Galore - Michael Crummey [40]
He asked permission of Selina Moore’s father over a checkerboard and a glass of brandy on Shrove Tuesday. They settled on an April wedding and the newlyweds sailed for Newfoundland through wild spring weather, the masts and sails encased in ice by freezing rain mid-crossing and the weight nearly capsized the vessel. Wind and lightning and St. Elmo’s fire in the rigging two days short of St. John’s and not a word of complaint from Selina the entire journey.
King-me fathered three children in the next five years, a girl, and two sons to carry on the trade he was building. The children arrived healthy and they were intelligent, curious creatures, affectionate with one another and as well behaved as a parent had a right to expect. Selina taught them to read and write and do their sums in the main room of their stud tilt until the spring she took to her bed and insisted on the completion of her wedding home. Lizzie was six when they moved into Selina’s House, a fireplace in each room, cod-oil lamps fixed to the walls of the hallways. Every spring that followed, the children performed an Easter drama in the parlor for their parents and a handful of friends and servants, a three-act opus penned by Lizzie which she revised and refined each winter in consultation with Jabez Trim and his Bible.
In the spring of Lizzie’s twelfth year, John Tom White convinced her parents the play should be performed for the entire community. John Tom was a Harbour Grace man who’d shifted to Paradise Deep after losing his wife to a chimney fire. He worked for Sellers as a culler, assessing and grading the quality of salt fish brought in each fall by the crews on the shore. He bragged often of the seasonal entertainments in Harbour Grace—skits and songs and recitations in the church hall—and he felt Paradise Deep was in sore need of the same. King-me had no interest in the children’s play or songs and skits, but the lack John Tom pointed to pricked at his pride. He had the store that once served as a courtroom set up as a theater, barrels and tools shifted along one wall and an old mizzen-sail hung for a curtain at the far end. Selina helped Lizzie sew costumes, and word made its way along the shore that an entertainment was to be seen at Spurriers’ Rooms at the end of Lent.
The whole affair promised to be grander than anything the playwright imagined for her creation. She slept poorly for weeks ahead and anticipation kept her awake most of the night before the performance. An audience of fifty souls crowded into the building and the show went off without a hitch until Mary the Mother of God approached the empty tomb on Easter morning and young Harry Sellers appeared as the angel bearing news of Christ’s resurrection. The play’s climax was Mary’s poem of thanksgiving recited upon her knees and Lizzie fainted dead away three parts through, her head lolling back mid-word and her body slumping to the floor. The audience thought her swoon part of the show until the angel began screaming at the top of his lungs. Even after being shaken awake Lizzie’s arms were limp and her eyes vacant and once she came to herself she was unable to explain her brief absence. She was aware of the room and the crowd, she said, but couldn’t move or speak. The spells continued in the months that followed, the girl dropping asleep as she brushed her hair or ate or laughed with her brothers. People were divided as to the cause, some suggesting the theater was a sinful institution