The Music Lesson (17 page)

“Your best bet is a departure in the morning, after the funeral, of course,” he said. “You’ve got the Aer Lingus ticket, and you can do what you like, but you might want to consider your options—there are freighters bound for America in and out of Cobh every week, and the passenger accommodations can be nice enough. The grub’s not bad, and it’s a decent way to pass a fortnight. It might suit you, a slow return, some time off on yer own, like. Most of the Panamanian ships don’t ask a lot of questions. I can give you some names if you want.”

“Questions don’t bother me. I don’t have anything to hide,” I said.

“No, so you don’t.” He sighed. “I’ll write down the information—it’ll be on the table for you. So that’s it, then. You can have a last look in the morning at yer little picture, I promise you that.” He leaned down as if to kiss me, and I froze. He stopped for a moment and then I felt his lips brush my forehead for an instant. “Ah, Patricia,” he whispered. “If I had a life that let me love anyone
a’tall, I would love you. Please believe me that I wasn’t playing games with you. You have to understand what it’s like here. Perpetual humiliation. We’re all trapped in it. We
have
to struggle. We
have
to resist. It’s a maiming thing, this great fuckin’ hatred.”

I had brought just one skirt, rather dowdy, dark blue corduroy, and I was wearing it, though I would have to wear it again to the funeral service in the morning.

As I approached the door to Mary’s cottage, it opened and Kieran O’Mahoney came out. Several cats emerged as well and streaked into the darkness. Who would feed them? I realized I hadn’t seen Tiggy in a few days. Oh, well, Irish cats seem to know how to earn a living. Kieran didn’t see me. He stopped and crossed himself, then stopped again to light a cigarette. He went to his car, which was wedged into a gap in the wall that runs along the road.

I waited in the shadows beside Mary’s chicken house, in no mood for a conversation, while he took a long, hissing piss against the wall, got into his car, reversed it into Mary’s yard, and pulled out into the lane to drive away.

With two other women from the parish, Nora had washed Mary’s body and laid it out in a white garment on the bed. I realized it must be a shroud. I had never seen one. Mary looked tiny, as if death had shrunk her down, sucked out something that had taken up space inside her.
I didn’t know what the protocols were, but following some instinct, I went to the bed, knelt down, and found comfort in the ancient familiarity of a Hail Mary and an Our Father.

Nora introduced me to Mary’s nephew, Peter Carew, and his wife, Kathleen, who is enormously pregnant. Peter is a tall, diffident-seeming man in his twenties, with a limp handshake. He’ll inherit Mary’s cottage. Kathleen took me by the sleeve and began to explain, rather defensively, that the minister from Clonakilty had called in earlier, briefly, and had authorized them to carry on.

Kathleen, like all of Mary’s neighbors, is Catholic, and they were doing things in the traditional way they knew, despite the burial being out of a Protestant church in the morning. Peter, she confided to me, “is a Godless heathen with no religion at all.”

There were candles guttering on several surfaces. White sheets were draped about on some of the furniture. Where had I seen this room before? Hogarth? Brueghel? Jan Steen?

The bedroom was narrow and stuffy, so after standing awkwardly for a few minutes, exchanging small talk with the Carews and Nora and two other women who were sitting on three chairs in a straight row, like children playing at being on a train, I went back down.

There were several other people in the house, some
of whom I knew from the village, but others were complete strangers to me. Food and drinks were laid out on the table in the parlor. It felt like Mary’s hospitality, somehow, and I wanted to eat something, having barely eaten all day, feeling comforted being in Mary’s house, which felt familiar, though I had never been inside before.

I ate a rather mayonnaisey ham sandwich, standing by the table, looking around at Mary’s things—doilies, seashells, Staffordshire figurines, some terrible nineteenth-century ancestral portraits in gilt plaster frames. An old man I recognized as one of the pub regulars who stare at me when I go into the village, whose Sunday best suit radiated rich camphor vapors, leaned against me and reached across the table to pour himself another drink of whiskey, finishing the bottle. He held it up to the light and squinted at it, as though he thought he might discover something in the empty bottle.

“Miss, do ya know why they call an empty whiskey bottle a dead soldier, miss?” he asked me politely.

“No.”

“Because, miss, the spirit is departed. Ya see? The bottle is empty and the spirit is departed. A dead soldier. That’s what they call it. They do. Did ya know that, now, did ya, miss?” He put the bottle down on its side and rubbed his hands together, delighted with himself.

“Donal, stop yer flirtin’ with the American lady,”
warned an almost identically dressed man who was sitting by the television set. The picture was on, but the sound was turned down. Its flickering blue light spilled across his lap.
Dynasty
was on.

“Donal’s like a dog with two tails when he has a chance to speak to a pretty gel. Have a bit of cake, dearie?” asked Hugh O’Keeffe’s wife. Wanting to be polite, feeling very much the stranger in their midst, I took the piece she held out, though evidently no one else had been in the mood for cake. It was heavily stuccoed with pink frosting that tasted of lard.

“It’s very good,” I said after one small bite.

Hugh O’Keeffe looked up from where he was sitting at the table. I realized he was drunk. I realized that most of the men in the room were drunk. “ ’Tis Orla’s speciality,” he said, drawing out the word to five syllables. “Donkey’s gudge.”

“I never,” Orla O’Keeffe assured me, resting her enormous work-roughened hand on my arm.

The Carews came downstairs and I sensed currents in the air that I did not understand. They weren’t liked.

The door opened and Annie Dunne stood there, the bad fairy at the christening. She was dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt that looked vaguely Spanish. She eyed everyone in the room suspiciously. Some cats bolted through the door as it closed, fanning a welcome gust of cold air into the stale parlor.

“ ’Tis a shame, oh, ’tis a shame,” Annie scolded generally. “And you”—she fixed me in her sights—“you, miss, you were the last to see Mary alive, you know. ’Tis a fact. The guards told me. They interviewed me, of course, asked me questions, like. They knew who would know what’s what in Ballyroe, they did.”

“They did no such thing; they stopped in to buy some fags and crisps is all,” Donal muttered. “ ’Twas Annie did the interviewin’.”

People trickled in and out for the next couple of hours, but by 2:00
A.M.
, only Nora, Orla O’Keeffe, and I were left. The Carews left early, a little embarrassed, I think, to be ducking the responsibility of the wake night, though Nora shooed them out, insisting that Kathleen needed to get off her feet. Nora and I washed the dishes—the “ware”—without much conversation. She told me that she had known Peter since he was a boy, when he used to visit Mary for a fortnight every August.

“He never was much of a lad, so it was a bit of a shock, all right, when he had to marry that Kathleen O’Leary so quickly. Her father was none too pleased. He had bigger ambitions for his youngest daughter than seeing her married off to a Brit with weak tea in his veins, though Peter did the right thing by her, I’ll give him that,” Nora said.

“This just happened?” I was momentarily confused.

“Oh, mercy no, the one under the apron’s her sixth. It’s become a habit with them.”

Drying Mary’s cups and plates with her dishcloth made me sad, made me miss her. I wondered what Peter would do with the cottage. Sell it? Rent it out? Nora left then, saying she needed to nip down the road for an hour to check on an infected cow her boys were minding for her.

I went up to Orla with a fresh cup of tea for her. There seemed to be a traditional requirement to mind Mary’s body at every moment—I realized that she had never been left unattended all through the evening.

I was glad when Orla said she needed to put her legs up, if I didn’t mind (she’s got some kind of circulation disorder, from the looks of her swollen ankles), and got to her feet heavily. She went down the stairs slowly, one at a time. I could hear her teacup rattling on its saucer as she progressed.

I was alone with Mary then for a while. Long enough to tell her the things I needed to tell her.

Who was she to me? I didn’t know her very well. She was an elderly Scottish lady who enjoyed reading a bit, loved her cats and her garden. We will always be bound together. She’ll keep the secret well.

At some point, Nora came back and Orla went home. Nora and I sat in silence beside the bed, nodding in and out of sleep, the candles burning down to the saucers. I dreamed of an endless sea that turned to green
fields. I started to cross the fields, but then the land under my feet turned to water again, the hills merely frozen waves now beginning to churn once more. I woke, thinking,
calenture
. Twice through the rest of the night Nora began to recite the Rosary and I joined her both times. I fell more deeply asleep in my chair after that, and when I woke again, it was daylight. My neck hurt the way it does when you’ve slept on a train. The undertaker was rapping on the door impatiently. The hearse was in the yard, an enormous vintage hearse with glass sides.

Kevin Donohue and his assistant pulled the coffin out onto a wheeled dolly of some kind and opened the lid. They were in narrow dark suits, and they looked like extras from a movie. The coffin was empty. Of course it would be, but the emptiness was somehow a strange sight. The tufted red satin lining was cheap-looking in the harsh morning light. Nora was rattling things in the kitchen, preparing yet another pot of tea. The Irish hold a deep belief that enough cups of tea are the antidote to anything. Donohue came in with his assistant and the four of us sat in awkward silence and had tea and some stale biscuits from a tin box that tasted as if they were left over from Christmas.

Nora and I helped them wrap Mary in a white sheet, and then they wound another coarser white cloth around her until she was completely wrapped, like a tiny mummy. Between the two of them they carried Mary’s
body on a canvas stretcher down the narrow stairs. They had to tilt her almost upright to clear the bottom step.

They placed her in the coffin and fastened down the lid. Although Nora had explained to me that Mary would be put into her coffin as she was, in her shroud, and there would be no dressing of the corpse because the coffin would be closed, Nora looked troubled at this moment and muttered to me, “A closed-coffin funeral. That’s how they do it for the Church of Ireland crowd. It isn’t right. It’s not our way. Not a’tall. Not a proper removal a’tall.”

Donohue heard her and said, “Sorry, Nora, orders from himself above in Clon. It’s the way that crowd likes to do it.” Not that it matters, but I really disliked the man. The Uriah Heep of Clonakilty. The coffin slid into its slot and the doors were closed. Donohue got behind the wheel, his assistant beside him, both of them wearing silly plastic sunglasses, and the hearse glided off, looking horribly wrong on this familiar little stretch of road. I watched it until it was out of sight around a bend in the lane, and then I set off down the road to pack up my things and change for the funeral.

Nora called after me that I could sit in with her family if I liked, and I didn’t know what she meant until she explained that they would give me a ride in their car to the church in Clonakilty in an hour’s time, once she had got the milking done. I accepted gratefully, not having thought how I would get there.

The cottage seemed empty in a different way than it ever had before. Mickey was nowhere in evidence as I packed my bag. He had left me information about the freighters in Cobh, and a bus schedule. Very thoughtful. I put on my nicest sweater and hoped I looked respectable enough. My hair was limp—I hadn’t washed it in five days. I caught a glimpse of myself in a window reflection as I set my bag by the door. I looked terrible, pale and haggard. Why not? I left some jeans on the top to change into, and otherwise everything I wanted to take home was in that bag except for this notebook, which I thought to keep with me in my handbag, in the event that someone might go through my things.

The ride to Clonakilty and back was nauseating, owing to Pat O’Driscoll’s terrible driving, the winding roads, a bad muffler, and the mixture of camphor and body odor that wafted off the entire O’Driscoll clan. I was jammed in the backseat between two of the sons, the other two having stayed home to mind the cows. The funeral itself was unremarkable and perfunctory, attended mostly by the local congregation—few of the neighbors from Ballyroe had made the drive. The minister seemed cold to me, the service rote. It had nothing to do with the Mary Carew I had known that little bit.

She had a headstone, with her name engraved on it
already, and her birth date, too, followed by a dash. It would be but the work of a moment for the stonecutter to add the year of her death. The service was done, the minister gone back inside the church, most everyone dispersed, and I stayed on, watching the coffin go into the ground. I had said my good-bye to Mary when I was alone with her in the night. Now I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the sounds of the spades digging into the mound of soil and then hearing the clods of earth hit the polished wood.