Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  Once there, Fergus surprised her by continuing to play the host, taking his place behind the bar while having her sit on one of the cracked leather-topped stools. Braced upon the bar, his arms looked as thick as her legs. His face was square and lined from an earlier life of raw weather, his hair curled like filings of iron…and her back felt very, very narrow.

  “We’ll drink,” he said, “and as we share those drinks we’ll talk as those who have too much respect for one another to go taking the piss. Bushmill’s for you?”

  Like she would argue at this point? He set them up, the bottle and two glasses.

  “Where’s Kathleen?”

  “She’s tending to other matters. And as we talk,” he pushed on, “you’ll be wanting to rid yourself of any notions you may have been holding to that all we are here’s a bunch of sheep-shaggers and bog-trotters with no good idea what goes on in the midst of us.”

  “No, I never—“ she started to protest.

  “Course you did. Yez all do when you come here, and most generally that’s the best thing for us both, but tonight that goes out the window.” He tapped her glass. “You’re not drinking.”

  She remedied that, felt the smooth burn all the way down to her belly.

  “And whatever it is you tell me, out with all of it, and don’t feel as you have to spare my delicate sensibilities,” he said. “I’ve a pretty fair idea why yez both came here, you and the lad…less so why yourself has stayed as long as you have, not as we’ve minded. But it was him brought you here, right?”

  “If by him you mean Patrick…?”

  “Let’s call him what he is: Saint Patrick the Fallen. No point in confusing him with the other. Visit his bones, then, did you?”

  She nodded.

  “And where’d you go?”

  “There’s a huge yew tree,” she whispered, “about a mile—“

  “I know where the yew tree stands. Only lived here my whole life, haven’t I?” The breath began to whistle through his nostrils. “How’d you know to go there?”

  She explained about the web sites, the bulletin boards; how the electronic cult of Patrick had inspired her, along with Ethan, to go circling the whole of Ireland.

  “Ah, jaysus,” Fergus groaned. “Says so on your Internet, so that makes it gospel, does it?”

  No idea what was really going on, and still she was beginning to feel like the most gullible person ever born.

  “You and the lad…something happen between the two of you you’ve been keeping to yourself? More than just himself going his own way and you lagging behind to moon about it? Something bad, I mean.”

  “Ethan hanging himself from the yew,” she spat, with a sting in her eyes and a pit again opening in her heart, “is that bad enough for you?”

  “Ah, jaysus. And you without a word to another blessed soul!” Fergus brought a hand to his mouth, steadied himself again the bar with the other. “The body—what’d you do with the body?”

  It felt as if she were describing acts committed by someone else—not someone who should’ve known better, but rather someone who in those minutes had been so much stronger of body and will. How else could she have scaled the tree, then crawled out onto the bough from which Ethan hung? How else could she have maneuvered the dead weight of his body up and onto the limb, then undone the noose from the puffy, stretched flesh of his neck? How else could she have found it within herself to haul him along the bough and back to the yew’s massive trunk…then lower him into the rotting hollow to join the bones, she’d thought, of Patrick Kieran Malone?

  While she hadn’t done these things without tears, without hating Ethan, she had tried to force herself to see the beauty in his exit, the still repose of his body depending from its stern loop of rope. Of course they had, half a decade ago, spent sleepless nights talking about suicide; fantasizing about it, sketching verbal rhapsodies of deathly scenarios. Of course they had written embarrassingly awful poetry about the loving embrace of their graves.

  Of course she had thought he’d outgrown it too.

  Years later, assaulted by the sight and the smell of it, she conceded that she could have found it beautiful only if it had been someone she’d never known.

  “Aw, Pandy,” Fergus said with crushing sorrow, “why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  “What, I was supposed to send him back to be buried by the people he most wanted to be away from, so they could pretend they’d loved him all along? Sorry, but no. He would never have forgiven me if I’d done that. I know he’d rather everyone think that one day he walked away from everything he knew and didn’t look back.” Surely anyone who understood would not condemn. “Ethan’s father broke his wrist when he was thirteen. He wouldn’t tell me why. It’s the only thing he ever refused to tell me. I just know it was another typical day at home.”

  “A terrible thing,” said Fergus, not without sympathy, “but the yew…”

  “I know about yew trees. I know what people used to believe about them, maybe still do in places like this. It just felt like the last thing I could do for him.”

  “What, the symbol of eternal life? Of renewal from decay?” he said, now with scorn. “A gateway to a new and better realm? Those would be the things you know about yews?”

  In a small, weakening peep: “Yes.”

  “Then what you know’s worse than nothing. Have you never heard of a yew to stand as a barrier between the right and the wrong?” He shelved the bottle. “What you know’s just enough to get this place noticed by the eye of God once again, and it was kept well enough when he was looking the other way.”

  Fergus swept up their emptied glasses, then went for a jacket and told her she should do the same, because she would soon enough be shivering from more than the chill.

  “And as if it matters now, the bones those Sisters brought…?” he said. “It was never the yew where they took ‘em. What you paid visit after visit to is something else entirely.” He shook his head in rebuke. “Well, you came here to plunge yourself into the thick of all that’s holy and all that’s not, and damned if I let you not look upon what it is you’ve done.”

  The last thing he grabbed, from behind the bar, was a shotgun.

  “For all the good it’s likely to do,” he said.

  VI

  It wasn’t just the power of suggestion and the sight of so many bucolic people stirring with such urgency after two in the morning. A few steps beyond the door of The Mouth of Oran, the feeling enveloped her as surely as the damp chill: Something here had gone terribly wrong. With each breath she felt it as a thickness in her lungs, a sour taste upon her tongue. In the distance, as the beams of powerful flashlights swept to and fro, even the light seemed sickly.

  Fergus’ legs were scarcely longer than hers, but still she had to struggle to keep pace, catching up whenever he stopped to confer with one person or another. Again, language was used as a barrier, so that any clue as to what was happening was denied her. They cloaked themselves in their darkest wools and tweeds, as if to blend into the night. Their eyes were never still, searching trees and the blue moonlit clouds. Like Fergus, many carried weapons normally reserved for the hunt or for the fields.

  And right now they hated her, didn’t they? Or was that much, at least, her guilty imagination?

  “A wee story,” he said once they were past the heart of the village, “so you can get your brain around what it is you may be soon seeing. And it’ll put the lie to what we told you about the name on our sign. Ever heard of Saint Columba, have you?”

  She didn’t think so, and before he could say another word: “Fergus, are we safe out here?”

  “Safe enough for now, I suppose, if Gerry Fallon’s aim is as good as his word.”

  “How good is his word?”

  “Well, there’s been some debate on that.” She couldn’t tell if he was serious, or thought she deserved being kept unnerved. “Saint Columba, as I was saying. Holy man, as you can tell from the saint part, ‘bout fifteen h
undred years ago. Did a good amount of travel in the name of his lord and savior. Came from the Donegal area, though it’s his travels in Scotland that are best known. Before it was Scotland. ‘Twas the Picts living there in Columba’s time. Had himself a friend named Oran—brother, some say—and the pair of ‘em and a dozen others went to the isle of Iona, off Scotland’s coast, bent on founding a monastery. One of his earliest acts was to banish women and cows from Iona, which alone makes him a peculiar enough fella in my estimation.”

  Fergus led them off onto a side lane that wound past a thicket of hedges and a gauntlet of gnarled oaks, a breeze stirring their leaves with a papery murmur.

  “Columba and his crew, they tried to raise a chapel but weren’t having much luck in the construction of it, what with the walls falling over all the time. A clear sign that the isle didn’t much care for them and their business, but folk like that, you’ve got to kill ‘em first to deter ‘em. So they decide they need to consecrate the ground, then settle as the best way to get that done’s with a burial…and a live burial, at that. Oran says he’ll be the fella. Take one for the team, I suppose as you’d say now. He laid his corpus down into the foundation pit, and didn’t they shovel him over.”

  The lane led them across an arched stone footbridge that she’d traversed a time or two in her wanderings. In the day, as picturesque as a postcard; tonight, the bridge and the brook beneath it hoarded the moon, reflecting sharp angles and points of light as baleful as soulless eyes.

  “Some days later Columba decides he wants to make a final farewell, so they dig back down and scrape the dirt from Oran’s face, and aren’t they surprised stupid when they find the head has a few things yet to say: ‘Heaven is not what it is said to be, nor is Hell what it is said to be. The saved are not forever happy, and the damned are not forever lost. The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all.’”

  “I’ll bet that went over well,” Pandora said.

  “Oh, like the ton of bricks. So Columba decides, ‘Nah, that’s not Oran any longer, Oran wouldn’t say such things. What that is down there’s a demon that’s got inside him.’ So they shoveled him over again quick as they could and that was the end of that. Except it must’ve made enough of an impression on at least one of those other lads that he saw fit to make sure the tale didn’t stay down there with Oran. The truth, no matter how unpalatable to some, it has its way of not staying buried.”

  By now they’d left the lane for a narrower path, crowded by weeds and thick tufts of grass. Someone’s private land, she was sure, even before they rounded a bend and she saw the peaks of a cottage outlined against the sky.

  “If people know the story, instead of the bullshit you told Ethan and me…don’t they look at you weird, naming your place what you have?”

  “Well, ‘tis a very old tradition, and I’ll not be the one to break with it,” Fergus said. “But it’s not a problem. They just think we’re a rude load of buggers. There’s an old saying, see. If you want to stop someone talking about something unpleasant, why, you ‘throw mud in the mouth of Oran.’”

  “I know you didn’t tell me that to explain an old proverb I never heard,” she said, “so I’m afraid to ask what it has to do with tonight.”

  “Many a thing, but the main one…? Amongst these isles and the people who’ve always called them home, there’s a long, strange history of heads having their say well past the point you’d think they could. We’ll start with that and take it from there as needed.”

  “Christ, you don’t mean that we’re on the way to —“

  “Hush yourself,” he said, with a hand light upon her shoulder. “Show some reverence, even if you don’t feel it.”

  They had gone past the darkened cottage, a whitewashed hulk with a thatched roof, to a lower, flatter building—a stable, perhaps. It looked as though it could have been standing as long as the stones in County Mayo, built from the ground up with wide, flat rocks fitted together with patience and mortared into fortress-like walls. She saw a pair of armed men, silhouetted on the roof like gargoyles, keeping a silent watch.

  At Fergus’ knock and a word, they were let inside, then the heavy door was secured after them with an iron bolt and a wooden beam. She wanted to stoop, the roof just inches from her head. Fergus, hand still on her shoulder, led her past a half-dozen others who milled about in the glow of lanterns hung from walls and rafters. Most of the lights were gathered toward one end, around a pair of long worktables pushed close together, with just enough room to walk between.

  “Aw, jaysus,” Fergus groaned after he’d taken a moment to stare down at what the tables held.

  These are real, she had to force herself to acknowledge. They’re not latex in a movie. These are real.

  “Look hard,” he told her. “See what it is you and your fella have done.”

  “Fergus,” Kathleen said sharply. “You don’t know that yet, but even if we learn the worst, there’ll be no blaming her. ‘Twas sure to happen in one generation or the next, or the next, and if after centuries of peace it’s happened in ours, then it’s ourselves that bear the blame, because we grew careless enough to let it happen.”

  Fergus lowered his head with a disgruntled murmur, but disputed nothing.

  “Years ago, we used to guard that yew, same as those before us,” Kathleen went on. “Then we must’ve thought we knew better—silly old tradition, what’s it matter if we’re lax? Well, I never heard you once raise your voice in objection—or any of yez here, or myself for all that—because it saved our arses some cold nights, didn’t it? So. There’ll be no blaming her.”

  Easier decreed than lived by, Pandora feared.

  Two men, one upon each table: They looked, she thought, as bodies would have looked long ago when brought home on ox carts from battles fought with swords, axes, sledges—things that hacked and things that crushed. From knees to scalps, they were rent with lacerations that laid them open to the bone, even into bone. One man she recognized from the music sessions in the pub, a blond-haired fellow in his early thirties whose fingers, broken now, seemed to never hit a wrong note no matter how fiercely he picked and strummed his cittern. His head hung by scraps of gristle and bone. She didn’t recognize the other…but how could she, with such damage to his skull?

  Pandora asked their names and was told; could not force out the words to ask why, with all that the talented Sean Reardon had suffered, they were making it worse. Hadn’t his body been savaged enough already?

  Evidently not. Using a knife that she imagined had cut into countless sheep, an older man finished taking off Sean Reardon’s head, then passed it to a woman who wore a cowled cloak against the chill. She dipped a cloth into a bucket to wash his cheeks, his forehead, his sparse, blood-matted beard. Pandora thought that would be the end of it…until this surgeon, butcher, whatever he was, began slicing into the chest and the lower stump of the neck.

  “You don’t need to keep looking,” Fergus whispered into her ear. “This is ugly work, I know.”

  “If it’s my fault,” she told him, “then I’ll watch.”

  Perhaps it was easier to take because of the tenderness they showed the body, in spite of what they were doing to it. This was not mutilation for the sake of spite, not even when they used shears to snap through the upper ribcage and expose the top half of Sean Reardon’s lungs. Pandora wondered if the woman half-hidden in the cloak was his wife, or lover, summoned to perform the last kindness she could, softening the barbarity of the ritual. If so, her composure and grace were remarkable.

  A few minutes more and the cutter had freed what he wanted: the ringed length of Sean Reardon’s severed windpipe, removed just above the point at which it branched into the bronchials. This too they washed, and trimmed its tattered upper end. By the time they rejoined it with the head, tightly stitching the trachea back to where it had been parted from the upper neck, Pandora was past the worst of her revulsion.

  He was a stranger to me. It’s not like Ethan. A strange
r, she thought. So isn’t there beauty in this…?

  There had to be. It lay in the care, the devotion…

  She turned a questioning glance to Fergus, then mouthed, But why?

  “If they’re to speak, they need to breathe,” he told her. “But the dead can’t breathe on their own.”

  The woman who had washed the head now held it as carefully as she might a newborn, supporting its weight while the windpipe dangled loose…then Kathleen knelt and grasped it and put its free end to her mouth.

  “Few can do this,” Fergus told her, “but some have been able in Kathleen’s line, as far back as we know it to go.”

  Spellbound by the soft glowing lights, the dance of shadows across expectant faces, she watched as Kathleen exhaled breath after slow, gentle breath through the remnants of Sean Reardon’s airway. She could hear it leaking from the head…sighing through the nostrils, where popped a bubble of watery blood; puffing free at the slack corners of the mouth. She’d heard Ethan’s breath escape like that sometimes, when they would talk late into the night and fall asleep together on the sofa. The tongue peeked out next, forced by air pressure…or so she thought until it dragged itself on a slow path from one dry corner of the mouth to the other. The eyelids eased open, no more than halfway, but good god, they’d moved, the eyes staring even though they seemed not to focus, and now the lips began to quiver and the chin to twitch.

  And while the breath may have been borrowed, Sean Reardon rasped out a groan that was very plainly his own.

  Pandora couldn’t help herself: “No…fucking…way.”

  She’d heard of heads lifted from baskets beneath the blades of guillotines—how they stared in shock with eyes still bright, how their mouths struggled silently to convey some final message that was lost forever, because they had no breath to carry it. Poised for moments between life and death, what secrets might they have had to tell, if only, if only? She wondered if what she was witnessing was less an act of magic than a titanic act of will from a fading ember of spirit that hung on as long as it could in hopes that it might be permitted one last declaration.