Fit Month for Dying (21 page)

As soon as I finish the
Memorare
, I begin saying my own words, saying them out loud, words that make no sense to anyone but myself. I wonder if Brendan is wearing his new Levis. I say, no, he isn't. He would never mess up those new pants, never splotch them with blood. He had waited too long for them to come in at the Avalon Mall. He could have gotten the brown-tab Levis, but he wanted the red-tab ones.

Greg paces between the porch and the rock wall, stricken. From time to time he comes and asks me how I am holding up. When he leaves I can't remember whether or not I answered him because I am so mesmerized by his bloody footprints on the frost-tipped grass. After me, he goes to Philomena. She doesn't answer him either. From my perch I see a doctor and a priest come and go, bumping into each other in the narrow porch doorway. They come over to speak to me, but because I can't comprehend what they are saying they give my shoulder a compassionate touch and leave. I hear someone shout to make room in the lane for the Mountie's car. I watch Philomena, too shell-shocked to protest, being led away by Frank Clarke. She is still making the whispering sounds as she climbs down off the wall.

And I watch as two men from the funeral home take an empty stretcher into the house and leave with it loaded. On the way out a sheet covers the stretcher, Philomena's sheet. I recognize the yellow daisy pattern. Someone near me, probably Bridey or Rose, says the sight of the sheet is better than the sight of a body bag. I see Paddy put the narrow porch door back on its hinges after the stretcher leaves. And I see Greg once more walking over to squat down beside me. The cuffs of his white shirt are stained red. He places his hand over mine. I feel one cold slab of flesh overlapping another.

Other people come and go. Neighbours. They carry buckets and mops and brooms and cloths to clean things up so we won't have to trample over bits and pieces of Brendan's skull. From time to time some of these same people come over to me and in muted voices ask whether I want to go their house, or sit in their heated car, or even move to the front of Philomena's house where the sun is shining so I won't freeze my kidneys on the cold rocks. “Let the tail follow the hide,” Grandmother always said whenever she threw out the cover of a pot that she had scorched beyond salvage. I refuse to budge. With my heart already dead, I see no point in saving my kidneys.

Danny comes home for the funeral. We sit together in the visitors' room in the funeral parlour while we take a break from our silent staring at Brendan's closed casket. Danny's eyes flash fury as he enumerates the punishments that should be in store for Father Tom Haley. “It's all his fault. That slime-eating, puke-faced bastard should be made away with. It's totally that putty-faced shit's fault. Brendan took his own life. He couldn't stand the shame. You'll never make me believe he was trying to get Dad's gun to work so he could practice shooting cans.” He says this as if I have been beleaguering him to accept Brendan's death as an unfortunate accident. “No siree,” he repeats, “you won't get me to believe that. It's what that chiselling bastard did to him that made him do what he did.”

Philomena sits beside him, but she doesn't nudge him to keep his voice down, nor does she order him to keep a civil tongue in his mouth in the presence of the dead, as she ordinarily would do. She merely pulls her black wool sweater closer around her bony shoulders. Over the last couple of days she has shrivelled into a frail old woman, the marrow squeezed from her bones, the juices drained from her body. Hers is the most terrible of griefs. Without words, without tears, she just sits and stares. Her lips never utter a regret. Her eyes stay as dry as the air in the windowless funeral parlour viewing room.

We bury Brendan on a leaden November day — November fourth, a Tuesday, a day so choked with fog that the foghorn on the downs at the far end of the Cove blats non-stop. The sky is a dirty grey. It keeps raining on and off. Philomena says that what is falling from the sky is not rain but heaven's shamefaced tears. What happened to Brendan is enough to scald the heart of the Almighty. To blister the souls of the saints.

Danny drives with us to the church service, but once it is over he sidles up to me and says that he and Paddy are going to renege on the cemetery part of the service. They are going to go back home to make sure the fires will be kept stoked so the house will be warm when his mother gets back.

It is a lame excuse; neighbours have stayed behind to look after things. I surmise that they're going to a tavern, not a decent thing to do at a time like this, but I lack the will to call him on it. Besides, I don't want to bring his defection to Philomena's attention, so I merely raise my eyebrows to acknowledge hearing him.

When we return from the cemetery, Greg, as usual, on account of the ruts in the lane, stops the car halfway up to the house. When we open the doors and step outside, we smell smoke. The three of us sniff the air and look around to see where it is coming from. Between the wind and the fog, we can't detect its direction, but when we get nearer to the house we hear the splintering of wood and the squeak of nails being pried loose.

“What the hell is going on?” Greg breaks into a run, and I race after him, leaving Philomena to fend for herself. When we come around to the back of the house, we see Danny up on a ladder wielding a wrecking bar, prying the clapboards from the porch. Most of the studs are already exposed. The air is filled with smoke from the fire Paddy has underway in the landwash.

“What the...what're you doing? What's going on?” Greg stammers.

Danny drops a clapboard to the ground. “Well, Paddy wanted to start a bonfire, and we didn't have enough wood.” He drops down another clapboard.

Greg is in no mood for Danny's humour. “What stupidity are you two up to now? Mom'll freeze to death! What...oh, I...” Understanding dawns on him and, in the same instant, on me. “I'm sorry, b'y. I see what you're doing. It's the right thing. I should have thought of it myself. But couldn't it have waited? There's people dropping by.”

“It's coming off, and it's coming off now,” Danny replies, ripping out nails. “Let whoever is coming come in the front.” He looks down at Paddy who is on his way back for more boards to put on the fire. “Ent that right Paddy? It's coming off now.”

“That's right, b'y.” Paddy stoops to gather up an armful of clapboards. “And like ye said, 'tis goin' back up. But not tonight. And we're goin' to put the door in a different place. Change the whole face of everything. It won't look like the same place at all.”

Danny stops wielding the wrecking bar long enough to ask, “Where's Mom?”

The last time I saw Philomena she was walking behind us up the lane, but when I look over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of her going in the front door. Greg also sees her. He says to Danny, “She's gone in the front door. She knows what's going on. She can't bear to see it being torn down. Maybe you should have warned her. Warned us.”

“No time for that. It just came to us at the church. Paddy mentioned how terrible it was going to be for her to have to walk in and out through that porch a dozen times a day, so I said let's go back and rip 'er down and build 'er bigger.”

Greg surveys the amount of work just to tear it down, let alone put it up. Perplexed, he asks Danny, “Is Paddy going to finish the job? You won't get much done by tomorrow afternoon.”

“No, b'y. You got it wrong. I'm not going back,” Danny drops another clapboard into the pile.

“Did you change your flight?”

“Nope. Cancelled it. No more lumber woods for old Danny boy.”

“But you can't give up your job! What're you going to do? Your work is out there!”

Danny points to the landwash where Paddy is stoking the fire. “See that fellow down there? He's my new boss. Yes siree, Bossman Paddy. He found out yesterday he got a government contract to build houses on that stretch of land just up from the church. Senior citizens' housing. He's hiring me to help him. Carpenter's helper. That's what I'll be.”

He screeches off another clapboard and throws it down for Paddy to cart away. “Imagine that! Old Danny boy a carpenter's helper. Still working with lumber, mind you. Can't seem to get too far away from the woods.”

I hear the kitchen filling up with people, and I know I should go in to help Bridey and Rose with the hostessing, but all I want to do is stay outside and listen to the splintering of wood that I know is taking away the last remnants of Brendan.

I'm no sooner in the kitchen when someone, jumping like Danny to the conclusion that Brendan's death was not accidental, asks, “Wasn't there any sign?”

The question, asked kindly enough, drives a spike through my heart. “No. No sign at all,” I answer, and because I still want to deny the actuality of what has happened, I tack on, “The storm door might have slammed up against him and knocked him off his legs. The wind in that door is something fierce. And he wanted to get some practice in to surprise Greg because he had told him he would take him target practicing one day.”

I can taste my lies as they slip over my lips. I abruptly leave the kitchen and go into the den. Philomena is sitting in Hubert's chair, idling her finger over the groove in its arm. I see blame forming and reforming in her dry eyes. I am certain she is thinking that any mother worth her salt would have seen a dark cloud gathering, would have noticed a shadow cutting across the sun — unless, of course, she was the sort of mother who was preoccupied with worms in codfish, with the overpopulation of seals, with whether she would be nominated for the leadership of her party.

Without reference to the surrounding conversation, without taking notice of Rose, who is passing out crustless sandwiches, without any prompting, Philomena begins to tell about the time she and a couple of her young friends took her father's dory out for a joyride. When they returned to shore, they neglected to haul the dory high enough on the beach so it would be out of reach of the rising tide. Sometime during the night the dory was swept out to sea, never to be glimpsed again. Ever afterwards, her mind's eye saw the dry spot high on the beach where her father had always secured the dory, where she should have secured it if she hadn't been so careless.

I wonder if her off-the-mark story is her way of telling me I was careless with Brendan. Will my mind's eye always have a dry spot to remind me of this carelessness, and will that dry spot be Brendan's empty room? Philomena's drier-than-beach-rocks eyes? Greg's cool civility?

Shortly after Philomena's allegory, I make my excuses and go upstairs to bed. But not to sleep. Even when daylight disappears and night comes, I still don't sleep. I get up several times. Sometimes I go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and sometimes I sit by the bedroom window and stare out in the direction of the cemetery.

Although I cannot see Dickson's Hill from my window, I can see it crystal clear in my mind. I see the mound of fresh earth, just a whisper away from the gathering of Corrigans. I wonder if Brendan is cold and if he can see the November-grey sky, empty except for one pale, washed-out star. And I wonder if he is already feeling the vastness of eternity and the finality of forever. And if he misses his family, all gathered in the house where he had spent the happy times of his life. And I wonder, too, whether, if it were possible for him to relive Sunday morning, he would do things differently.

I get up at daybreak far more exhausted than I had been before I went to bed. Philomena and Greg never even pretended to try to sleep. Greg spent the night wandering from the den to the kitchen under the pretext of keeping the fires going. Philomena sat at the kitchen table and looked over snapshots that she has kept stored away in a shoebox, tied in bundles. While I begin to set the table for breakfast, she continues to look at the worn snapshots, picking out paragraphs in each cracked and brown-faced life to relate to Greg whenever he comes into the kitchen to stoke the fire. From the way she stares at each picture, I can tell that it comforts her to recall her many relatives already on the other side who could meet her grandson, a soul in special need of being met because his sudden death did not allow him to make any preparation for the journey.

“They were all on hand to meet him,” she says, naming names. “And they made him feel welcome. I have no worries on that score.”

Philomena's pictures are her treasured possessions. After Hubert died she began mislaying things — glasses, purse, keys — as if, now that he was gone, she was willing to let old age have its way with her. But she never mislaid her photographs. These she kept tidily arranged in their box, although they were stacked away helter skelter in her brain.

When I come to the table to set down the plates, she holds up a picture for my inspection. Greg's First Communion. He is dressed in a Sunday suit and has a white ribbon in his lapel. He is looking straight into the camera, sober and serious, the seeds of the lawyer already germinating within him. Danny is standing a little behind Greg. He is dressed in short pants, obviously his play clothes. From Danny's grin and his unkempt appearance, it is clear that he jumped into the picture uninvited, mischievously barging in on Greg's special day.

“That scamp,” Philomena says, and I know she is referring to Danny.

I offer to refill her cup from the pot of tea she has kept brewing all night on the back of the stove. She merely shakes her head. When I continue to set the breakfast table around her, she gathers the loose pictures together so she can tuck them into their separate bundles before placing them back in the box. When she comes to the last picture, she runs her roughened hand over it. It is a photo of herself and Hubert on their wedding day. It shows them young and in love, not yet ripped and torn by the many heartaches yet to come.