Galore - Michael Crummey [57]
King-me’s cows woke to the racket carrying up from the shoreline and they kicked at their stalls, lowing mournfully while it went on. The soldier standing guard scrambled away from the door with his musket at the ready, afraid for his life. Father Phelan leaned into Mrs. Gallery’s neck as the noise rose and ebbed and rose again. —From the sound of that, he whispered, Callum must have been mistaken about the size of Judah’s blade.
Mrs. Gallery shrugged away from him. —You’re no better than a whoremaster, she said.
Events unfolded then much as Devine’s Widow predicted. The machinations at Selina’s House occurred behind closed doors and they could only guess at the arguments presented, the threats and promises made between King-me and his wife, the promises and money exchanged between King-me and Lieutenant Goudie. Sellers called court to session in short order, the charge of capital murder dropped due to insufficient evidence and Judah convicted of theft on the testimony of Captain John Withycombe. He was fined fifteen pounds sterling and taken directly from court to the public whipping post where he received thirty lashes. Devine’s Widow soaked sheets in vinegar and strapped them to his back to cover the welts and Judah slept six weeks on his stomach.
Jude moved into the tilt when Callum completed the new house at the end of that summer, though Mary Tryphena and the baby stayed under her parents’ roof. Judah seemed to have no expectation that his wife share his bed or his home but he knew Patrick for his own and doted on the child.
Mary Tryphena ignored her husband as much as possible. She was tormented by the thought that everyone on the shore knew what they’d done in the fishing room, the same as if she’d raised her skirts to him in broad daylight on the Commons. She swore at the time it would never happen again and had rarely faltered since. Once or twice a year appetite got the better of her resolve and she slipped from her parents’ house in the dead of night to call Judah outside where the open air made the smell of the man less overwhelming. The same stew of release and regret in the aftermath, creeping to her room like a thief, the buzz of simple animal pleasure pulsing through her. The last time, she swore after each lapse. The very last.
When little Patrick Devine was five years old, Father Phelan announced plans to build a Catholic sanctuary on the shore. A cathedral, he said, that would put the modest Episcopal chapel to shame.
The work involved in such an undertaking ran so hard against the grain of the man that no one took him seriously. The bishop in St. John’s was steadily carving the country into parishes, resident priests were taking up duties once the province of itinerant clergy, and Father Phelan found himself with less and less territory to cover. He was bored staying so much in one place, people said, and the church was simply idle talk.
Phelan spent hours in the company of the shore’s best boat builders and carpenters discussing naves and arches, trusses, beams, windows. He chose a plot of land on the Tolt as the church’s location. —The wind up there, Callum Devine warned him, could strip the flesh off a cow. But there were almost as many Catholics living in Paradise Deep as in the Gut by then and the priest insisted the sanctuary sit between the two.
Jabez Trim and a handful of other Episcopalians worked with the Catholic men to raise the frame in September, Mass held within the skeletal walls that first evening. And the entire structure collapsed