Galore - Michael Crummey [15]
Despite it all, Lizzie refused to allow him across the threshold of the house. Devine’s Widow made a show of arguing he should be invited in to eat but the smell of the man was enough to stifle the appetite of a pig. He took his meals sitting on a stump of wood in the open air and Mary Tryphena studied him when she thought she wasn’t being watched. His brows and lashes so white his eyes seemed bald, like the lidless stare of a codfish. There was something at once stunned and slightly menacing about the man.
He recognized the name he was called by and followed simple orders or requests, though his life and work were so governed by routine that the simplest of hand gestures or a nod of the head communicated all he needed to know. Most were convinced he understood not a word of English or Irish. When boats worked close to Judah on the water, people spoke about him as if he were deaf.
—Shits as much as the next person, Callum said in response to their questions. —Eats like a Spaniard. Sleeps like the dead. Haven’t seen him kneel to pray or cross he’s self the once. And he got the smell of a Prot on him.
—You miserable bastard, Callum Devine.
—Now Jabez, he said, I’m only having you on.
—Have he ever spoke a word to you?
—You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, Callum said. —But he’s not a fool.
Jabez nodded. —That one’s as deep as the grave, I expect.
At the end of that summer there was a confirmation service at Kerrivan’s Tree. The Mass was said in Latin and the rest of the service in Irish, although most English on the shore attended for the indecipherable pageant of it. Mary Tryphena and Floretta Tibbo and Saul Toucher’s ten-year-old triplets took their first communion as the sun dropped below the hills above the harbor. The triplets were identical and indistinguishable even to their parents but for Alphonsus who’d won the single pair of shoes between them by lot. He slept in the boots to keep them to himself, though his brothers took it in turns to claim one or the other was Alphonsus and the boy wearing the shoes had stolen them from their rightful owner. The shoes and the name traveled from one boy to the next in an endless round and not even the triplets could recall anymore who had been the original Alphonsus. When Father Phelan announced before the sacrament that we are all one in Christ Jesus, the three brothers seemed deflated, as if they’d had enough of such arrangements.
After the service a more secular sacrament was celebrated on the Commons above Kerrivan’s Tree with jugs of spruce beer and black rum and shine passed around. Men and women and not a few children besides got drunk there, the moon come out and the mosquitoes and blackflies fierce in the dusk. King-me Sellers and Selina and their grandson made a brief appearance and a handful of people caught sight of Mr. Gallery circling the clearing to watch the festivities. A bonfire of driftwood and green spruce and dried dung from the goats and sheep that grazed the meadow burning at the center of the field. Jabez Trim’s three-string fiddle and a wheezy accordion played by Daniel Woundy led a dance of dark shadows tramping the grass flat. Callum persuaded Judah into the gathering where they danced arm in arm, both men polluted with drink. Judah’s fishy stink drifted under the smoke of the fire and everyone on the field welcomed it as the smell of abundance and prosperity come among them. Callum knew a thousand tunes and had been a regular entertainment at weddings and wakes and he was coaxed into singing half a dozen songs for the crowd. It was the first time anyone heard him utter a note since Eathna died the year before.