Galore - Michael Crummey [138]
Abel’s ongoing recovery from tuberculosis was singular enough to be linked to the rise in the union’s fortunes. He’d grown eight inches in the previous year and went out with one inshore boat or another when he could sneak away from Hannah, working a full day on the water with the strength and energy of any boy his age. His father had been taking him to local meetings since he left hospital, the union members making a point of shaking his hand or touching the white of his head for luck. Abel’s story had reached all corners of the country with a union branch and he was brought to the convention as a kind of mascot. Coaker asked him to stand on the first morning and Eli pushed Abel to his feet when he hesitated.
The meetings went on into the evening by lamplight and Eli spent every free moment in Coaker’s company, conferring over cigarettes, walking with him at the end of the night to analyze the day’s events or discuss future projects. Abel joined them on those walks but there was something exclusive about their conversation that made him feel solitary in their company. They made monumental decisions as if discussing what they might like for supper. —A new hospital is what we need up our way, Eli said. —Something to show what the union can make of the place. Selina’s House can’t hold half what the shore needs anymore.
Coaker nodding as he walked, chewing it over. —You get a fundraising campaign started when you get back, he said. —I’ll write to the prime minister.
The union did nothing before it passed through the president’s head, the ten thousand permutations and ramifications of every act played out in Coaker’s skull before a course was set. —I want you to run in Paradise District next election, he told Eli, and even Abel could tell the decision was made. —Would you like that, Abel? Coaker asked him. —Your father a member of the House? His tone suggested he merely had to say as much to make it so, like God decreeing there be light in the world.
—I guess so, Abel said. He’d been sharing a bed with Hannah since moving back to the Gut, his father sleeping alone down the hall, and he couldn’t avoid the absurd thought the union leader had arranged this as well. There was something in Coaker he chose to dislike, an expectation of deference, a proprietary assurance. Coaker had lately insisted Abel call him Uncle Will. As far as Abel could see, Uncle Will had no interest in him or children in general, and the false note made him distrust the man that much more.
He stood at the rail with Eli as they sailed into Paradise Deep after the conference. The cathedral’s steeple and the F.P.U. Hall flying the union flag, the Methodist chapel and Selina’s House on the Gaze rising out of the hills to meet them. Without looking at his father he said, I wants my old room back.
Eli looked at him for only a moment. —I’ll talk to your mother, he said.
Paradise District went to the F.P.U. in the 1913 election, as did thirteen others across the island. Eli’s first order of business was finagling government money to match funds raised by the union for the new hospital, which was already under construction. Father Reddigan led a Catholic campaign for the project and the entire population turned out for the facility’s opening. There was an eight-bed maternity ward and a consumptive wing, X-ray and pharmacy, an operating theater equipped with acetylene lights and its own power generator, a telegraph room in the basement. It was as if the modern world had arrived on the shore under one roof and official celebrations went on through the day, prayer services and a luncheon with toasts and speeches from visiting dignitaries. But the hospital’s wonders were overshadowed in the minds of most by Esther Newman who had come home to commemorate the opening with a special concert, the Nightingale of Paradise performing on the shore for the first time since Obediah Trim’s funeral.
An over-capacity crowd assembled at the hall, people standing four and five deep outside the windows for a glimpse. No one had yet laid eyes on Esther. She’d