Galore - Michael Crummey [134]
It wasn’t until she died that he learned Judah was missing and Levi felt a surge of the old poison in his gut. He burned the white bastard’s crazy work scored on the walls of the fishing room, as if the absence of physical evidence might convince him the man had never existed at all. But he felt cheated of something by the disappearance. It was as if the old crone had made a cuckold of him. And that thought renewed his failing animosities.
He had Trass go along to Coaker’s initial gathering at the old church out of idle curiosity. Sent inquiries to acquaintances in Notre Dame Bay and St. John’s who reported Coaker was a loner and a fool, possibly delusional, addled by his years trying to conjure a farm out of rock and bog, by a marriage he was ill-suited for. The notion of him building a union was a joke, they said. Levi engaged Trass to attend the clandestine weekly meetings and he compiled a list of the local men who had taken the pledge. He was particularly gregarious when he crossed paths with them at church or on the streets, asking after their health and the health of their families, thinking how their faces would look when the union foundered and they came begging for credit. The spring promised to be as good as a concert.
He went to his bed after midnight and crawled out of it long before light. He was at the table when Adelina and Flossie came down to their breakfast. The women were virtually inseparable before the children left for the States and he never saw them but in one another’s company now, walking the garden paths arm in arm, sitting together in the evenings to knit or crochet or read. He tried to send them to America with the youngsters and it was still a mystery why they refused. —I made a vow, Flossie told him, her eyes averted. As if it was a life sentence.
The women never spoke against him, but there were subtle acts of defiance he couldn’t miss. Volunteering at the hospital after he bargained away Selina’s House. Offering singing lessons to Tryphie Newman’s daughter, cutting clippings from the Evening Telegram whenever there was a mention of the Nightingale of Paradise. Sitting side by side at Mary Tryphena’s funeral in their best black mourning as if the woman were kin.
—How did you sleep? Flossie asked him.
—Adequately.
His wife set her knife carefully across her plate and glanced at Adelina. The two women were unfailingly demure in his presence, but there was an air of condescension about them, the residue of whispered conversations when his back was turned. —Have you thought of speaking to Dr. Newman? she asked.
—About what exactly?
Adelina said, It’s been months of this now, Levi.
—You’re exhausted, Flossie told him.
There it was, the one thing he could not abide, the reason they refused to leave with the children. They pitied him. He pushed his chair back from the table. —Sleep, he said, is the urging of the Devil.
In March the local men who’d secured sealing berths left for Harbour Grace and Brigus and as far as St. John’s en route to the ice fields after whitecoats. No union meetings were held while they were gone and it was nearly a month before the sealers made their way back, wearing the clothes they left in, sleeves and pant cuffs crusted with blood, the lot of them haggard and punch-drunk and carrying trinkets from the Water Street stores for their wives and children. The sealers collected Eli Devine on their way through Notre Dame Bay and on the night of the union’s first meeting back Levi went out to the barn as soon as the women retired, anxious to hear what Thomas Trass had to report.
It was a wild night, the rafters cracking in the wind and the cows restless. The foul weather made time crawl and Levi took out his pocket watch periodically to glare at it in the dark, trying to guess the hour. He’d all but given up on Trass when the door at the other end of the building opened and was hauled shut against the gale.