Galore - Michael Crummey [35]
——
As soon as Devine’s Widow left the house, King-me slipped out to the barn where the cows were in from the meadow to be milked. He took a bucket off its peg to join the two hired men already at work. He loved the smell of a barn, the rank closeness of it. He sat next the udder of a cow and leaned his forehead against the heat of her flank, hoping it might ease the ferment that seeing the widow brought on.
It wasn’t enough that she had refused to have him those ages ago, an Irish girl who’d come from nothing and owned nothing. She had to ruin his livestock and poison half the household besides. The cow shifted away from him as he latched on to the teats and he whispered to settle the animal down. It made him look a fool to blame Devine’s Widow for the state of his cows, he knew, but no one had been able to offer any other explanation. The milk of his one milch cow dried up within a week of the woman leaving his employ and she was never the same mild creature, not even after the milk came back in. All his stock descended from that first cow, each one just as unpredictably skittish, kicking down the stalls at the slightest provocation, knocking pails of milk across the barn. —Explain that, he demanded of the doubters.
And he was supposed to think it coincidence, was he, that four of his servants took sick the very month she was dismissed, their faces gone red and puffy after a particular meal of cod, his own head swollen to twice its natural size? The look of it in the glass like some livid pillow from a whore’s chesterfield. He was like to die the better part of a week and knew who to blame for the affliction, but he bided his time, let her think she’d got away with it. There were no magistrates in those days and he had to wait almost a full year before a naval ship stopped into the harbor.
Given the charge, Captain Churchward insisted on having the ship’s chaplain present for the trial and they sat in a bare store appointed as the courtroom, the naval officer and his clergyman behind a table, plaintiff and defendant in wooden chairs before them. King-me had no memory of the men’s faces, just a vague recollection of the red and black of their outfits. The Irish servant girl who refused him sat her hands in her lap, soft-spoken and polite through the whole procedure, and she still with every goddamn tooth in her head when she smiled. That face still vivid to him, so many years on. The naval officer asked for King-me’s evidence and he offered it as calmly as he was able. The milk drying up overnight and he had seen the defendant sneaking away from the property on the evening in question and believed she was there decidedly to take away the milk of the cow by force of witchcraft. The naval officer making notes in a booklet, then leaning to the chaplain to conference in whispers. —Did anyone see the defendant in the presence of the cow, the officer wanted to know.
Not as far as he was aware, King-me told the man, but he suspected no person other than the defendant for the loss of the cow’s milk.
The captain pursed his lips, as if puckering for a kiss. —So there is no one who might have seen the defendant placing a spell on the cow in question?
—Never mind the bloody cow, King-me shouted. —We was all nearly poisoned to death by this creature.
—Ah, the officer said.
Fucking Ah!
—Do you have any evidence to support this claim, Master Sellers?
—I had my head swell like a pig’s bladder and turn scarlet. And most everybody in my employ afflicted to a lesser extent.
—And what makes you think the defendant was responsible for this?