The Lost Souls' Reunion (2 page)

It is as if they never left.

I turn the first of the cards and, still, the Storyteller. In the Storyteller the weave of past history and present intent is to be found, in the Storyteller the threads of the future are to be found and gathered together.

The story is told in and from the place it began. In the old house which knew such despair and came to know what joy meant. Solas is the name of the house, the place where the lost souls found refuge and it will always be so. It is protected by the long arms of time.

Sive is the name on me. I am the Storyteller. I am the last of the Lost Souls – reunited for an evening.

1 ∼ Hoar Rock

T
HE TIDE OF STORYTELLING
, which ebbs and flows between past and present, brings us to the shoreline that Solas overlooks. The waves wash around the bare feet of a young woman, whose soles are so hard she has run across the stones like they were bog cotton. The wind whips hair across her face; her skirt twists around her swollen belly.

The sun sets on her.

She raises her arms above her head, slides into the dancing water, wincing as it creeps around her hips. She waits for the big wave, starts to count them:

‘One … two…' The sand shifts and she can no longer stand.

‘Three … four…' The air is warm, but the sea still has a cold bite and from the waist down she is numb. ‘Five … six…'

She breathes out. Her ribs reach for her lungs.

The jaws of the seventh wave open wide and swallow her, she curls up, sinks like a stone. A body now more water than flesh. She does not fight the change.

‘Take me down. Take me away.'

The sea tosses and turns like a restless sleeper and the woman, thrown now on to her back, can see the dark liquid clouds of evening closing in the light. A heron skims across the wave tops, as if searching for silver gleams of mackerel. But it wants the woman with the red-gold hair. The heron dives and meets with no resistance, catching her by locks that are the same colour as this drowning sun. Heron and woman break the waves fast claiming all that is left of the day.

The thunderous roar of air drives the limpness out of her; she thrashes against the bird's grip. Whole hanks of hair are torn from her head, but the heron holds fast and the beat of its wings is steady over the short distance to the shore.

Once the woman reaches firm footing the heron can no longer hold the weight and retreats to a rock. It rests with all the stillness and all the grace the drenched, spewing woman stumbling on to the shore lacks. The heron curves its long neck into its breast. The light of owls is thickening.

*   *   *

When the woman wakes it is to find the heron gone, and that the waves have once more turned to melting copper under a sun now rising. She wonders if she tried to drown again this morning whether death might be warmer.

But there is the dull ache of defeat in her bones and the knowledge that the heron would return. She is a child of the sun and it has risen, asking her to live another day.

Up the long laneway from the beach to the house, Carmel Moriarty walks with a worn look about her. The wild desire for freedom has gone and her shoulders slope with the weight of what is ahead of her.

She wraps her hands around her belly, whispers to it – ‘God protect both of us.'

Her father is waiting, a strap pressed against his thigh. As she squeezes past him in the doorway her body folds in on itself. He stares down the road she has just walked up and closes the door.

*   *   *

Carmel Moriarty grew up in Solas. Then it was known as Hoar Rock – a cold place. Once home to a large family, the line had dwindled to the nothing Joseph Moriarty knew he was.

The land did not co-operate with farming, running along the shoreline as it did. It turned Joseph Moriarty into a demon. He put care into the stony soil and it spat rocks back at him. That taught him only to hate the earth. His crops were miserable, their growth stunted by the harsh, salt-laden winds.

He took his frustration out in public bars, where he never stood a round of drinks. No woman would go near him until Noreen.

Noreen Byrne, then, had the reputation for being fast and loose in times when the fast and loose were good to roll around with in woods and fields but bad to settle down with.

The image of Noreen stands before me now.

You were a fine, strong woman, Noreen, with a ready laugh! But you enjoyed life too much, that's what they said. You reached twenty-eight and realized no man wanted to share your years with you and even if they did their mothers wouldn't let them. So you cast your eye around and found the truth in a short man with granite features and no real smile, only the cruel kind.

Sit, Noreen, while I tell them.

The truth was Joseph Moriarty was the only one if she did not want to die alone. The others slid off to safer territory with tighter women and paid the price of being bored all their lives.

In time you wished to be alone, you learned. But at twenty-eight you had different wants. You had no proper home. Your parents were in a tied cottage, which would be lost when they died. You cleaned and gutted fish. Who would want to do that for the rest of their natural born days?

So you asked him to dance. He would not. So you sat down beside him and asked him to talk to you. He would not. You followed him around like a puppy dog for five solid months, swallowing everything like pride, before you got him.

He never bought you an engagement ring, or a present, or even a drink.

You never kissed while you were courting. You never kissed after you were wed.

A woman with Noreen Byrne's bones and laugh, a terrible shame that no one should have kissed or made love to her in married life! All of us assembled agree on that one.

I can feel the cold-to-the-bone presence of the man I never met. Where are you, Joseph Moriarty? Show your face.

His eyes are before me now, telling me he would plant me like one of his crops into the stony soil with half a chance. He is here because he is part of us by blood and incident.

The spirit of Joseph Moriarty is welcome to stay in a room full of friends, but only until his part is played and I promise that the truth will not be changed in his favour. It will be put in front of him.

2 ∼ The Road of Swords

T
HE TRUTH IS PUT
in front of Joseph Moriarty as it was in front of Noreen when she crossed this threshold for the first time on her wedding day, to find nothing but broken bits of furniture and dirt. The house had been fine, two storeys, with an oak staircase and many rooms.

People prosperous enough to appreciate fine sea views, in days when most sheltered from them for the sake of warmth, had built the Hoar Rock farmhouse. But the Moriarty name now came down to one man and that one man had closed off all but a few rooms to light and to habitation, not just because of cold. There was dark in him, a weight put on him from the first breath of his life.

The father and mother of Joseph Moriarty had put all their hopes on to the one child they could have, along with the burden of their ill health and dwindling prospects. He was left to work at what he did not want to be, a farmer who did not have a farmer's instinct, not the first one of the Moriartys to be born that way. The best fields had been sold over four generations, leaving him with the ones that brought more in the way of work than reward. His only means of income, unless he would walk into the world with nothing, was to work them. They could not be sold. He turned his back on anything like hope for a future. He turned his back on the reputation for romantic notions the Moriartys were once famous for and it did not make his farming any better.

A wife had never fitted into Joseph Moriarty's plans. There had been no one willing to take on the sourness and the lack of prospects. Until Noreen who, like Joseph, was afraid to leave the town for uncertainty. Though brave within it, she had spent little of her life beyond it. What could not be seen, well, it was glorious until you came to live it, so those who had been to beyond and come back had said.

Noreen had wanted to go beyond, but only with company. None had offered to take her. So Noreen stood in front of Joseph Moriarty long enough for him to notice what there was in her he needed. Some said that she had already got reason to need to be wed. If she had, she had lost it by the time Joseph looked back at her. She fooled herself at the prospect of the big house and the fields with the fine views of sea and harbour. She had romantic notions about helping Joseph in them and turning his bad temper around. Noreen was a fish gutter, not a farmer's daughter. Any farmer's daughter would have told her fields with fine views of sea and mountains are bad fields. No farmer wants the soil such scenery offers.

They had been married after ten o'clock Mass, with only her family in attendance. His were all dead and other relatives wanted nothing to do with him. Noreen paid for tea and scones for the women in the Harbour View Hotel. The men bought their own pints. Joseph sat among them but did not speak. She had thought they might go somewhere for the day afterwards. But he was keen to be home.

‘There's a bed in the back room for you,' Joseph said, sitting down at the kitchen table, not offering to carry her small suitcase.

A cloud of dust rose from the sheet when she lifted it on to the mattress. Fine echoes of laughter and loving times rose along with it. This bed had not been used in a long time. There was to be no pretence of love. Joseph Moriarty had married Noreen for the work in her. In that same night she would beat out the dust of lives gone and her own hope of times to come.

‘Where will I find a wardrobe?' she called out to him.

‘Your family might give us one as a wedding present,' he laughed without joy. ‘Haven't I given the roof?'

Noreen née Byrne, now Moriarty, put an apron over her new dress to make a start. She had expected nothing and got worse than that.

‘Have you any kind of soap?' she asked him, standing over the sink, staring at her reflection in the clear water. It seemed it had changed since morning.

‘Have you not brought any soap?' he enquired. ‘Do you not wash yourself?'

‘Household soap, Joseph, for the kitchen.'

He pointed to a press.

She wished now she had gone off with one of the casual labourers who came into the town, or one of the actors in the fit-up theatres who spoke so well.

‘Well,' she thought, six hours after marrying him. ‘There's always the hope that he might die before me.'

And he did, but it took many years and by that time she had already lost herself.

‘I suppose I do have a present for you.'

Noreen spilt some of the hot tea she had made for them, having scrubbed the kitchen around his seated form. It smelt of carbolic, the windows opened wide to let in the betraying sunshine, which gave it all the appearance of a happy place.

‘There's a plot out the back you might do something useful with.'

He also gave her six hens to look after. From that day on he took the surplus and left her the six. When one died he cursed Noreen as if she had wrung its neck herself. What she got from him on that first day was all she got.

She was left alone at night in the back room. Occasionally he would push open the door. He was not the first for Noreen but he was the roughest and he did not like her to make a sound.

*   *   *

The child, Carmel, came into the world quickly – as if not to cause trouble. She did not cry until they tried to put shoes on her.

An only child, her companions came out of her imagination. Her dreams were filled with kind people who could only love her since she had created them and she had not a spiteful bone.

‘Get wise to the world, girl, or it'll walk all over you!' Noreen tried to teach her when they were not under Joseph's eye.

Once they had left him. Noreen's family had sent her back, warning her they would tell Joseph the next time. They reminded her how lucky she was to have married a farmer.

After that day Carmel did not meet or know her grandparents who lived three miles away in another world. Joseph did not like his wife and child to go into town unless it was absolutely necessary. He did not like to pay for shoes or clothes.

Noreen's last pair of tights laddered just before her daughter was born. She made dresses for her girl out of her own clothes and was left with little to wear for herself. She did not go into town if she could help it.

When Joseph had drink on his breath or a look in his eye the child had been taught to go to the barn until she was called. Sometimes Noreen was not well enough to come out for her, so she slipped into the night and learned the ways of a cat, prowling until the first light.

That was how Eddie Burns came to know her, a streak of flame through Gamble's wood, hiding and watching him with her green eyes, from a safe distance. They did not say hello to each other over the years that they turned into man and woman. What was between them needed no words.

Welcome, Eddie. There's a place beside Carmel for him, as there has always been.

*   *   *

Eddie left school at thirteen to take over his uncle's window-cleaning round. He could cycle over thirty miles a day, which did not worry him as he liked his own company and his work did not take him out on wet and windy days. On those days he liked to walk through the wood and feel her watching him. In bad weather, woodland gives the best shelter, without a soul to disturb it.

Carmel was rarely to be seen in Scarna. People would have forgotten her mother only they caught an occasional glimpse of her in early morning or late evening, shopping for a few bits. Their hearts went out to the big woman reduced to a bag of bones. Joseph was seen more often in the town and avoided. The word on their girl was that she was simple.

Noreen tried to put manners on Carmel, but there was no reason for her to keep them. They were far enough away from the town for her to grow up without a friend. On the days Noreen got her to school, by dragging her, the teachers sent her home by lunchtime. They could not keep her at a desk and she took off her shoes continually.