Galore - Michael Crummey [47]
The old woman watched her son while he busied himself at his boots. —I thought your mind was made up to leave that girl be.
—I’m only coming to keep you company, he said. He was out the door then, shouting at them to get a move on.
Callum hadn’t known a moment of real peace since the afternoon he’d seen Lizzie perform in Spurriers’ storeroom as a girl. Mary the Mother of God speaking to the gathering as if she’d appeared out of a Lordly shaft of light through the roof. It was a witching he’d never heard tell of, that a child could conjure such a vision, his pulse so fierce as he watched her that each heartbeat rippled across his sight. When Mary fell to her knees at the Savior’s tomb his legs quivered and he thought he might drop where he stood. And then Lizzie surfaced through that likeness of rapture, collapsing up there in his stead. A hush in the room those few moments before the angel began screaming, Callum’s cock on end and his throat closed over with reverence and dread and wanting the strange little dark-haired girl for his own.
He’d never learned how to quiet his head during the years without her. He was a regular fixture at Shambler’s for a time, trying to muffle the roar of the girl’s proximity with booze. But the hours of drunken respite guttered into a bitterness that threatened to kill him and he chose to bury himself in the dredge of all that needed doing instead, taking to it as though to a religious calling. Rinding lungers for wharves and stages, tanning sealskins in the fall, barking herring nets, framing boats through the long winters. He offered himself up to others on the shore, slut for work that he was. He spent several days each spring working on Ralph Stone’s pathetic roof. He adopted the childless and aging Kerrivans, helping William haul and split and stack their winter wood, trenching their potato garden and fertilizing it with seaweed or capelin, building a stone fence around the apple tree at the margin of their property. The endless physical labor was a hairshirt he wore next his skin, though it was only Devine’s Widow who named it for what it was. —No good ever come of pining, she told him.
Callum had confessed his intentions to Father Phelan early on, but the priest had no patience for his vigil, thinking it an insult to God to live in such denial. He made a habit of plying Callum with drink, offering to take him to the home of a woman he guaranteed would make them welcome, dismissing Callum as a sodomite, a fairy, a eunuch in fisherman’s boots when he refused. —Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, he quoted drunkenly, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave. The priest slapped at Callum’s crotch. —With thy might, you useless tit.
Father Phelan’s ridicule never bothered Callum as much as the relentless public speculation concerning Lizzie. Everyone had an opinion about the girl to share, about her spells and the years spent skulking on the margins of their lives, all of which suggested some flaw at her core. Eventually Callum was forced to admit that what people said of her was true, that she was wild and twisted in some fashion. He couldn’t help thinking he was to blame, asking the girl to share a truncated life that was slowly deforming them both. And he became increasingly withdrawn and reclusive as that fact came home to him.
On the evening of the Boxing Day dance organized by John Tom White, a crowd came to the house in the Gut, drunk and fed up with Callum’s cloistering himself away. They took his solitariness as an insult to their own company and decided to carry him if necessary to the festivities in Paradise Deep. Daniel Woundy and Saul Toucher and Father Phelan and several others dragged him to the door while he fought like a man being led to a lynching, elbows and knees and cursing, his shirt tearing along its seams. Saul Toucher punched at Callum’s ribs to get his hands off the door frame and Callum went down, grabbing legs as he went. The group moved off into the darkness with this strange