Galore - Michael Crummey [128]
—Jesus Eli, Tryphie said. —Don’t mess around with her.
—Can’t let you leave and not launch this thing, he said. He squiggled back into the seat.
—How does it feel in there?
—Snug as a casket, Eli shouted.
The Sculpin was wheeled to the shoreline the following Sunday. A huge crowd on the waterfront to watch the strange device being towed to the middle of the harbor on a barrel raft. Eli stripped to his skivvies and climbed inside, Tryphie leaning over the hatch to review the operation one last time. —You have to keep her trim when you let go the ballast tanks, he was saying. Eli looked up at his cousin as one esoteric instruction after another rattled his way, yaw and pitch, stern planes and rudder. —Shut up Ladybug, he said.
Tryphie reached to shake his hand and Eli held on awhile.
—You’ll do well, Tryphie told him, not to worry.
—I wish you were dead, Eli said.
Tryphie sealed the hatch and stepped off into a dory where he set about hammering holes in the barrels to scupper the raft. The iron fish floated clear into the bay, the sea around her boiling with escaping air and the vessel descending gracefully enough until she was halfway underwater. She started rolling aft then, Tryphie shouting correctional adjustments that seemed no help to Eli. The keel broke the surface a moment and the capsized vessel sank slowly into the black.
There was no plan for what in the aftermath seemed altogether predictable. Men scrambled to get boats on the water, half a dozen dories sculling to the spot where she went down. It was seven fathoms to the bottom and they tried to hook some part of the hull with grapples, casting where air bubbled to the surface. Two lines were rowed to shore and fifty men dragged the weight of the machine into the shallows where she lay on her side. A flood of seawater poured clear when Tryphie released the hatch, Eli extracted from the innards by the white of his hair. He was unconscious and his lungs waterlogged and the doctor worked him over for fifteen minutes on the beach before he could be brought to the hospital.
He didn’t come to himself until the next morning, his eyes trolling slowly about the bed where Hannah and Bride and Tryphie stood watching him. Bride called for the doctor and Eli shook his head against the pillow. —This was all a mistake, he said.
—Don’t waste your strength, Bride told him.
He was home the next day and back on the water with Strapp’s crew two days later. But he refused visitors and never left the house except to work. He talked in monosyllables and ate his food with an apathy that verged on revulsion. No one spoke of the accident for what it was but Hannah could see that Eli was skewed somehow, as if his mind had capsized along with the Sculpin. For weeks she tried to pass Eli’s listlessness off as a kind of hangover, as if the shadow on his heart was a physical bruise that would fade with time. But when she could stand it no longer she went to see Reverend Violet, thinking a dose of the evangelist’s forcefulness and drive might be the tonic Eli needed.
The minister came to visit the house on a Sunday afternoon. —I thought I’d drop in, he said. —I’m not keeping you from something? He sat on the edge of a chair, hitching his pants up at the knee. Violet was past sixty and just as relentless as the missionary who appeared on the shore forty years before. His wife had raised a family of seven children while he proselytized the coastline and he had installed sons in the pulpits of new churches in Spread Eagle and Smooth Cove. Half the shore flew the Methodist banner as a result of his tireless campaigning. He had no time for prevarication. —Your wife is afraid there’s some harm come to you.
—I’m fine, Eli said.
—You give yourself a good fright, he said.
—Never felt better.
They danced awkwardly back and forth the room this way for half an hour and neither man would surrender the lead. Violet stood finally and went to the door. —The Lord brings us low to lift us up, he said. —When you’re stripped bare, that’s the time to