A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  “Stepsister,” Nell amended, remembering Chief Bryce’s puzzlement over her name.

  Mrs. Gilmartin surveyed Nell’s chic black walking dress, shirred bonnet, and crochet gloves as she pulled a leather knife sheath from an apron pocket. “You don’t look much like the sister of a roughneck like that.” Turning toward the chicken coop, she cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed, “Claire Caitlin, what the divil’s takin’ you so long?”

  “I’m tryin’,” came a high-pitched, breathless voice from within the coop.

  Mrs. Gilmartin raised her exasperated gaze to heaven.

  Nell said, “I’m very distressed about how my brother died, as you can imagine, and I was hoping to reconstruct his final days.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ I can tell you about that Murphy fella other than I wish he’d of picked somebody else’s place to hide out at—and set fire to. I can’t get too het up about it, though, seein’ as it was the good Lord’s work. An eye for an eye. That’s what I told that chief Bryce, and that’s what I’ll tell you, stepsister or no.”

  “Perhaps your daughter—”

  “My daughter don’t know nothin’ about no murderin’ thief.”

  Will bristled on Nell’s behalf. Touching his arm, she said, “My brother and I followed different paths in life, but he was the only family I had left, so I’m sure you can understand why I’m curious about his death and the days that led up to it.” As Mrs. Gilmartin, looking unmoved, was opening her mouth to respond, Nell said, “You know, I think I’ve seen you. Don’t you attend early Mass at St. Catherine’s?” Nell did, in fact, recognize her from church, as Father Donnelly had said she would; Hannah Gilmartin was a hard woman to miss.

  Mrs. Gilmartin blinked in surprise, her expression softening. She slid a bone handled hunting knife from the sheath, produced a whetstone, and set about sharpening the blade. “Yeah, I reckon you mighta seen me at St. Cat’s. Hunh. I took you for one of them lace curtain lasses of the Orange persuasion ‘cause of the way you’re flashed up. Sorry for the insult, miss.”

  Will looked down and rubbed his chin to hide his smile. He was as pale as ever, with an indolent heaviness to his eyes that served as a constant reminder to Nell of his seemingly inextinguishable appetite for opiates.

  She’d lain awake for hours last night contemplating the evolution of her relationship with Will over the past two and a half years, culminating in Saturday night’s bittersweet reunion in the boathouse. She’d finally fallen asleep around two in the morning, only to awaken sweating and shaking from a dream that the house was burning down around her, and there was no one to put it out but she—a bucket brigade of one. She grabbed the basin off the washstand and ran into the bathroom, but when she tried to fill it up, all that came out of the faucet was a series of long, excruciatingly slow drips. The drips gleamed in the fiery luminescence, each one striking the porcelain sink with a metallic clatter. Nell had looked closer, only to find the sink filling up steadily, inexorably, with hypodermic needles.

  That morning, over the dawn breakfast on the back porch that had become Viola and Nell’s summer ritual, Viola said, during a pause in the conversation, You know it would be quite all right with me if you were to remarry. You’ll be a free woman soon, with any luck, so I thought you should feel... unencumbered. Nell, quite certain that she’d been expected to remain unwed until Gracie’s early adolescence, had ruminated on the matter over her eggs bourgeoise before asking Viola if she wouldn’t please avoid mentioning the divorce petition to others, including Will. After several long minutes of disconcerting silence Viola said, Do be careful in your choice of a husband, Nell. I know something of the safe and convenient marriage. I also know something of ardor. The former should only be chosen over the latter when one has exhausted every option at one’s disposal. We humans are weak and needful creatures, and there is really no substitute for true passion.

  “I got her! I got her!” A wanly pretty girl in a striped apron lurched out of the chicken house gripping a screaming red hen upside down by its feet.

  “Bring her here, then,” said Mrs. Gilmartin as she ground the knife over the whetstone with purposeful strokes. “And keep ahold of her. If she gits loose from you now, there’ll be no catchin’ her a second time, you can be sure of that.”

  The girl stared at Nell and Will—but especially at Nell—as she carried the writhing bird to her mother, holding it at arms length. She was as delicate as her mother was brawny, a waifish little thing with brown hair and guileless eyes. Nell supposed she must have seen this girl at St. Catherine’s in past summers, although she couldn’t place her. Where she did recognize her from, Nell realized with a start, was Jamie’s funeral. Claire had been one of the weeping females whom Nell had taken for a heartbroken admirer of her brother.

  “This here’s the sister of that fella that burned up in the cranberry shed,” Mrs. Gilmartin told Claire, gesturing toward Nell with a knife. “I told her we don’t know nothin’ ‘cept what we told the constables.”

  Nell said, “Claire, didn’t I see you two weeks ago at my bro—”

  “Maybe in town,” she said with a furtive little shake of her head. “Maybe at the market.”

  “Get that bird trussed up,” her mother told her, “before she gets away from you.”

  Claire looped the noose around the chicken’s feet and pulled it snug, all the while standing as far from the thrashing creature as she could.

  “Get the pail,” her mother told her, “and this time don’t tarry. You got to do it fast when the time comes.”

  The girl lifted a dented tin pail from the ground and held it under the hen, averting her gaze and squeezing her eyes shut.

  Mrs. Gilmartin seized the hen by its beak, stretched its neck, and sliced off its head. The bird let out a screech; so did Claire.

  “The pail!” Her mother yelled as blood sprayed from the flapping, headless chicken, spattering her and her daughter both. Nell and Will backed up hastily; it was fortunate that they were both dressed entirely in black.

  Claire thrust the pail up over the bird, holding it there until it had ceased twitching, which didn’t take long. She set it on the ground directly under the limp hen to catch the remaining dribbles of blood.

  “I said fast.” Mrs. Gilmartin threw the chicken head at Claire, who sidestepped it with a squeal.

  “Sorry, Ma.” Claire was, indeed, a “young” nineteen, as Cyril had said, with her high, thready voice and timid manner. She wore her hair in two braids; a silver crucifix hung around her neck.

  “I understand you got trapped in the burning cranberry shed trying to help my brother,” Nell told Claire. “You risked your life for him. I’m grateful for that.”

  Mrs. Gilmartin, crouching down to clean the blood off her knife by stabbing it into the dirt, let out a disapproving grunt.

  “Where is the cranberry shed?” Will asked, looking around at the outbuildings, none of which appeared to have been exposed to fire.

  Gesturing toward a patch of woods to the south, Claire said, “It’s off thataway, between the cranberry bogs and Mill Pond Road.”

  “Had you known he was hiding out in there before the fire?” Will asked.

  “Of course she didn’t,” said Mrs. Gilmartin as she straightened up, pulling off her gloves and stuffing them in her apron pockets. “What kind of a question is that? Claire, fetch me a peck basket from the barn, the one with the swing handle.”

  As Claire ran off to do her mother’s bidding, Will said, “I’m just asking because it sounds as if that shed is pretty isolated. I was wondering what she was doing there.”

  “The harvest starts soon,” said Mrs. Gilmartin as she untied the apron and slung it over her big shoulder. It’s Claire’s job to clean up the shed and get it ready, ‘cause we use it for storage and what-not the rest of the year. See, that’s where the berries are taken after they’re picked. We pack ‘em in bushel boxes to cure—or my workers do, the fellas I hire at harvest time. After about a week or ten
days, they’re sorted and barreled and sent off to market.”

  “When did you start cleaning the shed?” Nell asked Claire as the girl returned from the barn and handed the basket to her mother.

  “It’s a big job, so I start around the middle of July.”

  “Most years,” said Mrs. Gilmartin, shooting a look at her daughter as she plucked a peach from the tree and sniffed at. “But this year, she kept putting it off, one excuse after another. That’s how come we didn’t know Murphy was there till the night of the thirty-first, when it burned down.”

  “You were cleaning it at night?” Nell asked Claire.

  “I got other chores to do during the day. So I headed down there after supper, and when I started getting close, I smelled smoke, and I heard him—your brother—I heard him scream, so I ran and I seen the shed was on fire. I guess I thought I should do somethin’, so I—”

  “He screamed for help?” Nell asked. “He actually said, ‘help me’?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said, seeming a little thrown by the question. “Anyways, that’s how I knew he was in there.”

  “Was he still screaming after you got inside the shed?” Nell asked.

  “What? No. No, he wasn’t makin’ any noise at all. I think maybe he was already... you know.”

  “Could you see him?” Will asked.

  Claire stared at him for a moment, then looked away, as if considering the question. “Um, no. I think so, no. He must’ve been behind something. There’s all this stuff in there, or was—crates and barrels, a table, the cranberry sorter... All of it was on fire, and there was so much smoke I could hardly see. Anyways, come to find out my skirt’s on fire and some bushel boxes stacked up near the door had started burning and fell over, so I couldn’t get out that way.”

  “What did you do?” Will asked.

  “I grabbed a shovel and smashed a window and crawled out that way, and then I ran back to the house fast as my feet could take me, screamin’ till my throat was raw. The boarders come runnin’ out with a bunch of them gallon buckets the cranberry pickers use. One of them got on a horse and went to fetch Ma, and we all—”

  “You weren’t home?” Nell asked her mother.

  Adding another peach to her nearly full basket, Mrs. Gilmartin said, “I was on my way to St. Cat’s to bring some chicken fritters to Father Donnelly. I’d made extra just for him. I only got about half a mile down the road before George came riding up to tell me what happened. By the time we got back, the fire was almost out. But the cranberry shed can’t be saved, just the sorter, ‘cause it’s metal. The shed’ll have to be torn down. And I ain’t got the money to rebuild it. I’ll have to use the barn this year. And I’ll have to build more crates and pallets, buy more barrels...” She shook her head, saying, “It’s a calamity, that’s what it is.”

  “How do you think the fire started?” Will asked her.

  “I reckon Murphy got careless with a match. Maybe he got drunk and fell asleep with a lit cigarette. Or maybe he knocked over a candle.”

  “Did you happen to notice any strangers on the property around that time?” Nell asked.

  “Only folks on the property were my boarders and the fellas I hire to tend the bogs, and they been workin’ for me for years. Wouldn’t none of them set fire to my cranberry house. Why would they?” Jogging the basket up and down as if testing its weight, she said, “I got to bring these to Father Donnelly. He’s expecting me by noon. So if you folks don’t have no more questions...”

  “Do you mind if we take a look at the cranberry house?” Nell asked.

  “Can’t see the point of it, but help yourselves. Just follow that path,” she said, pointing. “It’ll take you south through them woods. You’ll pass the bogs on your right, next to the pond, then the path splits off in two directions. You want to keep to the left, headin’ east. There’s another little patch of woods, and then you’ll come upon what’s left of the cranberry house.”

  Will said, “May I ask why it’s so far from everything else?”

  “That’s to make it easier to get the cranberries to market once they’re cured and sorted. “If you was to keep following that path through the woods, you’d come right out onto Mill Pond Road.”

  “I appreciate you letting us see it,” Nell said.

  “Ain’t much to see, but you’ll find that out for yourselves. Claire, I expect you to get busy plucking and dressing that bird. It better be in the pot by the time I get home.”

  As Mrs. Gilmartin was walking away, Claire turned to Nell and said softly, “I’m sorry about your brother, Miss Sweeney. But I’m glad he got laid to rest in the churchyard, by a priest. He got buried proper, so he’s with Jesus now.”

  “I hope so said Nell, reflecting on Claire’s theological naïveté in believing that a lifetime of sin could be negated by the simple expediency of a Christian burial. She declined to mention that she had applied just that morning to have her brother’s body unearthed from that very churchyard. “Claire, I wonder if you would help us find our way to the cranberry shed.”

  “But...” Looking toward the dead chicken, she said, “Ma wants me to—”

  “We won’t keep you,” Nell said as she curled an arm around the girl’s shoulders and started down the path that led to the cranberry house. “But I would like to chat with you a bit.”

  “What about?”

  “About my brother’s funeral, for one thing. Your mother doesn’t know you went to it?”

  “Oh, Ma would have a conniption if she knew. She said he was a godless hoodlum, and that he got what was coming to him. You won’t tell her I was there, will you, miss?”

  “Of course not. But I am curious as to why you went, given that he was a total stranger to you, and a criminal, at that, one who was responsible for burning down your cranberry shed.”

  Claire looked down, her hands buried in her apron pockets, and jerked her birdlike shoulders. She walked that way in silence as the path entered the woods. “I kind of felt… I dunno. Like a person ought to have someone there when he’s laid to rest, even someone that didn’t know him.”

  “But you did know him, didn’t you?” said Nell, seeing Will, out of the corner of her eye, give her a look of surprise. “He wasn’t a stranger to you at all.”

  Claire looked at her sharply as she stopped walking. “I... I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

  “Your mother told you I was Jamie’s sister, but she never told you my name. Yet you called me Miss Sweeney. You knew my brother was hiding out in the shed, Claire. You talked to him. You befriended him. He talked about me.”

  “Ma said she’d whip me to the bone if I told anyone.”

  “But you didn’t tell,” Will pointed out. “The clever Miss Sweeney sorted it out on her own.”

  “I’m not trying to get you in trouble,” Nell told her. “I’m just trying to piece together my brother’s last days. If you could help me to do that, I would be very grateful. And I promise your mother won’t find out what you’ve told me. Curling her arm around Claire’s, she continued on down the path through the woods, Will following behind. “How long did you know that Jamie was hiding out on your property?”

  “He told me that was what you and his Ma used to call him—Jamie. I called him Jim, on account of that’s what he told me his name was—Jim Murphy.”

  Duncan had been the first one to call him Jim, Nell recalled. He’d said ‘Jamie’ made him seem like a little boy.

  Rephrasing the question Claire had neglected to answer—she seemed a bit mentally unfocused—Nell said, “When did you realize Jamie was living in the cranberry house?”

  “It was the first time I went down there to start cleaning it up.”

  “Which wouldn’t have been the evening of Sunday the thirty-first, as you told us,” Nell said, “but some time before that.”

  “It was the Saturday before, and it was in the afternoon. I mean, not Saturday the day before, but—”

  “Eight days before,” Nell sai
d. “That would’ve been July twenty-third. Four days after...” Murdered Susannah Cunningham of Boston, aged 37 yrs.

  Nell squinted from a sudden onslaught of sunlight as the path emerged from the woods to continue along the eastern edge of a field next to Mill Pond. The field had been planted with four rectangular cranberry beds of about an acre each—carpets of low green vines speckled with ripening berries. Between each bog, and extending to the path on which they walked, were makeshift roadways of wooden planks. The path, which widened as it passed the bogs, was rutted with years’ worth of close-set wheel tracks, probably from wheelbarrows used to transport the harvested berries to the cranberry house.

  Will said, “So you’d gone to the cranberry house that afternoon to start setting it right, and you found James Murphy there. That must have been quite a shock.”

  “I screamed, but couldn’t nobody hear me way out there. He stood in front of the door, blocking it so I couldn’t get out, and he told me to calm down, talkin’ real soft and slow. He said he didn’t mean to do me no harm. I didn’t believe him at first. I was never so scared in my life.”

  “Did you know who he was?” Nell asked.

  “He asked me that. I told him I figured he was one of them fellas they’d been looking for, the ones that killed that lady. He told me it wasn’t him that done it. But he said the cops didn’t know that, and they’d hang him if they caught him.”

  Nell’s relief at hearing this was tempered by the knowledge that Jamie might have just been saying that to get Claire on his good side.

  “He seen my crucifix,” Claire continued, “so he said he knew I was a God-fearing girl and would do the right thing. And then I remembered I’d seen him once or twice at St. Cat’s, and I thought if he went to Mass, he couldn’t be all bad. He pulled his Sacred Heart medal out from under his shirt and said it meant more to him than anything. He said his ma gave it to him before she passed.”