City of Hope (6 page)

I looked at the figure in the chair. Back arched, arms hanging rigid against his side, his naked chest unresponsive to my touch, his mouth hung open, his eyes were staring emptily at the same corner of the ceiling. It was a stranger—just some lifeless doll.

“No!” I said again. “No, no, no,” and I ran from the house.

That was not John in the house, it couldn't be. He was outside. He was down in the bottom field tending the sheep. The body in the chair was some trick, a dream, a confusion.

I ran from the house to find my husband, my shoes sliding across the damp grass. I tripped across potholes until I threw the shoes off, my stockings ripped on sharp stones, my skirt tearing against the brambles as I ran.

“John,” I called, “John, John, John.” I shouted out his name, repeating it over and over again until my voice became nothing but a hollow howl, absorbed into the vast emptiness of the bogs and fields all around.

I knew he wasn't there, but equally I knew that it wasn't him back at the house. That lifeless, rejecting corpse was not my husband. It was an aberration. The knowledge of that calmed me somewhat as I gathered myself and walked slowly back toward the house. I could not go back in, so I went and sat in the hollow of the large oak tree at the edge of our first field. This was John's smoking stool. I tossed back a pile of brown mulch with the toe of my stockinged foot and the ground beneath was littered with small white stubs of paper. John's leather tobacco pouch was hidden away, tucked into the mossy pit of two low branches. John did not like to smoke in the house, preferring to come out here after breakfast and have the smoke snatched away by the wind. The cleansing air of nature diminished every human endeavor—smoke rings disappeared with the merest flick of wind, on a still day they floated to the edge of the large oak's canopy of leaves and John felt he had won. He loved to battle with nature; keeping the nettles at bay around the house, pulling them with his rough, bare hands. My husband bathed from a tin bucket outside in our yard on the coldest of days. While others lay cowed in their beds by wind and rain, John faced the worst weather to tend his livestock, comforting and caring for them. When he was done, he came home to my fire and my food, and I comforted and cared for him. That was how it had always been, until I'd lost hope in the possibility of our increasing our family, and disappeared myself into the world of avarice and achievement. I couldn't think about that now. I picked up the worn leather pouch that Paud had given him for his fourteenth birthday and put it into the pocket of my apron. (I had put my apron on when I went to feed the hens. I had remembered to do that, even though we had been fighting, remembered to protect my smart work clothes.)

Doctor Bourke came and found me.

“We should go and tell Maidy,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

I didn't go back into the house. Doctor Bourke looked down at my bare feet, but passed no comment.

In the car he spoke, cautiously and briefly, about the details. He was doing his duty. Trying to ground me, to try and help me take it in. John had suffered a massive heart attack. It might have been coming on for months, years maybe. Men didn't like to visit doctors—it was a common enough problem, he assured me. John was one of those stoic people who kept their ailments to themselves. The change in temperament, the early nights, the loss of appetite, these were all symptoms, signs that something was amiss. Signs I had missed.

I half listened, nodding my assent with irritated bobs of the head until he stopped, awkwardly. We drove in silence then for the seven miles to Maidy's cottage, the place where John had grown up. The old couple had adopted their nephew, John, when he was nine. His mother had died first of some unnamed illness, and his father (Paud's youngest brother) shortly afterward—of a heart attack, I now remembered. Maidy and Paud had no children of their own and, to all intents and purposes, John was their son. I drove more carefully on this journey, concentrating my thoughts on Maidy, on how she would react to this news. It was terrible news—just some terrible fact that we had to relay.

John is dead.

Three words, that's all it was, the saying of three small words. They were in my head, but I would not—could not—let them pass into my heart. I kept telling myself that it was a bad dream. I made myself believe that if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, it would go away.

The light was fading and, as I drove, the road ahead evened to a gray line, blurring into the heavy blanket of foliage at its edges, drawing down the curtain of night, further softening my grasp on this terrifying reality. The journey to tell Maidy “John is dead” was happening, but it didn't feel real.

Doctor Bourke went in first. I stood outside the front door of the cottage while he told her. There was the heavy scent of lilac around the door, and a basket of freshly picked potatoes on the stoop, an early spring crop, the earth on them already dried in the sun. Maidy would barely brush off the dust before boiling them briefly, then leave them in the pan covered in a clean cloth to steam themselves soft. We ate them as children with our hands, straight from the table, the warm, salted butter that she made herself sliding down our chins. Some things never changed.

I heard a scream from inside the house. The three words were said, and I could comfort her now. She was standing in her working apron, stained with the mud and flour from her day's work, her homely bosom shaking with instant tears, her hands outstretched as she reached for me. I fell against her, my jaw tight as I held on to her, clenched her fleshy back and guarded myself against her raw, unavoidable grief.

I held Maidy and comforted her, but I did not cry, or let myself fall into a wife's natural keening.

I held myself together like a rock. I would not look into the void.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

I drove us all back into town, calling in to Heffernan, the under­taker, on the way, before dropping Doctor Bourke off at the priest's house. They would both follow us down in Father Geraghty's car.

“Drive slowly,” the doctor whispered to me as we arrived. “Let Heffernan get there before you, and deal with things first.”

I nodded as if I was a character in some film that he was giving his commission to. This task was nothing to do with me somehow, it was about protecting Maidy. The old woman sat shocked into silence in the back of the car, her large frame covered in her Sunday coat and hat, which I had gently dressed her in before maneuvering her into the back seat.

“I want to be with him,” she insisted as I drove off alone with her. “I need to see John. He's in the house alone. You shouldn't have left him,” she cried from the back, a thread of accusation pleading through her grief, “for the banshee to get him, Ellie. The banshee will get him.”

“Shhh now, Maidy. We'll be there soon. Settle yourself, we'll be there in a minute. Take out your beads and say a decade—they're in your pocket.”

The platitudes of comfort fell out of me naturally, as if this were her drama, not mine. Repeating the motions I had gone through with her in the hours after Paud's death. Except that I had felt a sickness then in the pit of my stomach and wept alongside her. I did not weep now. I couldn't. If I wept, I would not be able to drive, or look after Maidy. If I wept, it would mean it was true. I would not weep and let the sadness pass into my heart. It was too huge. I would explode with the pain of it.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . .”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

I picked up the second half of the chant and we prayed out loud, backward and forward, she gleaning comfort from the mercy of God in her hour of need, while the familiar mantra only succeeded in clearing my mind of all else but the road—strengthening my resolve to detach myself from what was happening. Maidy giving herself up to the truth, me saving myself from it.

When we got to the house I saw Heffernan's funeral hearse in the yard. The horse was munching on a hedgerow at the top of the lane, and started when I caught him in my lights. He opened his lazy eyes wide, as if embarrassed to be caught in the act of eating at an inappropriate time.

I took Maidy out of the car and led her toward the open door of my cottage.
John's cottage. Our cottage
. I could not go in. I called Doctor Bourke out, and he came and took her arm. He looked at me quizzically as he led her inside, and I shook my head.

“I can't believe it, I just cannot believe it, John, my John . . .” I heard Maidy wailing from inside, and the low mumblings of the priest offering her comfort.

I was alone again. I began to pace up and down the yard. It was pitch-dark, save for the glimmering light that came from the small windows of our house. I concentrated my mind on the ground beneath my feet, the cold creeping up my bare legs where the stockings had torn. I needed to feel things from the outside in, to quell the panic rising up in me, to push it back down. I stopped at the door of the barn, where a hardy old rose bush pushed proudly up from an otherwise dead patch of earth. I grabbed at it blindly and pressed, until I felt the thorns pierce my hand, then shook it off and sucked the blood from the plump skin at the base of my palm.

“Are you not coming into the house, Ellie?”

It was Doctor Bourke.

He appeared suddenly in the darkness. I could just see his profile against the light of our open door.

How long had passed since I had called into his house to collect him? How long since he had been here, tending to John's hips after the shooting? Hours, days, years—it seemed to me to be one and the same time.

“No.” And in a sudden urge for familiarity, to be heard by another human being, I said, “I can't—not while . . .”

“Would you like me to ask Heffernan to take him back into town? Now that Maidy has seen him.”

“Yes,” I said, “I would.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and held it there for a moment without saying anything, sliding it gently away as he walked off.

I reached into my apron pocket for warmth and my hands fell on John's tobacco pouch. I went over to the oak and, feeling my way in the dark, placed it back where I had found it a few hours ago.

He might want to come back and smoke.

I waited until I saw Heffernan's man lead the horse over to the door of the house, then turned my back as they loaded the funeral carriage, and until I could no longer hear the loud clopping of hooves on the lane.

Father Geraghty was still in the house. He would stay there all night until the neighbors came at first light.

The two of them sat by the fire and prayed. Maidy's face was pleading with me to join them, but I couldn't.

I could not sit still. Instead I busied myself frying us up a simple meal of potato cakes, eggs and bacon. Father Geraghty ate heartily (as priests always did, even under the most appalling of circumstances), and although Maidy and I barely touched the food, the making of it and clearing up afterward kept me distracted. I cleaned out the fire and set a new one, baked a loaf for the morning and made more tea. Their prayers halted, Maidy and the priest's eyes followed me anxiously around the room, but I refused to sit and allow myself to lapse into the awkward waiting silence of the bereaved. I longed to put on the radio and break through the wretched atmosphere, to fill the room with music, a joyful noise to help me mask the truth. I wanted to bring life back into the room, to interrupt the slow mortification of silence, the growing emptiness. The truth.

At a little after midnight Maidy sent Father Geraghty home. It was a break in protocol, but he was old and I could see that Maidy was exhausted from having to deal with him by herself.

“Ellie and I need some time alone,” she said. My heart raced at what I knew was coming.

“Would you like me to stay and talk about the arrangements?” he asked.

“No, thank you, Father,” she said. “Ellie and I can arrange that business between ourselves. You'll call again in the morning?”

“Of course.”

There was such calm, such normality in their exchange, that I told myself I could do this after all. “Business,” Maidy had said. Yes, this was just business after all.

I saw him out of the house and, taking the Tilley lamp from the table, I lit a path to his car.

“Thank you, Father,” I said.

He looked paternal in this soft light. They had been friends, this old priest and my own staunchly religious father. They both had pointed gray features and an impenetrable dedication to the Catholic faith, sometimes at the cost of other things—in my father's case, affection for his wife and only child. John was the man in my life who had taught me how to love.

When I went back to where Maidy was I said, “I don't want him laid out at home, I want him kept in a closed casket by Heffernan until the funeral.”

The words were out before I knew it. I was surprised by how voraciously this opinion had seized me. I had never thought of John dying before, and yet I was certain what I wanted. Or, rather, what I didn't want. Over the coming days there would be weeping and wailing, people calling to the house with platters of food, neighbors prodding and poking at my conscience, talking about how, why, when John died, discussing things in every minute detail. They would dig for my grief, as surely and as deeply as the grave we would bury him in. I knew that I would not be able to endure it.

“I don't want any fuss,” I said.

Maidy was shocked.

“Well, I've never heard of such a thing, Ellie. Where on earth did you get an idea like that? No, John will be laid out in his own house. It's bad enough he was taken away by Heffernan tonight, but I know you needed a night's grace. However, he'll be back in the morning, then I told Heffernan I'll arrange the body myself. As his wife, you will help me. It's the way.”