Galore - Michael Crummey [17]
The surf was heavy with the tide’s turn, the shudder traveling up the cliff and through his body, his head like a bell being rung by a hammer. His order preached primitive poverty and austerity, and Newfoundland might have been created to embody both. He was a lousy priest, he knew, and deserved no better than to serve in such a backwater shithole of Christendom. But he couldn’t deny the Lord at work in him, that hammer striking.
He was prodigal with blessings in his drunkenness. He turned to the south to bless the people of the Gut and to the north to bless Paradise Deep. He blessed the figure of Mr. Gallery who had waited near the Commons to follow him home and waited for him now just off the Tolt Road. He opened his trousers and wavered at the lip of the precipice to piss into the waters below. He blessed his shriveled little pecker before tucking it away to walk into Paradise Deep. He held a number of particular blessings in reserve, thinking of Mrs. Gallery waiting for him in her bed and the archipelago of angels they were about to inspire to fits of jealousy.
Through that fall Mary Tryphena found herself showered with small anonymous gifts, handfuls of partridgeberries in the bowl of a leaf, smooth stones or shells from the beach, the weathered skull of a bird, a sweet apple from Kerrivan’s Tree in a square of cloth. There was no privacy in her life and the gifts were placed in public spaces where she would stumble upon them, on the Washing Rocks at the mouth of the brook, tied to the door of the outhouse before she made her last visit of the night.
Occasionally her mother or father or Judah discovered the finger of polished driftwood on the doorstep, the jewel of seaglass on the windowsill. But Mary Tryphena never doubted who they were meant for. She was surprised by Absalom’s stealth, by the knowledge he had somehow gleaned about the particulars of her days. It seemed out of character, given what she knew of his awkwardness and insularity, given he had no idea they were cousins.
She hoarded the keepsakes under the roots of an old spruce stump near the house and told no one about the furtive relationship, knowing from the start it was an impossible match. King-me Sellers had disowned Lizzie when she married Callum Devine and the man would never allow Absalom, his only acknowledged grandchild, his sole heir, to follow after her. And it was just as unlikely that Callum and Lizzie would consent to such an arrangement.
They saw each other only when she attended one of Jabez Trim’s services or accompanied her father to Sellers’ store for winter supplies and Absalom was so withdrawn that Mary Tryphena doubted her reading of the world. There was such an unfamiliar pleasure to the conversation between them, such an adult privacy, that it made her feel sick to think she might be wrong. It wasn’t until the heavy snows blew in and the men began spending their days in the backcountry cutting and hauling wood that something definitive came to her, a letter folded and tied with string that she discovered among the blankets of her bed. The boldness of it startled her, that Absalom could come into the house undiscovered.
She carried the paper in a pocket close to her heart for weeks afterwards, unfolding it in her rare moments alone. She studied the note like a botanist in the presence of some exotic flower. She smelled it, she licked the paper and the ink which tasted of oil and berries, she prayed to it as if the words might be coaxed into coming to her in her dreams. She passed her days in a state of irritable exhaustion, she kicked and called out in her sleep. Devine’s Widow was convinced only a man could be at the root of her trouble but Mary Tryphena denied it. Her mother came to her at night to ask if there was anything she could do and Mary Tryphena turned away to bawl into her mattress of straw. Lizzie had set out to