The Snowmelt River

by Frank P. Ryan

  Alan glanced up at a jet passing high overhead. The sound might, at a pinch, be described as a thundering, however faint and distant.

  Kate said, ‘I’m showing Alan around the place. But you could tell him more about the house.’

  ‘Sure he’s not interested in this auld ruin.’

  ‘Ma’am, I am interested.’

  Bridey peered back at him with a look of suspicion. ‘And why is that now? Because it looks so contrary?’

  He couldn’t help but smile at her choice of word for the house, which captured the look of it perfectly. ‘Is it Victorian?’

  ‘It started off as Georgian, but they went through a fit of overhauling it during Victorian times.’ Bridey talked into the air, as if half-bemusedly to herself. ‘That was the time when it got its name, the “Doctor’s House”. The Doctor in this case being the medical superintendent of what in them days was known as “the madhouse”.’

  Kate tugged at his arm to haul him away from Bridey’s reminiscences. ‘We’re going to take a look at the garden.’

  ‘Ah, be off the pair o’ you! Leave me to feed Darkie! But mind you keep clear of them greenhouses. Sure that uncle of yours is as stubborn as the tide.’

  Kate waited until Bridey and Darkie had disappeared through a side door into the house before explaining, ‘My grandmother died when Fergal and Daddy were young. Bridey became their nanny. Then when Daddy died at the mission in Africa, she blamed the planes.’

  ‘She blamed the planes?’

  ‘For taking him to Africa.’

  Alan shook his head.

  ‘She’s convinced the house is cursed.’

  ‘Cursed?’

  ‘By what went on – in the old asylum.’

  He smiled. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s a weird-looking house!’

  ‘All the time I was growing up here I thought I was living in the same world that Lewis Carroll wrote about.’

  The original house must have been compact and square, with sash windows divided up into small Georgian panes. But somebody, maybe the Victorian asylum keeper, had inserted an octagonal tower on one corner. Alan was standing right outside it, looking up at a structure of wooden frames filled with small glass panes, capped by an amazing minaret-style tower that soared to a tiny flagpole, bearing the Irish tricolour. On the gable ends of the house he saw other additions, very likely arising out of the same fantastic imagination. Ornate canopies topped fussy bay windows and porticos surrounded the front and back doors. There were additional dormer windows on the roof adjacent to soaring chimneys. The surrounding gardens were a labyrinth of arbours for roses, honeysuckle and stuff, so you could wander out of the house into a fairyland of scents and colours.

  They carried on round to the back, taking a course that avoided some large greenhouses, with peeling paintwork and several broken panes.

  He murmured, ‘Looks to me like Bridey had a point!’

  ‘It’s nothing that a bit of fixing wouldn’t make safe. They were properly cared for when Grandad was alive. He was interested in plants, an amateur like me. But Fergal is too busy to take proper care of them. Bridey wants to knock them all down. We’re the only Shaunessys left of the family. She’s terrified something bad will happen. But there are old memories, like when Daddy and Uncle Fergal were growing up. So Fergal can’t bring himself to do it.’

  She led Alan along a neglected path, overgrown with elderberry and nettles, bringing them face to face with a tunnel big enough to drive a car through. When they stepped inside, it was dank and gloomy. A hesitant light hovered around the entrance, as if fearful to penetrate deeper.

  ‘I used to hide here from Bridey, playing hide-and-seek. It cuts right under the main road. Then there are all sorts of secret carriageways and tunnels before it finally comes out in the grounds of the hospital.’

  ‘This still leads to the asylum?’

  Kate nodded. ‘It’s a mental hospital now. Once I saw a picture of the old superintendent. He had huge side-whiskers and a beard like Father Christmas. The whole place was arranged so patients never left it even when they came to work here in the gardens.’

  ‘Creepy!’

  Kate hooted with laughter at the expression on his face. ‘Some of the mad people still try to escape this way. Oh, I know I shouldn’t call them that. There are times I feel madder than any of them myself. But Bridey could tell you stories. Those poor souls, they wade out into the river until it comes up to their chins. Then they shriek to the nurses that they’ll drown themselves if anybody tries to come and save them.’

  ‘Shee–it!’

  She led him back to the house where they did a tour of the downstairs rooms. Bridey appeared with two glasses of orange juice, then left them to it. They carried their drinks into a study with collections of tropical insects mounted in frames.

  ‘Your uncle works with insects?’

  ‘He’s an entomologist at University College Cork. He’s off right now counting new species in the African jungle before they become extinct.’ Then, with what seemed a clumsy abruptness, she just came right out with it and asked him how his parents had died.

  Alan was startled into silence.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘There isn’t much to say. It was an accident.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  He looked down at his feet. Would she never stop asking him questions? ‘It was in March – just a lousy accident.’

  She slumped down into a chair and toyed with her orange. She said, ‘I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  He remained standing, annoyed with himself for letting his feelings show. ‘How about your folks?’

  ‘Mammy and Daddy were murdered.’

  ‘Oh, man!’

  ‘You don’t need to worry. I’ve got used to it.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’d been on a school skiing trip. It was snowing a bit but it wasn’t any kind of a snowstorm. Dad and Mom were coming to pick me up. A special treat in a chopper. Dad was an experienced pilot. He wouldn’t have taken any risk. A bunch of us, school friends, we wanted to get one more run on the slopes. I look back and I think it was a really stupid thing to do. I keep thinking, what if we hadn’t gone back for that last run? A kid called Rudy Forrester broke his leg. It was a really bad break, with his shinbone poking out through his skin. Mom and Dad – they had to take him to the hospital about thirty miles away. They were supposed to come right back for me.’

  The silence between them lasted several seconds.

  ‘All my life, well, I guess I was your typical American kid. You could say I was one of those laid-back guys. To tell you the truth—!’ Alan’s right hand suddenly came up and he slapped it against his head, like he somehow wanted to just punch sense into it.

  She jumped to her feet and grabbed at his arm. ‘Please, Alan! Don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself.’

  His brown eyes grew distant. ‘I guess … I guess I was some kind of a stupid jerk. The kind of kid who just goes through life without really thinking all that much about anything.’

  She held onto his arm, almost hugging it to her. ‘What happened to them? Was it an accident?’

  ‘That’s what the wreck report said. They made a big thing about the fact it was snowing – and the fact Dad wasn’t familiar with the area. But he was a really good pilot. I just don’t buy it.’

  ‘You don’t think it was an accident?’

  ‘My grandfather, Padraig, doesn’t think so. He’s downright paranoid about it.’

  ‘What? He thinks it was suspicious?’

  ‘I know it sounds kind of crazy. But that’s what he thinks.’

  She took him into a large sitting room, with its big chintzy lounge suite and dark mahogany furniture. The strange tower came off it on one corner, and there was an upholstered window seat so you could sit in there and look out into the garden. There were photographs on the walls of waterfalls, and safari shots of lions, zebras, elephants and cro
codiles. In between the photographs, Alan saw rusty iron spears and big wooden clubs. He looked at pictures of a younger Kate with her parents outside single-storey buildings with white walls and red-tile roofs. They were surrounded by palm trees and colourful tropical plants. Kate’s parents looked slim, medium height. Her father was black-haired and her mother was red-haired, like Kate herself, but a lighter, more golden, red. There was a boy, who looked younger than Kate, with the same red hair.

  She brushed her finger over the glass in the frame. ‘My brother, Billy.’

  ‘And all that’s what – some kind of medical mission?’

  ‘It was a Belgian Catholic Mission, with a school and a small hospital. Mammy was the matron of the hospital and Daddy was the doctor. They worked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo all of the time I was growing up. Billy and me, we lived here with Uncle Fergal and Bridey.’ Her green eyes filled with longing. ‘We used to really look forward to going out there and joining Mammy and Daddy in the long holidays. The mission was close to the gorilla forest. There were palm trees in the grounds and all sorts of fabulous plants. Right outside our bungalow was a giant aloe that sent up seed flowers as tall as a tree. Then, when they seeded, the whole plant just withered away and died. Sister Marie Therèse, she was like the Bridey over there. She had such a sense of fun. She used to tell us stories of what the patients did behind the doctors’ and nurses’ backs. They still believed in spells and potions. She called them les petites feticheurs! I loved the Africans too. They needed so very little to make them happy. Mammy used to say that the best smiles she ever saw were African smiles.’

  Alan saw that the living room was like a mirror image of the living room back at the sawmill. Bridey and Padraig had each made a shrine to happier times.

  ‘What happened, Kate?’

  Her head jerked and her eyes darkened. ‘There was a lot of trouble going on. There were enough bad people locally already without others coming out of Rwanda. Mammy and Daddy had been told to leave. But they knew if they abandoned the hospital the mission would have been finished. And they thought they were safe because they were a hundred and fifty kilometres away from the border.’ She hesitated, blinking a little fast, still staring at the photographs.

  ‘Good job you weren’t there!’

  ‘I was there and so was Billy.’ Kate inhaled and her nostrils dilated. ‘Sister Marie Therèse saved me. She was in charge of the kitchen gardens. We were out there gathering vegetables when we heard the trucks drive in and then the shots and the screaming. I wanted to run back but she stopped me. There was a … a kind of pit. An underground store where she kept yams and stuff. She pushed me into it.’ Kate sniffed and rubbed at her nose. ‘I hid there all through it.’ He could see she was doing her best to fight back tears. ‘I was still there when government soldiers came around, I don’t know how many days later. They found me in the pit. They … they told me the rebels had killed them all … everybody …’

  ‘Hey—!’

  ‘I had counselling. I couldn’t bear to go out. I couldn’t face meeting people – nobody. Not even my friends.’ Kate’s face was flushed and her eyelids were blinking so fast they were fluttering. She looked very different from the girl who had pushed him out of the way of the swans.

  He touched her shoulder, spoke to her softly. ‘C’mon, Kate! Let’s go explore the garden!’

  She scampered back out through the door, half running. He gave her a little space to recover her composure. When he caught up with her he found himself standing at the top of a gentle slope of lawn leading down to the open river. Alan followed her gaze across the forty yards of reed-strewn water to the Green, and beyond that, to the mountains, which were so close you felt you could put out your hand and touch them. He realised that they were almost exactly opposite the place he had been fishing, but closer to the big fork in the river.

  ‘A good job Bridey wasn’t watching us earlier!’

  Kate managed a nervous laugh. ‘Bridey would have needed binoculars. But if she had, she’d have had a heart attack.’ She was hurrying on again. ‘Come on – I told you there was something I wanted to show you!’

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘You won’t know about BSBI.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Botanical Society of the British Isles. I’m helping them with a project on rare and threatened plants.’ She stopped in front of a small tilled piece of the garden, right by the water, about as far away from the house as you could possibly get. It was divided up into tiny beds, each about a foot square, separated from its neighbours by uneven rows of bricks. He guessed that Kate had laid out the bricks.

  ‘You see?’

  The beds were empty except for one.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Go on! Take a closer look!’ Kate went down onto her haunches and so he did the same. He saw a flower that looked a bit like a dandelion. The label read ‘Irish fleabane (Inula salicina) – rare. K.S. Clonmel, Tipperary’.

  ‘K.S. – that you?’

  She nodded, proudly. ‘It’s on the threatened list. I’m waiting for the seeds so I can send them to the gene bank people in Dublin.’

  ‘Huh!’

  She glanced across at him with a wry smile. ‘If you’re really interested, maybe you could help me.’

  ‘I know nothing about this stuff. If you hadn’t told me what it was, I’d have looked at that plant and I’d have seen a weed.’

  Kate’s eyes turned to the Comeragh Mountains, to the forests that clambered over the lower slopes. ‘I just knew it was fate. Your grandfather’s woods cover half of those foothills. There are bits of the old original forests up there on the slopes. Bogs, even!’

  From the chatter of words she had flung into the air like seeds, Alan’s mind plucked out one more curious than all the others: fate.

  The Blooming

  Mark Grimstone was glad he had agreed to keep his sister company while Mo was looking for crystals. They had scouted a few rocky fields before cutting in to explore the dense woods off the Dungarvan Road. After three-quarters of an hour of walking through shadows and being bitten by midges, they came out into a natural clearing, with a white rocky scarp at one edge. Mo went to investigate while Mark passed a moment or two looking around him, swivelling on the heel of his left trainer. Her squeal of delight meant a discovery had been made.

  They would spend an hour or two here. Mark sat in a patch of grass, lounging back against a heather-covered outcrop, whipping at insects with a switch of ash and wondering why the Reverend Grimstone, his adoptive father, had brought them to the Irish backwater of Clonmel.

  Grimstone would play his usual games, pulling in the more gullible locals – those hoping for salvation from their personal demons – into his rituals of head-touching and shouting their sins aloud. This was all in a day’s work for Grimstone’s style of hellfire and brimstone. But why Clonmel? Mark couldn’t fathom it. He gave up trying, and slumped back against the outcrop, watching his sister search for treasures against the sun-bright scarp of pearly rock.

  Mo was happy poking around among the crystals, or finding something that caught her eye in a single flower head or an insect scuttling among the stems and roots. She’d take ages examining her finds before sketching them into her album. Mark dropped his head, plucking a battered harmonica from the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. His fingers caressed it, as if the feel of it was comforting, and he played a few riffs to while the time away. His eyelids never completely closed, but he relaxed into a daydream, lulled by the peacefulness of the woods and the image of his sister searching for crystals. He so abandoned himself in mind-mazing that he lost track of time. Only when he noticed that his face and forearms were burning did he swear aloud, causing Mo to lift her head.

  ‘Mo! You might have warned me.’

  ‘I – I’ve guh-guh-guh … guh-got the cuh-cuh-cream.’ Her stammer worsened because he was annoyed with her.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right! I’ll com
e and get it.’

  He climbed back up onto his knees, rubbing the skin of his face with hands that were also growing increasingly lobsterish. He was burnt all over. And now he saw, with a start of alarm, that they were not alone. A man was watching them from the far edge of the clearing. Dressed in worn denims and leather boots that were laced to just below his knees, he was as lean as a scarecrow, with a face that looked like a weather-beaten mask pulled tight over a long bony skull. It was with a thrill of alarm that Mark noticed his eyes. They were an intense bright blue, so luminous that even from a hundred feet away they seemed to glow with an inner source of light.

  Suddenly the man stepped out of the shadows and, with a long-legged amble, he closed in on Mo.

  She abandoned her backpack and notebook and, scuttling over to Mark’s side, she clutched his arm so fiercely he winced with pain from his sunburnt skin.

  ‘Are you aware this is a private wood?’

  The words were spoken in a bass growl. And now he stood over them, the stranger was as tall as a door.

  ‘We’re sorry! We didn’t know we were trespassing.’

  ‘English it would seem, judging by your accent.’

  ‘Stop buh-buh-buh-bullying muh-muh-my brother!’

  The old man’s cheeks were lined with vertical wrinkles so deep they could have been gouged by a chisel. His eyes, swivelling from Mark to his sister, were like searchlights.

  ‘You don’t much resemble brother and sister.’

  Mark muttered, ‘We’re adopted, if it’s any of your business.’

  The tall man paused a moment, as if to reappraise Mo anew. ‘And your names, if you please, without the boldness?’

  ‘I’m Mark Grimstone and this is my sister, Mo.’

  ‘Yes, and if I’m not mistaken, you must be the brood of the visiting Reverend Grimstone?’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Met him? I certainly have not. Nor would I ever wish to do so. Just what do the pair of you think you’re doing in my wood?’

  ‘My sister is interested in crystals.’