Galore (5 page)

—I spose you wants a cup of tea with that, she said.

Callum came around the side of the house and walked up beside his mother. —What is it you wants? he asked.

The same polite voice from the back of the group said, We only wants to have a word with your man in the shed.

—The idiot haven’t got a word in he’s head.

—We’ll burn it down if we have to, Callum.

The door opened a crack then and slowly wider and in the light of the torches Mary Tryphena looked out from the shed to tell them the man was gone.

The mob forced their way past her and then into the house and they carried out a drunken search of the nearby bushes before heading to the waterfront. Callum stood watching the light of the torches dip in and out of the fishing rooms before he went back inside. He sat on the edge of the children’s bed to speak to Mary Tryphena. She’d had a dream that woke her, she said, and went outside. Saw the lights coming and had gone to warn the man away, shooing him off as if he was an old cow trampling the garden.

—You went out to pee, did you?

—No, she said.

Callum shook his head. He didn’t know if the girl meant to say she’d dreamt the event before it happened or if it was simple coincidence, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He’d always thought Mary Tryphena had too much of the widow in her. Precocious and grasping after life in a way that made him afraid for her. Eathna had been his girl, gregarious and unserious. Dimples and a head of red curls and a lovely voice to accompany him when he sang around the house. He’d never felt the same ease with Mary Tryphena. There was more to the world than what could be seen or heard or held, he didn’t doubt the fact. But it was an invitation to trouble to put too much stock in such things, to cultivate them. —What else are you after dreaming? he said, but she only stared at him with a pitying look.

Lizzie was still awake when he came to bed and they lay that way the rest of the night, both of them rigid and fearful. She was angry with him for going outside, though he didn’t see how he could leave his mother to stare down a crowd of drunkards bent on murder. —She needs no help from heaven or earth, Lizzie said. A note of disgust in her voice, as if the old woman’s fortitude was something to be despised.

Callum was ten years older than his wife. He’d loved her from the time she was a child and spent much of his adulthood resigned to a life without her. It was thanks to some murky intervention by Devine’s Widow they were together now though they’d never acknowledged the fact. Lizzie wasn’t used to being in anyone’s debt and she never made peace with the notion.

It was still dark outside when he rose from the bed two hours later, the morning calm and warm as all mornings had been since summer began in earnest. The sharpest sliver of moon like a fish hook over the Tolt.

Devine’s Widow stopped him at the door as he left. —You’ll have a good day out there today, she said, and he nodded without looking at the woman.

Daniel and James were already on the stagehead. No one mentioned the night’s events and they climbed down into the boat carting buckets of bait and jigging lines. They loosed the moorings and shoved clear into the still water of the cove. James and Daniel sat to the oars and rowed through the narrows on the high tide while Callum cut and set the baitfish on their hooks. They were an hour out before they realized the standing smell of offal and fish guts from the splitting room was still with them. The stink drifting back from the bow. They found the stranger curled into the fore-cuddy under a bit of canvas sail, a half-naked stowaway. They guessed he made his way to the fishing rooms from the shed the night before, the only place in the Gut where his own stink wouldn’t give him away, slipping into the boat to hide when the torches came for him. —Which means he’s something more than an idiot, Daniel said. The three men argued about the wisdom of keeping him in the boat, about the time that would be wasted rowing back. —He’s a goddamn jinker, James insisted. —We’ll all be drownded out here with him aboard.

Daniel suggested they just send him overside and be done with it, but Callum couldn’t see what would stop him being carted ashore in the belly of another whale and they’d be back where they began. The stranger hadn’t moved a muscle since being uncovered, only his eyes flicking back and forth between them, and he was staring at Callum now as if waiting for a verdict.

—I’ll tell you this much, James Woundy said, I’m sick to death of carting the bastard all over God’s green earth. I’ll not row another stroke with him in the boat.

—What about it? Callum asked the stranger. —You want to take a turn at the oars? He held out his hand as a taunt but couldn’t refuse when the man reached to take it. James and Daniel both retreated to the stern as he made his way to the taut and set the oars, rowing cross-handed toward the new sun as if the sun was his destination.

They passed a handful of other boats that were having no luck at the fish. There was pointing and shouting when they saw who was at the oars and by the time the sun had come full into the sky there was a tiny flotilla in their wake, following at a discreet distance. Some among them men who carried torches into the Gut the night before. The stranger rowed on without a glance over his shoulder, shipping the oars on a nondescript bit of shoal ground known as the Rump.

—Now what? Callum asked. —You wants a spell, is it? But the man tossed the grapple and turned to the wooden buckets where the lines and jiggers were coiled. He looked to Callum a moment before letting a line run through his fingers over the gunwale and then began jigging, a rhythmic full-arm heave and release that he repeated and repeated while his floating audience watched silently.

—What do you think, Daniel? Callum asked.

—He’s off he’s head is all.

James said, I’ll bet the fucker won’t row us home out of it either.

The stranger struck in then, hauling the line hand over hand, arms straining with the weight. The first pale glove of flesh let loose a pulse of oily ink as it broke the surface. —Fucking squid, James shouted. —He’s into the squid. The creatures kept coming out of the dark water, the air webbed with strings of black that fouled the clothes and faces of the men in the boat. Every line in the skiffs around them went over amid a bustle of shouting and it took time in the confusion for Callum to make sense of what was happening. The squid on the line were coming aboard in an endless march, already piling up past their ankles and it was impossible he could have hooked so many in one haul. Callum lifted one out of the bilgewater but they rose in a chain, one squid attached to the tail of the next. He looked back to the stranger and could see he’d dropped his line altogether and was bringing the squid in hand over hand in one continuous string, mouth to tail, mouth to tail, mouth to tail. He looked around at the other boats where men were jigging furiously although no one had managed to strike. Daniel had put out his own line and was having no luck either. Callum called to him and pointed. Eventually everyone stopped to watch Callum’s boat fill, the weight of the squid lowering the gunwales to the water.

Jabez Trim rowed in close and asked if he might have the chain when they were done and Callum cut it clean, handing it across the open water. —Don’t drop it for jesussake, Jabez said. When the second boat was full the squid were handed on to a third. By mid-afternoon every shallop and half-shallop and skiff in the flotilla was weighted and the crews blackened and fousty with ink. The chain came back to Callum and he tied it to the stern with two half-hitches before they began the slow row back to the Gut, keeping head-on to the waves to avoid swamping in the swell. Callum thought of his mother’s words to him before he left the house that morning and a chill passed through him to think she’d foreseen such a thing. He was struck by the sensation she’d made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head. They stopped to let other crews take their fill as they made their way home and by the time the last squid came over the gunwales every boat on the water had taken a full load aboard.

The coffin built to bury Michael Devine was whitewashed and fitted with rockers and used as the infant’s crib during the warm summer months. He was an uncommonly pleasant child after his baptism, never crying for more than hunger and sleeping through the night by his second month. He was known on the shore as Little Lazarus, the child rising each morning from his casket with a smile on his face, untroubled by dreams.

The albino stranger came to be known as Judah, a compromise between the competing stories of who it was in the Bible had been swallowed by a whale. Jabez Trim complained that Judah was a country in the Holy Lands and not a sensible thing to call a person but he abandoned the argument once it was clear the name had taken hold.

In the weeks after the chain of squid was brought ashore the cod reappeared in vast numbers and no one could keep ahead of the fish. They couldn’t remember a time when cod were as plentiful or so eager to be hauled aboard and everyone credited Judah’s presence for the change. Boats followed in the wake of Callum’s skiff, staying as close as they could to their good luck charm. The fish seemed to float along beneath Judah’s feet as if they were tied to the keel by a string.

Jabez Trim closed a Sunday service by reading the story of Jesus instructing fishermen to put their nets down where all day they’d come up empty, how they came away then with more fish than they could haul, and no one failed to think of Judah. By the end of the summer they were calling him the Great White or St. Jude for the patron saint of lost causes. Catholics began crossing themselves in his presence as they would before the altar. The sick sought him out for a laying on of hands if all other cures had failed, sitting with Judah in the poisoned air of his shack and placing his hand against what ailed them. There was talk that one person or another had returned to the blush of health after an audience with St. Jude.

Despite it all, Lizzie refused to allow him across the threshold of the house. Devine’s Widow made a show of arguing he should be invited in to eat but the smell of the man was enough to stifle the appetite of a pig. He took his meals sitting on a stump of wood in the open air and Mary Tryphena studied him when she thought she wasn’t being watched. His brows and lashes so white his eyes seemed bald, like the lidless stare of a codfish. There was something at once stunned and slightly menacing about the man.

He recognized the name he was called by and followed simple orders or requests, though his life and work were so governed by routine that the simplest of hand gestures or a nod of the head communicated all he needed to know. Most were convinced he understood not a word of English or Irish. When boats worked close to Judah on the water, people spoke about him as if he were deaf.

—Shits as much as the next person, Callum said in response to their questions. —Eats like a Spaniard. Sleeps like the dead. Haven’t seen him kneel to pray or cross he’s self the once. And he got the smell of a Prot on him.

—You miserable bastard, Callum Devine.

—Now Jabez, he said, I’m only having you on.

—Have he ever spoke a word to you?

—You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, Callum said. —But he’s not a fool.

Jabez nodded. —That one’s as deep as the grave, I expect.

At the end of that summer there was a confirmation service at Kerrivan’s Tree. The Mass was said in Latin and the rest of the service in Irish, although most English on the shore attended for the indecipherable pageant of it. Mary Tryphena and Floretta Tibbo and Saul Toucher’s ten-year-old triplets took their first communion as the sun dropped below the hills above the harbor. The triplets were identical and indistinguishable even to their parents but for Alphonsus who’d won the single pair of shoes between them by lot. He slept in the boots to keep them to himself, though his brothers took it in turns to claim one or the other was Alphonsus and the boy wearing the shoes had stolen them from their rightful owner. The shoes and the name traveled from one boy to the next in an endless round and not even the triplets could recall anymore who had been the original Alphonsus. When Father Phelan announced before the sacrament that we are all one in Christ Jesus, the three brothers seemed deflated, as if they’d had enough of such arrangements.

After the service a more secular sacrament was celebrated on the Commons above Kerrivan’s Tree with jugs of spruce beer and black rum and shine passed around. Men and women and not a few children besides got drunk there, the moon come out and the mosquitoes and blackflies fierce in the dusk. King-me Sellers and Selina and their grandson made a brief appearance and a handful of people caught sight of Mr. Gallery circling the clearing to watch the festivities. A bonfire of driftwood and green spruce and dried dung from the goats and sheep that grazed the meadow burning at the center of the field. Jabez Trim’s three-string fiddle and a wheezy accordion played by Daniel Woundy led a dance of dark shadows tramping the grass flat. Callum persuaded Judah into the gathering where they danced arm in arm, both men polluted with drink. Judah’s fishy stink drifted under the smoke of the fire and everyone on the field welcomed it as the smell of abundance and prosperity come among them. Callum knew a thousand tunes and had been a regular entertainment at weddings and wakes and he was coaxed into singing half a dozen songs for the crowd. It was the first time anyone heard him utter a note since Eathna died the year before. His voice like the first taste of sugar after Lent, a sweetness that was almost hallucinatory.

Couples disappeared into the alders and berry bushes beyond the field as the night wore on, shifting clothes to accommodate the drunken love they had to offer one another. Shouting and singing and petty arguments flared among the congregation as they staggered toward the collective hangover awaiting them. They were never more content with their lot in life, never happier to consent to it.

Lizzie left for home with young Lazarus right after Mass and Mary Tryphena spent the evening in the company of Devine’s Widow. Her first communion was a disappointment, the ceremony tarnished by the sullenness of the Toucher boys who swore under their breath and picked at one another through the service. But the night on the Commons that followed was more to her liking, the firelight and fierce release of it. She walked down to Kerrivan’s Tree to hide when her grandmother announced it was time to go home. She took off her bonnet so the white of it wouldn’t give her away and she climbed into the branches, clear of the old woman’s meddling. King-me’s grandson had settled into the upper branches earlier in the night for the same reasons, but he was invisible in the pitch and Mary Tryphena sang to herself as she often did when she was alone. She almost fell from her perch when he spoke to say he liked her voice. —I wasn’t singing for you, she told him.