The Passions of Emma (43 page)
Colin, the barber, put wind in his bag and his mouth to the blowpipe, and filled the night with wails so harsh and rich and sad they pulled at the sinews of the soul. But then out came a fiddle and an accordion. The music turned loud and joyous, and it wasn’t long before shoes began tapping and the kerosene ceiling lamp swayed as if the little shack were dancing on its stilts.
Someone said something that caused someone else to laugh, and then the talk grew as lively as the music. Father O’Reilly handed around a plate of clay pipes and a bowl of tobacco. The men dipped mugs into the beer bucket in the sink and passed around jars of
poitín.
Soon the kitchen grew hot with the press of bodies and the burning candles, the air thick with tobacco smoke and the malty smell of beer.
poitín.
Soon the kitchen grew hot with the press of bodies and the burning candles, the air thick with tobacco smoke and the malty smell of beer.
The women gathered around the table and drank endless cups of tea. Emma stood on their fringes, listening but not belonging. They weren’t being rude, she knew. They didn’t know what to make of her, and so they made nothing at all.
“He took right to the pap bottle, God bless him,” Mrs. Hale was saying. As the caretaker of little Jacko, she was commanding most of the attention. “After she couldn’t nurse him no more, the poor dear. And you wouldn’t live so long as to see a sweeter babe. He never fusses. Just lays in his cradle for hours on end, blowing spit bubbles and practicing his smile.”
“He’s got his father’s smile, he does,” someone said.
“And his mother’s hair, God bless him.”
They all looked over at Bria lying in her coffin with her hair spread in a scarlet fan on the white satin pillow.
All but Emma, who walked out the open door and stood alone on the tall front stoop. But the night offered no comfort. The whole world was blurred in a thick white salt cloud. It muffled some sounds and magnified others. She could hear the small sucking rattle of the tide on the beach around back.
The beach where Bria had died.
Emma’s head fell back and she looked up, into a white infinity. She had thought she hadn’t any more tears inside her, yet they came again, overflowing her eyes and rolling across her cheekbones and into her hair.
I can’t bear this, she thought. God must end this now, for I can’t bear another moment of it.
Tomorrow would be the funeral Mass and then they would bury Bria in the Saint Mary’s cemetery, among the tumbled old monuments whose weathered faces were furred with moss. Her grave would be a fresh scar on the earth for a while, but within weeks the grass would begin to grow there again, and come winter, the snow and rain would begin to scour the new stone. And in the spring, Emma would plant violets, and they would bloom.
Eventually, Emma knew, her tears would stop coming so easily, and what seemed so unbearable now would become bearable almost without her realizing it. But her heart would hold on to her grief forever, would hold on like a lover. Because her heart knew there were some loses you never got over.
The fog had turned as thick as buttermilk by the time the waking party came to an end. In groups of twos and threes, by families and alone, the guests dipped their fingers in the holy-water font and received Father O’Reilly’s blessing of
Dia is Maire Dhuit
before disappearing into the white-shrouded night.
Dia is Maire Dhuit
before disappearing into the white-shrouded night.
And the house grew silent once again.
Emma helped the girls to undress and saw them settled for the rest of the night in the white iron bed. She leaned over and brushed the red curls off Merry’s forehead and kissed the soft, pink skin.
Merry hummed.
“She says Mam doesn’t want to leave us,” Noreen said.
Emma cupped Merry’s face. The little girl’s cheeks were wet and sticky with tears. “Of course she didn’t, honey, because she loved you all so very, very much. But she’s at peace now, in heaven.”
Merry’s hum took on an angry tone, and she shook her head, hard, but this time Noreen only shrugged.
Emma tucked the sheet more snugly under Merry’s round, dimpled chin. “Good night, girls,” she said, although she could barely get the words out her throat had grown so sore. All of her had grown so sore. But as she turned to leave, Noreen said in a small, tight voice, “Miss Emma, will you lay by us for a time?”
So she turned down the lamp and stretched out beside them on top of the diamond-patterned quilt, lay beside Bria’s daughters in the dark on this, the second night they would spend without her. Through the open bedroom door she heard Shay and Bria’s brother talking. Rather, the priest was talking; there were no answering words from Bria’s husband. And when the girls finally slept and she went out into the kitchen, she found him alone, standing in the middle of the worn brown linoleum floor as if he weren’t quite sure how he’d come to be there.
The black taffeta skirts of her mourning dress rustled as she came up to him. She laid her hand on his back. He turned, slowly, so that for a moment her hand seemed to cling to the black cloth of his coat before it fell to her side.
She stood before him, bleeding inside for him. He looked as though someone had wrenched his heart out of his breast and wrung it empty. She wanted to comfort him, to take comfort from him, but she couldn’t think how to begin to do either one.
“If there’s anything else I can do . . .”
She watched him try to smile and fail. “No, thank you. You’ve
done so much already.” His gaze went back to the casket on the table as though pulled there. He looked at it as if he waited for the woman inside to get up and come to him. “I’d like to be alone, please,” he said.
done so much already.” His gaze went back to the casket on the table as though pulled there. He looked at it as if he waited for the woman inside to get up and come to him. “I’d like to be alone, please,” he said.
He’d said it gently, almost sweetly, but it hurt.
She turned and left him then. But when she was through the door, she paused and looked back, although afterward she wished she hadn’t. He had gone to the coffin and stood looking down on his dead wife’s face, and in that silent kitchen she heard him speak such broken, desperate words.
“And how am I supposed to go on living without you, Bria darlin’? Will you be telling me that, then,
mo bhean
?”
mo bhean
?”
In the days that followed his wife’s death, Shay McKenna took his fishing dory out on the water at dawn and stayed there until it grew dark.
The hours of daylight were long in August, and they were easily filled up with dragging nets, harvesting traps, and baiting lines. On days when the wind blew strong, he sailed up into it and let the wind beat on his face and body as if it had fists. On days when there was no wind, he rowed. Those were the best days, when he made himself so tired he couldn’t think, and the only pain he felt was the ache in his muscles and joints and bones.
But sometimes . . . Sometimes the setting sun would turn the clouds the color of her hair, and the water spilling over the bow would sound like her laugh. Or the evening breeze would make the same little sighing sound she’d always made when he entered her, and he would know the soul-scouring pain of loss and never-again.
Sometimes, thought Shay McKenna, it felt as though he’d taken a gun and shot a hole in his heart.
She’d been gone over two weeks when he came home one day a little earlier than usual. Even so, the sun had set, leaving the sky an
ashen gray with puffs of charcoal here and there. He took his time putting up the dory, delaying that moment when he would have to walk into the house and she wouldn’t be there.
ashen gray with puffs of charcoal here and there. He took his time putting up the dory, delaying that moment when he would have to walk into the house and she wouldn’t be there.
By the time he made himself climb the stoop and open the door, the lamps had been lit against the falling darkness. The kitchen smelled good, he thought, of supper cooking on the stove. He started into his bedroom, then stopped dead on the threshold.
Miss Emma Tremayne was bent over his bed, changing his son’s soiled nappy. As he watched, she pushed her face into Jacko’s belly, nuzzling him with her nose, and the little fellow waved his fisted hands and laughed—that deep, gurgling chortle babies made.
And tears stung Shay McKenna’s eyes.
She must have sensed his presence, for she straightened and turned. She uttered a small exclamation of surprise, and the blood rushed pink over her cheeks. “Mr. McKenna! I thought you were . . . I hope you don’t mind. He needed changing.”
He nodded and waved his hand, as if giving her permission to carry on. But he couldn’t seem to say anything, and he backed out of the doorway, feeling hulking and clumsy and too big for his skin.
He sat down at the kitchen table, and the cat Gorgeous jumped into his lap. He fondled the cat’s chewed ears while it kneaded his thighs with its huge paws. There was a peaceful, homey silence to the house. He could hear the rattle of potatoes simmering on the stove. And from the bedroom, the rustle of silk, the whisper of a kid slipper across the floor.
He was just wondering where his daughters were when her voice came floating out to him. “I sent the girls over to Mrs. Hale’s with the leftover poppyseed cake we had for tea . . . She’s been so kind, Mrs. Hale has.”
He knew Emma Tremayne had been coming here often in the weeks since Bria’s death. The girls told him of those afternoons when she met them at the mill gates, with a hamper full of food. They would collect little Jacko from Mrs. Hale, and then Emma
would put on tea parties for them all. Proper, Great Folk–type tea parties that would have made Bria smile.
would put on tea parties for them all. Proper, Great Folk–type tea parties that would have made Bria smile.
He looked around him. The flowers on the table sure hadn’t been put there by him. He’d left the breakfast dishes on the slopstone, but they’d been washed and put away. Yet even without all that, he knew those days when she came because he could smell the traces of her presence that she left behind. A hint of lilacs that always made him think of warm spring afternoons, when the whole world seemed full of expectation and promise.
He noticed an unfamiliar book on the table and he picked it up. It was a gold-leafed, satin-bound volume titled
The Lives of the Presidents.
He opened it up to the flyleaf and read: “To Emmaline Tremayne, for excellence in spelling.”
The Lives of the Presidents.
He opened it up to the flyleaf and read: “To Emmaline Tremayne, for excellence in spelling.”
Excellence in spelling . . . The thought made him smile. He tried to imagine her as a child. She probably wore white pinafores so starched they crackled when she walked. Surely she’d never gone around with holes in her stockings and skinned knees and straw in her hair.
She came out of the bedroom with little Jacko in her arms, not crackling, maybe, but rustling, surely. That silky whisper of a rustle that she seemed to make even when she was standing still. He watched her lay his son in his cradle, watched how she smoothed the hair down over the soft spot on his head with her finger, and he thought of how Bria had always done that, and his throat tightened with longing for something that was never again to be.
He looked away from her, out the window that framed a sky that was now the deep, dark blue of summer twilight. When he looked back, he realized she had come to stand at the table, with her hand on the back of a chair, and she was staring at the book he held. A worried frown had put a little crease between her dark eyebrows.
“Noreen told me you’ve been teaching her how to read,” she said, “and I thought . . . Well, as she’s interested in American history, and there’re a few deliciously gory parts in there to give her the shivers,
I thought she might like . . .” Her hand tightened its grip on the chair. “I did say she had to ask you first, though, before she could keep it. I hope you don’t mind.”
I thought she might like . . .” Her hand tightened its grip on the chair. “I did say she had to ask you first, though, before she could keep it. I hope you don’t mind.”
He wanted to tell her he was that desperate for his girls to learn to read, to be educated. He was that desperate to get them out of the mill, he would have sold whatever he had left of his soul. But he couldn’t seem to get any air or words past his throat.
He laid the book down carefully on the table. He spread his hand out flat on the oilcloth. Spread his fingers out wide, until the veins and bones of his hand pushed against the skin.
He glanced up and saw that she, too, was looking at his hand. His big, brutish, scarred, and callused hand.
Her gaze jerked up, met his, and then pulled hard away.
The skin on her forehead was so translucent he could see the blue veins, see them pulse. He wondered what had her so skittish around him tonight. He never knew which Emma she would be. The daring, rebellious child with the mouth on her saucy and quirky as an Irish riddle. Or the shy society miss who behaved as if she wouldn’t say boo to a mouse.
And then there was the young woman he had come to know and like during those final weeks of his wife’s life. That Emma was a generous, kind, and loyal friend.
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