Galore - Michael Crummey [52]
—That’s the good Lord, she said. —Telling you it’s time to give up the drinking.
He rubbed his temples with both fists, still uncertain where he was. He stood up straight and held the table to steady himself. —All right, he said.
But Martin Gallery was taken with the notion his wife carried another man’s child and even stone sober it grew in his mind. Virtue lost her patience with his sullenness and silence and she ignored him as best she could. The child was all she thought of. Their child. The baby’s arrival, which she prayed would bring her husband back to himself.
His mood darkened with the first incontrovertible signs of the pregnancy, as if the distended belly and swollen breasts proved his worst suspicions correct. He drank next the fire every evening as winter descended and Virtue stayed in the bedroom to avoid his accusations. When he went out to find drinking company she barred the door and Gallery spent a portion of the early mornings screaming at his wife and her secret lover locked away in the house that he’d built with his own hands.
It was no secret that Martin Gallery was terrorizing his wife during his binges, accusing her of infidelities, threatening to take the lives of Virtue and any man he found in her bed. Jabez Trim once tried to talk some sense to him and succeeded only in placing himself first on the list of Gallery’s suspects, so most people avoided the couple altogether. The mummers passed by without calling at the house in the droke that Christmas season and Gallery drank most often with Saul Toucher who treated Gallery’s drunken tirades as a bit of harmless theater. Names of possible adulterers were discussed at length, scenarios which placed particular men in Mrs. Gallery’s company were explored. They agreed there was no man on the shore above suspicion, no woman alive who could be trusted completely. Saul’s wife was still nursing the new triplets. —How do you know for certain, Gallery asked, those children are your own?
Saul pointed out the cleft of his chin, as prominent as the cheeks of a baby’s arse. —They all got the same, he said.
Gallery shook his head. Even that seemed flimsy evidence to inspire so much confidence.
Sheila Woundy’s husband found Gallery passed out in a snowbank one January morning on his way into the backcountry after firewood with Daniel and James. He would have walked by the man in the predawn light if his wood dog hadn’t stuck his head off the path, his tail wagging furiously. Elias Fennessey couldn’t call his dog off whatever had its attention and when he tried to drag the animal back onto the trail he discovered Martin Gallery half-frozen in the bush, hair and eyebrows white with frost.
They strapped a length of twine under his armpits and the Newfoundland dragged him out the Tolt Road to his house in the droke. Elias knocked at the barred door, calling for Mrs. Gallery, and together they shifted him inside and set him near the fireplace, stoking the fire until it roared. Elias didn’t want to leave Virtue alone with her frozen husband and he sent Daniel and James on into the woods with the dog, saying he’d catch them up later in the morning.
When Gallery’s eyes opened an hour later he looked at Elias a moment before nodding his head in recognition. —Mr. Woundy, he whispered.
Elias was a widower himself when he wed Sheila Woundy. She had married into his name, but the change never took on the shore. Their only son, James, had been christened Fennessey but was commonly known by his mother’s surname. Even Elias was referred to as Mr. Woundy and he was too old to take offense. He nodded back at Gallery. —You give us some fright, he said. —Thought you was a dead man.
Gallery looked around the room until his eyes settled on his wife in a chair near the table.