Both Jonah and Carmel looked at Eddie.
‘The big bottle at the door. Go and get it, Carmel.’
Carmel rose and Jonah did not stop her.
In the kitchen she saw the open doorway. She walked towards it. No one knew the ground here as well as Carmel. She went out into the night and had begun running when the first shot rang out. It stopped her in her tracks. The second brought her running back to the house.
Eddie lay in a heavy-breathing pile of blood and bared bone. He moaned and Jonah kicked him over on to his back.
‘I had to do it. You let her run off.’
Jonah did not hear the sound of the returning Carmel, her feet too light for that. She reached for something to bring it to an end and she found the poker. She brought it down on his head and Jonah brought his hands up with a great roar. He kicked at her wildly.
His foot found the soft hollow of her belly and it took the wind out of her, she rolled on to her back, gasping. Her long hair fell into the open fire. The burning began. Eddie wrenched himself around and began to crawl towards her. Carmel’s long hair was all vibrant red for one glorious moment. She brought out a lump of firing with her bare hands and ran at Jonah.
He brought his hand up to shield his face. The burning woman put her coal into his open palm. He reached for the blade.
And it was the blade with the fire reflected on it that went into Carmel’s belly and it brought fire with it. The air was filled with smoke. Carmel fell to her knees and reached for the dying man who had been her only love.
They held each other and they lay there, under Jonah’s feet, until the moans stilled and the bodies with them.
Jonah sat, trembling, his hand joined the roar-chorus in his head and it throbbed and ached and he went into the back room where the old woman was laid out and took the sheet covering her face and left her death open to the air.
‘It was not meant to go this way,’ he reasoned with the still form. ‘No one tells the truth. No one but me. I have to make sure that I tell Sive the truth when she comes. I have to make sure she knows what must happen and what must not happen. This has all gone wrong because no one will do as they are told. I will tell her that.’
He felt the ice-blade against his neck. The ghost of Noreen Moriarty had returned from taking Myrna off to where she was going. The ghost of Noreen Moriarty bared her teeth at Jonah Cave and followed him when he ran from Myrna to the next room.
Jonah sat at the table with the ice-blade against his neck. I did not come home for another hour. It was already night again. He could not forgive now. It had all gone on too long.
* * *
I cried out and fell on my mother and my mother’s love, Eddie. I wailed and Jonah came to me and pulled me off them and said, with his hands around my waist, my neck, with his lips against my ear, ‘This is all because of you, because of you. It is up to you to put this right.’
39 ∼ All Redemption Gone
‘WE WILL GO TO the room, the furthest room,’ Jonah said. ‘We have a lot to talk about. We can to go to the furthest room from this one where we can talk.’
I would not leave them. I clung to them screeching and he pulled me, by the hair, to the room, and he held the blade against my throat. I prayed for Myrna to return.
‘Why leave,’ I whispered as I moved and bent and turned as I had learned in the dark rooms of before. ‘Why leave us now?’
He told me to lie down on the bed.
I saw nothing, felt nothing. I reached out with the eyes I had through nothing and found Noreen Moriarty waiting at the end of it. In her sunflower hat. She had a boy with her. A young boy with tanned skin and fair hair and his hand in hers. Noreen smiled at me and let go of the boy’s hand and pushed him towards me. He came to me and he put his lips to my forehead and the wrenching, gasping thing above me that twisted itself into me and was cold and heaving was no more. The young boy with fair hair took me off by the hand and we walked into the greenest of places and lay down and slept.
And while the fair-haired boy had taken me off, Jonah had been left with the spirits of his own calling which tore at him and filled him with the savage knowing that he was a creature lost to life as he wished to live it.
And that is when he lost his mind entirely. All of him went over to the place he wished only to leave behind. All redemption gone. Still he would not listen. Still he thought to make me into what he wished me to be.
He would not give up trying while he had breath in him, he would not give me up while I had breath.
Out of this night, out of the darkness, comes Jonah Cave. He has lived all his life in it. Now he visits it upon me.
Jonah Cave. You use your blade again.
And you tell me that it is for my own good. For a woman who would let a man such as your father lay a hand on her.
You torture that which you love. And all the while my spirit watches you from the far corner of the room. It stays and it watches, with Noreen who has come to comfort me. She holds me and brings to me the realization that I have the power to bring death to you.
All my spirit has to do is wish you dead and the death wish would be yours.
The truth was put in front of you then, Jonah Cave, as it is now.
I open your eyes to what I am, not what you had believed you had created with your knife and your talk. I show you the torn-apart breast and heart. I leave you with the stillness. In it you have no place to hide.
You whimper and gather the shorn hair. In the hair you had loved you wanted to find life. But shorn from me it cannot live but takes on a lifeless, drab and dull form. Its shining black now faded – no longer my kind and alive night, but your dead and dull one.
I show you that your night will not end. I show you that your creation is death. I show you that the hair and the ring binders you had gathered were mementoes of people who did not love you. All, now, are beyond your persecution, except him that you had almost persecuted to death and beyond.
You had thought to wait for him, to take him with you. But you realize, no, it would be better for your father to arrive and to see that the son has taken that which he most desired.
* * *
The thought made Jonah sigh. He took the gun and lifted my limp hand into his. And he pulled the trigger.
It took some minutes for him to die and in those moments he hoped that his mother would come for him. But she did not. His spirit went as his life had gone, alone. On ahead of him he saw Carmel and Eddie walk together with the tall old woman, three shadows into the new light.
But his own limbs felt like lead and he could not join them.
He was left with the room and what was in it. A woman with the badness cut out of her. A man shares that badness and sacrifices his own living to have his blood run with hers. Their shared blood a sign to all that they shared life.
A suicide pact some would say. Jonah smiled at that and shivered, a long shudder went through him, and the ghost of a word came to his lips.
He was gone. His last word left unuttered.
My soul was lost. My emptiness all around and no way of leaving it. I called out and no sound came.
* * *
Carmel and Eddie’s moments of going. I only see them now, the ones gathered tell me what I do not know of their own story. It is a comfort to me, to see Carmel and Eddie standing above what they once were and holding on to each other and who they are now.
This is how they left us. They went from what they no longer needed. They left all that had gone wrong between them and took the pure drop of their love in a look they shared over their stilled bodies. Their eyes were the same as the moment when a living breath was in them.
The years did not fall away from them, they were not returned to youth and the lines on each of them were the map of their loving. It was not a paradise that opened for them, but the unlocked door to Solas.
* * *
‘I cannot walk through it,’ Carmel shook her head. ‘I must wait and watch for Sive. He will do harm to h
er.’
‘None that cannot be undone,’ Noreen’s voice between them, and her shadow cast itself clear on them, complete with hat. ‘Life has its work to do with her, away with you.’ Then the shadow walked out the door before them and off among the trees at the bottom of the field.
‘We leave now or we stay in a place where we will intrude, Carmel,’ Eddie took her hand.
They went through the open doorway and down the field into woods that had held all their loving. They walked hand in hand through the woods of goodbye to the far off place and they passed a just-roused Thomas who would soon set out from having slept in the woods. It was not for them to stop, Eddie said. But Carmel could not be prevented.
‘Hurry on, Thomas,’ she gave a whisper that came to him in the form of a breeze that gave more of a chill to him on an already cold almost-morning.
Noreen walked ahead of Carmel and Eddie not only because she knew the way, but because these were moments they must have to themselves. They would not walk this wood again – and it had been all and enough for them while living. The trees wept leaf tears and the woodland creatures hung their heads to their breasts in sorrow at such a going, for Carmel was their own kind and Eddie the one she loved.
They came to a place where I cannot follow even with my story. Carmel asked where Myrna was and Noreen kissed them both on their foreheads and they felt the cool surprise of it. The dead feel as the living do, for they live too, but in another place.
‘Myrna has gone on ahead,’ Noreen smiled and they saw the shape of her through the shadow. ‘Time for us to follow.’
40 ∼ Thomas Comes
THOMAS REACHED the end of the brambled laneway as light was breaking. No sign of Jonah’s car. He breathed a sigh of relief. If Thomas had known that being left homeless and penniless and old and broken could have brought this much happiness he would have become so a long time ago.
‘We will wander together,’ he breathed. ‘We will know the whole world.’
He did not linger in the yard of the house, before the smouldering pile of his belongings. The dogs did not even bark, did not emerge from their hidden places to challenge him. He went in through the open door to the kitchen and stooped over the bodies of Eddie and Carmel and on into the back room where Myrna’s uncovered body lay.
Then up the stairs, two at a time, and into all the rooms until he found the one that held what remained of me.
And he saw, first, the end of Jonah had come and it was a bloody one. He moved towards the body and it was only then that he saw what remained of me – obscured by Jonah.
Thomas let out a great cry, which shook all the world. He gathered my opened skin and my near lifeless bones into him.
He put his lips to the place where the hair had once been and then grasped the hands that had held him and he cried out that I had not deserved this. I had only loved. Why could it not have been him to suffer and die?
He did not glance again at the body of his son. But talked to him.
‘It is a terrible thing,’ Thomas wept. ‘It is a terrible thing we have done, Jonah, you and I, to this young girl and her family. We have taken them with us, Jonah. May God forgive us.’
And he cried and in crying he gathered what he could not recognize to be me. He took shorn hair and pressed it against my head to make me whole and his, and it was impossible.
Then he felt the faint breath and he did not know whether to leave me to get help or spend the last moments with me. He fought going or staying and did not feel a hefty woman in a sunflower hat reach under his arms and pull him away from me and to his feet. Before he left he covered me with a blanket. He could not bear for me to be cold and dying.
He went to the town and his long stride took him to the door of the doctor. The doctor, sitting over his breakfast, was given no time to finish. His wife had tried to keep the tall man who might be death at the door but he had gone through the house until he found who he needed to find.
‘Get your bag,’ said Thomas Cave. ‘And you,’ he spoke to the wife, ‘call an ambulance and the police. Send them to the place where Sive and Carmel Moriarty and Eddie the window cleaner live.’
‘Where is that?’ The wife wanted to know, though she knew it well.
‘The Hoar Rock.’ The doctor grabbed his coat and stood.
* * *
They took me by ambulance to a white room and I lived there by a thread for a long time. And I longed for death.
Thomas sat by me. I was always cold and I did not wake or see Thomas.
Then one day I opened my eyes because I felt warmth rise through me from my feet upwards.
I found the white-haired man rubbing life into them.
‘I brought socks,’ he said to me. ‘To keep out the cold.’
In that moment life won back Sive Moriarty.
* * *
There were long and terrible days. There were police and newspapers and all manner of inquisitions. They took what they needed to take from my grieving heart to know that Jonah was the one who had killed and torn asunder.
Many of them said, ‘Sorry for your trouble.’
They let me home from the hospital. I travelled in a car with Thomas to Solas and I screeched on seeing it. But they did not hear.
I was beyond kindness and care. I roamed long nights when I would not stay in Solas for all that had happened here. Thomas walked after me and I wept for my departed ones and for the alone future I faced with this stranger of a man who I had given up all for.
It went on for many weeks and it went for many days and nights and it would have gone on forever if the cold letter had not come to say the bodies were now free to be buried. The examinations of them were complete and satisfactory.
I did not feel complete or satisfactory. I wished for Myrna and Carmel and Eddie to live and for Thomas and me to die.
He bowed his head each time I said so, each time I would not eat what he made to eat or drink, each time he said a word I told him he did not deserve to speak. He bowed his head and he took the anger as he took the tears and the night walks and the raving and the emptying of all I had to make way for all that was to come.
Then the cold letter came to say that the bodies were now free to be buried.
And we had to bury them.
I could not bear to.
But then they said they would put them in cold, anonymous graves if we did not claim them. Thomas said he would make the arrangements. His money was returned to him on Jonah’s death.
I left it to him to see to it.
At night I slept alone, as far away from Thomas as I could be. Though my body cried out for comfort. He slept in the room Myrna had once had, with the dogs, who had taken to being not far behind him.
Thomas was not a housekeeper, the place was lost to neglect. I would have been the same if Thomas had not finally dragged me to the bathroom and forced me to pour water on my skin. And then I could not be prevented from going to that bathroom and spending many hours a day in it. Scrubbing what could not be seen with the slow deliberate rhythm that made my skin cry out and bleed.
Thomas had to force food into me then. And what he forced was brought up in angry spurts and he would clean it and begin again.
Then, one night, when all that was left of me was skin and bone and eyes, the door opened and the fair-haired child of before came and he put his hand in mine. I closed my eyes.
The sleep that came to take me was the kindest I have ever known.
* * *
When I woke a day was already half lived.
I rose and came down the stairs to find Thomas sitting at the table. He was thin and drawn. His face had set hard and hopeless again. I was a wild-eyed skeleton, my hair knotted and covering my half nakedness like a dark cloud.
‘They will be buried here,’ I said. ‘They can be buried in the part of the wood that is ours. They were happiest in the woods.’
‘Well,’ Thomas sighed. ‘What of consecrated ground?’
‘There is no ground
better than this.’
‘Will you have something to eat?’ Thomas asked.
‘Something,’ I said.
We ate in silence and each plateful that was put in front of me I cleared until I had eaten my way back into the living and breathing world. When I had finished I looked at Thomas.
‘There is a lot to be done.’
He shook his head.
‘No. I have done most of it. The bodies will be brought straight to the church. There will be a Mass and then they will be brought here. I will speak to the curate. He is a good man. It can all happen tomorrow if you wish, we are waiting for you to say when.’
He did not tell me that he had imagined this would never happen and that he had planned to bury the three without me. He did not tell me the humiliation he had suffered in walking into the town and being greeted only with silence and open stares.
The funeral home had charged him double what they would anyone else. The town had talked of nothing else but this house where all the murders had happened and the funeral home had to think of its good name and future custom.
Two men were hired to dig the plot. It cost a lot of money, Thomas had been advised by the men. He paid what was asked because he could not dig it himself.
After eating we walked down on to the beach so that I might gather what I needed.
He helped me with the driftwood. We bound them together into crosses of a fashion. He helped me to clear the house and to open all its windows so that the sadness could be taken by the air waiting to come in and begin the new life.
All this work we did in one day without a word between us. I did not ask him for anything, he was there with it before I had to ask.
That night I went to the room in which he slept, in which Myrna had slept. That night I slept in his arms. He held me and kept watch.
* * *
It was a fine day, the day that those three lives came to their final end. It was full of the promise of spring and the flowers that we put on the fresh earth were the first daffodils although they were not grown on our land. Thomas had bought them. They looked false to me, they looked severed and not in keeping with the wildness of the spot. But Thomas had done enough and I had not spoken to him to indicate otherwise.
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