Galore - Michael Crummey [76]
Obediah: Adelina’s sister Nancy, she married a Yank and left for the Boston States. Thirty year ago. The two older brothers followed after her and they haven’t so much as cast a shadow on the shore since. Only Levi and Adelina is still with us.
—Absalom inherited most of the shore from his grandfather and once Ab is gone, Levi will have it all.
—He’s a hard man, young Levi. Money is all he thinks about. He’s married to Reverend Dodge’s daughter Flossie but he don’t have a thought for a soul except his mother.
—He got no time for Absalom at all.
—Well, I expect he’s got his reasons to dislike his father.
—Now Brother, Azariah said and the two fell silent. It was a rare instance that saw the Trims edit the catechism, stumbling on a subject too sensitive or scandalous to mention in the company of an outsider. —Crow boys! Az shouted to the dogs, as a way of ending the conversation. —Crow!
Each time they passed the droke at the foot of the Tolt the dogs bristled and growled at the trees and shied from the path. The brothers averted their eyes and kept quiet until it was well behind them, as if they were holding their breath against some poison in the air. There was a grown-over clearing in the trees and Newman was curious to know who had lived there and why it was abandoned. —You’d do well to keep clear of it, was all the brothers offered.
On Old Christmas Day the Trims carted him seventeen miles up the shore to see a man reported by a son-in-law to be on his deathbed. Newman drunk and running alongside the sled to sober up. Deking off the trail to puke into the spruce trees before catching up the Trims. —You’re having a fine old Christmas, I see, Az said.
Mummers had invaded the clinic the first night of the season and stayed until light the following morning. Newman didn’t know what to make of them or their antics, swinging him by the arm while music was played on fiddles and accordions, demanding he feed and water them, and all hands taking liberties with his arse as if they were testing the freshness of a loaf of bread. He sat them to glasses of rum and slices of the dark fruitcake patients brought in by the dozen and they left without ever revealing their identities. Each of the next eleven nights followed the same pattern though the troupe of mummers was always different. He guessed some of them from their limps or postures or physical tics and when the rum ran dry he sent around glasses of ethyl alcohol that they drank down honey-sweet.
The clinic was still crowded with mummers when the Trims came looking for Newman with news of the dying man. They left two hours before light and arrived mid-afternoon to find the elderly gentleman sitting with a glass of rum next to a fire. —I was feeling a bit nish when Sally’s man come by yesterday, he told the doctor, but I’m the finest kind now. Newman listened to his heart and checked his temperature and reflexes and there was, from what he could tell, not a thing wrong with the man. It was ten hours’ hard travel to reach him and after a meal of tea and bread and molasses they started for home, arriving after the moon had set and twenty-four hours without sleep for all three.
Newman insisted they stop at the Trims’ property to spare the dogs another half-hour hauling and he walked back to the surgery on his own, half asleep on his feet. There was a man sitting in the darkness of the front room when he arrived. —I let myself in, Patrick Devine said and he hurried out the door holding Newman’s sleeve. —I hope to God we haven’t lost them both.
He led Newman over the Tolt Road to a house in the Gut where a man with a wooden leg met them at the door. —Lazarus Devine, the man said by way of introduction. There was a somber group at the kitchen table, a woman with an infant in her lap, and Amos Devine, the young Nordic boy he’d seen with the albino. There was a man at the head of the table smoking nervously and rubbing his knuckles across a weak chin. —My brother Henley, Patrick Devine said,