by Paul Watkins
“You don’t need to sell the house. Not to get your ticket.” His hand found its way to the familiar perch of my shoulder. “I’ve got you a place on a boat leaving from Boston. It’s heading to Galway with a load of farm equipment.”
“When?” Suddenly I saw myself walking down a gangplank into Ireland. The picture was so clear and sudden that for a moment Jamestown seemed to disappear out from underneath me.
“Three days. The captain is an old parishioner of mine. It won’t be comfortable. It’s only a cargo ship.”
“That doesn’t matter. Thank you.”
“I daresay you’re already packed.”
It seemed to me sometimes as if my skull was like rice paper to Willoughby, with thoughts lit up like candle flames behind it. “What’s in the suitcase?”
“The ashes.”
I slammed the case down on the ground. The flesh cringed on my arms.
Willoughby bent slowly down and picked up the case again. “I took care of the cremation.”
We reached the road and started heading toward my house. I kept looking straight ahead, not wanting to catch sight of the case in Willoughby’s hand. I could not see a man reduced to this.
“Have you had many people stopping by?” His overcoat rustled as he walked. Sea spray still clung in beads to the cloth.
“Two men came by last night. They were talking to my dad the night of the fire. I’d never seen them before that. They were Irish. Their names were Duffy and Pratt.”
“That doesn’t sound familiar.”
“My father was angry with them about something. They wanted money but he wouldn’t give them any. He said they were mad showing their faces around here. And he said if they wanted money, they should come to you, but they didn’t want to do that. I guess they drew the line at taking money from a priest.”
Willoughby walked on a few paces and then suddenly stopped.
A car drove past us, clunking through its gears. Leaves flickered in the breeze. All around us, the grass was thick and heavy in the first green blaze of summer.
“Did you say this man was named Pratt? With a nose like a bird? About as tall as me?”
“That’s him.”
Willoughby seemed to be watching me, but then I saw that he was staring out across the bay. I even turned to see what had caught his eye, but there was only the white-capped water and Monahan’s ferry, heading back to the mainland.
Then Willoughby changed direction. He began walking back toward town. “Come with me,” he called over his shoulder.
He turned down a side road before we reached town. We walked down a dirt lane crowded at the edges with purple-flowered chicory and black-eyed Susans with petals so bright yellow-orange that they seemed to fizz in my eyes.
Willoughby led me to the cemetery, stepping fast beside the thunder-colored tongues of old graves, past my mother’s, where I thought he was going to stop. He kept going until he reached the far wall, where poison ivy had already begun to creep its oily leaves across the stones.
The suitcase thumped down in the grass and he swept back the tall weeds that had grown around a stone.
The stone said: JOHN THOMAS PRATT. BORN ARAN IRELAND 1878. DIED JAMESTOWN JANUARY 7th 1904.
Then he cleared away another stone. MICHAEL DUFFY. BORN CONNEMARA IRELAND 1881. DIED JAMESTOWN JANUARY 7th 1904.
Willoughby pulled up the weeds and threw them over the wall. “They must think that no one would remember after all this time. They didn’t even bother to give you false names.” He swung around and faced me. “You see, these aren’t their graves. These are only memorial stones. Which your father and I paid for, I should add.”
“So why did they need memorials? How could you think they were dead?”
“Do you remember when the bay froze over in the winter of 1904?”
“Yes.” I remembered walking on the beach with my mother. Waves were frozen into green humps on the sand. I couldn’t touch the brass buttons of my coat because my mother said my fingers might freeze to them. Steam rose off the ice, climbing so thickly that I couldn’t see the mainland.
“Duffy and Pratt had just come here from Ireland. God knows, they were in some kind of trouble because even the Ancient Order of Hibernians up in Boston wouldn’t help them and they helped almost any Irishman who’d been in trouble back in the old country. I don’t know what these boys had done. They shacked up with your dad for a few days. He must have known them in Ireland, but he wouldn’t say and warned me not to ask questions. Well, when the bay froze, your father and these two men decided to run across for a lark. I was there when they started their crossing. It was fine for a bit. The ice was as solid as paving stones. Then I started hearing cracks when they put down their feet. The ice was splitting. The sound was almost like gunfire. I lost sight of them in the mist, but I was calling at them to turn back. Then after a bit, I saw a shape running toward me and it was your father. He said that Pratt and Duffy had gone ahead and were still trying to cross. And that was it. Nobody ever heard from them again. Nobody saw them reach the mainland. We waited for their bodies to wash ashore in the spring, but they never did. We all assumed that they’d been carried out to sea when the ice melted. So there was nothing to bury. And nothing to assume except that they had died. That’s why we put up the stones.”
Moss had filled in their names. Willoughby bent down and carved it out with his thumb. “Your father must have known. He never said a word about it to me.” Then he stood, knees cracking. The blood had run into his face. He tried to smile, as if to show it didn’t matter any more.
“I wonder why they needed to disappear.” I started walking back toward the road. Bees belly-flopped into the chicory flowers, and rolled around in the pollen.
“They needed to make a new start, same as your father.”
“Well, then why did they come back?”
“They need another favor. And who do men who are supposed to be dead go to when they need some help? To the only person who knows they’re still alive. There’s a lot going on now in Ireland. I’m sure that many favors are being asked.” He raised a finger and held it out to me in warning. “It’s a war, Benjamin.”
“I read the papers.”
“Yes, but do you understand? There’s Catholic gunmen fighting in the streets with English soldiers and some of the Protestant Irish who want the English to stay. I think of that, and I ask myself why I’m helping you go to this country.”
“You want to know as badly as I do what he was hiding. That’s why.”
Willoughby stayed quiet for a while. Then he breathed in deep and said, “Perhaps.” The heels of his heavy black shoes dug into the road.
* * *
The suitcase contained a cylinder. Its nickel sides had a soft yellow-silver shine, smudged by fingerprints. The ashes were inside.
I set it on the table. The cylinder wasn’t large, but its weight was like lead.
A man reduced to this, I thought again. I couldn’t see it. No strength in me could cram the memory of my barrel-chested father into a space so small.
Maybe in time, I thought. But for now the smooth gleam of the cylinder was so far from the dullness of ashes and even farther from the solidity of my father’s body, that I could only think of it as a strange piece of furniture.
* * *
“Mr. Sheridan? Hellooo! This is Arnold from the bank.”
I had forgotten about the bank. Instead I had become lost in the muddle of packing. I was only bringing one suitcase, but couldn’t figure out what things to take. I’d spent the last hour sitting on the end of the bed, my hands tucked into different pairs of shoes, inspecting each one as if I’d never seen it before and wondering which would be best for the trip.
I could hear Arnold thumbing through some papers as he talked to me over the phone. “I’m just calling to say you should be here a clear half hour before the bank opens tomorrow. It’s your big day.”
Arnold had a gut. It was so much like a pregnant woman’s belly t
hat in the middle of the interview, I had thought about reaching across and patting it. He had a salesman’s voice. New customers at the bank were always sent to Arnold. I heard that he was important to the bank because he could drink anyone under the table and still make sense. He spent most of his days taking important clients out to lunch and drinking them under the table, but not before he made them buy more bonds.
The trouble with Arnold’s salesman’s voice was that it never stopped being a salesman’s voice. I knew that already, and I had only met him twice. I wondered how his wife could stand it. Living with Arnold, I imagined, was like living in a nonstop auction house.
“Hello, Arnold.”
“Hellooo!”
“I can’t come to work for the bank for another month. Maybe longer.” I spent a few minutes telling him why. I leaned against the rubbed patch on the wall and left out as many details as I could.
He clicked his tongue whenever I paused for breath.
It wasn’t going well. I told him I knew it meant he might have to reconsider giving me the job. I said I understood. But it couldn’t be helped, I told him.
Arnold clicked at me like a slow-running clock and then said he’d have to call me back.
I’d lost the job. No doubt about that. It surprised me how little I cared.
The house seemed strangely quiet after I’d hung up the telephone. I had been hoping he might become angry. Tell me I was fired even before I had started. Then I went back upstairs and kept packing.
I was not afraid of the war in Ireland. I didn’t really believe that it was a war, not like the headlines of 1916—Verdun, Jutland, Ypres—burying the Irish rising of that year under barrage after barrage. It barely seemed important, when the whole of Europe was being plowed underground, with twenty thousand casualties in one July day on the Somme. The only thing I could clearly recall about the Irish rebellion was my father reading an article at breakfast, then rolling up the paper and slamming it down on the table. “They’re shooting the poor bastards!” he yelled.
Instead of fearing the war, I was afraid that I would travel all the way across the Atlantic and find that no one could tell me what I wanted to know. I had no plan for what to do if that happened. I didn’t even have a plan for what to do if they did tell me. All I had now was the impatience to be gone. It blanketed all other thoughts.
* * *
Hettie stood on the doorstep. She had a ledge of breast. In her outstretched arms she held a pie with steam still rising from the crust.
“Good morning, Hett.” I remembered when she used to be skinny. The bones of her ribs stuck out. Then she had started to grow, skin piling on skin, and it seemed for a while that she would never stop growing. At first, she was ashamed of her breasts. Then, for a while, she was proud of them. But when they grew too big, she went back to being ashamed, and wore baggy dresses to hide them.
Years before, she and I used to hunt for steamer clams in the low-tide mud of Mackerel Cove. We threw stones onto the wave-smoothed rocks and wherever a jet of water shot up, a clam had closed shut against the shock. We dug in the black sand to find them. Grit scraped our fingernails white. Sometimes we dug up the heavier quahog clams, which the Indians used to make wampum. We broke them on the rocks and ate them raw, skimming the purple-rimmed shells back out into the water.
Hettie smiled and the pie was heavy in her outstretched arms. “I baked you another.” Then the smile peeled away. “Oh, Benjamin. Are you all right? Are you coping here all by yourself?”
* * *
There was only the sound of forks clicking through piecrust and touching the china plates.
The pie had been made with blackberries picked out on Dutch Island the year before. They were picked in late summer when the jellyfish came to the bay, waves of them, first clear ones and then pink ones, washing up on the sand.
I’d helped her pick the berries. She and Bosley and I had all sailed out to the island in Bosley’s homemade boat and gathered them in buckets made of tin. Then Hettie bottled the berries and stored them in a closet under the staircase. The closet was filled with bottles, holding the dark sweetness of strawberries and raspberries and peaches.
Hettie’s face had gone red with the warmth of the pie. “You can taste the summer in these berries, can’t you?”
“I was just going to say it myself.”
She stared at me now.
I knew what she was thinking. “He died in his sleep, Hett. There wasn’t any pain. I’m coping very well.”
“It must be so difficult.”
“It’s not difficult all at once. I think it’s more a thing that’s difficult in small ways for a long time.” I set a berry on my tongue and crushed it against the roof of my mouth. It was true you could taste the summer in them. I thought back to the sea-rose bushes and their shabby pink blossoms that came in late August and the northeaster storms that blew all the petals away. For as long as the berry lasted in my mouth, I let the old summer spark back to life in my head.
“I always missed you when you went away.” Hettie cut herself another piece of pie. She set the slice carefully on her plate. The dark juice seeped slowly out from under the crust. “Do you know, Benjamin, I used to be in love with you.”
I grinned awkwardly and did not know where to look.
Hettie spoke with a mouthful of pie and her teeth were a little bit blue. “It’s true. I can say it now because it was such a long time ago. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. I used to think that someday we’d be married.” She raised her head and scanned the ceiling. “I used to think we’d live here in this house.”
“Did you, Hett?” I followed her eyes to the ceiling, as if something might be there to change the subject. “Well, I’m sure I used to think about it, too. Back in the days when we went clamming. Do you remember?”
“That far back?” Her fork clacked down on the plate. “I’m not talking about that far back! I’m talking about last summer!”
“Were you, Hett?” I smoothed sweat off my face with the palm of my hand. “I didn’t know.”
“I should have told you then. Right when we were picking berries on Dutch Island. Before you went and asked that Newport woman to marry you.”
I sighed and swallowed the mouthful. Now the summer had gone from the berries. I didn’t know how she had found out. Probably she’d heard it on a telephone line. There was a time when her knowing about it would have sent a corkscrew feeling through my guts, but all it drew from me now was a pinch at the back of my neck, like I felt sometimes when the weather was thundery.
“Do you still love her, Benjamin? Do you love her like I loved you last summer?”
“Oh, Hett. Please.” I tapped my fork on the plate.
“Oh, Hett nothing! You give me an answer.” She looked as if she might lunge for me. Her legs seemed braced to spring.
“I don’t know. I thought I loved her but that was a long time ago.”
“If you loved her, then you should never have let her go. You should have done whatever it took to keep her.” Hettie owned the silence that followed. She let it drift for a while.
I thought back to the times when I had to lock myself in my room so as not to get on the next train to New Canaan and be near Clarissa. A vial of acid fell shattering through my body. Maybe I should have gone. For the first time in ages, doubt scrambled my nerves.
“I should have done the same to keep you, shouldn’t I?”
I shrugged. I wished things could have been simple again between us. Back to the time of clam digging in the mud.
“But I lost you, didn’t I?” Her hands were spread flat on the table. “And now you’re probably moving away from here, and I will have lost you for good. It’s true, isn’t it, Benjamin?”
I met her eyes and it was painful to keep up the stare. But I could not look away. I thought I owed her more than that. “It is true, Hett.”
“Yes.” Now she looked down at the mashed remains of the pie. She began to cry without sound.
>
She did lose me, but long before she thought she had. I lost her, too, and I wondered if I would regret it someday.
When she had gone, I felt a vast, black quiet settle on the place. It was this quiet that she had come to chase away—Hettie who had brought pies before to this house and to others and who knew the silence of houses of the dead.
* * *
Bosley delivered the mail. He would make his deliveries until the fire bell rang. Then he’d sling the udder of his mailbag onto his back and run with flat feet to the volunteer fireman’s house. He wore his oilcloth fireman’s coat over the sky-blue mailman’s uniform, as if to remind me that I had betrayed him and he was not yet ready to forgive.
Bosley had always been the clumsy kid. He was the one who would tangle his kite in the trees or crash his bicycle in the first week that he got it. Bosley’s elbows and knees were always bloody from his clumsiness.
To prove that he wasn’t clumsy anymore, Bosley had built himself a boat. It was a dinghy with a mast and sail. On the stern, he painted Mary-Sue. The letters started out big but grew thinner and smaller as he ran out of space.
On the summer weekends, he took his boat out on the bay. Mary-Sue wobbled through the harbor, square sail thrashing on its lines. One time he sailed to Saunderstown. Then he had to take the ferry back, dragging his dinghy up the car ramp, because he didn’t know about tacking against the wind to cross the bay again.
“How’s your boat, Bos? Did it survive the fire?”
“I don’t know.” He raked his fingernails back and forth across the mailbag. It left cloudy trails in the leather. “When the fire started, I rowed out to the mooring, but it was already gone. I don’t know if it sank or if it got loose. I like to think it got loose. I think about it drifting out to sea. Maybe it will wash ashore on a desert island and save some castaway.”
“Who was Mary-Sue, anyway?”
“My boat. Just my boat.” He pulled a roll of paper from his tunic and handed it to me. “This is because I feel bad about your father.”
