Galore - Michael Crummey [123]
He laughed and shook his head. He stayed because Patrick hadn’t come back to the Gut for years now and Druce had no one else to look out to her. Because Mary Tryphena was nearly as old as the century and bound to leave them before long. He stayed to spare Levi Sellers the satisfaction of seeing one more Devine pushed off the shore. He stayed because Tryphie …
—God knows maid, he said. —Why is it you never managed to get into trouble all this time?
She looked away, making a dismissive noise in her throat.
—It wasn’t Obediah you were at the church to see, he said. —Was it, Hannah.
—What else would I be doing?
—You’ve been going over there to look at me in that picture.
Hannah shook her head. —You don’t mind yourself, I know.
—Tell me I’m wrong, he said, and I’ll be gone.
—Eli, she said, I’ve been waiting for you to leave here since I was a girl.
—Jesus Hannah.
She straightened where she stood. —I am not going to beg, that much I will tell you.
He watched her awhile then, that little cauldron of doggedness and impotent distress, reflecting his own heartache back to him. Shadows and light and wishful thinking was all there was to the world, that much he could attest. He lifted his tumbler and finished his drink. He said, I’d have another, Hannah. But she didn’t move from where she stood next the stove. —If you can stand to have me, he said.
{ 7 }
KERRIVAN’S APPLE TREE WAS STILL STANDING on the far side of the Gut when Eli and Hannah Devine’s son arrived in the last year of the nineteenth century. The tree hadn’t borne leaves or fruit for so long it was nearly forgotten and none but the oldest livyers on the shore remembered anything of Sarah Kerrivan who carted the sapling across the ocean in a wooden tub. The branches were gnarled and brittle and stripped of their bark and they stooped to the ground where even the stones of Callum Devine’s rock fence had been scattered by generations of winter frost.
Hannah Devine was well on in her life to be carrying a baby for the first time and she was taken with cramps while working the garden in her fifth month. Druce sent Eli to borrow a horse and cart from Matthew Strapp and they clattered over the Tolt Road to the hospital with Hannah grunting through her teeth. The child was barely a child at all when it came into the world, a glove of translucent skin, dark clots of the organs showing through the flesh. The tiny cock like a thread unraveling at a seam. Newman clamped and cut the umbilical cord and handed the infant to Bride before he turned his attention to Hannah. She had still to pass the afterbirth and he’d all but forgotten the child when Bride called across the room to say there was a heartbeat.
A month later the infant weighed no more than a decent cod fillet and still wouldn’t latch onto his mother’s nipple to eat and few thought he would leave the hospital alive. Dr. Newman and Tryphie had fashioned a metal incubator with a glass cover, the little oven heated from below by cylinders of water suspended over kerosene lamps. A constant watch was required to monitor the temperature and the family took the work in shifts, Hannah and Eli, Druce and John Blade and Hannah’s sisters-in-law, Tryphie and Minnie and Bride.
Even ancient Mary Tryphena took her turn beside the child. It had been years since the old woman showed the slightest interest in the world, but she’d fussed over Hannah during her pregnancy, pushing concoctions of bog myrtle and gold-withy on the expectant mother. And she carried on with her doctoring after the child was delivered, opening the incubator when she was left alone to smear his chest with liniments and poultices that could be smelled in every room of the hospital. Newman warned her away from tampering and barred her from the room altogether when she ignored him. —Keep that old witch away from the baby, he