Galore - Michael Crummey [70]
Devine’s Widow and Lizzie saw the men off at the door each morning and Callum hobbled down to the fishing rooms, badgering them about lines and bait and the weather before they rowed out the Gut. But Mary Tryphena refused to leave her room until she knew they were gone. There was a hint of something final in the most casual farewell during those savage days. And despite all she’d seen of the world, she believed it impossible to lose her son if she hadn’t said goodbye to him.
Callum puttered around the Rooms awhile after the boat went out, until the leg forced him to limp home and put it up the rest of the morning. He could feel his pulse throbbing in the swell of it, his heartbeat a steady torment. Absalom Sellers had set aside two berths on his new sealing vessel as a peace offering to his estranged blood, and if the ship ever managed to escape the harbor some spring Callum promised Lizzie he would go to the ice to watch over Lazarus. Devine’s Widow insisted Laz would be safer with Judah for company and the two women bickered the issue for months. Lizzie still hadn’t forgiven Callum giving away Mary Tryphena’s hand at the widow’s instruction and he felt forced to side with his wife, though his body was a worn thing, a tool held together with twine, cross-braced with wood and nails. He could feel the two women ignoring one another in the tiny house and he sat with his rosary to keep clear of the strife, praying the chain of beads through his fingers.
—You’re a fine Episcopalian, Devine’s Widow told him. She thought their defection to Dodge’s church was a meaningless gesture. —Catholic you’re born, she said, and Catholic you’ll die.
—In that case, Callum said, it makes no odds where we goes to pray.
The only real religious affiliation Callum knew was a personal one, and Father Phelan’s absence cut deeper each season. He never shared Phelan’s weakness for drink and women and the sacraments, but Callum was a child of deprivation and there was comfort in the priest’s insistence that feeding an appetite was at the heart of a proper life. —The Word was made flesh for a reason, he’d said. Callum thought it was the priest’s lust for life he was grieving as his own body faltered. But it was the certainty of Phelan’s calling he missed most, its suggestion that the people on the shore were something more than an inconsequential accident in the world.
No one heard anything of Father Phelan but for rumors of his nomadic work in the furthest reaches of the country where the Church held too little sway to bar him gathering congregations of six and seven in a kitchen. The priest living itinerant in the isolated realms of his parish like a thief, baptizing and wedding and burying as he passed through. Callum was years dead on the Labrador ice fields before the only shred of real news reached the shore—that Father Phelan had drowned while traveling among the northernmost islands of the coast. The priest’s corpse was found afloat on its back in open seas, decked out in the threadbare remains of Cunico’s clerical robes, his arms crossed over his chest. The fishermen who recovered the body found the pyx nestled safe in Father Phelan’s hands, the Blessed Sacrament inside it still dry.
{ PART TWO }
{ 5 }
THE DOCTOR WAS SCHEDULED TO ARRIVE via packet boat out of St. John’s and the entire population crowded the landwash to watch him come ashore. He was greeted on the wharf by Barnaby Shambler, publican, undertaker and member of the Legislature for Paradise District since elections were first held in Newfoundland thirty years before. Shambler had courted other doctors and nurses to serve his constituents, two or three of whom had made it as far as Halifax or St. John’s before illness or belated discretion sent them packing. People doubted his most recent recruit would get any closer