The Lake (4 page)

Despite the warmth of the day, autumn could not be denied. The evening light had all but faded by the time most of the fishermen had gone home, and the local regulars had taken up their usual places in Casey’s. The old sash windows were still open, and the cooler air mixed with the smell of smoke and kegs and the stew; a comforting smell of home for Peggy. They would normally have a fire lit at this time of year, she thought, looking at the blackened grate that hadn’t seen a spark for what must be four months now. It had been such a summer; they just hadn’t needed it. She might light one tomorrow night. It would be nice to have it lit.

‘You should have lit the fire.’ Carla’s teacher-like intonation assailed Peggy’s ears. Her sister stood behind her, sorting coins in the opened till drawer. ‘It gives the place a bit of life.’ She shivered. ‘And God knows it could do with a bit of life.’

Peggy heard it slam shut. She decided to ignore her sister.

‘Although,’ Carla elbowed her in the ribs, ‘yer man over there,’ she tipped her head towards Frank, who was sitting with an empty dessert plate before him, a newspaper in one hand, and a mug of coffee in the other, ‘he’s a bit of life. No?’ She elbowed Peggy again.

Before Peggy could retort, the door opened, and a diminutive elderly man walked into the bar.

‘Oh, Jaysus, well here’s the walking dead,’ Carla said under her breath, and went off around the bar to clear Frank’s table.

The man walked in slowly through the porch, his eyes only leaving the flagstone floor briefly to acknowledge two younger men seated with pints at a low table. He was dressed for colder weather, wearing an old tweed jacket over a wool shirt and threadbare jumper. His trousers were two sizes too big, gathered in at the waist by a length of rope. Strands of white hair poked out from under his plaid cap, which he removed and hung on a hook next to the fireplace.

‘Young wan,’ he nodded to Peggy as he approached the bar.

‘Coleman,’ she said. ‘It’s getting cooler at last out there now, I think.’

‘’Tis that, child. ’Tis that.’ Coleman sat up on a stool and crossed his arms. Peggy pulled him a pint, and he watched the contents of the glass settle. After a moment, she filled it and placed it on the bar in front of him. He sat up straighter, and rubbed the white stubble on his chin, regarding the pint as if it was something he had never seen in his life before. Then he lifted it and drank some back, stealing a glance to his right as he did, to where Frank was seated with his paper. Peggy watched his ritual. She noticed how his white hair curled like a baby’s around his ears. He could do with a visit to Mrs. Byrne’s himself, she thought. The idea made her smile. She knew it was more likely that he’d get his brother to cut any stray locks with a kitchen knife.

‘That’s a fine pint.’ He nodded at Peggy, wiping the froth from his whiskers. ‘A fine pint.’

‘Oh, only the best at Casey’s,’ Peggy sighed, lifting a bottle of fizzy orange from the shelf behind her. She opened it and poured it into a glass for herself, popping a plastic straw in from a box beside the till. She could drink it more discreetly from a straw. Carla was sitting with a few local lads, soaking up their unbridled admiration. So much for her helping out. Peggy noticed Coleman take another sideways glance at Frank who was standing up to leave. Frank removed his wallet from his back pocket and took out a note. She couldn’t help but notice the strawberry blond hairs on his chest just below his neck, where the top two buttons of his shirt were left open.

‘Thank you for that,’ he said to her, leaving the note down on the counter between them. ‘It was very nice.’

‘You’re very welcome.’ Peggy took the note and turned quickly to the till to hide her reddening cheeks. She glanced up into the mirror. Frank was standing awkwardly next to Coleman, the older man pointedly ignoring him as he gazed down into his pint.

‘Frank, have you met Coleman?’ Peggy said loudly into the till. She turned and handed Frank his change. ‘Coleman has lived in Crumm all his life. He knows more about the area than anyone. Coleman,’ Peggy said, ‘this is Detective Sergeant Frank … ’ she stopped.

‘Ryan,’ Frank finished.

‘Sorry,’ Peggy said. ‘Detective Sergeant Frank Ryan. He’s down from Dublin because of the body found at the lake. He’s been helping Garda O’Dowd with the … the situation.’

Peggy waited. Coleman just nodded slowly at his pint, not looking up at either of them.

‘Coleman,’ Frank said.

The older man just nodded again.

Peggy threw her eyes to heaven. ‘Maybe you might be able to help the guards with their enquiries, Coleman?’ She spoke slowly, as if Coleman might not understand. ‘You having all the local knowledge. About the valley and the lake.’

Still the older man said nothing.

‘He’s not from Dublin, Coleman,’ Peggy said under her breath. She silently implored Frank not to contradict her. ‘He’s just stationed there.’

‘Is that right?’ the older man said at last, from a mouth that was clearly short a few teeth. ‘And what part of the world do you hail from, Detective Sergeant?’

‘Galway, sir.’ Frank winked at Peggy, who was slowly wiping the already clean counter beside them. ‘I grew up in Galway. My parents are both from Connemara.’

‘I see.’ Coleman took a draught of his pint.

‘I’ve lived in Dublin for the past ten years though,’ Frank said, a note of defiance in his tone. ‘Longer.’

‘I suppose you have a ticket for the match Sunday, so,’ Coleman said.

Frank thought about the coveted All-Ireland football final ticket he had back in his room in Dublin, wedged in the frame of a picture of Saint Michael his mother had given him. He had a bad feeling that was as close to the Hogan Stand as the ticket was going to get.

‘I do’, he said.

Coleman drained his pint and left it down on the bar, just a fraction farther away from him than before. Without saying a word, Peggy took the glass away, and began to pull another for him.

‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his gnarled hands up and down his thighs as if he was trying to massage some life into his legs, ‘at least those bastards from Cork aren’t going to be there.’

Peggy snorted. ‘Oh, if there’s one thing we like less than people from Dublin around here, it’s people from Cork,’ she laughed, shaking her head at Frank.

Frank just smiled, and sat back up on the stool he had occupied earlier that evening. ‘So you know the area well,’ he said to Coleman. ‘Do you remember them moving the graves before the dam was built?’

Coleman looked up at Frank as if he might be mad. ‘Sure wasn’t it I myself who was doing the moving?’ he said, turning back to nod at the fresh pint that Peggy had placed in front of him. He shook his head. ‘It was a terrible job, so it was. Upset a lot of people, as you might understand.’ He spoke slowly, deliberately; each word pronounced as if it was not his first language he was using.

‘I’ll get that.’ Frank nodded at the glass of stout. ‘And I’ll have one myself.’ He handed Peggy back some of the coins.

The old man’s lips twitched and he bobbed his head in Frank’s direction. ‘A terrible job. But sure, that was what they made us do. They came down from Dublin one day. A group of them. Like Cromwell did before them. Oh, with their measuring instruments, and big cars, and cameras. They took one look at the place and decided the whole lot of it would be better off under water.’

Frank could sense Peggy’s embarrassment at the old man’s bitter appraisal of the engineers and civil servants who had probably only been doing their job. He guessed Coleman regarded Frank himself in much the same light.

‘1946 it was. Not long after the war.’ Coleman sat even straighter on his stool, squinting out before him into the past, remembering. For someone who would hardly speak five minutes before, it seemed that he had plenty to say after all. ‘But there were shortages of all sorts at that time. It took until 1952 before they finished it. 1948,’ he announced loudly, drawing out the words as though they should be set to music. Frank noticed a few of the locals in the bar look over briefly in their direction. ‘1948, 49. They bought up all the land, from Crumm and Ballyknock on the east of the valley to Slieve Mart on the west. And we all had to get out. That was it. We had the year to leave, that was all.’ He turned to Frank and looked him in the eye for the first time in the whole conversation. ‘And they did not pay what they should have for that land,’ he almost shouted, his eyes blaming Frank. ‘That they did not.’

He turned back to his pint and went quiet for a moment. Peggy served another customer at the bar, but Frank could feel her watching them all the while.

‘They paid us what they wanted to, and that was that,’ Coleman said. ‘And we took it, of course.’ His voice, quieter now, was tempered with resignation. ‘That dam was to be built whether we got a fair price for our land or not. The water would be the sheriff.’ His face creased with the memory.

Peggy laid a cardboard coaster on the counter in front of Frank, and set his pint down on it. ‘Coleman worked with the other men to move the graves to the new graveyard,’ she explained to Frank, looking hopefully at Coleman. ‘He might be able to show you where that was. Isn’t that right, Coleman?’

Coleman nodded. ‘It is,’ he said.

He leaned over to one side suddenly. Frank went to catch him, then realized that the man was just reaching into his trouser pocket. He took out a crushed packet of cigarettes and threw them onto the shiny, lacquered bar.

‘My land was to be flooded. I’d sold the few cattle I had. There was work to be had at the graveyard for a few of us, so that is what I spent the summer of 1950 doing. Moving bodies.’

He went quiet then. Frank sensed the gravity of what Coleman was describing to him. Even Peggy was silent, as she stood behind the bar opposite where they sat, her arms folded, her eyes fixed on the old man’s face.

‘That must have been a difficult job,’ Frank said.

‘Aye. ’Tis better to leave those who are dead in their resting place. No old bones want to be lifted.’ He took a cigarette from the box and tapped it on the counter. ‘And my own people were there, of course. ’Twas that way for all the men. And if your own people were to be disturbed, you were not to work that day. That was how it was settled.’

Frank shook his head. He couldn’t contemplate digging up the bones of the dead, and moving them to be buried somewhere else. It seemed wrong. But then, so did purposely flooding a whole village, and yet that was what had to be done. People wanted electricity, so people had to pay for it. One way or the other. His mind went back to the grave he had stood over earlier that afternoon.

‘But the cemetery wasn’t near this place? I believe it was across the valley?’

‘That’s right.’ Coleman leaned in over the counter as Peggy struck a match for him. ‘’Twas across under the shadow of Slieve Mart. Near the manor house. That was where we moved them from. The new cemetery isn’t far from the original site. Half a mile further up the hill, no more.’

Frank watched as the man pulled hard on his cigarette. It was clear that the body they had found was not from the old graveyard. He wasn’t really surprised. The shallow depth of the site, and the ominous sacking that the body seemed to be buried in had suggested that it was no consecrated grave. He wanted to ask Coleman outright if he had any idea who it might be, buried there on the shore, being watched over this very night by that young, eager, local lad. Surely if anyone had gone missing from the place in the past few decades, Coleman would know about it. But it was clear to Frank that Coleman didn’t trust him. The man’s memory of what officials from Dublin could do to a place like Crumm was obviously still fresh.

‘So it was a farm you had in the valley?’ he asked. ‘Was it cattle you said?’ He took a slow swig from his pint. He had better pace himself. He suspected that he was going to be in Casey’s a little later than he had intended.

Coleman looked as if he were deciding whether to answer Frank or not. After a moment, he spoke. ‘’Twas my father’s land. And his father’s before him. And then mine and Desmond’s. Ours alone. And we farmed it together.’

‘Desmond is Coleman’s brother,’ Peggy said quickly to Frank.

‘They came with the army. After everyone had left. In ’51 I think it was. They came with their explosives and they blew the lot up.’

Frank looked up from his pint. ‘They blew it up?’ he said. ‘Your house?’

‘Our home … place, the Kilty Bridge, the old mill. Some other buildings in the village. They blew them up. Thought it was a great sport. They clapped each other on the back and took photos for the paper.’ Coleman pursed his lips. ‘We watched from the bleachers. Those of us who were still around.’

‘Did many leave altogether?’ Peggy asked. Frank glanced at her but her eyes were fixed on the old man’s face.

Coleman looked up at her with a furrowed brow and flicked his cigarette into a big ceramic ashtray she had left down on the bar near to him. ‘Hardly a soul stayed,’ he said at last. ‘The land was gone. There was nothing to stay for.’ He fell silent for a moment, his eyes trained on the ashtray. ‘Most went up to Dublin. A few of the older ones moved in with family in Crumm. Tom Clancy,’ he looked up at Peggy who nodded. ‘Tom moved in with his daughter and her family in Ballyknock, Lord have mercy on him.’

A punter gestured to Peggy from across the room and she acknowledged him and reached for a bottle of stout.

‘Coleman worked as a postman in the village,’ she said to Frank as she flicked the cap off and tilted the bottle into a glass, ‘until he retired a few years back.’

More than a few, Frank thought to himself, trying to picture the old man cycling the roads with his bag of letters. But he couldn’t help but be struck by the man’s story. He had sensed it, down at the lake. Aside from the finding of the body, there was an eeriness about the place. Echoes of bitterness and loss were in the wind that blew up from the water. As he watched Peggy take the bottle and glass over to a man seated by a window, he tried to imagine Coleman and his brother, watching from a distance, as their home was legally blown up before them. Bachelor brothers, probably in their forties at the time, and all they owned in life taken from them without their consent. Too young to retire, too old to move up to Dublin and start anew. It couldn’t have been easy. Then he thought of something.