The Godforsaken Daughter

by Christina McKenna

  Lately, however, all that grief and despair had turned to anger—anger at the injustice of it all. She was angry with Vincent—barely a month into his sixty-eighth year and rarely ill in his life—for causing her such grief by exiting so early. She was angry at Ruby, for she’d been his favorite. She knew that Vincent would have wanted Ruby to carry on the farm. He’d said it often enough. But his death was a betrayal too far.

  So she took her revenge on both, by selling off the dairy herd and renting out the land. Not only dishonoring her dead husband’s wishes but depriving the daughter of the only world she knew.

  “Did you have a good sleep, Mammy?” asked Ruby, pouring the tea, stewed to the color of oxblood, just the way her mother liked it.

  “Enough sleep? I never get enough sleep. Why d’you think I have to lie down during the day?” Martha, her usual cantankerous self, held out her plate for the slice of cake. “That looks like one of your auntie Rita’s?”

  “No, Mammy, I baked it this morning.”

  “Is that so? Looks very like one of Rita’s to me . . . always great at the sponges, Rita. She learned it from me, of course. Not that she’d ever give me any credit. She wouldn’t have had that bakery business if it wasn’t for me.”

  Ruby said nothing. She was getting tired of defending herself. A lull was better than a row.

  Mrs. Clare sliced the cake into tiny pieces, as was her way. “Well, what have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Finishing off the tea cozy. The cupcake one I started on Monday. It’s very nice. But I won’t show it to you till it’s ready.”

  “You’re still at that, then?”

  “Mammy, there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know the way when Daddy was alive he always . . . he always give me twenty pound a week for me work on the farm.”

  Ruby waited for the mother to fill in the blanks so she wouldn’t have to spell it out, but Martha just sat there, staring into the middle distance.

  “Well, you haven’t give me any since . . .”

  “You’re not working on the farm no more, so why would I give you money? Besides, don’t you get my pension money every Monday?”

  “But that’s for groceries. I’ve nothing left over for meself. For things . . .”

  “And what things would you need, Ruby? You don’t go out. You’ve no responsibilities. You’ve got your bed and board here—which is more than a lot of people have.”

  “Did Daddy leave me anything in his will?”

  The mother looked askance. “What kind of question’s that? Your poor father hardly cold in his grave and all you’re concerned about is how much money he left behind him.”

  Ruby wished she hadn’t broached the subject. The atmosphere of calm she strove always to maintain around her mother was ruffled now.

  An uneasy silence fell.

  Ruby was seated in the carver chair at the head of the table. The one her father used to occupy. The chair that had forgotten how to hold her father now held his beloved daughter instead. She felt closest to him when she sat in that chair.

  It looked out on the field where he died. The field her mother now decreed was cursed. Back in 1926, it had taken the life of Arthur Clare, Ruby’s grandfather. Killed in a tractor accident at only forty-two, when Vincent was ten. Ruby had sown a patch of flowers on the spot where her father fell. A memorial to both men.

  So, as the mother nibbled on the cake and took tiny sips of tea, sitting in her own isolation, Ruby reran the images from that fateful day. As if putting herself through the misery of it time and time again would somehow heal the pain and bring her father back.

  She recalled peeling potatoes at a basin on the table. Head bent over the task, stripping the skin from a King Edward with an old knife.

  Something had made her look up.

  That’s when she saw her father, just standing there out in the field, stooped like a question mark, studying the ground, a hank of baler twine in his left hand.

  His cap had fallen off. It lay in front of him. A November wind was lifting his hair. What’s he looking at? Why doesn’t he pick up his cap?

  Suddenly, he toppled forward. As if pushed by a sharp gust. He didn’t use his arms to break his fall.

  Something was wrong.

  Ruby dropped the knife. She ran, crashing down on her knees beside him. But in the seconds between the knife falling and her knees touching the ground, he was gone. His ear pressed against the soil, staring into eternity, peaceful.

  She screamed.

  “Daddy! Daddy! Wake up!”

  She’d heaved him over onto his back. Grasped his shoulders, leaned close. Shook him hard. “Daddy, Daddy, wake up!” The left sleeve of his jacket was caked in mud. The smell of it filled her nostrils. Tears fell from her face onto his. She gripped him more tightly through the rough tweed. But it was useless. He was dead. Father no more. Her protector: gone.

  “Oh God! Oh dear God, bring him back! Please bring him back!” The words breaking from her throat got lost on the wind, carried away over the bleak hills and dales of Oaktree Farm.

  A raven alighted beside her, transfixed.

  But too late. Too late. God had already shut the book on Vincent Clare’s life.

  “You’re not crying again, are you?” Her mother’s voice. A knife tearing into the sacredness of Ruby’s memories. “’Cos if you are, I’ll—”

  “I wasn’t, Mammy. I think I have a cold coming on.” Ruby brought a hankie to her nose and feigned a sneeze.

  “I was going to say: May and June are coming home this weekend. May rang this morning when you were out.”

  May and June: the twins. Five years younger than Ruby.

  May born one minute to midnight on May 31. Three minutes later, on June 1: her sister. The pair of them away in Belfast, working for Boots department store on Royal Avenue. May in the pharmacy department, doling out drugs. June on the Rimmel counter, doling out cosmetics. Yes, away in the city, but not far enough away for Ruby’s liking. The weekends they came home were torture.

  She hated the pair of them, and flinched as she thought of them now. Petite, rail-thin, and snooty in their stretch-stirrup pants and pointy high heels, clopping in off a late bus, clutching vanity cases and buckling the air with their censure.

  “I hope our beds are made up fresh, Ruby.” May marching in first and up the stairs.

  “Yes, I hope they are, Ruby.” June, echoing behind her, forever in her shadow: indebted to her sister for having braved it out of the birth canal first. “We know the smell of mildew, you know.” Heads bent over the twin beds, sniffing pillows. “Mrs. Hipple is very thorough. Changes our bedding twice a week. Doesn’t she, May?”

  Mrs. Hipple, their landlady on the Antrim Road, was held up as a paragon of good housekeeping.

  “Yes indeed, June. City people know about cleanliness.”

  “I washed the sheets this morning.” Ruby, breathless from the stair climb, filling the doorway. “They’ve been drying on the hedge since morning.”

  “Hmm . . . if you say so.” May, holding fast to her disappointed face. “God, have you put on even more weight?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Well, she hasn’t got any thinner, that’s for sure.” June chipping in, always siding with her twin, but never with Ruby.

  “So you’ll have to change their beds,” Martha was saying now, eyeing her daughter, knowing the request would upset her. “And I’ll have another cup of that tea.”

  “I changed them last weekend.” Ruby got up to refill the teapot. “And they only sleep in them for two nights.”

  “Well, I don’t want no rows in this house. I want peace. So change them again and be done with it. They like fresh beds when they come home.”

  Ruby sighed. Replenished the teapot and to
ok it to the table.

  “And there’s another thing I want you to do before I forget. In the attic. Been meaning to tell you, but it keeps going out of my head. And is it any wonder, given what I’ve had to suffer these past months? So I don’t need you complaining about your sisters or asking about a will.”

  Ruby wouldn’t hear the end of “the Will Question” now. She wished her mother would just shut up and leave her alone. She longed to be free of Oaktree House, now that her dear father was gone. Yes, free of the house, her whining mother, and her grudge-bearing sisters. But there wasn’t much chance of that, with no money and two O levels.

  Life behind the walls of a convent might be better after all.

  “What about the attic?” she asked, exasperated.

  “Did you say a decade of the rosary for your father this morning?”

  “I always do. First thing when I wake up.”

  “Good. He needs all the prayers we can say, to get himself out of purgatory.”

  “I think Daddy went straight to heaven. He never did anything wrong in his life.”

  “Nobody’s that good. Only saints go straight to heaven. Did you learn nothing from your catechism? Your father’s mother wasn’t a good one. I can say that now ’cos your father’s gone. So he’ll be in purgatory a good while, on account of her.”

  Ruby had never known the woman; Grandma Edna had died when she was a baby. She was rarely talked about, and then only in hushed tones. To add to the mystery, there were no photos of her in the house.

  “Why was she not a good one, then?”

  Martha, still imagining her husband having the dross of his earthly transgressions cleansed in the purgatorial fires, looked at Ruby, distracted.

  “Up in the attic there’s a case your father kept, belonging to her. A filthy thing, with a naked woman on the front of it. I wanted to pitch it out years ago, but he wouldn’t let me. So, I want you to go up there. Take it out the back and burn it, d’you hear me?”

  “Why d’you want it burned?”

  “You don’t need to know why. She wasn’t a good one: Edna Clare. Came from bad stock. One of them Romany soothsayers, who claimed she could see into the future and talk to the dead. She did the Divil’s work, in other words. Aye, I married beneath myself when I married your father. But he was . . . he was—”

  Had the daughter been looking her way she would have registered the sudden pall of fear tensing the mother’s features.

  But Ruby was staring past her, out the window. She set her mug down hard on the table.

  “Who the hell is that? And what the hell is he doing in Daddy’s field?”

  A tractor was driving into the field Vincent Clare had died in. The field her mother had promised Ruby she would never rent out.

  “I forget his name. He rang the other day and asked about it and—”

  Ruby pushed back the chair, her ire rising.

  “You promised me, Mammy! You promised.” She jumped up and bore down on her mother, close to tears. “I told you: any field but that one. I told you.”

  “Well, we need the money, and I own the land, and—”

  Mrs. Clare didn’t get to finish because Ruby had taken off. Out the door, belting down the yard, scattering the chickens, raising dust. She arrived, panting, at the mouth of the field, shouting at the stranger to leave.

  But the man tearing over the grass on the tractor, his cutting machine in tow, heard nothing. She caught up with him, swung round in front of him, and stood waving her arms.

  The shocked stranger braked suddenly, the grille guard of the tractor a mere foot away from Ruby’s bibbed bosom.

  “What the hell are you doing in this field?” She demanded, arms akimbo, face pink with anger. “Get outta my field this minute!”

  The man killed the engine. “Jezsis!”

  Ruby stared hard at him as he clambered down from the tractor seat. On the short side, shabby, wearing old trousers with the knees gone, held up with a set of frayed braces. His shirt could have done with a wash and he wore a cap pulled low over his eyes against the strong sun.

  “Jezsis, I could’a kilt you there!” was all he said, shoving the cap peak off his eyes to get a better look at her.

  “Get outta my field this minute!”

  “You’re not Mrs. Clare?”

  “I’m Ruby Clare, her daughter, and my father died in this field.” She pointed to the flower patch. “Right there! So it’s not for renting. Who are you?”

  The man studied the flowers. “Jamie . . . Jamie McCloone. Well, I’m James Kevin Barry Michael, but I get Jamie for short.” He took a step toward her and held out his hand, shyly. “I’m . . . I’m sorry for yer loss.”

  Ruby was taken by surprise. She hadn’t expected the farmer to be so respectful. Hesitantly, she put her hand into his. It felt as rough and callused as her own.

  “Thank you. Daddy’s only dead these seven months.”

  “Yer . . . yer mother didn’t say. I saw the ad in the Vindicator and thought I’d give it a ring.” Mr. McCloone pulled on his earlobe and stared at the flowers again. “I wondered why them flowers were there. Naw, it wouldn’t be right to cut a field where yer daddy died. Not right atall.” He looked back at the road. “I’ll get ground off somebody else. There’s plenty rentin’ these days. Just needed a bitta . . . a bitta hay for the cows and the like.” He touched his cap and climbed back into the tractor seat.

  Ruby watched him go. As he turned onto the main road he looked back and raised a hand. Part of her wanted to hurry after him and tell him it was okay; he could cut the grass if he wanted.

  She stood, watching his tractor until it disappeared from sight, wondering how her attitude toward the field could change so quickly. Then wandered back the way she’d come, turning over the name “James Kevin Barry Michael McCloone,” as she bolted the gate and retethered it tight.

  What an odd long name!

  As she walked slowly back to the house, something told her it wouldn’t be the last she’d be seeing of the strange man in the shabby clothes. The strange man in the shabby clothes with the very long name who’d accorded her such respect.

  But first there was the attic—and that thing that needed throwing out.

  What was it? Oh yes: Grandma Edna’s old case.

  Well, Ruby knew one thing for sure: she wouldn’t be burning it. If the case meant so much to her father, she’d be having a look inside and hiding it in a safe place.

  If Grandma Edna had secrets, Ruby was determined she’d unlock them. And her mother would never know a thing.

  Whatever she learned would remain with her, and with her alone.

  Chapter four

  In the grounds of Killoran’s community center sat Rosewood Clinic. A five-roomed, ashlar-faced building on an acre of closely shaved lawns dotted with rose bushes, it formed part of the town’s health-care facilities. One accessed it through a revolving door into a waiting room and reception area, where the soft tones of the rose garden were carried through in the pale moss carpet, cream walls, pine furniture, and cushioned seating.

  Not for the first time, Henry marveled at the fine timing that had brought him here. He’d spotted the ad early in the middle of May, and put it to one side, having given it no more than a halfhearted appraisal. It wasn’t exactly tailor-made for him. He was a city boy, had never considered a career far from Belfast. Moreover, the position was for a period of three months; the ideal candidate would be prepared to function as a locum, a stand-in, really—for the man who ran the clinic. He’d understood that Dr. Sylvester Balby, the psychiatrist in question, was working on an important paper, and his research was taking him to Massachusetts.

  Henry had diligently logged the number of days since his wife’s disappearance. He had not given up hope. Not even with the approach of a second May. But finally, as May 25 loomed, his will broke. He told hi
mself it was hopeless. His lovely Connie was never coming back.

  On Monday morning, he slipped quietly into his office and retrieved the advert from his desk drawer. He arranged an interview over the telephone, was hired immediately, and began work in Killoran at the beginning of June.

  Senior psychiatrist Dr. Sylvester Balby and newly appointed Dr. Henry Shevlin were to share the building for the time being, prior to Balby’s departure for the United States. Each had separate offices and consulting rooms either side of the corridor. They also shared a secretary, Miss Edith King, who was stationed at a reception desk in the foyer and supervised patients in the waiting room.

  Miss King, a brisk lady in her midfifties, was, to Henry’s trained eye, the epitome of the dedicated, no-nonsense secretary.

  Just a week into his new job, in rare idle moments, he’d find himself glancing at her through the venetian blinds of his office and wondering about her home life. She had the posture of a ballet dancer, her ringless fingers striking the typewriter keys with exacting diligence. He’d never had the luxury of a personal secretary. At the Mater, there was a pool of secretaries—mostly young women—who kept the wheels of administration turning in a large office on the ground floor. The Rosewood Clinic was different; being smaller, it had more of a community atmosphere, which was a welcome change.

  The cases that came his way were no different, however; the vagaries of the human condition presented themselves in a litany of all-too-common disorders. Broken individuals, some more fractured than others, all wishing to be returned to their true selves under the attentive gaze and ready ear of the therapist.

  Those outpatients who couldn’t be helped at Rosewood would be referred for committal to St. Ita’s, the sprawling mental institution outside Derry City. It was Henry’s task to assess referrals from GPs in the Killoran area.

  The patients within the walls of St. Ita’s, in common with the Mater Infirmorum, were mainly women. Women sought help more readily than men. Women attempted suicide more often than men; but, sadly, too many males would rather die at their own hand than seek help. In Henry’s experience, those trends had remained unchanged.