Galore - Michael Crummey [50]
She picked up her apron to wipe at her hands, knowing it would be a cruelty to deny Selina the illusion of safety she was after. Knowing Callum would never otherwise have the bride he waited on. She said, I’ll do what I have in me for Lizzie if you settle Master Sellers on the wedding.
—That’s no promise.
—You take care of Master Sellers, Devine’s Widow said. —Let me worry about the rest.
Callum insisted the ceremony be put off a full year out of respect for the dead. —I’ve waited too long to marry into grief, he told Lizzie. King-me showed his face at the service long enough to give his daughter away before cutting all ties with her.
Callum came to bed the first night of their marriage with an erection that Father Phelan would have described as a decade in the making. His cock went limp so abruptly after he came that Lizzie thought for a moment she’d damaged or broken it somehow and Callum couldn’t disguise his amusement, his whole body shaking when the level of her ignorance came clear to him. —You wanted to marry a slut, did you? she asked.
He said, You haven’t ever seen King-me’s bull mount the cows, maid?
She had not. She’d never seen anyone, not even her brothers, naked. She avoided the barns and for all her wild roaming she’d maintained a careful ignorance of the most basic facts of life. She’d had glimpses of the act, wood dogs or goats at one another, though it looked like a fight, a sickening intimacy to it that made her look away. She told Callum about the surreptitious trips to the Pond, the game she’d made of sneaking closer and closer to Ralph Stone’s shack, the shock of seeing him take a piss only a spruce branch from her hiding place. Nothing at all to hint at the truth of the matter before her encounter with Ralph Stone’s pizzle. She was beating at Callum’s chest to stop him laughing as she tried to explain herself. —Nothing, nothing, nothing, she said furiously. —And then to come face to face with the like of that.
—From the stories old Ralph told me, Callum said, you’re not the only woman he give a mortal fright with that oar of his.
They went quiet then, the man between them a moment, not two years dead. Passed in his sleep days before Jabez Trim walked out to look in on him. A miserable October, three weeks of a steady downpour and at some point after he died Ralph Stone’s long-suffering roof gave up the ghost as well. A three-foot hole cratered above him, the steady stream of rainfall soaking the bedclothes and the corpse and threatening to set the very bed afloat, as if the ocean he’d escaped had come to claim him after all.
Lizzie said, We wouldn’t ever have come to this if he hadn’t carted me down here.
Callum shrugged against her. —I expect that might be true.
They could hear Devine’s Widow snoring in the room Callum laid on the back of the tilt before the wedding and Lizzie nestled her forehead into his chest, thinking of the old woman’s face when she’d stared down at her, paralyzed on the table. A look of cold appraisal that made her helplessness seem irremediable.
They knew Selina had come to speak to the widow after Harry and George were lost. Within a week King-me offered a tortured blessing to his surviving child and her fiancé. Lizzie and Callum had never spoken about the role Devine’s Widow played in that sequence of events, refused even to acknowledge it. They were happier telling themselves love alone was responsible for their union. Love and blind chance. Love and the intervention of Ralph Stone’s bladder on a summer’s afternoon before they knew one another.
Lizzie reached down to cup Callum’s penis, the mysterious little creature spent and still wet, like something half-drowned and just clinging to life. The old woman’s snores echoing from the back room. —I hate your mother, Lizzie whispered to him. And she felt her husband’s cock stir in her hand.
Virtue Gallery was a woman who blossomed in marriage, as if she’d tapped some vibrant subterranean source of beauty. It was the sign of a happy match, people said. Virtue had never so much as kissed a man before her wedding