Galore - Michael Crummey [122]
Much of the floor space was occupied now by a great fish built of iron intended for underwater travel, the bowels of the creature just large enough to seat a man next to a series of levers and pulleys to operate the fins and rudder and ballast tanks. The Sculpin, Eli called it. They’d spent much of the previous year arguing the lunacy of the notion as the fish was framed out and took shape on the workshop floor. —You’ll have yourself drowned in that goddamn thing, Eli said during his last visit two months before.
Tryphie had flung a screwdriver at him. —Fly the fuck out of it, he shouted as he reached for a hammer.
Eli hadn’t come by the workshop since that argument and he had to make an effort even now not to ridicule the contraption. —How’s Minnie keeping? he asked.
Tryphie leaned against a workbench, wiping at his hands with a rag. —She’s after bawling herself to sleep every night since Esther left us.
Minnie had been dead set against sending her only child off to St. John’s to be molded and coiffed by some stranger. She was alone in her opposition—Tryphie and the doctor, even Bride siding with the girl’s ambition—and she acquiesced in the end. But things were said between Minnie and Eli in the process that cemented their dislike for one another.
—I expect it’s hard for her, Eli said.
—You don’t know fuck-all about it is the very truth of the matter.
Eli nodded, not up to a fight. There were moments when he felt the weight of all that had passed between him and Tryphie on his shoulders. He was still waiting for something central and final to give way, to set him loose or kill him. He gestured helplessly, casting his hand as if he were throwing an imaginary line across the workshop floor. Tryphie carried on wiping his hands, not willing to pick it up. —I just wanted to look in, Eli said finally. —Wish you a merry Christmas.
—Same to you, Tryphie told him.
—That’s a fucking coffin you’re building there, he said as he left and a wrench slammed against the door behind him.
He spent most of the day tramping aimlessly along the roads in the backcountry, the spires of the cathedral rising up out of the harbor’s bowl as he walked back from Nigger Ralph’s Pond. He saw Mary Tryphena coming along the Tolt Road from her daily visit to the asylum cell and he walked down into the Gut with her. —You coming over for supper tonight, Nan? he asked when they reached her door.
Mary Tryphena turned to look him full in the face. The blue of her eyes glaucous, like water caught over with a film of ice. It was hard to imagine what was keeping her alive. —Everything I eats these days, she said, tastes like a bucket of nails.
After supper he set out over the Tolt again. There was a light on at Hannah’s place and John Blade waved him in from the table. Hannah set about pouring a drink for them both as if Eli had made an appointment for the visit. John asked after Druce and Mary Tryphena and a handful of other people in the Gut and he was only halfways into his rum when he said, Matthew is expecting me next door. He got up for his coat. —I might just kip down on the daybed if I has a few snorts, he told his daughter. —Don’t wait up.
Hannah closed the door after him and turned back to the kitchen. —How’s your drink, Eli?
He raised the glass still half full. —John don’t mind leaving you alone like this?
Hannah walked to the stove, standing close for the heat, her hands hidden behind her. —If I had a mind for trouble I’d have got into it for long ago, she said. She was a plain-looking woman though the years of work in the gardens and on the fish flakes had made a virtue of her plainness. There