Michael Crummey Read online

  Daniel suggested they just send him overside and be done with it, but Callum couldn’t see what would stop him being carted ashore in the belly of another whale and they’d be back where they began. The stranger hadn’t moved a muscle since being uncovered, only his eyes flicking back and forth between them, and he was staring at Callum now as if waiting for a verdict.

  —I’ll tell you this much, James Woundy said, I’m sick to death of carting the bastard all over God’s green earth. I’ll not row another stroke with him in the boat.

  —What about it? Callum asked the stranger. —You want to take a turn at the oars? He held out his hand as a taunt but couldn’t refuse when the man reached to take it. James and Daniel both retreated to the stern as he made his way to the taut and set the oars, rowing cross-handed toward the new sun as if the sun was his destination.

  They passed a handful of other boats that were having no luck at the fish. There was pointing and shouting when they saw who was at the oars and by the time the sun had come full into the sky there was a tiny flotilla in their wake, following at a discreet distance. Some among them men who carried torches into the Gut the night before. The stranger rowed on without a glance over his shoulder, shipping the oars on a nondescript bit of shoal ground known as the Rump.

  —Now what? Callum asked. —You wants a spell, is it? But the man tossed the grapple and turned to the wooden buckets where the lines and jiggers were coiled. He looked to Callum a moment before letting a line run through his fingers over the gunwale and then began jigging, a rhythmic full-arm heave and release that he repeated and repeated while his floating audience watched silently.

  —What do you think, Daniel? Callum asked.

  —He’s off he’s head is all.

  James said, I’ll bet the fucker won’t row us home out of it either.

  The stranger struck in then, hauling the line hand over hand, arms straining with the weight. The first pale glove of flesh let loose a pulse of oily ink as it broke the surface. —Fucking squid, James shouted. —He’s into the squid. The creatures kept coming out of the dark water, the air webbed with strings of black that fouled the clothes and faces of the men in the boat. Every line in the skiffs around them went over amid a bustle of shouting and it took time in the confusion for Callum to make sense of what was happening. The squid on the line were coming aboard in an endless march, already piling up past their ankles and it was impossible he could have hooked so many in one haul. Callum lifted one out of the bilgewater but they rose in a chain, one squid attached to the tail of the next. He looked back to the stranger and could see he’d dropped his line altogether and was bringing the squid in hand over hand in one continuous string, mouth to tail, mouth to tail, mouth to tail. He looked around at the other boats where men were jigging furiously although no one had managed to strike. Daniel had put out his own line and was having no luck either. Callum called to him and pointed. Eventually everyone stopped to watch Callum’s boat fill, the weight of the squid lowering the gunwales to the water.

  Jabez Trim rowed in close and asked if he might have the chain when they were done and Callum cut it clean, handing it across the open water. —Don’t drop it for jesussake, Jabez said. When the second boat was full the squid were handed on to a third. By mid-afternoon every shallop and half-shallop and skiff in the flotilla was weighted and the crews blackened and fousty with ink. The chain came back to Callum and he tied it to the stern with two half-hitches before they began the slow row back to the Gut, keeping head-on to the waves to avoid swamping in the swell. Callum thought of his mother’s words to him before he left the house that morning and a chill passed through him to think she’d foreseen such a thing. He was struck by the sensation she’d made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head. They stopped to let other crews take their fill as they made their way home and by the time the last squid came over the gunwales every boat on the water had taken a full load aboard.

  The coffin built to bury Michael Devine was whitewashed and fitted with rockers and used as the infant’s crib during the warm summer months. He was an uncommonly pleasant child after his baptism, never crying for more than hunger and sleeping through the night by his second month. He was known on the shore as Little Lazarus, the child rising each morning from his casket with a smile on his face, untroubled by dreams.

  The albino stranger came to be known as Judah, a compromise between the competing stories of who it was in the Bible had been swallowed by a whale. Jabez Trim complained that Judah was a country in the Holy Lands and not a sensible thing to call a person but he abandoned the argument once it was clear the name had taken hold.

  In the weeks after the chain of squid was brought ashore the cod reappeared in vast numbers and no one could keep ahead of the fish. They couldn’t remember a time when cod were as plentiful or so eager to be hauled aboard and everyone credited Judah’s presence for the change. Boats followed in the wake of Callum’s skiff, staying as close as they could to their good luck charm. The fish seemed to float along beneath Judah’s feet as if they were tied to the keel by a string.

  Jabez Trim closed a Sunday service by reading the story of Jesus instructing fishermen to put their nets down where all day they’d come up empty, how they came away then with more fish than they could haul, and no one failed to think of Judah. By the end of the summer they were calling him the Great White or St. Jude for the patron saint of lost causes. Catholics began crossing themselves in his presence as they would before the altar. The sick sought him out for a laying on of hands if all other cures had failed, sitting with Judah in the poisoned air of his shack and placing his hand against what ailed them. There was talk that one person or another had returned to the blush of health after an audience with St. Jude.

  Despite it all, Lizzie refused to allow him across the threshold of the house. Devine’s Widow made a show of arguing he should be invited in to eat but the smell of the man was enough to stifle the appetite of a pig. He took his meals sitting on a stump of wood in the open air and Mary Tryphena studied him when she thought she wasn’t being watched. His brows and lashes so white his eyes seemed bald, like the lidless stare of a codfish. There was something at once stunned and slightly menacing about the man.

  He recognized the name he was called by and followed simple orders or requests, though his life and work were so governed by routine that the simplest of hand gestures or a nod of the head communicated all he needed to know. Most were convinced he understood not a word of English or Irish. When boats worked close to Judah on the water, people spoke about him as if he were deaf.

  —Shits as much as the next person, Callum said in response to their questions. —Eats like a Spaniard. Sleeps like the dead. Haven’t seen him kneel to pray or cross he’s self the once. And he got the smell of a Prot on him.

  —You miserable bastard, Callum Devine.

  —Now Jabez, he said, I’m only having you on.

  —Have he ever spoke a word to you?

  —You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, Callum said. —But he’s not a fool.

  Jabez nodded. —That one’s as deep as the grave, I expect.

  At the end of that summer there was a confirmation service at Kerrivan’s Tree. The Mass was said in Latin and the rest of the service in Irish, although most English on the shore attended for the indecipherable pageant of it. Mary Tryphena and Floretta Tibbo and Saul Toucher’s ten-year-old triplets took their first communion as the sun dropped below the hills above the harbor. The triplets were identical and indistinguishable even to their parents but for Alphonsus who’d won the single pair of shoes between them by lot. He slept in the boots to keep them to himself, though his brothers took it in turns to claim one or the other was Alphonsus and the boy wearing the shoes had stolen them from their rightful owner. The shoes and the name traveled from one boy to the next in an endless round and not even the triplets could recall anymore who had been the original Alphonsus. When Father Phelan
announced before the sacrament that we are all one in Christ Jesus, the three brothers seemed deflated, as if they’d had enough of such arrangements.

  After the service a more secular sacrament was celebrated on the Commons above Kerrivan’s Tree with jugs of spruce beer and black rum and shine passed around. Men and women and not a few children besides got drunk there, the moon come out and the mosquitoes and blackflies fierce in the dusk. King-me Sellers and Selina and their grandson made a brief appearance and a handful of people caught sight of Mr. Gallery circling the clearing to watch the festivities. A bonfire of driftwood and green spruce and dried dung from the goats and sheep that grazed the meadow burning at the center of the field. Jabez Trim’s three-string fiddle and a wheezy accordion played by Daniel Woundy led a dance of dark shadows tramping the grass flat. Callum persuaded Judah into the gathering where they danced arm in arm, both men polluted with drink. Judah’s fishy stink drifted under the smoke of the fire and everyone on the field welcomed it as the smell of abundance and prosperity come among them. Callum knew a thousand tunes and had been a regular entertainment at weddings and wakes and he was coaxed into singing half a dozen songs for the crowd. It was the first time anyone heard him utter a note since Eathna died the year before. His voice like the first taste of sugar after Lent, a sweetness that was almost hallucinatory.

  Couples disappeared into the alders and berry bushes beyond the field as the night wore on, shifting clothes to accommodate the drunken love they had to offer one another. Shouting and singing and petty arguments flared among the congregation as they staggered toward the collective hangover awaiting them. They were never more content with their lot in life, never happier to consent to it.

  Lizzie left for home with young Lazarus right after Mass and Mary Tryphena spent the evening in the company of Devine’s Widow. Her first communion was a disappointment, the ceremony tarnished by the sullenness of the Toucher boys who swore under their breath and picked at one another through the service. But the night on the Commons that followed was more to her liking, the firelight and fierce release of it. She walked down to Kerrivan’s Tree to hide when her grandmother announced it was time to go home. She took off her bonnet so the white of it wouldn’t give her away and she climbed into the branches, clear of the old woman’s meddling. King-me’s grandson had settled into the upper branches earlier in the night for the same reasons, but he was invisible in the pitch and Mary Tryphena sang to herself as she often did when she was alone. She almost fell from her perch when he spoke to say he liked her voice. —I wasn’t singing for you, she told him.

  —Still, he said.

  Absalom, his name was. He said hardly a word in company, and opinion was divided on whether this was due to his stutter or to losing his parents so early or simply a mark of Sellers’ airs at work in the youngster. He was introverted and queer and seemed much younger than others his age, sheltered as he was by living in Selina’s House. Absalom reached to pick one of the young apples, handing it to Mary Tryphena after taking a bite himself, and the unexpected intimacy of the gesture made her stomach quiver like a hive of bees. She watched the featureless outline of him in the dark awhile. She said, Do you know who I am, Absalom?

  —Mary Tryphena Devine, he answered, stuttering on the D.

  She thought he was making fun of her in some obscure way, but his manner was all innocence. Somehow he didn’t know her mother was King-me’s daughter and Absalom’s aunt, that he and Mary Tryphena were cousins. It was a laughable ignorance in a boy his age and she felt a rush of maternal affection for him. The smell of the apple was surprisingly sweet and she bit into the hard fruit before passing it back. They finished the apple together and Absalom climbed past her to the ground then, his hands traveling her arms and hips and legs as he went. From the base of the tree he said, You’ve the loveliest hair, and she answered good night without looking down.

  The bonfire went on burning till the small hours of the night, Father Phelan the last to leave the dregs. He was pleased with himself and with the evening, the children brought to the faith and his homily on the jealousy of angels, the gathering on the Commons and the more intimate gatherings in the bushes at the edge of the field. Life insisting on itself out there in the dark, though times had been mean and uncertain. He found the dirt path near Kerrivan’s Tree and followed it through the village, drunkenly blessing each dwelling he passed. He walked the steep ascent of the Tolt Road and stood on the headland awhile to catch his wind before descending into Paradise Deep. The coastline bereft of light for a thousand miles in either direction, the ocean festering below him. While he stood at the cliff’s edge he blessed the fish of the sea and the dull coin of the moon sailing behind clouds.

  Legal strictures against Catholicism had been lifted decades past and a vicar appointed to govern all ecclesiastical matters from St. John’s. But Father Phelan continued to operate outside the bounds of state and Church hierarchy. He lived among his parishioners like a refugee, dependent on the charity of the communities he served. He claimed it was only in the Gut and Paradise Deep that he felt safe to walk about in daylight. The shore was so far from St. John’s, he said, so far from the minds of the governor and the vicar, that they were almost forgotten.

  The surf was heavy with the tide’s turn, the shudder traveling up the cliff and through his body, his head like a bell being rung by a hammer. His order preached primitive poverty and austerity, and Newfoundland might have been created to embody both. He was a lousy priest, he knew, and deserved no better than to serve in such a backwater shithole of Christendom. But he couldn’t deny the Lord at work in him, that hammer striking.

  He was prodigal with blessings in his drunkenness. He turned to the south to bless the people of the Gut and to the north to bless Paradise Deep. He blessed the figure of Mr. Gallery who had waited near the Commons to follow him home and waited for him now just off the Tolt Road. He opened his trousers and wavered at the lip of the precipice to piss into the waters below. He blessed his shriveled little pecker before tucking it away to walk into Paradise Deep. He held a number of particular blessings in reserve, thinking of Mrs. Gallery waiting for him in her bed and the archipelago of angels they were about to inspire to fits of jealousy.

  Through that fall Mary Tryphena found herself showered with small anonymous gifts, handfuls of partridgeberries in the bowl of a leaf, smooth stones or shells from the beach, the weathered skull of a bird, a sweet apple from Kerrivan’s Tree in a square of cloth. There was no privacy in her life and the gifts were placed in public spaces where she would stumble upon them, on the Washing Rocks at the mouth of the brook, tied to the door of the outhouse before she made her last visit of the night.

  Occasionally her mother or father or Judah discovered the finger of polished driftwood on the doorstep, the jewel of seaglass on the windowsill. But Mary Tryphena never doubted who they were meant for. She was surprised by Absalom’s stealth, by the knowledge he had somehow gleaned about the particulars of her days. It seemed out of character, given what she knew of his awkwardness and insularity, given he had no idea they were cousins.

  She hoarded the keepsakes under the roots of an old spruce stump near the house and told no one about the furtive relationship, knowing from the start it was an impossible match. King-me Sellers had disowned Lizzie when she married Callum Devine and the man would never allow Absalom, his only acknowledged grandchild, his sole heir, to follow after her. And it was just as unlikely that Callum and Lizzie would consent to such an arrangement.

  They saw each other only when she attended one of Jabez Trim’s services or accompanied her father to Sellers’ store for winter supplies and Absalom was so withdrawn that Mary Tryphena doubted her reading of the world. There was such an unfamiliar pleasure to the conversation between them, such an adult privacy, that it made her feel sick to think she might be wrong. It wasn’t until the heavy snows blew in and the men began spending their days in the backcountry cutting and hauling wood that something definitive came
to her, a letter folded and tied with string that she discovered among the blankets of her bed. The boldness of it startled her, that Absalom could come into the house undiscovered.

  She carried the paper in a pocket close to her heart for weeks afterwards, unfolding it in her rare moments alone. She studied the note like a botanist in the presence of some exotic flower. She smelled it, she licked the paper and the ink which tasted of oil and berries, she prayed to it as if the words might be coaxed into coming to her in her dreams. She passed her days in a state of irritable exhaustion, she kicked and called out in her sleep. Devine’s Widow was convinced only a man could be at the root of her trouble but Mary Tryphena denied it. Her mother came to her at night to ask if there was anything she could do and Mary Tryphena turned away to bawl into her mattress of straw. Lizzie had set out to teach Mary Tryphena her letters as a young child but the lessons were abandoned during the lean years of rough food and exhaustion and she’d forgotten most of the alphabet in the time since. The note she carried was like a page out of Jabez Trim’s Bible, the word of God which meant one thing and one thing only, and only those initiated into the mysteries could decipher it.