Galore - Michael Crummey [136]
Eli had been back in the Gut since March but Abel’s mother chose to stay on at the hospital. The three of them spent part of each Sunday morning on the veranda before church and that was all there was to them as a family. Hannah refused to have Abel stirred up and she protected him from any talk of the union or politics in general, though even a shut-in could sense the tide of change rising on the shore.
Abel’s condition improved through the summer and on his better days he wasn’t content to lie in bed. He paced his tiny room or sat at the shelves to leaf through books he’d never opened before, just for the novelty of it. He stood on a chair to reach Jabez Trim’s Bible tucked away on the highest shelf. He had no memory of seeing the book in Patrick Devine’s library and didn’t know what to make of the artifact. The pages were leathery and thick, the hand-lettered text archaic and blurred. It seemed a foreign language he was looking at and he wrote out lines and verses, trying to imitate the baroque bells and curves as if he was sketching a landscape. He spent weeks writing his way through Genesis and Deuteronomy and Psalms and Ecclesiastes, figuring one letter at a time, making the strange script his own through repetition.
There was a rush to join the F.P.U. in the fall. The union fish was sold in bulk in St. John’s, fetching fifty cents a quintal above the price paid by Sellers & Co. A circular letter from Coaker announced that His Lordship Bishop McNeil of St. George’s had approved a new wording of the union’s pledge, and Father Reddigan said nothing when three dozen Catholic men took the oath a second time ahead of word from the archbishop in St. John’s. Half the shore’s population ordered their winter provisions through Coaker’s wholesale outfit and Levi sold off a portion of his waterfront property to Matthew Strapp to keep the company afloat.
Eli left for Change Islands to attend the annual session of the supreme council of the F.P.U. in late October. He was due home the first week of November with Coaker in tow and there was a flurry of activity in preparation for the great man’s arrival. The doctor pronounced Abel well enough to go home when his father arrived and he waited for the union boat with more anticipation than most. He browsed aimlessly through Patrick Devine’s library, opened books at random to read a line or two. He stood on his chair to bring down Jabez Trim’s Bible, to be sure it was a real thing and not just some figment of his consumptive imagination. Tracing the letters with an index finger as he mouthed the words.
Out the window of his sickroom he’d watched a new building being raised near the Episcopal church through the fall. The letters F.P.U. painted a storey high over the doorway now. He was the only person on the shore ignorant of the acronym’s meaning. Friendly Priests Unfrocked, he guessed. Furious Partisan Utopia. Forgetful Pastoral Undertakers. Free Parcels Untied. Bunting was pinned to the front of the hall, an archway of fir branches and wildflowers waited on the new union wharf just acquired from Matthew Strapp.
He woke one night to the flicker of red and yellow across the ceiling and he lay watching it shiver and drift there like the northern lights, thinking it was the fire in the stove. When the alarm was raised it went house to house all the way to the Gut, two hundred men and women standing in a line to pass buckets up from the harbor. They saved the hall though the facing and part of the roof had to be torn out and replaced, men spidered over the building to repair it before Coaker’s arrival. Abel walked by with Hannah the morning the letters were repainted