Galore - Michael Crummey [85]
Absalom placed a second checker atop the white, aligning it carefully with his index fingers. —Are you sure you’ve never played this game before?
—You’re letting me win, Mr. Sellers.
Absalom raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.
—I should be getting on, Mary Tryphena said.
Absalom reached out to turn the lamp back, the room settling further into darkness. —You’ve the loveliest hair, he said.
Bride’s baby stirred on the daybed suddenly, the little limbs jerking in a spasm as he woke. Mary Tryphena crossed the room and lifted him into her arms.
—You’re certain this one is Henley’s boy? Absalom said.
—Motherhood is a certainty, she said, but fatherhood. She was quoting Devine’s Widow to make light of the situation, but Absalom only winced again as if she’d kicked him. She said, Henley married the girl, Mr. Sellers, he must think as much.
—Hell’s flames, Absalom said, lifting his face to the ceiling. —I wonder if we’d ever married, Mary Tryphena. Would I have killed you or you have killed me?
It was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging the note he left for her when she was a girl. She was on the verge of asking what possessed him to use those bizarre biblical endearments, but Absalom seemed to regret the mention of marriage. —Ann Hope will be worried if she finds me gone after church, he said.
—As she should be, I spose, Mary Tryphena said quietly. She’d expected the sting of shame would ease over time but just hearing Ann Hope’s name made her face burn. The new mother lying with her infant in an upstairs room as she shuffled to Virtue’s bed with the child’s father, Absalom falling on her with his pants around his ankles. They lay still after he came, both aware of the house suddenly and listening for voices or footsteps. Mary Tryphena’s arm was levered awkwardly behind her back and she’d lost all sensation in the limb beneath their weight. —Get up, she said, shifting under him. —Get up, get up. He rolled away and she pulled her clothes together as best she could, wanting out of the house.
He tried to say her name but the ghost of his old stammer had come back to haunt him. It was the first thing people noticed when he returned from England, that he’d all but conquered his childhood stutter. He grabbed her wrist to make her wait, hauling his pants up with his free hand. —I have s-s-something, he said.
She waited in the kitchen for him to come back from his office and he handed her an envelope. A kernel of something hard in the bottom, a stone or a dried seed or what. She shook it out and a shard of white clattered on the tabletop. She picked it up to take a closer look. A little wave of shock and revulsion rolling through her when she realized what she was holding.
—I thought you should, he said. —I don’t know. It doesn’t b-belong to me.
He placed the tooth back in the envelope and pressed it on her, as if it was payment for a debt, as if that tooth would free him of any claim she might have. He was God’s own fool, she thought. The spasm of revulsion galled the back of her throat and the sour flavor stayed with her for days afterwards. She could still taste it now as the events played over in her mind, these years later.
Absalom turned away from Mary Tryphena and the baby to retrieve his walking stick, eager to be gone. There was something odd about him, Mary Tryphena thought, a vulnerability she hadn’t seen in him since he was a boy, and she felt the need to give him something before he left. —The youngster has your eyes, she said. But Absalom was unable to look at her directly, raising his walking stick in mock salute as he stepped out the door.
He walked with his head down toward the Tolt Road, thinking, as he always did after seeing Mary Tryphena, about that tooth in its envelope. He’d gone looking for it the day after he married Ann Hope, walking back and forth along the path without knowing he was searching until he spotted it in the grass. Unable to explain that urge to himself even now. Kept it tucked away for years before he pressed it on Mary Tryphena, to make amends somehow. To have something