The Visitors (6 page)

—Oh, my dear—

Zoë took a quick sip from the glass.

—And so there I was, my dear, sitting next to my father, not watching him, but having to listen to him, to endure him, and I never liked to look into his face, though his was a handsome face, narrow with strong
jawbones, pale, with tiny red veins that spread out along the cheeks—you remember things that are of no use, you remember things that are of no use, he used to say to me—but I listened, I had no other choice but to listen to him, and I watched the fields and the meadows, the cows and the houses that drifted past so slowly, and I thought I was never going to be home and free from that car and him and his voice—

—I imagine that’s your new friend at the corner, my dear, wearing the baseball cap, Zoë said.

Her finger was pressed against the screen. I reached my hand up and wiped dust from it. The backpack was at his feet. A loose bunch of flowers lay atop it. The shirt was tight across the shoulders, but it otherwise fitted him.

—Mister Mysterious Walter, my dear—

—And flowers for his aunt, my dear. How sweet is that—

—He stole them from the park, my dear. He’s late, and I gave him that shirt—

—I never imagined you wearing a cowboy shirt, my dear—

—When I was a teenager in Dublin, a girl bought it for me. It was a bit of a joke—

—Did she buy you a horse, too?

—No horse, my dear, or spurs, in case you are curious.

—Don’t be rude to him because he’s late.

—I was hoping I’d seen the last of him, my dear—

I was sitting on the edge of the bed and lacing my shoes. Zoë was pressing the screen door open. The tote bag swung in her other hand. She tapped the screen with her nails—the bare, skinny arm extended, the palm flat against the screen.

—Let’s not keep him waiting, James. He must be nervous about seeing someone he hasn’t seen in so long.

At the end of June, Michael located the well down the paddock from the front of our house. The next week he brought a small JCB and drilled. Two weeks later he dug the foundation for the pump house. In early July, he brought a cement mixer, hitched to the back of his Nissan van. Pipes of all shapes and sizes, cement blocks, bags of cement, wood, and heaps of sand and gravel were delivered from the creamery store. We covered them with sheets of plastic against the rain, though that was a summer of sunshine.

When the seven-by-seven foundation was set, Michael and a bricklayer built the walls. Michael plastered the walls himself. I remember walking out our front door, out to turn in cows, or cut wood for the range, and I’d stand in my mother’s flower garden and listen to Michael whistling tunes on his ladder, and it wasn’t until I moved to Dublin that I heard those tunes again, and there I also heard the words. Songs by Patsy Cline, Cole Porter, Billie Holiday, and Frank Sinatra that the locals sang late on Saturday nights.

That first day, my mother told Michael to be sure to tell Nora the moment he got inside the door that evening to not bother with his lunch. My mother would make his lunch, she had to make lunches for us anyway, and because of the fine weather, there were plenty of tomatoes, scallions, and lettuce. My father grew these beside my mother’s flower garden, along with potatoes, onions, parsnips, carrots, strawberries, and raspberries. Michael sat on a cement block and ate my mother’s sandwiches and drank her tea from his white enamel mug.
My father sat with him, unless we were making hay, and if that was the case, Michael helped out.

Two or three days a week, Michael brought Kevin, and they started to stay late in the evening. There was a problem with how the well was lined, a leak, something like that, I forget, but I remember hearing them nailing down the frame of the roof while we milked the cows. After they were milked, my mother and sisters made supper, which Michael and Kevin sometimes stayed for, and after supper my father and Michael smoked Sweet Aftons by the range and drank bottles of stout, while Michael retold his jokes and we watched television, and when this one program we liked to watch was over, my parents told us to go outside, run around, enjoy the fine long evenings, what were we doing indoors anyway, watching that awful American trash, but if we were going to the river we were to be careful, even though the water was low.

High or low in summertime, we went to the river. Oh, how I loved the river so! We’d take our shoes off and stand in the warm mud below the sloping bank and we’d laugh and shove each other and slowly sink into that mud that boiled up to our ankles. Then we waded in and tore out the rushes, ferns, and water lilies, and we swatted the fat bluebottles and the clouds of midges and laid down jam jars and tin cans on the sandy riverbed to catch the tiny fish we called brickeens. We decorated the jars and cans with moss and pebbles from the riverbed and placed them on our bedroom windows. The brickeens survived a few weeks.

Anthony stopped coming to the river with us that summer. He had stopped spending any time with his younger brothers and sisters, and when our parents told us to go outside, Anthony was allowed to cycle up the road to meet the Mahers, who had a record player and two or three K-tel records. The Mahers and Anthony smoked Majors and drank cheap English cider. Rarely had they the money to buy them, so they just shoplifted them. My parents knew nothing about any of this. Or if they did, they pretended they didn’t. Rules for boys being way more lenient than rules for girls.

Kevin’s interest in coming to the river with us was Tess. She was sixteen. She was beautiful. She knew this. And she rejoiced in Kevin’s telling her how nice her red hair looked, how fine she was in her pink skirt, and she sat before the mirror in the girls’ room and rolled the hissing curling iron through her hair and carefully brushed on mascara and eye shadow.

—Don’t put that stuff on your face, they’ll go stone mad, Hannah used to say.

—Let them go stone mad, Tess used to say.

And she’d smile at me in the mirror and I’d smile back at her, and she’d press her face closer to the mirror.

—Tell her not to do it, Jimmy. She’ll listen to you, Hannah used to say.

—She won’t listen to me, I used to say.

—Don’t blame me when they get mad at you, Hannah used to say.

—Don’t worry, I won’t, Tess used to say.

Then Tess would laugh in the mirror, and when she laughed I did.

—You’ll get us all into trouble. That’s what you’ll do, Hannah used to say.

And she’d tightly fold her arms and sigh and turn her back on Tess and the mirror.

On one of those evenings in early July, Kevin sat on the riverbank. He took off his work boots and socks and rolled his pants legs up to his knees. Tess sat beside him and slipped her sandals off. They had walked hand in hand through the meadow behind the three of us. Hannah and Stephen were bent over, singing into the water.

Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea

Silver buckles on his knee

When he comes back he’ll marry me

Bobby, Bobby Shafto!

Tess was wearing the pink skirt and the tight gray blouse that had two or three cloth-covered buttons at the neck. The skirt and the
blouse, Tess’s purple coat, other secondhand clothes, and four pairs of girl’s platform shoes had arrived a few weeks before in a parcel from my mother’s old National school friend who lived in a neighborhood at the end of the Piccadilly Line in North London.

Kevin and Tess stood whispering in the mud. The three of us were eyeing the fleeting shoals of brickeens. I’d follow one brickeen, pick it out from the rest, but every time it got lost among the others. Stephen and Hannah were shouting with delight that there were more brickeens this evening than ever before. Kevin and Tess left the riverbank and headed toward the small hill a few hundred yards away. I waited ten or fifteen minutes before I told Hannah and Stephen that I needed to piss. They weren’t listening; they were too into their brickeens. And so I waded out and strolled up the side of the hill. At the top of it I hid behind one of the hay pikes we had made the week before. Michael and Kevin Lyons had helped. At the bottom of the hill sat Kevin and my sister. Their backs were against a hay pike.

I had seen one porn magazine. They were illegal, but the Mahers had one. One of their Liverpool cousins had sneaked it over on the boat. And one Sunday in May, after second Mass, when I was walking the road home with the Mahers and Anthony, the oldest of the Mahers pulled his jumper up, reached his hand down the back of his pants, pulled the magazine out, opened it up, and shoved it into my face. They laughed. And so did I. It was a glossy photograph of a naked and bony young woman on all fours. A naked man knelt at either end of her. The men were hairy, fat, and older. One had a thick mustache, the kind you imagined a bandit wearing. And it all looked so brutal. The hungry look on the woman’s face, the tip of her swollen pink tongue clamped against her bottom lip, the men blissfully stroking themselves, warming up for the real action. But sure enough, I was terribly excited by it. I didn’t yet have pubic hair, but I believed that when I did, I’d fit right in, be accepted by Anthony and the Mahers, and go forth with them on their adventures.

Long and thin goes too far in and does not suit the lady

Short and thick does the trick and out pops the baby

I read the story below the photograph. I don’t know if the Mahers or Anthony did. They might have got what they wanted by looking. Boys read the
Beano
,
Hotspur
,
Batman
,
Superman
, and
Spider-Man
, when we could get our hands on them. I read those and Andrew Lang’s version of the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
, the Greek myths, the Norse and Irish myths, tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Old and New Testament stories,
The Arabian Nights
,
Treasure Island
,
Don Quixote
,
The Last of the Mohicans
,
The Adventures of Robin Hood
,
Lorna Doone
,
The Swiss Family Robinson
, and
Robinson Crusoe
. Those books were in the National school library, which was a two-door glass cabinet that the teacher unlocked on Friday afternoons—but the story in the porn magazine has also stayed. The man with the bandit mustache told it. He said the woman chewed on the end of his penis like it was a cigar. How could you forget
cigar
? How could you forget
chew
?

Bricks and mortar will not stay,

Will not stay, will not stay,

Bricks and mortar will not stay,

My fair lady.

Kevin and Tess were pure electricity when they skipped along the top then down the side of that small hill. Tess’s pink skirt blowing out in a breeze. I was back in the river. I said nothing to Stephen and Hannah about what I had seen. I was learning to be secretive. Then Kevin and Tess were behind me, but I didn’t turn. I didn’t want to give them any hint that I was in the know. I reached down and flung handfuls of water at Stephen and Hannah. They kept shouting at me that I’d frighten all the brickeens away, but I didn’t stop. I laughed. I played the
fool. The fool being the next-door neighbor of the secretive. Late evening sunshine on the water and on the two large rocks on the opposite bank. The sweet smell of ripening hay, the laughter and the shouts from my younger brother and sister, and behind me my elder sister and Kevin Lyons giggling.

I’m not sure how it came about. I did think Tess and he were still in the mud behind me, though next their laughter came from up the riverbank, then harsh words from him, clothes being ripped, a scream from Tess, a splash, Tess crying, and the bluebottles before me turning furious.

None of us could swim, and the water between Tess and us was crowded with the stiff rushes and the slimy water lilies and the sharp reeds that would slice your skin open. Columns of wasps skimmed in and out of a mossy hole in the riverbank—but I dashed out of that river, ran along the bank, past the unripened blackberry bush, slapping at the midges, calling my sister’s name, who was crying and calling my name. Hannah was also crying and Stephen was crying because Hannah was. Kevin stood on the edge of the riverbank, his arms flat against his side, his head down. I said nothing when I ran around him, down the riverbank, through the soft mud, and into the water, where I grabbed my sister’s hands and pulled her to her feet. She would not have drowned. The water was shallow. But you never know. And Tess was otherwise in bits. Stephen and Hannah were by then beside us. Hannah held her sister’s right hand while Stephen and I walked Tess out of the river and sat her on the bank. She was crying and gripping the ripped blouse at the neck. The buttons had vanished. I looked up to see Kevin Lyons running at the edge of the meadow. He clutched his boots and socks to his chest. He’d made powerful tracks.

The two men in the kitchen were on their third or fourth bottle of porter. My mother was cleaning up and circling the men like a hawk. Asking what else they needed. They ignored her unless another bottle was called for. Their pale ashes and the burned-out butts of Sweet Aftons scattered across the range top, where a blackened kettle and
teapot sat. And then us huddled in the middle of that kitchen. Like we had stepped unwillingly onto a stage. Tess’s red hair matted against her cheeks. Broken rushes sticking out of her hair like knitting needles. Like swords stuck in stones. The muddy and wrinkled pink skirt. Tess was still crying and gripping the blouse to her neck. Hannah was still crying. She stood in front. Stephen was on one side of Tess. I was on her other. And the first thing my mother said when she saw us was for us not to drip all over the tiles that she had spent the last hour mopping. And the second thing she said was did she not warn us a million times to be careful when we ventured to the river.

Hannah blurted it out.

—Kevin Lyons shoved Tess into the river and ran away! And because of that all my brickeens escaped!

—What has come over that young fellow at all, Michael turned to my father and said.

—The same thing that’s come over these wretches before us, my father looked at his friend and said.

My mother smoothed the front of her apron then stepped between the men and us. She pushed the hair from her face and placed her hands on her hips. Her eyes were on Tess.

—Go down to your room immediately and put on something decent! Fix your hair, and did I not warn you a million times to not plaster that muck on your eyes, how many times! How many! How many!

—I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Tess cried.

—You’re not sorry! Not one bit! If you did like you were told devilment like this wouldn’t happen.

Then my father stood. His wife stepped aside.

—Clear out of this kitchen! Or I’ll get the stick to yez! And pull that door after yez!

Tess and I were down in the girls’ room. Tess was sitting on the edge of her and Hannah’s bed. Tess’s legs were crossed. Left over right. The left one was shaking. The girls’ door was open and so was the toilet door. Hannah was sitting on the toilet bowl and crying. Her cries
echoed up and down the blue corridor. She cried that Tess brought this on herself. Did she not say many times that something like this was bound to happen! And next Hannah cried that we’d never see brickeens like those again! Why, oh why did Tess always have to ruin everything for everyone! Stephen was in the boys’ room. Stephen was most likely whispering to dying brickeens on the windowsill. He was bored with this drama. Tess was staring at the floor. I reached out and held her shoulders and begged her to look up. She had stopped crying but her hand still gripped the ripped blouse. And that left leg still shaking. Her wet scraggly hair fully hiding her face. Like the river before we ripped the lilies from it. Rushes wilting in Tess’s hair and rushes scattered at my feet and muddy water dripping from her hair and dress onto that bedroom floor.

—I saw you, Tess, I said. —I saw what you and him did.

Tess looked up.

—Don’t tell them, Jimmy. Don’t ever tell. If they find that out they’ll kill us—