Galore (16 page)

Virtue went downstairs to pack her few things in the room off the kitchen and left Selina’s House for a second time, walking across Paradise Deep to the stud tilt that had been sitting empty more than a year. Those who witnessed it swore they saw the figure of Mr. Gallery following at a distance and disappearing behind her when the door of the house in the droke was closed.

Jabez Trim made a visit the following day, holding his leather-bound Bible to his chest like a shield. He couldn’t bring himself to step over the threshold and he called to her from the doorway. —Everything all right here, Mrs. Gallery?

Virtue was in the tiny pantry where she’d been washing dishes unused since she left and setting them back on the shelves. The place was dilapidated and damp from sitting empty so long, broken panes in its one window. The fire burning in the fireplace had barely touched the chill of the place. In the gloom he could see Mr. Gallery huddling as close to the dog irons as a chair could be set. —Mrs. Gallery?

She came out to him, wiping her wet hands on her apron. He looked down at his shoes and whispered, not wanting to be overheard by the figure near the fire. —We’ve just been wondering, Mrs. Sellers most especially and the little one, Absalom. We were all of us fearful for your safety.

—A year too late for that I’d say, Mr. Trim.

Jabez nodded and motioned with the Bible in his arms. —Is there anything can be done for you, Mrs. Gallery?

She turned to look directly at her husband. —Can you send this one to hell?

—Would I was at liberty to make such arrangements, he said. —What is it the creature wants of you?

—I would have thought you might be able to tell me such things, she said. —You and that Book of yours.

—I am the dullest instrument of the Lord, Mrs. Gallery, and that’s the sorry fact of the matter. You don’t plan to stay here?

—You can ask Mrs. Sellers to send along what wages she owes me, Virtue said and then held up her hand to ask Jabez to wait, disappearing into the bedroom. She came back, folding a coil of jet-black hair into a square of cloth. —This is for Absalom, she said. —Tell him I meant him to have it when he was older. And Mr. Trim, she said. —If you could find a private moment to pass it on.

Jabez nodded and turned the strange gift over in his hand. —You’ve precious little wood to keep that fire, he told her.

—Whatever you can offer, she said, I’d be grateful.

The charity of the communities kept her fed and provided enough fuel to heat the house but no one came near the droke other than to drop potatoes or salt cod or a turn of wood in the clearing outside the door. Absalom Sellers occasionally escaped his grandparents long enough to place a keepsake on the window frame or at the door of the outhouse, and that single sign of affection was all Virtue had to sustain herself. Mr. Gallery was seen at times perched like an owl on the roof of the house and people occasionally crossed paths with him on the trails in the backcountry, though he took no note of other travelers, muttering fiercely to himself as if in argument with the universe itself. They crossed themselves or whispered the Twenty-third Psalm and walked as quickly as they could in the opposite direction.

Father Phelan spent Lent and the holy days of Easter in other parts of the country and it wasn’t until the Labrador pack ice moved past the coast and the first buds appeared on Kerrivan’s apple tree that he came back to them. Jabez Trim searched him out as soon as he heard word of his return, tracking him down at the widow’s home. The priest had a weakness for stories of hauntings and unclean spirits and ritual exorcisms, recounting them in all their arcane and nauseating detail. He was full of questions for Jabez, wanting to know what Mr. Gallery was wearing when he saw him and if his features appeared changed and what language he spoke.

—No language what can be made out, Father.

—You buried him, Jabez.

—Myself and Callum there, we dug the grave away out past Nigger Ralph’s Pond where no one would have to look on it. Never left a stick of wood or a stone for a marker.

Lizzie said, He’s out there looking for his grave is what he’s doing, wandering all over God’s creation like that.

—Hush Lizzie, Callum whispered. He considered it bad luck even to speak of the man and wished the conversation were going on in someone else’s house. Mary Tryphena was in his lap and he leaned down to hum a tune into the child’s ears, as if it might protect her from the conversation.

The priest turned to Devine’s Widow. —You’ve an opinion on this, Missus.

—He wants something of that woman, I’d say. And there’s no one else alive or dead can give it to him.

—Do you not know what to do, Father? Lizzie asked.

—The dead are more like mortal creatures than we know, he said. —Each one rises to a different bait.

The priest set out early the next morning and walked to the house in the droke. Mrs. Gallery didn’t get up from the table, calling him in from where she sat. Her husband occupied his usual chair by the fire, huddling close to the flames, as if against a draft.

—He’s forever cold, Mrs. Gallery said. —I think sometimes he might sit his arse right in the fire to try and get warm.

—There’s fire galore awaiting him elsewhere, Father Phelan said. —Does he talk to you at all?

—He talks only to himself. And I can’t pick out a word of it.

The priest sat at the table and watched the two awhile. It was difficult to say which of them looked lonelier or more forlorn. —Why do you think he’s here, Mrs. Gallery?

She slammed a hand on the table and even the ghost startled in his chair by the fire. —Isn’t it your job to tell me such things, Father?

He smiled at her. —I don’t want to tell you what you already know, is all.

—I won’t forgive him, she said. —May he burn in hell, I won’t.

The priest walked across to the figure by the fire, crouching to look up into the face. —Would you like to make confession, Mr. Gallery? he said, but the specter’s mouth only went on working at its indecipherable monologue. —It’s not forgiveness he’s after, Father Phelan said.

—Well
what
then?

—It seems to me, Mrs. Gallery, your husband thinks you know exactly what.

They fucked on the dirt floor beside the fireplace, Mrs. Gallery’s skirts hauled to her waist, the priest’s black cassock unbuttoned and his drawers at his feet, and the woman’s dead husband kicked at the fireplace crane to drown the feral noise of them together, the cast iron clanging like a church bell, his stricken face raised to the ceiling.

—I thought he’d come to kill me, Virtue said afterwards. —To finish what he’d left unfinished.

—He’s not here to hurt any but himself, the priest said, watching her straighten her skirts matter-of-factly, as if she were laying a tablecloth for dinner. —It may be a long penance he’s after, Mrs. Gallery.

—I’ve no pressing obligation elsewhere, she said.

Father Phelan visited the house every morning and led Virtue through the most varied and perverse acts of love his years of lechery had taught him. Her husband’s ghost a tortured witness to it all. Virtue sat over Phelan’s cock to take the length of it inside her, reaching behind to cup his balls in her hand. —He used to call you a dirty mick priest, Father.

—Oh sweet Jesus, Phelan whispered.

—Said he’d cut off your nuts if you laid a finger on me.

—Oh Christ help us.

The ghost appeared to weep at times, though the tears were dark as soot on his face.

No one was privy to the goings-on at the house in the droke, though there was plenty of speculation about the rituals being performed to rid Mrs. Gallery of the cross her husband had become. Father Phelan was uncharacteristically reticent about the details, though he stayed longer than was his custom. After two months of parading the basest carnal pleasure before Mr. Gallery, Father Phelan asked again if he wished to make confession, but the specter simply muttered in refusal. —He’s a stubborn devil, the priest told Virtue. —It could be years of this ahead of us.

—I trust I can count on you to fulfill your ecclesiastical duties.

—I am the Lord’s servant, he said, and he paused at the door. He said, It’s hard to fault your husband wanting to keep you to himself, Mrs. Gallery.

—He had me to himself, she said.

From that visit forward, the priest stayed at the house in the droke whenever he was on the shore and no one doubted a match of some sort had been made between Father Phelan and Virtue. They were never seen together outside the house, but to Mary Tryphena Devine and every child born after her, Mrs. Gallery was “the priest’s woman.” And Mr. Gallery took his place in a crowded netherworld the youngsters came to know as well as their own, a realm populated by charms for fetching lovers or curing warts, by fairy lore and the old hollies which were the voices of the drowned calling out of the ocean on stormy nights. They inherited their parents’ aversion to the house in the droke, taunting Mr. Gallery as they ran past the little patch of woods or daring one another to sneak close enough to touch the door. That spectral figure on the margins of their lives seemed as ancient and abiding as the ocean itself, and generations after Gallery was sighted for the last time he occupied a dark corner in the dreams of every soul on the shore.

{  4  }

M
ARY
T
RYPHENA
D
EVINE BORE A CHILD
by Judah, just as Devine’s Widow told Selina she would. At the time there was no evidence to support such a claim and Mary Tryphena felt it was the old woman’s certainty that set the world in motion, as if her telling a thing somehow made it so. —You’ll marry Judah, the widow woman said to her, and that will keep him with us.

Lizzie was the only person with gall enough to oppose the old witch but she fell into one of her spells as she tried to bar the wedding party from getting through the door. While they walked over the Tolt, Devine’s Widow asked the girl had she seen the rams mount the sheep or the dogs on one another. Mary Tryphena nodded uncertainly. —Man and wife, Devine’s Widow said cryptically.

Judah helped lift them through the offal hole into his prison on the waterfront and nodded in assent when prompted by the priest during the ceremony. But left alone, Judah seemed as doubtful as Mary Tryphena what should follow. —We’re married you and me, she said. —You know what that means, Jude? The smell of the man was as strong as ever, though in the company of the room’s fishy stink it seemed less oppressive. Mary Tryphena turned away finally, kneeling and lifting her skirts over her waist to present her bare backside. Judah sat motionless and she glanced back at him. —Jude, she whispered. He was chained to the floor by an ankle but managed to shuffle toward her, leaning to one side to put out the candle. Cock the size of a snail, her father used to say, and she had her own memory of him naked on the beach, Devine’s Widow lifting his prick’s tiny blue head on the blade of her knife. He was groping blindly behind her and accomplishing nothing that she could tell. Mary Tryphena reached back and latched on to what she thought was his wrist.

King-me’s cows woke to the racket carrying up from the shoreline and they kicked at their stalls, lowing mournfully while it went on. The soldier standing guard scrambled away from the door with his musket at the ready, afraid for his life. Father Phelan leaned into Mrs. Gallery’s neck as the noise rose and ebbed and rose again. —From the sound of that, he whispered, Callum must have been mistaken about the size of Judah’s blade.

Mrs. Gallery shrugged away from him. —You’re no better than a whoremaster, she said.

Events unfolded then much as Devine’s Widow predicted. The machinations at Selina’s House occurred behind closed doors and they could only guess at the arguments presented, the threats and promises made between King-me and his wife, the promises and money exchanged between King-me and Lieutenant Goudie. Sellers called court to session in short order, the charge of capital murder dropped due to insufficient evidence and Judah convicted of theft on the testimony of Captain John Withycombe. He was fined fifteen pounds sterling and taken directly from court to the public whipping post where he received thirty lashes. Devine’s Widow soaked sheets in vinegar and strapped them to his back to cover the welts and Judah slept six weeks on his stomach.

Jude moved into the tilt when Callum completed the new house at the end of that summer, though Mary Tryphena and the baby stayed under her parents’ roof. Judah seemed to have no expectation that his wife share his bed or his home but he knew Patrick for his own and doted on the child.

Mary Tryphena ignored her husband as much as possible. She was tormented by the thought that everyone on the shore knew what they’d done in the fishing room, the same as if she’d raised her skirts to him in broad daylight on the Commons. She swore at the time it would never happen again and had rarely faltered since. Once or twice a year appetite got the better of her resolve and she slipped from her parents’ house in the dead of night to call Judah outside where the open air made the smell of the man less overwhelming. The same stew of release and regret in the aftermath, creeping to her room like a thief, the buzz of simple animal pleasure pulsing through her. The last time, she swore after each lapse. The very last.

When little Patrick Devine was five years old, Father Phelan announced plans to build a Catholic sanctuary on the shore. A cathedral, he said, that would put the modest Episcopal chapel to shame.

The work involved in such an undertaking ran so hard against the grain of the man that no one took him seriously. The bishop in St. John’s was steadily carving the country into parishes, resident priests were taking up duties once the province of itinerant clergy, and Father Phelan found himself with less and less territory to cover. He was bored staying so much in one place, people said, and the church was simply idle talk.

Phelan spent hours in the company of the shore’s best boat builders and carpenters discussing naves and arches, trusses, beams, windows. He chose a plot of land on the Tolt as the church’s location. —The wind up there, Callum Devine warned him, could strip the flesh off a cow. But there were almost as many Catholics living in Paradise Deep as in the Gut by then and the priest insisted the sanctuary sit between the two.

Jabez Trim and a handful of other Episcopalians worked with the Catholic men to raise the frame in September, Mass held within the skeletal walls that first evening. And the entire structure collapsed in a gale of wind before the roof was shingled or a single pew was placed inside.

—It’s like in the Book of Job, Jabez suggested to Father Phelan. —God sends trials to test us.

—God is a miserable bastard, the priest said.

Father Phelan had crews cutting fresh timber to rebuild through the next winter, Callum and Judah and young Lazarus, the Woundys and Saul Toucher’s crowd. They milled the wood in the spring and hauled it up the Tolt Road to set the church on the foundation of the one recently lost. They timbered the walls like a fortress and anchored the four corners of the building with ship ropes against the trials of God. The altar rail was fashioned from a gunwale salvaged off a Portuguese wreck, an iron cross forged in King-me’s smithy fixed to the steeple. The Romans had two months of services in the new building before a lightning strike set the church ablaze. The fire brought every soul to the Tolt, even the shade of Mr. Gallery walking the edges of the inferno.

The main doors were choked off by fire but the side door leading to the sacristy stood open. Callum Devine passed the window nearest the altar as he ran toward it and he saw a man backlit by the flames inside, trying feebly to break the glass. Callum smashed out the frame with his elbow and hauled Father Phelan through, the priest choking and retching, his hair and eyebrows singed. —Tried to get the Blessed Sacrament, he whispered. —From the altar.

The crowd milled helplessly while the roof fell in and the fortified walls burned to the stumps. Lightning had struck a flock of sheep on the Commons as well, five animals lying charred and bloated in the grass, the stink of burnt flesh lending the scene an acrid, apocalyptic feel.

In the wake of the storm the day was calm, the sky a scoured blue. Lazarus and Judah took the skiff out after a load of fish even though Devine’s Widow suggested they were tempting fate to go on the water in the wake of such an ill omen. Callum didn’t discourage them but stayed in himself and he sat at the kitchen table with the women while they waited. All of them speaking in whispers, as if at a wake for a child.

Mary Tryphena was watching her son half-asleep in Callum’s lap, his grandfather running his fingers through the boy’s hair. Patrick’s features hadn’t changed since the day he was born, the disconcerting look of an adult about him even then. After Devine’s Widow washed away the blood in a basin he was almost as pale as Judah, the eyelashes and the wisp of hair at the crown rabbit-white. Devine’s Widow placed the child in her arms and Mary Tryphena held him close, moving her face across the nape of his neck, relieved to find only the smell of new life there.

Callum looked out the window to guess the time of day by the sun. —They’ll be along now the once, he said. He set Patrick on his feet and stood up himself. —I’ll send the boy up for you when the fish are in, he told the women. Mary Tryphena caught the faintest scent of Judah drifting from her son as he passed by. She’d refused to let him go out in the boat with his father and during his little tantrum of protest the stink wafted from his skin like a squid’s black ink.

It was only days after his birth that Mary Tryphena discovered how a crying jag or a good fright or a fit of infant rage would call it up in him, sour and fierce. She could barely stomach the youngster’s presence when he was upset and she felt cheated of something by his affliction. It was Judah or Lazarus he went to when he wanted comforting. And there was a distance between mother and child that felt unnatural to Mary Tryphena, an undercurrent of something like grief.

—You’d hardly believe that, Lizzie said, looking up at the ruins of the church still smoking on the Tolt. Devine’s Widow suggested even Father Phelan would have to recognize the fire as a sign from God but Lizzie shook her head. —God give up talking to the likes of us, she said, a long time ago.

Father Phelan was taken to the house in the droke while the church was still burning. Mrs. Gallery stripped and washed him and settled him into bed and early that afternoon she joined him there. They were unusually gentle and patient with one another, staying in bed all that day and through the night that followed. They woke several times in the early hours to start in again where they’d left off, drifting back to sleep in a sticky haze. The priest was first out of bed the next day with breakfast ready by the time Mrs. Gallery joined him at the table. She glanced up from her plate suspiciously. —You aren’t after falling in love with me, Father.

—Mrs. Gallery, he said, I am married to the Church.

She smiled for only a moment before the thought of the fire struck her. She said, You don’t think there’s a message being sent you?

—What sort of message?

—Perhaps the Tolt isn’t where the Church belongs.

—Even Christ was denied three times, he said.

After his breakfast he walked the path to the outhouse. He felt remarkably peaceful sitting there, shut away from the world. He’d always thought of the privy as a holy place, a refuge from all but the most basic human concerns. As a novitiate he scandalized his superiors by claiming it wasn’t the church but the shithouse that was God’s true home in the world, the pungent effluvium as meditative an odor as incense, sunlight through the crescent moon carved in the door providing the dusky ambience of a monastery cell. He laughed at the thought now. Nearly an old man and more ridiculous with each passing year.

God spoke to no one, he knew that. God was scattered in the world and the word of God was a puzzle to be cobbled together out of hints and clues. He sat far longer than he needed to, pondering Mrs. Gallery’s questions. It was the thought of losing the country he’d been fighting against with his sanctuary on the Tolt, the church meant to lay claim to these few of his flock, this one bit of coastline still left him. It was vanity, plain and simple, trying to hold what you loved a moment longer than God granted it. But he’d always been a vain man.

He walked back through the droke of woods and stood a moment staring out at the shoreline crowded with wharves and flakes and slipways, fishing rooms and storehouses and twine lofts. Only the hundred feet of waterfront reserved by King-me Sellers stood vacant, a straggly meadow of uncut grass above it. Sellers satisfied his expansion requirements by foreclosing on the properties of debtors and legally the plot remained public land, but the merchant refused to allow anyone to build on it. A view of the entire harbor from that patch of ground, the meadow a midden pile of fish bones and maggoty cod and broken pike handles, wood scraps too rotten to burn. The whitened bones of Judah Devine’s whale scattered about like the ribs of a wrecked vessel. A shit heap of garbage at the head of the bay.

The priest made his way up to the Tolt where a forlorn band of searchers picked through the ruins for iron nails that might be reused. Father Phelan called Judah and Callum up to the chancel and they unearthed what was left of the altar from beneath the cindered remains of timber and shingle. They found the pyx containing the Eucharist in its cubby there, the container unmarked, the wafers inside as white as the white of Judah’s face.

—I’ve seen the error of my ways, Callum, the priest said.

—You’re giving up the drink, Father?

—I’d sooner be dead. Call everyone round, he said and he began praying in Latin, the searchers making their way up the blackened nave to receive the last Eucharist ever celebrated on the Tolt.

There were two late-summer arrivals on the shore that season which, added to the loss of the Roman church, made it the most memorable in years.

Ann Hope traveled from Poole to marry Absalom Sellers, sailing into Paradise Deep in mid-August. The two had met during Absalom’s years as an apprentice in Spurriers’ accounting offices in England and they maintained a correspondence after he returned home, her letters full of books and theater and politics. She was five years Absalom’s senior, sister to a fellow apprentice at Spurriers and just returned from eighteen months traveling on the continent when they met. —I expect I will be a spinster, she admitted in their first conversation. —I am too homely and too intelligent to warrant a proposal of marriage.

It was her nose, he thought, that made her face such a trial to look at. Her eyes beady and wide-set on either side of that imposing cliff, which gave her obvious intellect an unfair whiff of treachery. Their friendship was rooted in Absalom’s belief that friendship was all she expected. She was the only woman who failed to reduce him to a helpless spurt of stuttering.

Her letters were Absalom’s only link to the wider world he’d briefly known. They filled him with a sick nostalgia he mistook for passion and he’d proposed to her by mail the previous fall. She sent news of her acceptance on the first vessel out in the spring, outlining her plans to leave England at her earliest convenience, but the letter went astray en route.

Absalom assumed from her silence that he’d insulted the woman. As the summer wore on with no word from her he’d even begun to feel a measure of relief at the rejection. No one in Paradise Deep knew she was coming before she disembarked on the wharf and asked to be taken to Selina’s House. —Where shall I have my trunks put? she asked him.