Free Galore by Michael Crummey Page A

carried in his mind since the previous fall. She was tall for her age and pretty enough but her frame was still a boy’s, slender and tough as a whip of alder.
    —What kind of a life would that be for me? she asked. —You off on the water most of the time?
    It was all going askew. Before answering her question John Withycombe asked if she was the Mary Tryphena who was granddaughter to Devine’s Widow. —I’d have thought it would be just the sort of thing a woman might want, he said then. —To have a man and her life to herself besides.
    The notion gave Mary Tryphena a moment’s pause and that pause inflated the man’s hope she might be considering him. She was thinking of her grandmother who lived by no rules but her own, who could claim the land their house sat on and the fishing rooms on the water, the privilege of ownership granted only to men and their widows. A life to herself. She smiled again at the ridiculous old sailor. —You’ll live too long yet to suit me, she said.
    The Englishman kneaded his hat, perplexed, trying to comprehend the content of her refusal. —I haven’t been well is the truth of it, he said finally. He coughed into his fist, looking down at his feet. —On death’s door is what some says.
    A rock struck him square in the chest and he startled backwards, dropping his hat to the ground as another sailed by him. He looked past the girl toward the stud house where her brother Lazarus was in mid-stoop, searching for another stone. As practiced as his sister in brushing off her unwanted suitors.
    —You little bastard, the Englishman growled.
    The youngster had an arm on him and was surprisingly accurate. He whipped a rock that clipped the old man’s ear. —Fly the fuck out of it, the little one said.
    —Michael Devine, Mary Tryphena shouted and she went on yelling at the boy in Irish, chasing him around the corner of the house and all the way to the tiny outbuilding that had been given over to Judah. They both fell through the door and onto the bunk Jude slept on, rolling around with their hands over their mouths to stifle their laughter. By the time Mary Tryphena gained control of herself and tiptoed back to the house the Englishman was gone, though he’d left in such a muddled passion that he’d forgotten his hat where he dropped it. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. It was made of wool felt, a rosette cockade with a pewter button on the left side. She turned to Lazarus who had followed behind her and placed it on his head. It fell around his ears, covering half his face. —You little bastard, he said in his best West Country accent.
    Mary Tryphena could see her father’s skiff coming through the channel, the gunwales low to the water with fish. Devine’s Widow already making her way to the Rooms from the big garden to help gut and salt the cod. Mary Tryphena took little Laz’s hand. —Come on then, she said. —See if you can’t make yourself useful.
    When they came up from the fishing room hours later, the Englishman’s abandoned tricorn hat was on Judah’s head, Lazarus sitting high on the Great White’s shoulders, the dog going before them like a horse drawing a cart. Lazarus had come to love the animal and Judah in the same proprietary fashion. Before he’d learned to walk he began following one or the other around, pulling at the dog’s fur, clinging to Jude’s trousers. He crawled to the shed whenever his mother’s back was turned and Lizzie found him at Judah’s feet or on his lap and she dragged him out by the arm, slapping the youngster’s backside to warn him away from the man. But he rose from each savage trimming like the Lazarus he was, more determined than ever to follow his own inclinations. Judah became a kind of pet to him, a mute, good-natured creature who suffered the boy to ride his back or poke at his belly with a stick or force-feed him handfuls of spruce needles.
    Lizzie swore the child was being corrupted by the company he kept,