House of Memories (13 page)

“I’ll never forget you, Jack,” she sobbed, and then she was standing beside Peter looking out the window and remembering the night that Dad was going into the coffin and it was Jack who had been there beside her.

When she turned around the bed was empty, and Shiner, Peter, Uncle Mark and David were carrying the coffin out the door. Kate, Mom, Nana Agnes and herself walked behind it out through the garden and into the yard where the hearse was parked. She knew that people were standing along the way, but blinded by tears she could not see them. Then the coffin was eased into the hearse. Slowly it moved out of the yard, and they followed it up the long boreen. Jack was making his last journey from Mossgrove.

T
HE MORNING OF
Jack’s funeral, Kate woke before dawn with a throbbing headache. While she lay in the darkness as David, deep in sleep, breathed evenly beside her, her feet were stiff and she felt like a block of black ice. Since she had seen Jack lying in the field, she had been enfolded in a wave of desolation. She had tried to function normally, but her legs and hands had become wooden and her mind had lost its coordination.

In the grey of the early morning her pain was unbearable, and because she did not want to wake David, she slipped quietly out of bed and went downstairs. She lay on the couch in the warm kitchen and let a wave of unrestrained sobbing wash over her. It was a relief to go with the tide of grief. When it abated she was drained but calmer. The yellow rays of dawn were filtering into the kitchen, and when she opened the back door the garden was full of golden light. As she walked down the path, the light encompassed her, and all around white butterflies rose from
the flowers and filled the garden with their delicate fluttering. Jack and herself had shared great days in this place, planning and digging. Now she felt his spirit close to her.

She ran her fingers along the fronds of a tall moist fern and remembered him carefully planting it after digging it off one of the ditches in Mossgrove. He knew that she loved ferns, and one of her fondest memories of childhood was of playing
hide-and
-seek with Ned under the huge ferns in the glen behind the house. “It’s good to have a little bit of the homeplace in your new garden,” Jack had told her as he lovingly planted the fern into a shady corner under a young chestnut that he had already transplanted from his own acre. Now as she looked around, she realised that most of her flowers and shrubs had been nurtured from seeds and slips by Jack. He had green fingers and loved to grow from seed, and many of the young trees around her garden he had brought on from tiny seedlings with constant care. “Your garden should surround you with friends,” he often told her as he brought in yet another little slip from Sarah or Agnes’s garden. Now, as she looked around her, she felt the comfort of all the loving that Jack had given her through this little place. He would always be part of her garden.

She sat on the seat under the beech tree. The early morning sun slanted through the surrounding trees, turning their
dew-laden
leaves into sparkling halos, and a lone blackbird covered himself in silver spray as he hightailed across the grass. Kate felt that she had never before seen the real beauty of this place. Its tranquility soaked into her distressed mind and a calming peace enveloped her. A phrase that Nora had recalled yesterday came back to her: “Where there is sorrow, there is sacred ground.” Because now, even though she was in deep
pain, she also sensed she was in a sacred place. When someone you love dies, she wondered, do you go a little bit of the journey with them? Were Jack and herself now in a new place? Though parted in the physical sense, was there in these early days after death a new spiritual union? Here in her garden, where Jack and herself had worked together with earth and stone creating something beautiful, would there always be part of them here together? She felt his intangible presence all around, enfolding her in a delicate cobweb of kindness which she knew might not last but at least gave her peace for now.

Later in the church, as she knelt between a grim-faced Peter and a silently weeping Nora, her sense of peace prevailed. From where had this blessing come? She had no idea, but was just grateful to Jack that he had come to her rescue and was helping her through this black time. Was he telling her that now she would have to take his place and be the one to help the young ones cope? Was she now to be the comforter of the family? She doubted that she was up to it. As her mind wandered around in questioning circles, she suddenly became aware that while everyone else was now sitting she was still kneeling. Nora was squeezing her fingers, trying to bring her back to reality, and Peter was frowning at her. As she sat down between them, she heard Fr Tim talking about Jack.

“Maybe sometimes we could be accused of waiting until someone dies before we acknowledge how great they are, but in the case of Jack Tobin, I think that we all realised that he was one of the stalwarts of this parish. A hard-working, honest, kind man, who loved this place and all of us. To Jack we were all as good as we could be, and yet he never perceived us to be saints; but he was very tolerant of our weaknesses because he had the
biggest, most generous heart in the parish. Everyone in trouble went to Jack, and he helped in the soundest, simplest, most straightforward way he could. Jack saw solutions where some of us saw dead ends, and his approach was all about application to detail and hard work. As he used to say himself, he knew the seed and breed of the whole place, and what he thought you should not know he kept to himself. Jack was an honourable man. He loved and shared the life of the Phelans through four generations and buried five owners of Mossgrove in his lifetime. He was the backbone of their life, and today they mourn him as a grandfather and father figure and loyal, loving friend. And yet his going, though sudden and unexpected, was just as he would have wished it, out in the quietness of his beloved fields where he was totally at home with God and creation. As a man lives, so shall he die, and Jack died exactly as he had lived.”

As she walked down the church after the coffin, Kate raised her eyes and looked at the sea of surrounding faces, and many looked back with tear-filled eyes. How many of these people had Jack helped in his lifetime? Often when she came to his cottage late at night, there was a neighbour with him deep in conversation. Now they were all here to pay their last respects to this kindly man who had helped them though hard patches of their lives. She was glad to see that Danny was under the coffin with Peter, Shiner and David. It would mean so much to Danny and probably come as a surprise to many people unaware of Jack’s recent effort to help him salvage Molly Barry’s homeplace. Jack had been the peacemaker who had seen them through the feuding years with the Conways, and now before he left he had planted the seeds of future peace between Peter and Danny. For Peter to have Danny shouldering Jack’s coffin
was an amazingly generous gesture brought about, she felt sure, by some indefinable urge that Peter himself might not be able to explain. Jack was the source of that inspiration. Is it possible, she wondered, that Jack gone from us is going to be as influential as Jack with us? Now he had all the answers, and so far he was making his presence felt even in the formation of his funeral!

But when they arrived in the graveyard and she watched Jack’s coffin being lowered into the deep, narrow grave, her newfound peace abandoned her. There was no easy passage through this physical separation, and an overwhelming sense of loss swamped her as Nora and Peter wrapped their arms around her and the three of them clung together. Martha stood blank-faced and remote beside them, while Shiner and Danny wept quietly side by side. Finally the grave was covered, and on the piled earth his old schoolfriends, Agnes and Sarah, laid little bunches of wild flowers. The flowers brought a sense of completion to the burial, and then the neighbours and friends lined up to sympathise. Kate had sometimes questioned the value of this exercise, but when old friends of Jack’s or her own appeared in front of her, she found it comforting. Then the crowds ebbed away and only the family and close friends were left.

“Isn’t it great that Dada’s grave is just beside Jack’s?” Nora whispered, her teeth chattering with the cold.

“I always thought that too,” Kate told her, “but now it means far more with Jack here beside them all.”

“There is only Jack and his mother in that grave,” Peter said, trying to steady his voice and get a grip on himself with normal conversation. “Where’s Jack’s father buried?”

“He is with his own people,” Sarah cut in. “That happened when a husband or wife died young and there was a possibility that the one left might marry again.”

“We’d better all get out of this cold or there’ll be a few more of us joining the crowd here already,” Martha told them impatiently, heading for the gate. They trooped after her in pairs and little groups, with the older people stopping along the way to pray at other graves.

Back at the house, Ellen Shine had the fire lighting in the parlour, and rounds of tea and chat began again. The prospect of yet another cup of tea is too much for me, Kate thought, and just then Martha shepherded a few of them out into the back kitchen where she had a row of steaming bowls of soup lined up.

“Thank God,” Kate breathed as the warm creamy soup slid down her throat. “I’m burnt up from tea.”

“Mom, how did you get round to it?” Nora said gratefully.

“Ellen had it ready, and she slipped it out here before the masses would descend on her,” Martha told them.

“I’m so cold,” Nora shivered.

“Graveyards are cold places,” Kate told her gently, “and death chills you from inside out as well.”

“Will we ever get over this?” Nora asked her piteously. “I can’t imagine Mossgrove without Jack.”

“We’ll have to, Norry,” Peter broke in determinedly. “If Jack taught us anything, it was that you had to keep going. Jack never gave up. I remember the day after Dad’s funeral when we were all in a desperate state, he said to me, ‘Come on, Peter lad, down to the river and we’ll do a bit of fencing, because there is healing in doing.’ And he was right, because we were better to
be out in the fields than huddled up in here.”

“All I remember of those days was the blur of pain and feeling that my world had come unstuck,” Nora said quietly, “and Jack was the only solid rock in the middle of the terror. Now there is no rock.” As she started to cry, Kate put her arms around her and ran her fingers soothingly through her long, soft hair.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Kate said, “but Jack would have kept the flag flying, as he used to say. In many ways I suppose we have much to be grateful for because he gave us so much of himself, and maybe now we should be able to go it alone.”

“I don’t want to go it alone,” Nora sobbed.

Her crying set them all off, and Martha, coming into the back kitchen, looked at them in disapproval.

“Will you for God’s sake pull yourselves together and look after the people out there with Ellen and Sarah?” She marched back into the kitchen with a full teapot.

“I suppose she’s right,” Kate sighed. “We’d better help.”

“She’s not,” Peter raged, heading for the back door. “She’s all about law and order. I don’t give a damn about that kind of thing.”

“Let him off,” Kate advised when Shiner made an attempt to follow him. “He needs time by himself. Some of us need to grieve alone and more of us need people. We all learn the best way for us.”

“Well, I have learnt nothing,” Nora said quietly.

“Come on, Norry,” Shiner said gently, holding out his hand to her, “and we’ll walk down along the fields. It will clear your head to get out.”

“I can’t go down to Clover Meadow where it all happened,”
she protested.

“No, no,” he assured her. “We’ll go up along the glen.”

“All right,” she agreed doubtfully, trailing him out the door.

When they were gone, only a white-faced Danny and Kate remained.

“I’m glad that you were under Jack’s coffin,” she told him quietly.

“I couldn’t believe it when Peter asked me,” he said tremulously. “It meant the world to me, as if I was being invited in from the cold. I feel kind of responsible for Jack’s death, because when he got that turn over in my place, I should have insisted on coming over with him.”

“I feel guilty too, Danny,” she confessed, “because I knew that Jack had a dodgy heart, as he called it. I should have insisted on his looking after it. But he did not want to go down that road, and I felt that it was his right to do it his way.”

“I can understand how you feel,” Danny told her.

“The strange thing about death, Danny,” she continued, “it’s full of guilt. So over the next few weeks when you feel bad about Jack, just remember that it is part of the aftermath of death. But you have probably discovered that yourself.”

“I thought that it was only me on account of how my father died. His death haunts me at times,” he confessed.

“As time goes on the guilt will fade, and your perspective on the whole thing will balance out,” she assured him. “Jack knew and understood how the whole thing happened.”

“Did he tell you?” he asked in surprise.

“No, Danny,” she assured him. “Jack would never betray a confidence.”

“I have always felt since the night my grandmother died that
you knew more about us than we do ourselves,” he said ruefully.

“Well, I suppose if you are with families in childbirth and death, you come very close to their inner core,” she told him, “but the strange thing is that your grandmother made me feel that she knew more about the Phelans than we did ourselves. But remember one thing, Danny, that it was Jack’s dearest wish that you would restore your grandmother’s homeplace, because he felt that he owed that to my grandfather.”

“Thanks, Kate,” he said gratefully. “I might need that thought to keep me going, that and money.”

“Sometimes, Danny, solutions come from the most unexpected corners,” she encouraged him, though privately she wondered where on earth the money could come from to restore Furze Hill and to pay off Rory, “but for now why don’t you follow Nora and Shiner up the glen?”

All afternoon she moved between neighbours and old friends, discussing Jack and his sudden death until eventually she felt that she had talked herself to a standstill. She saw Mark and Nora cuddled up close together in the window seat of the parlour, and she slipped gratefully in beside them.

“How do you keep going, Aunty Kate?” Nora wanted to know.

“Auto pilot,” Kate assured her, “but now I need the sustenance of you two.”

“Are you bleeding inside?” Nora asked.

“That’s as good a way as any to describe it,” Kate told her.