The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  He goes down to the kitchen and runs the cold tap and fills two glasses of water. When he returns, the dog is crawling on its belly towards her feet.

  She is from Curraboy, three miles away.

  ‘Only out the road,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met before, have we?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. Although we may well have, at some stage, around the town. At football matches maybe.’ Then she gives a little laugh. ‘Or Irish dancing years ago – everyone meets at Irish dancing!’

  ‘Did you go to St Mary’s?’

  ‘No. I went to Curraboy National School. And then I went to boarding school in Limerick.’

  Villiers, probably. She might be Protestant.

  ‘But we were always in and out of town and we came to Mass in Clonduff,’ she says. ‘I’m sure our paths crossed there.’

  Luke nods.

  ‘My grandfather’s name was Luke,’ she says then.

  ‘A lovely man, no doubt! Patron saint of doctors.’

  She nods, smiles. He can do better than that.

  They are both looking at the dog.

  ‘The poor cratur …’ Luke says.

  So much conversation is phatic, social, he thinks. We must be the most accomplished race at saying nothing, and doing it with charm.

  ‘He’s very timid … worse since Mikey went away. I don’t know if he’ll ever come right.’

  He steals a look at her. Slim, small-chested. Five foot four, at the most. The opposite of Maeve. They wouldn’t be a match, physically. He could pick her up.

  ‘Did you say you live in Dublin?’

  ‘Yes, but I come and go.’

  ‘Have you brothers or sisters? Maybe I know them.’

  ‘No brothers. Two sisters, and my mother. My father is dead about five years.’

  They are silent then. There is something disquieting about the silence. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he gets an immense feeling of foreboding.

  She looks around the room. ‘Are you the book-lover in the house?’ she asks. When she lifts her eyes to him he swims in them. Green, vivid green. He has to look away.

  ‘I am.’

  He waits.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asks. ‘Are you a farmer?’

  ‘Not really. Well, not at the moment. I lease out the land. I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Ahh,’ she says, nodding. ‘Primary or secondary?’

  ‘Secondary. English. English and history actually, but mostly English. I teach in Dublin at Belvedere College. I’m on a career break at the moment.’

  ‘Really?’ Her eyes widen and she smiles. ‘I work in Summerhill and the North Strand area. I’m with the HSE.’

  ‘Ah, you’re only up the road from Belevdere then!’ They might have passed each other on the street, stood together at a bus stop. ‘What do you do in the HSE?’ He is trying to avoid looking at her breasts.

  ‘I’m a social worker. Child welfare and protection. I work with kids and teenagers – troubled ones – and their families. And with kids in care. That’s my catchment area – the north inner city, your neighbourhood. Very different kids to the ones you teach though, I’d say.’

  ‘A bit, all right. Though we have a few local lads coming to us too.’

  They stand looking at the dog. Now the silence becomes a force field around them.

  Soon she will leave.

  ‘Poor devil,’ he says, about the dog. He sneaks another look at her.

  ‘My mother thought she’d be able to keep him,’ she says. ‘But our own dog won’t tolerate him … And this fella is not one to fight his corner. I’ve been at home on holidays for the last fortnight so he’s gotten attached to me. But I can’t take him back with me. He’d be alone all day, it wouldn’t be fair.’

  He leans forward and offers the dog the back of his hand. The dog stiffens with fear. He imagines the little heart beating against the ribcage.

  He can keep the dog. He can do what he likes. He can fill the house with dogs, if he likes. No one’s business. What people see – the big house overrun with cats, the walls coming down with books, the place going to wrack and ruin.

  ‘I’ll keep him,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. He can hear the gratitude and relief in her voice. ‘I’m really grateful.’ She looks down at the dog, smiles affectionately. ‘You’re very lucky, buster! … I’ll leave you my number and if it doesn’t work out I’ll come and take him back, I promise. And the girl in SuperValu, Katie, said she’d help – if you need to go away or anything, she said she’d mind him.’

  When she stands and draws her body upright his eyes fix on her legs and thighs and he feels a powerful physical sensation, as if he is pulled upwards with her legs and thighs – pulled up by the force of her body, up into her.

  She takes her phone from her jeans pocket. He clears his throat. For a moment he cannot recall his phone number, then calls it out haltingly, uncertainly, and she taps her screen. In the hall, his own phone pings.

  He stands in the doorway until her yellow car disappears from view. The sun streams into the hall. He listens for sounds inside the house. He steps into the hall and whistles lightly, then calls ‘Paddy’. But the dog does not budge. Even when Lily pokes her head around the door he does not stir.

  All afternoon Luke leaves him alone. He clatters about the house, opening and closing doors noisily, talking animatedly to Lily. He tries to hear what the dog hears – the distant human voice, the echoes, the footsteps.

  Later he enters the drawing room and sits on the sofa, reading. Now and then he tries to coax the dog from his spot. Finally, he lifts him gently – the animal stiffening in his hands – into an old wicker basket and carries him outside to the old servants’ kitchen in the yard. He places the basket in a corner where the sun slants in through a high window. He places a bowl of water beside him, and, closing the door behind him, leaves the dog in peace.

  IN THE EVENING he walks up the driveway of Ellen’s bungalow. Inside, her TV screen flickers in the dim light. He approaches the large picture window and waves, and Ellen rises and beckons him to the front door.

  ‘Is it too late to mow the grass?’ he asks, after they greet each other. ‘I’ll have it done in less than an hour.’

  ‘Ah, there’s no need – sure it’s hardly a week since you did it last. It’s fine, Luke, for another day or two. Come in, come in.’

  He watches her walk ahead of him. She had a hip replaced last summer in the Bons Secours Hospital in Cork. He drove her there the day before the operation. In the hospital bed, in her nightdress, she looked nothing like the tall, strong woman of his childhood. Her shoulders, frail and drooping, weighed down, he thought, with eight decades of feeling and worry for the family. When he got up to leave, her eyes suddenly welled up. ‘I’ll be here in the morning before they take you down to theatre,’ he said, bending down to embrace her. She felt like his child then. ‘And every day until I bring you home.’

  In the living room she zaps the TV off. ‘Wouldn’t politicians madden you the way they talk, the humming and hawing, the amming and awing? How is it, Luke, in this day and age they can’t be more straightforward and articulate? After all the free education, is this what we have, these plebs? The Europeans must be laughing at us beyond in Brussels, with the thick accents and the roundabout way these fools have of saying things.’

  ‘I know. Right gombeen men still, some of them.’

  He sits on the sofa opposite her.

  ‘What news have you?” she asks.

  She would like to see him settled, married, producing an heir for Ardboe.

  He tells her about the dog. ‘Katie Cullen in SuperValu sent a girl up with him. His owner – the girl’s uncle – is gone into a nursing home. A frightened little fellow he is too.’

  The girl is in Dublin by now, back in her own life. All day long since her departure he has felt an absence that he associates with previous partings and separations.

  ‘You and Lucy were al
ways great dog-lovers,’ Ellen says.

  He nods. He pictures the dog locked in the old kitchen. Moving around on the cold flagstone floor, sniffing at the base of the door. The best thing is to leave him alone until he settles down. ‘And Josie, of course,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, don’t talk,’ Ellen replies, rolling her eyes in mock exasperation.

  For a few moments, she is, he thinks, pulled back into reverie. As thick as thieves, the two sisters, all their lives. Ellen the protector, Josie the mischief-maker. Slept together in Josie’s big bed the first few nights after Ellen’s arrival every summer. He’d hear them giggling late at night when he was a boy, and he’d get up and go to them, and climb into bed with them. Ellen giving out about the stink of cats off the bedclothes and the crumbs under them. What’re you munching, Josie? Ellen would ask. Nothing. You liary thing, you! You won’t have a tooth left in your head, Ellen would admonish, and you’re getting fat too. You’re going on a diet tomorrow, madam. Now turn around and snuggle up – you too, Luke.

  ‘I met Dilly Madden in town this morning,’ he says.

  ‘How is she? Mad as a brush still, I suppose.’

  He nods. ‘Mad as a brush,’ he says, and immediately regrets it.

  ‘God help her, the poor creature.’

  ‘She wasn’t always that way, was she?’ he asks. ‘When she was young?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. But there’s a strain in the Maddens. It runs in families.’

  ‘The same might be said of ourselves, Ellen.’

  She looks at him, surprised, a little hurt. ‘How so? What do you mean?’

  ‘Josie. They could say she was odd, a bit mad.’

  ‘Ah, no, Luke, that’s different. Everyone knows why Josie was the way she was. On account of Una’s death – the shock of it affected her. Anyway, Josie was just slow. The other thing’ – she taps her head – ‘is entirely different.’ She pauses. ‘And Clonduff is full of it, whatever the reason is. I’d bet this whole area has one of the highest rates of mental illness in the whole country.’

  Her hands are resting on her lap, her fingers entwined. She rotates her thumbs around each other, first clockwise, then anticlockwise. She has done this for as long as he can remember. He brings his own hands together, holds his thumbs side by side in an upright position. As a child he used to think of his thumbs as human, female, mothers. His fingers were the children, lined up beside them, four kids a-piece. His big toes were mothers too, leaning towards their children. They reminded him of the mosaic image of the Blessed Virgin set into the alcove in the side altar of the church, her head aslant, her face full of patience, kindness, forbearance. Things he has never told anyone. How could he explain that the sight of his own big toes moved him, or that, on certain nights when he pulled aside the covers, he felt a stream of love emanating from them?

  ‘Josie was perfect before the accident,’ Ellen explains. ‘Sure don’t I remember? I was ten at the time. She lost her talk afterwards. We thought she’d never talk again. It was Una’s falling into the well that did it.’ She looks at Luke. ‘My mother was convinced Josie saw it happening. She was only two, but she was out in the yard with Una that morning … And then, of course, Dadda’s death six months later. It was an awful time for us all … an awful time.’

  He is on the point of asking her something that has been gnawing at him about the old well.

  ‘Do you know where I was that morning? Above in Lynch’s playing with Alice, Jim’s sister … I was wearing a new green coat that we got for Christmas – Una and I got it between us. That’s the way it was, money was scarce, we shared everything … I wanted to show off the coat to Alice.’

  She jumps up from her armchair. ‘I’ll make us tea. I made some fruit scones earlier so we’ll have some – and you’ll take the rest of them home with you.’

  Alone, he studies the room. Everything is spotless. Photographs neatly arranged on the mantelpiece and on the wall: Ellen and her mother on a trip to Knock years ago; his father and mother on their wedding day; several photos of Josie and Lucy and himself; various members of the Clark family, the wealthy American family who were Ellen’s employers for almost forty years. During the day she keeps the TV tuned to CNN, the volume set low or on mute, the loop of American news and images streaming into her room her way of staying in touch with America. She retired and moved home when she was sixty-four and had this bungalow – a retirement gift from the Clarks – built on the family land.

  During her trips home every summer Ellen brought her American ways with her. She taught him and Lucy to make cookies and peach pie and knickerbocker glories. She brought home a red soda fountain, a cheese board, a coffee percolator. She taught them how to set the table properly. Always wanting to improve them, help them better themselves. She bought him his first watch. She brought books, small musical instruments – ukuleles, flutes. Beautiful American clothes – dungarees, sneakers, baseball caps, the expensive cast-offs of the Clark children. Occasionally, still, Luke wears the perfectly preserved cord jackets and sweaters once worn by Hubie Clark in the 1960s and ’70s.

  She carries in a tray with tea and scones. She picks up a teaspoon and hands it to him.

  ‘Take a good look at that,’ she says.

  He turns the spoon over. ‘Ah, Aer Lingus! I remember! You used to steal the spoons on the plane, you thief, you! There’s still one left above in the house.’

  ‘They’re the only things I ever stole in my whole life. A spoon a year – when Aer Lingus still served proper cutlery. And I don’t regret it one bit. After all I spent on Aer Lingus airfares over the years!’

  She pours the tea.

  ‘Do you want to go to Waterford or anywhere this week?’ he asks. ‘What about Cork? Do you feel like a browse around the shops?’

  She has mild blood pressure and some arthritis in the other hip but she is, otherwise, healthy. She takes a daily walk by the river or up the road to the graveyard. She rarely goes into the town. He brings her groceries from SuperValu several times a week. Her service to others has long ended. Once, she was engaged to be married. Though full of goodness and generosity her whole life he has the impression that, privately, she is a little bitter, and thinks life went against her.

  ‘Ah, I’m all right for now. Sure what do I need? Aren’t the wardrobes below there full of clothes?’ she says. ‘I have an appointment with the eye clinic in Waterford next Thursday, eleven o’clock I think. We’ll go for a nice lunch afterwards, if you’re not in a hurry.’ Then, pausing before she lifts her cup, she says, ‘You poor devil, you’ll have spent your best years driving old women to hospital appointments.’

  What of it, he wants to say. He couldn’t not do it. It used to perplex Maeve, his duty-boundness, as she called it. It’s not duty, he’d correct her, duty demands effort. Besides, he wanted to say, I get more than I give.

  And he’d have driven Josie to Timbuktu if he thought it would save her. The hope he had had that late spring and early summer, driving her up to the hospital in Cork. Four days a week for five weeks. Desperately willing the treatment to work. Praying even. The drive over the Vee where he pulled over and stopped one morning and pointed out the three counties below them. That’s Cork over there, he said. A stony silence from Josie then, an atmosphere that usually indicated hurt or confusion. No, it’s not, she said, Cork is pink. It took him a few seconds to realise she was remembering the counties as he had taught her years ago using a political map of Ireland. Driving through the sleepy towns and villages along the way, a gentle silence settling on them. Will we stop for an ice cream, he’d ask. Then they’d sit in the car with the windows down, licking their ice cream cones, gazing at a tractor going by or a small group of children on the footpath. Without saying a word, one of them would start to suck the ice cream noisily from the tip of the wafer, and the other would join in. You’re an awful woman, Josie O’Brien, he’d say. He’d walk her along the hospital corridor to the cancer ward, watch her face suddenly darken with r
age if her favourite infusion chair was occupied by another patient. When the nurse inserted the IV line Josie would turn to him. ‘You can go now, Luke.’ On the occasions when he was mistaken for her son, neither of them corrected the error. He remembers how every Friday evening for years she got all dolled up before he arrived home from Dublin. Following his mother around, pestering her with questions – what time is it, why isn’t he here – until his mother would lash out. You’re a scourge! A silly old woman! Where do you think he is – above in Dublin enjoying himself with Maeve, that’s where! Each leave-taking wounded her. She cried at the door every Sunday evening when he left to return to the city.

  ‘Old women, my eye!’ he says. ‘After all you did for us, Ellen, over the years.’

  ‘Do you know my one regret?’ she says.

  He shakes his head. Not having children of her own, he guesses, but it’s unlikely she’ll say that.

  ‘Not learning to drive. A big mistake. But in America I always had Ernest the chauffeur to take me everywhere. And then when I came home every summer, your mother drove me around.’

  On the mornings of Ellen’s arrival his mother rose early and drove up to Shannon to meet her. All morning Josie waited at an upstairs window for the first sighting of the car coming up the avenue, then came running down the stairs shouting, They’re here, they’re here. A great welcome at the front door then. Huge suitcases thrown open in the hall. Toys, clothes, candy. Smell of mothballs. Chatter and laughter drifting up from the kitchen. Ellen home, the family made whole again. He remembers the purity of that joy. He wishes he could find a way back to that place and those times and resurrect the family’s past, its dimmed glory.

  ‘I tried to get your mother and father to come out and visit me in America before ye kids were born. Your mother would have come in a shot.’ She snaps her fingers. ‘But your father was afraid of flying.’

  ‘And driving. And heights,’ Luke says. ‘He wouldn’t even climb a ladder to paint the house. Mammy had no fear, she ran up and down the ladder like a mountain goat.’

  ‘He climbed Croagh Patrick once.’