Michael Crummey's novel The Adversary is about feuding families and east coast fisheries — read an excerpt now
CBC Books | Posted: September 12, 2023 2:36 PM | Last Updated: September 12, 2023
The book will be available on Sept. 26, 2023
Michael Crummey's writing has always been deeply rooted in Newfoundland and Labrador — and his latest novel The Adversary continues that tradition.
The story centres on two rivals who represent the largest fishing operations on Newfoundland's northern outpost. When a wedding that would have secured Abe Strapp's hold on the shore falls apart it sets off a series of events that lead to year after year of violence and vendettas and a seemingly endless feud.
Crummey is an award-winning poet and novelist from Newfoundland and Labrador. He is also the author of the novels The Innocents, Sweetland and Galore and the poetry collections Arguments with Gravity and Passengers.
Two of Crummey's novels have been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction — Sweetland in 2014 and Galore in 2009. The Innocents was shortlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2019 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
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The Adversary will be available on Sept. 26, 2023. Read an excerpt below.
Solemn abandoned his work on the Quaker meeting house after the accident, staying close to watch over Imogen, to keep her from picking at the skin which pulled tight and itched like it was crawling with insects beneath the bandages. He changed the dressings as he was instructed and he scolded her for the flesh she was scrawbing raw.
"That won't get no better you don't leave it alone," he told her. He'd suggested to the Widow he could sleep on the floor beside the kitchen hearth in case Abe made another visit to the house. But she shook her head.
"Mr. Strapp has abandoned whatever interest he may have had in Miss Purchase."
The source of her certainty was a mystery to him, but he wasn't about to question the woman. He'd come barrelling down the hallway when Imogen took up her screaming. The Widow hauling the girl into the porch and plunging the scalded arm into the water barrel, laying across Imogen's back to hold her there as she reeled in shock, her mouth open, her eyes wide and blind. It looked to Solemn like the Widow was trying to drown an animal, bracing her weight against the convulsions to keep the arm submerged.
The source of her certainty was a mystery to him, but he wasn't about to question the woman. He'd come barrelling down the hallway when Imogen took up her screaming.
Abe Strapp was gone by the time he thought to glance around.
"Should I go for the Beadle?" he asked.
"The Beadle is away on The Hope," the Widow said. "Go and fetch Mary Oram."
There was no one but the Widow Caines could have made Solemn make that run up Oram's Drung, in the same droke of trees where the Catholic dead were buried, to call on Mary Oram. Like every youngster on the shore and a goodly number of the adults as well, Solemn lived in terror of the woman and her reputation for spells and witchery.
It was her queer figure as much as her trade that gave credence to the most outlandish stories about the woman. She was no taller than Solemn's sister and wore a knitted cap over her bald head. She had hardly a lash or brow to her eyes, which gave an inscrutable fairy look to her face. She was said to have no fingernails.
Hers was the only house on Oram's Drung, an ancient cubbyhole hardly fit to be used as a stable. She kept herself alive with the vegetables and salt meat and snared rabbit and firewood people could afford for her services as midwife and healer, and with the fish gifted to her when she went to the waterfront to ask a crew how they'd made out on the water. It was a kind of offering to keep bad luck at bay, gifting her a cod to carry off in her doll's arms. There was no saying what might befall a fisherman who denied her and no one was willing to tempt fate by sending her away empty- handed.
She cracked the door on its leather hinges and peered out into the falling light of the evening. Her bald face looking up at him from the shadows like a moon reflected at the bottom of a well.
The older youngsters in Mockbeggar dared each other to sneak up Oram's Drung after dark and Solemn had once gotten close enough to see candlelight leaking through the seams of a window's wooden shutter. But every step toward it felt like a descent into the guts of some biblical leviathan and he turned and bolted to save himself being consumed for good and all.
He'd never gone near the place a second time, except walking past it in the funeral procession for his father. He couldn't bring himself to get closer than a stone's throw still, walking into the clearing and shouting for the woman from across that distance. She cracked the door on its leather hinges and peered out into the falling light of the evening. Her bald face looking up at him from the shadows like a moon reflected at the bottom of a well.
"The Widow Caines is asking for you," he said. "Imogen Purchase is in trouble."
"She idn't having that youngster already?"
"She've got her arm scalded to death," Solemn said. The figure in the door frame was small
enough he could have picked her up in his arms like a goat.
enough he could have picked her up in his arms like a goat.
"You go on down," Mary Oram said. "Tell her I'll be there directly."
LISTEN | Michael Crummey on The Current with Matt Galloway
By the time he made it back to the house, Imogen's arm was red as the shell of a boiled lobster and the girl was trembling in her seat. The Widow Caines told Solemn to light the kitchen lamps and he set about the task, grateful to have something useful to do. He placed one on the fireplace mantel and the other on the table near where the girl was sitting.
They heard the outer door then as Mary Oram let herself in. Her head not much above the latch as she turned to close the porch door behind her. She was wearing her bright woollen cap and a calico jacket and she carried a leather satchel across her shoulders.
"What's after happening here now?" she said.
"Is the baby going to be alright?" Imogen asked her.
"Don't you worry about the baby," Mary Oram said. "A little scalding idn't going to harm that child." The Widow said,
"Solemn will get you anything you need." And she went back to her office on the second floor.
Mary Oram leaned over the girl's lap and lifted the arm towards her face. After that inspection she removed her materials from the satchel, bottles and jars and cloth- wrappings of roots and dried flowers, a ram's horn. She bidded Solemn about to collect onion and clean linen and linseed while she picked through her pharmacy and she directed him to cut the onions fine as she prepared an oily resin. She scraped a little of the ram's horn into the concoction she set as a poultice on the girl's arm, talking all the while about the burns and scalds and boils she'd seen in her days and who had died of their affliction and who was scarred for life.
She scraped a little of the ram's horn into the concoction she set as a poultice on the girl's arm, talking all the while about the burns and scalds and boils she'd seen in her days and who had died of their affliction and who was scarred for life.
A jaw- me- dead, Solemn's father used to call the woman. The boy guessed it was her time alone on Oram's Drung made her tongue run twelve- score to the dozen, the numberless injuries and their various cures coming in a constant stream as she worked. Once she finished with the dressing, Mary Oram had Solemn help Imogen to her bed in the room off the kitchen. She removed the girl's stockings and bound the chopped onion to the soles of her feet.
"She'll be alright then?" Solemn asked.
"If that arm don't go bad on her," she said, "the girl will be fine."
After three days it was clear the arm was going to go bad. The scalded flesh swelled and turned purple and black and it stank sweetly of rot. Mary Oram returned to the house every day and made noises in her throat as she sliced away some of the infection with a knife while Imogen bit down on a piece of leather. She applied sea doctors minced with cod liver oil, and a decoction made of dissolved jellyfish, but nothing improved the situation. At each visit the woman's incessant talking subsided a little more, until the arm was bad enough Mary Oram said nothing as she went about her ministrations.
She never offered a word to Solemn about the state of things but he sometimes overheard her reports to the Widow— talk of having the Beadle take the arm at the elbow, discussions of whether waiting for the baby might be too late for the mother— which made him wish he knew less than he did. He had to steel himself against the smell and the sight of the ruined flesh sloughing away in strips when he changed the dressing. Imogen staring at the ceiling to avoid the sight herself.
"When The Hope comes in from coasting," the Widow told him, "we'll have the Beadle look at that arm."
Excerpted from THE ADVERSARY by Michael Crummey, published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. Copyright © 2023 Michael Crummey Ink, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.