Authors: Michael Crummey
Esther could sleep for hours and he was at loose ends without her activity to occupy him. He pretended to read, half listening for the sound of her up and about again. He copied endlessly from Jabez Trim’s Bible, he chopped firewood and hauled water and cleaned ash from the fireplace and the kitchen stove. He snooped through the rooms of the old hospital, picking through the clutter and junk, puzzling over the arcane surgical equipment or browsing through stacks of medical notes. Esther woke hungover and miserable and Abel boiled the kettle for tea, folding her hands about the mug to be sure she wouldn’t drop it.
Hannah came by with meals on occasion, to satisfy herself Abel wasn’t starving to death. Once a week Bride visited the house to ask after Esther. —She isn’t causing you too much trouble?
—I don’t mind, he told her.
—I could come for a night sometime to spell you off.
—We’re fine, he said.
He resented these incursions into what he thought of as his territory. There had been no further word of shipping Esther off to Connecticut and by March month Abel had forgotten his station was intended to be temporary.
At the beginning of May, Esther’s father came to Selina’s House unannounced. Tryphie arrived with Eli and they knocked for fear of what they might barge into if they did not. —Hello Abel, Tryphie said when the boy peered out.
Abel slammed the door shut in the men’s faces and stood behind it, the floor pitching beneath him.
—Open the jesus door, Eli shouted.
The goat looked out from the parlor, chewing placidly on a tuft of ancient case notes. Esther came to the top of the stairs and stared down at him where he barred the entrance. She was wearing a stage dress of black chiffon, backlit by sunlight through a window.
—You’ve the loveliest hair, he told her. He was struggling not to bawl, his pale face gone awry with the effort.
—You let them in now, Esther said. It was the first full sentence she’d ever blessed him with. —Tell them I’ll be down the once.
Abel waited in the parlor with the imperturbable goat while Esther sat with the men in the kitchen. Eli appeared at the door finally, looking in at his son among the filth of the room. The youngster unable to hold his father’s eye, his life hanging in the balance. —She says she won’t leave with him, Eli said.
He only nodded at the news.
—Get that animal out of the house, Abel.
And he nodded again.
Tryphie stayed on in Paradise Deep a month, trying to cajole his daughter into coming to live with him in Hartford. He spent part of every day in the company of the Honorable Member, sitting in an office on the second floor of the F.P.U. Hall, staring out the window at Selina’s House as Eli blathered on about the union. Twenty thousand men—a tenth of the country’s population—had taken the pledge, fourteen union candidates elected to the House of Assembly in the last election. A monthly union newsletter to counter the fabrications in the merchant-run papers. Eli had a cot in a room behind the office and spent most of his nights there. Trade agents across Europe to sell their fish, Eli told him, an F.P.U. office in Greece. Levi Sellers reduced to pandering to the Catholics just to keep afloat. —We can’t get enough warehouse space in St. John’s to supply the operation, he said. —Mr. Coaker is looking for a place closer to the northeast coast. We’re going to build every inch of this from the ground up somewhere, warehouses, drying rooms, cooperage, a shipyard. An electric generating station.
—I think I’ll wander on, Tryphie said without looking away from the window.
—Elevators, Eli said, to shift the fish from the drying rooms to the warehouses at ground level. Things that have never been built before, things that haven’t hardly been thought of.
—Is she going to drink herself to death over there? Tryphie asked.
Eli leaned back in his chair. —Abel will watch out to her, he said.
Tryphie glanced across at Eli, a portrait of Coaker on the wall above his head, the president’s face appearing to float in the glare of light through the window. Tryphie considered it a fact that he hated Eli Devine and had done so for a long time. He looked back out at Selina’s House. —You think there might be some work for me in all of that? he said.
—Down in Hartford, you mean?
—I figure it might be better if we came home out of it.
—I wouldn’t have thought Minnie would want to set foot back here.
Tryphie stood from his chair to stop himself telling Eli to fuck off. —She’ll want to be next her daughter where she can keep an eye on her. If you could set me up with some work.
Eli shifted forward to put both elbows on the desk. —I’ll see what I can do, he said.
Tryphie left for the States in late June and all the talk that summer was about war in Europe, the flotsam of rumor and half-facts washing up on the beaches. Eli was away at Government House in St. John’s all summer. Britain declared itself in August and Newfoundland carried along in its wake. Five hundred volunteers enlisted with the Newfoundland Regiment for service overseas. Coaker offered to resign to join up himself, only relenting when union locals flooded him with telegrams and letters urging him to stay on as president. The war inflated the price of fish and men were mad after the cod all season.
In October Tryphie and Minnie came home to Paradise Deep. Abel was afraid they’d move into Selina’s House at first but Minnie wasn’t prepared to live in close quarters with her daughter’s misery and they settled into John Blade’s old place instead. Tryphie went to work in the union office as an accountant though he spent most of his time blueprinting Coaker’s elaborate fantasies, pulleys, gears and winches, electric motors, turbines, power lines.
Adelina and Flossie Sellers chaired the Women’s Patriotic Association, hosting knitting bees to send scarves and socks to the troops overseas. Joshua Trim was among the first union volunteers to make it into action, and news he’d been killed reached the shore shortly before Christmas, the blinds down at the Trims’ household all through the season.
Esther railed against the war with a drunken exuberance and Abel settled himself a pacifist out of allegiance to her. She seemed to have no argument with the conflict but that it was happening in Europe. As if the war was an escalation of the continent’s appetite for sacrifice and waste. She greeted the young men on the streets with calls of
Hello Cannon Fodder
and they nodded warily. Watching after the woman and the pale youngster in her wake. Abel had grown to almost six foot and towered over his alcoholic charge, the pair like a carnival marriage on display, their strangeness a twinned thing.
After her first full sentence to him, Esther seemed incapable of shutting herself up. She talked endlessly of which roles she’d sung in what productions in which storied theater, each opera’s intrigue and backstabbing and doomed affairs mirrored in the dressing rooms and backstage halls and hotel rooms of the performers. The mad directors and absinthe-addled librettists, the aging Lotharios who lost their nature and the nose off their face to venereal disease, the pedophilic impresarios who bankrolled the productions. Esther was always drunk when she reminisced, breaking into scraps of arias or humming the orchestra lines, and there was no clear narrative to the diatribe. Abel had trouble keeping the details of one theater or composer or horny, social-climbing tenor separate from all the others.
—Do you know what I am? she asked one afternoon and there was a belligerence to the question that made him wary of answering. —I, she said, striking a stagey pose meant to mock herself, am a mezzo-soprano.
The words meant nothing to him but he knew enough to let her carry on.
—Supporting roles, she said, that’s what a mezzo gets. Servants. Mothers-in-law. I didn’t go all the way to Europe for a life in the shadows.
She found a vocal instructor willing to stretch her range, an aging Swiss with an addiction to opium and few scruples, and she had to sleep with him before he consented to the undertaking. Esther mimicked his fussy accent. —You must sleep nine hours a night and drink only water, no coffee or tea, no alcohol, you must keep your throat covered at all times, you must never engage in Sapphic love.
—In what?
—He was a lunatic, Esther said. —But no one else would help me.
She pushed her way into lead roles with persistence and one judicious love affair after another. Crisscrossed the continent and left her audiences wet, roses thrown onto stages from Hamburg to Vienna to Paris, booking engagements a year ahead. —Then the voice started to go, she said. She shook her flask of gin and took a long pull. —I guess I should have steered clear of Sapphic love as well.
There was a man who did Esther wrong, a horny, social-climbing tenor with busy hands who swore his undying love to her. He practiced his scales with his face between her legs, those muffled notes rising through her bones to strike in her head like pleasure’s hammer. His father was German, his mother Italian, and he had confused the arts of love and war in his upbringing. He left her for a Frenchwoman with the breasts of a ten-year-old and a five-octave range.
The salacious detail aroused and appalled Abel. He was sorry to hear such things and hung on every word. Esther’s tone was strangely light when she spoke of the man who discarded her for the bird-breasted soprano, when she ran through the long list of others she’d hurt or been scarred by, the whole merry-go-round of desire and flesh and betrayal and hope. A tinge of regret in her voice, to find herself beyond it all now.
In July of 1916 the name of a town in France arrived on the shore. Beaumont-Hamel. The desolate numbers whispered back and forth—eight hundred and two members of the Newfoundland Regiment ordered out of their trenches into the muck and wire and relentless machine-gun fire. A morning of blue sky and calm. It took all of half an hour to cut them down as they stuttered toward the German line, chins tucked into their shoulders against the hellish weather. Only sixty-eight men standing to answer roll call the next morning. There were three local boys among the lost and every family on the shore could claim a brother-in-law or nephew or second cousin dead or wounded or missing.
Hannah came to Selina’s House to sit with Abel, just to watch him breathing across the table. Her mortal son, his eyes and teeth and hands. The numbered hairs of his head. —I never thought, Hannah said, I’d be thanking the Lord you had the consumption.
It was early afternoon and Esther was already halfways drunk. —Dr. Newman says there’s nothing wrong with him. Once conscription passes the House, she said, they’ll be happy to take Abel as well as anyone.
—The union won’t ever let a draft pass the House, Hannah said without the conviction she wanted.
—Why won’t they?
Hannah made a feeble gesture with her hand. —Mr. Coaker, she said.
Esther threw her head back to laugh and she cursed the sham union and Coaker who ruled it like God Himself. She cursed the House of Assembly in St. John’s and the war in Europe and then she cursed Europe itself, one country at a time. Abel had never seen her in such a state. She stalked down the hall and clumped upstairs to her room, still cursing.
—I don’t want you alone here with that woman, Hannah said. —It isn’t proper.
—You asked me to move in.
—When you were just a youngster that was, she said. —I never meant for. But she only shook her head.
Abel went upstairs when his mother left and stood outside Esther’s room, trying to guess if she was awake. —Who’s there? she shouted and he went back down without a word.
He sat with Jabez Trim’s Bible, copying verses from the Song of Songs awhile. He wandered the servant’s quarters like a prisoner exploring the nooks and crannies of a cell. Shifting furniture, trying moldings around windows and doors as if he half expected to find some compartment secreted behind. Taking empty bottles from a high shelf to peer down their necks. There was a manila envelope sitting up there, a waterfall of photographs pouring onto his bed when he untied it, 10-by-14 and portraits all, though the focus was rarely on the sitter’s face. It was a catalogue of injury, scars and misshapen limbs and heads swollen twice their natural size. Five wizened faces in a row, old turnips the lot of them though they were dressed in children’s clothes, the incongruous stoop of age in their postures. A bald-headed man and woman who seemed to have no fingernails. There was a young girl he wouldn’t have recognized as his mother except for the web of skin between her fingers, the camera focused on the hands splayed in her lap. A pale stranger with cloudy eyes and a shock of colorless hair, an expression of startled forbearance.
—You could almost be looking at yourself there, Esther said.
He turned to see her standing against the door jamb. He didn’t know how long she’d been watching him. She nodded to the picture with her chin. —You’re the spit of your great-grandfather.
—Who? he asked.
—The Great White, she said. —Mary Tryphena’s man. Has no one told you a thing about yourself?
—I guess they haven’t, he said.
The sheet of paper where he’d copied verses from the Song of Songs was on the bed and she picked it up. —What’s this crazy writing you do? she asked and he told her how he’d found the Bible in Patrick Devine’s library and deciphered it by copying one letter at a time. She said, You’re a queer stick, Abel Devine. She was staring at him with an odd attention he’d never felt the weight of before. She sat next him on the bed. —Have you ever been kissed, Abel? A real kiss?
—I don’t think so.
—That man there, Esther said—she pointed to the photograph—is your great-grandfather, Judah Devine his name was. She kissed him then, her mouth slightly open, the sweet and sour of gin on her breath. —He was born out of the belly of a whale down on the landwash, on the Feast of St. Mark. Her mouth again, a hand under his shirt against bare skin. —It was Devine’s Widow cut him free of the whale’s stomach with a fish knife, she said. —She was Mary Tryphena’s grandmother, the widow woman, a witch is what some people said.
Esther carried on talking a long time, unspooling the family’s tale as she undressed the youngster, navigating the complications of one generation and the next, rowing her way toward them where they lay together in the servant’s quarters of Selina’s House, blood on blood on blood. Abel lying silent through it all, willing to take every word as Gospel as long as her mouth came back to his, as long as her hands.