Galore (36 page)

He had Trass go along to Coaker’s initial gathering at the old church out of idle curiosity. Sent inquiries to acquaintances in Notre Dame Bay and St. John’s who reported Coaker was a loner and a fool, possibly delusional, addled by his years trying to conjure a farm out of rock and bog, by a marriage he was ill-suited for. The notion of him building a union was a joke, they said. Levi engaged Trass to attend the clandestine weekly meetings and he compiled a list of the local men who had taken the pledge. He was particularly gregarious when he crossed paths with them at church or on the streets, asking after their health and the health of their families, thinking how their faces would look when the union foundered and they came begging for credit. The spring promised to be as good as a concert.

He went to his bed after midnight and crawled out of it long before light. He was at the table when Adelina and Flossie came down to their breakfast. The women were virtually inseparable before the children left for the States and he never saw them but in one another’s company now, walking the garden paths arm in arm, sitting together in the evenings to knit or crochet or read. He tried to send them to America with the youngsters and it was still a mystery why they refused. —I made a vow, Flossie told him, her eyes averted. As if it was a life sentence.

The women never spoke against him, but there were subtle acts of defiance he couldn’t miss. Volunteering at the hospital after he bargained away Selina’s House. Offering singing lessons to Tryphie Newman’s daughter, cutting clippings from the
Evening Telegram
whenever there was a mention of the Nightingale of Paradise. Sitting side by side at Mary Tryphena’s funeral in their best black mourning as if the woman were kin.

—How did you sleep? Flossie asked him.

—Adequately.

His wife set her knife carefully across her plate and glanced at Adelina. The two women were unfailingly demure in his presence, but there was an air of condescension about them, the residue of whispered conversations when his back was turned. —Have you thought of speaking to Dr. Newman? she asked.

—About what exactly?

Adelina said, It’s been months of this now, Levi.

—You’re exhausted, Flossie told him.

There it was, the one thing he could not abide, the reason they refused to leave with the children. They pitied him. He pushed his chair back from the table. —Sleep, he said, is the urging of the Devil.

In March the local men who’d secured sealing berths left for Harbour Grace and Brigus and as far as St. John’s en route to the ice fields after whitecoats. No union meetings were held while they were gone and it was nearly a month before the sealers made their way back, wearing the clothes they left in, sleeves and pant cuffs crusted with blood, the lot of them haggard and punch-drunk and carrying trinkets from the Water Street stores for their wives and children. The sealers collected Eli Devine on their way through Notre Dame Bay and on the night of the union’s first meeting back Levi went out to the barn as soon as the women retired, anxious to hear what Thomas Trass had to report.

It was a wild night, the rafters cracking in the wind and the cows restless. The foul weather made time crawl and Levi took out his pocket watch periodically to glare at it in the dark, trying to guess the hour. He’d all but given up on Trass when the door at the other end of the building opened and was hauled shut against the gale. The gust stirring up the smell of piss in the straw. —I was starting to think perhaps they’d turned you, Levi said and even before he finished speaking he knew it wasn’t Thomas Trass coming toward him in the dark.

—Hello Levi.

—Not a very pleasant evening to be strolling about, Eli Devine.

—Thomas asked me to tell you he won’t be able to make his appointment.

The thought crossed Levi’s mind that Trass had been playing him all along but he dismissed it. The man didn’t have the imagination.

—Val Woundy has been keeping a close eye on your Mr. Trass, Eli said, as if he could guess Levi’s thoughts.

—Trass has been feeding me lies all along, I suppose.

—Let’s just say the union meetings that mattered did not take place on the same night as Bride’s classes.

Levi laughed out loud, slapping at his thighs. —Splendid, he said. —And this is the point where I claim to have a man attending the
secret
secret union meetings as well.

—You don’t have the first clue what’s coming, Levi. But I wanted to come by to tell you to watch for it. So you’ll know I helped steer it your way.

Eli turned to leave and Levi followed after him. —You had an enjoyable time in the company of Mr. Coaker, he said. —Mr. Coaker wouldn’t allow a man like yourself to go without the creature comforts. He took care of your needs while you were away from your wife?

The door swung shut and Levi pushed out into the weather, chasing Eli as far as the road. He was shouting for all he was worth though he could barely hear himself in the wind. He carried on yelling uselessly a while, the words whipped back over the roof of the house and scattered across the Gaze.

It was the Old Hollies that woke her, Flossie thought, the keening voices of some long-drowned sailors carried ashore by the storm, and she lay still in her room praying for them to pass. Heard the back door then, the entire house shifting to accommodate the weather’s push. And the eerie voice rose through the wind’s racket again, half-strangled and pleading, though she could swear now it was coming from somewhere inside the house. She rushed across to Adelina’s room, shaking her awake. —Listen, she whispered. —Listen, listen, listen.

They went arm in arm down the hall, calling for Levi. The garbled voice going on as they reached the stairs and crept toward it one step at a time. —Levi? Adelina called again and the voice went quiet finally. They could just hear the muted sound of sobbing where Sellers lay helpless on the floor below.

Levi learned to scrawl a signature with his left hand after the stroke but needed assistance to perform the simplest tasks, to dress and eat and go to the outhouse. His eye was nearly closed on the dead side of his face, the invalid flesh so shapeless and drooping that he looked like a wax figurine set too close to the heat. Two hundred and seventy-six men came off his rolls that spring, taking provision sent by schooner from Notre Dame Bay instead. The union members paid St. John’s prices for their gear which led to complaints from the fishermen still buying at Sellers & Co., and Levi lived in a state of perpetual vexation.

It was only the intervention of the Catholic Archdiocese that saved Sellers & Co. from complete ruin. Father Reddigan had blessed the union’s first steps on the shore with his silence, though he’d heard murmurs from the archbishop’s office in St. John’s. Before the men returned from the seal hunt in the spring, he received a letter of instruction dismissing the F.P.U. as a secret society that bound its members by an unlawful oath and was ipso facto condemned by the Church.
No Catholic can join it
, the archbishop wrote,
unless he means to incur the Censures of the Church. If he has taken any oath in the Society let him understand it is unlawful and not binding. Please act on this information to stamp out the Society at once if it has appeared in your Parish
. Reddigan made the announcement at Mass four Sundays in a row and by the time the Labrador crews set out in June not a single Catholic on the shore remained a member of the F.P.U.

Abel Devine spent part of each morning on the hospital veranda when the weather allowed. Everyone who passed would call or wave, as if it was bad luck not to acknowledge the Devine boy struck with consumption. The only person who ignored him was Levi, stilting his way past Selina’s House toward the offices of Sellers & Co. His right arm in a permanent clench against the chest, the nearly paralyzed leg swinging from the waist like a pendulum.

Eli had been back in the Gut since March but Abel’s mother chose to stay on at the hospital. The three of them spent part of each Sunday morning on the veranda before church and that was all there was to them as a family. Hannah refused to have Abel stirred up and she protected him from any talk of the union or politics in general, though even a shut-in could sense the tide of change rising on the shore.

Abel’s condition improved through the summer and on his better days he wasn’t content to lie in bed. He paced his tiny room or sat at the shelves to leaf through books he’d never opened before, just for the novelty of it. He stood on a chair to reach Jabez Trim’s Bible tucked away on the highest shelf. He had no memory of seeing the book in Patrick Devine’s library and didn’t know what to make of the artifact. The pages were leathery and thick, the hand-lettered text archaic and blurred. It seemed a foreign language he was looking at and he wrote out lines and verses, trying to imitate the baroque bells and curves as if he was sketching a landscape. He spent weeks writing his way through Genesis and Deuteronomy and Psalms and Ecclesiastes, figuring one letter at a time, making the strange script his own through repetition.

There was a rush to join the F.P.U. in the fall. The union fish was sold in bulk in St. John’s, fetching fifty cents a quintal above the price paid by Sellers & Co. A circular letter from Coaker announced that His Lordship Bishop McNeil of St. George’s had approved a new wording of the union’s pledge, and Father Reddigan said nothing when three dozen Catholic men took the oath a second time ahead of word from the archbishop in St. John’s. Half the shore’s population ordered their winter provisions through Coaker’s wholesale outfit and Levi sold off a portion of his waterfront property to Matthew Strapp to keep the company afloat.

Eli left for Change Islands to attend the annual session of the supreme council of the F.P.U. in late October. He was due home the first week of November with Coaker in tow and there was a flurry of activity in preparation for the great man’s arrival. The doctor pronounced Abel well enough to go home when his father arrived and he waited for the union boat with more anticipation than most. He browsed aimlessly through Patrick Devine’s library, opened books at random to read a line or two. He stood on his chair to bring down Jabez Trim’s Bible, to be sure it was a real thing and not just some figment of his consumptive imagination. Tracing the letters with an index finger as he mouthed the words.

Out the window of his sickroom he’d watched a new building being raised near the Episcopal church through the fall. The letters F.P.U. painted a storey high over the doorway now. He was the only person on the shore ignorant of the acronym’s meaning. Friendly Priests Unfrocked, he guessed. Furious Partisan Utopia. Forgetful Pastoral Undertakers. Free Parcels Untied. Bunting was pinned to the front of the hall, an archway of fir branches and wildflowers waited on the new union wharf just acquired from Matthew Strapp.

He woke one night to the flicker of red and yellow across the ceiling and he lay watching it shiver and drift there like the northern lights, thinking it was the fire in the stove. When the alarm was raised it went house to house all the way to the Gut, two hundred men and women standing in a line to pass buckets up from the harbor. They saved the hall though the facing and part of the roof had to be torn out and replaced, men spidered over the building to repair it before Coaker’s arrival. Abel walked by with Hannah the morning the letters were repainted in red above the doors.

—Foul Plot Unhinged, Abel said.

Hannah jerked his arm. —Has your father been telling you stories?

—It’s just a game, he said, pointing up at the acronym. —Funeral Pyre Unlikely, he offered. —Fallen Paradise Uplifted.

She looked at him a long time, as if she still had her doubts.

A flotilla of skiffs and dories went out that afternoon to meet Coaker’s yacht, escorting the
F.P. Union
into harbor where the waterfront was jammed with spectators. The lungers of the wharf were laid over with woven mats in the F.P.U. colors and half a dozen sealing guns fired as the procession came to the docks. Coaker was led a walkabout like royalty, shaking hands and ruffling youngsters’ hair. Abel stood among the crowd with Hannah, his head resting on her hip. —This is the boy can’t be killed, is it? Coaker asked when he reached them.

There was a parade to the F.P.U. Hall and Abel sat in Hannah’s lap at the back of the stage during Coaker’s speech. He was overcome by the exertion of the day and the crowd’s heat and he nodded off while the man was speaking, startled awake to applause and glanced up at Eli Devine leading the ovation beside them. His father looked half-starved, Abel thought, and was staring at the union man like he was something good to eat.

Hannah took Abel back to Selina’s House before the dance began and he slept awhile in the room behind the kitchen. The door stood open and he could hear his mother and Bride talking in whispers at the table as he dozed. He woke sometime after dark to the quiet of a woman crying, the wet suck of breath as she tried to stifle her sobs. He thought it might be his mother but fell asleep again before he could say for certain.

After he was discharged from the hospital Abel walked the paths in the Gut to regain his strength, wandering as far as the French Cemetery where he strolled among the headstones, marking the names of family laid there. When Mary Tryphena was still with them he’d peppered her with childish questions, wanting to know where was she born, how did her father and mother die, was there a church on the shore when she was a girl. —I don’t remember nothing about them old times, was all she said. And he was still a stranger among his kin in the French Cemetery.

Before winter settled in he was spending hours a day on the backcountry roads, traveling beyond Nigger Ralph’s Pond toward the Breakers, trying to set the vast spaces to heart. Compared with the densely populated world of Patrick Devine’s library, the scrubland and bog seemed virtually uninhabited, a place without history or memory, a landscape of perpetual present. He knew it as his country but was at a loss to say how and he walked the barrens endlessly, as if walking was a way of courting a world he was barely acquainted with.