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By Root 372 0

in their dispositions. Newman never heard a word of complaint from either man. They ran alongside the sled and were cheerfully tireless. One or the other would take the harness at the lead when the dogs flagged or the sled bogged in heavy snow, shouting Crow boys! to encourage the team ahead. They never lost their way or seemed even momentarily uncertain of their location. They traveled narrow paths cut through tuckamore and bog or took shortcuts along the shoreline, chancing the unpredictable sea ice. Every hill and pond and stand of trees, every meadow and droke for miles was named and catalogued in their heads. At night they navigated by the moon and stars or by counting outcrops and valleys or by the smell of spruce and salt water and wood smoke. It seemed to Newman they had an additional sense lost to modern men for lack of use.

They worked for Sellers like everyone else on the shore, but had tried their hand at any entrepreneurial opportunity the country afforded, spinning wool and churning their own butter, fur trapping and fishing the local rivers for salmon. They’d built a sawmill that they ran with help from the sons, brothers-in-law and nephews in their widely extended families. They were practical and serious and outlandishly foreign. They described the deathly ill as wonderful sick. Anything brittle or fragile or tender was nish, anything out of plumb or uneven was asquish. They called the Adam’s apple a kinkorn, referred to the Devil as Horn Man. They’d once shown the doctor a scarred vellum copy of the Bible that Jabez Trim had cut from a cod’s stomach nearly a century past, a relic so singular and strange that Newman asked to see it whenever he visited, leafing through the pages with a kind of secular awe. He felt at times he’d been transported to a medieval world that was still half fairy tale.

He filled his letters to Connecticut with the medical oddities he encountered, providing clinical descriptions alongside the apocryphal or speculative pathology he was offered by locals. He visited Red Head Cove where more than half the population had inherited red hair and freckled skin and hemophilia from a single foxy Irishman. He treated a five-year-old with webbed fingers that were somehow supposed to be a vestige of her grandfather’s tryst with a merwoman. Saw a family of seven brothers and sisters in Devil’s Cove who were suffering accelerated senescence, their bodies entering puberty within the first three years of life, progressing through middle age by five. Two older siblings hadn’t survived beyond a decade and the younger children had no hope of outliving them. It was a widow’s curse according to some and the strangely ancient children defied any medical explanation Newman could dredge up. He took photographs of these and other striking cases, idiopathic scoliosis presenting with a forty-five-degree curvature, cleft lip, birthmarks in the shape of animals or continents. A middle-aged brother and sister born bald and without fingernails in Spread Eagle. He developed the albumen plates in his office, bathing the glass in solutions of gallic acid and silver nitrate and fixing the image with hyposulfate of soda.

Newman was on a call to the Gut when he first laid eyes on the startling figure of Judah Devine, throwing rocks into the cove for a black Labrador, the dog retrieving the stones and dropping them at his feet. Newman introduced himself, asking permission to do an examination. There was a boy with Judah who explained the man was mute. Jude sat quiet as the doctor checked his eyes and ears and mouth, and ran his hands against the grain of the white hair to see the scalp. The stink off him almost unbearable. —What’s his name? Newman asked the boy.

—Jude Devine. He’s me grandfather. The boy had a Nordic look about him, the hair white-blond and his face pale as the royalties of Europe. Eyes a blue so light they were almost colorless. —He was born out of a whale’s guts, the youngster said. —That’s why he suffers so with the smell on him.

—What do you mean, born?

—Devine’s Widow cut him from the belly