Galore - Michael Crummey [145]
She was not drunk. Hadn’t touched a drop since storming out of the kitchen to stew in her bedroom, staring up at the skewed continents. All those young men rotting somewhere in the irredeemable stain that was France. And she’d come downstairs to claim Abel before he was stolen away from her, kneeling over him now to bless his body and the soul it housed. A drunken notion though she was sober. Wanting to keep him safe from the world those few moments.
They lay nearly naked on the bed afterwards, silent under the weight of what had passed between them. Abel forced himself up on an elbow to look down at her. —Esther, he said, but she placed a finger against his lips. She said, Never tell a woman you love her, Abel.
He stared, his eyes filming over with tears.
—It will always sound like a lie, she said. —Better you let a woman figure it out for herself.
The sound of the front door interrupted them, a woman’s voice calling down the hallway. They could hear the goat complaining as it was forced outside, the clatter of its hoofs on the wooden steps. Abel hustled into his clothes and went through the kitchen to find his mother closing the door on the animal, a bag set at the foot of the stairs. —We’ll want to get that filth cleared out, she said. —You can put my clothes in the room next to Esther’s.
You’re too late, he wanted to tell her but decided it was best to let her figure it out for herself.
Eli left the shore the next morning and was gone for months, in St. John’s for sittings of the House or traveling with Coaker to Catalina Harbour where construction was already underway on the union’s base of operations. The entire project was scheduled for completion by the end of 1917, wharves, warehouses and offices, church, school, hotel, shipyard and seal-oil plant and branch railway. Fish stores with 135 feet of frontage and three electric elevators, a cooperage and sail-making room in the loft.
Most of the design work was done in St. John’s or on site, but Eli had enough piecework sent Tryphie’s way to keep him fed. Dozens of small projects in the power plant and shipyard and cold-storage plant, telegraphs arriving from the project manager with requests and specs and alterations. Tryphie couldn’t imagine any of it in the real world. The turbines in the power plant required the trenching of a twelve-hundred-foot canal, the installation of a nine-hundred-foot wood-stave pipe that was six feet in diameter and reinforced every six inches with steel bands. He expected the entire enterprise to falter at any moment. But the price of fish stayed at record heights as the war dragged on and the union had an endless supply of cash to keep the fantasy aloft.
He worked away at the plans in the F.P.U. offices through the summer and into the fall, the complex engineering problems and their clean mathematical solutions a relief from the mess he felt his life had become. Hours passed without a thought to Esther’s condition or Minnie’s lost Connecticut or Eli Devine.
Levi Sellers was sitting in a chair beside the window when Tryphie looked up from the desk one early December morning. A shiver ran through him at the sight—that box of a head and hawk nose, the mutilated ears hidden under a straggle of gray hair. One side of the face sliding earthward and making a slur of his speech. There was nothing in the fallen world, Tryphie thought, could kill the son of a bitch. Levi nodded toward Coaker’s portrait on the wall. —You don’t mind that one staring down at you all day?
—What are you doing here?
—How’s your Esther making out?
—I’ve got work to do, Mr. Sellers.
Levi pushed himself to his feet with his cane. —You plan to spend the rest of your days sketching doodads for Eli Devine?
—I’m considering my options.
Levi started toward the door, his movements so exaggerated and awkward it was hard to believe he’d come into the room without Tryphie noticing. —My father, he said. —Absalom Sellers.