Galore - Michael Crummey [133]
They could hear Abel coughing in the next room and both women turned their heads to the sound, waiting for the spasm to end.
—I don’t know, maid, Bride said after the youngster went quiet. —I can’t help thinking there’s some lack in a man who would name a place after himself like that. Coakerville, she said. And the women laughed at the foolishness of it.
Coaker insisted that all F.P.U. members be able to read and write and he tasked Azariah Trim with arranging instruction on the shore. The union’s night-school classes began at the end of November and forty-five men gathered in a lamplit room once a week to learn their letters. Az recruited Bride to teach and she nursed her students along with the same mix of temerity and charm that made her so invaluable at the hospital. By the time they left for the seal hunt in March most of the original forty-five were able to write their own names and read simple Bible verses and count by fives and tens.
The regular union meetings preceded the school sessions and without Coaker’s guidance they degenerated into fractious free-for-alls. After those first heady weeks, a hangover of doubt set in. They had only Coaker’s word that such a thing as the Fishermen’s Protective Union existed. No one knew how the F.P.U. planned to outfit members for the fishery or sell their fish at the end of the year. Doubting Thomas Trass led a group demanding assurances, securities, but there were none to be offered. —We got nothing if we don’t hang together, Az Trim told the room.
—Levi Sellers will see us all hang together if he gets wind of this, Trass insisted. —Make no mistake.
The numbers at the meetings dwindled as the season crept closer. Thomas Trass stayed on despite his vocal reservations and it seemed that the schooling was all that held him. He was one of Bride’s slowest students, working at the lessons with a dull earnestness. He’d taken to tracing his name absently on the tabletop or his thigh during any idle moment, Thomas Trass, Thomas Trass, Thomas Trass, as if he had to continually remind himself who he was. Trass was past sixty and a lifelong bachelor. He was engaged to a girl in Smooth Cove as a young man and walked thirty miles down the shore the day before the wedding to find her dead. It was well after dark when he arrived, his fiancée laid out in the kitchen for her wake, and he’d turned to walk back to Paradise Deep without so much as taking off his jacket. There was something about Thomas Trass, people said, that was still out on that trail in the dead of night, somewhere between Smooth Cove and home.
After each night class he and Val Woundy accompanied Bride to Selina’s House and saw her through the door. Val headed home to the Gut then and Thomas lay an hour on his daybed as he’d been instructed. Not a light on the shore when he slipped back into the cold, no sound but his footsteps over the snow. He walked along Sellers’ Drung toward Selina’s House, then beyond it to Levi’s property where he circled behind the house to the barn. Levi sitting on a stool at the rear, among the heat of the animals. —I was starting to think perhaps they turned you, Sellers said each time Trass picked his way past the stalls to offer a report on the night’s developments. It was all about to fall to pieces as far as Trass could tell and he’d be sorry to lose the schooling if it happened sooner rather than later.
Levi handed the man his two dollars and sat awhile longer after Trass left, avoiding his bed to spare himself the hours of lying there insomniac. He tried to think of the last proper night’s sleep he had, sometime long before Mary Tryphena Devine passed on. Levi used to watch for her from his office window, the woman on her trek to the fishing room where Judah wasted away, and he developed a grudging admiration for the old woman’s mettle. He’d had to keep reminding