Galore - Michael Crummey [106]
He managed to drag himself up into the passageway before a pintail of churning water swallowed him, the wild current turning and turning him until he lost track of up and down and east and west. His lungs burning in the black chill and he surrendered to the scald of it finally, taking in mouthfuls of cold salt just for the relief, knowing it was the end of him. A strange, narcotic peace flooding his limbs when he gave himself up to the notion. He wasn’t a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.
He saw a gray flicker of sunlight beyond that image and the last candle still burning in him clawed toward it, kicking for the sky. He was shirtless and still holding a book in his right hand when he surfaced into wind and rain, thirty feet from the Trims’ boat.
The Bible was the only book the Trims had an interest in and they refused to take any salvage from the trip. —He’d as like crawl into the house of a night and slit our throats to have them back anyway, Obediah said. Lazarus insisted Patrick take the chesterfield as well, a green leather monument to his lunatic stupidity, and it occupied pride of place in the house ever after.
Druce was all of nineteen and pregnant for the first time. World within a world. Patrick sorting through the trove of books on the kitchen floor while Lazarus recounted the event. The ship pulled under in a matter of moments, Patrick breaking the surface with the book held above his head like a torch. Druce watched her husband pottering on his knees as if he were a toddler playing with blocks of wood. She said, Would you have done as much to save your wife and child, Patrick Devine? But he seemed not to hear her. She had never felt so helpless, watching her husband absorbed in the alien world on the floor, their baby moving under her hands, and an urge to violence took hold of her. After she killed her husband she planned to burn each and every book, feeding them one at a time to the fire.
It was a momentary impulse but it filled her with a sense of dread that would not lift. She went into labor four months premature and the baby died before it saw the light of day. Druce suffered late miscarriages seven times in the next five years, a little graveyard of nameless children growing in a corner of the garden. She began hiding her pregnancies from everyone but her husband who dug the graves and set the tiny failures into the ground. They never spoke of the affliction, out of humiliation or superstitious fear, and Patrick filled the darkening silences between them by reading aloud from his library of salvaged stories. Druce listened to him hours at a time, the sad facts of their own lives suspended while he led them through those foreign tales. The end of every book left them feeling melancholy and sentimental and they lay awake half the night in bed, the sex charged with loss and helplessness and a furious, unjustifiable hope they lacked the means to express any other way.
Amos was the first pregnancy Druce carried to term, followed quickly by Martha and then Eli. The children left her little time to sit still and Patrick seemed happy enough to have the library to himself. He could read through a gale, oblivious at the end of the chesterfield while the youngsters played puss-puss-in-the-corner, as the little ones rode Amos around the floor, squealing like donkeys. It was a private space he retreated to at every opportunity and Druce sometimes referred to herself as a book widow when company called, making a show of her grievance. But she never begrudged Patrick the pleasure, having spent the worst of the hard years there with him.
Locked away in Sellers’ fishing room, Patrick passed his time reading the only book he’d been allowed and playing endless rounds of noddy with Lazarus and Amos. There wasn’t a shred of real evidence against them, he knew,