Galore - Michael Crummey [11]
The crew stayed on the water until they struck enough fish for a boatload, sometimes drifting three and four days without coming ashore, wrapping themselves in a square of canvas sail to sleep for an hour. The weeks of fatigue and hunger had them hallucinating voices and shapes and figures on the horizon or in the ocean. James Woundy came out of his skin one morning before the moon had set, shouting and pointing at the fugitive outline of a merwoman skimming beneath the surface near the boat. Golden surf of hair and naked arms as long as oars, a trail of phosphorescence in her wake. He had to be held back to keep from going over the side after her, Daniel and Callum pushing him onto his back in the bilge water. Daniel sat on him until he came some ways back to his senses.
They’d been out nearly three days and hadn’t had a morsel of food in twenty-four hours. Their fresh water was all but gone and they’d be forced to start the haul back to shore now, with or without fish to show. Daniel was staring off at the landless horizon from his seat on his brother’s chest. He looked to be near tears.
Callum said, I know he’s blood to you, Daniel, but that youngster’s a goddamn fool.
Daniel shook his head. —I saw her too, he said. —I saw her there.
—Sure fuck, Callum said. —So did I. But I’m not ass enough to go overside to try and grab her tit now am I?
The cod had never been so scarce, not in living memory. Even the capelin and squid and bottom-feeders like lobster and crab seemed to have all but disappeared. A season or two past they consoled themselves with talk of times before their own when grass was boiled and eaten and the dead were stripped of their rags to dress the living before being buried at sea. But those stories cut too close now to be any comfort.
By mid-July it was clear the season was beyond salvaging, that no one would clear the debt incurred in the spring to gear themselves for the fishery. Most were in arrears from one failed season aboard another and King-me forced the most desperate to grant him a mortgage on their land estates as a surety. He’d already taken possession of half a dozen fishing rooms and seemed determined to own both harbors entire. The spring’s whale meat was long gone and some families were surviving on winkles and mussels dug up on the beaches or the same meal of herring served morning, noon and night until a body could barely keep the fish down. The summer not half over and already there was talk of winter and how many would starve without help from God.
Father Phelan had little solace to offer on that question and tried to make himself useful as a drinking companion, offering reminiscences of the women he’d bedded on the southern shore of the Avalon or details of the sexual dysfunctions of the English monarchs through the centuries. He sang songs he’d learned from darkies in the West Indies, taught “native dances” from the South Sea Islands that had men leap-frogging one another with underpants on their heads, oinking like pigs. A night without worry was all he had to give them, a taste of God’s Heaven on earth.
He came to see Mary Tryphena once a week to school her in the catechism and the finer points of the faith. He was always miserably hungover and they sat in the open air on the shady side of the tilt. The shed where the stranger slept stood behind them, the pale face glimmering in the dark interior when the door was ajar. The man had lately found the use of his legs and for a few days he’d wandered about the Gut, peering in windows or standing