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Authors: Jennifer Cornell

Departures

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DEPARTURES

Departures

Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize 1994

JENNIFER C CORNELL

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Pittsburgh and London

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260
Copyright © 1995, Jennifer C Cornell
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
Paperback edition 1996

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cornell, Jennifer C
      Departures / Jennifer C Cornell.
            p.   cm.
      ISBN 0-8229-3855-3 (cl: alk. paper) — 0-8229-5604-7 (pbk: alk. paper)
      ISBN 978-0-8229-7883-1 (e-book)
      1. Northern Ireland – Social life and customs – Fiction.   2. Violence – Northern Ireland – Fiction.   I. Title.
PR6053.0717D46     1994
823′.914–dc20

94-41565
CIP

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Eurospan, London

 

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of these stories first appeared in somewhat different form:
Quarterly West
(“
Inheritance
”);
The Massachusetts Review
(“
Rise
”); and
The New England Review
(“
Undertow
”). “
Heat
” originally appeared in
TriQuarterly,
a publication of Northwestern University.

My thanks to Lamar Herrin, James McConkey, Jen Hill, Susan Choi, Pete Rock, and all those at Cornell who have read my work with care and enthusiasm. I am a better writer for having known you. Thanks also to Boston Latin School, the Museum of Fine Arts, Magee College and the University of Ulster; the Cornerstone Community, the Belfast Writers' Group, and Shankill Team Ministry; Harry Greenwood, Chris Aldridge, and all the good people at SCSG; Owen Thomas, Pat and Brian Scott, Luis Urrea, Mary Condren, Monroe Engel, and Richard Marius; the Fusaros, the Cornells, and the Hannigans. Finally, loving thanks to my parents, James and Carole. You have shaped me and these stories more than you think I know.

for Martin

Contents

Heat

The Start of the Season

Hydrophobic

Departures

Stigmata

Touched

Outtake

Inheritance

Rise

The Swing of Things

Punching In

Undertow

Maps of Belfast may be found on
pages 2
and
175
.

DEPARTURES

Heat

She looks like a young one, my father told me, while I was still too far behind him to see—Careful now, he said, try not to frighten her. She was smaller than I had expected, and more fragile. Among the chestnut hairs that cloaked her back and shoulders there were longer, thicker strands of black, yet they too had an unexpected softness, and when the light breeze from the hills above the gully blew over her from behind, the smoky down of her inner coat stirred like a living thing against her skin. Be very quiet, my father said softly, but already her ears lay flat against her skull and her thin lids were drawn so tightly away from her eyes that the jaundiced whites jumped and flashed each time a sudden noise startled her into movement.

She was the first thing we'd captured since we started setting traps six weeks before. My father'd told me what Albert Freel had said, that April was too early, that animals grew sluggish in the summer heat and it was foolish to stalk them while they were still lean and wary with the memory of winter. Albert Freel had a stable of greyhounds, every one the colour of foam in the harbour at Larne, and when he walked them all together up the Shankill to the Woodvale Park he moved in the midst of a small, private sea. The false spring had tricked us, Albert said; five days of warm winds and sunshine and half the dogwoods in the cemetery had begun to bloom, and on the edges of tarmac all over the city bold blades of grass
had suddenly appeared. Then the cold had unfolded with the weight of wet fabric, and those who'd been counting on the coming of summer barely had time to get out of the way.

The corridors of the traps we used were long and narrow; collapsible doors at either end sprang up when unsettled and shut the unsuspecting in. Sheets of metal covered the inner mesh frames, all four panels made for removal: captives could be viewed that way without risking release. The plates slid in their grooves with the sound of knives being readied, yet every morning when we went to check them the doors of the traps had snapped shut on nothing, or else were still lying open, though the bait inside was gone.

This is how we came to set them. My father had been fixing the floor of a barn when a nest fell down from above straight into his arms. He'd held out his hands when he'd seen it coming, and then there they were: a trio of fledglings, still blind, open-mouthed, psoriatic with first plumage and the eczema of recent birth. A man from Ardoyne had been on the job with him; hearing the whistle of small things in motion, he'd practically bolted when he'd seen my father with a dry puff of dust rising up from his palms. The man's wife had had triplets and he needed the work—he'd spent three weeks fitting windows in Ballysillan, ten days in east Belfast on a decorating job, his wife had been sick with the worry of it but he'd kept his head down and his mind on the wage—but he was growing convinced that his luck was finished, and he'd taken the nest falling as some sort of sign. Just get rid of them, for chrissake, he'd argued, they're done for now, sure, anyway. But my father was thinking of a goldfinch he'd bought when he was first married, how the smell of fresh linen had made the bird sing whenever my mother
brought clothes in from the line. So he'd shaken the rubble from his cap and whiskers, nestled the birdlings in an old canvas sack, and brought them back home as a present for me.

The first evening we had them we boiled porridge and my father tried to feed them with a kitchen spoon. They opened wide when their lips touched silver, but the cartilage kept catching on the spoon's heavy basin, and the hard, yellow corners of their mouths pulled away. So he made up a potion of egg yolk and mince, a few drops of milk, a bit of sugar, and with the aid of an eyedropper squeezed the pulp in. He fed them steadily till their hunger subsided and their heads started to loll, nodding in time with their impatient breathing and their shoulders shuddering in somnambulant flight. Well, wee woman, my father said finally, covering the box he'd found for them with a bit of muslin secured with twine, that'll be your job from now on.

They died on a Saturday about a week later while we were out shopping down in the town. There was a disturbance in the Castle Court complex—a suspect parcel had been found on a bench—and to pass the time we'd gone to Bewley's, where hundreds and thousands roll out from under whenever a teacup or platter is lifted, where even the dust is finely ground coffee and whatever's left over when chocolate is shaved. But after an hour my father decided that the purchase he'd forgotten in one of the dressing rooms when the security officers had asked us to leave was unlikely to be there when we were let back inside; so we paid our bill and headed back up the Shankill, through a thickness of people in optimistic attire—bright coloured jerseys and unbuttoned anoraks, a few boys in T-shirts, a few girls in shorts—all moving with the rustling sound of large, leafy vegetables packed upright in bags. Crossing
Berlin Street we heard the explosion. Wouldn't you know it, my father said, turning back towards the city to look for the smoke. We could have just waited; it's all over now.

The shock must have shaken the legs of the table, for the box lay on its side on the floor when we got home. We found one of the babies up in the rafters, bits of another behind the sink. The third they'd taken to the back of the house where they'd left what remained of him in a heap by the door. They'd eaten only soft things, like the eyes and the belly; they'd left the feet, the fused rubber fingers, the spurred, calcareous prominence of the spine. Wood rats, my father said, but later that evening Albert said no. Albert Freel read spoors like an oracle, and the droppings he'd found were small and spherical, occurring in piles like end-of-day fruit picked over and scattered by some quick, careless hand. It had to be rabbits, given the evidence. Rat droppings had a longer, less generous shape. The rat is a small-minded animal, he said. Even its feces reveal what it is.

It couldn't be rabbits, my father answered. A rabbit would never do such a thing.

All the same, Albert said, it's been a bad year. Skunk, fox, weasel—rabbit, too—everything's been living off garbage for the past four months. You know what a bad winter can do to a beast.

But they're vegetarians, my father said. They eat grass and tree bark. Forest fruits.

Look where you're living, Albert said. There's no bilberries or bramble round here anymore.

Still, when we set the traps it was wood rat we hoped for. My father had chosen the type of trap carefully, rejecting a range of more sensitive models for one which would neither injure nor maim. I imagine his intention was much as it had been the previous autumn, when he'd
caught a boy stealing apples from the tree behind our house. The tree itself was unclaimed property—the land it stood on had never been ours—but the boy had crossed through my mother's garden to reach the low branches and swing himself up; the tender shoots of asparagus and aubergine, the ascending strands of the tomato vines she'd planted that spring, before she died, all had snapped with the weight of him when, awkward with apples, he'd stumbled and fallen as he made his way down. The following evening he'd come back with a basket. My father waylaid him, seized him by the collar when he tried to run away and hauled him into the house. I know you, Trevor Irvine, he'd said, then he'd made the boy sit at the kitchen table while he tried to explain about respect for others, how nothing should ever be taken for granted, how he could have had all the apples he'd wanted if only he'd called in first to ask. In the fifteen minutes before we released him I watched the blue veins at the boy's temple flutter while his eyes scanned the room for an unguarded exit, his raw reddened fingers gripping his knees.

We didn't know what to do with the doe, but my father supposed that Albert Freel would. Albert lived with his dogs and a coop of pigeons in a house at the end of the Glencairn Road. The house had been built on a crest overlooking the city, between two fields of dry gorse and heather where in the summer cows were taken to graze. His dogs were his livelihood, and he housed them with him. When my father and I came into his sitting room all six of them rose with the smooth, fluid movement of silk through a belt loop, scattering like ash to other parts of the room.

Now what did I tell you? Albert said when he saw her. What did I say all along?

So what should we do with her? my father asked him.

Whatever you want. The shops down in Smithfield might give a few quid; there's that butcher on the Road does game now and again. Or I've got a Rex out the back, if you want. Belongs to my nephew. We could try for a litter, though you never know. That might be the best thing, but, with the child and all.

Aye, let's do that, my father said slowly. Shall we do that, daughter? You've never seen wee babies being born.

Whatever youse want, Albert said. Just so long as you realise there's no guarantee.

The buck was housed with the pigeons in an ancient enclosure, one of the last thatched structures east of the Bann. Thin beams of light from the chinks in the stonework transected the space inside its four walls, casting a pattern of loose-woven baskets which moved over Albert as he stooped and shuffled, while I thought of magicians crouching in boxes, half-moons and comets decorating the sides, and wondered what they did, where they went to, when the razor-sharp swords plunged in all around.

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