Galore - Michael Crummey [66]
Father Phelan was gone when Mrs. Gallery rose from her bed in the morning and there was no sign of her husband besides, the fireplace black and cold. She stayed on in the droke the rest of that winter before returning to her position at Selina’s House a third time, nursing King-me and his wife into their doddering years while Absalom took on more and more of the ramshackle empire his grandfather had wrestled out of wilderness and fog.
Father Cunico lived three years on the shore before the animosity of his Irish congregation and the winters defeated him. He was a solitary figure within his parish, spending long hours writing melancholy letters to his family and the archbishop and his friends at the Holy See, complaining about the infernal Newfoundland weather and the insolence of the livyers that seemed congenital to the place. His only companion and confidant was God, who the priest thought of as an unhappy visitor to the country, much like himself—called to the irredeemable wilderness by duty and homesick for more civilized surroundings.
Cunico was a refined and delicate man in a world where delicacy and refinement were ridiculous affectations. He kept a silk handkerchief in the sleeve of his vestments that he produced to cover his mouth and nose whenever he walked near the fish flakes on the waterfront. The locals found it a chore to take him seriously and the Italian responded to their condescension with a show of ecclesiastical force, instituting a growing list of strictures. He saw the Irish language as a tool of sedition and refused to allow it spoken in his presence or within the sanctuary. He forbade Catholic children to attend Ann Hope Sellers’ school, running classes of his own where he taught Latin catechisms and forced students to memorize the labyrinthine hierarchy of the Church. He condemned the tradition of passing infants through the branches of Kerrivan’s Tree as a pagan rite, and Catholics, like their Protestant neighbors before them, were forced to carry on the practice in secret. He withheld the sacraments from families of mixed marriages until the Protestant spouse converted to the faith.
Callum Devine stopped attending Mass altogether at that point. He’d never forgiven himself for denying Father Phelan though the excommunication was all that kept Lazarus and Judah and James Woundy out of prison. He’d no doubt Devine’s Widow orchestrated the entire thing while she nursed the Italian priest and it was his mother’s shadow as much as the Church Callum wanted to leave behind. He and his wife and everyone else in the house but the widow were confirmed in the Episcopal faith and the Devines became the only Protestant household in the Gut.
Those Catholics who had no express argument with the priest had little time for the Italian’s manner. Cunico was a stickler for decorum, for religious formalities, as if he were already ensconced in the make-believe world of the Vatican. He became widely known as Father Cuntico in honor of his perpetual state of vexation. At every Mass he listed the congregation’s failings in their duty to the parish and its priest and threatened to abandon them if the situation did not change.
He took it as a personal insult when things did not and he left for good on a June morning of steady drizzle, his trunks packed and carried aboard a Spurriers ship bound for St. John’s. A small group of parishioners were there to see him off but he refused them a final blessing, offering only his assurance that their community would never prosper again, as if God were departing on the same vessel as His emissary.
Callum felt the story disproved the notion that Father Cuntico had no sense of humor. But in the wake of the Italian’s departure there was little enough to laugh about. The quintals