Galore - Michael Crummey [125]
Hannah was increasingly protective of the improbable child. She barred Abel inside during inclement weather and through the entire length of the winters. She forbade activity that would overexcite or tire him. She refused to allow talk of politics or local gossip or the family’s checkered history in his presence, as if he might catch something fatal from such topics. He spent much of his early years in his grandfather’s library where he became a reader in self-defense, escaping his isolation in the worlds categorized and alphabetized and stacked on the parlor shelves. The youngster knew nothing of Absalom Sellers growing up ignorant of the most basic facts of his own life in Selina’s House or Lizzie’s years as a recluse wandering the backcountry, he’d never been told a thing about Judah Devine’s biblical isolation in his asylum cell. But everyone else on the shore could see Abel was being raised in a solitude that was a peculiar inheritance of his blood.
Mary Tryphena was the only person who never doubted the boy would survive and she seemed to recover her appetite for life through the child’s persistence. Hannah discouraged contact between the two, not wanting Abel exposed to the old woman’s talk. She was forced to ask Mary Tryphena to watch him while she was on the flakes or working the garden but warned her to keep a tight rein on her inclination to reminisce.
Mary Tryphena was as ancient as Devine’s Widow by this time, a meager, emaciated figure. Her movements were deliberate, almost mechanical, as if she’d been designed and put together in Tryphie’s workshop, and her reticence somehow enhanced that impression in Abel’s mind. He thought her kin to the imaginary worlds of the library, a character out of Gulliver’s Travels. There was something in her antediluvian bearing that made her seem immutable, and it never occurred to him that her place in his life was temporary. He was reading to her when Mary Tryphena took her turn, the ancient smiling oddly where she sat on the green leather chesterfield, as if she felt he needed encouragement. —Are you all right, Nan? he asked and she went on smiling in a surprised, pleading fashion. —Nan? he said.
By the time he’d fetched Hannah from the garden Mary Tryphena had found her voice and insisted there wasn’t a thing wrong with her. —You scared me, Abel said and she laughed at him, as if his fear was a childish thing. She reached a hand to touch his face. —You loves your Nan, don’t you.
—Yes, he said. —I do.
She said, I waited all my life for you, Abel Devine.
And there was something in the declaration that made the boy feel like bawling.
—We should get you to the hospital, Hannah said.
Mary Tryphena shook her head. —I’d kill for a cup of tea, she said. But she didn’t touch the mug when Hannah set it on the table beside her.
—Do you want that tea or not?
—Can’t move me arms, my love, she said. She shook her head and smiled at them in the same strangely apologetic fashion, the words gone again. Hannah sent Abel to fetch the doctor but the old woman was dead before they came back over the Tolt.
Judah Devine had been so long out of people’s minds that no one thought to carry the news of Mary Tryphena’s passing to his lunatic cell until after the wake. There was no sign of the man inside and he’d clearly been gone from the place a long time. Bald strips of sky showed through the roof and salt-spray rimed the gaps in the lungers underfoot. People felt foolish to have accepted the fact Judah was living out his days in the godforsaken hole and they denied ever believing such a thing. Some claimed to know he’d left the waterfront shortly after the locks came off the prison doors and spent the remainder of his days on an old trappers’ line near the Breakers. Others that the escape was a recent one and Judah was still holed up in a woodland tilt near Nigger Ralph’s Pond.
The greater