by Jan Karon
'You're kind. Thank you.' He didn't want to say that the anglers weren't the only ones having their last day. 'I regret that the uproar took some of the shine off what Bella did for us. It was a great privilege to hear her.'
'Her day off yesterday was spent practicing, so I'm giving her today. We're going busking tonight at the Tubbercurry Fair.'
'Busking.'
'Playing the old music for whoever walks by or will listen. Setting out the hat. A lot of musicians do it.'
'How far away?'
'Thirty-five kilometers. Bella is isolated here, she needs to be among friends, other musicians. She's after going alone, but I'm going with her. 't will give us time together.'
'Always a good thing.'
'Seamus and Maureen will stand in with Liam at dinner. Seamus has many holiday hours due him by law. He'll spend a few with us over the next days, though Lady Agnew will not approve.'
'Lady Agnew.'
'Sorry. It's what Paddy calls his mother, after the original painting by Mr. Sargent.'
'If I know my cousin, he'll sleep the day away, Cynthia and Katherine are going off to Sligo for hair appointments, and I'll be no trouble. Perhaps you can get a break.'
There would be no good time to tell her; he should do it now. 'I haven't talked with Cynthia about this, Anna, but I think we should ...' He hesitated.
'Move on?'
'Yes.'
''t is what I would do in your place.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Please don't be sorry, you'll get me started on all the apologies you're owed, and we'll be at it a fortnight.'
He was wilted cabbage. If he sat on that bench, he would not get up.
'Would you like your fry now, Reverend? Cynthia says your diabetes . . .'
'I would, yes. Thank you.'
She walked toward the kitchen door, leaving her trug among the iris.
'Anna,' he said.
She turned. He saw the exhaustion in her face, in the slump of her shoulders.
'I believe there's a silver lining in this.'
She made no response and went in.
Why couldn't he keep his trap shut? He did believe that, but there was no proper solace in him--why did he strive to dredge up the skills of priestly consolation which he'd apparently lost or never had?
He sat on the bench, weighted by all that had happened. And why had it happened, anyway? He'd gone on maybe five vacations in his life. The very word had for decades been foreign to him. There'd been a couple of summers at Walter's in Oxford, an occasional summer in Pass Christian as a boy, the long-ago trip to England, and of course the initial visit to Broughadoon. That was it, unless his honeymoon counted as a vacation. But why this upheaval in what should be a refreshment? And, Lord, why the ankle business into the bargain? This was, after all, Cynthia's birthday gift. And what about Anna and Liam, who had most to suffer in this monstrous snare? They were good people . . .
He realized he was whining; that these were the very questions put to him unceasingly during his years as a priest. Why me? Why her? Why us? Why them? Why now? Why then? Endless.
It was nearly eleven when he woke from a nap and found his wife sitting beneath the open window in her green chair, dressed and reading the journal. He sat up on the side of the bed. 'I think we should leave tomorrow with Walter and Katherine.'
There was a long silence. His heart beat dully; his legs felt like a couple of pine logs.
'A terrible thing has happened,' she said.
'Yes.'
'In the journal, I mean. I saw your bookmark, it's just ahead.'
'Don't tell me.' He had zero interest in another terrible thing. 'They offered us the Vauxhall, I could have taken you around a bit, driven you by a castle or two. I hear there's a car park close to Yeats's grave, you could have made it over without any trouble.' She didn't appear to be listening. 'Lunch at a pub, even--we might have done that.'
She was staring at the wall above the bed, at the print of sedge warblers in a thicket of reeds.
'Did you rest?' he asked.
'Sort of. Ready to get something done with my hair--I'm tired of standing in the shower on one leg like a heron.'
He left the bed and dressed quickly. 'Coming down?'
Her mind was still elsewhere, she looked perplexed.
'Coming down, Kav'na?'
'Yes,' she said.
'Do we agree we should leave?'
'Probably. I suppose so. Yes.'
He checked his watch. 'They'll be arriving anytime.'
'Have you told Anna or Liam?'
'Anna.'
'What did she say?'
'That she would do the same.'
'Where will we go?'
'I called around before I brought your tray up. Emailed Dooley, by the way. Talked with a four-star inn in Sligo, but no dining and nothing on the ground floor. Two hotels were booked solid--high season, as you know. I'll make more calls this afternoon; we'll rent a car, of course.'
'Do you think you can do it, the driving on the wrong side?'
'I will do it,' he said.
His cousin was true to form. Knocked out and ready for a decent sleep, Walter gave him the so-called cousin's kiss, joined him in exclaiming the Kavanagh family motto, and hied to the room until dinner. He watched him climb the stairs, feeling strangely moved, even startled, by his cousin's evident aging in the years since Walter served as his best man. To his mind, his first cousin had always been twelve years old--the only kid he ever knew who could make straight A's and just as handily make short work of anyone who bullied him.
Katherine was also true to form. After a bit of washing up and two cups of Conor coffee, she slid back behind the wheel of the rented Fiat and was off like a shot. His wife waved from the passenger window.
Pud followed him into the lodge. In the kitchen, he sat at the pine table where the family took their meals, and ate the lunch left for him. There was the sense of being in the wake of a storm--but for occasional birdsong through the open windows, the place was as silent as stone.
Having found the number in his notebook, he dialed his distant cousin Erin Donovan who, on his previous trip to Sligo, had hosted the tea at which most of the liquid refreshment was ninety-proof.
'Hullo, everyone. Don't look for me in Killybegs 'til August thirty, I'm in Ibiza--no phone, no email, no worries, have a great summer!' That place again. He didn't leave a message.
Using Anna's list of recommendations, he rang a couple of innkeepers--both jovial as all get-out, but no availabilities. Then, bingo, a double room with in-house dining and a spectacular view of the ancient cairn on Knocknarea, available tomorrow night only. Walter and Katherine would have no problem with driving them to Strandhill, where he would rent a car and find the wits to make further plans. He took out his credit card and booked the room.
He looked at Pud; Pud looked at him.
He changed into shorts and a T-shirt and in ten minutes was headed down the lake path at an easy gait. The very air was a lough, a deep swim of moisture and heat that moved like silk against his bare flesh. Things were shifting forward now--a room with a view, a new outlook; he felt the release of it. He was running along the shore near the hut when he glimpsed something moving in the reeds. A white swan pushed out upon the breast of water, soundless, the elegant, curved neck repeated in the looking glass below. 'Hey,' he said under his breath. 'You're beautiful.' As with rainbows, he counted the sight of a swan a good omen.
He hung a right past the hut, Pud at his heels. Slapping midges and pouring sweat, he pushed through the woods, hopeful that Ireland was as free of ticks as of snakes.
As he reached the stone wall, he heard the distant mourning of the fiddle. Bella had gone before him to the Mass rock.
Pud growled, then barked.
'Reverend Kav'na?'
He turned, startled. Liam's detective connection, who had been on the scene last night--a stocky fellow with a bulbous nose and heavy eyebrows, wearing what appeared to be a wool su
it over a turtleneck.
Corrigan held a wallet open to his credentials. 'I hardly recognized you out of your collar, Reverend. Guess you don't need to see this.' He closed the wallet.
'You gave me a start.' Pud still barking.
'May I ask what brought you into the woods?'
'Looking for a Mass rock on the other side of the wall. Anna Conor gave me directions.'
'My grandfather had a Mass rock on his place, called it an altar rock. 't is sometimes found in a pair with a hollowed-out stone for a font. Do you know the history?'
'Not entirely, no.' He squatted and gave Pud a rub behind the ears.
'Our priests used them in secret to conduct Mass. When th' English were after exterminatin' th' Catholic church altogether, there was a price on the head of every priest--they were hunted like fox.'
'How may I help you, Detective Corrigan?'
'Merely wondering what you were about, Reverend. It seems all this began the night after you and Mrs. Kav'na arrived at Broughadoon.'
'Correct.' The poker club had done their own arriving before things began--but he said nothing.
'Seen anyone about the place on a bicycle?'
'Only the bicycle on the main road which we discussed earlier.'
'Would you call yourself an art lover?'
He stood again. 'Most definitely. My wife is an artist.'
'Do you collect art?'
'Hers.'
The fiddle keening in the long distance . . .
Corrigan smiled, ironic. 'Were you familiar with the work of the senior George Barret before coming to Ireland?'
'Enough to know his importance in Irish art history.'
'Exiled himself to England.'
'Yes.'
'What are your plans for the remainder of your holiday?' Corrigan had closed his wallet, was kneading the leather between his fingers as if by long habit.
'We're leaving tomorrow.'
'I believe you were booked for several days yet.'
'We were. But the recent business of the man in the armoire followed by last night's distressing episode is hardly fodder for a pleasant holiday.'
'Most unfortunate. And where would you and th' missus be headed tomorrow?'
'To Strandhill, I can't recall the name of the place.'
'I'll get the name from you before we leave. You'll be around?'
'I will. Anything else, then?'
'Not at the moment.' Corrigan wiped his face with a handkerchief. 'Close.'
Was there no seersucker to be had in the Eire, nor open collars? 'If you've done with me ...' He headed for the wall.
'No one over the wall, I'm afraid, 'til the Garda have a chance to get in and make a sweep. Cheerio, then.' The ironic smile, and over the wall went Corrigan himself, as if he owned the place.
He retraced his passage through the woods and up to the lodge, then showered, dressed, and went downstairs, hearing in some distant quarter an electric drill. He poked around the library until he found a volume of Synge's plays, and soon after sitting in the wing chair fell soundly asleep.
He heard the crunch of gravel in the car park, the slamming of the Fiat's doors, voices. Thirty minutes of shut-eye had helped.
'Did I snore?' he asked Pud.
Cynthia careened in on her crutches. 'We need to talk,' she said. Through the open front door, he saw Katherine digging around in the trunk of their rental car.
From the throne of her chair, his wife told him everything.
'I cannot believe, not even in my wildest imagination, that you would ever, I repeat, ever have allowed me to ride in the same car with your so-called Stirling Moss. It is a grave discredit to the memory of Mr. Moss to compare him with a perfectly crazed, lawless, and out-of-control imposter.'
'Okay, okay,' he said, holding up a hand in surrender. 'Your hair looks great.'
'My hair,' she said, 'is standing on end. Why did you ever, I repeat, ever think I'd be willing to tool around an entire country with this person at the wheel?'
He knew the feeling.
'Are you out of your mind?'
'A perfectly good question,' he said.
'As for the jolly plan for us to travel together in the same vehicle when my ankle is knit--never. You should have seen the face of the shop owner when she opened the door and Stirling pulled the car practically up to the washbasin.'
What could he say?
At six-thirty, Katherine appeared at their door in her bathrobe, pleading sudden and utter exhaustion, and reporting Walter still incoherent. They wouldn't be down for dinner, they were having it in their room, please forgive--but they'd be up at the crack, ready for a lovely long chat at breakfast before heading over to the ruin of the family castle and off to the cemetery for a gravestone rubbing and then down to Connemara, though heaven knows they'd love to stay and help the Garda solve the mystery of the missing painting, and what a scramble their long-awaited trip to Ireland had turned out to be for all concerned, proving once again that truth is immensely stranger than fiction.
On Katherine's heels had come Corrigan, nosing out the name of the inn at Strandhill, and then Feeney, on his way home from the free clinic he'd pulled together two years ago.
Feeney showered praise on the patient who had obviously resisted every temptation to rile the ankle by witless conduct.
Following dinner, they declined the trifle or chocolate torte and opted for coffee at their table.
'I can't do it,' she said.
'Can't do what?'
'I can't leave.'
'Can't leave?'
'Because these people mean something to me. They need us.'
'But we can't be providence for other people, Kav'na. Oswald Chambers says that's one of our hardest lessons--learning that we mustn't interfere in other people's lives.' There wouldn't, after all, be a checkers game with William . . .
'I'm not trying to be their providence, I'm their friend. Bella needs someone, Timothy--someone who isn't her overworked mother or Maureen. It's not that I'm in any way better than these two good women, not at all, it's that I was once as frightened and frozen as she is.'
'But this is a vacation,' he said in something akin to his pulpit voice. He'd never see the Mass rock or finish Fintan O'Donnell's journal or row her to the forested island in the middle of the lough, but so be it.
'What is a vacation, anyway? Two or three weeks of sucking up every good thing for yourself ? And even with all that's happened, I love it here. It feels in a way like home, like family. You know I never really had a family. Just my parents and myself in this sealed envelope, each of us desperate to break the seal. I don't feel our stay is over yet, something isn't right about leaving.'
'But what can you do if we stay?'
'About what?'
'About anything.'
'I don't think I'm needed to do anything except be here.'
He said to her what Anna had said to him. 'You're very unusual, Kavanagh.'
She shrugged, laughed a little. 'I remember sitting on the big stone in the schoolyard with my teacher one day, it was fifth grade. Everyone had gone and we were waiting yet again for Mother to come for me. Miss Collins asked if it made me sad for my mother to forget me. I said it made me sad that Mother herself felt forgotten.
'She looked at me and touched my hair and said, Cynthia, you are most unusual. I was afraid that being unusual wasn't good, then she said, And that's a good thing. Sometimes I think Miss Collins might have been my first taste of God.'
She sipped her coffee. 'Besides, I'm not interfering any more than you interfered by hearing Anna's testimony.'
'She asked me to hear it.'
'And in a way, they've asked me to be here, to stand with them . . . though of course they haven't said that in so many words.'
His wife had a mind unlike any he'd ever encountered, a fact he blamed, if any blaming were to be done, on the nature of artists in general. Her instincts often raced ahead of his own to the quick of things.
'My work is g
oing so well now--the best in years. I'd like to tough it out, Timothy--live it out, pray it out, paint it out.'
'This trip is your birthday gift, not mine. All I want is to do what's best for you.'
'But what's best for me right now is what's best for them, I think. Don't you see?'
He did see. But it angered him.
In the library, which he was coming to account as the central nerve center of the universe, Seamus and William were at the checkerboard, the Labs by their feet; a couple of club members sat at a game table, having coffee with Tom and Hugh.
'Hey, y'all!' Tammy threw up a hand, jangling the redoubtable bracelets.
'Pull up a chair,' said Debbie, 'we're just shootin' th' bull.'
'Thanks. Maybe later.' He couldn't shoot the bull right now if someone gave him cash money. 'Come,' he said, offering his arm to his wife. 'I'm taking you out.'
She eyed him, solemn, then laughed. He saw the forgiveness in her, and laughed back. Caving to the siren call of dispute was the last thing they needed.
'Look,' she whispered, as they stepped out to the garden.
In the last of the light, the silhouette of two people who had been quicker on the draw.
'Busy bench,' he said.
'Shall we go in and start a jigsaw?'
It was definite, then, engraved in stone--they would not be leaving. One didn't start a jigsaw without hope of seeing it through.
'I have a call to make.' He expected to pay for the room in Strandhill, an expense accountable to a birthday made happier. But there would be no accounting of such expense. A couple from Kerry had called, said the inn-keeper, and would be thrilled to get the room-- been to your Philadelphia, saw the bell, deposit refunded, and thanks very much.
He scrawled a note for Liam and Anna--Would like to stay as earlier planned, hope our room remains available, Tim--and left it on the enormous slab of limestone that served as the kitchen prep station.
On the way to the library, he suddenly remembered seeing Bella on a bicycle the morning after their arrival. He hadn't meant to lie to Corrigan--until now, he'd forgotten that brief glimpse entirely. Besides, that was days ago, so how could it have anything to do with last night?
