Galore - Michael Crummey [119]
—I’d watch my step then, she said, if I was you.
He was stung by the gall of her. —Don’t you have the slightest concern for your soul, Missus?
—I don’t remember being born, she said, and I won’t remember dying.
He’d left the old woman there without a word of comfort, wishing her dead and gone as he walked back over the Tolt. The strength of that urge surprised him, it was animate and vital, a feral creature he dragged around on a leash, it kicked and clawed and kept him awake half the night with its racket. Reverend Dodge had never experienced a hangover though something akin to it afflicted him when he heard the news of the widow’s death—a foaming sear of regret and a sick aftertaste in his mouth, the suspicion he’d made a royal ass of himself. That he’d been wrong about God or himself somehow.
Dodge looked up at the priest. —I hated that woman, Father.
—The Lord tests us, Reddigan suggested.
—The Lord is a miserable so-and-so, Dodge said.
After the priest gave a final blessing, Flossie and Adelina came to sit with him. They offered to read awhile but he sent them away. —You shouldn’t be alone, Flossie said.
He shook his head. —I’m not alone.
God, they thought he meant. And he allowed them to think as much as they rustled their heavy skirts through the door. He stared up at the ceiling after they’d gone, left alone with the widow woman’s shade. As was right and proper. He’d seen her at work through the years, sitting with the sick and dying. Not a comforting presence, but inexhaustibly patient. Days without respite sometimes before she could stand and weight the eyelids down. She was a little pool of darkness across the room now and he tried to raise a hand to greet her. But he’d left it too long and even that gesture was beyond him. When Adelina looked in an hour later he was gone, arms folded on the chest, the eyes drawn closed.
Dodge’s death was the end of the Episcopalian Church in Paradise Deep, the congregation too small to warrant a new minister. The last adherents gathered for lay services a few months longer before they disappeared into the bosom of the Methodists, and Reverend Violet’s congregation eclipsed the Catholic numbers for the first time. Father Reddigan continued to suffer occasional losses to the evangelist, prompting him to write the archbishop about his concern for the Church on the shore. Monsignor, we are still celebrating Mass in a wooden chapel raised by an apostate more than half a century ago, one can hardly expect it to instill a sense of God’s majesty within the congregation, and perhaps it is time, Monsignor, to consider building a cathedral commensurate with the beauty and glory of the Holy Roman Church.
Every Catholic fisherman on the shore gave over his catch on the feast days of the saints to help underwrite the project, and the cornerstone was laid in 1892. The black granite for the church was quarried in the hills above Devil’s Cove and shipped to Paradise Deep one half-ton block at a time, the stones dressed and raised under the supervision of two Italian masons recruited by the archbishop.
In December of 1894 the Union Bank and the Commercial Bank of Newfoundland collapsed under the burden of overextended credit to St. John’s merchants and the entire colony descended into bankruptcy. Levi Sellers stopped taking fish altogether during the first year of the crisis and many Protestants joined the Catholic work crews on the cathedral for the single meal a day provided to volunteers. It was the largest stone building ever constructed outside St. John’s and almost every soul on the shore had a hand in raising the sanctuary before it was done. There was a nondenominational pride taken in the height of the twin spires, as if the sprawling cathedral were a physical extension of their will, a testament to what