Galore - Michael Crummey [28]
—You’ve picked a busy time to come ashore, the widow woman said.
—I am the Lord’s servant, Dodge offered. —I’m told there is no father.
—You don’t think she found herself in this condition without help, Reverend?
He couldn’t believe the gall. And the woman holding the baby seemed to have fallen asleep while he sat there. He raised his voice, hoping to startle her awake. —Do you know who fathered this child?
—From what I seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate. Some say it was Saul Toucher or one of his young fellows. But that’s what some say whenever there’s blame to be cast.
Dodge leaned away from the woman to collect himself. He looked about the pathetic shack, taking in the meanness of the lives it held. The sand on the floor was raked smooth and someone had used a stick to trace a pattern of ocean waves where the traffic of feet wouldn’t scar it. There was nothing else on view that suggested the slightest interest in elegance or beauty.
—There’s worse off in the world, Devine’s Widow said as if she could see his thoughts. —What we have is ours.
A witch, Sellers had called her, and there was certainly an argument to be made. Dodge said, That child will be raised in an English home.
—The Lord’s servant you are, Reverend. We were wondering what would become of him. Devine’s Widow stood to take the child from Lizzie who was still dead asleep and she plopped the bundle into his lap. —His mother is being laid out at Shambler’s, she said. —You’ll want to look in on her.
Dodge had the Irish servant he’d come with carry the infant back over the Tolt and he went immediately to Shambler’s premises, stood over Martha Jewer’s body on a wooden table in the back room. She was wearing her one filthy dress, her chin tied up with a length of twine and her feet bare. —She wasn’t fourteen, Shambler told him. —An orphan girl.
—Was it one of the Touchers fathered the child?
Shambler shrugged. —It’s all fellows out at Toucher’s, nine or ten of them but for Saul Toucher’s woman. They’re like a pack of dogs, that crowd.
—That hardly answers my question.
—It might mean the question’s better left, Shambler said.
Reverend Dodge placed his hand briefly to the belly where the day before there’d been a child. —I should like to see the cemetery, he said finally.
It was a thirty-minute walk up the Tolt Road and then further into the backcountry to the Burnt Woods where there was a meadow of soil deep enough to accommodate a body. Reverend Dodge was accompanied by King-me Sellers who went ahead of him to show the way. It was called the French Cemetery, King-me told him, because the first people buried there were sailors drowned when a French ship wrecked on the Tolt a hundred years before. Or because the land once belonged to a man named French who buried a wife and child during a typhoid outbreak before he was cut down himself. Sellers seemed to have no idea which story was the true source of the name and no obvious preference for one over the other. There was no fence to mark the graveyard, just a scatter of wooden crosses and three tall stone markers placed side by side. The meadow was high enough they could see the ocean and the boats of the fishermen on the grounds, and all the graves faced outward to the sea. —That’s a long way to carry a body, Master Sellers.
—Every decent bit of ground is planted with potatoes, King-me said, or used to graze goats and sheep. This is all stone and boulders and plates of shale, not fit for growing. You gets two feet down into that and you’re liable to believe the land don’t want us here, alive or dead.
Dodge leaned forward to read the stone markers. Sellers, each of them said. He straightened and looked across at his host.
—All mine, King-me said.
Dodge read more closely. Two sons and a daughter-in-law.
—A ship headed over to England, Sellers said. —They’d gone with the youngest, to find him a wife. Harry