Galore - Michael Crummey [137]
—Foul Plot Unhinged, Abel said.
Hannah jerked his arm. —Has your father been telling you stories?
—It’s just a game, he said, pointing up at the acronym. —Funeral Pyre Unlikely, he offered. —Fallen Paradise Uplifted.
She looked at him a long time, as if she still had her doubts.
A flotilla of skiffs and dories went out that afternoon to meet Coaker’s yacht, escorting the F.P. Union into harbor where the waterfront was jammed with spectators. The lungers of the wharf were laid over with woven mats in the F.P.U. colors and half a dozen sealing guns fired as the procession came to the docks. Coaker was led a walkabout like royalty, shaking hands and ruffling youngsters’ hair. Abel stood among the crowd with Hannah, his head resting on her hip. —This is the boy can’t be killed, is it? Coaker asked when he reached them.
There was a parade to the F.P.U. Hall and Abel sat in Hannah’s lap at the back of the stage during Coaker’s speech. He was overcome by the exertion of the day and the crowd’s heat and he nodded off while the man was speaking, startled awake to applause and glanced up at Eli Devine leading the ovation beside them. His father looked half-starved, Abel thought, and was staring at the union man like he was something good to eat.
Hannah took Abel back to Selina’s House before the dance began and he slept awhile in the room behind the kitchen. The door stood open and he could hear his mother and Bride talking in whispers at the table as he dozed. He woke sometime after dark to the quiet of a woman crying, the wet suck of breath as she tried to stifle her sobs. He thought it might be his mother but fell asleep again before he could say for certain.
After he was discharged from the hospital Abel walked the paths in the Gut to regain his strength, wandering as far as the French Cemetery where he strolled among the headstones, marking the names of family laid there. When Mary Tryphena was still with them he’d peppered her with childish questions, wanting to know where was she born, how did her father and mother die, was there a church on the shore when she was a girl. —I don’t remember nothing about them old times, was all she said. And he was still a stranger among his kin in the French Cemetery.
Before winter settled in he was spending hours a day on the backcountry roads, traveling beyond Nigger Ralph’s Pond toward the Breakers, trying to set the vast spaces to heart. Compared with the densely populated world of Patrick Devine’s library, the scrubland and bog seemed virtually uninhabited, a place without history or memory, a landscape of perpetual present. He knew it as his country but was at a loss to say how and he walked the barrens endlessly, as if walking was a way of courting a world he was barely acquainted with.
By the spring, Father Reddigan was instructed a second time to threaten the censures of the Church if his parishioners did not forswear the union. But even with that loss, the F.P.U. had an air of inevitability about it. Ten thousand men across the country had taken the pledge and not the old cabal of St. John’s merchants or the Catholic archbishop’s disapproval, not Sellers’ arsonists or God Himself seemed capable of bringing the movement down. Union stores opened in Paradise Deep and in Spread Eagle, stocked to the rafters with Verbena and Five Roses and Royal Standard flour, with salt pork and salt beef, molasses, sugar and kerosene, with creamery and Forest butter, with Ceylon teas and tobacco, all at wholesale prices. The stores offered a framed picture of President William Coaker that sold by the hundreds and hung in kitchens and parlors along the shore like a Protestant crucifix.
When Abel was thirteen years old he and his father sailed to the annual F.P.U. convention in Bonavista, sitting among two hundred delegates as they debated and presented motions. There was an election coming and the union planned to run enough candidates to hold the balance of power in the House. They hammered out a platform on fishery regulations and education and old-age pensions and