Pearl (16 page)

My friend is dead, my friend is dead, my daughter wants to die,
she thinks, over and over, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Surely this is something she should be allowed to weep for. She searches in the seat pocket for the sleeping mask. Does it matter, she wonders, if someone sees tears dripping below a mask? My friend is dead. My daughter is dying. I am alone.

Surely she can be allowed to pray to Devorah. What is prayer, after all, but asking for help, any kind of help you want, saying anything that comes to your mind? That was what she did with Devorah all the time; they helped each other, they told each other everything. They understood each other completely. Neither of them ever judged the other; always, they took the other’s side. Why can she not do that now, talk to Devorah as she always talked to her, ask her for help as she always did? If that was prayer, it must be a permissible kind, even when you are not a believer, when you’ve staked your life on having left belief, in the name of justice, in the name of truth. And who will know she is praying to Devorah? Who will censure her, punish her if she prays for her child who wants to die to the friend of her youth?

But what is the language of prayer for someone like herself who has staked her life against all that prayer stands for? She thinks of her favorite poem, Herbert’s “Prayer.” She has Herbert with her. Her copy with Devorah’s handwriting:
To Maria on her twenty-first birthday. With all my love.

She no longer believes in prayer, but it is still her favorite poem. Learned by heart. Yet her heart has proved inadequate, because she doesn’t in fact remember the whole thing, only phrases, disconnected from the whole: “A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear . . . the milky way, the bird of Paradise . . . the land of spices; something understood.” She had memorized it once, as a Christmas gift to her father: Christmas 1966. She’d learned it in Mother Emmanuel’s class and loved the speed of it, each phrase a whole world, each phrase a complete vision of the desirable. “Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, the milky way, the bird of Paradise.” She had thought it wonderful, the jump from the plain words
ordinary
and
well drest
to the extravagant world of stars and feathers. Proudly, she had recited it to her father on Christmas morning in his library. He tapped his fingers together. “Very fine,” he said, “but without, I think, the spiritual complexity of Hopkins.” She realized she hadn’t pleased him, and immediately she knew why. She had offered him something outside the protectorate of the church. Herbert was an Anglican; therefore he must be named inferior, somehow lacking. He must be condescended to. Did her father feel his response had been inadequate? Did he regret dashing his daughter’s joy? I don’t think so; he would always have seen before his eyes the beacon of his duty, the singular vision, one way and one way only of right being in the world. She excused herself from her father’s study and went up to her room, not to cry but to be alone with the dryness in her heart. There had been a lively warm place where the flame of excitement at the idea of pleasing her father lapped and climbed. Now there were only ashes in an empty and cold grate.

And yet it hadn’t made her love the poem less. She doesn’t believe in anything on the other side of prayer, but she believes in the language of that poem, the potential of language for transformation, the forcing of the miraculous, for comprehension of all that seems to be incomprehensible, a place of rest at last. Surely it is all right to go to your friend, your dead friend, with your wish for the miraculous, your wish for consolation. Surely, at a moment like this, you can speak as you like. She closes her eyes, hoping no one sees her folding her hands, and speaks to her dead friend in what she knows is the language of prayer: the speech of perfect freedom, pure desire. There can’t be anything wrong with it. She presses her head against the cool plastic surface of the window and looks out into the sky, which is beginning to lighten; it is nearly 6 a.m. She will talk to her friend. She will say whatever she wants, as she always did.

Devorah, help me.

Where are you now? We are both in the sky but I can’t see you. Are you part of something now, something that makes sense of everything?

How can this have happened? I loved her so much.

And now she’s saying that her life is worth giving up. All I want to say to her is, “Nothing is worth your life.”

I will stop it. Help me, Devorah. Help me to stop it.

I will stop her.

I will stop her death.

I will make her live.

Help me.

The voice of the pilot interrupts her.

“About to make our descent into Dublin,” says the Irish voice.

And now, Maria thinks, it will begin.

12

“I’m Dr. Morrisey. I’m in charge here. We’ve got to get her to a hospital. We can’t wait any longer.”

A man’s voice responds, one of the policemen. “So you come on a white horse, riding to the rescue, and she gets her fifteen minutes of fame.”

Pearl looks up. She sees men and women in uniforms and then one woman, not in uniform, wearing a camel-colored coat. She leans down, takes Pearl’s wrist. “I’m Dr. Morrisey. I’m going to take you to hospital. It would be easier if you’d cooperate.”

Pearl has expected this. They will tell her to cooperate; she will resist. Civil disobedience. Gandhi and Martin Luther King. She will say nothing; if they hold her she will kick and thrash. Not to hurt anyone but to protect herself.

She sees the doctor’s face. Older than she but young, still a young woman. Glasses. Not on a white horse at all. And not coming to her rescue. Perhaps she believes she is, but Pearl knows she has planned well and rescue is impossible. It is much too late. She is proud of this.

The two policemen are holding what looks like gardening shears. The handles are red but the blades, curved down toward her now, are silver. She hasn’t been afraid until now. The shears are so large. She hadn’t thought they’d be so large. They could pierce her skin; they could cause her to shed blood. She is afraid of the sight of her own blood. They aren’t kind, the faces of the men who hold the shears. It wasn’t kind, what one of them just said to the doctor about her fifteen minutes of fame.

She could almost laugh at the idea of fame.

She thrashes as they approach her, but they are no longer patient. One takes her head in a tight grip. Others grab her legs and arms. They come near her with the shears. Will they put out her eyes? She closes them. “No, no, no,” she says.

“Too late for that, my girl,” one of them says. Too late for what? she wants to ask them.

“I don’t want her hurt. Take it easy,” the doctor says.

“She didn’t make it easy for us,” a policeman says. “There’s not much space between the cuffs and her skin. And she’s doing this limp trick. If she’s cut, it’s on her head, not mine.”

“Just be careful,” the doctor says.

She can’t move. One policeman is holding her legs, one her arms, and a third has her head tucked between his elbow and his side.

“Let me do it,” the doctor says.

“I think we can handle it, doctor,” the policeman says.

“I’ve done surgery in war conditions, officer. I think I’m qualified.”

The doctor leans over her. She can’t see her face; her head has been immobilized; she can’t look down. She hears the sound of a snap—no, a snip.

“All right, then,” the doctor says.

Her chains have been cut. Her skin has not been pierced. She is being lifted, then put down. Something soft is against her back. A bed. A stretcher. She is being carried across the pavement. She looks at the people gathered. She has the impulse to wave, but she stops herself. From the corner of her eye, she sees a face she knows. Finbar. Finbar has come to see what she has done.

It isn’t Finbar’s face she wants to see, but Stevie’s. She closes her eyes, closes out the glimpse of Finbar so Stevie will appear. But Stevie will not come. She calls him: Stevie, I need to see you now. I need to see your face. You were my friend.

My friend, he was my friend, Pearl says, over and over in her mind. She will not think about the doctor or the shears or the policemen with their unkind words. She will try, instead, to remember how she and Stevie became friends. Perhaps this will bring his face to her. Seeing his face will bring her courage, the courage to resist. But when she tries to think of how their friendship began she sees not his face but the body of a horse. “So you come on a white horse, riding to the rescue.” No, not that horse. No one is riding the horse she sees; the horse is dead, hanging upside down.

That was how she became friends with Stevie: when they saw the dead horse.

She called for the image of Stevie’s face, but another has come to her: the image of a dead horse.

She’s right, Pearl is. She and Stevie became friends in Mayo, and it happened at the time they saw the horse.

I will tell you the story of Stevie and the horse. I will tell you everything that happened to Pearl in Ireland, everything since we last spoke of her, everything that led up to the place she is now, as long as you understand that at this moment she is not capable of such a sustained narrative; she has only an image: the image of a dead horse, hanging upside down, at the top of a hill in the county of Mayo. But I will tell you the whole story.

Now you will learn about Stevie Donegan, his life and death.

.  .  .  

It was the tenth of March, the beginning of lighter days, of spring, a stretch of a few days of unseasonably warm weather. Things were still pleasant in Finbar’s apartment; Pearl was enjoying her life with him and his friends, even if she’d begun to grow suspicious of Mick Winthrop. Mick invited Pearl and Finbar to stay for a few days at his place in Mayo. Mick’s son Stevie would come along. She’d hardly spoken to Stevie, she didn’t even know for sure how old he was; on one of their walks he told her he was fifteen. It was the horse’s death and burial that made them friends. She cannot call up Stevie’s face, but she can remember the horse. She feels that at least this is something to have of Stevie.

Finbar and the other boys thought Mick was wonderful, a wonderful father to recognize his bastard son, to support him, to come over to Ireland several weeks a year to be with him. Stevie is of a noble line, they all said, the nephew of Reg Donegan, an IRA hero. In 1982, Reg Donegan had been convicted, with two other IRA soldiers, of leaving a bomb in a suitcase in the Leeds railroad station, a protest against Margaret Thatcher’s treatment of Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers. Two people were killed, one a commuter, a mother of three, one a Pakistani workman. Fifteen more were wounded. Mick and the boys never saw those bodies when they talked of Reg and his heroism; those bodies were erased for them by the pressure of the word
hero
. “Your father was a hero,” Maria always said to her, but Pearl didn’t have to erase any bodies because of the pressure of that word. She couldn’t erase the bodies when she heard Reg’s name; she wondered about the dead, the two of them, and the injured, wondered if they’d recovered or if they’d lived maimed and imprisoned all those years. Stevie’s uncle Reg had been in an English jail for sixteen years: Brixton prison, among the most notorious.

Pearl could see that Stevie was a disappointment, an embarrassment to Mick. Stevie was slow; his eyes were weak and pale behind thick glasses; his lips were full and girlish; there was a mole the size of a dime below his left eye. He couldn’t catch a ball; no one around Mick, except for Pearl, seemed able to catch or throw, and when Mick threw a ball to Pearl she sometimes felt his surprise—or was it chagrin?—when she caught it. When Mick kept saying that Stevie came from a noble line, she could see he was trying to make something up to himself.

She was so happy to be in the country. The trees along the road leaned toward one another, friendly, sheltering, forming a kind of airy roof, making up for the starkness of the Dublin streets. In the morning, the mist would rise up and she would look at the vagueness and think that she was, in that vagueness, entirely happy. And the color: a smoky whiteness, then a silver, then the pink pressing up beneath it and then all at once a blueness—or blue grayness on the mornings when it rained. It is called a burning off, what happened to the fog, but nothing so violent as flame seemed part of it. It often rained, but by noon the rain would stop and the sky would be rinsed and pure and it was wonderful simply to breathe.

.  .  .

Mick called his house a shack, but it wasn’t a shack, it was a house with white stuccoed walls, two bedrooms whose walls were also white stucco, a kitchen painted yellow, and a bathroom with hot running water. There was a wild garden, junglelike, lush and overgrown, and a vicious-looking patch of raspberries said to be wonderful in June. Down the road from the house there was a working farm, and Stevie and Pearl walked down there the first morning they were at the house. They said good morning to the farmer. He was very old, and he didn’t really run the farm anymore; his son and his grandsons ran it. But he wasn’t speaking to them. He’d built himself a little house on the edge of the property and had isolated himself almost completely. He went to church and to the pub; no one ever came to visit.

Mick learned from the son that the old man had fought with them over the treatment of the hay. The farmer would never have talked about it. Once he said the way hay was being treated now was “diabolical” but made no mention of his son’s role in the devil’s work.

I will explain the dispute about the hay as far as I understand it. For as long as anyone could remember, hay had been stored in stacks; they’d been a feature of the landscape. But in the past few years, the farmers had taken to covering the haystacks with black plastic. It was much more efficient; it kept the hay from rotting, so you weren’t at the mercy of the weather. But Pearl thought the old man was right when he said that covering the hay was diabolical. It looked evil: malevolent black lumps sitting in the fields. Mick said it was just feudalism, just tourism, to want to keep the hay in the old way; it was progress to put it under plastic. It was a good thing and only someone who wanted to keep the people picturesque for the tourists rather than prosperous would oppose it. What about the ecological impact of all that plastic? Pearl asked Mick. She’d passed the point where she accepted everything he said as true. “Look,” he said, “that’s an elitist issue. If the farms disappear entirely, it will have a much worse ecological impact long term. What about the ecological impact of tourism? Fat-assed Floridians bringing their tour buses, their litter, their state-of-the-art hotels. To say nothing of the political and psychological aspects. Complete poison. Look, these guys can’t survive, competitively, unless they take up modern methods. I’ve talked to them, not to some ‘ecological expert,’ some Trinity don who hasn’t worked the land but only reads about it. I know what’s what for these people; I’m on the ground with them.”

She wanted to tell Mick he was in Mayo only about ten days a year total and had no right to speak for anybody but himself, but she knew that would upset Stevie. She saw, spending time with Stevie, that any sign of discord distressed him. It pained him that the old farmer thought one thing about the hay in plastic, which was what Pearl thought, and that his father thought another. He loved his father and didn’t want to think of him as being wrong. Also, he wanted to please his father, though he knew he rarely did, so it was important at least never to displease him, and he knew Mick would be displeased if his son didn’t agree with him. Pearl was growing fond of Stevie; she liked their times together, slow-moving, nearly silent. She didn’t want to distress him. So she stopped arguing about the black plastic, even though she knew she was right, because she also knew that Mick would argue in such a way that, even though she was right, she would appear to be wrong.

The old man had a dog and a cat and an old horse that used to pull a hay wagon, but she was only up to eating grass when Pearl and Stevie met her. The horse—or mare, as she should be called—cropped the grass, very gently. Pearl and Stevie would stand by the fence looking at her, not saying anything. Pearl felt a rightness in the world with that horse, whose name was Queenie, looking out at things. Looking out for things. The old man would say a few words to them; none of them said much really. Eventually, the man would offer them cigarettes, and she could tell that Stevie felt he ought to take one, but that when Pearl said no he was relieved because he could say no too.

One day the horse got sick, agonizingly sick. She’d eaten some grass that had gone moldy, her guts had twisted up, and she was in agony. She kicked the walls of the stall right down. The old man had to get his son to shoot her. Then he needed the son’s modern machinery to deal with the horse’s body and to bury her.

Pearl and Stevie didn’t know the horse had died; they went over in the morning, as they always did, and what they saw was terrible. The mare’s body had bloated to a grotesque size, or her belly had (her legs looked fragile and spindly, although in the ordinary way they were far from fragile; she was a cart horse, a workhorse, not a thoroughbred). The son and grandsons attached a pulley to the tractor so they could lift the horse with chains; her legs stuck straight up into the air, so they wouldn’t break, and her head had rolled back. The horse hung upside down: huge, precarious, her legs useless, and the weight of her, even though she was suspended, made them all feel crushed. The old man just stood to the side; he was so taken up with sadness that Pearl and Stevie were afraid to talk to him. Pearl thought a grief like the old man’s should not be exposed to the light of day. The son, who seemed like a very nice man, a man in his forties, the father of the family, with thin blondish hair and a very red face, said they were going to bury her at the top of the hill. Pearl asked if she and Stevie could come along. The old man nodded.

The son and the grandsons had used the tractor to dig the grave earlier that morning. Pearl imagined it nearly killed the old man to ask for the help of their machines when those machines stood for everything he hated. But he had no choice. In some ways, she thought, that was the most terrible.

They hauled the horse up the hill. Pearl was afraid the chains would break and the horse would fall and splatter on the ground.
Dead weight,
Pearl thought, as she saw the horse being hauled. She had never seen anything dead before, and for the first time she understood that death also meant deadness: heaviness and absence, mass attached to nothing but itself. She kept her eye on the deadness all the time that the tractor did its work, slowly, steadily, inching up the hill, till Queenie was lowered into the grave. And then the dirt was spread over her, and the old man walked away. Pearl and Stevie walked away too.