Galore - Michael Crummey [91]
—You’ve refused him three times now, Absalom.
Dodge had talked of retiring back to England before he was widowed but appeared to see no point in the notion now. He’d officiated at his own wife’s funeral and carried on in the ensuing years with his insufferable single-mindedness, even as his congregation steadily dwindled. Just the sound of his octogenarian footsteps on the stairs set Absalom’s teeth on edge, the blinkered energy in them.
—Have you noticed, he asked his wife, how often the reverend has taken to saying the Lord works in mysterious ways?
—No, she lied, I hadn’t.
—What was it he used to say? About Providence?
—Providence takes care of fools.
—He’s not as bold as all that anymore, Absalom said. —Now it’s all the Lord’s mysterious ways with him.
—You make him sound like a real livyer, Absalom.
He smiled and reached for her hand. It was the unlikeliest transformation to think Reverend Dodge a Newfoundlander at heart. Though the change made the man no more likeable. —I can’t suffer it, he said. —Not today.
The only people Absalom never refused were Azariah and Obediah Trim. The three men reminiscing about the shore when they were young, wandering through the histories their lives intersected at different angles, Jabez Trim’s Bible and Judah born from the whale’s belly and the loss of the Cornelia. Az and Obediah growing up terrified of seeing Mr. Gallery in the droke or crossing paths with him in the backcountry, how they sometimes mistook Absalom in his wanders for the murderer’s ghost. Absalom pointed blindly to the ceiling, telling them Mr. Gallery had come through this very roof, feet first and the man dead a year by then. How he’d swept up the plaster dust himself after Virtue left the house with Mr. Gallery trailing behind her.
They had never been close as younger men, but their conversations created the illusion of a shared past that was a comfort to Absalom. The brothers brought Jabez Trim’s Bible to read aloud to him as he grew frailer. Obediah made his way through the truncated story of Isaac one afternoon, the child left tied and helpless under Abraham’s knife. There was a rare silence among them afterwards, all three thinking of Henley and Levi. Both sons bound in their way by Absalom and neither seemed likely to be spared.
—Father told us James Woundy liked to write his own endings to that story, Azariah said. —All of them bad.
—Perhaps James Woundy was a smarter man than he let on, Absalom said.
After the brothers left, Ann Hope came to tell him Levi was waiting downstairs. Absalom pushed himself into a sitting position, lifting his legs one at a time over the side of the bed as his son came up the stairs. —Hello Levi, he said.
—Mr. Sellers, sir.
—What do you have for me today?
Levi gave a clipped summary of the latest reports from Labrador on catches and weather, the price they might fetch for Labrador green and West Indie in the fall. He said, It’s been a wet summer, we’re likely to see a quantity of dun fish not worth the salt used to cure it.
—There’s no sense worrying about the weather, Absalom told him. —It’ll make you old before your time.
—Yes sir, he said.
—Don’t patronize me.
Levi turned the hat in his hands in an endless round. —Yes sir.
Absalom took a labored breath. —You expect all this will be yours soon enough, he said. —The business.
—Soon enough, Levi repeated, yes sir.
—I’m afraid, Absalom said and he lay back on the bed, too tired to sit up any longer.
—You’re afraid, sir?
He shook his head on the pillow.
—Should I fetch Mother?
Absalom raised one hand and then coughed a rope of blood onto his nightshirt. Levi shocked into stillness by the obscenity of it.
—What is it? Absalom asked. —What’s happened?
Levi left Selina’s House after the doctor arrived, asking that any news be sent along directly. He went straight home and shut himself in the office, sitting among his account books and ledgers while he tried to quiet his breath, to stifle the tremor in his legs. His wife knocked at the door. —You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Flossie