Galore - Michael Crummey [94]
Adelina gouging at herself with a knife then, the sleeve of the child’s dress red with blood. It made her daughter’s despair so palpable that Ann Hope sat up half the night with Virtue, bawling helplessly. —I know you don’t want to hear talk of it, Virtue said. —But I can go over to the Gut and see Mary Tryphena.
—You think this is some kind of curse too, I suppose.
Virtue shrugged. —If there’s some relief to be offered the child, why keep it from her?
Ann Hope was about to give birth to Levi and she cradled her massive belly in both hands, shaking her head.
—Mary Tryphena might not even have to step foot in the house, Mrs. Sellers.
The baby kicked against her hands and Ann Hope turned them palm up to stare at them. —You won’t tell her I sent you.
—I’ll take care of this, Virtue said.
The following evening Virtue made Adelina a cup of tea, as she was instructed. The girl was sent out of the kitchen when she finished, the dregs emptied into the fire and the cup placed upside down on the highest shelf in the cupboard. Ann Hope was standing at the door, watching. —No one touches that cup, Virtue told her.
In the morning Adelina found the warts lying loose around her in the bedsheets, each the size and texture of a raisin. Virtue gathered them up, enough to fill a teacup, and she burned the lot in the stove. Adelina was surprisingly subdued to find herself cured overnight, thinking she might just as easily wake some morning to exactly the opposite. And the relief Ann Hope felt was followed by a stubborn uneasiness. As if she’d surrendered some part of herself to the shore for good.
She went into labor three weeks later, the baby stalling as he crowned, and after several hours without progress Virtue gave her an ultimatum. —I can’t be any more help to you or that infant, she said, and I won’t be the cause of the child’s death, may God help me.
A hired man was sent to the Gut to fetch Mary Tryphena and things went as well as could be expected once she arrived. Ann Hope even managed to feel a grudging admiration for the woman’s impersonal effectiveness, her discretion.
She was supposed to lie in a week after the delivery but never could stand the enforced idleness. She hobbled downstairs when she woke the next morning, walking gingerly along the hall toward the servant’s room where Virtue was watching Levi. She stopped to catch her breath in the kitchen, one hand on the back of a chair. Saw the single cup on the windowsill where Absalom had set it. She couldn’t explain it to herself still, how seeing the cup there told her what she had no other way of knowing.
That evening Absalom came up to the bedroom where she lay with the baby. He stood at the bedside and held out his hands, but Ann Hope made no move to pass the child to his father. —You will not see that woman again, she said.
Absalom let his hands fall back at his sides.
—Promise me, Absalom Sellers, or so help me God.
He took a step back. —I never meant, he said.
—That will be all, thank you, she told him and she settled Levi closer to her breast.
They never spoke of the incident again, though it circled their lives like a moon, its tidal pull sucking at their heels. Henley Devine coming into the world nine months later, his hopeless stammer in her classroom. Ann Hope treated him like any other student, to protect Levi from the truth as long as she could. Strapping her own son when she caught him mimicking the bastard child’s stutter.
Adelina put