Fit Month for Dying (4 page)

“And girl, I loved it when you told the Premier there'll be nothing left in our waters but the hulks of scuttled fishing vessels because the boats will be no good to the fishermen anymore. And the few fish that'll be left will be so full of splinters they'll only be good for firewood — they'll have nothing else to eat but those scuttled boats.”

“Imagine taking on the Premier!” Danny says. “Imagine that!”

“And she'll be back in power before long,” Paddy loyally predicts. “All the signs are about that the Liberals are going to make a come-back.” He wags a finger at Danny. “She'll be our premier yet. Mark my words.”

Again we fall into silence, but after only a few minutes the sounds of Hubert's strangling once more press unmercifully against my eardrums. I gulp for air, and even though the hall is bitterly cold, I break out in a heavy sweat. Paddy Flynn leans against the stair railing, a touch of a smile still on his face. In desperation, I say, “Paddy! Tell us some stories. You never run short of stories. Come on!”

Danny pokes Paddy in the ribs. “Come on, b'y. You're not here for your good looks. Keep talking. Make something up if you have to.”

Paddy straightens up, rearranges his legs to get more comfortable and looks towards Greg for permission to keep talking. Greg shrugs. The night is already out of his control.

“Did I ever tell ye about the time me mudder went to Boston to visit my sister, Maggie, and she died up there and they flew her body home to St. John's. And my God Almighty, they lost her?”

“No,” Danny and I say in unison. Greg, too, shakes his head. By now even he needs a distraction from Hubert's watery breathing. He has laid his reading material aside and has begun softly drumming his hands on his thighs.

Paddy takes a swallow of beer and swipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Well, 'twas like this,” he begins, rearranging his legs once more, settling himself in for the telling. “Well, you see, she died early one morning up in Boston. A heart attack. We got a phone call telling us about it and that they were sending her back in the morning on the plane. My sister couldn't come with her because at that time she had so many youngsters at home she practically had to turn them outdoors to count them. So we knew we had to go in to St. John's to pick her up. To the Torbay Airport.”

He looks at me. “But, of course, before we could leave home there was stuff we had to do. Like getting the parlour ready.” Paddy knows that if anyone can understand about getting parlours ready for wakes, I can, but for the other two he outlines the preparations necessary to convert a room into a funeral parlour. “We brought in the kitchen chairs to lay the coffin on. Four of them. Got out the candles. Just like that candle in there, very same pale colour. Only we had two of them. Got them on Candlemas Day. Mopped and dusted and threw out the flies that had hung around over the winter. And we brought in lilacs. Hardly opened, mind you, even though it was mid-June. Capelin-skull time. You knows what that's like. On top of that we had the coldest damn spring, the harbour still had slob ice. There was even a bloody big iceberg grounded out there, came too close to the shore and got hitched up in the shallow water. Just off the lighthouse. Got some neighbours to come stay with the children so me and Bridey and me brother-in-law, Thomas Kiervan, could go to the Torbay Airport. Mick Riley loaned me his station wagon. See, I only had a Volkswagen. And there's not much space in one of them things for a coffin.”

He leans over towards Greg, steadying himself by anchoring one hand on the linoleum. “You knows Mick Riley? Lives up the road a ways.”

Greg nods. “Up by Dolph Simmons. Right!”

“Right you are. Damn glad of his offer I was. Didn't have the hearse out here then.

Thanks to our MHA here, we got a hearse now. She weaselled the money out of the government somehow.” He turns to Danny. “Don't suppose ye knows this, you being away more than you're home, but a fellow from down the bay set himself up a funeral parlour here not long ago. So fancy 'tis a damn shame you have to be dead to spend the night there. Talk about snazzy! My sonny b'y, 'tis almost as good as the Newfoundland Hotel.”

Danny begins searching his clothing for matches, flailing his hands against his pockets. “Hold it! Hold! Hold it right there, Paddy! I'm out of matches.” He takes a long drink from his bottle of Black Horse, tipping his head far back to let the last drops run down his throat. “You got matches, Paddy?”

“Not a one, b'y. I've been using yours all night, if ye haven't noticed.”

I remember the packet of matches Philomena left on the night table by the death vigil candle. I tell Danny, and he creeps into Hubert's room. Paddy takes advantage of the break, says he's going downstairs to see a man about a dog. Within a few minutes Danny comes back into the hall carrying the lighted candle in its holder, holding it aloft. Greg hurries to get up.

“Oh my God, is it time? Is he going?”

Danny calmly motions him to sit back. “Naw, b'y. Still the same. There was only one match in the packet. So I lit the candle. That way I can have all the cigarette lights I need, and we'll have the candle already lit when the time comes.”

Clutching the candleholder in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he gingerly lowers himself to the floor. Once settled, he slips the cigarette between his lips, bends low over the candle and draws flame into the tobacco. He straightens up, exhales a mouthful of smoke and sets the candleholder on the floor. With the side of his hand he carefully shunts it towards the wall, out of harm's way.

Paddy returns, sits down and reclaims his story. “Well anyway, like I said, off we went to St. John's. When I gets to the airport, I goes up to the desk and asks for me mudder. Two fellows there. In uniforms. There wasn't a passenger in sight. Not a soul.

“‘It's cleared out,' one of the fellows tells me, as if I can't see for meself. So I tell them I didn't expect to find her in the waiting room. I say, ‘She was travellin' in a coffin.' My sonny b'y, as soon as I said that their eyes darted to a sheet of paper they had laid out on the counter with names on it. Passenger list. Maybe it said Mudder's coffin was supposed to be on the plane. Anyway, as soon as they scanned that paper, they took off.” He swipes his hands together. “Just like that, they took off. I could see them making phone calls. They went out back to the freight shed. They came back in and made more phone calls. They looked in corners. Finally they admitted they had lost poor Mudder.”

Paddy stops the telling long enough to uncap two fresh beer. He passes one to Danny and takes a few gulps from his own bottle. This time before continuing he rubs his mouth dry with his sweater sleeve.

“‘Lost Mudder?' I sez. Now I'm thinkin' of all of those people back home in the parlour waitin' fer her. All the people Bridey notified before we left. And I'm thinkin' of the lilacs wiltin' in the water jugs, givin' off a dead smell even without a body. And I'm thinkin' of the fire in the kitchen stove having to be kept low so the wake room won't heat up. And I'm thinkin' of the house being filled with relatives and we'd have to hold them over until we found Mudder. Even my Uncle Matt said he was goin' to try and make it to the house, and he's so thin you can hear him cuttin' the wind when he walks by. Always sick he is.

“Ye fellows knows how Uncle Matt is. Always something wrong. If 'tis not his heart, 'tis his arthritis, and if 'tis not his arthritis, 'tis a lump here or a bump there. Enjoys poor health, ye might say. But he's me mudder's brudder so I had to ask him.

“So I sez to those fellows at the counter — and I can tell ye I'm pretty steamed up by now — ‘Blood of a bitch, buddies,' I sez, ‘how could you lose Mudder? She was dead. Nailed in a box. Not like she could wander off or anything. Not like she could belly up to a bar and get plastered and miss the flight.'”

He pauses long enough to take another swallow from his bottle. He burps, mumbles “Beg yer pardon,” and begins again. “So when I sez this to the fellows at the desk, this head guy comes out and tells me to go home. They have another plane coming in. They'll get back to me later. Made it seem as if I was kickin' up a fuss over a lost suitcase or somethin'. Well sir, that did it for me. ‘
Get back to me later
! Me go home? Without Mudder? Because yer too busy to find her?' So I moved in real close to him. Just like this.” Paddy slides across the linoleum floor, right up against Danny. “So close I could smell the fish cakes he had for breakfast. I said, ‘Look here, buddy, I don't give a shaggin' shit if yer busier than a rooster with two dicks, I'm not leavin' here till you finds me mudder.'”

The three of us break into reckless laughter. Even Greg forgets to muffle his mouth. “I'm tellin' ye right now,” Paddy says, pointing at me, “he turned whiter than that blouse of hers. In fact, I've seen corpses with more of a flush.”

Sensing he has gone on long enough, Paddy takes a swallow of beer and rounds up his story. “So between the jigs and the reels and the phone calls, the long and the short of it is, they found poor Mudder out in Vancouver. Upended in a hangar. Standing on her head. A fellow from here who works out there told me that. Upended, he told me, like an old lobster pot against a shed.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I'm tellin' ye, b'ys, it was some hard. An awful feelin'. I knows she was dead and all, but to think of her gettin' treated that way. To think...”

Tears stream down his face. He swipes them away with his sweater sleeve, tries to distract his emotions by fumbling with his beer bottle, wiping its neck with the heel of his hand. Danny reaches over and claps him on the shoulder.

“I knew yer mother, Paddy me son. Mrs. Agnes was a good woman. And those buggers treated her like an old dog. I know it hurts. I know...”

Danny's voice chokes. “Shit! I don't want Dad to die. I never really knew him. Left home too early. Seventeen. And before I left we had words. Never told anyone. Dad never said he was sorry. I didn't either, for that matter. Now 'tis too late. Way too late.”

Danny withdraws his hand from Paddy's shoulder and rubs it over his own face in rapid strokes. In the half-light the glowing ash of his cigarette looks like a firefly crawling over him. “Shit!” he says again. “Shit!”

Greg reaches out and awkwardly pats Danny's knee.

“That's all right, Danny boy. Seemed bad at the time, I s'pose, whatever it was. But he never said anything to me. Nor to Mom, for that matter, because I think she would have told me.”

Danny keeps his head bent. His eyes stare at his knees. “But he never believed me,” he says, barely above his breath. “That's what hurts. Didn't want to believe me. If I was telling the truth then that other blood of a bitch would have to be shown up for what he was. And everything would be brought out in the open. And that's what Dad didn't want to have happen. Didn't want a sniff of scandal to touch his church. I'm certain that was why.”

Greg senses peril. He withdraws his hand from Danny's knee and sits up straight. “What are you getting at, Danny? What happened?”

Paddy and I sit up straighter as well. Foreboding cramps my stomach. Danny looks up at Greg and waves him off. “Nothing, b'y. Nothing at all.”

He lays his cigarette on the neck of his empty beer bottle so he can use both hands to swab away the tears that he wants to pretend aren't there. He says, forcing steadiness into his voice. “Just the beer talking. Just foolishness. Childish stuff. Forget it!”

“It's not foolishness if it hurt you that much,” Greg insists. “Tell us what it was.” He reaches out and places his hand back on Danny's knee. “Come on, Danny. What was it?”

Danny jumps up, muttering he has to go downstairs to get more beer. In his hurry and clumsiness, he tips over the lighted candle he had earlier set aside, the candle all four of us have forgotten about.

“Oh shit!” Danny sputters, seeing the mess of wax beside him. “Look what I've done. I've buggered Dad's candle.”

He fumbles the remaining stub of candle upright so that it looks like a miniature lighthouse surrounded by a sea of congealing wax. The three of us rush to help, but our efforts produce only a humped-up mess.

“Do we have any more candles?” Danny asks frantically, looking at me. “Mom'll have my ass.”

I shake my head. “I don't think so. Just a red one I gave her for Christmas. It won't do.”

“Could we shave off the red?”

“It's too big, as big as a water tumbler.”

“Don't let the wick drown!” Paddy instructs.” A stub is better than nothing. And you'll never get it relit if it drowns.”

I grab a bottle cap and begin baling out the well of liquid that is threatening to snuff out the wick. Greg straightens up, cocks an ear towards Hubert's room and hisses, “Listen! Listen!”

We listen. We hear the wind and the rain. We hear the rattle of the windowpanes. What we don't hear is Hubert's breathing.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” we all cry, scrambling to our feet.

Greg leaps up and runs to wake Philomena. Danny races into Hubert's room. I grab the stub of candle and, cupping my hand around its base, follow behind, walking fast but not fast enough to douse the flame. Seconds later, Paddy is beside me, shoving an empty cigarette packet underneath the candle to save the dripping wax from going on the floor or from scorching my hand. I pick up Hubert's cooling, lifeless hand and wrap it around the wax-encrusted candleholder — by now there isn't enough candle left to hold onto all by itself. As soon as I have secured Hubert's hand in place, I look at Paddy, who looks at Danny, who looks at me, each of us knowing what the other is thinking: if Hubert has found his way to heaven, he must have fumbled for it in the darkness.