Galore - Michael Crummey [99]
At first he did his best to make Tryphie laugh as well, before he saw how excruciating laughter was. Eli staring out the window as his cousin bawled through the pain, a sick roil in his gut. It was an intimacy too adult for the boys, layered with guilt and frustration, with affection and pity and resentment.
At the end of that summer Bride asked the doctor when Tryphie might be well enough to go home. Newman had been gathering information from his father on advancements in skin grafting for burn victims which could ameliorate the disfigurement. It was experimental, he warned her, and promised to be torturous. But left alone, the scar tissue would make a severe hunchback of the boy. Bride surprised Newman by crying at the thought of what lay ahead for the child, it was as if she’d stepped out of her clothes in front of him, and he excused himself to offer some privacy. Though he would have cut off an arm for a few moments more in the presence of that nakedness.
He didn’t understand how living in close quarters with Bride could make the woman more exotic than she was at a distance. She was pious and demure and all spine, she was peregrine and aloof, a vulnerability about her that she could bury or wield like a stick. All summer he was sick with wanting her and dreading the return of the Labrador crews in the fall. Even if Bride stayed on as a nurse she would move back to the Gut with Henley Devine and that cloud followed him as September descended. He spent his free time in the backcountry with a muzzle-loader and a horn of powder and the thought of Bride in another man’s bed. He shot at anything that moved in the landscape, using his surgeon’s scalpel to skin fox and rabbit and grouse, beaver and lynx. He slept under the stars to prepare himself for the black void of losing her.
Newman was miles inland on the barrens when the Devines returned from Labrador with Henley’s corpse, the man dead since the first week of August. A seven-foot shark took his line as it was set, Henley hauled overboard by a boot tangled in the twine. He was dragged five fathoms under, half-drowned and unconscious when the crew managed to lift him above the gunwale. Henley never opened his eyes again, though he held on three days before he died. Judah Devine built a casket of spruce and they covered his body with the salt meant for curing fish to keep it long enough to be shipped home and buried.
Bride was on the wharf when Laz and Judah and Patrick angled the rough spruce box onto the stagehead. The men silent as they raised the coffin, a bashful look about them, as if they were sneaking home after a night of drinking. —Someone should go tell Mary Tryphena, she said.
The casket was set out in the parlor, doors and windows propped open against the smell. Mary Tryphena stayed with her son while Bride made arrangements for the burial and she felt gutted, sitting with a hand on the coffin, the cover nailed shut weeks ago. She couldn’t avoid cataloguing Henley’s failings as she sat there, he was juvenile and spoiled, selfish, self-centered, intemperate, he was a lousy husband and father, he was myopic and feeble and solitary. Mary Tryphena had loved him as compensation for all he lacked, fiercely and without reservation, knowing she was alone in her devotion.
Tryphie wasn’t well enough to attend his father’s funeral and was relieved to be spared the event, not knowing how he was meant to react to the stranger’s death. There was more awkwardness than grief among mourners at the church, an embarrassment to feel the loss so little. Judah helped dig the grave and waited alone there during the service, staying to bury Henley after the prayers were said and Bride had tossed her handful of dirt on the coffin lid.
No one spoke of it openly, but the Devine men expected Henley’s death would mean the end of their persecution by Sellers & Co. It was a surprise to find themselves screwed over a second time when