Galore - Michael Crummey [34]
The widow said, A priest isn’t meant to relish the sufferings of others, Father.
—We choose our own hell, Phelan said, and he smiled at her.
She stopped at the peak of the Tolt on her way back into the Gut. Dark water and ragged patches of pale blue over shoal ground. As a younger woman she often thought of Ireland gone under that horizon and swallowed by the waters. But it had been a lifetime since she’d felt that regret, knowing it was useless to ask questions of the past.
She wasn’t much above a girl when she first came to Paradise Deep, indentured to Sellers for two winters and a summer, and she’d nearly worked herself free of him before his marriage proposal led to her dismissal. The harbor settled by a handful of English and all of them tied to King-me’s operation, so she walked to the Gut where she expected a more sympathetic welcome among the Irish and the bushborns. The Tolt Road only the barest hint of a path and rough walking with snow still down among the trees. She made a tour of the cove but no one would chance the merchant’s wrath by taking her on. Sarah Kerrivan at least offered a bed but she refused to sleep under another’s roof again. She fashioned a lean- to of spruce boughs next the Kerrivan’s scrawny apple tree, sleeping with their wood dog to avoid perishing in the cold. The following spring she raised a one-room tilt with logs she’d cut through the winter, but she had no better prospects for employment. There were nine or ten men to every woman on the shore in those days and any single man would have wed her if she showed the slightest interest, if it wasn’t common knowledge she’d spurned young Sellers who lived in Paradise Deep like some feudal lord, drinking tea with fresh milk from his own cow. No one could imagine what they might offer to turn her head and they left her alone.
The same had been true of King-me while she worked for him. Before he proposed he never spoke a word to her except to give instructions or request a specific meal from the kitchen, though it was clear to her how besotted he was. King-me had no experience or interest in love and he seemed incapable of recognizing what had struck him. He blamed fevers and ague and indigestion for his feeling so out of sorts. He consulted her on a cure for worms he suspected as the cause of his distress. He ordered Tincture of Sage and Essence of Water-Dock from quack physicians in England who promised relief of the sullen headaches, the poor appetite and swollen stomach, the spirits funk. In desperation he had her brew a colonic of molasses and cod-liver oil to clear his system of its bad humors.
In April of their second winter in Paradise Deep, only weeks from losing his right to order her around the property, he came into the shed where she was milking the cow, standing out of sight on the far side of the animal as he proposed. She didn’t lift her head from her work, smiling down at the pail. —Marriage, is it? she said.
—You have no husband, he said. —And I need to take a wife.
She could tell he felt it was a simple business decision about property and standing and knew she could never expect anything different of him. The thought of marrying a man so ignorant of his own motives seemed no different than indentured servitude. —You need to take a wife, is it? she said, and King-me nodded helplessly, out of his element altogether. —And I need to take a piss, Master Sellers. Is that for or against we two getting married?
She could simply have said no and they might have carried on as though nothing of consequence passed between them,