Galore - Michael Crummey [12]
The priest stopped at the shed door before leaving and nodded to the man inside. He talked for a while about the fish and the strangely fine weather and his time in Africa, without knowing if a single word was understood. —Well sir, he said finally. The heat did nothing to help the man’s odor, the priest could hardly catch a breath for the reek. —There’s some people talking of making away with you, he said. —They think you’re bad for the fish, is what it is. It’s most likely just talk. Although there’s no telling what people might do if times get bad enough and times are not good. Father Phelan glanced over his shoulder to see if any of this news registered on the man’s face, but couldn’t make out his features in the gloom. —The peace of the Lord be with you, he said before he left.
They came for the stranger eventually, as the priest expected they would. Two dozen men drunk and armed with fish knives and hayforks and torches and rope, a ragged medieval tapestry descending the Tolt Road in the dead of night. Devine’s Widow shaking Callum awake. —They’re coming for him, she told him.
—Who?
—Get up, she said.
He heard their racket then, the men shouting to one another as if the dark affected their ears as well as their eyes. Lizzie put a hand to his arm, begging him to stay inside, and Devine’s Widow went out on her own while they argued. She was standing in front of the shed door when they arrived, her shawl across her shoulders, grey hair loose about her head and her sunken face trenched with shadows in the torchlight. No one was surprised to find her there and it was Devine’s Widow they’d gotten drunk to face. There was nothing to the woman but sinew, her body like a length of hemp rope. But she’d brought most of them into the world and delivered their children as well. She sat with the dying and washed and laid out the corpses. She seemed a gatekeeper between two worlds whose say-so they were helpless to carry on without. Someone at the back of the group asked her to stand aside, the deference of the request so comical in the circumstances that she laughed.
—I spose you wants a cup of tea with that, she said.
Callum came around the side of the house and walked up beside his mother. —What is it you wants? he asked.
The same polite voice from the back of the group said, We only wants to have a word with your man in the shed.
—The idiot haven’t got a word in he’s head.
—We’ll burn it down if we have to, Callum.
The door opened a crack then and slowly wider and in the light of the torches Mary Tryphena looked out from the shed to tell them the man was gone.
The mob forced their way past her and then into the house and they carried out a drunken search of the nearby bushes before heading to the waterfront. Callum stood watching the light of the torches dip in and out of the fishing rooms before he went back inside. He sat on the edge of the children’s bed to speak to Mary Tryphena. She’d had a dream that woke her, she said, and went outside. Saw the lights coming and had gone to warn the man away, shooing him off as if he was an old cow trampling the garden.
—You went out to pee, did you?
—No, she said.
Callum shook his head. He didn’t know if the girl meant to say she’d dreamt the event before it happened or if it was simple coincidence, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He’d always thought Mary Tryphena had too much of the widow in her. Precocious and grasping after life in a way that made him afraid for her. Eathna had been his girl, gregarious and unserious. Dimples and a head of red curls and a lovely voice to accompany him when he sang around the house. He’d never felt the same ease with Mary Tryphena. There was more to the world than what could be seen or heard or held, he didn’t doubt the fact.