Galore - Michael Crummey [51]
The only shadow in their lives was the absence of children. Virtue was embarrassed by her trouble and Gallery, cavalier about the subject at first, was more and more taken up with the idea that his wife was defective. They’d shared the house he built in the droke of woods for five years and had both begun to think they might never have a child. Their discussions on the subject became increasingly unhappy, Gallery talking as if he’d been tricked into wedding a barren woman. Virtue subjected herself to long courses of sour teas and potions of sheep laurel boiled with tobacco and she observed a variety of superstitions that were said to ensure conception. She went so far as to ask Jabez Trim to pray for them, though Gallery scoffed at the notion, given Trim’s own childlessness. Virtue suggested they ask a blessing from Father Phelan instead but Gallery wouldn’t hear of it. He’d rather cut off his own balls with a rusty fish knife, he said, than have a child on the say-so of a mick priest.
—Oh Martin.
He turned on her with a flash of anger. —You’d love to have the bastard’s hands on you, I’m sure.
Virtue got up from her seat.
—No, he said. —It’s his mick cock a slut like you is after.
It was the first time he’d spoken to her in such a fashion since the night he’d come to her door at Selina’s House. She stared at him awhile, hoping to shame him without speaking, and then she went to her bed alone. She found him asleep on the flagstones of the fireplace next morning, wrapped in a coat. He woke meek and remorseful and newly in love with his wife and the couple enjoyed a period of sexual appetite unlike anything since their first weeks together.
She knew she was pregnant the moment it happened, felt it like a wick lit inside her. But she said nothing until she missed her second period. Gallery hadn’t touched a drop of liquor in the house since the wedding, never drank in Virtue’s presence and never came back to the droke until he was sober. But at the impromptu celebration for the pregnancy he toasted his wife and the child and his neighbors and returned the toasts offered by everyone else in the room. He was up half the night singing love songs to Virtue where she lay in the back room, pretending to sleep. It was late autumn, after the fall fish was in and before there was snow enough to haul wood from the backcountry, and Gallery carried on celebrating at every opportunity. Virtue felt he’d proved himself long enough to be granted a reprieve and she found small doses of the man when he was drinking surprisingly easy to take. He came to bed asking her if she might show him, once more, if it isn’t too much to ask mi’lady, the precise steps she’d taken to sow the infant in her belly. And they lay together afterwards with the impending glory of the child between them.
—Those were all the steps? he asked one night, his hand in the heat between her thighs. —You’re certain?
—Each and every one.
—You didn’t leave out a step or two?
—Those were all I remember.
—Perhaps we should go over it again to be sure.
She laughed at him, pushing his hand away. —Go to sleep, you fool, she said. And she’d almost drifted off when he spoke again. —You’re not leaving out a step are you, Virtue Gallery?
—What are you talking about, Martin?
He sat up in the darkness, struck by a doubt. —It seems strange, is all. Five years we’ve shared this bed and your belly barren all that time.
—I won’t be talked to like this, she said.
—You didn’t ask a blessing of that mick bastard, did you?
She let out a long breath, relieved by the ludicrous accusation. —Of course not.
—Well what did you do then?
—I just showed you.
—All the steps? he shouted. He was out of bed by then, knocking around in the dark after another drink, and she found him passed out beneath the board table in the morning, his dancer