Galore - Michael Crummey [10]
—Is he a Catholic, do you know? the priest asked.
—He’s neither fish nor fowl, this one. But he could use a blessing, Father.
Phelan stepped into the fog of the tiny room. He leaned over the man, made the sign of the cross and prayed awhile in Latin. He took a brass vial from an inner pocket and anointed the white forehead with oil. He came back into the open air and shook his head to clear it. —Mrs. Gallery says there’s some would gladly have that creature drowned in Nigger Ralph’s Pond.
—There’s some would gladly have you drowned in Nigger Ralph’s Pond, Father.
The priest turned to Mary Tryphena. —Your grandmother is a miserable witch, do you know? He closed the door of the shed without saying another word to the man inside. —I’ll hear your confessions now. Callum will want to be getting out on the water.
Mary Tryphena still thinking about the man’s skin, the shimmer of it, his face like the flame of a candle you could snuff between your fingers.
——
Callum crewed a half-shallop with Daniel and James Woundy, an open boat decked at both ends, with twenty foot of keel. There was a poor sign of fish again that summer, and the men traveled further and further along the coastline and out into the Atlantic to search for them. They left hours before daylight and rowed ten or twelve miles into the currents, as far as the Skerries or Monks Ledge or Wester Shoals, where they drifted with hook and line over the gunwales, waiting.
They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.
It was true that a cod would swallow any curiosity that strayed by its nose and a motley assortment of materials had come to hand in the process of gutting them over the years. Lost jiggers and leather gloves and foreign coins, a porcelain hat brooch. A razor strop and half a bottle of Jamaica rum, a pinchbeck belt buckle, a silver snuff box, a ball that King-me claimed was used for a game called lawn tennis in France. The prize above all others was Jabez Trim’s Bible, recovered from the gullet of a cod the size of a goat. It was bound in a tight leather case but the pages were wet and stuck to one another and it took months of careful work to separate the leaves. There were portions so distorted by their soaking they were barely legible, but for many years it was all they had of the Word of the Lord among them.
Jabez once read the story of Abraham and Isaac during a Sunday service, Abraham leading his son into the mountains to sacrifice him as God demanded, but the verses that followed were blurred beyond reading and Isaac was left with his father’s knife poised above him. James Woundy was so taken by the truncated tale that he still retold it on the long trips to and from the fishing grounds, adding his own version of what he considered the inevitably gruesome conclusion. Jabez tried explaining that God gave Isaac a reprieve at the final moment, sending an angel to stay his father’s hand, but James was skeptical. —That don’t sound like the God we knows out here, he said.
Daniel was almost twenty years older than his half-brother, married with youngsters of his own by the time James came into the world. Everyone agreed James was slightly touched, a childishness about him he seemed unlikely to grow out of. Their mother was the oldest bushborn living, a woman more ancient than Devine’s Widow. Sheila Woundy had given birth to seventeen children by three different husbands, the latest of whom wasn’t yet fifty years of age and was only thirty when they married. She was rumored