The Disenchanted Widow (43 page)

Herkie got down off the chair. He shook Gusty’s hand. “Thank you, Mr. Grant.”

“That’s all right, son. Thanks for findin’ me wallet.” Gusty reached into it and pulled out one of the fivers. “That’s for you, for the journey.”

“Gee! Thank you, Mr. Grant.” Herkie was delighted. No one had ever given him so much money. He looked up at his mother. “Ma, can I buy me Action Man now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask Mr. Grant.”

“Oh, buy whatever ye want, son,” Gusty said. He patted Herkie’s head. “Ye’re a very honest wee lad, so ye are…a credit tae yer mammy.” He turned to Bessie. “Well, I must be goin’, Mrs. Hailstone.”

She saw him to the front door. “I’ll not check anything, Mrs. Hailstone, for I know ye looked after everything very well.”

Bessie thought of all the reconstructive work she’d just carried out on several items in Dora’s collection. The fishy smell of Copydex adhesive still hung on the air. She hoped the landlord hadn’t a keen nose. She doubted it somehow. All the same, she
had
noted a faint whiff of scent coming off him. Odd.

“Aye, just leave the keys under that gnome there, afore ye go,” he said.

“I will indeed,” said Bessie, eyeing the gnome, which Herkie had relieved of its pointy ears on their first day in the cottage. She’d managed to glue them back on again in a rough, lopsided kind of way.

“Well, be seein’ ye, Mrs. Hailstone.”

Bessie extended a hand. “Thanks…thanks for everything.”

The hand, she noted, felt much softer than the one she’d shaken on that first meeting. Interesting.

She saw him eye her tweed suit, the Mrs. Peacock cast-off.

“That’s a fine costume you’ve got on,” he said. “Would that blouse be the silk or the satin? Hard tae tell the diff’rence between them.”

Bessie, taken aback, fingered her collar. “It’s silk. Satin, ye see, is much shinier.”

“Oh, I’m with ye now, begod. Satin’s the shiny boy. I wundered about that, so I did.”

He turned and climbed into his truck.

“Well, good luck, Mrs. Hailstone. Have a safe journey.”

In seconds he was gone, leaving behind him a trail of dust and a very bemused Bessie.

She went back indoors, chuckling to herself.

Gusty’s brief career as landlord might have ended, but Mrs. Hailstone would have been stunned to learn what seismic shifts her breakdown near the village had wrought in the mechanic’s life. He would miss his glamorous tenant—that was certain. But such heartache was tempered by the fact that behind the locked doors of a room in Kilfeckin Manor, an altogether different Gusty had been born. As he roared away in the truck, richer by another vehicle, his spirits high and fancies free, he pressed down harder on the gas.

Satin, he thought. Aye, satin is the
shiny
one! Maybe, just maybe, if he hurried up, he could grab a half hour in the Turret Room before his bar shift at three.

Bessie pulled out her suitcase. Inside was Herkie’s bag: the Dunnes Stores shopper. She thought back to the last time they’d packed up their things, in the old house in Valencia Terrace, and how panic-stricken she’d been.

No such panic on this occasion.

What a wonderful, serendipitous move breaking down outside Tailorstown had proved to be!

The packing didn’t take long. They’d be traveling light.

“Right,” Bessie said, when everything was safely zipped up, “I’ll just take another wee look round…make sure we haven’t forgot anything, son. You take the bags out tae the sunseat. Lorcan will be here soon.”

“Ma, look!” Herkie was pointing at a chest of drawers in the corner.

“What is it, son?”

“The record player, Ma.”

“God, you’re right. What am I gonna do with that? We can’t take it on the plane.”

At that moment, there came the sound of clip-clopping out on the road. Herkie ran outside.

“It’s Barkin’ Bob, Ma.”

“God, the very one. We’ll give it tae
him
.”

Herkie waved, and in under a minute the traveling junk collector was reining in Brenda at the front of Rosehip Cottage. He immediately launched into his spiel.

“Wid yer mammy want to boy a bucket?” he began, trotting out the words in his customary, knife-grinder’s drawl. “A basin, a froyin’-pan for tae froy her sausages of a marnin’. Or some turf for the foyer, tae keep her warm of a long winter’s noyt. Well, whaddya say, boy?”

“D’ye want a record player?” Herkie asked, looking up at the primordial chaos that was Bob’s face.

“A
what
?”

“Here it is!” Bessie called out.

Through the front door she came, bearing the final endowment from her doomed marriage to Packie.

Bob scrambled from his perch and began making room on the cart. He shifted a shadeless table lamp, a chamber pot, and a sun-bleached portrait of John F. Kennedy to one side and relieved Bessie of her burden.

“It was a wedding present,” she said. “My husband’s dead now, and we’re goin’ till Amerikay, so can’t take it with us. It’s workin’ all right, so you should get a bit for it.”

“God bless ye, daughtur!”

“And the records…not much good without them.” She handed over her prized album collection with a twinge of sadness. Gloria Gaynor, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton had taken her through many a rough patch.

She’d miss the music.

Bob eyed Dolly’s generous cleavage on the cover of
Heartbreaker
and stuck her on the cart within kissing distance of the slain US president.

“God bless ye, daughtur!” he said again.

“Ye can take that, too,” said Herkie, proffering his Action Man. “I’m gonna be gettin’ a new one.”

“God bless ye, son!” said Bob. The headless Action Man joined the one-armed Barbie, and Bob swung himself back onto the cart.

A car horn sounded—and there was Lorcan turning in off the main road. The yard was small, and with Lorcan’s arrival old Bob was blocked in.

“It’s all right, Bob,” Bessie said. “We’ll only be a minute.”

She ran back into the cottage. There was no time to delay. She grabbed up her handbag, pulled the door behind her, turned the key, and, following Gusty’s instructions, stowed it under the garden gnome.

“All set?” Lorcan took her suitcase and opened the trunk.

“All set!”

“Lorcan, I’m gettin’ a new Action Man, so I am.”

“Excellent, Herkie…now you get in the back there. We can’t keep this gentleman waiting.”

Bob raised his hat in acknowledgment. “Good luck tae ye now and God bless ye!” he shouted. “May the wind alwa’s blow at yer back!”

Lorcan put the car in gear and they moved off.

Bob and Brenda followed behind.

At the end of the lane Lorcan turned left. Bob turned right.

Herkie clambered up on the backseat and waved goodbye to Bob and his mare, to the cottage, the dwellings and fields of Tailorstown.

The car crested a hill.

Bob fell away from view.

Herkie sat back down again.

Soon Bob was turning down his own lane on the outskirts of town. At the far end of the lane, across a field, stood his old shack.

He bumped his way down the familiar route.

Without warning, a fox shot across Brenda’s path.

She reared with a startled whinny, hooves flailing the air.

The cart lurched sideways, upsetting its load. Several items ended up in the ditch.

“Holy God!” Bob sighed and dismounted.

He stood, surveying the mess; some of the items were now even more damaged than before.

With resignation he got down on his knees. His most recent acquisition, Mrs. Halstone’s record player, lay upside down. Luckily, it was still in one piece. He pulled it toward him. As he did so, the back panel came away in his hands.

“Ah, Jezsis! But you’re aisy enough tae fix.” He began shoving the panel back into place.

It would not go all the way, however. Something was jamming it.

Bob fumbled inside the record player. He frowned. There was what felt like wads of paper stuffed inside. He tugged one out and held it up.

“Oh, holy God!”

He was looking at the printed face of H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth II.

A wad of twenty-pound notes fanned beneath his blackened fingertips.

A thousand in the bundle, easy.

He upended the record player and shook it.

Immediately, obediently, unleashed, unfettered, out they came: sheaf upon sheaf, bundle upon bundle, the secreted spoils of Packie’s heist.

The plunder, the hoard, the ill-gotten gains that Packie had died for, that the Dentist had drowned for, and for which Bessie Halstone-Lawless had very nearly given
her
life.

“Oh, holy jumpin’ Jesus God!”

Barkin’ Bob fell upon the scattered booty, eyes wide with ecstasy. He counted ten bundles in all. Ten thousand pounds lay strewn about him! He gazed in wonder. His heart on fire.

He could not see—or even begin to imagine—the pain the loot had caused, the lives it had ruined, the blood spilled in the pursuit of its gain, its loss, and its retrieval.

Bob saw only God’s rich reward for a lifetime of hardship.

He lay on his back, opened his arms wide and burst into riotous song.

“
Oh, Jesus’ blood never failed me yet,

Never failed me yet, failed me yet.

Oh, Jesus’ blood never…
”

A flock of starlings flew from the trees. A breeze riffled the leaves. Brenda pranced in excited dance. But Barkin’ Bob sang on and on, deaf to the strum and strang of nature’s shifts.

He sang in celebration, in thanksgiving, in the undeniable knowledge that, after years of poverty, living off scraps and distant dreams, his prayers had been answered.

Finally.

The sun came out. Bob took it as a sign. God was smiling down upon him. The horrid past—all gone.

He gathered up the bills and headed homeward: a spirit freed, a man reborn, his life changed for good by the evil and the wronged.

Author's Note

Even though this is a work of fiction, the occurrences and situa-tions involving the priest, Father Cassidy, are based on real events.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to everyone on the Amazon team, most especially to senior editor Alan Turkus, editor David Downing, and copyeditor Elise Marton.

To my sister Ann and brother William, for encouraging me every step of the way.

To my special friends Catherine Lynch and Elizabeth Jean Hunter, for always being there for me.

To Anne and Robert Keogh, for providing me with a lovely setting where I could finally finish the book.

And last but not least to my husband, David, for his never-faltering faith in me.

About the Author

Christina McKenna is a graduate of Belfast College of Art, where she gained an honors degree in fine art, and later a postgraduate degree in English from the University of Ulster. An accomplished painter and novelist, McKenna has exhibited her art internationally and in Ireland, and taught art and English for ten years. She is the author of the highly praised memoir
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress
, as well as the nonfiction books
The Dark Sacrament
and
Ireland’s Haunted Women
, and a previous Tailorstown novel,
The Misremembered Man
. She currently lives in Northern Ireland with her husband, the author David M. Kiely, with whom she collaborates on occasion.