.

It was a shock still to see herself such a pessimist, so vindictive. She’d arrived in Newfoundland determined to turn the wheel of progress a notch and managed only to grind herself down on the implacable rock of the place. She still spoke the language of reform but she’d lost her faith years ago. Ann Hopeless. Greedy to cling to what little was left her. There were whole seasons of her life when Mary Tryphena never entered Ann Hope’s thoughts. But she could see now that every day since Levi’s birth had been a fight to surrender nothing more to the woman. She lived in fear of Absalom asking to see Mary Tryphena before he died, but the only visitors he showed any interest in were the Trim brothers. He mentioned them several times a day and eventually she relented, instructing them not to indulge in idle chatter that might tire or upset him.

The brothers spent their time in silence while Absalom slept or read to him from Jabez Trim’s Bible. Azariah read the story of Ishmael, prophesied by an angel of the Lord to be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him, and destined to dwell over against all his kinsmen. Absalom smiled grimly up at the ceiling. —That sounds like my Levi, he said.

—He’s a hard man all right, Obediah said quietly.

Absalom moved his head on the pillow. —Has something happened?

—Not since, Azariah said, no.

—Since what?

The brothers glanced at one another. —We oughten to trouble you sir, Azariah said.

—It’s too late not to trouble me.

The blind man’s face twitched as they gave a brief account of Levi’s activities, Absalom raising his hand for silence finally, struggling for air. The Trims stood from their chairs. —Go fetch Mrs. Sellers, Obediah said.

Ann Hope set him lower in the bed once he’d recovered himself, the brothers waiting against the wall to say their goodbyes, solemn and regretful, feeling they’d ruined what little time the dying man had left in the world. Absalom passed days in silence, unable to speak a word to his wife or daughter. He felt he must have poisoned Levi somehow, sleeping with Mary Tryphena in the servant’s quarters while the youngster took his first tentative breaths upstairs. Half a lifetime then waiting to be reconciled to one son before he could put things right with the other. Even as his life was reduced to this single upstairs room, to the deathbed he lay on, Absalom had managed to nurse the fantasy some miracle would spare him setting them one against the other for good.

When he woke from his fitful bouts of sleep he could tell there was someone in the room, his wife or daughter keeping an eye on him. A difference in the quality of the silence, occupied space. —Who’s there? he asked.