Galore - Michael Crummey [142]
He only nodded at the news.
—Get that animal out of the house, Abel.
And he nodded again.
Tryphie stayed on in Paradise Deep a month, trying to cajole his daughter into coming to live with him in Hartford. He spent part of every day in the company of the Honorable Member, sitting in an office on the second floor of the F.P.U. Hall, staring out the window at Selina’s House as Eli blathered on about the union. Twenty thousand men—a tenth of the country’s population—had taken the pledge, fourteen union candidates elected to the House of Assembly in the last election. A monthly union newsletter to counter the fabrications in the merchant-run papers. Eli had a cot in a room behind the office and spent most of his nights there. Trade agents across Europe to sell their fish, Eli told him, an F.P.U. office in Greece. Levi Sellers reduced to pandering to the Catholics just to keep afloat. —We can’t get enough warehouse space in St. John’s to supply the operation, he said. —Mr. Coaker is looking for a place closer to the northeast coast. We’re going to build every inch of this from the ground up somewhere, warehouses, drying rooms, cooperage, a shipyard. An electric generating station.
—I think I’ll wander on, Tryphie said without looking away from the window.
—Elevators, Eli said, to shift the fish from the drying rooms to the warehouses at ground level. Things that have never been built before, things that haven’t hardly been thought of.
—Is she going to drink herself to death over there? Tryphie asked.
Eli leaned back in his chair. —Abel will watch out to her, he said.
Tryphie glanced across at Eli, a portrait of Coaker on the wall above his head, the president’s face appearing to float in the glare of light through the window. Tryphie considered it a fact that he hated Eli Devine and had done so for a long time. He looked back out at Selina’s House. —You think there might be some work for me in all of that? he said.
—Down in Hartford, you mean?
—I figure it might be better if we came home out of it.
—I wouldn’t have thought Minnie would want to set foot back here.
Tryphie stood from his chair to stop himself telling Eli to fuck off. —She’ll want to be next her daughter where she can keep an eye on her. If you could set me up with some work.
Eli shifted forward to put both elbows on the desk. —I’ll see what I can do, he said.
Tryphie left for the States in late June and all the talk that summer was about war in Europe, the flotsam of rumor and half-facts washing up on the beaches. Eli was away at Government House in St. John’s all summer. Britain declared itself in August and Newfoundland carried along in its wake. Five hundred volunteers enlisted with the Newfoundland Regiment for service overseas. Coaker offered to resign to join up himself, only relenting when union locals flooded him with telegrams and letters urging him to stay on as president. The war inflated the price of fish and men were mad after the cod all season.
In October Tryphie and Minnie came home to Paradise Deep. Abel was afraid they’d move into Selina’s House at first but Minnie wasn’t prepared to live in close quarters with her daughter’s misery and they settled into John Blade’s old place instead. Tryphie went to work in the union office as an accountant though he spent most of his time blueprinting Coaker’s elaborate fantasies, pulleys, gears and winches, electric motors, turbines, power lines.
Adelina and Flossie Sellers chaired the Women’s Patriotic Association, hosting knitting bees to send scarves and socks to the troops overseas. Joshua Trim was among the first union volunteers to make it into action, and news he’d been killed reached the shore shortly before Christmas, the blinds down at the Trims’ household all through the season.
Esther railed against the war with a drunken exuberance and Abel settled himself a pacifist out of allegiance to her. She seemed to have no argument with the conflict but that it was happening in Europe. As if the war was an escalation of the continent’s appetite for sacrifice