Galore - Michael Crummey [82]
Mary Tryphena knew the couple had been stealing time alone when Bride was pregnant and thought it a hopeful sign, but for all the couple was sharing in the marriage bed Henley might as well be sleeping next door with Laz and Jude. And the obvious distance between the newlyweds mirrored the lack at the heart of her own marriage. The house was quieter with Bride become such a gentle lamb of God and Mary Tryphena was thankful for that. But she couldn’t help feeling lonelier in their company.
Lazarus and Patrick came to the house to see her on a Sunday in April. She was watching the baby while Bride and Henley were at the evening service. Patrick took the youngster up, walking back and forth the kitchen with the baby on his shoulder while Lazarus sat at the table and removed his wooden leg, setting it on a chair and rubbing absently at his stump. Laz took a cup of tea and asked how the infant was sleeping and he speculated on the summer’s weather and spoke for a time about their mother’s habit of setting Callum’s place at the table after he died. When he was almost finished his tea he said, Henley wants a spot on the Labrador crew this year. As if it were just one in a series of unconnected notions floating through his mind.
Mary Tryphena glanced at Patrick who was humming into the baby’s ear to say the conversation was of no interest to him. They were like vessels tacking east and west in a contrary wind, traveling north in slow tangential increments. Both men born into the sly indirectness that made her childhood a torture.
Laz shifted in his chair. —He come and asked me straight out to hold him a place.
Judah and Lazarus were the first to give up on the local fishery, sailing for the coast of Labrador each May. They found fish galore there and for the last time Jude’s talismanic luck drew men from up and down the shore. Hundreds living the same migratory existence now, away from home all summer. Three decades they’d been making the trip, staying through September or October if the weather held, the Devine women left alone half the year to fend for themselves.
Lazarus drank the last of his tea and picked up the wooden leg, set about reattaching the leather straps. He said, You think it’s a good idea, him coming down with us?
—Why wouldn’t it be?
—He got the itch for Labrador awful sudden. Never showed no interest before. That don’t seem like a particular good sign for a marriage, does it?
It was a dodge meant to avoid stating his real concerns and Mary Tryphena snapped at him. —What would you know about what’s good for a marriage?
Lazarus stood up and tapped the floor several times with the peg leg, like he was testing the strength of ice on a pond. There was talk he’d long ago taken an Eskimo bride in Labrador, that there were half-breed children down there christened Devine. —I expect I knows as much as you do, he said, managing it somehow without a hint of meanness.
Mary Tryphena and Judah hadn’t touched one another in years by the time Henley came along. Jude arriving home from Labrador in the fall to find his wife pregnant. Henley’s birth in late February was a subject of much speculation on the shore, and even if the timing hadn’t aroused suspicion it was obvious there was nothing of Judah in the boy. His skin fair but not pale, his little tuft of hair black as sheep shit. There was an awkwardness to the welcome the new child received from family and neighbors, as if he’d been born with a deformity they were studiously ignoring. Jude was civil to the boy but there wasn’t a single moment’s ease or affection between them. Henley never ventured into the house