In Too Deep (17 page)

He knew that he had survived certain drowning, surely a miracle, but he couldn't find even a stirring of happiness in the fact. In his mind, it made God cruel beyond compare for saving him. His experience had been that problems rarely found their own solutions, and the life that spun ahead of him seemed set to offer only pain: a circus of accusations, maybe even the horrifying indignity of a trial. It was hard to locate even a grain of compassion in sparing him for that sort of ordeal. Mercy, real mercy, would have been to drag him under without giving him the chance to think his way out of what was happening. This, he knew, was what people meant when they spoke of having their very own crosses to bear. Sick with anger, he lay back, studied the sky and cursed the heavens.

There was a solution, of course. All he had to do was wade back out into the water, out and out until he was deep enough to sink. But where, just a few hours ago, the idea of a swim thrilled every nerve in his body, now the prospect of that coldness was too much to even contemplate. The edge of the sea lay some twenty feet or so away, caught in mid-retreat, and the surface moiled with a vicious cunning. God was at it again, talking him out of his bad thoughts.

After an hour, he got slowly to his feet and staggered up the beach to where he had left his clothes. They were wet through and coated in sand. He thought of taking them down to the water's edge and rinsing them out, but the idea seemed to call for too much energy. He dressed, not caring about how the clothes felt around him, then considered the ocean once more. It was as restless as before, the waves churning their whitish bilge up against the strand. Finally, he turned and walked up the beach to where he had dropped his bicycle.

Sunday was the day he set aside for tending to the grass. Every Sunday morning, after first mass had ended, he'd climb the low hill behind the chapel to where the graveyard lay hunched against the wind. The passing years had made the whole thing less of a chore, somehow, and there were midweek days now when he'd straighten up from the handle of the plough, groaning as some invisible hammer beat painful nails into his lower lumbar region, and find himself thinking almost wistfully of the Sunday to come, that hour or two that he'd spend on his knees over the grave, scraping moss and the stubbornly creeping fronds of ivy from the granite headstone, tearing weeds and dandelions from the stone trimming, and keeping the grass low and uniform with a pair of small hand-shears. Some of the graves, the newer ones, had coloured pebbles, chippings that shone like stained glass whenever it rained, but he was determined that his grave should have grass.

He had never married. He knew that many people in the village thought him odd, a little bit eccentric, but some men just weren't the type who bothered with such details as wives and families. Early on that had bothered him a little, and there were plenty of nights coming in cold and weary from the fields when he could have imagined nothing nicer in the world than the idea of a wife waiting to comfort him with a few gentle words. Other men returned home on such nights to a smiling woman, to the enticing smell of a lamb stew, the promise of a roaring fire and a comfortable chair. And in bed, maybe a late embrace, some small but heartfelt human contact that could make a lot of things seem better than they really were. His lot, though, was to open his door to a cold breeze and darkness. Occasionally, out of some determination, he'd find half an hour during the day to prepare a pot of stew, and he'd make enough then to last a week or more, piling every ingredient that came to hand into a large pot and letting the whole concoction simmer until everything – the cheapest cuts of mutton or beef as well as the carrots and potatoes and onions and pearl barley, even cabbage, if he had it – had been reduced down to something like a gelatinous pulp. Later, and in the nights that followed, he'd eat plates of the stuff out of duty and because it offered a modicum of heat, and he'd sneer at the empty fireplace and tell himself that he didn't need a wife, that it wouldn't be worth having a woman around just for the sake of a pot of stew. Women were peculiar sorts. He recalled his mother, but vaguely; she had been as peculiar as any of them, fussing over things that didn't matter at all, moaning about never having enough money, or needing a new dress, or about the condition of the wallpaper. The kind of complaints that, if truth be told, really had very little to do with living. And he remembered, too, how his father would stand there, head bowed until his stubble-ridden chin was planted against his chest, kneading the top rung of a kitchen chair's back, those big hard hands fairly strangling the wood. His father had been a strong man in almost every way imaginable, but when women talked, there was nothing to be said.

Some men needed wives, just as some needed to be told when to wake up, when to eat and how to dress. Others got by just fine on their own, and if the solitude of that could be lonesome, it could also be soothing. It was true that he hadn't set out intentionally to remain alone, and back in his younger days he could cast his eye with the best of them, but as he left behind his twenties and wandered on into an imperceptibly deep middle-age, he found that living alone was a state that suited him just fine. In his life, there was no one to complain when he drank too much, no one to push him to mend broken things around the house or to paint walls that would only grow dirty again anyway from the smoke of the turf fire. He used the house for eating and sleeping, nothing more than that, and over the years his personality had developed too many sharp corners to bother much about comforts and soft things.

Money was his way of measuring success. After his father died, the farm had come to him. It was in a shambling state, rundown and barely viable, but he worked hard to make a go of things, tending to the major problems first and then slowly extending until eventually he had doubled their landholding to almost thirty acres, rearing herds of upwards of eighty head of cattle. After a time, it no longer even felt like work to him. He'd rise at four, toil in the fields or in the barns until nine or ten o'clock at night, and even later in the summer, until he knew every blade of grass and pothole on his land, every hair on the back of every cow. As a small personal indulgence, he kept an acre free for growing potatoes and cabbages, and he tended to that patch of ground like a devout gardener. Beyond that, there was little else he needed.

The idea of a grave struck him one day while he was furrowing the ground to lay a row of spring onions. His years of hard work had paid off, making him a wealthy man, and while his hands cut open the dark soil he let his mind wander as to what sort of things people spent money on in their search for happiness. He was aware that some men liked to throw away their hard-earned savings on fine cars, noisy low-slung Italian things that were painted in the gaudiest of colours and could cover a hundred miles of distance in a faster time than it took a thirsty man to put away a pint of stout. Others squandered what they earned on trips abroad, to all those places that looked cut out of a John Wayne film or a wildlife programme. But he already had a van, an old rust-laden shell of a thing that couldn't boast much in the way of engine-might but which got him – with just a little coaxing – where he wanted or needed to go. And he didn't see himself as much of a one for holidays, either. The farm needed him here, not wandering around Hollywood or Kenya or the Grand Canyon. But he had enough money hoarded now, probably more than he'd ever need, and he had the idea that he'd really like to buy himself something nice, something that would feel sufficiently rewarding for all those years of slavery to the farm. He just couldn't decide what that might be.

And then the idea stormed his mind.

It felt so complete and perfect that he raised himself from his knees and pushed his filthy hands into the small of his back, his face tilted towards the sun. The sky wasn't much to look at; clouds of veined marble, bruised and headed with the assurance of a springtime outburst, and the small yellow sun seemed as mediocre as ever, a glowing thumbprint of little worth. The idea boomed through his mind with all the sung hosannas of a revelation, but the world around him looked unperturbed. He'd been searching for something more than mere flash, something that would last longer than a memory or a well-maintained motor. Something with the eternal qualities of rock, if such a thing were possible. And there it was, fully conceived in his mind's eye: a grave. And not just any grave either, but the biggest and very best grave in the parish, maybe even the county. That was perfect. All other considerations fell away and he set himself to planning.

He paid out for a pocket-sized hardbound notebook and a good pen. Organisation, he decided, was probably the key to a successful hunt. And every Sunday after first mass, instead of getting himself back to the chores that were stacking up around the farm, he took himself on tours of local villages to spend an hour or so just strolling around their graveyards. The Protestant graves, on the whole, tended to be more impressive than their Catholic counterparts, and after a few weeks he gave up on the Catholic graveyards altogether. He was fifty-two years old and, while time wasn't necessarily of the essence, he decided that there was no sense in being wasteful about it either. Focus was important.

Within a month he was forced to widen his search, and his Sunday excursions became all-day affairs, carrying him further and further afield until he was fringing the county bounds, wading through knee-high swathes of nettles and dogweed and poking around in jungles of collapsing headstones. Afterwards, he'd lunch in one pub or another, taking on board a pint of stout and a sandwich if there was one to be had, really making a day of it. He'd settle in the corner snug, relax with his pint and set to scribbling down descriptions of what he had seen. The notebook filled steadily, to the point where he had to buy a second one, and in this he broke his explorations down into categories that compared height, width and stone type. Such behaviour didn't seem obsessive, no more obsessive surely than the way some men hoarded the statistics of their favourite hurling teams. He'd found himself a hobby, that was all, and an enjoyable one, at that. And though many of the stones he looked at were rubbed bare by exposure to decades, even centuries, of rain and gale, he developed a fondness for inscriptions that were pithy or poetic, and he noted the best ones down with care, not so much with the intention of utilising them for his own epitaph, but simply for personal pleasure. Near the back of the second notebook were crude but generally successful sketches of the very best stones, the towering Celtic crosses and trumpeting cherubs. One grave he'd seen had even carried the very shape of Death itself, a hooded figure armed with a scythe. Time had broken away the points and edges, but the menace was no less fearsome for that, and even though he shivered at the notion of having such a sculpture loom above him for all eternity, there was something sort of enticing about it, too.

Eventually, after he had exhausted virtually every graveyard of note in the entire county, he turned his thoughts to making a decision. Granite seemed the logical choice of stone. Marble was strong, yes, but its lacquered gleam felt overpowering, not in keeping with his idea of eternal rest. He liked old, unfussy things, and marble just felt too contemporary. Granite had no patina; it could be cut smooth and polished clean but it would still hold the sense of having been hauled from the earth.

Both of his parents lay in the family plot, a double grave set in the upper tier of the cemetery. The first Sunday after early mass that he had taken himself up there, he grimaced with shame. It was his first visit in years. Christ, how long was it? Twenty? More than that, he decided. He stood shin-deep in weeds and briars, and bowed his head. The headstone that had stood since the time of his great-grandfather on his father's side, a short and simple stone cross that even in his childhood had long since been worn clean of markings, now lay knocked over backwards and smashed into three distinct pieces. The ocean gales and violent rainfall had done for it, he knew, that incessant natural beat pounding until it had shifted and reshaped the very earth itself. He drew and spent a deep, weary breath. The morning was overcast, the hillside draped in a thin veil of mist. A hunchbacked willow tree leaned down from behind the cemetery's nearby boundary wall, its leaves shifting and soughing in the cold air. He should never have allowed his family grave to deteriorate so badly, but the farm had eaten up years of his life, and time had passed so quickly.

He turned, just before starting back down the hillside, and considered his surround. The village stretched away down below; he could make out familiar buildings, and he could see where the sweep and rise of the land cloaked his farm from sight. In the west, the ocean rolled, a torpid grey slate flecked with frothing, breeze-tugged spumes. But up here, everything felt calm and peaceful, the mist and the feral edge of dishevelment adding something elemental to the atmosphere. A sense of the eternal, he decided.

Things needed to be put to rights. Every Sunday morn-ing, he made the slow climb, doing a little at a time. For a man so used to the rigours of manual labour, it would have been easily within his capabilities to clear the site in two or three visits, but he had no reason to hurry, and the routine became so quickly and easily pleasurable that he would have happily toiled at the chore forever, weeding, plucking stones, turning the earth and trimming the grass. Every week, mindless of the weather, he'd limit himself to an hour or two of work. Afterwards, he'd take himself down to Reilly's pub in the village, and he'd sit at the end of the bar, or by the fire once the days began to take on a chill that made it all the way into his bones. And once the stout had taken full hold, he'd profess aloud, though to no one in particular, that there was not a grave in the village, even in the entire county, that could compare with his own. ‘Once the stone is in place, you'll all see what I mean,' he'd gasp, because the drink had a habit these days of making him slightly breathless. ‘Fit for a High King,
'
he'd add, letting the worn stubs of his dirt-encrusted fingers push the scattering of loose coins around the table, enough for one more pint, perhaps two. It was difficult to break old habits; money was a hard-earned thing, to be equated with exhaustion, sore hands and back pain, and the idea of parting so freely with it, especially on such a frivolous indulgence as drink, jarred with him. So one more, maybe two, and that would have to be his lot. ‘Fit for a High King,' he'd say, and some of the other men at the bar or seated nearby would look up and nod. By then, though, most had heard it all before. They'd tend to their own pints and let him talk until he'd drank away his coins or until his sense had returned. Then he'd rise, nod goodbye to old Reilly behind the bar, and make his way home to put in the few hours of remaining daylight at baling hay, milking the goat, or tending to any one of a hundred other small demands insisted upon by his little piece of farm.

The sculptors refused to etch his name into the stone. He tried to explain what he wanted, that of course they'd have to leave the date blank but the rest could be worked on, surely, the names of those gone before him and, at the bottom, his own name. They agreed to everything, even the leading epitaph on which he had settled: ‘The Dineen family', and just below, in a beautiful Old English script, ‘They worked the soil'. But when it came to adding his own name, he was met with outright refusal. Some legal grey area, apparently. ‘Anyway, don't you think that's a bit on the ghoulish side?' the man on the telephone had said, in a tone that seemed obtuse and not a little judgemental, and there was nothing else to do but give in, because there was just no talking to some people. Besides, once the stone was in the ground even the law would find it pretty difficult to stop him adding anything he wished. And surely there was more than one man in Cork that could handle a chisel.