Galore - Michael Crummey [21]
He and Mrs. Gallery lay awake after they’d exhausted each other’s appetites, talking of the news on the shore and plans for the season ahead. It had been years since people had any enthusiasm for Christmas, households far gone into the winter’s supplies by December and months of rough hunger still to struggle through. Toward March some families were so weak they hardly moved from their bunks for weeks at a time. A central fireplace with a square wooden flue was the only source of heat in the spruce tilts, and Father Phelan would sometimes find a family huddled around it in silence, their faces cratered and blank. Not a morsel of food among them beyond a pot of watery soup. He went begging to King-me Sellers on their behalf, coming away with a pocketful of green fish not fit to feed a dog, a bag of brown flour infested with weevils. It was enough to keep them another week or two and stave off starvation until the seals came in on the Labrador ice.
But Christmas this year promised a return to the days when the shore had known something closer to prosperity. Everyone did well enough on the fish to clear their debt with Sellers and set aside a good store for themselves, and the warm summer delivered a historic crop of root vegetables to see people through to the seals. There was an air of celebration in the two communities and Phelan expected that Christmas was the time it would surface in all its glory.
He held Mass in Callum’s fishing room on Christmas Eve, the building lit with whale-oil torches, and he had to repeat his homily and offer the sacrament three times to accommodate the numbers who waited outside in the cold. From Christmas Day through to the Feast of the Epiphany the nights were ruled by bands of mummers roaming from house to house in the dark, five or six to a group and all dressed in outlandish disguises, brin sacks and old dresses or aprons, coats worn backwards and legs through the arms of shirts that were tied at the waist as breeches, men dressed in women’s clothes and women in men’s, underclothes worn on the outside of their many layers. They traveled with spoons and crude wooden whistles and other noisemakers, they knocked at one door after another for admittance and barreled inside requesting cake and bread and whatever drink the house had to offer. In return they sang songs and danced and in general acted like fools. Their heads and faces were covered by sacks or veiled with handkerchiefs and they spoke ingressively to disguise their voices and they stayed until the inhabitants guessed their identities or until they’d drunk up every drop of liquor on the premises. They were aggressive and rude, they were outlandishly genderless and felt free to grab the ass of man or woman for a laugh, they frightened the children and left a house in shambles, but not a door was barred to them. Father Phelan loved the devilment and followed in their wake, taking up with one group of mummers and then another. There was a mild spell through the whole of Christmas and mummers crisscrossed the two tiny villages till daylight, the priest making his way back and forth over the Tolt Road half a dozen times in a single night.
On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany he fell in with a group of mummers that included Horse Chops, a man covered in a blanket, a wooden horse’s head on a stick before him. The eyes were painted at either side of the head, one black and one blue, the jaws of the horse driven through with nails for teeth and tied with leather strings so they snocked together. Horse Chops was a seer who could answer any question put to him. At every stop a mummer wearing a crown of spruce boughs chose one member of the household as a victim, asking Horse Chops the most embarrassing questions he could dream up. No subject was too lewd or personal, no question