Galore - Michael Crummey [78]
Obediah said, We two was there when she come to the house to ask for Father’s ticket.
—We’re all fair gone here, Jabez told Devine’s Widow. Olive was lying on a daybed near the fireplace, the young brothers fussing over her like spinster aunts. —That’s a payment of cash money if we gets into the fat and enough pelts are taken.
—Jude will hand over whatever he makes on the trip. I’ll see to that, Jabez.
—I was never much for living off charity.
—That’s fine, the widow woman said. —There’s Laz’s death if he goes off without Judah, she said. —I’m telling you now.
Jabez sighed and got up to put more wood on the fire. There was no logic to the notion but that made it no easier to dismiss.
—I’d be happier having you home, Olive told him. —We’ll manage somehow.
The Devines loaded aboard the Cornelia the last of March, their boots hobnailed for the ice, a sealing box packed with salt meat and hard-boiled eggs and pork tongues. The Cornelia sailed north for the Front with a crew of twenty-nine men and the entire population turned out to see them off, waving and cheering as if they were at a carnival. And that mood persisted until the weather turned two days later. The harbour was blocked with drift ice pushed ashore by an unfavorable wind and in the first week of April two gales blew down from the Labrador. They heard rumors of ships wrecked by the storms, and no one slept for fear of what their dreams might tell them. By the tenth of April survivors from Bonavista and Conception Bay began trickling through on their way home. As many as fifty sealing ships were icebound and then wrecked, they said, the Cornelia among them. Some sealers were able to reach Belle Isle on foot but were stranded there without food or shelter for days. Those that felt strong and foolhardy enough struck out over the ice toward communities on the Northern Peninsula and from there hitched rides on coastal boats and fishing schooners that were ferrying them home.
The governor dispatched a vessel from St. John’s to collect the sealers still stranded on Belle Isle and eventually it arrived in Paradise Deep with most of the Cornelia’s crew aboard. Flags at half-mast and corpses stacked like cordwood on the deck, the bodies still frozen in the postures in which they’d died.
—We was all down on the waterfront to see the boat come in, Obediah said. —And not a sound for all the crowd was there. You could hear the chain let go when they anchored off in the harbor.
Boats were rowed out to collect the survivors and the dead and no one knowing still which of the two was being brought home to them. Eleven corpses all told. Seventeen haggard survivors.
Lazarus went through the ice as they made for Belle Isle and soaked himself to the waist, his feet frozen, and he was forced to lean on Judah the rest of the way. On the treeless island the sealers built snow walls to block the wind and trudged in endless circles through the nights, knowing they would perish if they lay down. Lazarus lost all feeling in his right foot and couldn’t walk without help. Their last day out he was too exhausted to stand and Judah stripped him of his clothes, wrapping the younger man under his gansey sweater next to his skin. He crouched under the snow wall then and covered them both in Laz’s coat. The rescuers found them there like that, huddled one around the other and Lazarus thought dead by all who looked at him. Couldn’t separate the two even after they got them carted aboard the vessel. The captain wouldn’t allow Judah to go below with the corpse in his arms so he sat out on the deck with a seal pelt for a blanket, a shroud of April snow settling over them. Lazarus didn’t so much as open his eyes before he was carried home to the Gut and set before the fire. Devine’s Widow cutting him free of Jude’s clothes with a knife.
Azariah said, Laz was frostbit to the ankle and the gangrene