Galore - Michael Crummey [107]
Patrick was certain his mother brokered the exchange with Levi. Druce offered up some story of Jude writing out his surrender in a code of Bible verses, but he couldn’t credit it. It was always the women at work in the back rooms of the family. He’d grown up in the shadow of the widow’s legendary machinations, watched Lizzie and Mary Tryphena pulling strings to set their men left or right. Bride was just alike in her way and he couldn’t avoid lumping Druce in with the lot of them. Judah given up like a sacrificial lamb and Patrick laid a portion of the blame at his wife’s feet.
Still, he couldn’t escape the galling conclusion the fault was their own somehow, he and his half-brother Henley, his uncle Lazarus and old Callum before them. The Devine men. All they had it in them to do was to catch fish and haul wood, to cut off the ears of their persecutors and marry the same woman over and over again. He was poisoned with the lot of them. He read his way through one book after another, getting up only to walk to the outhouse or carry in a turn of wood or go upstairs to bed. His corner of the room smoldering with a telltale shadow of his father’s stink. The same fierce funk that seeped from him as he and Amos held Levi down, Lazarus flaying at his ears with the knife. Judah had been sound asleep in the Gut when it happened but he was paying for all of them now.
Mary Tryphena was the only person permitted to visit her husband and she walked into Paradise Deep each day with bread and breakfast fish tied up in a square of cloth. Judah never touched a morsel and seemed to survive on the salt sea air alone. Lazarus went straight to Mary Tryphena’s to ask after news when he saw she was home but there was never any news. No official charges had been laid against Judah and Levi seemed in no hurry. He’d demanded a confession be part of the exchange and sent Barnaby Shambler with a written statement to read aloud to Judah. Shambler dipped a pen in the inkwell he’d carried with him before holding it out to the prisoner. He’d expected the man to place an X at the foot of the page, but Jude set the paper on his lap and affixed an elaborate signature. God’s Nephew, it read. And nothing more had happened since.
Lazarus said, I’ve been thinking this year I might stay.
—Stay where? Mary Tryphena asked.
—Down the Labrador, he said. —Fly the fuck out of this for good. I’ve got people down there would take me in. I think Amos might do the same.
—Does Amos have people? To take him in?
—He won’t be left out in the cold.
Mary Tryphena nodded. She said, Did Judah ever?
—Now maid, he said.
—I’ve a right to know.
Lazarus shook his head. —Jude’s as true as the day is long, he said. His voice cracked and he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. —He’s not ever coming out of there, is he.
—I don’t know, Laz.
—And so you do, Lazarus said. —He got it in his head Levi will let us alone if he stays in that room and he won’t leave it now for love nor money. You knows that as well as me.
Mary Tryphena nodded into her lap. —Jude’s as true as the day is long, she said.
—I won’t stay and watch him rot over there.
Laz started crying again and Mary Tryphena went away to her room for a moment. He’d pulled himself together when she came back into the kitchen with the tiny envelope in her hand. —I want you to take this with you if you goes, she said.
Laz held the envelope up, shaking it to guess at the contents. —What in God’s name is it? he said.
Stories of Judah’s biblical