Later in the church, as she knelt between a grim-faced Peter and a silently weeping Nora, her sense of peace prevailed. From where had this blessing come? She had no idea, but was just grateful to Jack that he had come to her rescue and was helping her through this black time. Was he telling her that now she would have to take his place and be the one to help the young ones cope? Was she now to be the comforter of the family? She doubted that she was up to it. As her mind wandered around in questioning circles, she suddenly became aware that while everyone else was now sitting she was still kneeling. Nora was squeezing her fingers, trying to bring her back to reality, and Peter was frowning at her. As she sat down between them, she heard Fr Tim talking about Jack.
“Maybe sometimes we could be accused of waiting until someone dies before we acknowledge how great they are, but in the case of Jack Tobin, I think that we all realised that he was one of the stalwarts of this parish. A hard-working, honest, kind man, who loved this place and all of us. To Jack we were all as good as we could be, and yet he never perceived us to be saints; but he was very tolerant of our weaknesses because he had the biggest, most generous heart in the parish. Everyone in trouble went to Jack, and he helped in the soundest, simplest, most straightforward way he could. Jack saw solutions where some of us saw dead ends, and his approach was all about application to detail and hard work. As he used to say himself, he knew the seed and breed of the whole place, and what he thought you should not know he kept to himself. Jack was an honourable man. He loved and shared the life of the Phelans through four generations and buried five owners of Mossgrove in his lifetime. He was the backbone of their life, and today they mourn him as a grandfather and father figure and loyal, loving friend. And yet his going, though sudden and unexpected, was just as he would have wished it, out in the quietness of his beloved fields where he was totally at home with God and creation. As a man lives, so shall he die, and Jack died exactly as he had lived.”
As she walked down the church after the coffin, Kate raised her eyes and looked at the sea of surrounding faces, and many looked back with tear-filled eyes. How many of these people had Jack helped in his lifetime? Often when she came to his cottage late at night, there was a neighbour with him deep in conversation. Now they were all here to pay their last respects to this kindly man who had helped them though hard patches of their lives. She was glad to see that Danny was under the coffin with Peter, Shiner and David. It would mean so much to Danny and probably come as a surprise to many people unaware of Jack’s recent effort to help him salvage Molly Barry’s homeplace. Jack had been the peacemaker who had seen them through the feuding years with the Conways, and now before he left he had planted the seeds of future peace between Peter and Danny. For Peter to have Danny shouldering Jack’s coffin was an amazingly generous gesture brought about, she felt sure, by some indefinable urge that Peter himself might not be able to explain. Jack was the source of that inspiration. Is it possible, she wondered, that Jack gone from us is going to be as influential as Jack with us? Now he had all the answers, and so far he was making his presence felt even in the formation of his funeral!
But when they arrived in the graveyard and she watched Jack’s coffin being lowered into the deep, narrow grave, her newfound peace abandoned her. There was no easy passage through this physical separation, and an overwhelming sense of loss swamped her as Nora and Peter wrapped their arms around her and the three of them clung together. Martha stood blank-faced and remote beside them, while Shiner and Danny wept quietly side by side. Finally the grave was covered, and on the piled earth his old schoolfriends, Agnes and Sarah, laid little bunches of wild flowers. The flowers brought a sense of completion to the burial, and then the neighbours and friends lined up to sympathise. Kate had sometimes questioned the value of this exercise, but when old friends of Jack’s or her own appeared in front of her, she found it comforting. Then the crowds ebbed away and only the family and close friends were left.
“Isn’t it great that Dada’s grave is just beside Jack’s?” Nora whispered, her teeth chattering with the cold.
“I always thought that too,” Kate told her, “but now it means far more with Jack here beside them all.”
“There is only Jack and his mother in that grave,” Peter said, trying to steady his voice and get a grip on himself with normal conversation. “Where’s Jack’s father buried?”
“He is with his own people,” Sarah cut in. “That happened when a husband or wife died young and there was a possibility that the one left might marry again.”
“We’d better all get out of this cold or there’ll be a few more of us joining the crowd here already,” Martha told them impatiently, heading for the gate. They trooped after her in pairs and little groups, with the older people stopping along the way to pray at other graves.
Back at the house, Ellen Shine had the fire lighting in the parlour, and rounds of tea and chat began again. The prospect of yet another cup of tea is too much for me, Kate thought, and just then Martha shepherded a few of them out into the back kitchen where she had a row of steaming bowls of soup lined up.
“Thank God,” Kate breathed as the warm creamy soup slid down her throat. “I’m burnt up from tea.”
“Mom, how did you get round to it?” Nora said gratefully.
“Ellen had it ready, and she slipped it out here before the masses would descend on her,” Martha told them.
“I’m so cold,” Nora shivered.
“Graveyards are cold places,” Kate told her gently, “and death chills you from inside out as well.”
“Will we ever get over this?” Nora asked her piteously. “I can’t imagine Mossgrove without Jack.”
“We’ll have to, Norry,” Peter broke in determinedly. “If Jack taught us anything, it was that you had to keep going. Jack never gave up. I remember the day after Dad’s funeral when we were all in a desperate state, he said to me, ‘Come on, Peter lad, down to the river and we’ll do a bit of fencing, because there is healing in doing.’ And he was right, because we were better to be out in the fields than huddled up in here.”
“All I remember of those days was the blur of pain and feeling that my world had come unstuck,” Nora said quietly, “and Jack was the only solid rock in the middle of the terror. Now there is no rock.” As she started to cry, Kate put her arms around her and ran her fingers soothingly through her long, soft hair.
“It’s not going to be easy,” Kate said, “but Jack would have kept the flag flying, as he used to say. In many ways I suppose we have much to be grateful for because he gave us so much of himself, and maybe now we should be able to go it alone.”
“I don’t want to go it alone,” Nora sobbed.
Her crying set them all off, and Martha, coming into the back kitchen, looked at them in disapproval.
“Will you for God’s sake pull yourselves together and look after the people out there with Ellen and Sarah?” She marched back into the kitchen with a full teapot.
“I suppose she’s right,” Kate sighed. “We’d better help.”
“She’s not,” Peter raged, heading for the back door. “She’s all about law and order. I don’t give a damn about that kind of thing.”
“Let him off,” Kate advised when Shiner made an attempt to follow him. “He needs time by himself. Some of us need to grieve alone and more of us need people. We all learn the best way for us.”
“Well, I have learnt nothing,” Nora said quietly.
“Come on, Norry,” Shiner said gently, holding out his hand to her, “and we’ll walk down along the fields. It will clear your head to get out.”
“I can’t go down to Clover Meadow where it all happened,” she protested.
“No, no,” he assured her. “We’ll go up along the glen.”
“All right,” she agreed doubtfully, trailing him out the door.
When they were gone, only a white-faced Danny and Kate remained.
“I’m glad that you were under Jack’s coffin,” she told him
quietly.
“I couldn’t believe it when Peter asked me,” he said tremulously. “It meant the world to me, as if I was being invited in from the cold. I feel kind of responsible for Jack’s death, because when he got that turn over in my place, I should have insisted on coming over with him.”
“I feel guilty too, Danny,” she confessed, “because I knew that Jack had a dodgy heart, as he called it. I should have insisted on his looking after it. But he did not want to go down that road, and I felt that it was his right to do it his way.”
“I can understand how you feel,” Danny told her.
“The strange thing about death, Danny,” she continued, “it’s full of guilt. So over the next few weeks when you feel bad about Jack, just remember that it is part of the aftermath of death. But you have probably discovered that yourself.”
“I thought that it was only me on account of how my father died. His death haunts me at times,” he confessed.
“As time goes on the guilt will fade, and your perspective on the whole thing will balance out,” she assured him. “Jack knew and understood how the whole thing happened.”
“Did he tell you?” he asked in surprise.
“No, Danny,” she assured him. “Jack would never betray a confidence.”
“I have always felt since the night my grandmother died that you knew more about us than we do ourselves,” he said ruefully.
“Well, I suppose if you are with families in childbirth and death, you come very close to their inner core,” she told him, “but the strange thing is that your grandmother made me feel that she knew more about the Phelans than we did ourselves. But remember one thing, Danny, that it was Jack’s dearest wish that you would restore your grandmother’s homeplace, because he felt that he owed that to my grandfather.”
“Thanks, Kate,” he said gratefully. “I might need that thought to keep me going, that and money.”
“Sometimes, Danny, solutions come from the most unexpected corners,” she encouraged him, though privately she wondered where on earth the money could come from to restore Furze Hill and to pay off Rory, “but for now why don’t you follow Nora and Shiner up the glen?”
All afternoon she moved between neighbours and old friends, discussing Jack and his sudden death until eventually she felt that she had talked herself to a standstill. She saw Mark and Nora cuddled up close together in the window seat of the parlour, and she slipped gratefully in beside them.
“How do you keep going, Aunty Kate?” Nora wanted to know.
“Auto pilot,” Kate assured her, “but now I need the sustenance of you two.”
“Are you bleeding inside?” Nora asked.
“That’s as good a way as any to describe it,” Kate told her.
“But how can you behave so normally then?” Nora demanded.
“Maybe because it helps her cope,” Mark interjected thoughtfully, his long sensitive face full of concern.
He was such a contrast to everyone else in Kilmeen, with his long hair and blonde beard and clothes that always looked, as Peter had once put it, as if he was wearing the kitchen curtains. But all the disarray covered an artistic mind that turned out pictures of startling originality. Now Rodney Jackson marketed them all over America. Until Rodney became involved they had more or less considered Mark locally as a bit of an oddity. But nothing converts the public mind like the ability to earn large amounts of money, and now Mark was viewed with awe in Kilmeen. But either way it had never bothered Mark, who had little interest in the human and viewed the natural world as a wonder for his canvas. That he was Martha’s brother was a puzzle that Kate had never been able to solve, because Martha was the most practical person you could imagine and Mark did not have a practical bone in his body. But Jack had an explanation.
“He’s a throwback,” he told Kate. When she had repeated questioningly, “a throwback?” he continued, “Every few generations a family can turn up ‘a throwback’ who somehow embodies the bloodline of someone long gone. The chances are that back along that family line there was a talent that might not necessarily have been developed, and then down the line it breaks out in a descendent and everyone is amazed. But sometimes the explanation is not lost in the mists of time, as is the case of Danny Conway, who embodies all the bloodline of his grandmother.”
She smiled at the memory of Jack’s words, and Nora demanded in surprise, “Aunty Kate, what are you smiling at?”
Kate gave them a detailed explanation. When she was finished, Mark chuckled in amusement, “So that explains me; I’m a throwback!”
“And you’re a lovely throwback, Uncle Mark,” Nora assured him, “and because there is a family connection between you and Rodney Jackson, it probably makes him very proud of his bloodline too.”
“Well, he believed in it anyway, that’s for sure,” Mark said.
“Did you hear from him lately?” Kate asked, curious to know if Mark knew anything more than she did.
“He was supposed to come for Easter as you know, but now he’ll be coming in a few weeks’ time, probably the end of the month,” Mark told her. “He has some big plan up his sleeve that he is quite excited about.”
“Like what?” Nora demanded.
“Well, for a hotel in Kilmeen,” Mark told them.
“Where?” Nora persisted.
“I think it’s the school, because he wants to take all those paintings down, and I’m to prepare new ones for the hotel,” Mark told them.
“And where is the school supposed to disappear to?” Nora demanded.
“I’ve no idea,” Mark told her.
“But, Uncle Mark, whose idea was it that we needed a hotel?” Nora wanted to know.
“Your mother’s, I think,” Mark said mildly.
“My God,” Nora gasped. “Peter was right.”
“Why?” Kate asked.
“Well, he said that it was Mom’s idea. That while she had no notion of marrying Rodney Jackson, she would still use him.”
“Dear, dear, but Peter has no false illusions about his mother,” Mark said quietly, and then added thoughtfully, “but then I suppose he inherited that trait from her.”
“Surely Rodney Jackson would not throw Uncle David out of his school?” Nora protested in dismay.
“I doubt it,” Mark said.
“But you’re not sure,” Nora persisted.
“Well, no, I suppose I’m not,” Mark admitted.
“Let’s change the subject,” Kate intervened. “Today is enough to handle without burdening ourselves with the future.”
“Aunty Kate, you sound just like Jack,” Nora said sadly.
Kate waited until all the neighbours were gone home and then walked up to Jack’s cottage. Toby was waiting at the gate and went ecstatic with delight to see her. She gathered him into her arms and hugged him.
“Darling Toby,” she asked him, burying her face in his bristly neck, “what are we going to do with you at all at all? We can’t take you away from here after all your years, and anyway you’d find your way back, so you’ll have to stay, but we can’t leave you here alone.”
The sight of the little dog looking at her with such absolute devotion brought a lump to her throat, and suddenly her tears were running down his coat.
“We all depended on Jack,” she told Toby as he furiously licked her face and then jumped out of her arms and ran to the door ahead of her. She dreaded opening the door into the silent cold cottage, but to her surprise the fire was lighting. She almost expected to see Jack sitting beside it.
God bless you, Sarah, she thought. You knew that I’d call.
She sat by the fire for a long time, thinking of all the times that Jack and herself had shared these evening hours, and gradually a quiet peace came to her. Toby slept contentedly at her feet. Then she became aware of a subtle difference in the sounds of the cottage. The clock over her head was not ticking, and she wondered if Sarah had stopped it, or did it need winding? She got up to wind it and put her hand down into the base of t
he old clock to find the key. Her fingers touched a roll of paper, and she brought it out with the key. She was holding a little bundle of letters tied with a faded blue ribbon. It was the last thing that she would have expected to find in Jack’s clock, and she slipped them back hurriedly, feeling guilty for having taken them out in the first place.
She walked around the cottage. The place without Jack filled her with pain, but still the sense of his past presence comforted her in another way. She opened the door of his bedroom and the smell of his pipe reached out to her. His brand of tobacco gave the room a sweet aromatic whiff. She went over to the window and looked out over his little haggard. All locked up for the night. Sarah had been at work here as well. How Jack loved this room, and when the lads had taken down the dividing wall last year, he was so pleased with his extra eastern-facing window to catch the morning sun. He loved the sky in the early morning and always said that it set the tone for his day. She drifted into his little parlour. He was so proud of this cosy corner where he lit the fire at Christmas. This was his treasure store for all his mother’s beautiful cloths. When she opened the tall press beside the fireplace, a lavender scent floated out to her. All the cloths were neatly folded with little bags of his garden lavender hanging off the edges of the shelves. How well he looked after them, she thought as she gently slipped her hand along the top of the folded rows. Her hand touched a small flat box, and she drew it out and opened it. It contained more of the same letters tied up with the same blue ribbon, and this time she recognised the handwriting. She put the box back carefully and left the cottage, closing the door quietly behind her.
House of Memories Page 15
