The Misremembered Man (30 page)

Having finally succeeded in securing the car, Paddy knocked on the cottage door and shuffled inside. In the McFadden parlor, Lydia selected a coconut monkey from Rose’s proffered plate. And in the Duntybutt barn, a rafter cracked with loud abandon.

Paddy, having discovered that the cottage was deserted, stood in the yard deciding where Jamie might be. He heard what sounded like a thunderclap. “Ah Jezsis!” a muffled voice was heard to cry. He rushed to the barn door and pulled it open. He was astonished to find his friend sitting in a heap on the floor, nursing a broken rafter attached to a length of twine.

“Christ, Jamie, what happened?”

Jamie, still stunned from the fall, stared at Paddy, wondering if indeed he’d arrived in paradise and, if he had, then what was Paddy McFadden doing in paradise, too?

Reality soon dawned when an excited Shep bounded through the barn door and leapt onto his master.

“Christ, Jamie, what happened?” Paddy tried again.

“There, there, wee Shep.” Jamie finally found his voice and hugged the dog.

“I was up…tryin’,” Jamie began, “tryin’ to fix that bit of a rafter when the damned thing fell on me.” He focused on Shep as he spoke, too embarrassed to meet his friend’s eye.

Paddy surveyed the scene and tried to make sense of it. He saw the empty whiskey bottle and torn bun bag on a bale. Why, he asked himself, was Jamie having a picnic by himself in the dark shed while tryin’ to fix a bit of a rafter?

“God, Jamie, you could a got yourself kilt!”

Jamie made no reply. Then Paddy noticed the letter on the high bale and the length of twine about Jamie’s neck—the length of twine that Jamie was now vainly trying to conceal inside the collar of his shirt.

Paddy averted his eyes from his friend, to spare his blushes. He considered the condition of the roof.

“Aye, them oul’ rafters is fulla woodworm. Dangerous boys, so they are.”

Jamie released Shep and the excited collie bounded over to Paddy. He took him by the collar.

“I’ll take the wee dog out, Jamie, and then I’ll help ye up.”

He led Shep out, thus affording his friend the opportunity of preserving his dignity by discarding in secret the evidence of his attempted suicide.

He returned a few minutes later, and was glad to see Jamie on his feet and the letter gone from the high bale.

“God, Jamie, you’ll never believe who’s waitin’ for you at our house.”

“Who?” was all Jamie could manage to say, as he accompanied his friend outside.

“Lydeea, Jamie, Lydeea Devine!”

“Lydeea?”

“Aye, Lydeea…and she sez she’s got some great news for you…and she sez she’d like to hear ye playin’ so you’d better bring the wee accordjin with you because we’re gonna have a party!” Paddy was breathless with excitement.

Jamie stood staring at him, not knowing what to think. Just a few minutes earlier he had had his hand on heaven’s doorknob, but for whatever reason, God had seen fit to slap the hand away. A period of readjustment to the earthly plane was necessary.

“Lydeea’s waiting for me? With Rose? At your house?” Jamie heard himself ask the questions that seemed just too incredible for words.

“Aye, that’s right. So you’d better run in and put your new suit on.”

Jamie looked back at the barn, at the necklace of wheeling wood-pigeons that were still circling in the sky above its roof. All at once he was no longer in the drab yard of his homestead. He was in the place he’d yearned toward for so long: “the sunlit clearing.” Suddenly all the black thoughts, the ones that had battered and buffeted him all his life, fell away and were replaced by a gleaming glade of joy. At last he understood.

“Heaven’s…heaven’s not up there,” he said at last, pointing toward the pigeons.

“Well, maybe not…I don’t know,” said Paddy, confused. “But y’know, Rose would always say it was…because she would always say that whenever you see the Blessed Virgin bein’ assumpted into heaven, it always shows her standing on a wee cloud when she’s goin’ up…in the prayer books and the like.”

Jamie continued to gaze up at the sky. He seemed not to be listening. Paddy shook his arm.

“Jamie, ye better go in and get your suit on. We don’t want Lydeea—I mean
Lily
—to be waitin’ too much longer.”

“Who?”

“Aye. She said her pet name was Lily. She was called that when she was a wee one, so she was.”

Jamie stared at Paddy in amazement. He tried to say something but the words simply would not come. He was remembering what he had told himself just a few hours earlier.

This evening I’ll be with you Lily, as sure as I’m standing here.

Nothing was making sense today—and everything was making sense.

“I’ll turn the car,” Paddy said. “Don’t forget the accordjin.”

Jamie hurried inside and Shep followed him. In the bedroom, he donned the shirt that Rose claimed was not so much “sunshine” but closer to a “custard” yellow. And the suit, that in her considered opinion was not peat, but “more of a gravy brown.”

Shep, lying on the bed, watched his master closely as he adjusted his tie, before slipping on his shiny shoes. He reached for his accordion, then straightened to admire himself in the mirror. No, heaven’s not up there in the sky, he said to himself.
It’s now, begod; it’s here. I’m part of it. I’m living it. It’s mine.
Shep stood to attention on the bed and emitted a full-throated bark. He sensed a change in his master’s routine—and it met with his full canine approval.

Jamie strode proudly from the house into the gilding sunlight, smiling broadly as he went. And as the dog went frantic and Paddy stood amazed, Jamie finally knew what happiness was. The best kind of happiness; that which through years of searching struggle is finally found and realized.

The ten-year-old boy from the orphanage had become a happy man. He belonged. He had leaped across that gorge of emotions and scaled an awesome height.

He sat in the passenger seat, Paddy at the wheel, Shep at his shoulder, and the accordjin on his lap. As the Minor pulled away from the farmhouse, Jamie was scarcely aware that the car was moving. When Paddy chose the wrong gear and the Minor spluttered and lurched as it began its slow labor up the hill, Jamie did not even register the jolting. He was dreaming, seeing only the beauty of the world through the grimy windshield, hearing only the sound of his accordjin music spilling out across the quiet fields.

“God, Jamie, there’s another thing I forgot to tell you,” Paddy said, careering down the hill and narrowly missing a milk churn. “I was in the post office the other day and Doris Crink told me…well, what she told me to tell you was that…was that she’d like you to call in for a drop o’ tea this Sunday.”

“Lordy me, is that so?” said Jamie, beaming broadly.

“Aye, she maybe wants to talk to you about your savings account…I don’t know what else it could be about…. Maybe she’s a wee bit of interest…a wee bit a interest to add on or maybe…”

Paddy continued in his fanciful conjectures, his voice fading away, merging with the rattling of the Minor. Jamie scarcely heard him. He was giving himself fully to the moment, his mind a flurry of memory and speculation. Lydeea…Lily my wee sister! How can that be? She died as a baby. The nuns said so. But then the nuns said I’d never been given a name. The nuns said lots of things that weren’t true. I know that now.

Then he recalled a remark Rose had made.

“Paddy, didn’t Rose say when she saw us in the Royal Neptune Hotel that Lydeea and me had the same noses?”

“She did indeed! She said ye could a been brother and sister, the pair a yous were that alike.”

As the Minor rattled into the McFadden yard and Lydeea hurried to greet him, Jamie said goodbye forever to that frightened, ill-favored little boy, to the child who’d answered to the number Eighty-Six, and in whose tortured dreams this sunlit future gleamed.

And he knew at last, as he ran to meet his sister, that life’s whole arduous journey had been in preparation for this moment. This perfect moment, free of pain and loneliness, and the memories of cruel people in darkened rooms that had haunted him for so very long.

For, in the tear-stained, heart-stopping warmth of Lily’s embrace, James Kevin Barry Michael McCloone understood with the utmost joy that he’d survived it all, and wanted to live.

He wanted to live and sing and dance and play for each and every one of his glorious,

his precious,

his God-given,

love-driven,

Lily-rescued days.