Free Galore by Michael Crummey

clean-shaven and dressed in their least dilapidated outfits. She sat with her mother and father as the men paraded their virtues, young widowers with a handful of youngsters and middle-aged virgins and Irish boys indentured to King-me Sellers, all promising fidelity and children of her own and what little wealth the coast provided. She won’t starve, they said. She’ll be looked after.
    Mary Tryphena felt peculiarly helpless in it all and wondered if it was somehow a state of womanhood, to be sought and fought for and have only the act of rejection to make a mark in the world. No, was her answer each time, no, no and no. And with each suitor she rejected, her reputation as the rarest and most unattainable of women traveled further along the coast.
    Devine’s Widow suspected the girl’s reluctance was fueled by an interest in Absalom Sellers and was anxious to see her granddaughter attached elsewhere. She suggested there were only so many offers a woman could expect in a lifetime and Mary Tryphena might exhaust hers before a bud had grown on the bush. —She haven’t even got a bit of tit to be mauled over yet, Devine’s Widow said, and she’ve turned away half the single men on the shore.
    —She’ll take the man she’s meant for, Lizzie told her.
    —Don’t be filling the child’s head with your foolishness, the old woman said.
    The thirteenth and last marriage proposal of her life came from the skipper of a Spurriers ship just arrived with the Episcopalian bishop for the dedication of the new church. The skipper was an Englishman named John Withycombe who had been making the trip to Paradise Deep long enough to know everyone on the shore by sight if not by name. He himself had carried stories of the raven-haired Irish girl pursued by half the men on the coast to bars and kitchens through Conception and Trinity and Fortune bays and old country ports like Poole and Waterford. He had no personal interest in the child at first. He was in his fifties and had married as a young man, but it was said of him that he didn’t stay ashore long enough to wash his clothes and dry them on a line. He hadn’t laid eyes on his own wife in nearly twenty years and had spoken of her as though she was dead for so long that everyone thought her so. He had no interest in anything that tied him to the land and relieved his physical needs on the tired beds of the whorehouses that occupied so much waterfront real estate in his ports of call. But as he repeated and refined his story of the unattainable beauty that half the island of Newfoundland was heartsick for, the notion took root in his mind. —Imagine your life, he would say at the conclusion of each telling, in the bed of such a creature.
    Eventually he lost his taste for food and drink to imagining just such a thing. He slept poorly or not at all and spent all his waking hours with his vision of the Irish maid. He forsook his regular visits to prostitutes so as not to sully the image of the girl he carried. His shipmates let him know what an arse he was making of himself but their ridicule only strengthened his resolve and he set himself to have Mary Tryphena Devine when next he sailed into Paradise Deep.
    He left the vessel after the vicar disembarked that morning and walked over the Tolt Road with the whistles of his crewmates echoing derision off the hills. He found the girl working in a potato garden behind the stud house and made his intentions known before he so much as told her his name. He was standing with a tricorn hat in his hands, turning and kneading it like bread dough as he waited for her response. —You won’t starve, he said. —And you can stay on in the Gut if you like, next your kin.
    They had never been introduced, though Mary Tryphena knew something of John Withycombe by reputation. She smiled across at him, already at ease with the particular agony of a man in love, and the smile unnerved the sailor completely. The girl was not at all the picture he’d