Galore - Michael Crummey [153]
—I’ll be fine.
He went on to the F.P.U. office where he tendered his resignation from the union executive. He walked to the telegraph office in the hospital basement, cabling St. John’s and Port Union to resign from the House of Assembly and the national coalition government. Back in the Gut he took his seat across from the president’s portrait and waited for night to fall.
Late that evening Eli lit a lamp and stoked up the fire to boil the kettle. There was a basin on the table under Coaker’s portrait that he poured full, shaving by his reflection in the glass. When he was done he took the frame off its nail and turned Coaker’s face to the wall. He dressed in his best shirt and coat and set out for the Tolt under a cold flood of stars. He walked into Paradise Deep, past Selina’s House and up Sellers’ Drung to the merchant’s house. Adelina met him as he let himself into the porch and he apologized for calling so late. —I wonder, he said, if I could talk to Levi.
On May eleventh the coalition government in the Newfoundland House of Assembly passed the Military Service Act with the full support of its F.P.U. members. The sudden reversal of the union’s opposition to conscription was undertaken without warning, and local councils across the island passed resolutions condemning the act and Coaker’s high-handedness in imposing the change without consultation. Responding in The Fisherman’s Advocate, Coaker spoke of the torture he suffered making the decision to support conscription, how he neither slept nor ate in the days before the vote. But he never managed to explain his reasoning to anyone’s satisfaction. In thousands of union homes the president’s portrait was turned to the wall or smashed on the floor or taken down and put away for good. It was as if half the country had woken from a collective dream to find the world much the same as when they’d drifted off.
Abel’s name wasn’t among the list of the regiment’s dead and missing published in the St. John’s Evening Telegram. His letters to Esther began arriving belatedly, from England and then France. Esther never opened them in company and never reported their contents and Hannah was forced to read them on the sly, sneaking into Esther’s room when she was gallivanting drunk through town.
Abel was marched around a parade square with a wooden rifle and a bayonet. He was granted two days’ leave before being posted across the Channel and wandered over half of London to see the theaters where Esther made her name. The roads in France were frozen mud and his toenails had blackened and fallen off from the rough walking. There was a half-breed from Labrador name of Devine in the regiment, he carried a tooth he claimed belonged to Judah. Abel was assigned work as a regimental stretcher-bearer where he was least likely to get others killed. They were moved off the front lines while they waited for reinforcements and were living the easy life, assigned as guards to the commander-in-chief. All through that summer he complained he was bored to tears but he’d requested a transfer to the regular infantry and expected to be more than a stretcher-bearer when they moved back to the front. Each letter closed with a line in a hand unlike the writing in the body, a style so old-fashioned and baroque it was almost comical. Behold thou art fair, my love, thou art fair, thine eyes are as doves. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.
As the summer wore on Hannah began to catch glimpses of a change in Esther’s figure, a rise in her profile under the layers she wore, a slight change in her posture that suggested a particular discomfort. Esther seemed determined to keep her condition a secret from the world, wearing even more clothes than was her habit, never leaving the house without a shawl or overcoat even when the sun was splitting the rocks. For weeks Hannah dismissed the evidence as her own imagination at work but by the end of August Esther’s overcoat was barely equal to the task. Hannah finally mentioned her