The Visitors

by Patrick O'Keeffe

  Hannah picked me up at the Junction. Coleman Daly was on the platform. He lowered his orange flag and asked Hannah how our father was keeping.

  —In great form, Coleman, Hannah said, and thanked him for asking.

  The train was sneaking toward Cork. Coleman gently poked my chest with the butt of the flag and said he hadn’t seen me in a long while, how was things with me? I turned from the train and cheerfully said I was heading off to the States. Coleman shook my hand, wished me luck, then stepped back, pulled off his cap, stared at the platform floor in a morbid way, and said it was a tragedy that young people had to go to that country again, since that’s a cruel country, if you think about it, people go stone mad over there, go to all extremes, he himself had the chance to go out there once, fare paid, the works, but he knew that country wasn’t for him, but saying all that, he had so many relations out there with so many years, and though he didn’t know what states they lived in, or what they did to make a living, he was dead sure they were doing frightfully well.

  On the drive home, Hannah said our father was not in the best of moods. He grumbled about his children not visiting, but he still took his walks, he read the paper, he had his appetite.

  I asked what he’d said when she told him I was going to the States.

  —That you’re the sort who’s happy no place, Hannah firmly said.

  I turned from my sister and watched the road. A few minutes passed.

  —He took this fit last week, Jimmy, and burned these things on the range. I wasn’t going to tell you, and I’m not going to tell the others—

  I turned to my sister.

  —Like what things, Hannah?

  —Things he kept in their room, Jimmy. I walked into the kitchen. He was standing over the range. The lid off and the flames flying up and the smoke filling up the kitchen—remember them tins of biscuits Mam’s friend in London used to post to us every Christmas when we were young?

  —I do, of course.

  —So there he was, Jimmy, pulling things out of four or five of them tins, and shoving them into the blazing range. The tins were filled to the brim and lined up along the top of the range—

  —But what things are you talking about, Hannah!

  —Things! I don’t know! I don’t want to know. I knew I shouldn’t have said a word to you—them small copybooks, Jimmy, that he once bought at O’Shea’s, but he turns from the range and says to me this should have been done before his wife and Michael left him—

  —And what did he mean by that—

  —Your guess is as good as mine—

  —But, Hannah, you said something to him—

  —I told him to go ahead and burn whatever he likes, Jimmy, but try not to burn the house down, and I opened the kitchen windows and the back door and the kitchen door, and I went down the hall and opened the front door to let the heat and the smoke out.

  Hannah sighed. I lit a cigarette and handed it to her.

  —He’s a lunatic, I said.

  —He’s our father, Jimmy.

  I said I was sorry, then said we should put it out of our heads. Hannah said she already had. And so I asked about the other things, and she said the cattle were fine, her part-time job in the Tampax factory in Tipperary town was fine, and things between her and the boyfriend couldn’t be better. The boyfriend was a neighbor. He worked as a fitter in the same factory. And when Hannah pulled up in front of the house she said they were going to marry inside the year. They’d already picked the children’s names.

  —That’s great news, Hannah, I said.

  The next night Hannah took him his supper in his room. She came back to the kitchen and said I should give him a while to eat. You know how he likes to take his time. Yes, I do. Was I in the mood to face him? No, never. Was I in the mood to say good-bye? A thing that had to be done. We were sitting at the table. I poured the tea. Hannah put biscuits on a plate. The telly was turned down. Hannah went through the people who were sick, dying, had got married, expecting before they got married, expecting but not married, who was new to the dole, who had left and where they’d gone to.

  —You heard, I suppose, that Una Lyons is going to London, Hannah said. —She’s marrying some English fella she met in Dublin.

  —I didn’t hear that, but good for Una, I said.

  —You won’t bother contacting Kevin in the States. He’s out there a while now, doing well, so I hear.

  —We were never friends, I said.

  —I think he’s where you’re going, Hannah said.

  —We’ll see what happens.

  —I hope you talked to Tess.

  —I did, don’t worry, Hannah.

  —I should go down, Jimmy, and see how things are with him.

  Hannah stood and opened the kitchen door. I was right behind her. She went down the blue corridor. I walked through the hall and out the front door. In the middle of the yard I knelt on one knee and petted the sheepdog. Her companion had died a few weeks before. Then I stood and walked to the edge of the yard and stared down the paddock. Weeds thrived around the pump house. Its roof and walls were covered with ivy. The poplars were very still. I turned from all of that and went back and knelt again and scratched the sheepdog’s head. I whispered in her ear that I was sorry that her companion had died. The sheepdog wagged her tail and I headed around the back of the house. Where the wood was chopped and cut looked the way it did in my head. I passed the kitchen-sink window and stood at the barbed wire and stared up the field. The cattle were lying underneath the bushes. I took a few steps along the wire and found a rusty thorn and I shoved my thumb down very hard on it then shoved the thumb into my mouth and sucked the blood. Next I was staring through the back window at the kitchen table. Tea going cold in mugs. Biscuits not touched on a plate. The slumped sleeper couch against the wall opposite was once Auntie Hannah’s bed. The dull and ignorant aunt you never warmed to. Above the couch, their smiling wedding photograph and next to that a black-and-white National school photograph of us in black turtlenecks. We looked like the Beatles on the cover of their second album. My mother’s friend in London posted those turtlenecks. Hannah walked into the kitchen with Auntie Tess’s white tray—that’s what we called it. I don’t know if Aunt Tess brought it on the train from Dublin one summer or if she posted it—Hannah’s head was down like an altar boy’s. I sucked my thumb again and went in the back door and crossed the kitchen and stood at the kitchen sink and washed my thumb and then washed his plate and cup and I washed the tea mugs and put the biscuits back in their packet and wiped my hands on the tea towel and stared for a while through the window at the Galtee Mountains. Then I looked down at my thumb. The blood had stopped. The skin was swollen and purple. Hannah said she was taking him down his mug of Complan. And she’d give him the tablets for his frail heart.

  —When I come back up you go down and put it behind you, she added.

  —Thank you, Hannah, I said.

  Hannah came up.

  —I’ll go down, I said.

  —It won’t kill you, she said.

  —It might kill me, I said.

  I kissed her cheek and she mine, and I went through the kitchen doorway and shut the door behind me. I switched the light on and stared down that blue corridor my mother had painted. I think I helped her paint it, or that’s something I’d like to think—the short blue corridor that saw no daylight unless the bedroom doors were open—and that night I went down it I swear I smelled his sweat from all his years of hard work. Sweat that insulated him like a coat of armor. Like the shell of the turtle. This thing you forever wanted to run away from. A way you didn’t ever want to be. Back then when I slept in the bedroom with Stephen and Anthony he was the last to go to bed. Every night he knelt at his chair for an hour and prayed. When he got up he checked the back and front doors then slowly walked down the blue corridor in socks his dead wife had darned too many tim
es. His rosary beads curled like a rattlesnake in the drawer behind his chair. Back then I waited for the almost soundless click of the kitchen door handle and his stockinged feet on the corridor floor. I stayed awake to hear. And those sounds still trap me in the oddest places—like waiting in the check-in line at an airport, or walking down a crowded American city sidewalk, or sitting alone with a book in the quietest corner of a used bookstore.

  That Sunday night I dreaded my few cowardly steps. Past the room on the right where I once slept with my two brothers. Three big boot holes in that door from when Anthony once wanted in and Stephen and I wouldn’t let him. Hannah and Tess’s room on the other side, where Hannah now slept on her own.

  I knocked on his door. He said to come in. I put one foot in the room, kept the other in the corridor, pulled the door against me like a shield, stuck my head in, and squeezed down on the door handle.

  —Take your weight off that handle, it’s in a tender way, he said.

  I let the handle go, but I didn’t move.

  He was sitting in his chair beside the bed. His back was to the window. The chair usually faced the window. He liked to stare out at his dead wife’s untended flower garden—his thin pale legs with the long and winding blue veins, the walking stick on the floor by the chair, and the red dressing robe that fell a few inches below his knees. The robe had black burn holes from the Sweet Aftons he’d stopped smoking the week after his wife died.

  —You didn’t come in to see me last evening or all day, he said.

  —You were sleeping. Hannah thought it best not to disturb you, I said.

  —So many are concerned about my well-being, he said. —What a lucky man I am. But you haven’t been down to see us in a very long while.

  —Busy in work, I said.

  —You were always a great one for the work. When are you going back?

  —Early train tomorrow, I said.

  —A very short visit. Like the Holy Father himself, he said. —So when are you going away?

  —The end of the week, I said.

  —You’re afraid to come into the room. You could at least dignify the man who raised you with that much.

  I opened the door and planted my feet in the room. He told me to close the door but to be extra careful of the tender handle. I did as he asked.

  My mother’s Mass shoes were on the small rug next to the bed. She bought that rug in Dublin years ago. Mothers and their children had traveled there by bus on a zoo day trip the Irish Countrywomen’s Association organized. It was springtime. My first time visiting Dublin. And it might have been my mother’s. I forget so much. And get so much wrong. On the dressing table their battered prayer books and his rosary beads. On the walls, the pictures of the Blessed Family, Padre Pio, and Saint Francis, who once sat atop the television. The heavy red curtains Auntie Tess sent from Dublin were open. The curtains reached the floor. The same sort of curtains hung in the boys’ and the girls’ bedrooms. It was dusk. A blackbird was singing. He raised his face. That smile appeared. He said the blackbird sang morning and evening. He scattered bread crumbs along the windowsill for her. The blackbird was his wife saying hello.

  —But all so soon, what day did you exactly say, or did you tell me that? he said.

  —This Friday, I said.

  —And why, he said.

  —Why what, I said.

  —Did Daly take the hearing from you at the Junction?

  —The hearing’s sound, I said.

  —You have a job, he said.

  —I don’t like it anymore, I said.

  —Aren’t you the plucky fellow, he said.

  —I wouldn’t know, I said.

  —You know it only too well, he said. —When I was your age, so many went off. The Christmas cards arrived for a few years with a few scribbles you could barely read and then them cards stopped arriving. People go away and don’t come back. Only too well I know that myself—

  —It’s not that way anymore—

  —Do you think it’s a fool I am!

  —That’s one thing I never think, I said.

  —Well, that’s good to hear, so what exactly do you plan on doing when you arrive there? And how long do you intend on staying there?

  —I’m not sure yet, I said.

  —Not sure. It’s not like you’re going down the road a bit.

  —I’ll get a job. I’ll go to school.

  —Will you now. Go to school. So you will.

  —That’s what I’m thinking.

  —And what does my plucky fellow intend to learn in school? From what I remember, you learned nothing there in all the years you went.

  —I might study English, I said.

  —Don’t you know that already?

  —Something else, then, I said.

  —But why are you going out there in the first place? he asked. —Your mother, God rest her, would want you to stay where you are, in that fine job I got for you. She’d like you to be here for your brothers and sisters. I’m not going to be around for too long more. Did you go and visit Tess? You took the train down to Cork to see her—

  —I rang her. She didn’t want me going down there—

  —You were very happy to not have to put yourself out—

  —She didn’t want me going down there. She said it’d make her lonesome—

  —That’s the best excuse I’ve heard in a long time. Since when did she know what she is thinking! That might be the one thing you know as good as I do!

  —Tess’s fine. She likes the nursing, I said.

  —You didn’t even bother to go down and see her, and you getting onto a plane for yourself—

  —I told you she didn’t want me to!

  —Keep the voice down. Do you hear me. The ears are sound as a bell. More sounder than your own. But what difference anyway that you are going. We never see much of you. You might as well be gone. When I think of it, you were always gone. My plucky fella cares greatly for us—

  —I’m not so sure about that, I said.

  —Now the truth of what I know since day one comes out—

  —Whatever you think yourself, I said.

  —Don’t disrespect your father, he said, grinding the back teeth, wagging the bent finger, and shuffling the feet.

  —Sorry, I said.

  —There’s little sorrow in you, he said.

  The blackbird started to sing. He cocked his head. That smile appeared and he turned to look at a holy picture on the wall above their bed.

  A few minutes later, he said, —You remember them John Garfield films, you do?

  —I do, I said.

  —You were young, but you were so fond of them. There’s risk for you, he said.

  —Eddie told me you were into the acting, the first day I arrived in Dublin, I said.

  —What are you bringing up now—

  —Your second cousin. Eddie in the union.

  —Like I have been saying to you my entire life, you talk and think about things that are of no use, and Eddie never had a clue what he was going on about. The only one Eddie is faithful to is John Powers. He keeps that family in high spirits. Eddie’s trouble is that he never got used to not being at home. He’d come down from Dublin for a few weeks in summer before he found the unfortunate old wife who could never give him a child, and we’d go for a few—

  —He told me that day he was sad he had no children—

  —There you are again, bringing up things that are of no concern to you—

  —I’m only saying what he told—

  —I don’t want to hear another word about that, he said.

  —Fine with me, I said.

  —Well, if you want to know, after the few pints you couldn’t stop Eddie from wailing that he would be a happier man if he’d stayed, and God forgive me now for saying this, but Eddie never t
old one word of the truth for one day in his life, not a word, lies for no rhyme or reason, that’s the kind Eddie is, and sure what could you expect, because that’s the way Eddie’s father was, who was likewise faithful to John Powers. When Eddie’s father died they found the empty bottles in every nook and cranny. They opened the wardrobe and the empty whiskey bottles poured out like the sands of time, and paper bags filled with whiskey bottles, hidden in the weeds, at the bottom of the haggard, empty bottles shoved into the rafters of the cow house and the henhouse. Of course, the father was on his own and Eddie was away in Dublin, starting his union for himself, and Eddie’s mother dead since Eddie was a youngster.

  He coughed loudly then took his hand from his mouth. He looked right at me.

  —Born and raised in Brooklyn, John Garfield was, but you being the plucky young fella that you are, you’d know that.

  —Of course, I know that, I said.

  But I didn’t.

  —Brooklyn’s not so close to Boston. Boston is a ways north of there, he said.

  • • •

  At the kitchen sink I gulped down two cups of water and stared out. No mountains and no fields. Only my dark reflection on that windowpane. Hannah’s dark reflection appeared to the right of mine. She was a few steps behind me.

  —It went all right, Jimmy, she said.

  —Like you’d expect, Hannah.

  —He still misses Mam so much. He talks about her all the time. He worries about us. He worries about you going. He doesn’t want you to go. He is so sad over your going.

  —He doesn’t have an ounce of sadness.

  —That’s a very mean thing to say, Jimmy.

  —If I call him the small, bitter, perishing patriarch, would that be mean, too, Hannah?

  —You’re trying to be smart now, Jimmy.

  —What if I am, Hannah?

  —I’d give anything to see Mam again, Jimmy.