Galore - Michael Crummey [62]
Father Cunico took sick after his dunking and lay prostrate in bed a full week with a fever, attended there by Devine’s Widow who applied cow-manure plasters to his chest. Judah and Lazarus and James were arrested by King-me’s constables and held for several nights in the same fishing room where Patrick Devine was conceived, but they were released after Cunico publicly absolved them. No one doubted they had the widow’s intervention at the priest’s sickbed to thank, though the cost of the bargain remained a mystery. Cunico left the shore for St. John’s in mid-October, citing the need to regain his health and to spend time in spiritual retreat to undo the damage inflicted upon him by the parish.
—That’s the last we’ll see of that milksop, Phelan told Mrs. Gallery. He was still making plans for the new church and laid them out before her in their bed. The land lying fallow on the waterfront at the center of his scheme and she shook her head against his shoulder.
—King-me won’t ever let that land to you, she said.
Phelan lay still a moment. He and Sellers had never spoken except when the priest was begging food for starving parishioners, the merchant niggardly and resentful of the imposition. —No, he said, I expect he won’t. But he devoted the fall and winter to cutting and standing timber to dry for the church, taking a crew of twenty-five men into the bush and working them until dark.
Ann Hope Sellers’ one-room school opened its doors in January and three dozen children carried in a junk of wood for the fire and took seats each morning to be taught their letters and sums and the basics of hygiene, and nursery rhymes that they chanted in unison. Even James Woundy came to take instruction to avoid conscription into Father Phelan’s work parties. Ann Hope put aside her initial reservations about the man’s attendance when she saw he was slow enough to enjoy practicing his letters on a slate and reciting the juvenile poems. He fancied himself her assistant and helped keep the students in line if they got restless. She took to leaving him in charge if she was called away from the school, until the morning she came back to find a row of boys standing with their pants around their ankles and James Woundy measuring their hairless peckers with her wooden ruler. The girls writing numbers in careful rows on their slates as James called them out. It was the end of James Woundy’s academic career and Ann Hope felt compelled to burn the ruler in the fireplace.
The raw wood for the church had to be hand-milled with saws and axes and planes, and Father Phelan had crews at work as early as possible in the spring, James Woundy entertaining the men with nursery rhymes laden with obscene substitutions. Hickory dickory dock, the louse ran up the cock. Old King Cole had a hairy old hole and a hairy old hole had he. He offered up the details of his going overboard after a merwoman years ago, taking her underwater and the cunt on her as cold and wet as March month, he pissed ice for a week afterwards. James didn’t do a tap of work but he was diverting enough to be tolerated.
The finished lumber was laid in the droke behind Mrs. Gallery’s house and the priest directed every Catholic man to meet him there before light on the day after Pentecost. The assembly numbered nearly one hundred, and in the first gray glim of dawn the church was carried in planks and beams to the midden above the shore. Mary Tryphena was watching from the Tolt with Lizzie and Devine’s Widow and a handful of other women. It looked to them as if a column of ants was marching spruce needles and sticks from one nest to another. The work began in earnest before smoke showed in a single chimney on the shore, the corner posts laid