Galore - Michael Crummey [135]
—Hello Levi.
—Not a very pleasant evening to be strolling about, Eli Devine.
—Thomas asked me to tell you he won’t be able to make his appointment.
The thought crossed Levi’s mind that Trass had been playing him all along but he dismissed it. The man didn’t have the imagination.
—Val Woundy has been keeping a close eye on your Mr. Trass, Eli said, as if he could guess Levi’s thoughts.
—Trass has been feeding me lies all along, I suppose.
—Let’s just say the union meetings that mattered did not take place on the same night as Bride’s classes.
Levi laughed out loud, slapping at his thighs. —Splendid, he said. —And this is the point where I claim to have a man attending the secret secret union meetings as well.
—You don’t have the first clue what’s coming, Levi. But I wanted to come by to tell you to watch for it. So you’ll know I helped steer it your way.
Eli turned to leave and Levi followed after him. —You had an enjoyable time in the company of Mr. Coaker, he said. —Mr. Coaker wouldn’t allow a man like yourself to go without the creature comforts. He took care of your needs while you were away from your wife?
The door swung shut and Levi pushed out into the weather, chasing Eli as far as the road. He was shouting for all he was worth though he could barely hear himself in the wind. He carried on yelling uselessly a while, the words whipped back over the roof of the house and scattered across the Gaze.
It was the Old Hollies that woke her, Flossie thought, the keening voices of some long-drowned sailors carried ashore by the storm, and she lay still in her room praying for them to pass. Heard the back door then, the entire house shifting to accommodate the weather’s push. And the eerie voice rose through the wind’s racket again, half-strangled and pleading, though she could swear now it was coming from somewhere inside the house. She rushed across to Adelina’s room, shaking her awake. —Listen, she whispered. —Listen, listen, listen.
They went arm in arm down the hall, calling for Levi. The garbled voice going on as they reached the stairs and crept toward it one step at a time. —Levi? Adelina called again and the voice went quiet finally. They could just hear the muted sound of sobbing where Sellers lay helpless on the floor below.
Levi learned to scrawl a signature with his left hand after the stroke but needed assistance to perform the simplest tasks, to dress and eat and go to the outhouse. His eye was nearly closed on the dead side of his face, the invalid flesh so shapeless and drooping that he looked like a wax figurine set too close to the heat. Two hundred and seventy-six men came off his rolls that spring, taking provision sent by schooner from Notre Dame Bay instead. The union members paid St. John’s prices for their gear which led to complaints from the fishermen still buying at Sellers & Co., and Levi lived in a state of perpetual vexation.
It was only the intervention of the Catholic Archdiocese that saved Sellers & Co. from complete ruin. Father Reddigan had blessed the union’s first steps on the shore with his silence, though he’d heard murmurs from the archbishop’s office in St. John’s. Before the men returned from the seal hunt in the spring, he received a letter of instruction dismissing the F.P.U. as a secret society that bound its members by an unlawful oath and was ipso facto condemned by the Church. No Catholic can join it, the archbishop wrote, unless he means to incur the Censures of the Church. If he has taken any oath in the Society let him understand it is unlawful and not binding. Please act on this information to stamp out the Society at once if it has appeared in your Parish. Reddigan made the announcement at Mass four Sundays in a row and by the time the Labrador crews set out in June not a single Catholic on the shore remained a member of the F.P.U.
Abel Devine spent