Galore - Michael Crummey [37]
He stripped out of his clothes and lay naked on the cold board floor of the bedroom, hoping some mortification of the flesh might clear his mind of the woman’s poison. There was a time after he’d brought Selina to Paradise Deep that King-me considered himself more or less clear of the widow’s trouble, married as he was to a half-sensible girl whose childlike stature suggested she could do him no harm, his work going well and a small brood of youngsters to will the business to.
He should never have gone to her for help when his wife took to her bed and refused to leave it. In some recess of his mind not crammed with ledgers and sums he was sure this request had cost him his children. Lizzie, for certain, a loss he had never rightly recovered from. His girl married to the witch’s son, she and her children, his own flesh and blood, living like savages in that woman’s house. He’d vowed to let it all lie, for Selina’s sake. But this trouble with Judah had simply fallen into his lap. The Great White, sea orphan, St. Jude. He was the widow’s work and no one could convince King-me otherwise.
Sellers had paid off a vessel in Newfoundland at the age of eighteen after several years apprenticing to the ship’s chandler and he became a small-time lender in St. John’s, fronting cash to fishermen and sailors to buy their drink. It was a job that required a minute attention to detail alongside a measured ruthlessness and he was perfectly suited to the undertaking. His success brought him to the attention of the town’s merchant community and he took invitations to meals and small entertainments among the quality, but the squalor of St. John’s depressed him. Still a young settlement and infested with all the old vices, TB and syphilis, petty crime and drunkenness and an inflated sense of its own importance. He took the position with Spurriers & Co. when he was promised a pristine posting, a merchant operation on a virgin shore that he could set to his own liking. For years they’d been supplying a crowd of bushborns up there and were ready now to make a push into the country. He’d sailed out of St. John’s on a May morning with thirty hogsheads of salt, two muzzle-loaders and three Irish servants, a crate of hens, four sheep, a single cow and a bull. A checkerboard that he was assured would help get him through the winters. A fortnight beyond sight of any human habitation he confronted the captain who had been sailing back and forth a wild stretch of coastline for days. —Ten years I been coming out here, the captain said, and the bloody place sits somewhere different every time.
Eventually they anchored in a harbor a full league in length, the bay with fathom and width enough for Spurriers’ ships to deliver provisions in the spring and to take on salt fish in the fall. A steep horseshoe of hills rising around them, the densely forested spruce crowding down to the landwash. The silence of the place was implacable, and King-me felt a panic rising through him in the face of all of that nothing, the shoreline a mute angel he was meant to wrestle a name from. He settled on Paradise before he’d stepped off the boat, thinking anything less would be an admission of weakness. The bushborns in the Gut knew the harbor simply as Deep Bay and the name was too apt to abandon altogether—Paradise Deep, they insisted on calling it. As if to tell King-me that something of the place would always be beyond his influence.
Watching Judah emerge from the whale’s guts, King-me felt the widow was birthing everything he despised in the country, laying it out before him like a taunt. Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness