Galore - Michael Crummey [13]
Lizzie was still awake when he came to bed and they lay that way the rest of the night, both of them rigid and fearful. She was angry with him for going outside, though he didn’t see how he could leave his mother to stare down a crowd of drunkards bent on murder. —She needs no help from heaven or earth, Lizzie said. A note of disgust in her voice, as if the old woman’s fortitude was something to be despised.
Callum was ten years older than his wife. He’d loved her from the time she was a child and spent much of his adulthood resigned to a life without her. It was thanks to some murky intervention by Devine’s Widow they were together now though they’d never acknowledged the fact. Lizzie wasn’t used to being in anyone’s debt and she never made peace with the notion.
It was still dark outside when he rose from the bed two hours later, the morning calm and warm as all mornings had been since summer began in earnest. The sharpest sliver of moon like a fish hook over the Tolt.
Devine’s Widow stopped him at the door as he left. —You’ll have a good day out there today, she said, and he nodded without looking at the woman.
Daniel and James were already on the stagehead. No one mentioned the night’s events and they climbed down into the boat carting buckets of bait and jigging lines. They loosed the moorings and shoved clear into the still water of the cove. James and Daniel sat to the oars and rowed through the narrows on the high tide while Callum cut and set the baitfish on their hooks. They were an hour out before they realized the standing smell of offal and fish guts from the splitting room was still with them. The stink drifting back from the bow. They found the stranger curled into the fore-cuddy under a bit of canvas sail, a half-naked stowaway. They guessed he made his way to the fishing rooms from the shed the night before, the only place in the Gut where his own stink wouldn’t give him away, slipping into the boat to hide when the torches came for him. —Which means he’s something more than an idiot, Daniel said. The three men argued about the wisdom of keeping him in the boat, about the time that would be wasted rowing back. —He’s a goddamn jinker, James insisted. —We’ll all be drownded out here with him aboard.
Daniel suggested they just send him overside and be done with it, but Callum couldn’t see what would stop him being carted ashore in the belly of another whale and they’d be back where they began. The stranger hadn’t moved a muscle since being uncovered, only his eyes flicking back and forth between them, and he was staring at Callum now as if waiting for a verdict.
—I’ll tell you this much, James Woundy said, I’m sick to death of carting the bastard all over God’s green earth. I’ll not row another stroke with him in the boat.
—What about it? Callum asked the stranger. —You want to take a turn at the oars? He held out his hand as a taunt but couldn’t refuse when the man reached to take it. James and Daniel both retreated to the stern as he made his way to the taut and set the oars, rowing cross-handed toward the new sun as if the sun was his destination.
They passed a handful of other boats that were having no luck at the fish. There was pointing and shouting when they saw who was at the oars and by the time the sun had come full into the sky there was a tiny flotilla in their wake, following at a discreet distance. Some among them men who carried torches into the Gut the night before. The stranger rowed on without a glance over his shoulder, shipping the oars on a nondescript bit of shoal ground known as the Rump.
—Now what? Callum asked. —You wants a spell, is it? But the man tossed the grapple and turned to the wooden buckets where the lines and jiggers were coiled. He looked to Callum a moment before letting a line run through his fingers over the gunwale and then began jigging, a rhythmic full-arm heave and release