Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  And what’s wrong with that? she wanted to know. I have a life, only I don’t recognize it anymore. I was taught things I can’t believe. I have a job but the best thing about it is I can be here and it doesn’t even miss me. I’d have a college degree if I’d had the conviction it would’ve been worth one more year. Maybe nothing fits, okay…but I refuse to roll over and say nothing ever will.

  “Remember those movies we used to rent?” he asked, and at first she thought of the obvious choices, baroque spectacles of blood and love and sorrow. The Crow—they’d watched it a jillion times, and not once had she made it through with dry eyes. Ethan would hold her and tell her…

  Oh. Right. These couldn’t be the movie nights he had in mind right now.

  “Those stupid high school comedies we used to laugh at instead of with?” Ethan said. “The ones where the idiot guy or the idiot girl is totally in love with the unworthy asswipe? But meanwhile, there’s always the geek who’s been right in front of them the whole time, with so much more to offer…except the geeks are invisible for the first hour and forty-five minutes. Well…”

  He couldn’t say the rest. Didn’t need to say the rest. Because they both knew everybody real lived in that first hour and forty-five minutes. They never got to the end, just kept skipping back to the beginning.

  The rest of the argument? Pretty much like that, only worse. Plenty of time to get worse, because as near as she could tell, in Ireland the clocks turned more slowly. Time enough to go from painful to ugly, then degenerate from there.

  Time enough for the best friend she’d ever had to turn his back on her, stalking across the meadows and leaving her to the remains of this suddenly cheerless autumn day.

  *

  She hadn’t tried to stop him as he’d set off alone, merely followed later, back into Glenmullen. The village was a woolly little place tucked among the trees and streams of a rough-hewn valley, serviced by one decent road up from Letterkenny, and the rest of any traveling done on glorified footpaths. Picturesque, to be sure, but ramshackle enough to discourage tourists who expected something cushier.

  There was no proper hotel or hostel, so they’d rented a second-floor room at a pub and inn bearing the unlikely name of The Mouth of Oran. When they’d asked Fergus and Kathleen, the owners, what it meant, they were told it dated back to when Fergus’ grandfather owned the place, and spitefully renamed it after an old sheep farmer and steady patron who, whenever he was on the premises, would rather have died than let anyone get the better of him in an argument…or friendly conversation, for that matter. The place was more pub than inn, but took care of creature comforts and food and alcohol alike.

  After the blow-up, Pandora gave Ethan a couple hours to cool off—long enough, she hoped, to welcome a peace offering of a round of porters—only to hike back and discover that he’d cleared out entirely, the sad-eyed little shit. Backpack gone, along with everything that had burst from it to make such a litter throughout the room. If Fergus and Kathleen had seen him vacate, they didn’t let on. Hard to tell what they genuinely didn’t notice and what was provincial discretion.

  But they had to figure it out soon enough, as she stayed on alone rather than immediately finishing the circuit back to Dublin. Comforting, she found it, to dig in and make a home away from home like this. She would eat herself miserable each morning with Kathleen’s traditional Irish breakfast: eggs, ham, bacon, black and white puddings, fried tomatoes, coarse brown bread soppy with country butter—meal enough for the rest of the day, almost.

  Of the evenings she would listen to the local musicians who gathered around the fireplace…if not down in the pub itself, at least from her bed, as the old songs, both the lively and the lamenting, filtered up through rafters and stone. Music, she had come to understand, permeated County Donegal the same way honeysuckle sweetened the air of spring. Under this roof, it wasn’t organized and it wasn’t for pay. They just came, bringing their guitars and mandolins, their whistles and flutes, their bodhrans and their pipes and most of all their fine, strong voices, and played as the spirits moved them.

  Did they get many tourists in Glenmullen, to hear such zest and zeal? Pandora was curious but knew that asking would make it all the more obvious she didn’t belong, a fact evident enough already…and for a week, at least, she wanted to belong. But no one else here looked quite like her. Her draping bush of raven hair was an easy enough fit, while her skinny frame, her dark-rimmed eyes, her wardrobe of black tights and jeans and boots and shapeless charcoal sweaters marked her as from parts beyond. But this seemed cause for no comment and only a few disparaging glances. Maybe, with that secret shrine not far off, they had in recent years become accustomed to the sight of the types of visitors it would draw, even if the locals didn’t know why such folk had come. Surely, in a land so intrinsically Catholic, they would be loath to tolerate such a blasphemy in their midst.

  Blasphemy or not, it was where she spent the biggest part of her days—the chasm between breakfast and nightfall when the hours seemed longest. She would hike to Patrick’s yew by a different route each morning, through rain and sunshine alike, ambling down rutted lanes and trekking across pastures of grazing sheep, approaching the grove from a new direction, a fresh way of looking at it.

  Interruptions were rare, and never anything that didn’t seem part of everyday life—a farmer, a shepherd, a retiree out for a stroll. Never any pilgrims like herself, which both relieved and aggrieved her. She knew that people were drawn here, and to the other three shrines—they spoke of it in chatrooms and bulletin boards, or argued over exact locations—but she’d never gotten a sense of how many. On any given day, dozens, if not hundreds, would trudge up rocky Mount Brandon at the opposite end of the island…in bare feet, if they were particularly devout. Here, could the numbers really be so few? The shrine’s loneliness would protect it, yet her solitude here only underscored how few they must be—those who could believe in the righteousness of devils.

  Encouraged by the tranquility of the yew, she would stretch along the ground beneath it and think of Patrick Kieran Malone. The man, not the blackened saint with the blood of priests on his hands. Born a few years earlier, and in a different place, she surely could’ve saved him. Could’ve pulled him back from his despair. Yes, there’s much more to life than that god they raised you on, crushed you with, she would have breathed into his mouth. There’s more to love than that terrible god’s illegitimate son and how he tried to assert his real truth through you…through your split flesh, your blood. You’ve only confirmed what I’ve always suspected, so let’s just exist in defiance of it all. She would’ve guided his inexperienced cock into her not-much-more-experienced cunt and felt him tremble with the newness of his life. She would’ve placed his hands upon her breasts—whose modest endowments had drawn more than one look of disappointment—and he would’ve found them delightful.

  Yeah. Right.

  First the fantasies, then the sense of humiliation. As a college dropout, the last thing she was entitled to was a stupid schoolgirl crush, although she didn’t let it stop her from heading out Kathleen’s door each morning. And the fourth such afternoon, without a soul in sight, she thought what the hell, this must be what it had been building up to all along…and so while lying beneath the tree, she skinned her hands beneath the elastic of her tights to slowly, deliciously, wank herself to a silent but shuddering release.

  So was it coincidence, Ethan’s timing, or had he been watching while hidden in a hedgerow or treeline? She would never know, only suspect that, okay, probably he had seen what for him was the last straw: that she preferred a ghost to him.

  So it seemed the fifth morning upon Pandora’s approach to the yew—leisurely at first, then at an apprehensive jog, and finally a terrified sprint, certain that once she got there she would see how wrong she was, that there wasn’t really anyone or anything that looked like Ethan hanging by the neck from the yew’s lowest bough.

  IV

  She hadn’t re
alized it at the time, but when Ethan was still alive, still her friend, and they were together far to the south, the equinox had come and gone. Light and dark in perfect balance on the fulcrum of a single day. The land had since tipped toward night. At this latitude, the plunge was more obvious than it would be back home in Ohio, a perceptible chunk shaved off each evening. Soon the darkness would be hungry for afternoon, too.

  Fine by her; Pandora wanted little more than to sleep. In less than a week she’d grown accustomed to finishing each day smelling like sun and rain and the fields. Now she stank of her own sheets.

  “Not off tramping about on your all-day hikes anymore, I see,” Kathleen said to her the second afternoon she was spending near the fireplace, over pints and a book. “If it’s your ankle you’ve turned, we’ve a splendid doc just down the road.”

  “No, I didn’t turn anything, I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Today, you say, but it’s a dietician you’ll be needing soon if you keep eating those breakfasts I serve you and then go and not walk ‘em off.”

  Which brought the first real smile Pandora had let go of in days. Kathleen’s voice, like that of most everyone Pandora had heard since coming here, could turn even chiding into a kind of music. Speaking from experience, perhaps, Kathleen was on the wrong side of thickset, although surprisingly light on her feet. She must’ve been around Pandora’s mother’s age, yet seemed both much older and much younger, with a braid of black hair, as thick as one of the yew’s roots, worn down her back.

  “Now if it’s the fella situation that’s been causing you to keep to our dampest, draftiest corners and risk your death of pneumonia…? Fellas come and fellas go, and another’ll be turning up soon enough…although much as I love the filthy old place, I doubt he’ll be turning up beneath our roof.”

  This brought an insulted howl from one of the daily regulars that Pandora had chatted with a few times. Too early for music yet, with almost a dozen scattered about the place…no way were she and Kathleen having a private conversation, no matter how much the others pretended to ignore them.

  “Well, it’ll not be the likes of you, Michael Ennis,” Kathleen called over to him, “so best you take your face and all three chins, and stick ‘em deep in that glass of yours, where you’ve forever found a more welcome reception!”

  Much laughter, the kind Pandora had always imagined erupting in places such as this, where the ones laughing and the one laughed at had known each other since birth. No secrets here, she imagined. No secrets, and it would be a difficult thing to manage dying alone.

  “He wasn’t my fella,” she said, so quietly now that only Kathleen could have heard. “He was just a friend.”

  “Ah. And a fine loyal one too, he looked to be, in his brief time here.”

  Brief time. Oh, she had no idea.

  “So maybe you shouldn’t be as quick to give up on him as you’ve seemed these past days.”

  No idea that Ethan wouldn’t, couldn’t, have a change of heart and come walking through the front door tonight, tomorrow, ever. Not a soul in this village did. If the last secret she shared with Ethan stayed where secrets should, not a soul ever would.

  Kathleen lingered at the table another couple of minutes, then seemed to sense that any more optimism might be overdoing it, and pushed back from the table to leave.

  “Before I forget…” Pandora dug into the pocket of her pullover sweater. “Did you leave this on the dresser in my room yesterday? I didn’t notice it until this morning, but the way I’ve been looking at the floor most of the time, there could’ve been a garden gnome up there and I might not have seen it.”

  She set it on the tabletop between them, a lump of gray-green stone that fit her palm perfectly. And make no mistake, the hand wanted to hold it. It had been carved and polished so smooth and round that it begged for caressing.

  For a moment too long, Kathleen merely stared.

  The image itself, as near as Pandora recognized, was prehistoric—one of those ponderously proportioned female figurines that seemed all belly and boobs, tapering like an egg with a blunted head, tiny feet. As for this one’s origins, Pandora imagined it had probably come from some still-breathing artisan with a fondness for the Stone Age, or maybe just plump breeders with oversized parts.

  Kathleen’s hand moved to claim it, on the verge, Pandora was certain, of blaming her own carelessness. Then Kathleen stopped herself, as if realizing she had no right to do what she was about to. She recovered well—if Pandora had had another ale she might not have noticed—and instead nudged the icon back toward Pandora’s hand.

  “A souvenir for a long-term guest, of whom we’ve become very fond. I meant to tell you and it slipped my mind,” Kathleen said. “Anybody can leave you a silly wee cake of soap, can’t they now.”

  Liar, thought Pandora.

  Although considering what she’d done with Ethan, she felt a good deal less than deserving.

  *

  But of course, Kathleen’s fib hardly settled the matter of where the statuette had come from. They had no maids here; the place was not so big that whatever needed doing couldn’t be handled by Kathleen alone, with the exception of wrestling new kegs into place down in the cellar.

  For a couple of minutes, Pandora turned herself queasy with thoughts that it might have been Fergus who’d slipped in and left the fertility trinket as some perverse rural prelude to an attempted seduction. But the more she considered it, the more absurd it seemed. For one thing, Kathleen no doubt would’ve snatched the thing up after all, then bounced it off her husband’s skull. For another, Fergus hardly seemed the type to rely on creeping guile. Narrowbacks, Pandora had heard that the Old World Irish sometimes called their New World descendants—whether a reference to a taller, leaner stature or a dismissive conviction that they weren’t up to their ancestors’ capacity to shoulder heavy burdens, either way it was none too flattering. Well, Fergus seemed a broadback through and through, and if he wanted you, she imagined that he would come straight for you. Not without charm, but straight-on just the same.

  By whose hand, then? No one she could fathom. If the thing had borne the least resemblance to a hanged man, she might’ve had cause for worry, that her actions of the other morning hadn’t gone unseen. But no…whatever this meant, it felt incidental to Ethan’s suicide.

  On the most appealing level, it was enough to hold the thing in her hand—its smooth curves, its comforting solid weight—and believe in magic.

  Over the past three days, she’d needed a mother. For the first time in years, she wanted a mother. But one who was enough of a realistic to admit that young men who were still boys inside sometimes killed themselves; a mother who could empathize with the loss without emptying buckets of judgment on her head, or delivering sermons on karma and wasted potential.

  So for now, it was enough to believe that she’d found two such mothers under the same roof: one to prod her out the door again…another to hold in her hand.

  V

  She came awake without knowing why, slowly enough that she couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t. She recalled an ugly noise in a dream that was already fading…a cry like the squall of butchered hog.

  As she turned over and burrowed into the quilts, she heard it again: an agonized bellow that had worked its way into her dreams. Jesus—it was the sort of shriek that made you curl into a ball and hope to go unnoticed, praying for a best-case scenario: some drunken unfortunate still lurching around after last orders, stumbling into…what, a crosscut saw, by the sound of it? Just his bad luck, please. Let there be nothing out there that might move on, unsatisfied, and start looking into windows.

  She sat up and drew the covers around herself as tight as cerements, as beyond the window and curtains, Glenmullen roused to an angry nocturnal life. A shout from the north, a keening wail to the west; other voices, one and two at a time, joining in. From down the block she could hear the clacking of a doorknocker; a minute later and it had come to The Mouth o
f Oran, an urgent fist battering at the front door downstairs. Barred by a heavy oak beam, the door had, until this moment, seemed merely quaint.

  Next, the sounds of someone opening up—Fergus, emerging from the private quarters that branched off the pub. She could hear a low rumble of voices belonging to men who sounded as though they would give anything to have remained in their own beds, the conversation weighted by a terrible gravity. She strained to pick up something from it, but their talk surrendered nothing. Gaelic; they had reverted to Gaelic.

  She waited in the dark as the visitors left and the door thudded shut; a moment later, the sounds of more words, more haste. She wanted to crawl into a closet, except the room was so old it didn’t have one.

  How old was the staircase out there, too, the one she’d walked every morning, every night? Suddenly it sounded grim with age, centuries of creaks and groans turning their spite upon her. She knew which of them it had to be; Kathleen’s feet had never sounded as heavy as this.

  At her door, finally, a knock that she could feel on her breastbone.

  “Kathleen?” she called out, knowing better.

  “A word with you, Pandy, if you please.”

  And if she didn’t? No problem, Fergus would just eat the door off the hinges.

  She slid from the bed and into the room’s autumn chill. In the dark, she threw on the clothes from yesterday, same as the clothes from the day before that. Out in the hall, Fergus waited in oppressive silence, until doomsday or whenever she opened the door, whichever came first.

  “Downstairs,” he said. “’Tis a talk for downstairs.”