Country Days (2 page)

The day he went away, I went up into the hay barn and burrowed deep down under the hay to cry in private and heal the pain of his going. Remembering the swallows, I climbed up to look into the nest. It was empty; the baby birds had flown away. That night, as Nanna's corset hit the leg of the iron bed with a clatter of bone and steel, I wondered if she had ever been young.

S
HE STOOD OUTSIDE
the circle of chattering schoolgirls with a calm smile on her face. It was the first day of term, and while the rest of the girls were busy getting to know each other, she was content to wait and let things happen. She was creamy skinned and curly haired, with pale blue eyes that almost disappeared when her face crinkled into lines of laughter. When you talked to her, Eileen gave you her undivided attention and made you feel that everything you said was important, even to the extent of sometimes repeating your last words as if they gave her food for thought. During the following year together in that boarding school, we became good friends. She was a pleasant, easy-going companion who saw good in all of us, and life around her was a pool of serenity.

After school she went back to farming, specialising in chicken and egg production. We still kept in contact as I was working in a town not far from where she lived. I sometimes stayed with her for weekends in the family home. It was a big farmhouse with high ceilings and a wide front hall from which
double glass doors opened into a glass porch, so that the front of the house always seemed to be filled with light. There was no mother in the home as she had died when they were children, which maybe made Eileen more mature than I was, even though we were about the same age. It was an old house and in the spacious bedrooms upstairs the beds were also old; in the room we shared, our bed had a sag in the middle. First into the bed slept in the sag and the other one slept on the surrounding hillside. Because we were young and flexible, the bed with the
built-in
dip in the middle was the cause of amusement rather than insomnia.

When we came in late at night from dates and dances, we chatted and laughed at all the things that are funny when you are footloose and fancy free, and when we closed our eyes in the small hours of the morning, the humpy mattress was no barrier to sleep. When I married a few years later I got buried in the baby bucket, as sometimes happens to young mothers, and we lost contact. I heard that she had got married, and then one day out of the blue she called with a quiet-voiced, smiling man and two little girls. It was great to see her and you had only to look at her to know that she was happy. The next time she called, there was a little boy with the two girls in the back of the car. We did not write to each other or even send each other Christmas cards, but still I would have considered her one of my dearest friends.

Then one day I met a man from her parish who told me that her husband had cancer. At the time he was in remission and the whole parish were praying for a miracle. Eileen’s husband was, he told me, a man around whom their whole parish revolved, involved in the GAA, in farming organisations, in race meetings and in everything that went on in the local area. The neighbour said to me, “If you had a problem in the morning, John would be the first man in your door.”

That night I rang Eileen and we talked for a long time. She was hopeful and fearful. It had gone on for almost a year, and when John took a step forward it was sometimes counteracted by two steps backwards. Just then he was going through a good patch, so hope was beginning to kindle in her heart. Shortly after that a nun from our old school died and we met at the funeral. I was delighted to meet them, and John looked so well that you would have given him a certificate of good health. It did not continue like that, however, and treatment became necessary again. From then on it was an up-and-down process with regular stays in hospital. Through it all, prayer was a great comfort to Eileen and John, and the neighbours sat with John in the hospital and called to see Eileen regularly. They had a very good friend in Fr Tom, who often said mass in John’s room in the hospital and prayed with Eileen and the children at home.

During those weeks I never called to Eileen’s home or visited John in the hospital. I had not been
part of their life before this illness and becoming part of it now would be an intrusion. My bond of friendship had been with Eileen herself, and our telephone conversations during those long,
pain-filled
days made me realise that our thinking was still in harmony. I regretted that we had lost contact over the years, that her children were now stran-gers to me and her much-loved husband somebody whom I had only met on a few occasions. I could be of no comfort to them now. Only close friends can help you in times of great pain.

The weekend before Christmas I was away from home, returning late on Saturday night. On the Sunday morning the phone rang and a young voice said, “I’m Eileen’s daughter; Daddy is being buried today.” The soft young voice was full of controlled pain, and when I put down the phone, there was an ache in my heart for my friend whom I knew would be filled with a deep sorrow.

We drove out to their parish church where the crowds overflowed on to the road outside. As there was no way we could get in, we decided to drive ahead to the graveyard which was a few miles away. Cars were parked all along the road and people huddled in the cold under the trees beside the high graveyard wall. As sometimes happens at funerals, the woman waiting beside me turned out to be an old neighbour from where I had lived as a child and who was now married on a farm near Eileen. We chatted as we waited for the funeral and she talked
about Eileen and John and what great neighbours they were and how pleasant it was to be living near them. When the hearse arrived, people poured out of surrounding cars and you would wonder where the long stream of funeral cars were going to park, but everybody found a place eventually.

Eileen was pale-faced and alert and surprised me by being totally in touch with everything and everybody present. She was amazingly composed, and I thought of that young girl outside the convent so many years before. She still had her pool of serenity. As I walked past her in the row of sympathisers, she pressed my hand and whispered, “Come back to the house afterwards.”

I had never been to her house. The narrow country roads in the hills behind the graveyard were not the easiest to negotiate and several times we went astray. In the end my husband suggested, “Why not leave it for another day. She would appreciate a call more in the days to come.”

It was a practical suggestion, but sometimes practical suggestions are not always the ones we want to hear. We continued and finally we came in sight of the house, which was across the valley from us and on the side of a sloping hill. The yard and the road up to it were lined with cars. There was something very sad about the sight of all those cars gathered around that hillside farmhouse on a bleak December afternoon. It was a celebration of sadness, and the man who had gathered them all together
was gone from their midst. I felt that Eileen was now floundering in a great solitary sea of loneliness, although surrounded by friends and neighbours.

In a farmhouse if you are a regular caller you go in the back door and if not you go to the front one. I went to the front. Inside Eileen was surrounded by people.

“I was expecting you,” she said, and I sensed then that even though I would come often in the future, it was right to be there on that day. The house was packed with people and I was glad to meet Eileen’s brothers and sister, some of whom I had not met since I had stayed with them years before. Neighbouring women laid out table after table of food and everybody was catered for. As Eileen and I sat together having tea late that evening, I said, looking at the laden table in front of us, “How did you get all this together?”

“Every Christmas cake in the parish is on that table today,” she told me.

It was a few days before Christmas and the statement was simply made, but it told a lot about her neighbours. After the tea I asked Eileen where Fr Tom was, and she smiled and said, “Out in the back kitchen washing cups.”

I found him there, and because everybody was after their tea, we had time to talk. He was a young man full of the love of God and his fellow human beings and a conversation with him overflowed with laughter. He was not a heavy-duty cleric but
a heavenly violin and God’s music played easily though him.

Among the topics of conversation we ranged over was the improvement in rural houses.

“I remember,” he said, “when I was a child that most of the chairs in our kitchen were without backs. They had fallen off over the years, and we children sat on the backless ones and left the good chairs for the adults. One day I had to go into town to get the vet for a sick cow. I was very young and had never been in town on my own before and had a fierce job in finding his house. The wife answered the door and put me into the sitting-room. I felt that I had better not take up a good chair, so I sat on one that had no back. The wife came in and told me to sit over on another chair. But I clung to my own chair, crippled with shyness, and said that I was fine on this one. She got very annoyed and said, “That’s not a chair; that’s the coffee table.”

Fr Tom laughed as he remembered, and I said, “Far away from coffee tables a lot of us were reared.”

“Yes,” he said, “but all that does not matter if the heart is in the right place.”

In the months that followed, any time that I rang Eileen or visited her, she had callers. The neighbours were in constant attendance and somebody called every night. During the day the farm still had to be run and it was now her sole responsibility. It worried her that she might not be able to cope, but after the first few hesitant months she came to grips with it.
She had dark, anguish-filled days, but she had great faith, and prayer was her constant companion. In the evenings when the cows had been milked, she spent hours working in the garden and found healing in the earth. But it was the neighbours who were her greatest support. She was lucky to be living in a part of the country where the rural community put their arms around her and helped to make her grief more bearable.

It meant a lot to both of us that our paths had crossed again. We would keep in touch in the
future
because friendship, like everything valuable in life, needs a certain amount of care.

T
HE PHONE RANG
as I came down the stairs. I picked it up to be met by an ominous silence, but when I strained my ear I could hear bronchial breathing. A jagged, hollow cough which sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a barrel wheezed into my ear, and I knew then that it was the Major. A very old, retired British army man, over six foot tall, bottle-thin and upright, with a high bald head and a purple nose, he lived outside the village in the restored corner of an old ruined castle. There was still a pregnant silence on the phone, and I could sense that he was cranking up his ancient vocal cogs as he prepared to grind his crackling voice into action. After a certain amount of spluttering “ahum, ahum”, he suddenly hiccuped into top gear.

“Alice!” he barked.

“Yes, Major,” I answered. I felt like saluting smartly, clicking my heels together and adding “all present and correct”.

“That confounded parcel,” he growled. “Who the blazes sent me that?”

As far as the Major was concerned, nothing of any
importance had left the post office that morning except his parcel.

“No idea,” I assured the Major.

“Good God!” he spluttered. “Do you mean to tell me that you have no idea who sent it?”

“No idea at all,” I told him.

I was keeping my side of the conversation to a minimum because the Major had the happy knack of tying you up in knots without even trying.

“Have you any idea what’s in it?” he demanded.

“No,” I told him.

“Well, it’s not mine,” he assured me.

I decided then that I would chance a question to sort things out, with the hope that our parcel enquiry would not wander too far off the point.

“How did you get it so?” I asked.

“Damned if I know,” he spluttered.

“Who is it addressed to?” I pursued.

“The Mayor,” he announced.

“Well, that explains it,” I assured him.

“Explains what?” he barked.

“The names are so alike that they got mixed up, and that is how you got it.”

“Preposterous,” he spluttered. “You should have sent the confounded thing to the Mayor.”

“But we have no Mayor, Major,” I told him, feeling that I was getting my Majors and Mayors in a tangle. The Major always succeeded in getting everyone around him confused while he blustered on, oblivious to the situation.

“And why haven’t we got a Mayor?” he demanded.

Though he had lived here for years the Major knew absolutely nothing about the ordinary life of the village and it would not have surprised him in the least if he had discovered that we had a nudist colony in the Catholic church. He was convinced that we were all slightly odd and we returned the compliment.

“Well, Major, it was just a case of the names getting mixed up,” I told him, “so you can give the parcel back to the postman in the morning.”

“Bloody will not,” he asserted. “I’m sending it back right now. Not keeping that chappie in the house overnight.”

I decided then that he was mixing up the postman and the parcel, so did not pursue the subject and was glad to put down the phone.

I promptly forgot all about the Major’s parcel until that night when Gabriel came into the kitchen with a strange look on his face and a small, square parcel in his hand.

“You’ll never believe what’s in this,” he said, placing the parcel carefully on the table.

“Not another one,” I protested and I went over and peered down at the writing on the parcel.

“Oh, that’s the Major’s parcel,” I said.

“How do you know about it?” he asked in surprise.

“Well, he was on the phone, meandering on about what was in it,” I answered.

“I’m not surprised that he was, the poor old devil,” Gabriel said sympathetically.

“Well, what the hell is in there anyway?” I demanded, wondering what on earth it was all about.

“Have a look,” I was invited.

I picked up the little brown box, which was surprisingly light and was wrapped neatly in strong brown paper. It had already been carefully opened, so I folded back the paper and lifted up the top of the box and peered in.

Inside was a human skull.

“Mother of God!” I gasped and dropped the box on to the table where it toppled over, spilling the skull out on to the tablecloth.

“Where in the name of God did that come from?” I yelled, staring mesmerised at the skull that sat grinning up at me. Admittedly it was a long time since it had seen active service. But I could well understand then why the Major did not want to keep “that chappie” in the house overnight. He was less confused than I had thought.

“Oh, put him back in, please,” I implored. “I don’t like looking at him; he’s making me nervous.”

“There’s a message with him,” Gabriel informed me calmly.

“Where is it?” I asked weakly.

Gabriel rummaged in the empty box, but found nothing.

“Oh, my God!” I said. “I think it’s inside in him.” The corner of a letter was sticking out through the gaping mouth.

“It must have fallen into the head,” he said,
promptly picking it up and extricating the note out through the gaping mouth, as if it were a letter box. I took the note gingerly and smoothed it out. It was written in very spindly writing and was difficult to read. At the top was a German address and the message was in very broken English, but the gist of the story was that the writer was a medical student who had been on holidays the previous summer in Kinsale and had visited Innishannon. He had explored our old graveyard at the end of the village and had taken a skull out of one of the tombs, thinking that it might assist him with his medical studies. He had carried the skull home with him, and then his problems had begun. Things, he related, had started to go wrong in his life and he had an accident; now he believed that the removal of the skull was the cause of all his worries. He wanted to return it, and in the accompanying note he gave details as to where he had found it, and he asked that somebody would follow his directions and replace the skull. He knew nobody in Innishannon and he assumed that the Mayor would know what to do. Like the Major, I now wished that we had a Mayor in the village.

“What are we going to do with it?” I appealed to Gabriel.

“Well, it’s dark now, so it’s too late to do anything,” I was told.

“But where will we keep it tonight?” I wanted to know.

Before we could decide on temporary storage arrangements, the door opened and my friend Frances sailed into the kitchen. When she saw our friend on the table, a look of amazement came over her face.

“I see you have company for dinner,” she remarked quizzically.

“Will you shut up,” I said. “I don’t think that it’s a bit funny.”

“Well, you’ll have to admit,” she said, picking up the skull without a bother on her, “that he is an unusual visitor. Aren’t you, old boy?” she added, inspecting him quite fondly.

“Don’t you mind handling him?” I asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “We had a full one of these” – by which I think she meant a full skeleton – “in the nurses’ home. We used to hang him up behind the door after study.”

“Dear God,” I said, “aren’t I glad that I never became a nurse.”

Under the influence of Frances’s relaxed approach to our friend on the table, my attitude towards him was beginning to thaw out a little. I thrust the accompanying letter into her hand, and as she read it her eyes widened in surprise and she gave a low whistle.

“Interesting! Interesting,” she commented. “That will teach him that an Irishman can be dangerous even when he is dead!”

“Where should we put him for the night?” I
wondered.

“Take him to bed with you,” Frances suggested with a wicked grin.

“God, but you are nasty,” I told her.

“Put him on the kitchen window,” Frances suggested then. “The dogs could get him in the yard and the cat could get him under the table, but he’ll be quite safe on the window sill.”

I was not sure if I found her practicality reassuring or revolting. But we put the parcel on the window and it looked quite harmless there. It could have been a box of chocolates.

“Let’s give him a name,” Frances decided. “It would make the whole business far more civilised, and who knows but that at one time he was a very important person.”

“What makes you think it’s a him anyway?” I enquired.

“Bone structure,” she announced grandly. She lined herself up beside Gabriel to outline the contrast between male and female facial contours. At this point Gabriel decided that he had more pressing things to attend to and removed himself from the discussion. He always found Frances’s mental dexterity slightly confusing. She had the ability to carry on three conversations at the one time: the conclusion of the conversation she had had with the person she had met before you, the relevant conversation of the moment, and the one she was carrying on inside in her own head. You had
to find your way between the three lines of thought and pick out what applied to the subject on hand.

“What will we call him?” I asked.

“Hitler,” Frances announced.

“Why Hitler?”

“He came from Germany and he is after causing a disturbance,” she declared.

“But he is not German,” I protested. “He only went for a visit.”

“True,” Frances admitted, “and as well as that he did not have much choice in the matter.”

“All the more reason why he should not be called Hitler,” I asserted.

“Well, what about Churchill?” she asked. “Didn’t he have some connection with Innishannon?”

“He only came here on holidays; he’s not buried here,” I protested. “But why can’t we just call him an ordinary name? He was probably a very ordinary fellow called Jack or something.”

“Jack in the box! Perfect!” Frances declared.

“Well, I had not quite thought of him like that,” I admitted.

“That’s your problem,” Frances proclaimed; “you don’t think.”

Before we got bogged down in a lengthy discussion on my mental limitations, I gave in gracefully. We called our visitor Jack, and that night he rested on our kitchen window in view of the old graveyard. He was almost back to base, but he still had a few detours to make.

The next morning when I awoke I looked out the window at the old tower in the graveyard at the end of the village and thought about Jack. It seemed very casual to take him down and just replace him as if he had never been disturbed. After all, he was part of a body, and where you had a body you usually had a priest and doctor. As Jack’s days of needing a doctor were long gone, we could dispense with that part of the ceremony, but maybe the presence of a
clergyman
was called for in the circumstances.

Now, our old graveyard is multi-denominational, for historical rather than ecumenical reasons, and gathered there are Catholic, Church of Ireland and various other bodies. As the devil you know is said to be better than the devil you don’t, I decided to tackle the parish priest first. Tucking Jack under my arm in case I would need to produce evidence to establish the authenticity of my story and to prove that I was not suffering from hallucinations, I set out for the parish priest’s house.

It was a lovely summer’s morning, and as I walked up the hill I could well understand if Jack was glad to be back in Innishannon. Wherever he had been it could never have been as nice as his own place. I could almost sympathise with him for tripping up our correspondent, who had whipped him away without even as much as a by your leave. I was beginning to feel quite protective towards Jack. Frances had been right: a name had given him a whole new dimension. In some way I felt that he depended on me to see
him safely home.

The parish priest did not quite see it like that. He sat by a blazing fire wearing three cardigans, and looked at me as if I had landed a dead cat at his feet. He was a very old man who felt the cold intensely, and the idea of exploring a dark, damp tomb did not appeal to him. I could understand his reluctance but at the same time I had Jack’s future to think about.

“My child,” he said in a wheezing voice, “that graveyard is no longer under our jurisdiction.”

“But, Father,” I protested, “it could have been when he was first buried there.”

“I have no way of knowing that,” he said decisively, and that was the end of the road for Jack and myself as far as he was concerned. As I walked out the avenue, I found myself humming the air of “O’Brien has nowhere to go”.

Next, with Jack still under my arm, I decided to pay a house call to the Church of Ireland minister, who lived at the other end of the village. He was a chubby little man with a beaming smile which faded gradually as I told my story.

“Unbelievable!” he declared.

I pulled Jack out from under my arm and proceeded to unwrap him to prove how believable it was.

“Put it away!” he said, holding up a shielding hand, and I began to wonder about all these men who were supposed to look after the dead.

“Well, now,” he said, “this is the position. That
graveyard is County Council property and no longer our responsibility.”

It seemed to me that the churches were of the opinion that burial, like birth, could only happen once. When you are buried, that’s the end of the road as far as they are concerned. If you make a bit of a come-back after that, then that’s not their problem. As we walked down the road, I wondered where Jack and myself would go from here. One tale that I had never forgotten since my schooldays was the story of the Little Red Hen, which ended with the line: “I’ll do it myself, said the little red hen.”

I decided I would perform the obsequies myself.

When I got home I rang Frances.

“We are going to bury Jack,” I told her.

“Who is going to do it?” she asked.

“You and I,” I said.

“Proper order,” she declared; “he could not be in better hands.”

“You can read the directions and I’ll do the burying.”

“Sounds like a kind of a DIY job,” she said.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “After all, Jack came to us, so we’ll finish the journey with him.”