Galore - Michael Crummey [42]
No one ever learned where exactly the man belonged, only that he’d sailed the tall ships from his earliest years and had seen the world half a dozen times over. His vessel went down in a storm eleven days out of Portugal and the men in the lifeboat died before his eyes, one by one. For days he had only corpses for company, facing them from the bow while they stared at him like an expectant congregation. His friends. Their faces every hour growing more tortured, more accusing.
He lost his nerve for the ocean after the rescue, refusing to leave the shore and going so far as to build on a piece of land out of sight of the sea altogether. He depended on the charity of others for a time, subsisting on cods’ heads and potatoes and wild berries and pond trout. Within two years he was cobbling a living with the cod-oil lamps he built in a tiny workshed and peddled door to door. Half the houses on the shore were lit by the work of his hands and eventually King-me Sellers shipped the lamps for sale in shops from Bonavista to Harbour Grace to St. John’s.
There were some who thought his blackness a sign of defilement or witchery and turned their backs at the sight of him. But he was easy to laugh and had more stories of exotic locales than Father Phelan, which made him good company. He kept to himself out at the Pond where the few who counted him a friend could seek him out. He lived in a tilt so poorly constructed a permanent maze of cups and bowls were laid out to catch the rain that sieved through the roof. The single table and chair and his low bed built with board salvaged from the lifeboat that carried him ashore.
Lizzie never laid eyes on him before her excursions to the Pond. From across the water she couldn’t make out his face or any features besides the remarkable cast of his skin. If the wind was right she could hear him singing snatches of hymns or drinking songs. She felt herself completely invisible to him and she began sneaking closer to his property to test the illusion. Gold rings in the lobes of both ears, a pale scar on one temple where the tight curls of his hair no longer grew, a missing front tooth like an open doorway.
He was much smaller than her imagination made him out to be from a distance, and older besides. He did little more than tinker out of view in his shop or crawl around on the roof of the tilt to stop up the most insistent leaks, all the while repeating the same three lines of a song. —Some marry for riches, the proud haughty way, some marry for beauty, the flower will decay, but if e’er I get married. He stopped there, seeming not to know how or why he would marry, and skipped back to the head of the verse in an endless loop.
She’d all but decided to give up her game the day he left his workshed, shirtless and walking straight for the spruce bushes where she was hiding. A disgruntled look on his dark face. She jumped to her feet, stars pinging across her vision. He stopped at the trees then and took his cock from his pants to piss.
When she woke from the spell of sleep Lizzie was in his arms and being carted at a run down the slope of the Tolt Road into the Gut. He was slick with sweat, out of breath and whispering some disjointed story about his mother and father, as if trying to keep her entertained during the trip. The strange paralysis that followed in the wake of her sleep made it impossible to nod or call out or ask where she was being taken before he pushed through a door and laid her on a table in front of the widow woman. —She’s not dead is she, Missus? he asked. —Tell me she isn’t dead.
—What is it you got done to her?
—She was in the bushes up at the Pond, he said. —Didn’t know she was there before she hit the ground. Right at my feet she was, he said, what a fright she give me, Lord Jesus.
Devine’s Widow peered down into Lizzie’s motionless eyes. A crone’s features and something ancient about the woman’s face Lizzie didn’t recognize, a stillness that wasn’t calm