Galore - Michael Crummey [29]
A cold rain was falling, the wind picking at their clothes like the hands of beggars on a city street. Please sir. Please sir. Dodge wandered along the uneven rows of crosses, names scored or painted on the wood. Spingle. Codner. Bozan. Harty. Devine. Hussey. Toucher. Snook. Brazill. Woundy. Protestant and Catholic set down in a mash. He turned at the far side of the cemetery and shouted across to Sellers. —We will have a fence. The earth beneath him was solid enough but he felt as if he was still at sea, adrift on a gray expanse without demarcation or border. He was shaking with a rage that he mistook for certainty. —Before another body is set in the ground there will be a fence, and the ground will be consecrated.
They built a riddle fence of narrow poles around the graveyard and Dodge himself spent hours each day helping to dig post holes and fix the logs in place to ensure it was completed before Martha Jewer was buried. The funeral was held in King-me’s largest storehouse to accommodate the same crowd of people who had come to meet the minister on the shoreline three days before, both Catholic and Protestant. Dodge stood before them on an overturned puncheon tub, decked out in his Episcopalian vestments, determined to turn the tide of local sentiment where he and the Lord were concerned. —Brothers and sisters in Christ, he began.
King-me lost all interest in building a church after Reverend Dodge took up residence on the shore. The minister spent three years trying to wheedle the money promised for the project and he had to threaten to leave to get it. The foundation was laid the summer before Absalom arrived home from England and it was in use for holy services by Christmas, the building complete but for the stained glass shipped from Manchester and stored in St. John’s over the winter. It was scheduled to arrive with the bishop when he traveled to the shore for the dedication.
Everyone expected there would be trouble of some sort during those ceremonies. Along with the bishop, Skipper John Withycombe had transported a Navy officer and a handful of soldiers who were meant to keep the peace, or at the very least ensure the vicar wasn’t stripped of his vestments and thrown buck-naked into the harbor by drunken Irishmen still nursing their resentments.
At Martha Jewer’s funeral Dodge announced that the French Cemetery would be open only to the remains of Episcopalians, starting with the corpse laid out before them. And further that all sacraments in the Church of England would be made available only to those confirmed in the faith. People tried to shout him down but he pressed on with the funeral. Chairs were thrown. Half the congregation walked out in the middle of the service. The funeral procession was pelted with stones and curses, as was every Protestant funeral procession in the year that followed. Mourners were forced to carry wood staves and fish forks to defend their clergyman and brawls often erupted between the two groups on the way up the Tolt Road.
Away from Dodge and his pronouncements most people did their best to carry on as they had, but the sectarian feuding spilled over from the funeral altercations. Boats and equipment were vandalized in a spiral of retaliation. It might have ended in bloodshed but for Peter Flood’s corpse being stolen in the confusion of a brawl one April morning. Flood had married a Protestant woman twenty years past but converted to the Church of England only weeks before his death, when Dodge threatened to dissolve the union and declare his children bastards. The thieves buried Flood in the new Catholic