Galore - Michael Crummey [49]
She said, Not even when we marry, Callum Devine, will you decide how I waste my life.
Virtue Clouter gave her notice to Selina after Lizzie’s family returned from Poole in the spring. She married Martin Gallery within the week and Lizzie consented to be maid of honor. Gallery had expected John Tom White to act as bridesboy and he asked King-me to stand in John Tom’s stead. Sellers didn’t know Gallery well enough to refuse him though he disliked being set in a dead man’s shoes. He carried out his duties as the vows were taken, walking ahead of the couple arm in arm with his daughter when the ceremony was complete, and people said it was as close as King-me would come to giving his daughter away. The old man stood straight and true as a navy mast, he looked like he might live to be a hundred. Lizzie caught Callum’s eye as she passed, as if to reassure him, her gaze steadfast and certain.
They endured three more years of their peculiar sentence after Virtue’s wedding, when another excursion to England was planned to find a wife for George. King-me decided to stay behind, unwilling to leave Lizzie with Callum still set for her and neither John Tom nor Virtue to watch them. Selina was afraid what might happen with father and daughter left alone in one another’s company so long and decided at the last minute not to sail. She begged Harry and his wife to leave Absalom with her, the child just weaned off the breast and learning to walk. Harry’s wife refused outright at first. But she was pregnant again and the second child would be born in Poole that winter, which Selina argued would satisfy her family’s desire to fawn over the offspring. After two days of needling and bartering and naked pleading the mother relented.
They shipped out on the last crossing of the fall and it wasn’t until the following spring that any news reached Paradise Deep. The vessel never made port in Poole and was unheard of since departing St. John’s. The blinds in Selina’s House were drawn, the windows darkened for a period of attenuated mourning, months waiting for some final word though it was obvious there was no hope. For the first time in years stories of how Devine’s Widow left King-me’s employ made the rounds, variations of the curse she was said to have laid upon him discussed and debated. May the sea take you and all the issue of your loins was repeated often enough to take on the air of truth and was generally accepted as such by the fall.
At the end of September Selina herself walked over the Tolt Road and into the Gut. She’d never stepped foot in the neighboring community and had to be directed to the stud tilt where Devine’s Widow lived. She refused the offer of tea, refused to sit down. Devine’s Widow expressed her condolences and she refused even to accept those.
—You’ll leave her be, Selina said. —If I settle things with her father and she marries Callum. You promise me you’ll let her alone.
—Mrs. Sellers.
—Your Callum is set for her, everyone on the shore knows as much, and I will see he has her. But you, you bitch. Selina took a breath to steady herself, a twitch about her mouth making it look as if she was trying to fight off a smile. —You will not harm a hair on her head, so help me God.
There was something familiar in the woman’s tone, a sickening note somewhere between supplication and threat. The widow’s husband had died during an epidemic of measles that burned through the shore twenty-five years before. Seventeen deaths in the span of three weeks, Jabez Trim performing four funerals on one black day alone. Her husband and only child both suffering and Devine’s Widow lay awake the last nights of their illness in a fever of her own, offering all she had to offer. It seemed for a time she would lose them both and in her desperation she chose between them. —Spare the boy, she said. —Take my husband but spare Callum.
In a way she envied Selena, believing there was someone other than God to bargain with. —My Callum is a good man, the widow said.
—You give me your word, Missus.