Galore - Michael Crummey [120]
Three months before the church was completed, Obediah Trim fell from a five-storey scaffold while installing stained-glass windows behind the altar. His body was carted to the hospital where the doctor set the multiple fractures to make him look halfways human in his casket. Newman wired the misshapen jaw in place and he stared at the face from one side and then the other, testing it against his memory of the man. —There you are, Obediah, he said. He touched his finger to the faint line below the Adam’s apple—the kinkorn, as Obediah called it—tracing the scar he’d left removing the egg-shaped fibroid in his first weeks on the shore. —There you are, he said again.
Azariah came to the doctor’s office the day before the funeral, carrying Jabez Trim’s Bible. He placed the ancient text on Newman’s desk. —We thought you should have it, Az said. —Me and Obediah. Once we was gone.
—You aren’t planning on leaving us are you, Az?
—I wanted to be sure it got to you, is all. You seemed so taken with it. It’s not much for all you’re after doing for us crowd, he said.
Newman nodded helplessly and the two men sat in silence a few moments. —I hear Tryphie’s girl is going to sing at the service, Newman said finally.
—We’re grateful to have her, Az said. —She’s what now? Thirteen?
—Just turned fourteen.
—Where does the time go, Azariah said and the doctor shrugged.
Newman left the Good Book where it sat on the desk, refused even to touch it. He couldn’t shake the sense that acknowledging the Bible’s presence would mean losing Azariah to some misadventure as well. It was Bride who rescued the book from the clutter months afterwards, placing it on a shelf in the storage room they’d made of the servant’s quarters off the kitchen.
Father Reddigan gave his congregation leave to attend the funeral and the crowd of mourners spilled out the doors, circling the Methodist chapel to listen at the open windows. Esther Newman sang “Amazing Grace,” the hymn carrying all the way to the harbor where even the gulls fell silent to hear it. Old Callum and Martha Devine together couldn’t hold a candle, people said. Esther herself wasn’t always easy to take, but her voice inspired the same sense of proprietary awe as the new cathedral. As if it was the best of what they were, distilled into something elegant and pure and inviolable.
Esther was born precocious and brazen and generally made her parents’ lives a trial. She avoided Minnie’s preoccupation with manners and chores by escaping to the Gut to sit with Mary Tryphena, listening to the old woman prattle on about the courtships and epidemics and wild winters she’d seen in her time, walking her over the Tolt to visit with Judah in his cell. It was obvious to Esther that her mother had no time for Eli Devine, and she went out of her way to cultivate a relationship with him as well, just to spite Minnie.
Eli saw early on that Esther’s talent was more than the shore could hope to hold to itself and he encouraged her nascent ambitions, as if some small piece of himself might escape into the wider world with her. She’d long ago outstripped what lessons Adelina Sellers had to offer and it was Eli’s idea to find an instructor in St. John’s, to have her board there several months of the year. Dr. Newman agreed to bankroll the venture and talked Tryphie and Minnie past their reluctance.
She was scheduled to leave for the capital city on the season’s last packet boat two weeks after Obediah’s funeral, and no one was surprised in the months that followed to hear Esther was singing at churches and concerts and weddings across St. John’s, that she received invitations to perform in Halifax and Quebec City. Three years later the governor himself would request she be featured at turn-of-the-century celebrations on Signal Hill. And in the spring of 1900 she would sail for France with letters of introduction from the Newfoundland governor and