Galore - Michael Crummey [60]
It was her nose, he thought, that made her face such a trial to look at. Her eyes beady and wide-set on either side of that imposing cliff, which gave her obvious intellect an unfair whiff of treachery. Their friendship was rooted in Absalom’s belief that friendship was all she expected. She was the only woman who failed to reduce him to a helpless spurt of stuttering.
Her letters were Absalom’s only link to the wider world he’d briefly known. They filled him with a sick nostalgia he mistook for passion and he’d proposed to her by mail the previous fall. She sent news of her acceptance on the first vessel out in the spring, outlining her plans to leave England at her earliest convenience, but the letter went astray en route.
Absalom assumed from her silence that he’d insulted the woman. As the summer wore on with no word from her he’d even begun to feel a measure of relief at the rejection. No one in Paradise Deep knew she was coming before she disembarked on the wharf and asked to be taken to Selina’s House. —Where shall I have my trunks put? she asked him.
King-me took an immediate dislike to the woman. —She haven’t the look of someone with the inclination to be a mother, he told his wife, but Selina wouldn’t allow him to speak another ill word of her. The wedding promised to be the grandest affair on the shore since the Episcopal church was dedicated, though planning the event was left entirely in Selina’s hands. Within a week of her arrival Ann Hope was badgering King-me for space that could be adapted to use as a school. She spoke to Barnaby Shambler and Jabez Trim and Callum Devine and a dozen others on both sides of the Tolt for contributions to cover the materials necessary to such an enterprise. —You see, Selina told her husband, how much children mean to her.
—She’s a schemer, King-me said. —She haven’t got a maternal bone in her body.
—They’ve got a school in Harbour Grace, Selina told him. —And in St. John’s and in Bonavista.
King-me looked afresh at the woman every time she demonstrated this knack for political maneuver. Cavalry charge or subtle manipulation, axe or razor edge, that and all between were in her bag of tricks and he couldn’t help but admire her for it. A school it was then, supposing he had to fund the entire thing himself, and he nodded angrily to signal his defeat.
Days before the September wedding, Father Cunico arrived on the shore. He carried letters of appointment from the prefect vicar apostolic in St. John’s naming him priest of Paradise parish. Cunico was sent with instructions to reverse the ecumenism that threatened the extinction of Catholicism on the shore and his first official act was to forbid his parishioners attending the wedding at the Episcopal church. The Italian priest went door to door to present his credentials and make his wishes known, though he spoke no Irish and his English was so heavily accented that people made a show of not understanding him. Phelan dismissed the new priest as a milksop and a zealot, a shameless bootlicker whose grandest ambition was to be appointed arsewiper to His Holiness the Pope. —He won’t be with us long enough to shave, Phelan predicted.
Cunico’s only ally on the shore was the Reverend Dodge who fed him and found him a place to sleep and provided what advice he could. He insisted the Italian pay particular attention to the widow’s crowd, and Cunico spent an evening in Callum Devine’s kitchen, trying to bring the family back within the bosom of the true Church. Lizzie was handed the letters of appointment and she read them aloud to the room. She hadn’t converted before her wedding and Cunico denounced the union, like Dodge before him. Their children and their children’s children were stained by it, Cunico told them. There was a quick back-and-forth between Lazarus and Callum in Irish and the Italian hammered his walking stick against the floor