Galore - Michael Crummey [64]
—All right, he told her. —If you’ll come to bed. I promise.
She waited a long time at the doorway and he thought for a while she might decide against the bargain. But in the end she stripped out of her clothes and settled under the blankets beside him.
In late June Father Phelan departed to make his annual visit to the archipelago of tiny communities along the coast, baptizing the children born and formalizing the marriages undertaken in his absence, saying a funeral mass for those who’d succumbed through the winter.
Father Cunico returned to Paradise Deep while Phelan was away, sailing into the harbor on a day of cloudless blue sky. The sloop he arrived on was a forty-footer built in St. John’s for the archbishop’s use. The vicar had spent the first weeks of the summer touring parishes on the Avalon before accompanying Cunico to Paradise Deep. The two men stepped off the vessel under the shade of umbrellas held by members of the crew and stood looking at the church before them. The walls painted with whitewash, the windows in place and a wooden cross fixed to the steeple.
—They’ve built you a church, Father Cunico, the archbishop said.
Word was passed house to house that the vicar had come with the Italian priest, that a Mass was to be held the next morning, and the church was full an hour before the service began. The vicar was a severe-looking Irishman, a cleric with an air of enthusiastic fasting about him, and he wasted no time in reprimanding the community for its treatment of Father Cunico. He reiterated the Italian’s appointment as the parish priest and outlined in detail the cost of defying him. Then he blessed the new sanctuary and held communion and at the end of the service when most believed he was done he opened the Bible to read from Galatians. —Even if we, or an angel from Heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be anathema. He listed Father Phelan’s crimes against the church then—heresy and schism which spread division and confusion among the faithful, as well as direct violation of the sacramental seal of confession by a confessor. Father Cunico tolled a brass handbell while the archbishop closed the Gospels and snuffed a candle that had been lit upon the altar and Father Phelan was excommunicated from the Holy Roman Church. Vitandis, the archbishop informed the congregation and warned them that a similar fate awaited anyone who ignored the Church’s will. On his return journey he stopped in every community between Paradise Deep and St. John’s to repeat the ritual of exclusion.
Father Phelan arrived at Mrs. Gallery’s two weeks later and she offered him the news when he came to her bed. —What does it mean, Father? Vitandis?
—Shunned, he told her. —To be shunned. The priest lay quiet a long time and she thought he might have fallen asleep. —Tell me that Italian shite hasn’t been saying Mass in my church, he said.
He spent an inordinate portion of the next morning in the outhouse though it offered no solace. He went directly from there to Callum’s house in the Gut, the men already back with the day’s first boatload of cod and sitting to a second breakfast of tea and bread. Everyone stopped still when the priest came into the kitchen and he looked from one to the other without catching the eye of a single person. Patrick came out of the pantry and ran to greet the priest but Mary Tryphena grabbed him by the arm, lifting him into her lap. —God be with you, Father Phelan said, and Devine’s Widow stood to turn her back. One by one the others stood and did the same, Callum and Mary Tryphena and Daniel Woundy. Even Lazarus turned away after his grandmother nudged his shoulder. Only Lizzie defied the old woman. —I’m sorry Father, she whispered.
The priest nodded. —Say me to your family, he said.
The same reception awaited him in every Catholic house on the shore. Doors barred against him, faces turned away, as if he were ringing a leper’s bell through the streets of ancient Jerusalem. The hundreds of children baptized by his hand, the dozens