Galore - Michael Crummey [132]
It was a week after Coaker left before Eli was able to get to Tryphie. He hadn’t stepped inside the workshop since the accident, the Sculpin’s carcass abandoned outside the doors. Tryphie was hunched over a diagram with ruler and pencil and didn’t look up to greet his visitor. The walls above the workbenches were stripped clean of tools. Eli leaned in to watch awhile, trying to outwait him. Turned to stand against the bench finally. —If you were going to build a warehouse to dry salt fish, he said.
Tryphie glanced up, squinting. —A what?
—A warehouse for drying fish.
—Hot-air dryers, you mean.
—Could be.
—You’d want forced air.
—You think fans or what?
—You could rig it up with electric fans, Tryphie said. —But something that large you’d need your own power station.
—One bloody step at a time, Eli said.
Tryphie flipped the paper and began sketching a rough notion. Lost in the size of it, the technical issues that came piling one on the other. He was throwing out figures as he worked and the two men riffed back and forth on specifications and alternative designs, the exchange so fluid and singular it was almost sexual. They carried on another fifteen minutes before Tryphie paused in mid-stroke. —Who is it building a fish warehouse?
—You hear about William Coaker when he was here?
—The farmer? Tryphie said. —Jesus loves the little children.
—He’ve got a thousand men signed on in Notre Dame Bay, Tryph. Says another two or three thousand by next spring. I’m going up to Herring Neck the winter. See how the union locals work, how the coop stores are set up.
—Does Levi know anything about this?
—You should come with me, Eli said.
Tryphie laughed and walked across the workroom floor.
—This is going to change the country, Tryphie, top to bottom.
—That’s a lot to ask of a fish dryer.
Eli picked up the sheet of paper and folded it. —We could be part of this, he said. —Me and you.
—Minnie’s set on the States.
Eli nodded to himself awhile. He asked a few half-hearted questions about arrangements for travel and where in Hartford they’d be living and Tryphie answered with his back to Eli, picking at a trunkful of tools. —I’ll go on then, Eli said finally but he didn’t move from where he stood. He said, I rolled the Sculpin, Tryph. I sank her on purpose. He let out a long breath. —I thought you should hear it from me. In case there was a question in your mind.
—You’re all right now, are you?
—Never better, he said.
Eli left for Coaker’s winter quarters in Herring Neck a month after Tryph and Minnie sailed for the States. Hannah moved over the Tolt to stay at Selina’s House while Eli was away doing God knows what in Notre Dame Bay. Bride set up a space for her in the upstairs room that Mr. Gallery had fallen into generations past, her cot set off from the hospital beds by a sheet hung from the ceiling. Hannah occupied her days with the tasks Minnie abandoned when she left, cooking and laundry and mopping floors. She read awhile to Abel each evening and drank a cup of tea with Bride while Newman carried out his last rounds. They discussed the day’s patients and weather and the minutest details of Abel’s condition. They talked often of the union, like everyone else on the shore. Coaker had passed through again at the end of October, speaking to three hundred men in the old Trim sawmill, making overnight trips with Eli to Red Head Cove and Spread Eagle and Smooth Cove where dozens more took the union pledge. Eli staying up half the night with Coaker to strategize, spending the days in clandestine discussions with fishermen, pushing the dream. It had been a relief to see him interested in the world again, if not in herself and Abel in particular. She thought he would come around to them soon enough. But there was a growing absence about her husband that was making her doubtful. —What do you think will become of it all, Bride?
Bride stirred sugar into her cup, set the spoon on the saucer. She’d heard people speak of Coaker as a tonic for the ills of the world. A visionary, they said. It made her squirm, that sort of church