Galore - Michael Crummey [92]
—No, he said. —Not a ghost.
—Would you like some tea?
He nodded and after she left the room he thought on what exactly it was he’d seen against the white of his father’s nightshirt. The sight terrified him, but the fear was braided with something murkier—a kind of awe, to see his own heart laid bare before him. It was like a sign that his life was about to begin in earnest.
He couldn’t fix in his mind when he learned the truth about his half-brother. He’d singled out Henley for abuse long before the question of paternity arose, the youngster was a sook and a stutterer which made him an easy target. The sting of their fraternal connection came to Levi over time, knowledge he grew into like clothes handed down within a family. The reality of his mother’s humiliation, to be teaching her husband’s bastard son his letters and arithmetic.
When Flossie returned with the tea, Levi had recovered himself enough to smile up at her. She came around the desk and placed her hand against his forehead. —I’m fine, he said.
His wife was a mouse of a woman, brown-haired and slight. Levi had barely taken note of her before he turned twenty-one, when Adelina suggested they marry. His sister and Florence Dodge were kindred in their insular seriousness, in the isolation that was part and parcel of their families’ standing on the shore. It was only in Flossie’s company that Adelina was unselfconscious about the warts afflicting her and they swore a sisters’ fidelity to one another as children. It was the thought of losing Flossie that kept Adelina from following her siblings to the Boston States and she brokered the match with Levi to formalize the sisterly relationship between them. Levi had a house built in a far corner of the north garden above Selina’s House and Adelina moved into a spare bedroom a month after he and Flossie married.
—Where’s Adelina? he asked.
—She’s upstairs with the children.
—The doctor is at Selina’s House, he said. —Perhaps she should go sit with Mother.
By the time the Labrador crews returned in the fall Absalom was said to be on death’s door and the business turned over completely to Levi Sellers. Levi revoked credit to the most desperate debtors on the shore and sent constables to repossess what little materials the bankrupts owned. There were altercations and bloodshed and half a dozen debtors were jailed in the old fishing room while they waited for the governor to appoint Levi the new district justice.
Absalom recovered enough by mid-September to eat toast and tea and soft-boiled eggs and to sit at the window with a blanket across his legs, but he heard nothing of what was happening in the wider world. The doctor insisted that visits be kept to a minimum and Ann Hope refused to allow the meetings with Levi to continue. —This is not a prison, he protested. —You are not my warder.
—It’s worse than that, I’m afraid, she said. —I am your wife.
The notion was enough to tamp down what fight he had left and Absalom approached the end of his life in a state of enforced ignorance not unlike his earliest years in Selina’s House.
Ann Hope catered to his every need through the day and she sat up with him at night, wearing herself thin with the vigil. She refused her daughter’s offers to share the load. —You can’t carry on like this on your own, Adelina warned her.
—In sickness and in health, Ann Hope said.
There was something fearsome in her mother’s sense of duty that Adelina wasn’t willing to challenge. But she moved back into Selina’s House where she might at least put food in front of the woman, encourage her to drink tea, to nap.
Levi spent the fall leaning his full weight into the business, ordering his cullers to bump ten percent of the season’s catch to cheaper grades across the board. When the Devine men came to settle their accounts they were told two-thirds of their fish was West Indie and virtually worthless. Levi and Lazarus yelling at each other across a desk, half a dozen hired men throwing the Devines off the premises. A lamp was smashed in the process, one of the hired men required stitches,