By the Lake (30 page)

At the Saturday market, Jamesie examined crates of live turkeys and finally bought a pair, a small turkey to give as a
Christmas present to the Ruttledges and a huge bird to take to Dublin. In return, the Ruttledges gave a bottle of eighteen-year-old White Powers they got from a bar in Enniskillen, a leftover from the time when prosperous bars matured and bottled their own whiskey. The dark whiskey had a slight taste of port from the cask and looked beautiful in the clear glass of the unlabelled bottle.

In the town a great-lighted crib was erected outside the church. The shops were all bright with lights and holly and streamers and tinsel. Alone among all the bars and shops Jimmy Joe McKiernan flew a tricolour in a two-fingered salute to the two detectives across the road in the alleyway—or to the town in general, which was so complacently celebrating Christmas, with the business of the country still unfinished.

In the little square near the cattle mart and shallow river the market traders erected their stalls around the statue of the harpist. In the evenings, with the street lamps on and the shops bustling and busy, it was moving to watch the families traipsing between the windows, the children in the shadow of their parents, stopping every so often to meet and greet friends and neighbours.

All the bars had a lighted Christmas tree and holly and looped strings of tinsel. Pages were pinned up beside the dart boards, on which lines could be purchased for the Christmas raffle, with prizes of a goose and a turkey, hampers of ham and whiskey and port and gin. Regular customers were served a Christmas round of drinks on the house. In all this feast of Christmas there were some shops that were almost empty, the assistants or owners looking out on the busy street to the passers-by who were all shopping elsewhere; and there were people wandering the town who had no people to meet, who did not want to be alone and were not noticed.

Ruttledge left Jamesie and Mary to the early morning train. They were going to Dublin for the whole week of Christmas.
Though he arrived early at the house they were already waiting, their suitcases and parcels on the doorsteps, the two dogs crying in their house, the key in the outside of the door ready to be locked, the brown hens shut in their house within the netting wire.

“Put yourselves to no trouble,” Jamesie raised his hand in a gesture that meant Ruttledge was free to do whatever he wanted to do about the place while they were absent.

Among all the bags and parcels on their doorstep there was only one medium-sized suitcase with their own belongings and clothes. Everything else was presents, the plucked turkey, the plum pudding, even the rare bottle of White Powers.

“We’ll taste it in Dublin. Too good for us. No good for us here on our own.”

Since they went to Dublin for their son’s wedding seventeen years ago, a single night hadn’t been spent away from the house. There was about them a spiritual quality, as if they were going forth as supplicants or communicants rather than to the small diesel train that would take them to Dublin in a couple of hours.

“The poor fellas,” Mary said of the protesting dogs as they drove away. “They don’t like to be closed in. They know full well that something is happening.” Then she withdrew into herself, but Jamesie named every house they passed, not with his usual fierce interest but as if it were a recitation of prayer, until it began to irritate Mary. “You’d think it was to America he was going.”

“Or to heaven,” Ruttledge said.

“Much more likely the other place.”

After getting the tickets they waited with the rest of the passengers on the white gravel of the platform though the potbellied stove in the waiting room was red. There was a lighted Christmas tree in the opposite corner. Not many people were
going to Dublin. They could see down a whole mile of track. In a field across the tracks an old horse and a few cows were eating hay together.

“Have you heard from Johnny?” Ruttledge asked as they waited.

“We had a card,” Mary said. “The poor fella even put in a note for us to have a Christmas drink on him.”

“He’s away to Birmingham to the Connors,” Jamesie said. “He’s in great fettle. After Christmas he takes up in his new place.”

“Will Patrick Ryan stay away or will he be home at Christmas?”

“He’ll be home,” Jamesie answered with total confidence. “On Christmas day he goes to the Harneys in Boyle. They come for him in a car. They’re cousins but I hear they are sick enough of the whole performance. Every Christmas starts off all right but then he has to try to put the whole house under him. That’s Patrick.”

“They’ll come for him all the same,” Mary said sharply.

“They’ll come. It’s just one day. They’re not going to stop now.”

“I might wander up to the house to see how he is or if he’s there,” Ruttledge said.

“You’ll see a choice house if you do,” Mary said. For the first time that morning she laughed. “All modern comforts and appliances.”

The signal fell at the end of the platform and the snub nose of the little diesel train came into view far down the tracks. The young stationmaster locked the ticket office and walked down the platform towards the signal box. He was carrying a white hoop and nodded and smiled at the passengers he knew.

“He didn’t even notice us,” Jamesie joked to hide his excitement, all his attention was fixed on the approaching train.

The train drew in, and with a few nervous words they were gone.

On Christmas Eve, Kate had some last-minute shopping. Ruttledge said he would go with her to the town and call on the Shah. It was late. He dropped her under the tricolour flying over Jimmy Joe McKiernan’s and drove slowly through the stars and crowns and trees and streamers and the chaotic parking of the town. The crib was floodlit on the steps of the church and the windows were ablaze with light for Midnight Mass. For this night anyhow, its modern ugliness had disappeared and it resembled a great lighted ship set to sail out of the solid middle of the town into all that surrounds our life. There was a white star above the entrance of the Central Hotel encircled by beads of coloured lights. When he reached the Shah’s domain, suddenly all was in darkness except for the street lamps. The scrapyard and big sheds were closed and there wasn’t a light or Christmas decoration in sight. The big light above the door of the station house was on and the light of televisions came through the windows of the cottages. As he approached the station house, the door suddenly opened and was held open while his uncle said goodbye to Father Conroy. When the door closed, the priest and Ruttledge stood face to face.

“This is a surprise,” Ruttledge said as they shook hands.

“There’s nothing wrong,” the priest said. “Every Christmas I come to the house to hear his Confession. We must be doing it for four or five years now.”

“You gave him Absolution?”

“And Communion,” the priest responded with equal lightness. “You’ll find him white as the driven snow.”

“A happy Christmas.”

“Many happy returns.”

When Ruttledge rang the bell, his uncle was plainly surprised to have a second caller and didn’t open the door until he recognized the voice.

“You’re some boy hauling our poor priest in from the country to hear your Confession instead of going down to the church like everybody else,” Ruttledge said.

“You met the man,” he responded defensively. “By all accounts you don’t bother him too much yourself.”

“The man is overworked with people like you.”

“That’ll do you now,” he began to shake with laughter. “It’s more than you do anyhow and that poor man you met going out needs a lock of pounds from time to time like everybody else.” He was enjoying the display of the power that could draw the priest to his house for an individual Confession. He wanted Ruttledge to delay. He swung open his liquor cabinet to display a formidable array of bottles. “You might as well have something now that it’s Christmas.”

Ruttledge shook his head. “Kate will be waiting. I just dropped in to say we’ll not be eating till around four tomorrow. But come out whenever suits you. We’ll be there all along.”

“Will it be all right to bring Himself?” he indicated the sheepdog stretched in front of the hot fire.

“Of course. Doesn’t he come every Christmas?”

The dog rose from the fire and looking first at his master trotted over to Ruttledge to be petted.

“He knows. He makes no mistake, I’m telling you. He knows,” he said triumphantly.

“I find it hard to believe it is Christmas Day and that there are just the two of us,” Kate said when they rose in the morning. “When I was little all my aunts and uncles and their families used to gather at my dear grandfather’s house. The best
part of Christmas Day was the morning when we drove to church, knowing that the long morning was ahead of us—the presents under the tree, the traditional lunch. Cousins, servants, an adored German shepherd, my grandmother’s cats, all of us milling around during drinks, taking stock of the presents; then the solemn prayer before the feast began. I was usually asked to sing ‘God Bless America,’ my grandfather’s eyes misting at the sight of little Kate singing. After that, it was downhill all the way. The old resentments and antagonisms surfaced, barely kept in check by my grandfather’s Edwardian presence.”

“What would he think to see you here this Christmas morning?”

“He would be appalled. He never travelled outside America and thought it vulgar for people to go abroad since everything that anybody could want was in the greatest country on earth. He never forgave my mother for marrying an Englishman.”

“The greatest country in Ireland was always the world to come.”

“And all we have is the day.”

“We better make the most of it,” Ruttledge kissed her lightly as they rose.

He tended his own cattle and sheep. The work was pleasure. All the animals were healthy and the tasks took up little more than an hour. Then he walked round the lake to Jamesie’s, taking a bottle of whiskey. The heron rose lazily out of the reeds. Wildfowl scattered from the reeds to gather out in the middle of the lake. The two swans were fishing close to their old high nest in the thick reeds. The first bell for Mass came over the water but no cars could be heard starting up between the bells. Everyone had attended Midnight Mass and was still sleeping. At the house he was met by the furious barking of the closeted dogs, the expectant clucking of the hens, the lowing of the old cow. The brown hens were loosed and fed, then the excited dogs. The cowhouse had been recently whitewashed inside and
out and the stone walls were a soft, glowing white. The two doors were painted bright red. Inside, the four cows were tied with chains to posts, their calves loose in a big wooden pen made from straight branches of ash taken from the hedge. Most of the bark had peeled or was worn away and the timber was so smooth it shone in places and was cool and polished to the hand. To the excited bawling of the calves, he fed each cow a measure of crushed oats from a sack on a raised stand, watered them and fed them the hay he had baled in summer. The bales had the sweet smell of hay saved without rain. With a graip and brush he quickly cleaned the house before letting out the calves to their suck. Despite Jamesie’s manly protestation that he had no interest in the cows other than the money they brought in, they were all placid and used to being handled. When the work was done and he had returned the calves to their pen, the brown hens and the dogs to their houses, he stood for a while on the street while a clock struck the hour from within the house: the whole place and everything about it was plain and beautiful. He then took the bottle of Powers, which he had left beside the pot of geraniums on the windowsill, and walked quickly towards the lake to see if Patrick Ryan was at home this Christmas morning.

The road he climbed from the lake was no longer passable other than on foot. Parts of it had been torn away by floods and never resurfaced. A rusted iron gate stood between two thick round stone piers but the entrance was choked with fuchsia and sally. There was a fresh gash in the ground where the gate had been pushed open and there were recent footprints. The whole street was grass-grown. Beside the door was a small pile of tins and bottles and plastic bags and milk cartons. Both the house and sheds were iron-roofed and solid but they hadn’t been touched by paint or whitewashed in years. Beyond the house, the old hayshed had been torn down in a storm. A mangled sheet of iron hung from an iron post like a dispirited brown flag. It was
to this house Patrick Ryan had moved when he allowed the house he had grown up in to fall.

There was no answer to Ruttledge’s knock and call. The door was unlocked. Inside, the room mustn’t have changed in fifty or so years. It hadn’t changed since Ruttledge first saw it ten or fifteen years before, the brown dresser, the settlebed, the iron crook above the open hearth, the horse harness hanging between the religious pictures on the wall—the smiling Virgin, the blood-drip from the Crown of Thorns—all faded now with damp spots underneath the glass, the cheapness moving, since it too had been touched and held in depths of time. In the small window the stone walls were at least four feet thick. The naked electric bulb that hung from the ceiling answered to the switch. By the fireplace was a bale of peat briquettes and in the centre of the floor was a pile of dry branches. A brand-new red Bushman was thrown among the branches and here and there on the floor were little piles of sawdust. A bowl of sugar, unwashed cups, milk, part of a loaf, a sardine tin, a plate with eggshells, a half-full bottle of Powers, a bar of soap, butter, an empty packet of Silk Cut, red apples, a pot of marmalade, salt, matches, a brown jug, an open newspaper, a transistor radio, an alarm clock littered the table. In stark contrast, one small corner of the room was spare and neat. An iron rested on an ironing board. Two perfectly ironed white shirts were hung beside a pressed dark suit. A pair of fine black leather shoes that had been polished till they shone sat on a chair.