Galore by Michael Crummey Page B

ague and indigestion for his feeling so out of sorts. He consulted her on a cure for worms he suspected as the cause of his distress. He ordered Tincture of Sage and Essence of Water-Dock from quack physicians in England who promised relief of the sullen headaches, the poor appetite and swollen stomach, the spirits funk. In desperation he had her brew a colonic of molasses and cod-liver oil to clear his system of its bad humors.
    In April of their second winter in Paradise Deep, only weeks from losing his right to order her around the property, he came into the shed where she was milking the cow, standing out of sight on the far side of the animal as he proposed. She didn’t lift her head from her work, smiling down at the pail. —Marriage, is it? she said.
    —You have no husband, he said. —And I need to take a wife.
    She could tell he felt it was a simple business decision about property and standing and knew she could never expect anything different of him. The thought of marrying a man so ignorant of his own motives seemed no different than indentured servitude. —You need to take a wife, is it? she said, and King-me nodded helplessly, out of his element altogether. —And I need to take a piss, Master Sellers. Is that for or against we two getting married?
    She could simply have said no and they might have carried on as though nothing of consequence passed between them, instead of her being turned out of the house before she could collect her few possessions or her wages. She could have left the premises without raining curses down on his head, half of which she had no memory of now, something about death to his household and the fruit of his loins and his livestock, though she never mentioned the skinny cow in particular. The words were flung about in the fury of the moment and she couldn’t have known they would tie her to Sellers as tightly as any wedding vow.
    ——
    As soon as Devine’s Widow left the house, King-me slipped out to the barn where the cows were in from the meadow to be milked. He took a bucket off its peg to join the two hired men already at work. He loved the smell of a barn, the rank closeness of it. He sat next the udder of a cow and leaned his forehead against the heat of her flank, hoping it might ease the ferment that seeing the widow brought on.
    It wasn’t enough that she had refused to have him those ages ago, an Irish girl who’d come from nothing and owned nothing. She had to ruin his livestock and poison half the household besides. The cow shifted away from him as he latched on to the teats and he whispered to settle the animal down. It made him look a fool to blame Devine’s Widow for the state of his cows, he knew, but no one had been able to offer any other explanation. The milk of his one milch cow dried up within a week of the woman leaving his employ and she was never the same mild creature, not even after the milk came back in. All his stock descended from that first cow, each one just as unpredictably skittish, kicking down the stalls at the slightest provocation, knocking pails of milk across the barn. —Explain that, he demanded of the doubters.
    And he was supposed to think it coincidence, was he, that four of his servants took sick the very month she was dismissed, their faces gone red and puffy after a particular meal of cod, his own head swollen to twice its natural size? The look of it in the glass like some livid pillow from a whore’s chesterfield. He was like to die the better part of a week and knew who to blame for the affliction, but he bided his time, let her think she’d got away with it. There were no magistrates in those days and he had to wait almost a full year before a naval ship stopped into the harbor.
    Given the charge, Captain Churchward insisted on having the ship’s chaplain present for the trial and they sat in a bare store appointed as the courtroom, the naval officer and his clergyman behind a table, plaintiff and defendant in wooden