Shadows in Heaven

by Nadine Dorries

  As Rosie watched Ellen’s back disappear around the corner, the thunder of the fast-running peaty river resounded in her ears. It came crashing down from the mountains over flinty boulders and smooth, centuries-worn pebbles, drowning out the intrusive rhythm of her own pulse, which had been beating a tattoo ever since Teresa had imparted her news. The rain poured, the river roared and the scattered cottages of the village were thatch-soaked and wretched and looked as miserable as a jilted lover. She had never wanted to be anywhere as much as she wanted to follow Ellen Carey and run into the Devlins’ bar and know the exact contents of the telegram, dictated by Michael. Her mouth dried and she swallowed hard as her hands scrunched up the fabric of her thin coat. A telegram from Michael!

  She breathed in and out, slowly. Keep calm. Keep calm. It was the hardest thing. Five years had passed, but she could give nothing away. She continued slowly down the main street, heading home. Keep calm.

  She had reached the butcher’s shop, and, looking up, saw Josie Devlin behind the counter, and John O’Donnell, Theady’s father, along with Bridget McAndrew. They were all, each one of them, watching her. She smiled nervously, unclenched her hands and pulled her frayed coat across her chest against the wind and the rain. She dropped her gaze to her feet and without waiting to see had anyone smiled back, continued her journey. If she had looked up instead of down, she would have noticed that Josie had indeed smiled kindly, John had touched the rim of his cap out of respect for her role as the teacher of his son, and Bridget McAndrew, who knew the secrets of most hearts in Tarabeg without needing to be told, had sent her a look of deepest pity. Rosie would have been glad to have missed that.

  The Devlins’ shop and home was divided into two, with two entrances. The meat counter in the front opened onto the main street, presenting a respectable frontage, whereas the bar at the rear was reached through a side door. A wooden shed in the back yard served as the slaughterhouse and contained a fridge which hid the salmon that were illegally poached from the Taramore river as well as the holy herrings during Lent. The running of the butcher’s shop and the bar was also divided up: Josie served customers at the front, while Paddy was either in the slaughterhouse or at the bar. From there he would dispense Guinness and, when the barrel ran out, whiskey and porter; when that ran dry, a mysterious milk churn full of poteen would appear, distilled from Malone potatoes and hidden away in Paddy’s yard until it was needed.

  Those who wanted to avoid incurring the wrath of the wife or attracting the attention of Teresa Gallagher bypassed the public house and kept their custom for Paddy’s bar. Respectable men had no notion to be seen stepping off the main street and in through the doors of the public house in the middle of the afternoon; and so, in a village where gossip was currency, they slipped through the side door of Paddy’s instead. Among their number was Father Jerry himself, Brendan O’Kelly, the clerk and magistrate for the area, and Mr O’Dowd. Respectable men supped with the fearful, the hen-pecked and anyone else who chose to partake of the cheapest drinks in town. There were also those who ducked in from the butcher’s, through the dividing curtain, to down a quick glass of whiskey, for medicinal reasons, while Josie wrapped up the pig’s trotters in the front.

  Paddy was in the process of filling a half pot of Guinness from a wooden barrel for Seamus Malone. Father Jerry was sitting next to him, stuffing a dudeen with tobacco. Teresa did not allow smoking in the presbytery. ‘’Tis an unholy act altogether,’ she would protest every time he tried, and so, to keep the peace, he kept his pipe for the back of Paddy’s. Porick McAndrew, Bridget’s husband, was sitting by the fire, well away from his wife. While he nipped around the back for whatever Paddy had on offer, Bridget herself always sat on one of the wooden chairs in the butcher’s shop, drank tea and talked to Josie. Brendan O’Kelly was at the table in the window, reading the Irish Times, having patiently waited until three in the afternoon for the mail van to arrive. He studied the crossword and chewed his pencil as he worked his way through half a pint of Guinness. The bar was silent apart from the rain hitting the windows and the slow drip, drip onto the wooden floorboards from the coat stand where Seamus had just hung his oilskin cape. A puddle began to form below it.

  ‘I’ll join you in a quick one, Seamus,’ said Paddy. ‘Will you be wanting a top-up, Porick?’

  Porick looked woefully into his glass. ‘I would like that, Paddy, sure I would, but you know, she would know I had, given that she has the sight. I can keep nothing from her and you would hear her all the way back if I did.’

  Paddy smiled. Nothing was missed by Bridget. The village apothecary, she spoke to the spirits and healed people with the potions she made in her cottage up on the hill. ‘You shouldn’t be such a lazy fecker, Porick,’ he said.

  Porick’s face took on an expression of deep hurt. ‘Paddy, do you have no sympathy for the cut of my back? Gone, it is, and it won’t ever be coming back – the doctor says that and he knows more about it than the witch I am married to.’ He shook his head self-pityingly. ‘You have no notion of the pain I am in. Besides, I still cut the turf and do odd jobs on the farm.’ He stood up slowly to leave, making a show of his aches and pains.

  Paddy made no response, just flicked back the tap and placed Seamus’s Guinness to the side to settle. Porick was the laziest man in the village and Bridget the hardest-working woman. Everyone agreed that there had never been such a mismatched couple.

  ‘Has Teresa left already?’ Seamus asked as he walked over to the fire to dry off. ‘I suppose she must have if you are here yerself, Father.’ He half raised his sodden cap to Father Jerry, then shook it onto the flames of the turf fire, which spat back at him in protest. Paddy never opened the bar of an afternoon until Teresa was clear of the village, sent away from the presbytery by Father Jerry on special errands or to visit her sister.

  ‘Aye, she left not minutes since,’ said Paddy. ‘She’s a desperate driver, that one.’ He had watched her turning the corner from the main street, both inside wheels leaving the ground as she drove her horse and trap out of Tarabeg, then stopping suddenly at the school. ‘There will be no one on the roads this afternoon and that’s for sure. She drives every sober man indoors before lunch until they know she’s back at home and the coast is clear. I cannot imagine what possessed you, Father, to give her the use of your horse and cart.’

  ‘Really?’ said Seamus with a smile and a wink towards Father Jerry. ‘Well, the fact that Father is often the first through the door as soon as she’s away down the road ought to give you a clue, ought it not?’

  Father Jerry pulled hard on his pipe and grinned. ‘’Tis the horse I feel sorry for,’ he said.

  Seamus chuckled. ‘’Tis you, Father, I’ll feel sorry for if she ever finds out you are over here in the afternoon. She’ll be down here giving out to you, all right, and Josie won’t be up for stopping her. Thick as thieves, the women in this village are.’

  They all looked out of the window, across the road to the seven acres of wasteland that spanned the Taramore river. Where the land bordered the main street stood the Church of the Sacred Heart, peering down at them, and the presbytery, where Father Jerry lived, along with his housekeeper, Teresa. Officially, Teresa kept records of the village births, marriages and deaths; unofficially, she also recorded all that mattered in between. She was often to be seen standing in front of the tall dark windows that blinked in the sunlight, missing nothing that occurred in the quiet village.

  Just as Paddy carried the two pots of Guinness towards the fire, Seamus opened his eyes wide. ‘Feck,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Paddy turned his head to follow Seamus’s gaze out the window. ‘’Tis only Guinness.’

  But he received his answer soon enough as, with little ceremony, the door was flung wide. The rain hurtled in first, and then came Mrs Doyle, the only woman in the village apart from Josie who could set foot near the bar without being talked about.

  ‘Oh Holy Mother of God, you are here,’ she gasped to Seamus.

>   Ellen Carey shuffled in behind her and slammed the door shut. It was acceptable to enter the bar with Mrs Doyle. If another minute had passed, her cloak of respectability would have disappeared. She pulled her shawl across her chest, folded her arms and pushed her shoulders back; if her short, thin hair hadn’t been soaked to the scalp and plastered to her face in wet strands, she would have looked important.

  ‘Hello, Paddy, Seamus.’ Mrs Doyle directed her pointed chin and beady black eyes straight at the earthenware pot that Paddy was placing in front of Seamus.

  Seamus jumped to his feet and pulled out a wooden chair from the bar’s only table. It stood in front of the fire and was covered in a bright green gingham cloth – a homely touch added by Josie. ‘Here, woman, would ye sit down,’ he said. ‘Ellen, here, you too. Paddy, pour a pot for Mrs Doyle, before she takes bad, and Ellen too, would you now.’

  Mrs Doyle flopped down into the chair he held out for her.

  ‘What have ye there?’ he asked. ‘Here, drink this. God in heaven, ye’ll be doing yerself no good, running like that at your age.’

  Mrs Doyle’s eyes flashed with indignation – her age was the best-kept secret in Tarabeg – but Seamus failed to notice.

  Josie bustled through the curtain. She had seen the tail end of Ellen’s shawl as she flew past the butcher’s shop window. ‘Is it a telegram?’ she asked, looking at the mustard-coloured envelope in Mrs Doyle’s hand. Telegrams no longer inspired the dread they had only weeks earlier. The war had been over more than a month since. Enough young men had died; there would be no more now. ‘Only John O’Donnell is in the shop and he wants me to check, before he’s away home. He doesn’t want to be missing the news now and having to wait until tomorrow like everyone else up the boreens. And besides, if Philomena finds out a telegram arrived when he was here and he can’t tell her what was in it, she’ll be giving out to him something wicked.’

  Seamus placed the pot of Guinness in Mrs Doyle’s hand. Her gaze met his and she winked as the draught slipped over her toothless gums as fast as it would those of any man. Her shawl fell from her dark hair and landed on her shoulders, and her eyes closed in ecstasy.

  Mesmerised, Paddy, Josie and Seamus watched her noisily gulp down almost the entire contents of the pot.

  ‘Jesus, she’ll be needing a second,’ muttered Seamus to Paddy, unheard by Mrs Doyle, who, as she finished, slammed the empty pot down on the table with one hand and proffered the ransom telegram to Seamus.

  She sucked the residue of the Guinness from her gums. ‘’Tis for you, Seamus,’ she wheezed, as though there had been any doubt, and, turning to Josie added, ‘Tell John he can be on his way now. ’Tis from Michael. He’s coming home.’

  For the briefest moment, no one said a word. Seamus, yet to open the telegram, stared at her open-mouthed until Josie broke the silence and bustled back through into the butcher’s shop.

  ‘’Tis from Michael,’ they heard her say.

  Seamus flinched as John O’Donnell’s response floated back through the curtain.

  ‘Sure, is he dead? The fecking bastard should be, fighting with the English. A traitor, he is, after what the English did to us.’

  ‘Stop, would ye,’ they heard Josie reply. ‘Surely to God, the war is over, the fighting is over, the worry, ’tis all over, and if you carry on like that in my shop, John, as sure as God is true, ’twill be over for you too.’

  They all heard a loud slap. Seamus hoped it was contact between John’s face and the flat of Josie’s hand, though Paddy knew it would have been the rashers John came in for every Thursday afternoon hitting the counter.

  Josie warmed to her theme. ‘The Germans lost, we can all have a bit of peace at last, Jesus, Holy Father, can we? At last, please, would you, John? Just shut the feck up and keep all yer bellyaching for Philomena. Don’t be bringing it in here into my shop, to me.’

  They heard the crash of the wooden till drawer and the sound of change hitting the counter.

  In the bar, Seamus said nothing, just raised his eyebrows at Paddy.

  Paddy, embarrassed, adjusted his cap and then thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coarse brown butcher’s apron. ‘Go on then,’ he said to Seamus, inclining his head towards the telegram, even though it seemed a little pointless now that Mrs Doyle had announced the news it contained. He brought out a small boning knife and handed it to him.

  A muscle in Seamus’s cheek flickered as he eased the knife into the edges of the envelope. He was well aware that his every action would be described and amplified within every home in the village inside of the hour.

  To Paddy, it felt like he was taking an age. He picked up a cloth and began to wipe the tap on the Guinness barrel to fill the time. The door opened and they all turned to see who it was had arrived at such an important moment.

  ‘Ah, what have we here?’ boomed the voice of Mr O’Dowd as he shut the door behind him.

  ‘A telegram,’ said Paddy, and they all turned their attention back to Seamus, who had laid the telegram on the table and with the flat of his hands was smoothing out the paper as though gluing it to the gingham fabric.

  Impatient, Paddy threw his dirty dish cloth into the sink. ‘Well, what has he to say?’ he asked.

  Father Jerry rose from his chair and moved to stand beside Seamus. Mr O’Dowd, so tall and broad that his head almost reached the ceiling, walked over and stood at Seamus’s other side. They read the telegram over his shoulders. Brendan pushed his pencil behind his ear and turned his chair away from the window to face the room and observe the moment.

  ‘He’s away home,’ Seamus said. ‘He was finally demobbed along with the lads from Galway and Cork, the ones in his regiment. They will be back home before the week is out, he says. They’ve been in Liverpool and will be catching the boat to Dublin and then the train to Galway. He doesn’t say what day or time exactly, but then that would be our Michael, would it not. He’ll surprise the life out of us all and turn up when we least expect him.’

  ‘Thanks be to God.’ Father Jerry blessed himself, and the others followed suit.

  Seamus smiled broadly. ‘He’s alive. I don’t care when the hell he comes home. He can do whatever he wants.’

  Josie walked back into the bar. She entered the room like a small tornado, the force of her personality taking up more space than her physical form required, and being the well-fed wife of the butcher, that in itself was considerable. Her face was damp around the hairline and still flushed from the heated exchange. ‘John O’Donnell has gone off with my voice ringing in his ears,’ she told them, even though they had all heard her shouting. In a silent act of defiance, the rashers safely in his coat pocket, he’d slammed the door and set the bell ringing out in painful objection. ‘Sure ’twas a bad reaction, that was, and ’twill be all over the village soon enough. You know what people are like, Seamus. Some will have an opinion we won’t care for.’

  ‘Aye, so it is,’ said Ellen, who had remained silent until then. ‘As soon as he gets home, he’ll tell his shrew of a wife, and then there’ll be no stopping it. The news will have reached Newport by dark. Philomena is as quick to spread the gossip as she is the slurry.’ She turned to Seamus. ‘Do you think Michael will be having any notion at all of how bad it is here? He’ll be finding it hard to get work if he comes home, will he not? There’s to be a law, they say, to punish those who fought with the British.’

  Paddy spat on the sawdust-covered floor. ‘’Tis disgusting itself how many around here wanted the Germans to win. Some say that even if the Germans were filling the roads on the way to Mayo, they would still rather that than support the British.’

  Josie, a woman who never usually sat down, pulled out a chair next to Mrs Doyle and sank into it. ‘Well, welcome news it is. I had given up on him altogether, the war has been over for that long. Wait until our Tig hears. He’ll be that pleased his best friend is coming back, sick with worry the lad had been. I’ll have to stop him running up the hill to the farm to wait
for him.’

  No one, from a place of kindness, corrected her by pointing out that Tig, who had one leg markedly shorter than the other, a pigeon chest and poor lungs, never ran anywhere. Even in Tarabeg, a mother could dream.

  Paddy smiled at his wife. Her bark was very much worse than her bite. As round as Mrs Doyle was thin, she had bright, twinkling, blue eyes and, despite her grumbling, was of a kindly nature. He watched as she took a handkerchief from her pocket, dabbed at her forehead, then wiped the moisture from her eyes and John O’Donnell from her mind.

  Josie Devlin rarely drank, but that afternoon she took two pots. No one could remember the last time she’d done that, but she was making a point, one that Mrs Doyle would carry back to the post office, Ellen to the tailor’s and both of them to Mass. Michael Malone was alive and well and his return home was to be greeted with much cheer. And besides, he was a good lad. He’d been a true friend to Tig, standing up for him when he was bullied, always sure to include him when there was a dance or a social. Tig had missed him rotten these last five years, Josie was well aware of that. The boys had been friends since they were born, as were Josie and Paddy with Seamus and Nola. Now was the time for her to help her friends in the best way she could. As stalwarts of the village community and purveyors of the most essential provisions – rashers, trotters, sausages and Guinness – the Devlins’ opinion carried some weight. Seamus knew exactly what Josie was doing and was grateful.

  ‘Well, sure, Michael hasn’t been the only one to fight for the British,’ said Ellen. ‘There’s been plenty more.’

  ‘Yes, but Michael was the first and he is the only one from around here to return home alive,’ said Mrs Doyle, who had delivered telegrams which held the worst news any parent could receive.

  ‘Who will be telling Michael about Sarah, Seamus?’ asked Josie, whose voice had dropped an octave. ‘Kevin McGuffey has sworn that if Michael goes anywhere near the cottage, he will shoot him. You will have to warn him. Surely to God, the boy will have survived the Germans only to come home and be put in the ground by a monster like McGuffey.’