Galore - Michael Crummey [114]
When they weren’t locked away with Patrick Devine’s books or Tryphie’s tools the boys tormented the goats in the meadow and tore up rhubarb gardens. They copied across the pans of sea ice that clogged the harbor each spring. They ran behind Sellers’ barns at milking time, beating the walls with sticks to set the skittish cows bucking. They threw rocks at the fishing room where the Great White was shut away, hoping to rouse some response to confirm the man was still among the living. They wandered the backcountry to play out complicated scenarios involving pirates and English soldiers or cowboys and Indians. Occasionally web-fingered Hannah Blade or one of the younger Woundys was drafted into the action, but more often than not they were alone.
Increasingly their friendship felt like a straitjacket, an attachment cemented by obligation and guilt, and an edge of cruelty crept into it. Tryphie’s hunchback made him an easy target, the livid skin stretched across his shoulders like a carapace. Ladybug, Eli called him, Monkey-man, Ape. They set tests of endurance to watch the other fail, holding their palms over a candle flame until someone surrendered, pushing the other’s head underwater for the panic and choking, the snot and tears. Both boys felt diminished by their attachment but couldn’t see how to escape it.
When they stripped out of their clothes to swim in the backcountry ponds the wind on their bodies stood their hairless pricks on end. They poked at one another innocently enough for a while, sword fighting they called it. And one afternoon Eli dared Tryphie to touch his cock, knowing Tryphie couldn’t resist a dare. —Too chicken to put it in your mouth, he said a week later. For the rest of that summer they lay side by side on the moss to suck one another after swimming, a pale starfish surrounded by miles of wilderness. They never spoke a word about it and Eli sidled up to the act each time, looking for any hint of hesitance or judgment in Tryphie’s manner. There was something shaming in the wariness it forced on them and eventually they avoided the backcountry ponds altogether to be free of it.
On Sundays they went to church together, sitting in a pew with Bride and Tryphie’s two half-brothers. They never took in a word of Reverend Violet’s interminable sermons, Tryphie’s head full of gears, angles, torque, glue and bevels and sandpaper and ball bearings, Eli wandering the streets of Boston or Hartford or lying in the moss with a faceless man, the wind like a second skin on his skin. After the service he walked down the aisle with his coat buttoned and his hands folded in front of him while Tryphie rambled on about a watch that could predict the weather or a saw blade set into a table and powered by a foot-pump. There was no one else on the shore like himself, Eli thought, maybe no one in the whole of Newfoundland.
The cod fishery followed its tidal rise and fall with implacable regularity, seasons of relative bounty followed by years of poor catches or poor markets overseas. The annual hunt for seals on the Labrador ice was lost to larger, faster steamships out of St. John’s and the bleak times made it hard to argue that anything less than Levi’s ruthlessness could keep Sellers & Co. afloat. Patrick Devine began traveling to St. John’s each spring in hopes of getting out from under the man’s thumb, spending the summer months aboard a schooner fishing cod off the Grand Banks.
Eli lobbied to accompany his father on the bankers but Druce refused to surrender her youngest child, as if she knew Patrick was destined one year not to come home. Every spring mother and son descended into the same argument and found their