Galore - Michael Crummey [147]
—What is he, Coaker asked Eli, seventy-five now?
—Older, I’d say. And looking every inch of it since Bride passed away.
—Cancer, was it?
—She didn’t last a month.
—Is he drinking again?
—He’s heartbroken, Eli said. —A person’s liable to do anything in that state.
Abel shifted his feet, feeling again like he was eavesdropping on a private conversation. Eli turned to him and said, Come see us over in the Gut tonight. Be good to catch up on your news.
The crowds dispersed by mid-afternoon and Abel helped take down the bunting and tables before walking back to Selina’s House. He carted a turn of spruce from the shed as he let himself in the back door, dropping the junks into the woodbox. Hannah was at the stove. —Supper’s almost ready, she said.
Abel nodded, brushing the bark from his jacket. —I’ll go see if Esther’s hungry.
—She’s never hungry.
—I’ll go see, he said.
He let himself into the gloom of curtained windows, the smell of her sleeping under the sting of frost in the air. He crossed to the bed and laid a hand against her face. —Esther, he said. Abel could hear the clank of cast iron on the stove downstairs, his mother letting him know she was there. They’d all three shared the house more than a year now with Hannah doing what she could to stand between them. Abel was forced to seek Esther out with pretend errands that gave him a few moments alone in her company. —Esther? he said again.
She muttered something guttural into the mattress. She’d been idly teaching him bits and pieces of all the languages she knew these last months and he’d picked up enough to sort one from another. —Guten Tag, he said and he asked in his broken German if she supper interested in was having?
Esther turned on the bed, covering her face with her hand. —Did I ever tell you how the widow died? Devine’s Widow?
—Who was she to me again?
—She was Mary Tryphena’s grandmother. Your great-great-great-grandmother.
Abel sat on the edge of the mattress. They hadn’t slept together since the day his mother moved into the house and he’d had to satisfy himself with this, listening to the woman he loved tell him who he was. He suspected she was making most of it up as she went, but there was something intimate and illicit in the telling. As if she was undressing him one item of clothing at a time as she filled out the bare genealogy with courtships and marriages, arguments and feuds and accidents, the myriad circumstances in which his people left the world. —How did the widow die? he asked. Meaning her to know he was hers completely.
—She lay down, Esther said. —Went to her bed one afternoon and refused to get out of it. She said, I had enough of this. It was Lizzie looked out to her at the end, washed and fed her and brushed out her hair. You’ll be happy enough to see me gone, the widow said to her.
—And what did Lizzie say?
—She said, I’ll be happy to think something and not have you know it just looking at me.
Hannah interrupted from the foot of the stairs to say supper was on the table.
—Will you eat something? he asked.
—I’ll be down the once.
It might be hours before she showed her face, he knew, or she might stay upstairs the rest of the night and he felt a new impatience bloom in his chest. He’d always assumed Esther was telling the stories to make company for his strangeness, to keep him close. But there were moments it seemed she was holding him at bay with the tale, hiding herself behind it. He went to the door and a sudden fear stopped him there. He said, You haven’t had enough have you, Esther?
—Enough of what?
—This, he said. —Us.
—You go on, she said. —I’ll be down now the once.
Abel sat alone at the table with Hannah. He knew his father had come by Selina’s House when he arrived that morning though neither of his parents said a word to him about the visit. And they ate now without mentioning the afternoon’s events or the union or Eli. He was nearly finished his meal when he looked up to see his mother crying. He