Michael Crummey Read online

  Devine’s Widow thought him a fool and made no secret of her opinion. But she knew years on the coast without liturgy or sacraments and was happy for those comforts now, despite the package they arrived in. Father Phelan claimed she was the only person in the new world he lived in fear of, which she dismissed as base flattery. —You’d be a half-decent priest if you gave up the drinking and whoring, she told him.

  —Half-decent, he said, wouldn’t be worth the sacrifice.

  He was lean and mercurial and abrupt, the sort of man you could imagine slipping through an outhouse hole when circumstances required it. He was fond of quoting the most outrageous or scandalous confessions from his recent travels, he named names and locations, adulteries and sexual proclivities and blasphemies. He had no sense of shame and it was this quality that marked him as a man of God in the eyes of his parishioners.

  —I hear you’ve blessed the house with another Devine, the priest said.

  —He’s sound asleep back there, Father, Callum said. —Not a peep out of him all night.

  They spoke English for Lizzie’s sake. She had enough Irish to discipline her youngsters and make love to her husband but lost her way in any conversation more general. She got up to fetch the infant from the children’s room and Mary Tryphena climbed out of bed to join the adults around the table.

  —Let me look at you, the priest said, holding her by the wrists and leaning back to take her in all at once. Her face pale and sunken and the eyes dark with congenital hunger. —Is she spoken for yet?

  Mary Tryphena pulled both hands clear. —No, she said.

  —Now I’m not asking you to marry me, girl.

  Callum said, We were thinking she might take communion this visit, Father.

  —Well now. That’s a step no smaller than marriage.

  —Stop trying to scare the girl, Devine’s Widow said.

  Mary Tryphena watched the steady flame of the candle on the table, pretending to ignore the conversation, and the priest obliged her by turning his attention to the infant. He made the sign of the cross and offered a blessing.

  —Jabez baptized him, I understand.

  —We thought we were going to lose him, Father.

  —Jabez Trim is a good man.

  —I see you got the news from Mrs. Gallery, Devine’s Widow said.

  Father Phelan nodded, the habitual blankness of his face unperturbed. —I managed to slip in for an hour’s rest when I got here. —And how’s Mr. Gallery?

  —I keep expecting him gone every time I come back. But so far, not. And he haven’t changed one jot all these years. Still won’t make confession.

  —It might be him not being Catholic, Lizzie said, smiling into her bowl.

  —That haven’t stopped others, Mrs. Devine. And not a one of those in the same need as Mr. Gallery. How are the fish this year, Callum?

  —Please God we won’t starve, Father. That’s as much as can be said for the fish.

  They carried on with the old introductory conversation awhile to settle back into relations as they stood when the priest left the shore months before.

  —Is it true now, Father Phelan said, what Mrs. Gallery tells me about your sea orphan?

  —Depends what it is she’s told you, Devine’s Widow said.

  —White as the driven snow, she says he is.

  —And the fiercest stench on him, Father, Lizzie said. —Would make your hair curl to smell it.

  —You saw him born of the fish, Missus?

  Devine’s Widow nodded. —Delivered him from the guts myself.

  Callum took a breath, half afraid to speak. —Is it God wanting to tell us something, do you think?

  —God give up talking to such as we a long time ago, the priest said.

  Devine’s Widow stood up from her chair. —I’ll take you out to him, Father.

  Mary Tryphena slipped off Callum’s lap and followed them along the side of the house. The stranger seemed to glow in the dark of his windowless shed. He was half sitting with his back to the corner, a square of canvas pulled to his waist as a blanket, watching them with the indolence of a creature that’s spent all its days tied to a stake.

  —Is he a Catholic, do you know? the priest asked.

  —He’s neither fish nor fowl, this one. But he could use a blessing, Father.

  Phelan stepped into the fog of the tiny room. He leaned over the man, made the sign of the cross and prayed awhile in Latin. He took a brass vial from an inner pocket and anointed the white forehead with oil. He came back into the open air and shook his head to clear it. —Mrs. Gallery says there’s some would gladly have that creature drowned in Nigger Ralph’s Pond.

  —There’s some would gladly have you drowned in Nigger Ralph’s Pond, Father.

  The priest turned to Mary Tryphena. —Your grandmother is a miserable witch, do you know? He closed the door of the shed without saying another word to the man inside. —I’ll hear your confessions now. Callum will want to be getting out on the water.

  Mary Tryphena still thinking about the man’s skin, the shimmer of it, his face like the flame of a candle you could snuff between your fingers.

  ——

  Callum crewed a half-shallop with Daniel and James Woundy, an open boat decked at both ends, with twenty foot of keel. There was a poor sign of fish again that summer, and the men traveled further and further along the coastline and out into the Atlantic to search for them. They left hours before daylight and rowed ten or twelve miles into the currents, as far as the Skerries or Monks Ledge or Wester Shoals, where they drifted with hook and line over the gunwales, waiting.

  They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.

  It was true that a cod would swallow any curiosity that strayed by its nose and a motley assortment of materials had come to hand in the process of gutting them over the years. Lost jiggers and leather gloves and foreign coins, a porcelain hat brooch. A razor strop and half a bottle of Jamaica rum, a pinchbeck belt buckle, a silver snuff box, a ball that King-me claimed was used for a game called lawn tennis in France. The prize above all others was Jabez Trim’s Bible, recovered from the gullet of a cod the size of a goat. It was bound in a tight leather case but the pages were wet and stuck to one another and it took months of careful work to separate the leaves. There were portions so distorted by their soaking they were barely legible, but for many years it was all they had of the Word of the Lord among them.

  Jabez once read the story of Abraham and Isaac during a Sunday service, Abraham leading his son into the mountains to sacrifice him as God demanded, but the verses that followed were blurred beyond reading and Isaac was left with his father’s knife poised above him. James Woundy was so taken by the truncated tale that he still retold it on the long trips to and from the fishing grounds, adding his own version of what he considered the inevitably gruesome conclusion. Jabez tried explaining that God gave Isaac a reprieve at the final moment, sending an angel to stay his father’s hand, but James was skeptical. —That don’t sound like the God we knows out here, he said.

  Daniel was almost twenty years older than his half-brother, married with youngsters of his own by the time James came into the world. Everyone agreed James was slightly touched, a childishness about him he seemed unlikely to grow out of. Their mother was the oldest bushborn living, a woman more ancient than Devine’s Widow. Sheila Woundy had given birth to seventeen children by three different husbands, the latest of whom wasn’t yet fifty years of age and was only thirty when they married. She was rumored to be the daughter or granddaughter or niece of an Indian woman herself and she spoke a pidgin of Irish and scraps of some other lan
guage known only to the bushborns. Some said it was Indians kept the bushborns alive when they first wintered on the shore with nothing to eat but salt fish and winkles and the bark off the trees, there was talk of marriage and children between them before the Indians disappeared off the coast some shadowy time long past. Though Daniel and James took offense at the suggestion and wouldn’t allow it spoken of.

  The crew stayed on the water until they struck enough fish for a boatload, sometimes drifting three and four days without coming ashore, wrapping themselves in a square of canvas sail to sleep for an hour. The weeks of fatigue and hunger had them hallucinating voices and shapes and figures on the horizon or in the ocean. James Woundy came out of his skin one morning before the moon had set, shouting and pointing at the fugitive outline of a merwoman skimming beneath the surface near the boat. Golden surf of hair and naked arms as long as oars, a trail of phosphorescence in her wake. He had to be held back to keep from going over the side after her, Daniel and Callum pushing him onto his back in the bilge water. Daniel sat on him until he came some ways back to his senses.

  They’d been out nearly three days and hadn’t had a morsel of food in twenty-four hours. Their fresh water was all but gone and they’d be forced to start the haul back to shore now, with or without fish to show. Daniel was staring off at the landless horizon from his seat on his brother’s chest. He looked to be near tears.

  Callum said, I know he’s blood to you, Daniel, but that youngster’s a goddamn fool.

  Daniel shook his head. —I saw her too, he said. —I saw her there.

  —Sure fuck, Callum said. —So did I. But I’m not ass enough to go overside to try and grab her tit now am I?

  The cod had never been so scarce, not in living memory. Even the capelin and squid and bottom-feeders like lobster and crab seemed to have all but disappeared. A season or two past they consoled themselves with talk of times before their own when grass was boiled and eaten and the dead were stripped of their rags to dress the living before being buried at sea. But those stories cut too close now to be any comfort.

  By mid-July it was clear the season was beyond salvaging, that no one would clear the debt incurred in the spring to gear themselves for the fishery. Most were in arrears from one failed season aboard another and King-me forced the most desperate to grant him a mortgage on their land estates as a surety. He’d already taken possession of half a dozen fishing rooms and seemed determined to own both harbors entire. The spring’s whale meat was long gone and some families were surviving on winkles and mussels dug up on the beaches or the same meal of herring served morning, noon and night until a body could barely keep the fish down. The summer not half over and already there was talk of winter and how many would starve without help from God.

  Father Phelan had little solace to offer on that question and tried to make himself useful as a drinking companion, offering reminiscences of the women he’d bedded on the southern shore of the Avalon or details of the sexual dysfunctions of the English monarchs through the centuries. He sang songs he’d learned from darkies in the West Indies, taught “native dances” from the South Sea Islands that had men leap-frogging one another with underpants on their heads, oinking like pigs. A night without worry was all he had to give them, a taste of God’s Heaven on earth.

  He came to see Mary Tryphena once a week to school her in the catechism and the finer points of the faith. He was always miserably hungover and they sat in the open air on the shady side of the tilt. The shed where the stranger slept stood behind them, the pale face glimmering in the dark interior when the door was ajar. The man had lately found the use of his legs and for a few days he’d wandered about the Gut, peering in windows or standing to watch women hang out their wash or hoe the potato gardens. They chased him off when they saw him, brandishing rakes or sticks, and children followed after him, flinging rocks at his head. He didn’t leave the shed at all in daylight now, and Father Phelan expected he’d be dead if not for Devine’s Widow.

  The priest stopped at the shed door before leaving and nodded to the man inside. He talked for a while about the fish and the strangely fine weather and his time in Africa, without knowing if a single word was understood. —Well sir, he said finally. The heat did nothing to help the man’s odor, the priest could hardly catch a breath for the reek. —There’s some people talking of making away with you, he said. —They think you’re bad for the fish, is what it is. It’s most likely just talk. Although there’s no telling what people might do if times get bad enough and times are not good. Father Phelan glanced over his shoulder to see if any of this news registered on the man’s face, but couldn’t make out his features in the gloom. —The peace of the Lord be with you, he said before he left.

  They came for the stranger eventually, as the priest expected they would. Two dozen men drunk and armed with fish knives and hayforks and torches and rope, a ragged medieval tapestry descending the Tolt Road in the dead of night. Devine’s Widow shaking Callum awake. —They’re coming for him, she told him.

  —Who?

  —Get up, she said.

  He heard their racket then, the men shouting to one another as if the dark affected their ears as well as their eyes. Lizzie put a hand to his arm, begging him to stay inside, and Devine’s Widow went out on her own while they argued. She was standing in front of the shed door when they arrived, her shawl across her shoulders, grey hair loose about her head and her sunken face trenched with shadows in the torchlight. No one was surprised to find her there and it was Devine’s Widow they’d gotten drunk to face. There was nothing to the woman but sinew, her body like a length of hemp rope. But she’d brought most of them into the world and delivered their children as well. She sat with the dying and washed and laid out the corpses. She seemed a gatekeeper between two worlds whose say-so they were helpless to carry on without. Someone at the back of the group asked her to stand aside, the deference of the request so comical in the circumstances that she laughed.

  —I spose you wants a cup of tea with that, she said.

  Callum came around the side of the house and walked up beside his mother. —What is it you wants? he asked.

  The same polite voice from the back of the group said, We only wants to have a word with your man in the shed.

  —The idiot haven’t got a word in he’s head.

  —We’ll burn it down if we have to, Callum.

  The door opened a crack then and slowly wider and in the light of the torches Mary Tryphena looked out from the shed to tell them the man was gone.

  The mob forced their way past her and then into the house and they carried out a drunken search of the nearby bushes before heading to the waterfront. Callum stood watching the light of the torches dip in and out of the fishing rooms before he went back inside. He sat on the edge of the children’s bed to speak to Mary Tryphena. She’d had a dream that woke her, she said, and went outside. Saw the lights coming and had gone to warn the man away, shooing him off as if he was an old cow trampling the garden.

  —You went out to pee, did you?

  —No, she said.

  Callum shook his head. He didn’t know if the girl meant to say she’d dreamt the event before it happened or if it was simple coincidence, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He’d always thought Mary Tryphena had too much of the widow in her. Precocious and grasping after life in a way that made him afraid for her. Eathna had been his girl, gregarious and unserious. Dimples and a head of red curls and a lovely voice to accompany him when he sang around the house. He’d never felt the same ease with Mary Tryphena. There was more to the world than what could be seen or heard or held, he didn’t doubt the fact. But it was an invitation to trouble to put too much stock in such things, to cultivate them. —What else are you after dreaming? he said, but she only stared at him with a pitying look.

  Lizzie was still awake when he came to bed and they lay that way the rest of the night, both of them rigid and fearful. She was angry with him for going outside, though he didn�
�t see how he could leave his mother to stare down a crowd of drunkards bent on murder. —She needs no help from heaven or earth, Lizzie said. A note of disgust in her voice, as if the old woman’s fortitude was something to be despised.

  Callum was ten years older than his wife. He’d loved her from the time she was a child and spent much of his adulthood resigned to a life without her. It was thanks to some murky intervention by Devine’s Widow they were together now though they’d never acknowledged the fact. Lizzie wasn’t used to being in anyone’s debt and she never made peace with the notion.

  It was still dark outside when he rose from the bed two hours later, the morning calm and warm as all mornings had been since summer began in earnest. The sharpest sliver of moon like a fish hook over the Tolt.

  Devine’s Widow stopped him at the door as he left. —You’ll have a good day out there today, she said, and he nodded without looking at the woman.

  Daniel and James were already on the stagehead. No one mentioned the night’s events and they climbed down into the boat carting buckets of bait and jigging lines. They loosed the moorings and shoved clear into the still water of the cove. James and Daniel sat to the oars and rowed through the narrows on the high tide while Callum cut and set the baitfish on their hooks. They were an hour out before they realized the standing smell of offal and fish guts from the splitting room was still with them. The stink drifting back from the bow. They found the stranger curled into the fore-cuddy under a bit of canvas sail, a half-naked stowaway. They guessed he made his way to the fishing rooms from the shed the night before, the only place in the Gut where his own stink wouldn’t give him away, slipping into the boat to hide when the torches came for him. —Which means he’s something more than an idiot, Daniel said. The three men argued about the wisdom of keeping him in the boat, about the time that would be wasted rowing back. —He’s a goddamn jinker, James insisted. —We’ll all be drownded out here with him aboard.