Galore - Michael Crummey [59]
—Mrs. Gallery, he said, I am married to the Church.
She smiled for only a moment before the thought of the fire struck her. She said, You don’t think there’s a message being sent you?
—What sort of message?
—Perhaps the Tolt isn’t where the Church belongs.
—Even Christ was denied three times, he said.
After his breakfast he walked the path to the outhouse. He felt remarkably peaceful sitting there, shut away from the world. He’d always thought of the privy as a holy place, a refuge from all but the most basic human concerns. As a novitiate he scandalized his superiors by claiming it wasn’t the church but the shithouse that was God’s true home in the world, the pungent effluvium as meditative an odor as incense, sunlight through the crescent moon carved in the door providing the dusky ambience of a monastery cell. He laughed at the thought now. Nearly an old man and more ridiculous with each passing year.
God spoke to no one, he knew that. God was scattered in the world and the word of God was a puzzle to be cobbled together out of hints and clues. He sat far longer than he needed to, pondering Mrs. Gallery’s questions. It was the thought of losing the country he’d been fighting against with his sanctuary on the Tolt, the church meant to lay claim to these few of his flock, this one bit of coastline still left him. It was vanity, plain and simple, trying to hold what you loved a moment longer than God granted it. But he’d always been a vain man.
He walked back through the droke of woods and stood a moment staring out at the shoreline crowded with wharves and flakes and slipways, fishing rooms and storehouses and twine lofts. Only the hundred feet of waterfront reserved by King-me Sellers stood vacant, a straggly meadow of uncut grass above it. Sellers satisfied his expansion requirements by foreclosing on the properties of debtors and legally the plot remained public land, but the merchant refused to allow anyone to build on it. A view of the entire harbor from that patch of ground, the meadow a midden pile of fish bones and maggoty cod and broken pike handles, wood scraps too rotten to burn. The whitened bones of Judah Devine’s whale scattered about like the ribs of a wrecked vessel. A shit heap of garbage at the head of the bay.
The priest made his way up to the Tolt where a forlorn band of searchers picked through the ruins for iron nails that might be reused. Father Phelan called Judah and Callum up to the chancel and they unearthed what was left of the altar from beneath the cindered remains of timber and shingle. They found the pyx containing the Eucharist in its cubby there, the container unmarked, the wafers inside as white as the white of Judah’s face.
—I’ve seen the error of my ways, Callum, the priest said.
—You’re giving up the drink, Father?
—I’d sooner be dead. Call everyone round, he said and he began praying in Latin, the searchers making their way up the blackened nave to receive the last Eucharist ever celebrated on the Tolt.
There were two late-summer arrivals on the shore that season which, added to the loss of the Roman church, made it the most memorable in years.
Ann Hope traveled from Poole to marry Absalom Sellers, sailing into Paradise Deep in mid-August. The two had met during Absalom’s years as an apprentice in Spurriers’ accounting offices in England and they maintained a correspondence after he returned home, her letters full of books and theater and politics. She was five years Absalom’s senior, sister to a fellow apprentice at Spurriers and just returned from eighteen