Galore - Michael Crummey [100]
By Christmas the Devines had exhausted their dried peas and flour and salt pork. They had a root cellar of potatoes and turnip and their fall fish and a barrel of pickled salmon and the charity of neighbors to see them through to Lent. Bride took up permanent residence as nurse and housekeeper at the clinic which offered some relief to the household in the Gut. She prepared Newman’s meals and washed his clothes, she cleaned the operating theater and disinfected the surgical tools and chopped firewood. She studied his medical books to learn as much as she could about adenoid removal, tonsillectomies, abscess drainage, amputation of the fingers and toes. She had the fire roaring before Newman rose in the morning and read three chapters of the Good Book by lamplight each evening before wishing him good night.
Newman lying awake hours in the darkness, wondering how long it was proper to wait before asking for a widow’s hand.
There was a general election set for the winter after Henley Devine was buried in the French Cemetery. The shore’s Irish population had long ago edged ahead of the English, but Protestant Tory Barnaby Shambler was the only member the district had ever sent to the House in St. John’s. The Irish vote was always split between the priest’s man and one or another mad-dog candidate, and Shambler rode that divide to victory like Moses crossing between the parted waters of the Red Sea.
But Shambler’s margin of victory was steadily narrowing as Father Reddigan took steps to unite the Catholic vote. Reddigan was the first Newfoundland-born clergyman to serve on the shore, with little invested in the politics of the old countries. His nation, he said, was Newfoundland and all Newfoundlanders were his countrymen, his kin. It was an attitude that threatened to make a Liberal candidate irresistible. During the most recent election Shambler felt compelled to surround the polling station with a mob, instructing them not to let Catholics pass unless they swore to vote Conservative. The mob was armed with staves and seal gaffs and Catholics carried the same to defend their right to suffrage. The brawling began in the morning and carried on until the polls closed, with Shambler holding his seat by the skin of his teeth.
Father Reddigan filed a suit with the returning officer demanding that the tainted results be voided, and a delegation from the Gut descended on the officer’s house to protest when the suit was dismissed. They cut the timbers and set hawsers to the eaves and pulled the building to the ground before they butchered his five head of cattle in their stalls. As they walked back to the Gut they threw the bread his wife had in rise into the ocean. Seven members of the mob were whipped at the public whipping post and marched in halters to the wreckage of the house where they received twenty lashes more. Reparations were paid. And the shore settled back into some semblance of calm. The genius of democracy at work, Shambler called it.
But the coming election was ruining his appetite. Father Reddigan lobbied for and was granted a separate polling station in the Gut, making Shambler’s mob redundant. There were rumblings of dissatisfaction among the Methodist teetotalers. Matthew Strapp was expected to run for the Liberals, a planter educated by Jesuits in St. John’s, owner of three flakes and a stage, two gardens and eight head of cattle, twenty sheep and twelve pigs. A staunch anti-confederate, a moderate drinker, father to seven children, he had no enemies, no obvious weakness. Shambler, who’d always been able to make any brawl serve his interests, attacked the Catholic Church itself to hold his support among the Methodists. Anonymous broadsides appeared on the shore decrying the Papist influence on Newfoundland politics, calling the Roman Church a bulwark of superstition, depravity and corruption with no place in the Legislature of the country.
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