Galore - Michael Crummey [30]
Dodge took it as a sign of God’s favor that the new church hadn’t been burned to the ground before the first services were held. The men who designed and raised the sanctuary were all boat builders and the structure looked like the hull of a ship flipped face down on the Gaze. The eight-foot stained glass window arrived on the vessel bringing the bishop, and Jabez Trim spent the day installing it behind the altar. Dodge had chosen the motif himself: the disciples hauling their nets under the watchful eye of Jesus.
The vicar, the Right Reverend Arthur Waghorne, was an amateur botanist. He barely glanced at the new church before wandering off into the fields behind the building where he spent the better part of the day sketching and collecting specimens on the Gaze. He was accompanied by two soldiers who sat in the grass below him, speculating on their chances of bedding a woman before returning to St. John’s. Arscott was a fifteen-year-old private from Devon, a virgin who labored under the illusion that no one but he knew the truth of the matter. He was next to useless as a soldier, clumsy with his weapons, naive and harmlessly sycophantic in his relations. Arsewipe was his nickname among the enlisted men. Corporal Kinnebrook was four years the boy’s senior. —Paradise Deep, he said. —What does that make you think of, Arsewipe?
—Heaven, is it?
—No, jesus, Kinnebrook said, swiping at his head. —A man of your vast experience on the battlefields of love, Arsewipe. Tell me that doesn’t make you think of fucking. Paradise Deep, he said with a note of reverence. The name alone had given Kinnebrook high hopes for the expedition, but everything he’d seen of the place so far promised disappointment. —I expect we’ll have to jump in the harbor to wet our dicks in this shithole, he said.
By the time Reverend Dodge came up from the church to collect them for the parade the two soldiers were asleep on the grass. —His Majesty’s finest, the vicar said as he kicked the men awake.
The parade began at the steps of the new sanctuary and wound its way through the footpaths of Paradise Deep, past the stores of Spurriers’ Premises as far as Mrs. Gallery’s droke and back again to Selina’s House where food and drink was set up on long tables in the garden. The Reverend Waghorne was at the head of the procession on King-me’s piebald mare, Dodge walking at the horse’s shoulder. The Navy officer, a mutton-chopped Scot named Goudie, marched directly behind them. The clergymen led hymns for the people in their wake. Olive Trim aboard her truckley at the rear, holding Martha Jewer’s orphan boy in her lap, the wooden cart pulled along by a Newfoundland. The soldiers were marshaled in two groups at either side of the procession and they kept a wary eye on the Catholics gathered in clusters to watch the parade. They followed at a discreet distance when the turn was made for Selina’s House and watched their manners, not willing to miss a chance at the spread laid on for the celebration.
A pig and two sheep turned on spits over an open fire outside Selina’s House and new potatoes roasted in the coals. There was partridge and rabbit stew and vegetables dipped in flour and fried with butter, roasted goose and turr, boiled puddings with raisins and fresh berries with cream for dessert. There was no fish of any description to be had and that absence was another sign of their newfound prosperity. That eating the bounty of the sea was a choice rather than a necessity.
Reverend Waghorne said grace and