Galore - Michael Crummey [8]
It was a ritual usually carried out with laughter and shouted blessings, but there was only a melancholy silence among the gathering as the sick infant made his way over their heads. Mary Tryphena stood outside the low stone fence with Devine’s Widow, watching Callum and Lizzie weep as if the child were passing from their hands directly into the hands of the dead. And then the awkward negotiation of the white-haired stranger among the branches, the man so much like an infant in his mute helplessness. Skin the white of sea ice. The fish barrow caught up on an angle that threatened to topple the stranger onto the ground and he had to be held by the shoulders while they disentangled his sickbed, the men shouting at one another and swearing. It seemed a travesty of something sacred and Lizzie walked away with the baby newly christened Michael in her arms. When the barrow was extricated from the maze of branches, the nameless man was carried back to his shed and set down on his bunk, Devine’s Widow sitting silent in the doorway to keep him company. To watch him die, is how she spoke of it afterwards, a note of satisfied wonder in her voice, to say how impossible it is to predict the direction events will run.
The summer that followed was uncharacteristically warm and dry and Kerrivan’s Tree produced apples sweet enough to eat for the first time in its purgatorial century on the shore.
It was a month after the baptism before Father Phelan showed his face, coming to the widow woman’s house before anyone made their way to the Rooms on the landwash to start the day’s work. Devine’s Widow and Lizzie sat at the table with Callum, the kettle boiling over the dark fire, a single tallow candle making a cave of the room. —Come in Father, Callum said. —We were just about to say the rosary.
—You’re a shocking liar, Callum Devine.
Devine’s Widow said, We’ve been looking out for you, Father.
—Only just made it in, he said.
It was Father Phelan’s habit to arrive at night and no one knew how he managed his journeys, whether he traveled by land or sea. There were no roads anywhere on the shore but the Tolt Road and the rough paths to freshwater ponds and berry barrens in the backcountry. It was impossible to credit he walked the distances he claimed through wild country and less likely again that he went alone by boat around a coast as savage and unpredictable.
—How did you find your way back to us this time, Father? Callum asked.
—By the grace of God, the priest said.
He’d traveled over half the world as a boy before taking religious instruction. He often spoke of his time in the West Indies and the Sandwich Islands and in Africa and no one understood why he had given up the warmth, the trees laden with fruit, the women lolling nearly naked on the beaches, for a place where his trials were eclipsed only by those of Job. The Catholic Church and its practices were outlawed when he first came to Newfoundland and Phelan heard confessions in safe houses on the southern shore of the Avalon, celebrated clandestine Masses in the fishing rooms of Harbour Grace and Carbonear, offered the sacraments and last rites in the kitchens and bedrooms of the Irish scattered the length of the coast. He’d escaped