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By Root 490 0

Abel took sick over the Christmas season and Newman diagnosed him with tuberculosis. There was little chance of recovery, the doctor said, and only a year of enforced rest offered any hope. Everything in the old servant’s quarters at the back of Selina’s House was shifted to an outbuilding, a small stove rigged up for heat. They moved in a bed and Patrick Devine’s library and Abel settled into the exile he’d been rehearsing for all his life. There were periodic visits from the doctor to take fluid off his lungs, and from Bride who brought his meals and took away his filthy sputum box. But his mother and the books his grandfather salvaged from the Atlantic were his only real companions. A veranda was built outside the back door as far as the southeast corner and Hannah set him up on a cot for the fresh air when the weather allowed, Abel drifting in and out of sleep as she read to him. He entered and left the stories by side doors and windows and found it impossible to distinguish one book from another. The complications and disappointments and modest epiphanies of those disparate lives seemed part of a single all-encompassing story that had swallowed him whole.

Eli went back at the fish in the spring, on the water before light six days a week, clearing the last of the cod in the whorl of seal-oil torches before walking gingerly home in the black, half-asleep on his feet. And no clue if there’d be a copper to show for it come the fall. Hannah already in bed and pretending to sleep when he came through the door, a plate of food kept in the oven. They never spoke of it directly, but he knew Hannah blamed him for dragging the boy out in all weather. And he supposed she might be right to think so. On Sundays he helped set Abel out on the veranda and then left them to the books, spending the duration of the visit in Tryphie’s workshop.

The Sculpin still occupied the center of the room. Tryphie declared it ready for a test voyage but his hunchback made it impossible to squeeze into the cockpit and no one else was willing to risk the job. Eli leaned against the Sculpin as they talked aimlessly about Tryphie’s latest undertaking or the state of Abel’s health. —He’s a tough little bugger, Eli said.

Tryphie felt a particular empathy for the boy’s predicament and he took exception to Eli’s glib assessment. —You haven’t got a goddamn clue, Tryphie insisted, you know that?

—That’s quite a claim coming from the inventor of the Sculpin.

Tryphie reached for a screwdriver.

—I was just leaving, Eli said, backing away with his arms in the air.

Tryphie turned to the workbench to set the screwdriver down. —I’ve been meaning to tell you, he said over his shoulder. —Been offered a job in Hartford. Me and Minnie are heading up there come September month.

Eli was at the door and he leaned against it. —When did you hear? he asked finally.

—A few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to tell you.

Eli nodded over the news awhile, his eyes on his shoes. —You’ll do well, he said.

Eli lay awake a good part of that night and woke early to the wind beating at the house like a sledgehammer. His heart hammering against his chest in the same wild fashion. He got out of bed and Hannah called after him. —You won’t be going out on the water in this, she said.

—I’ll just start the fire.

He knocked around the kitchen awhile but couldn’t stay inside, pushing out the door into the weather. He walked into Paradise Deep while it was still dark, the wind so fierce on the Tolt he had to crawl on his hands and knees to stay on the headland. The sun came up a gray disk on the horizon as he walked to Tryphie’s workshop behind Selina’s House, the room empty but for the bulk of the Sculpin. Eli stood there as the day’s slow rise brought the machine out of the shadows. He hauled himself up top and swung the hatch open to peer inside. The entryway as big around as an outhouse hole and he stripped out of his pants and shirt to slither through, settling himself nearly naked among the pedals and gearshifts and tackle. Through the starboard porthole he saw Tryphie come in the