The Lost Souls' Reunion

by Suzanne Power

  Hoar Rock was once home to a well-made farmer who could afford the view of the harbour at the far end of the grey crescent of rocky shoreline. The house was built at a time when many dwellings huddled away from the elements. Hoar Rock courted them and its first prosperous owners had the means to run fires all year. In the leaner times, when the good land had been sold, Joseph Moriarty was left to farm the rocky fields more sand than earth. The fires were lit only for a few hours on the coldest days and the Hoar Rock house contained a chill that was present even at the height of summer.

  This was the house we had come to, and the house, glad to be occupied by the living, whose voices hindered the tormented calls of the dead, asked for the sun to shine on us for the first morning. So when we looked out of our windows we saw the trawlers fishing a glassy sea, a smoothed and polished sea, a rare jewel in the depths of winter. We saw the colourful fronts of the harbour buildings and heard the seagull cries and seal barks carried to us along the shoreline from the harbour three miles away, so still was the air.

  ‘A day for shirtsleeves,’ Myrna said, and I could answer the cheer with a smile because the sharp nature of the fresh air had brought life to my city-dulled lungs. We pulled chairs outside and had our mugs of tea watching the new world.

  Afterwards I went to the barn at the side of the house to find what was left in the way of furniture. What was left was home to families of mice who did not take kindly to being disturbed. Two stray cats came from nowhere, like striped shadows. They pounced on the newly exposed nests and carried away the hairless babies. I tried to stop them, but they moved quicker than I will ever learn to. Behind the barn were the remains of Noreen’s chicken run and an overgrown track led to a patch of garden, which Noreen had tried to tend to bring some beauty to Hoar Rock on its ugliest days. A few resilient wallflowers had taken over whatever else had been cultivated but now, in winter, these had died back leaving withered evidence of their intentions.

  How could anything have grown here?

  The sun faded in the mid-morning and I went inside with Myrna. When I saw what had to be done, it was all I could do not to go back to where we had come from. Spots of rain hit the corrugated roof, painted red. The spots told me that when rain fell you would hear little else in the house.

  Carmel was nowhere to be found. I thought to look for her, then realized this was her place. She would find me.

  There were eyes waiting in the town. The bank was happy to take my English money as most people in the town were going in the direction from which I had come. When I left the bank I had a handful of strange notes between nothing and us.

  In the shop the woman put my change on the counter – afraid to touch my skin. On the corner a group of boys-near-men was listening to a transistor, their fingers curled around the last drags of a cigarette or stuffed in their pockets with small change that could take them nowhere.

  ‘Phil Lynott’s sister, lads, it is!’ one said, and the others shouldered and cawked, eyes on me then, in the manner I knew men to look.

  Later, women with shopping bags full of idle speculation would hear from each other, at Mass, that Carmel Moriarty had come home, with an old woman and a dark woman. We were to remain outside.

  * * *

  In the soft woodland of before morning a woman walked a path familiar. Her tender feet pinched by branches, her walk not as sure as it had once been.

  In the soft woodland of morning a middle-aged man took the stroll that was part of his bachelor’s ritual, part of a day that was the same as any other. He had places of pilgrimage.

  It was not surprising to him to find the object of prayers under a dark tree, her back to him, hunched over, nursing her ribbon-cut feet. Her wild hair carpeting her back, not vibrant, as it had once been, duller with strands of silver. But the same hair and form.

  He was convinced he imagined her. His imaginings were more real now than the day in which he lived, worked, ate and slept.

  He sat with her and she did not move, so he knew he had gone a little more mad and sorrowful to have aged her so, even in his fantasies. But she was real – when she turned her face towards him she had the lines and marks of the years that had come between them. Her eyes no longer glistening, her eyes faded. A face familiar, yet strange and weathered as his own was.

  He put his arms around her and his Carmel had grown cold, as if she had risen from the bottom of a grave or a sea and he was sure that it must have been one or the other, and he was all at once grateful and afraid.

  He was fearful for the story behind the lines and marks and fading, what must it tell and would he be made to hear it?

  Her look said he would not. She had no words to put on the time apart.

  The weight of years lifted and settled between them as a permanent loss, which nothing could be done about now. She knew him still, and he knew her.

  The heat in her rose, but not as it had as a young girl, only enough for him to know she was living. In the new place which was the same as the old but had her in it again.

  This time she would not be lost to him.

  * * *

  Myrna grappled with the strangeness of the land she viewed through the open window and the dreams that had made it familiar to her. She knew the curve of the beach, the point where it changed from rock to sand. She knew the house, the long laneway, and the trees that surrounded it. All of these Noreen had shown her.

  She knew the marks of the land held history in them. The call of the sea close by spoke reminders of that history.

  Myrna would have walked to the sea on this first morning but her bones spoke loudly. She had lived a great many years and had enjoyed her own company and would be sorry to lose it. The goodbyes to herself had begun.

  The thought of being light again was pleasant to her. She had been heavy a long while. The green of the place they had come to was a place like that out of her childhood and startled her with familiarity, so long had she lived in the grey city.

  She let out a laugh, surprising herself at how deep it went. She felt a shiver down her long spine bone of separate and connected lives and she stepped out of the dark house. The sunlight laughed with her and she found a spot to bask in it. Time to rest before the time to work.

  She thought of her own life and the rich tragedy and quiet happiness of it.

  She thought of the men she had lain with and the women who had wanted to learn her secret way of loving. No secret did she have but knowledge found in a world that wanted to give it. Now she would give what she knew to Sive and let Sive do with it what she would. Myrna hoped she would grow roots and grow solid. Myrna herself had chosen shadows. Soho had suited her – a place where women come and go. In Soho no one asked you to become real.

  There had been a time when she had been as Sive had been – a child alone, a stranger to all in the world. Life had stepped out of the shadows and taken her by the hand. She had grasped that hand and lived to the full, until she realized she had become a prisoner of the freedom she had always courted. The price paid for chains refused.

  Once she had been held – not by the arms of man or woman, but by what grew inside her and made her heavy with the need to rest. The child had been born and taken away at a time when dead children were commonplace. Myrna took to wandering on the day the baby had been put in the ground.

  In all her years and what they had contained she had only one regret – that she had not mothered. Now life had given her that with the girl-woman Sive and the future Myrna must help her secure before life pulled her down and tied her. Myrna knew Sive’s heart was not a wandering one – it was one that needed refuge.

  Myrna hoped she was not too tired to give what she had. She longed to release her last breath – but it had to be held. It had to be held.

  The ghost of Noreen Moriarty, wearing a sunflower hat and worn smile, watched Myrna from the kitchen window. Myrna looked over her shoulder and shaded her eyes. She waved at Noreen who raised a hand. They both turned back to look at the sea.

>   14 ∼ The Card of Beginnings, of Dreams

  IT WAS A QUIET EVENING and it was many days since we had arrived. The beginning was wearing on and it did not offer much in the way of hope for a future where we could pay our way. I had not seen my mother except in the mornings when she left wild-eyed and in the hour before dawn, when she came home wild-eyed.

  Myrna caught my anxious eyes and said, ‘Your mother has other preoccupations now. She is in her own place. Perhaps you need preoccupations.’

  ‘What we’re going to do for money gives me enough to think about. Or do you have an answer for that, too?’ I answered her.

  ‘None, except to say I am aware you must regard me as an extra burden. I will not be that to you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘If I tell you we will be looked after you will think I am leaving you to find the answer.’

  ‘No, but I’m the only one fit enough to work.’

  Her laugh was wry and filled with distant kindness.

  ‘Sive, you have feet of stone you are that rooted to practicalities. How will we lift your eyes above them?’

  ‘It is easy for you to say.’

  ‘It is far from easy. None of us knows what will happen from one moment to the next.’

  ‘How will we eat next week? There’s no work here,’ I asked. ‘Unless I do what I did before.’

  ‘There will be no need for that kind of work here. Your grandmother will not allow it.’

  ‘My grandmother is a ghost. She can’t work; neither can you and neither can my mother. That leaves me.’

  Myrna twisted her back to me and poked the fire.

  ‘We will all find a way soon enough. We are only at the beginning, Sive, learn patience.’

  From my silent time I was still the holder of few words, so I had none to answer her and went outside.

  * * *

  I sat on the window sill, watching the evening fall softly on the waves, the wing-beat of the heron flying over them in time with their meeting with the shoreline. All the world seemed to have its rhythm but me. The weight of choices made by others long before I was born seemed to gather on my shoulders.

  Myrna came and stood beside me. With my mind’s voice I asked her: ‘Why does life want me to continue?’

  I could not speak it out then, to speak would have been to show too much of what was inside me.

  ‘You have a hard tone, Sive, that does not live in your heart. Life asks a lot of you. Give gladly or not at all,’ she answered as if I had spoken aloud.

  I felt the deep pull towards her and put my head on her shoulder. She combed her fingers through my hair, tracing the shape of my hairline.

  ‘The way your hair meets your skin, there is ending of smoothness and beginning of wildness!’ I heard the soft smile in her voice and body. ‘Will you remember in this, I will not see you harmed?’

  I said I would. Then she was gone from talk a while and I felt the uncertain creep up by degrees. I turned to face Myrna and watched her as I would a stranger.

  Her body-flesh hung like straight curtains on wide shoulders and slim hips. Its paleness all the more evident with the black jet of her eyes looking out of it. The silver markings of her hair, the blue-veined fineness, gave her the look of a long-beautiful one who has not mourned the passing of youth and the arrival of soft old age. There was nothing soft in Myrna’s form – there was a strength and purpose that ran through her like all the tomorrows were still hers. She held her head high and was proud of her body and the story it told and more proud still of the story it did not tell, but which she held inside her.

  ‘Mine is a body on its way back to the earth and into the sky that clings to it. They claim a little more each day and I claim them,’ her old bones and skin and hair sang.

  Myrna smiled and her eyes touched me, then she put her hands where her eyes had been. The feel of her skin, the skin of a long life, so transparent I could see through it into her very bones. But she wanted me to disappear into my own, my own skin which opened and let me into its quivering heat and insistence.

  ‘I had your fears,’ she spoke soft enough for the dead to hear. ‘I wandered, eating nothing, drinking nothing. I was afraid to go into the world that was calling me, so I stayed hidden and grew more afraid until the dark-eyed woman came to me in a dream and said, “Look in the mirror,” and I did, and I saw that my eyes were now her eyes, blacker than night. She said to me then, “Leave behind all you are, take nothing but your dreams.” And that is what I did, Sive, the very next day. In dreams you came to me. Your first cry drove straight into my heart and bound me to you. I waited long and patiently for the next cry. It has not come yet.’

  It came then. I cried all the waves I had watched and more, as I cried I had the memory of tears unshed for fear of drowning under them. My want was under them all – the want of a warm life, with love and good fortune in it.

  ‘You do not smile at all, Sive,’ Myrna said. ‘You have forgotten that we met in dreams before we met in person. Even when times are at their most dark and ravaged you have the freedom of dreams. The breath of them fell on you before my eyes did. Let your mother to her wildness and you to yours.’

  I understood this even as she spoke it, but she went on.

  ‘Dreams will always be enough, even when they are all we have.’

  From her deep pocket she pulled her cards, her companions, and drew one. A blank card, a white space, nothing more.

  ‘The most important card of all, of dreams. It represents beginning. The space for you to fill as you wish. Dreams will bring warmth when there is none to be had. Do not try to live without them. Do not dismiss them as foolish – they are as real as the breath you take. Tonight let your dreams give you the courage to keep going and the patience to wait for what will surely come,’ Myrna said, leaving me to the last light and the view of the sea.

  * * *

  With the new dawn, my courage and waking sense returned and I saw us lying in the dusty remains of other lives that had ended.

  So I rose and I began to scrub and clear the traces of the despair that clung to the walls. I opened windows and let in the sunshine that Noreen had once let in.

  Fresh times had come. Though I had no reason to think that I could feel it. I sang as I worked and Myrna crept into the kitchen so that I found her sitting at the table listening to me without being aware of her arrival.

  ‘You always arrive without noise,’ I smiled.

  ‘I leave the same way,’ she replied. ‘Your grandmother is delighted with what you are doing about the place.’

  ‘Tell her to send work then,’ I said, not ready to hear of those dead and gone. ‘And none of us will have anything to worry about.’

  But even as I said it I was doing more, and happier about it.

  ‘Later I will go down to the beach,’ I threatened.

  I was losing my fear of straying far from the house, in much the same way as my mother could not be kept in it.

  I placed the crib in a waiting place, under the stairs.

  * * *

  Carmel came up the laneway with a small, dark man wearing a shy expression and clothes that had no female hand in choosing them. I put down my scrubbing brush and watched. I thought she might have gone back to the old ways. Myrna rested a hand on my shoulder.

  The pair of them were joined together by hands that would not be separated until they came into the house. Their eyes would look for each other during the small talk of introduction and tea-making.

  ‘Where is it?’ Carmel asked.

  ‘Below the stairs,’ Myrna answered. ‘Sive put it there, for safe keeping.’

  Carmel took Eddie by the hand and showed him. He did not look at it or me. He had thought to pretend the crib was not something he had made, but it had been one of the first things Carmel had told him about, told him she had admired him making it.

  He shook his head, there was a lot here to get used to.

  ‘There’s not much left in the way of fur
niture,’ Eddie remarked quietly. ‘I have a few bits of things my mother left me after she died and no use for them. Could I drop them up to get you started?’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Carmel said.

  ‘We’ll have them,’ I said.

  Eddie smiled.

  ‘That’s settled so.’

  ‘Would you know where I could find work?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not much in the way of work. I’m cleaning windows on half and full empty shops these days. Only people who have money and work would be the religious. The religious have their favourites though, them that have their tongues stuck to the altar rails when they’re not licking the arses off them.’ He blushed red then. ‘Sorry, the only talk I get these days is bar talk.’

  Eddie saw our strangeness and knew we would need help in this tight town. He saw my skin. The town had crippled his own life’s possibilities. He would do what he could to make sure it would not do the same to us.

  So work in the town was out of the question for the dark girl of Carmel’s.

  In the hours he had spent with Carmel he had reached once for her deepest heart and she had curled up and away from him.

  ‘You can’t go there any more,’ she told him.

  All she had given before was still in her eyes. It would be a question of loving through the help he had denied her before. St Manis’s came to him.

  St Manis Home was where the old went to live out their last, unaccompanied days. He cleaned its windows and he saw too much of what went on inside to wish to live to a great age. But it was a place where he knew I would find work. The nuns would favour a dark girl for work in order to show her the straight and narrow.

  So it was that I found myself tramping the road of Pass If You Can, which wound into the Black Hills behind our house. I found myself before a grey building with an air of silence, which said life stayed away.

  Sister Mauritius was expecting me.

  15 ∼ A Lost Place at the Edge of the World