Galore - Michael Crummey [75]
—And you believe that, do you?
The boy shrugged. —He is what he is, Doctor. I got no reason to doubt it.
—Do you think he’d let me take a photograph of him?
—He’s not deaf.
Newman wrote his father a long description of the faux-albino of indeterminate age, salvaged from the belly of a whale about the time James Woundy enjoyed his dalliance with the mermaid. Man suffers acute bromhidrosis, Newman wrote, and is completely mute. Eyes, oddly, displaying no lack of pigmentation though the blue is unusually faint. Not a true albino, then, although he could think of no other explanation for the man’s appearance. A full set of teeth but for a central incisor lost to some blunt trauma.
His father complained frequently in those early months about losing his son to a backwater of superstition and ignorance, but his tone thawed in the face of Newman’s unexpected passion for his vocation, in the carefully detailed histories the letters offered. He responded with advice and articles and requested follow-up on cases of particular interest. There were no questions about his son’s personal life or his plans for the future and as far as Newman was concerned, that was just as well.
It was during the long hours of travel with Obediah and Azariah Trim that the doctor learned most of what he knew about the people on the shore. The brothers’ knowledge of the coastline’s genealogy was biblical in its detail and they offered all they knew in a call-and-return that had the fluency of a catechism.
Obediah: James Woundy now, he was a lazy stawkins.
Azariah: Not quite right in the head, but sweet as molasses.
Obediah: Sweet as molasses and just as slow.
Azariah: He had the one daughter. And James Woundy had all he could do not to choke on his food so there’s no telling how he managed it.
Obediah: The child’s mother was Bridget Toucher and the Touchers was a hard crowd to grow up a girl among.
Azariah: They was never married those two but they had Magdalen between them. And Bridget Toucher, she finally settled with Lester Flood and they both come to the Lord last year, just before Les died of the consumption.
Obediah: Young Magdalen, James’s daughter that is, she jigged up with a fellow name of John Blade.
Azariah: Not John Blade from Devil’s Cove now. John Blade from Devil’s Cove, he turned Catholic and married Peter Freke’s widow and they lives up on the Gaze. The Roman Blades, they are.
Obediah: Magdalen married the John Blade whose father come over from Devon. John and Magdalen have got the three youngsters between them now.
Azariah: There’s James and Matthew. And the young one with the webbed fingers, Hannah her name is.
—Yes, Hannah, Newman said, relieved to have a face to cling to. He sometimes used a pad and pencil to map the spiraling connections but even then he lost his way. The roots of each family so intertwined they were barely distinguishable. Obediah’s first wife, Sara Protch, died in childbirth and he was married now to her younger sister. Azariah’s sister-in-law married her way through the Toucher triplets, the first fellow freezing to death on the ice, the second lost to a bout of typhoid. The third passed away not eight months ago, asleep on the daybed in the middle of the afternoon.
—Identical triplets? Newman said.
—You doubt it, do you?
—One in two hundred thousand. Never seen it myself.
—It was Alphonsus that Sandra married the first time round, Az Trim said. —And she called her husband Alphonsus regardless which one it was in her bed, they were the spit of one another in every particular.
Newman was surprised by their candor. There was no confidence, no family intimacy from the past century they seemed unacquainted with.
Obediah: Adelina Sellers now, she teaches the little ones up at the school. She’s the youngest of Absalom’s lot save Levi. She was afflicted with warts as a girl, Doctor. Used to walk around in a mourning veil, with her hands tucked up in her sleeves, half the shore thought she was born without fingers.
Azariah: