Authors: Michael Crummey
Dodge lifted a hand. —I was all they had to look to, he said. He seemed to drift a few moments before he said, You never met the widow, Father. Devine’s Widow?
—She was long gone by the time I got here.
—I went to see her before she died. A hundred if she was a day. Dodge closed his eyes. —She was a loathsome creature, Father.
—This wouldn’t be the time, Reddigan said, to dwell on such things.
But it was too late to warn the dying man off standing one more time at the bedside to look down on that gaunt face, the bottomless black well of her eyes. —I’ve come to pray for you, he’d announced and the widow turned her head to the wall to dismiss him. —Pride goeth before a fall, he said.
—I’d watch my step then, she said, if I was you.
He was stung by the gall of her. —Don’t you have the slightest concern for your soul, Missus?
—I don’t remember being born, she said, and I won’t remember dying.
He’d left the old woman there without a word of comfort, wishing her dead and gone as he walked back over the Tolt. The strength of that urge surprised him, it was animate and vital, a feral creature he dragged around on a leash, it kicked and clawed and kept him awake half the night with its racket. Reverend Dodge had never experienced a hangover though something akin to it afflicted him when he heard the news of the widow’s death—a foaming sear of regret and a sick aftertaste in his mouth, the suspicion he’d made a royal ass of himself. That he’d been wrong about God or himself somehow.
Dodge looked up at the priest. —I hated that woman, Father.
—The Lord tests us, Reddigan suggested.
—The Lord is a miserable so-and-so, Dodge said.
After the priest gave a final blessing, Flossie and Adelina came to sit with him. They offered to read awhile but he sent them away. —You shouldn’t be alone, Flossie said.
He shook his head. —I’m not alone.
God, they thought he meant. And he allowed them to think as much as they rustled their heavy skirts through the door. He stared up at the ceiling after they’d gone, left alone with the widow woman’s shade. As was right and proper. He’d seen her at work through the years, sitting with the sick and dying. Not a comforting presence, but inexhaustibly patient. Days without respite sometimes before she could stand and weight the eyelids down. She was a little pool of darkness across the room now and he tried to raise a hand to greet her. But he’d left it too long and even that gesture was beyond him. When Adelina looked in an hour later he was gone, arms folded on the chest, the eyes drawn closed.
Dodge’s death was the end of the Episcopalian Church in Paradise Deep, the congregation too small to warrant a new minister. The last adherents gathered for lay services a few months longer before they disappeared into the bosom of the Methodists, and Reverend Violet’s congregation eclipsed the Catholic numbers for the first time. Father Reddigan continued to suffer occasional losses to the evangelist, prompting him to write the archbishop about his concern for the Church on the shore.
Monsignor, we are still celebrating Mass in a wooden chapel raised by an apostate more than half a century ago, one can hardly expect it to instill a sense of God’s majesty within the congregation, and perhaps it is time, Monsignor, to consider building a cathedral commensurate with the beauty and glory of the Holy Roman Church
.
Every Catholic fisherman on the shore gave over his catch on the feast days of the saints to help underwrite the project, and the cornerstone was laid in 1892. The black granite for the church was quarried in the hills above Devil’s Cove and shipped to Paradise Deep one half-ton block at a time, the stones dressed and raised under the supervision of two Italian masons recruited by the archbishop.
In December of 1894 the Union Bank and the Commercial Bank of Newfoundland collapsed under the burden of overextended credit to St. John’s merchants and the entire colony descended into bankruptcy. Levi Sellers stopped taking fish altogether during the first year of the crisis and many Protestants joined the Catholic work crews on the cathedral for the single meal a day provided to volunteers. It was the largest stone building ever constructed outside St. John’s and almost every soul on the shore had a hand in raising the sanctuary before it was done. There was a nondenominational pride taken in the height of the twin spires, as if the sprawling cathedral were a physical extension of their will, a testament to what they were capable of in the worst of times. Even the atheist doctor took an interest, setting up his box camera on the Gaze every few months to photograph the latest stage.
Three months before the church was completed, Obediah Trim fell from a five-storey scaffold while installing stained-glass windows behind the altar. His body was carted to the hospital where the doctor set the multiple fractures to make him look halfways human in his casket. Newman wired the misshapen jaw in place and he stared at the face from one side and then the other, testing it against his memory of the man. —There you are, Obediah, he said. He touched his finger to the faint line below the Adam’s apple—the kinkorn, as Obediah called it—tracing the scar he’d left removing the egg-shaped fibroid in his first weeks on the shore. —There you are, he said again.
Azariah came to the doctor’s office the day before the funeral, carrying Jabez Trim’s Bible. He placed the ancient text on Newman’s desk. —We thought you should have it, Az said. —Me and Obediah. Once we was gone.
—You aren’t planning on leaving us are you, Az?
—I wanted to be sure it got to you, is all. You seemed so taken with it. It’s not much for all you’re after doing for us crowd, he said.
Newman nodded helplessly and the two men sat in silence a few moments. —I hear Tryphie’s girl is going to sing at the service, Newman said finally.
—We’re grateful to have her, Az said. —She’s what now? Thirteen?
—Just turned fourteen.
—Where does the time go, Azariah said and the doctor shrugged.
Newman left the Good Book where it sat on the desk, refused even to touch it. He couldn’t shake the sense that acknowledging the Bible’s presence would mean losing Azariah to some misadventure as well. It was Bride who rescued the book from the clutter months afterwards, placing it on a shelf in the storage room they’d made of the servant’s quarters off the kitchen.
Father Reddigan gave his congregation leave to attend the funeral and the crowd of mourners spilled out the doors, circling the Methodist chapel to listen at the open windows. Esther Newman sang “Amazing Grace,” the hymn carrying all the way to the harbor where even the gulls fell silent to hear it. Old Callum and Martha Devine together couldn’t hold a candle, people said. Esther herself wasn’t always easy to take, but her voice inspired the same sense of proprietary awe as the new cathedral. As if it was the best of what they were, distilled into something elegant and pure and inviolable.
Esther was born precocious and brazen and generally made her parents’ lives a trial. She avoided Minnie’s preoccupation with manners and chores by escaping to the Gut to sit with Mary Tryphena, listening to the old woman prattle on about the courtships and epidemics and wild winters she’d seen in her time, walking her over the Tolt to visit with Judah in his cell. It was obvious to Esther that her mother had no time for Eli Devine, and she went out of her way to cultivate a relationship with him as well, just to spite Minnie.
Eli saw early on that Esther’s talent was more than the shore could hope to hold to itself and he encouraged her nascent ambitions, as if some small piece of himself might escape into the wider world with her. She’d long ago outstripped what lessons Adelina Sellers had to offer and it was Eli’s idea to find an instructor in St. John’s, to have her board there several months of the year. Dr. Newman agreed to bankroll the venture and talked Tryphie and Minnie past their reluctance.
She was scheduled to leave for the capital city on the season’s last packet boat two weeks after Obediah’s funeral, and no one was surprised in the months that followed to hear Esther was singing at churches and concerts and weddings across St. John’s, that she received invitations to perform in Halifax and Quebec City. Three years later the governor himself would request she be featured at turn-of-the-century celebrations on Signal Hill. And in the spring of 1900 she would sail for France with letters of introduction from the Newfoundland governor and the organist at the Anglican cathedral.
Soon enough, all the shore would hear of her would come from newspaper reports of her performances in the great opera houses of Europe, the London papers referring to her as the Northern Pearl, as the Nightingale of Paradise. The early letters would trickle off to occasional postcards and even that callous dismissal of their place in her life would seem inevitable and understandable. They would all remember her as she was at Obediah’s funeral, when she made their grief seem regal and glorious, when she still belonged to them alone.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dr. Newman gathered the work crews in front of the cathedral’s main doors for a final photograph. One hundred and forty-seven men sitting on the steps of the building that was only days from completion, Eli in the back row beside Azariah Trim. Father Reddigan spoke to the doctor as the men wandered back to their work, asking for a print that could be framed and hung in the church.
No one could say who first took note of the anomaly and some who examined the picture in the vestibule dismissed the notion altogether. It was just a trick of shadow and light and wishful thinking, Newman said. But most swore they could see the dead man in the back row, his features indistinct but recognizable. Obediah staring out between the faces of Az and Eli. One hundred and forty-eight men on the steps of the cathedral they’d raised. Father Reddigan set a candle beneath the photograph that was lit all through Advent and there was a steady stream of visitors to see Obediah and bless themselves or whisper a prayer.
Eli had been at the foot of the scaffold when Obediah fell and he helped lift the shattered corpse into a cart. Every night since the accident the man appeared in Eli’s dreams with his marionette limbs akimbo, his broken jaw flapping uselessly east and west. The thought of Obediah standing beside him whole and unharmed seemed a ridiculous notion, but it was too great a temptation to resist in the end. He went to the cathedral just after dawn on Tibb’s Eve, hoping to find the place deserted. But Hannah Blade was there, standing at the photograph. He was about to slip out the door when she noticed him, backing away from the picture quickly, feeling caught out.
—Give you a fright, he said.
Hannah still had no man of her own. Eli heard of one or two fellows coming round to see her before Magdalen died but it seemed settled afterwards that she’d look out to her widowed father and wind up alone.
—First time in to see it? he asked.
—I been in a few mornings, she said.
Eli nodded. —Is it him there, do you think?
—Father will be wanting his breakfast, she said and she went by him with her head down.
—Say me to John, Eli called after her. He watched her awhile before he let the door close, turning toward the photograph across the vestibule, the candle alight beneath it. And without taking a step nearer it came clear to him why Hannah had been there. He leaned on the door, knocking his head against the wood, as if he might clear his mind of the realization.
He left without looking at the picture, making his way to Selina’s House and walking to the workshop Tryphie had set up in an old barn. There was a forge at one end, benches along the other cluttered with tools and wood and metal, jars of screws and nails, blueprints and sheets of paper littered with sketches and dimensions. Tryphie’s two half-brothers were both practicing physicians, one working on the Labrador coast and the other in Montreal, which made it easier for Newman to accept Tryphie’s refusal to attend medical school. He eked a living from a stream of royal patents for new and improved wrenches, new and improved school desks, new and improved can openers, new and improved acetylene lighthouse lamps. Tryphie also made a few dollars as a carpenter, building small boats and puncheon tubs and other odds and ends. But all that activity was simply a way to avoid destitution. He devoted every moment he could afford to the fanciful creatures churned up by the endlessly turning gyre of his mind. Tools with arcane applications, many of them surgical in nature as requested by Dr. Newman; a method for fabricating and setting false teeth; coils of wire for conducting electrical current. The walls were hung with a dozen prototypes of his flying machine, one of which cost him a broken leg during a test flight off the workshop roof. —There are some things, Eli told him then, that are better left in your head, Tryphie.
Much of the floor space was occupied now by a great fish built of iron intended for underwater travel, the bowels of the creature just large enough to seat a man next to a series of levers and pulleys to operate the fins and rudder and ballast tanks. The Sculpin, Eli called it. They’d spent much of the previous year arguing the lunacy of the notion as the fish was framed out and took shape on the workshop floor. —You’ll have yourself drowned in that goddamn thing, Eli said during his last visit two months before.
Tryphie had flung a screwdriver at him. —Fly the fuck out of it, he shouted as he reached for a hammer.
Eli hadn’t come by the workshop since that argument and he had to make an effort even now not to ridicule the contraption. —How’s Minnie keeping? he asked.
Tryphie leaned against a workbench, wiping at his hands with a rag. —She’s after bawling herself to sleep every night since Esther left us.
Minnie had been dead set against sending her only child off to St. John’s to be molded and coiffed by some stranger. She was alone in her opposition—Tryphie and the doctor, even Bride siding with the girl’s ambition—and she acquiesced in the end. But things were said between Minnie and Eli in the process that cemented their dislike for one another.
—I expect it’s hard for her, Eli said.
—You don’t know fuck-all about it is the very truth of the matter.