Galore - Michael Crummey [97]
The funeral procession rimmed the harbor along Water Street and inched toward the Tolt Road. There was a carriage for Adelina and Florence and the children but Ann Hope insisted on walking to the French Cemetery. She kept her hand in the crook of Levi’s elbow, Absalom’s coffin an arm’s length ahead of them on the cart. She was still furious, though the anger that sustained her felt more diffuse now, its object less clearly defined. She felt an odd kinship with her husband to be saddled with the weight of an action so irreversible. She had listened outside the sickroom as Levi gave his flawless imitation of Henley’s stammer, reminded just how skillful a mimic he’d been in school. The little stamp to shake a particularly stubborn word loose. F-fuck you, you b-b-bastard. That part of the conversation, at least, had been genuine.
All that was left to do afterwards was guide her husband’s hand to the bottom of a blank page while Barnaby Shambler told Absalom he was a fool, though he admired the man’s moral fiber to be so concerned with what was right and proper. He went through the motion of signing his own name beside Absalom’s illegible scribble and left the room with a smile on his face.
It had been appallingly easy to orchestrate, and watching Shambler at work almost undid Ann Hope, his businesslike act of deceit setting a niggle of guilt to simmer in her belly. She came to see something of her husband’s long-time prison in herself after the fact and she felt unexpectedly sentimental toward him in those final days. She camped out in Absalom’s room, turned him one side to the other every hour, wet his dry lips with a cloth, refused Adelina’s offers of relief. Relief was the last thing she wanted.
Hours before he died Absalom stirred in the bed beside her, the dry, cracked lips moving a moment before he managed to find his voice. —Who’s there? he whispered. It wasn’t forgiveness exactly, but she found herself willing to set him free of what she knew was holding him still. She leaned forward to take his hand. —Absalom, she said. —It’s Mary Tryphena.
{ 6 }
ABSALOM SELLERS WAS BURIED in the French Cemetery in November. The following April, Tryphie fell into a barking pot on the beach while the fishermen were curing their herring nets for the season. Fir bark and spruce buds were kept on the boil in a large iron cauldron, the concoction ladled into half-barrels where the twine was soaked before being laid out on the bawn to cure. A handful of boys horsing around nearby, Tryphie and Patrick Devine’s eight-year-old, Eli, leading games of pitch-and-toss and tag while the men shouted at them to mind their step, to keep clear of the fire, to shag off home out of it.
The tubs stood only two foot high and Tryphie tipped backwards into the steaming water trying to avoid Eli’s tag. The men were spreading their nets on the rocks below and it was only Eli near enough to help. He grabbed Tryphie by the shirtfront and without thinking dipped a hand under his back to pull him out. Neither boy felt any pain, just a sudden breathless shock that was almost pleasurable. Eli led Tryphie up off the beach to avoid having the men see the state they were in and they were halfway home before the scald kicked to life.
Martha was alone when they came through the door. She stripped Tryphie out of his clothes, the sweater still hot and clinging to the flesh of his back. The bald outline of the burn from his shoulders all the way to the left hip and buttock. She sent Eli to get Mary Tryphena while she tried to quiet Tryphie’s bawling with a spoonful of honey.
A crowd gathered at the house as news spread, all staring at the naked boy kneeling over Martha’s lap, his back lobster red. Bride gathered blankets while the boy’s father went after a handbar. They lay Tryph on his stomach and covered him and started out for the Tolt Road, the youngster wailing and begging for a drink of water.
Newman heard them coming and followed his patients outside. Saw Bride