Galore - Michael Crummey [144]
It was early afternoon and Esther was already halfways drunk. —Dr. Newman says there’s nothing wrong with him. Once conscription passes the House, she said, they’ll be happy to take Abel as well as anyone.
—The union won’t ever let a draft pass the House, Hannah said without the conviction she wanted.
—Why won’t they?
Hannah made a feeble gesture with her hand. —Mr. Coaker, she said.
Esther threw her head back to laugh and she cursed the sham union and Coaker who ruled it like God Himself. She cursed the House of Assembly in St. John’s and the war in Europe and then she cursed Europe itself, one country at a time. Abel had never seen her in such a state. She stalked down the hall and clumped upstairs to her room, still cursing.
—I don’t want you alone here with that woman, Hannah said. —It isn’t proper.
—You asked me to move in.
—When you were just a youngster that was, she said. —I never meant for. But she only shook her head.
Abel went upstairs when his mother left and stood outside Esther’s room, trying to guess if she was awake. —Who’s there? she shouted and he went back down without a word.
He sat with Jabez Trim’s Bible, copying verses from the Song of Songs awhile. He wandered the servant’s quarters like a prisoner exploring the nooks and crannies of a cell. Shifting furniture, trying moldings around windows and doors as if he half expected to find some compartment secreted behind. Taking empty bottles from a high shelf to peer down their necks. There was a manila envelope sitting up there, a waterfall of photographs pouring onto his bed when he untied it, 10-by-14 and portraits all, though the focus was rarely on the sitter’s face. It was a catalogue of injury, scars and misshapen limbs and heads swollen twice their natural size. Five wizened faces in a row, old turnips the lot of them though they were dressed in children’s clothes, the incongruous stoop of age in their postures. A bald-headed man and woman who seemed to have no fingernails. There was a young girl he wouldn’t have recognized as his mother except for the web of skin between her fingers, the camera focused on the hands splayed in her lap. A pale stranger with cloudy eyes and a shock of colorless hair, an expression of startled forbearance.
—You could almost be looking at yourself there, Esther said.
He turned to see her standing against the door jamb. He didn’t know how long she’d been watching him. She nodded to the picture with her chin. —You’re the spit of your great-grandfather.
—Who? he asked.
—The Great White, she said. —Mary Tryphena’s man. Has no one told you a thing about yourself?
—I guess they haven’t, he said.
The sheet of paper where he’d copied verses from the Song of Songs was on the bed and she picked it up. —What’s this crazy writing you do? she asked and he told her how he’d found the Bible in Patrick Devine’s library and deciphered it by copying one letter at a time. She said, You’re a queer stick, Abel Devine. She was staring at him with an odd attention he’d never felt the weight of before. She sat next him on the bed. —Have you ever been kissed, Abel? A real kiss?
—I don’t think so.
—That man there, Esther said—she pointed to the photograph—is your great-grandfather, Judah Devine his name was. She kissed him then, her mouth slightly open, the sweet and sour of gin on her breath. —He was born out of the belly of a whale down on the landwash, on the Feast of St. Mark. Her mouth again, a hand under his shirt against bare skin. —It was Devine’s Widow cut him free of the whale’s stomach with a fish knife, she said. —She was Mary Tryphena’s grandmother, the widow woman, a witch is what some people said.
Esther carried on talking a long time, unspooling the family’s tale as she undressed the youngster, navigating the complications of one generation and the next, rowing her way toward them where they lay together in the servant’s quarters of Selina’s House, blood