On Canaan's Side (26 page)

I come full circle. I feel it in my bones. Just after waking, as I brewed up the tea, and wondered did I have the true desire to drink it, I stopped what I was doing, and put my two hands to my face.

When I received the phone call, asking me to come to the school, I had no idea what it was for. It was some years since Bill had attended, and it was a Sunday. Furthermore it was only nine a.m. But I went, dutifully enough. I wondered had they confused me with someone else, or had dialled the wrong number, and would be surprised to see me instead of the person they had in mind. I called a cab, and nice Mr Jensen drove me. He was giving out about all the new people in Bridgehampton, even though I suppose it gave him more work. He didn’t like what had happened to the price of land. He said his own children would not be able to afford to build houses there. He thought the government should do something about it, but he didn’t think they would. America was all for the rich now, he said.

It was the usual cab talk, soothing in its way. Change happens everywhere, and we could never be immune to that here. I was grateful for my niche. It was a beautiful morning, and I was inclined to optimism. I was sure in my heart that Bill would recover from his difficulties. I knew he was drinking far more than he used to. Stacy had rung me just the day before, saying he had come to her house, and had stood outside and shouted up at the windows. She had asked me if I could ask him not to do that. I thought I might ask Mrs Wolohan to revive the college plans, and see how Bill responded to that. With all that had happened, even so, I thought, well, he’s young, and the heart recovers. All it needs is time, and people to be thinking about you. Somehow I could imagine him, manning a forest station, watching out for fires. The sunrise itself out there in the wilderness a sort of fire, the sunset a conflagration.

Nonsense like that. Comforting stuff. Delusional, I suppose.

They brought me down to the boys’ lavatory. I am not sure if I was ever in a male urinal before. They had already cut him down off the cubicle door. The hook was absurdly low, as if placed for a young child, high school though it was. I marvelled in a strange way that he had managed to hang himself on that. His army tie had been cut from his neck, and he was lying on a stretcher. I asked had there been efforts to revive him, and the ambulance man said he didn’t know. He said they had waited for me to come, but he had to get back as soon as possible, as there was a fire on the highway out past Southampton. There was a nice cop there I recognised from the town, and a nurse. The doctor had been and gone, apparently. All this I saw and registered nowhere except on the very top of my brain. Nothing sank in further than that.

He lay on the floor, slightly turned, his legs bent at the knees. He looked awfully young. Not as young as when he came, but young. I wondered had he been brought out of the mountains to anything good. I just did not know. I knew that I had loved him and would have gladly given my life for his, a thousand times over.

I suppose his face was altered by the way he had died, but I don’t remember it like that. In my memory, his face is beautiful and soft, his hands with their long fingers lie open like the flower Honesty. There is no breath in his body but the eyes seem to be still looking at the world, as if by looking on even after death he might penetrate to its mystery.

There should always be rain for a funeral, or if the weather is to be dry, frost, and snow deepening spoonful by spoonful, although this would make the work of the gravedigger harder. Nowadays they have a little digger for that work. They made a cut into the earth about three by seven feet, very expertly. I imagine the men finished off the work with the spade, it was so neat and clean. Like lads up on a high bog in the Dublin Mountains, slicing the sods of turf with a precision that only the water-hen and snipe can see.

But that day – and long ago it seems, but really only the length of this strange ‘confession’ – the sun moved through the trees like water. The trees were solemn, full-leaved, and stately, and the sunlight poured through them. It might have been a liquid or a thing you could touch. Something you could take a portion of, weighing it out or cutting it, and add into a cake mixture. The sunlight moved through the trees like a gold wind. It was full of things, human things, whispers, old bits of talk, past matters, and the cancelled future. There was a thin, inching wind. They were lowering his body down in its veneered casket with the oak lines painted onto the pine, the idea of a better wood onto the true and honest wood. He was going down into the earth. The sunlight poured through the trees like a liquid. His companions in the army had come out, and one of the young boys blew a bugle, and his sergeant unfolded the lovely flag and spread it over the mock oak, and down he was lowered by his sundered friends, and soon enough he was there, at the bottom of the hole, and they, after their appointed ceremony, slowly went away, to do whatever young soldiers do after a burial like that. I cannot say, I would not say. The sunlight moved through the trees, approaching the rim of the grave with its own simple gravity, as if God Himself had taken the form of sunlight and was timidly looking in, afraid of his own creation, to view the matter bare and unadorned, afraid of what He had done, or what He had let happen. The old trees shrugged in their absolute magnificence and luxury, and the boy who meant more to me than my own sere life was packed away like a store of potatoes into a potato pit, for which the cottager will never return.

Afternoon

I will go out now into the village and fetch my few and mortal messages. I have the house neat and tidy of course and it will be no trouble to Mrs Wolohan, and I am sure she will forgive me the slight untidiness of this body, lying completed and still.

It is only one last bit of a life that I undo. Lord, it is nothing, absolutely nothing. A year, or two.

I don’t leave much. I have put such things as I value into a box, but who will want them I couldn’t say. No one. I wonder if there might be anyone in Ireland who would want them, if I had an address. The photos of Ed and Bill and Joe, which might only seem unimportant to someone else, even a relative. The letter from my father about Maud, and the three letters from Annie, sent in the 30s, the 40s and then the 1960s, the later one asking me to come and visit, but in characteristic fashion, supplying no address. And I thought it was better left, busy as I was, and settled with Mrs Wolohan, and believing, oh believing in the ancient adage to let those sleeping dogs lie. But Maud and Annie and Willie and my father never left me anyhow. There is never a day goes by that we don’t drink a strange cup of tea together, in some peculiar parlour-room at the back of my mind. Then there are Ed’s army papers and suchlike, and Bill’s letters, and both their drawings from school, Bill’s drawing of the hanged man that so upset his teacher Miss Myers.

I suppose all will be bagged up and set in the trash. At last Mrs Wolohan will have her little house back. God bless her for her beautiful and infinite patience.

I am thankful for my life, infinitely. I am thankful for my father, my sisters, Tadg, Cassie, Joe, Ed, and Bill. To take your own life used to be a mortal sin, so mortal that the priest would not let your body lie within the boundaries of the graveyard. It very likely still is. But that is all the guesswork of mortal men. No one should say they know God’s mind, you cannot speak for God. I confess it is a little while since I made my once customary journey to Our Lady of Poland church in Southampton, to make my confession to the nice Polish priest there. It is a long long while, in fact. But now I have made my confession here. Let God weigh it up, and see what must be done with me. I am taking the risk of going before I am called. I wish to present myself early at St Peter’s gate.

I fancy just up the track inside the gates will be a figure waiting, and that by the agency of God’s mercy I will be let through. I wish, I wish to walk forward hurriedly to that figure, to embrace him again, just as, standing that first day in my house, he once to my astonishment embraced me.

Night

Mr Eugenides, who bears the cleanest face in Christendom, was deeply solicitous, as only a man can be when he has married his public to his private face, which as always was discreet, and in the same moment sincere.

‘You will be sorry and weary,’ he said, in his eccentric phrasing, ‘for a long time. Believe me, Mrs Bere, I do know. My own father was lost in the fighting in the Peloponnese, ah, ah, many years, many years ago. Sorrow, sorrow! The sorrow of countries, and our own private souls. Never grows lighter.’ And indeed as he spoke I caught a full measure of his sorrow. It mingled and danced with my own.

‘Thank you, Mr Eugenides,’ I said.

And with an elaborate eloquence of gesture he smoothed at his smooth counter, with both hands, as if he might soothe the lost tree itself it was made of, and nodding his head presidentially as he did so.

And I told him I was not sleeping well, and ought I go to Dr Earnshaw for a proper prescription? But Mr Eugenides would hear nothing of it, and he found on his computer evidence of a recent script for me, and he proposed to add to this, or ‘stiffen’ it, as he said, whatever he meant by that, he hardly intended it to mean like putting additional spirits in a drink. But at any rate then he would take no money, would have nothing to do with the bills I fetched from my handbag, as I thought I must, since I had not the intention to pursue the pills on my insurance – but no, no, he would have nothing of it, he pressed on me a half-dozen cards of sleeping pills – ‘Samples anyhow, Mrs Bere,’ he called them, which I don’t think they were, judging by their pristine appearance. I left the shop with his consoling voice behind me and the little set of pills in my bag, splayed out loosely among the old lipsticks and compacts, like a strange hand at cards.

My road home seemed all the more vivid to me as I wended along it. The trees with their leaves crackling in the breeze, the little parsimonious vistas of yards and shining cars, and then the generous vistas of budding marshland and the lacy trim of the sea on the horizon. Nothing was wrong with it, nothing was wounded. The road where I had often walked, content enough, where Bill had driven along so often in his beat-up car, his windows open and his music burgeoning out, a kind of gipsy in this composed world.

I came in my gate. The sea sat out on the beach like a thousand patients at a surgery, still, vexed, worrisome. It was so late in the afternoon that the world, like the shops soon in the village street, was closing. Colours were being picked up from the landscape and the seascape, the brighter blues, the ribbons of inexplicable yellow sitting out on the water, the thousand nesting places of the highlights caused by the sun. But the sun was falling away under the table of the world, like a drinking man. All the plucked colours of the landscape it had gathered into itself, it was a fire for consuming them, it was doing something very violent and terrible, off there in the distance. Now my flowers also burned in their beds, as if reluctant to give up their fantastical plumage. The dark would soon tear that away also, erase maybe for the last time all my tiny victories over soil and salt wind. It would pull away their colours, and then the colours of the struggling lawn, and then my door, my walls, my roof, pull all the colours away, and the colours of my heart with them.

I stepped in the door and stood in the hall, a stranger at last, as if I had never been there before. Indeed it looked bigger and wider, and for the first moments I was taken by confusion. I was staring at things I knew well, and did not know at all. The further door into my kitchen was open, and I could see the sea-light spread like a new plastic paint on the Formica table. There was something beautiful about it, beautiful, vivid, and strange, and I knew in that instant that a person could be truly happy there, all its tinny accoutrements ranged about them, and that I myself had been that privileged person for a long long time. It seemed to me that this new strangeness was the fashion of my dwelling saying goodbye. It knew what I intended and was embroiled in its own necessity for courtesy. I knew, I exulted in the fact that when I was done, there would be something so slight lying there in the dress I wore. That the infinite gap between two points, in this instance being alive and being dead, that the mathematicians tell us cannot be closed, would be closed. I would not have any distance at all to go to nothing.

But still I stood there. This old lady who intended to take her own life with Mr Eugenides’ little pills. Something other than the dark was convening beyond the kitchen, marking the darkening window glass, was it even an army of the fog, legions upon legions rising up from the surface of the sea, exhausted soldiers finding again their strength, their fabled lives, and coming onto the beach of Bridgehampton, to take it in a rightful conquest? I did not know. I felt I would never know anything again, I was not in any way dismayed by the feeling. I was absolutely in cahoots with that moment, because contained in it I sensed both my disappearance and my queer victory. I carried Bill in my breast, and now instead of it being a stony weight that would kill me, crush the last breath from me, it was something else again entirely, a lightness, a veritable possession, as if I was a little cart for him, to carry his lightest of souls into heaven. I stood there, an utterly old, ruined, finished woman, and the breath was taken out of me, but not by grief or human vengeance. The peaceful darkness filled the kitchen, crept into the kettle to make a nest for darkness, crept into the sugar tin and the baking trays, played in the curves of the ladles and the big mixing spoons, touched everything, peering at everything, even into those cancelled spaces no one sees, the tops of cabinets and the farms and asylums of dust that lie under fridge and cooker. And the darkness was so dark that it looked to me like light, though it wasn’t, it was a dark I understood well enough, it was the insides of something, like pips, like kernels, hard poems and items of God that God keeps his own counsel on, keeps secret and marvellous, almost selfishly, greedily, but who can blame Him? The darkness enfolded on itself, like a fog made miniature, it turned and turned and advanced, and framed suddenly in great clarity and lovely simplicity, a creature dancing, dancing slowly, its collar studded with glass jewels, glinting darkly, dancing, dancing, the long, loose-limbed figure of a bear.