Authors: Michael Crummey
—Hell’s flames, Absalom said, lifting his face to the ceiling. —I wonder if we’d ever married, Mary Tryphena. Would I have killed you or you have killed me?
It was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging the note he left for her when she was a girl. She was on the verge of asking what possessed him to use those bizarre biblical endearments, but Absalom seemed to regret the mention of marriage. —Ann Hope will be worried if she finds me gone after church, he said.
—As she should be, I spose, Mary Tryphena said quietly. She’d expected the sting of shame would ease over time but just hearing Ann Hope’s name made her face burn. The new mother lying with her infant in an upstairs room as she shuffled to Virtue’s bed with the child’s father, Absalom falling on her with his pants around his ankles. They lay still after he came, both aware of the house suddenly and listening for voices or footsteps. Mary Tryphena’s arm was levered awkwardly behind her back and she’d lost all sensation in the limb beneath their weight. —Get up, she said, shifting under him. —Get up, get up. He rolled away and she pulled her clothes together as best she could, wanting out of the house.
He tried to say her name but the ghost of his old stammer had come back to haunt him. It was the first thing people noticed when he returned from England, that he’d all but conquered his childhood stutter. He grabbed her wrist to make her wait, hauling his pants up with his free hand. —I have s-s-something, he said.
She waited in the kitchen for him to come back from his office and he handed her an envelope. A kernel of something hard in the bottom, a stone or a dried seed or what. She shook it out and a shard of white clattered on the tabletop. She picked it up to take a closer look. A little wave of shock and revulsion rolling through her when she realized what she was holding.
—I thought you should, he said. —I don’t know. It doesn’t b-belong to me.
He placed the tooth back in the envelope and pressed it on her, as if it was payment for a debt, as if that tooth would free him of any claim she might have. He was God’s own fool, she thought. The spasm of revulsion galled the back of her throat and the sour flavor stayed with her for days afterwards. She could still taste it now as the events played over in her mind, these years later.
Absalom turned away from Mary Tryphena and the baby to retrieve his walking stick, eager to be gone. There was something odd about him, Mary Tryphena thought, a vulnerability she hadn’t seen in him since he was a boy, and she felt the need to give him something before he left. —The youngster has your eyes, she said. But Absalom was unable to look at her directly, raising his walking stick in mock salute as he stepped out the door.
He walked with his head down toward the Tolt Road, thinking, as he always did after seeing Mary Tryphena, about that tooth in its envelope. He’d gone looking for it the day after he married Ann Hope, walking back and forth along the path without knowing he was searching until he spotted it in the grass. Unable to explain that urge to himself even now. Kept it tucked away for years before he pressed it on Mary Tryphena, to make amends somehow. To have something more pass between them than a sordid little tryst in a servant’s bed. Her husband’s tooth. Hell’s flames. He was God’s own fool, and if ever proof were needed.
He couldn’t avoid feeling watched as he walked to the Tolt but if there were faces in the windows, he was too blind to tell for certain. Only Ann Hope and Levi knew his sight was failing and not even Levi knew how quickly it was leaving him. He’d lately found it impossible to read or make entries in the account logs and he finally had the doctor come see him at Selina’s House. Newman turning Absalom’s face to the light of an upstairs window, moving a finger across his field of vision. He sat back and folded his arms. —How many fingers am I holding up? he asked.
—Somewhere between one and five, Absalom said. He asked Newman how long he had before he was completely blind.
—Months, the doctor said. —Years perhaps, but not many.
—Don’t tell my wife.
—I’m right here, Ann Hope said from across the room.
It seemed to him his body was in open revolt, hot coals flaring in his joints as he walked down the Tolt Road. The path was wide enough now for horse and cart but it was studded with roots and stones and Absalom walked with his head at an odd angle, trying to watch his feet from the corner of his eye. He stumbled on the path, flailing to catch himself, and he felt exactly like the ridiculous old man he appeared. His entire life’s endeavor about to pass on to a son who despised him. —Hell’s flames, he said aloud.
King-me was thought to be a wealthy man but the truth was he’d nearly bankrupted himself by the time he died, licked out by grief for the wife he didn’t know he loved and ranting about the nightmare fate of his sealing vessel. Absalom put little stock in dreams but King-me unnerved him with sheer repetition, with his detailed litany of disaster. He overinsured the
Cornelia
and came through her loss with money enough to finance a larger vessel that enjoyed better luck on the ice. He added a second, then a third schooner to the fleet, and the annual harvest of seal pelts brought in just enough to offset the losses incurred in the cod fishery. It was a delicate balance that a single lean year could sabotage. And there was no way to make more of the operation with most of what the shore produced going directly to Spurriers.
The firm was known as Spurious & Co. when Absalom worked as an apprentice in the accounting department in Poole. Cod prices collapsed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the undercapitalized business was kept afloat with one dubious financial sleight of hand after another. Ann Hope’s brother stayed on in the accounting office and his letters kept them abreast of the increasingly outlandish maneuvers. Absalom leveraged a purchase of the company’s assets on the shore months before a fraud investigation sank Spurriers for good. The transaction made a reality of King-me’s charade, leaving Absalom owner and lord of all he surveyed, though it wasn’t until the shift into the Labrador fishery that Sellers & Co. managed to post a profit. And by then Absalom had lost three children to the Boston States. The eldest married and gone before Levi was born, the two older sons following in quick succession. And all three lobbied their parents to sell off and come to the States as well.
Ann Hope was uncharacteristically silent on the topic, though it was obvious what was in her heart. Most people on the shore were still dressed in rags, their children afflicted with rickets and consumption, only a handful could recite the alphabet, despite her lifetime crusade against squalor and ignorance. Nancy’s letters were full of music and theater and poetry readings, church bazaars and tea parties, market stalls filled with vegetables and meat of all descriptions. Fresh tomatoes. Pears. Just the words on the page brought a knot to her throat. But she never so much as hinted at her opinion, wanting her husband to do this one thing for her without being told. It made a sullen walker of Absalom in the last half of his life. To have so consciously disappointed his wife.
By the time he descended the Tolt Road the streets were busy with parishioners on their way home from evening worship. Levi and his wife were at Selina’s House when he arrived, seated in the living room with Ann Hope and Virtue while Adelina served tea. He took his seat beside Virtue as if he had just returned from a quick visit to the kitchen.
—How was your father’s sermon? he asked Flossie, addressing the person least likely to ignore him.
—If you are so interested in the theological musings of Reverend Dodge, Ann Hope said, perhaps you should have attended the service.
—Fresh air was all the blessing I needed this evening. Walked out the Tolt Road as far as the Pond.
Reverend Dodge arrived after dispersing the last of his congregation and once he was settled with a cup of tea he said, We missed you at church this evening, Absalom.
—I converted to the Methodists, Absalom said. —Like everyone else.
Dodge pursed his lips to say he understood the comment was meant to be humorous.
—I expect you’ll be preaching to an empty church before long, Reverend.
—The Lord works in mysterious ways, Mr. Sellers, he said.
Levi was turning his cup in circles on its saucer during this exchange and he waited until he was sure it was done before he spoke. —I’ve heard reports from several sources this past week, he said. He used his most perplexed and innocent tone. —That Dr. Newman made a call at the house?
—He came to have a look at my knees, Absalom lied.
—They’ve been bothering you more of late? Levi had his mother’s nose and seemed always to be looking down that eagle’s beak as he spoke.
—I’m an old man, Absalom said. —Everything bothers me.
—And what miracle cure did the good doctor offer that made you want to walk out as far as Nigger Ralph’s Pond this evening?
—Levi, Ann Hope said.
Adelina set her cup in her lap and sighed. Virtue reached to take Absalom’s hand and she smiled across at him with her vacant look of affection. The old housekeeper was the excuse he gave when Levi or Flossie or Reverend Dodge raised the possibility of a retirement to the States. Virtue wasn’t well enough to leave behind or take with them, he said. And there was enough truth in it to give the claim some conviction. But everyone sitting in the parlor knew Absalom chose to stay for the sake of Mary Tryphena and for Henley, a man he’d never spoken to directly.
Even to Absalom it made little sense, cleaving the family he had for an illegitimate son he couldn’t acknowledge. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave Henley behind completely, to vanish from his son’s life as his own parents had. Thinking an opportunity would come to make things right if he stayed close and waited.
The Labrador crews began returning by mid-September and the Devines arrived home on the afternoon of the twenty-third. Patrick’s oldest boy, Amos, had grown half a foot over the summer. Mary Tryphena wouldn’t have recognized him but for the white hair and the pale pale blue of the eyes. Henley nodded warily to Bride when they reached the garden and she held the baby up for him to see. At the house the men stripped off their clothes in the yard where the lice and fleas would be boiled out of the seams. Judah stood a little off to himself and Mary Tryphena couldn’t help taking him in. He looked almost normal among the group of naked men, their torsos the same cold slug-white under the one change of clothes they’d lived in nearly half a year. The same hum of filth rising from each and everyone.
It struck her that Judah had barely changed in the years since she’d first seen him naked on the landwash, his age still a mystery to judge by sight alone. Time had been kind to him, she thought, though the notion was a poor gloss for what she actually felt and couldn’t articulate to herself. That something in the man seemed to stand apart from time altogether.
They were all in a fine mood. They’d made a good voyage of it, the fish cured to a high grade. No one was killed, there’d been no injuries beyond cuts and bruises. Amos was given his head with the rum bottle the season’s last Saturday and he’d thrown Laz’s wooden leg on the fire. And even that event was already reduced to anecdote, a story to amuse themselves and tease the youngster. Lazarus stood naked in the cool September air holding the new peg leg he’d carved during the voyage home, the straps fashioned out of leather salvaged from an old apron.
—D-don’t let Amos near the stove, Mother, Henley shouted. —He’ll have every chair in the house b-broke up for f-firewood.
Laughter all around. Even Judah managed a tired smile. And Mary Tryphena allowed herself to think perhaps it had been for the best.
Years followed the same migratory pattern. Henley slept chaste beside his wife through the winter and took what pleasure could be found on the Labrador during the fishing season. Even Harold Callum Devine could sense his father’s habitual lean northward and he never warmed to the man, as guarded saying his goodbyes each May as when the stranger arrived home in the fall.
Patrick and Amos followed the women into the Methodist fold. —We spends enough time apart, Patrick said, without going to separate churches every Sunday. Martha had inherited Callum Devine’s gift and she was a major attraction at the services, singing out over the congregation during the hymns. Her white hair like a saint’s halo shimmering with the palest colors of the northern lights, her voice like the voice of a creature only half human. She and Bride accompanied Reverend Violet on his summer mission trips along the shore, Bride witnessing to the change Jesus made in her life, Martha leading the motley congregations through half a dozen hymns.
The Trim brothers volunteered their boat as transportation for the mission trips and the American doctor sometimes traveled with them to pull teeth and lance boils on the stagehead. Reverend Violet was leery of allowing a hardened apostate to accompany the evangels, but came to appreciate how physical relief and spiritual rebirth could follow one on the other. Bride became a kind of nurse during these trips, assisting during procedures requiring an extra hand, working with Newman until the service began. The sound of Martha singing “Rock of Ages” or “Amazing Grace” would steal the last of his patients and he followed them up to watch from the doorway. Bride and her youngster taking up a collection of pennies while Martha lifted her face to the wooden rafters. Those raw and unlettered congregations startled by the hint of grace in her voice, half of them in tears to hear it.
Bride’s son had long ago been nicknamed Tryphie, in honor of Mary Tryphena’s legendary inquisitiveness as a girl. Bride could see Newman found children trying and she did her best to shield him from the boy. But confined aboard the Trims’ thirty-footer, there were inevitable interrogations.
—You’re American, Tryphie said, staring at the doctor, and Newman admitted he was. The boy wanted to know if the doctor’s mother and father were American as well, did he have brothers and sisters and were they American, did he have a dog, a horse, a cow and were they all American? It was exactly the kind of child’s questioning Newman found exasperating though he did his best to hide it around Bride. —Yes, he said, my dog is American, my horse is American, my cow is American.