The All of It: A Novel Page 6

  She nodded.

  “And?”

  “And?” meeting his gaze.

  “You gave them some sort of satisfaction, of course?”

  “In my fashion I did.”

  “In your fashion, Enda?”

  She stiffened and came back at him with: “That I lied to them? Is that what you’re getting at with me, Father?”

  “Given your circumstances, I assume that you lied, Enda. And please don’t take that attitude with me. What I’m trying to get at is the scope of the lie. Its magnitude, its effects—”

  “Oh,” she mused, “I just said we’d known each other all our lives, Kevin and myself, and that our getting linked, well, that when we got old enough, it just seemed like the next thing to do. I made it sound ever so middling and dull….” Her mouth lifted in a shrewd smile: “There was one girl full of airs, always peeking at herself in the glass, and she put it to me early on in front of all the others: ‘What was the cut of your wedding dress?’ I asked her back, ‘God in heaven, where would the likes of me ever get a wedding dress?’ That finished the curiosity.” She laughed. “Have you ever noticed, Father, how the ordinary sets to rest a person’s interest in yourself?”

  At his according laughter, she made a shifting, energetic gesture and asked, “Could you tell me the time please, Father?”

  He read his watch aloud to her.

  “Kathleen Martin and Maeve O’Callaghan are coming on the hour with the others,” she said excitedly. “Catherine McPhillemy, God keep her, got them for me.”

  He took in her maddening gladness at having Kathleen and Maeve to keen for Kevin. She knew—ah! he knew she knew; he’d said it from the pulpit a hundred times or more—of his disapproval of professional keeners. “Banshee lamentation,” he’d labelled the practice, “that robs a wake of its true grief and turns it wild.”

  Had she not heard the words, or was he, as a priest, so little to her she felt no need to give him mind? And to spring it on him like this, as a fact of imminent occurrence, causing him this itch of pique, nettle that she was, sitting there before him, her excitement all unhidden, and himself cut by a blade of sudden hurt and the question as suddenly formed in his mind: Am I, then, less to her than I would wish to be?

  “Father?” she ventured timidly. “You look struck.” Her eyes, as his own met them, were soft and anxious, enormously proximate and warm. “You’re all right, Father?”

  “All right?” he surprised himself by calling out, “When I’ve just learned I’m to look forward to a headache and to being deafened by the howling of she-wolves?”

  She hooted, “Father!” and to his astonishment let out a high peal of a girlish giggle. “Father!” and again, the alluring giggle: “What a thing to say of Kathleen and Maeve!”

  “Their baying,” covering his ears with a wild gesture (surely he’d gone crazy) and positively enjoying her delight at him as a sufferer.

  “And them only wanting to keep the wake lively!” she defended through her laughter. “Father!”

  And himself, then, giving over to laughter steeped in irony, for to Enda, of course (he should have known), keeners howl louder of life than of death.

  He said at last, smiling, mocking despair: “Whatever’s to be done with you?”

  She ducked her head: “Ah now, Father—”

  Then, calming: “But there’s plenty of time still for you to tell me more,” and, picking up: “Was Mr. Dunne surprised when you and Kevin decided to leave?”

  “Oh, that he was indeed,” she answered readily, her mood quieting to match his. “He offered Kevin more in wages and said he’d speak to Mrs. Bowler too about a bit more for myself, made a point of asking us if we felt we’d been wronged in any way. Kept at us, you know. But Kevin stood firm. When he saw we were bent on going, he told us he was sorry to lose us and if we ever changed our minds and decided to come back, he’d always make a place for us.” She smiled proudly.

  “You’d considered of course what you’d do next?”

  “We had,” she said definitely. “Whenever we’d the chance, we’d talked of little else.”

  “And?”

  “Well, we had it in our hearts to be near the sea again….” Her face took on a ruminative look. “That we’d grown up close by it, I don’t know, it was in our blood, the smell of it and the fogs…. I know fogs put some people off. Take poor Eileen McCafferty now, fogs are a torment for her, nothing but ghosts in them as far as she’s concerned. That’s from her dad’s drowning, of course…. But for Kevin and myself growing up, whatever variety and lift there’d been to our days had come from the sea, the clouds blown in and the storms and fogs, and then those grand days of a bright sun and wind that’d make us feel like lambs, running and cuffing each other, nothing able to tame us, not even our dad raising his arm to us and pointing to the work still to be done….” She smiled. “So we figured to move in stages southwest from Ballymote, towards the coast.”

  “And?” his eyes fixed on her.

  “I still can tell you these forty-eight years later the main places we passed through, and myself nor Kevin not ever been back to any one of them since!”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, there was Tubbercurry and Swinford—Kevin caught a runaway horse for a man in Swinford and the man gave over a five-pound note to him as a reward like! Imagine! In those days, that was a fortune! And at Ballyvary, we saw a good-sized place burn to the ground. Not a thing could be done.”

  “That’s above Castlebar, isn’t it, Ballyvary?”

  “Aye…. Now, Castlebar! We couldn’t get away from there fast enough!”

  “Why?”

  “There’d been a bachelor murdered in his bed the night before we got there, and the place was alive with the strain of it. Us being strangers, Kevin said it was best not to linger. Kevin got the full of it from a cartwright he helped put iron-shod on the wheels of a wagon….” She clucked her tongue. “Terrible, a thing like that…. It happens more now, murder and the like. Even on an everyday basis, over the merest things, you see tempers being let out at an awful rate, isn’t it so, Father?”

  “Indeed. Temper’s a raw-willed thing…. But go on, Enda. Did you get to Westport?” he asked eagerly.

  “Westport!” she beamed, “I’ve the loveliest memories of Westport.”

  “Back then,” he put in hurriedly, “it was completely lovely. Now, it’s a bit overrun with people and traffic. Almost too lively for a place of its size. Americans like it, and Germans. Tourists…. They change a place.”

  “Aye, they do. But those many years ago, like you said, it was completely lovely…. We were a week there, Kevin having got work with a builder. Mr. McEvilly was his name. He’d a face sewn over with purple veins, but such a nice disposition. It was him as put it to Kevin that, to his mind, the coast running out towards Roonah Quay was as beautiful as could be found anywhere in the world. It was him too that gave Kevin the map.”

  “The map?”

  “Aye, I’ve got it still. If you’ll remind me, I’ll show it to you sometime.”

  “I’d like that.” He hoped she saw how enormously pleased he was that she’d made the offer.

  “Mind,” she larked on, “we couldn’t read, of course, but Kevin—it showed the trust he had in Mr. McEvilly—he’d ticked off all the places we’d been to, and Mr. McEvilly’d put circles around them on the map. As I said, you’ll see it for yourself another time…. When Kevin first showed the map to me, I didn’t have the wit to take it at its value. He told me, ‘Look, here’s where we started, here’s where we’ve been, and here’s where we are’—pointing, ever so excited. But it struck me as daft, all the days we’d trudged, the distances, Father, and him holding a piece of paper no bigger than a square of handkerchief, nattering on and on, telling me that what I remembered as a full day’s hard walk was no more than the length of a daisy petal!”

  He laughed. “Go on; go on.”

  “I never supposed you’d be so interested, Father.” Her
smile was brilliant. “Well, Mr. McEvilly’d put a big dot on the map by the place he’d told Kevin was Roonah Quay. Kevin told me, ‘All that blue colour beyond the dot is the sea, and where that dot is is where we’ll be heading.’” Her face, at this moment, took on the look of a mischievous child: “Now, Father, where the dot was on the map was the length of several daisy petals from where Kevin said we were standing in Westport, and when I asked him how long it’d take us to accomplish the trudge and he told me he figured three days, four days at the most, I hooted! It was then he lost patience with me.” She paused.

  “Don’t stop, Enda!” he begged, leaning forward, drawn by her lit eyes and freshly pinkened cheeks. “Take me through to the last step!”

  “Father dear, that you care so!” she opened out her hands to him.

  The sweetness of her gathering gesture charged him through with joy. “You’ve netted me with your telling,” he said with a rushing sense of elation and, instantly, was more conscious of himself than of her.

  She gave him a smile of the purest appreciation, then took up with: “As you’d suppose he would, Kevin had us to start off the next day at first light…. It was an overcast kind of a morning, very cool, the wind being up and the sky filled with those thin uncertain clouds that has tails to them—”

  “‘Kite-clouds,’ we called them when I was a boy.”

  “Aye,” she nodded. “Beautiful they are too, sailing so fast over your head, one after the other, racing.”

  He remembered lying in the grass, faced heavenward, playing at the solitary game of picking out the speediest….

  “That day, it was like we were tied to them, Father,” she mused quietly on, “like they were pulling us along, there was such a hurry in us and no hint of tiring…. Usually when we were on the move, we’d speak between us of what we noticed on the way, flowers and trees, different birds and creatures and the like.” She stopped; then, in a rushing way: “Did you know, Father, that Kevin fancied kestrels? Indeed…. Since he was very small…. He was forever looking up, searching them out in the sky. What always took him, he said, was the way they sit, so high up, you know, with an entire view of the world before them yet with nothing in the world to ransom or fetter them…. The morning I’m speaking of, though, he was so arrowed for Roonah Quay he was blinkered to everything but the straight of the track before him…. As for myself, Father”—she brought her hands together in a cupping way, as if she were holding something fragile and alive—“I was near crazy with excitement! I can’t tell you!” She laughed richly: “I had this certain picture in my head of a cottage with pink dog-roses and hollyhocks at the door and a cow lying in the shade of a stand of alders and sheep grazing in a pasture that let down to cliffs and the sea beyond, and inside the cottage, a blue tea-cloth spread ready on a table…. It was all so clear to me, being as it was a dream of the desiring kind—”

  He marvelled at the word she’d chosen to emphasize and nodded his head in a deep, according way.

  “You do see the state I was in!” She met his gaze with luminous eyes. “Well, we went all that day, happy as larks. That night, we sheltered in a rock-set very like a cave. It was at the top of a cliff that let out over the sea…. It’s beyond me to tell you how it stirred us, the air, and, at last-light, the homing seabirds letting out those cries that fill you so with the feel of your own privacy…. Just before he fell off to sleep, Kevin told me, ‘I think we’re getting near to where we belong.’ There was fields of stars over us, and below us waves skurling in and breaking on the rocks in that patterned way you can count by…. When I said my rosary, I could hardly think for the spending of all I was feeling.”

  Her prowess still, he thought: unkillable, emanating from her like heat.

  “Father? I’m going on too much.”

  “No,” he protested, “no. Just the contrary.” And, in the clutch of a near-forgotten sense of intimacy and concentration: “It’s years since I’ve engaged in such close talk with anyone. It makes me—happy.” He might have said “sad” if he hadn’t caught himself in time, then wondered whether, for what he had said, she’d think him ailing.

  But: “A talk of the confiding sort,” she said simply, “it’s not everyone a person can have it with.”

  As to a gift, he responded: “Thank you, Enda dear, thank you…. Go on for me, please.”

  “Well, the next day it was a race between the sun and us, which would be up first! We had our breakfast of biscuits and water on the road…. The going was harder than it’d been the day before—”

  “The long slopes,” he said.

  “Aye, and the steep,” she nodded solemnly.

  “But,” he breathed, the grandeur of the view from the impetuous coastal cliffs springing up in his mind’s eye, “did you not feel like one of Kevin’s kestrels eyeing the world?”

  “Of course!” she affirmed. “You know, Father, before Kevin got sick, we’d take the walk to Leegans Head on a fine day and be thrilled over and above all the times we’d ever been there before. It’s nothing, I mean, you can ever get used to.”

  “Never.”

  “And it’s there, of course,” she went on, “you’ll see every kind of seabird, gulls and coots, them especially, and ducks. I’ve always thought for queerness, cormorants is it, the way they ride the water and circle their heads about….”

  “But for charm, it’s curlews,” he put in. “And at Leegans Head, have you noticed too, Enda, how tame the land-birds are? The tits and whinchats? I had one land on my head one day.”

  “No!”

  “Indeed! It’s the seeds of the high-growing grasses that attract them in such numbers, I read somewhere once.” Then, almost shyly: “There’re harebells up there too.”

  “Carpets of them.” Her eyes gleamed.

  He’d come on the violent blue of them hiking, five years ago, his first summer at Roonatellin, after putting in that particularly terrible four-year stint in a profoundly troubled district of County Louth where he’d been sent by the Bishop because, as the Bishop’d told him, “I can trust you not to mix God and the Church in with the politics of the region.” Still, during the time he was there, in the lash of the terrorists’ narrow-eyed hatred, two of his older parishioners had been kneed and three of the younger ones—mere youths—murdered. “You’re overdue some peace,” the Bishop had written at last, and sent him then to tend the flock of usual-seeming beings that was Roonatellin’s.

  He had never spoken, nor ever would he, except in the broadest way, of his days in County Louth. But now, to Enda, he said, “The first summer I was here, I don’t know if you remember, I wasn’t in good health—”

  “Of course I remember, Father. It was an ulcer wasn’t it you had? Dr. Jason let it out that you did to Huey Slieve. Huey had one too, and you know Huey, he blathered it abroad faster then any decent woman would have.”

  The irony: himself and Huey Slieve coupled by ulcers…. “I was tired out, too. I don’t mean to go into it”—certain he mustn’t—“but I mention it because I’ve always thought I was cured more by the heights of Leegans Head than by Desmond Jason’s doctoring.”

  She gave him a conspirator’s grin and lapsed into brogue: “Him was a bad ’un. And us at his mercy…. Dr. Mansfield, now, he’s of a whole other cut.”

  “Indeed. But,” he peered at his watch, “we’ve gotten off your telling.”

  “Ah. I’ll go on…. Kevin and myself, we started down into Roonah Valley, not knowing its name then of course, and we got about halfway down the mountain—just below that knob, you know, that sticks up over Keogh’s land—when the path we were on crossed another that was a bit wider and more travelled-looking, and Kevin said it’d likely be the better one for us, so we took it. We rounded the road-bed by the stream, just as you do today, only then it wasn’t the road that it is now, only a well-earthed cart-track, and there before us, set back from the track, well, there was—this!” She trilled out the word emotionally at the same time she flung open her arms to the four
walls of her home. “Forty-eight years ago last August!”

  “Jubilation!”

  She laughed. “Oh, Father, such as it was!” She sat straighter, terribly intense, remembering: “A more sorrowful ruin of a place you can’t imagine, the thatch rotted and caved in onto the floor in places, not a pane left to a window, raspberry bushes so snarled over the yard-wall you’d have the skin taken off you if you tried to get through them. I can still see us, the way we just stood by the wall looking at the place, our tongues in our pockets for the woe of it. Still, though, there was something about it that called to us—”

  “The way it nests in its own glen, would it have been?”

  “That. And the slopes behind. And the sea so close, of course. But…it was more the feel of the place, ruined even as it was”—she brought her brows together—“that in its time, it’d been a glad thing—”

  “And could be again,” he put in.

  “Aye! That’s what we said when we finally did speak, that while it was sad it’d been allowed to go so far to pieces, still, there wasn’t a hint of anything unnatural about it, of a haunt or the like, you know, and how, if it was fixed up and cared for, it could be ever so wonderful again.”

  “Did you go into the yard then and there, or did you come back to it at a later time?”

  “Oh, then and there! You couldn’t have kept us from looking the place over.” She drew her hand through the air. “We found the thinnest spot in the raspberry tangles…. The yard, though, it was but one stone-heap after another—them, and old hay-mounds beaten down by the weather, and knots of vetch and thistles…. The door was screened over with bolted roses, but of course, the windows being out, we just stuck our heads through the frames for a peek inside. As I said, the thatch was on the floor in places, but from one of the window-openings there was a clear view of the hearth, and that set my heart to beating faster….” She leaned forward. Her eyes came together in slits: “That image, Father, I’d had of the blue tea-cloth spread on a table? Well, you’ll not believe it, but for me, it was there…. It, and a lit fire. Not the rubble and mess, but order, the truth, you know, of the way it could be.” She spoke the last words deeply, like a proven sibyl.