Galore - Michael Crummey [115]
When Tryphie turned sixteen he left to attend college in St. John’s in preparation for the inevitable medical degree. Eli was relieved to be free of his company but felt at a loss in his days without it. He knocked around on the waterfront and tramped over half the countryside, trying to fend off the hatred for the shore that grew in him like a black mold. It was a surprise to discover he despised the people closest to him simply for enduring their lives of want. The only venture on the shore not owned by or beholden to Levi Sellers was the Trims’ sawmill and Eli took a job there over the winter months, squirreling away nickels and dimes toward a way out.
He was seen in the company of Hannah Blade on occasion and people thought they were just odd enough to make a grand couple. But Eli was never known to set his cap for any girl in particular. There was a solitude about him, a whiff of secrecy that encouraged idle speculation. Every discussion of Eli eventually ran through his family tree, as if it were a list of symptoms. Devine’s Widow begetting Callum who married hag-ridden Lizzie Sellers. Callum and Lizzie begetting Mary Tryphena and peg-leg Lazarus, raised from the dead and father to Jackie-tars on the Labrador. Mary Tryphena wedded to the stench of the Great White, and they two begetting Eli’s father, Patrick, who all but drowned himself to bring home a stack of books.
Eli was a queer stick, no one could deny it. There’s no escaping your blood, people said, and Eli Devine was saddled with more weight than most.
In the winter of his eighteenth year Tryphie brought his fiancée home to Paradise Deep for a Christmas wedding.
Newman had planned to send his stepson to school in the States but Tryphie refused. Even St. John’s he had to be bullied into. He spent two homesick years at Bishop Feild College, miserable even while he fell in love with Minnie Rose, a kitchen maid at the house where he boarded. The two carried on a clandestine courtship for a year before Tryphie proposed.
The couple arrived at Selina’s House mid-afternoon on Tibb’s Eve. Newman was in surgery and didn’t lay eyes on his future daughter-in-law until he sat at the supper table. A girl Tryphie had rescued from the life of a scullery maid, a seventeen-year-old with no education and less ambition, an attitude of congenital deference about her that set Newman’s teeth on edge. He excused himself without taking tea and hid out in his office until he did a last round for the evening and went to bed.
—That girl wouldn’t last thirty seconds into an appendectomy, he said to Bride.
—Tryphie isn’t marrying a nurse.
—Well maybe he ought to be.
—Don’t you say a word, she warned him.
—And what if I do?
Bride waited a moment, considering how far she was willing to push. —Tryphie’s never wanted to go to medical school at all, she said. —You know that.
—And this is his way of getting out of it? Marrying a maid who can’t manage a sentence without the word sir or ma’am tacked to the end?
Bride said, You’re just like your father, Harold Newman.
—Goddamn it, woman.
—If you profane the Lord once more, Bride said.
Newman raised himself on an elbow, exasperated and furious and just the barest niggle of something sexual beginning to turn in him. —Are you going to wash my mouth out with soap, Nurse?
She turned away on her side to hide her smile.
—Kiss me, he said.
—I wouldn’t touch those filthy lips to save my soul.
She tried to fend him off when he fell on her, slapping at his ears. He grabbed her wrists to pin her arms above her head. —You’ve ruined my life, he said, nuzzling her breasts.
—Sure you never had it so good, you foolish gommel, she said, falling back into an accent so thick he’d thought it a foreign language the first time he encountered her. There was something in hearing