Galore - Michael Crummey [58]
—It’s like in the Book of Job, Jabez suggested to Father Phelan. —God sends trials to test us.
—God is a miserable bastard, the priest said.
Father Phelan had crews cutting fresh timber to rebuild through the next winter, Callum and Judah and young Lazarus, the Woundys and Saul Toucher’s crowd. They milled the wood in the spring and hauled it up the Tolt Road to set the church on the foundation of the one recently lost. They timbered the walls like a fortress and anchored the four corners of the building with ship ropes against the trials of God. The altar rail was fashioned from a gunwale salvaged off a Portuguese wreck, an iron cross forged in King-me’s smithy fixed to the steeple. The Romans had two months of services in the new building before a lightning strike set the church ablaze. The fire brought every soul to the Tolt, even the shade of Mr. Gallery walking the edges of the inferno.
The main doors were choked off by fire but the side door leading to the sacristy stood open. Callum Devine passed the window nearest the altar as he ran toward it and he saw a man backlit by the flames inside, trying feebly to break the glass. Callum smashed out the frame with his elbow and hauled Father Phelan through, the priest choking and retching, his hair and eyebrows singed. —Tried to get the Blessed Sacrament, he whispered. —From the altar.
The crowd milled helplessly while the roof fell in and the fortified walls burned to the stumps. Lightning had struck a flock of sheep on the Commons as well, five animals lying charred and bloated in the grass, the stink of burnt flesh lending the scene an acrid, apocalyptic feel.
In the wake of the storm the day was calm, the sky a scoured blue. Lazarus and Judah took the skiff out after a load of fish even though Devine’s Widow suggested they were tempting fate to go on the water in the wake of such an ill omen. Callum didn’t discourage them but stayed in himself and he sat at the kitchen table with the women while they waited. All of them speaking in whispers, as if at a wake for a child.
Mary Tryphena was watching her son half-asleep in Callum’s lap, his grandfather running his fingers through the boy’s hair. Patrick’s features hadn’t changed since the day he was born, the disconcerting look of an adult about him even then. After Devine’s Widow washed away the blood in a basin he was almost as pale as Judah, the eyelashes and the wisp of hair at the crown rabbit-white. Devine’s Widow placed the child in her arms and Mary Tryphena held him close, moving her face across the nape of his neck, relieved to find only the smell of new life there.
Callum looked out the window to guess the time of day by the sun. —They’ll be along now the once, he said. He set Patrick on his feet and stood up himself. —I’ll send the boy up for you when the fish are in, he told the women. Mary Tryphena caught the faintest scent of Judah drifting from her son as he passed by. She’d refused to let him go out in the boat with his father and during his little tantrum of protest the stink wafted from his skin like a squid’s black ink.
It was only days after his birth that Mary Tryphena discovered how a crying jag or a good fright or a fit of infant rage would call it up in him, sour and fierce. She could barely stomach the youngster’s presence when he was upset and she felt cheated of something by his affliction. It was Judah or Lazarus he went to when he wanted comforting. And there was a distance between mother and child that felt unnatural to Mary Tryphena, an undercurrent of something like grief.
—You’d hardly believe that, Lizzie said, looking up at the ruins of the church still smoking on the Tolt. Devine’s Widow suggested even Father Phelan would have to recognize the fire as a sign from God but Lizzie shook her head. —God give up talking to the likes of us, she said, a long time ago.
Father Phelan was taken to the house in the droke while the church was still burning. Mrs. Gallery stripped and washed him and settled