Galore - Michael Crummey [86]
He couldn’t avoid feeling watched as he walked to the Tolt but if there were faces in the windows, he was too blind to tell for certain. Only Ann Hope and Levi knew his sight was failing and not even Levi knew how quickly it was leaving him. He’d lately found it impossible to read or make entries in the account logs and he finally had the doctor come see him at Selina’s House. Newman turning Absalom’s face to the light of an upstairs window, moving a finger across his field of vision. He sat back and folded his arms. —How many fingers am I holding up? he asked.
—Somewhere between one and five, Absalom said. He asked Newman how long he had before he was completely blind.
—Months, the doctor said. —Years perhaps, but not many.
—Don’t tell my wife.
—I’m right here, Ann Hope said from across the room.
It seemed to him his body was in open revolt, hot coals flaring in his joints as he walked down the Tolt Road. The path was wide enough now for horse and cart but it was studded with roots and stones and Absalom walked with his head at an odd angle, trying to watch his feet from the corner of his eye. He stumbled on the path, flailing to catch himself, and he felt exactly like the ridiculous old man he appeared. His entire life’s endeavor about to pass on to a son who despised him. —Hell’s flames, he said aloud.
King-me was thought to be a wealthy man but the truth was he’d nearly bankrupted himself by the time he died, licked out by grief for the wife he didn’t know he loved and ranting about the nightmare fate of his sealing vessel. Absalom put little stock in dreams but King-me unnerved him with sheer repetition, with his detailed litany of disaster. He overinsured the Cornelia and came through her loss with money enough to finance a larger vessel that enjoyed better luck on the ice. He added a second, then a third schooner to the fleet, and the annual harvest of seal pelts brought in just enough to offset the losses incurred in the cod fishery. It was a delicate balance that a single lean year could sabotage. And there was no way to make more of the operation with most of what the shore produced going directly to Spurriers.
The firm was known as Spurious & Co. when Absalom worked as an apprentice in the accounting department in Poole. Cod prices collapsed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the undercapitalized business was kept afloat with one dubious financial sleight of hand after another. Ann Hope’s brother stayed on in the accounting office and his letters kept them abreast of the increasingly outlandish maneuvers. Absalom leveraged a purchase of the company’s assets on the shore months before a fraud investigation sank Spurriers for good. The transaction made a reality of King-me’s charade, leaving Absalom owner and lord of all he surveyed, though it wasn’t until the shift into the Labrador fishery that Sellers & Co. managed to post a profit. And by then Absalom had lost three children to the Boston States. The eldest married and gone before Levi was born, the two older sons following in quick succession. And all three lobbied their parents to sell off and come to the States as well.
Ann Hope was uncharacteristically silent on the topic, though it was obvious what was in her heart. Most people on the shore were still dressed in rags, their children afflicted with rickets and consumption, only a handful could recite the alphabet, despite her lifetime crusade against squalor and ignorance. Nancy’s letters were full of music and theater and poetry readings, church bazaars and tea parties, market stalls filled with vegetables and meat of all descriptions. Fresh tomatoes. Pears. Just the words on the page brought a knot to her throat. But she never so much as hinted at her opinion, wanting her husband to do this one thing for her without being told. It made a sullen walker of Absalom in the last half of his life. To have so consciously disappointed his wife.