Galore - Michael Crummey [68]
—A coffin, King-me repeated, nodding his head. He stood from his chair suddenly and stumbled past the boy, Devine’s Widow watching after him as he went through the door.
—That’s your father, Patrick said to Lizzie, still figuring the connections that seemed as convoluted to him as the Catholic hierarchy.
—Go on outside now, Devine’s Widow said. —Leave us women be.
She and Lizzie stared across the table after the boy left. They had learned to travel adjacent to one another in the tiny world they shared, mastering an intricate dance that offered the illusion they lived independently. It was impossible to say the last time they carried on a conversation not mediated by someone else’s presence. But they were both struck by the same cold presentiment now and mirrored it each to the other.
—I won’t ever speak to my father again, will I, Lizzie said.
The widow shrugged.
Lizzie pushed at her eyes with the heel of her hand and lifted her apron to wipe her face, shaking her head angrily.
—I know you hates me, the old woman said.
Lizzie laughed then. —Yes Missus. I surely do.
—That’s all right, maid. It means you’ll always carry me with you.
——
King-me’s winter-long season of nightmares fed a growing sense in Selina’s House that the old man was veering into senility, and the trip to consult Devine’s Widow seemed a final proof. He was delirious when he came back into Paradise Deep, claiming it was a coffin they were building next the church and ordering it be left to rot. Absalom could tell that nothing short of a talking- to from Selina would settle his grandfather down. Selina’s influence on their world had been subterranean, almost imperceptible, and it was a shock to see the extent of the change when she left them, King-me on the verge of foundering altogether. The old man took to his bed mid-summer and didn’t leave it until he was carried from the house in a casket that September.
Absalom resumed work on the sealing vessel and it was completed late the following summer. She was christened the Cornelia for Absalom’s long-dead mother, sails and equipment and provisions were laid in for a maiden trip to the ice in the spring, and that promise was the one source of optimism on the shore. There were only thirty-odd berths available and men paraded to Absalom’s door, pleading for tickets for themselves and their brothers and sons. The fishing had gone poorly for a third straight season and steady rain through July and August ruined the gardens. The winter fell early with heavy snows, the harbors were iced in by Christmas and stayed that way till mid-June, months too late to sail after the seals. Some households had not enough wood laid in to last the length of the winter and they burned furniture and the timber and walls of outbuildings to avoid freezing to death. Even in Selina’s House the milk froze solid in the jug and had to be chipped with a knife and dropped in slivers into their tea. By the end of May cows and sheep and dogs were falling to starvation and the foul meat of those animals sustained people until a straggle of capelin finally spawned on the beaches at the end of June.
Judah Devine became a subject of much speculation on the shore through those dark days, Protestant and Catholic alike making pilgrimage to Jude’s shack to sit awhile in his presence, as if some of his old luck might accrue to them just by breathing in the smell of the man. For the first time in years his boat was followed around on the water as if he were an Old Testament prophet trailing a retinue of acolytes and hopeful doubters. But the cod seemed to have vanished from the waters and everyone finished the season