City of Hope (7 page)

I shuddered at the mere thought of seeing John's dead body again, never mind touching it. In America, people were cared for by funeral homes with dignity and propriety. Caskets were opened or closed, as the family wished. It wasn't the way here. Bodies were laid out in the house by their families, if they were able (and Maidy was versed in the practice, having laid out half the townland in her time, as well as her husband, Paud, not a year before), then left as a centerpiece in their kitchens for partygoers to drink and dance and weep over—the older, more polite ones admiring their remains with ghoulish curiosity. I would not have John, or me, subjected to such a savage practice.

“I don't want his body back in this house, Maidy. I don't want everybody in, looking at him.”

“You can't do that, Ellie,” she said firmly. “It's not how these things are arranged.”

“I'm his wife,” I said, “and I shall do as I like.”

“And I'm his mother,” she answered, “and I know about these things.”

For a moment we stood on the edge of our respective anger. My decorum was informed by blind terror, I knew that, and fury rose up in me that this old woman, with her broad, hardy grief, was going to grab my heart and tear it open.

Maidy's face was hammered with age. The benign, chubby woman I had fallen in love with as a child was slimmer and starting to sag. Her skin was looser, her lively, laughing eyes jaded with the passing of time, for she had been considerably weakened by her husband Paud's death. She needed to see John and carry out the ritual of his passing in the way that was familiar to her. She was ready to fight me for that privilege. I was weakened by my love for her, but my love for John was stronger. I would not see him dead. I could not.

“For John,” she said, “think what he would have wanted.”

Would have.
The past tense again. Why did everyone have to keep saying it? Catching me off guard. I was angry—with her for pushing me into sadness, and with John for leaving me alone at the time when I needed him most.

“I can't,” I said, as close to tears as I had been since I had found him. My petulance eased as I spoke the truth, and as it left me my knees buckled. “I can't look on him.”

Maidy caught me, put her arms around my waist and guided me to sit by the stove with her. She smelled of bread and carbolic soap, the smell of home—of a love so old I feared it was lost to me forever.

She settled me into Paud's old armchair, the one he had given to John when we had first moved into his parents' cottage some fifteen years before. The bright flowered fabric was darkened where both of our men's heads had slept against it, full of the food and comfort their wives had created for them after all those hard days working on the land. I leaned back into it, and behind my eyes conjured the shadow of John's face.

“I can't believe it, Maidy. I can't believe he's gone, I won't.”

Maidy stayed silent as I wept out my words, tears pouring down my face.

“I can feel him here, Maidy. He's still here, in this house, in this chair. He's not gone. He's not left me.”

I caught my breath as I spoke, and licked the salty water from my lips, and pushed the spilling tears away from my cheeks with a careful swipe of my palms. I could only allow myself a small leak from the vast well that was building inside me, mopping at the surface as if it were only spilled milk from the glass of a clumsy child.

Maidy would need to see his body and cry and keen with the women. The routine and ritual of death in a small Irish town would take their course, and Maidy was right—it was what John would have wanted. It wasn't what I wanted, although in truth I could not say what I wanted, except for that fact that I did not want my husband to be dead.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

I woke suddenly from a deep, velvety sleep and lay in the bed. The light was barely filtering through the curtains. Where was John? Gone to the sheep already? The lamb—was he checking on the newborn lamb he had brought in the day before?

The first neighbor arrived soon after dawn. Brid Donnelly was an old matriarch and Maidy's oldest friend.

“Maidy, Maidy, Maidy,” she cried from outside the door, “your boy is dead—your darling John is dead. He's DEAD!”

Oh God! I heard the latch open, then Maidy howling, and in my mind's eye I saw Brid, wiry and dressed in her widow's black, putting down a tray of freshly baked scones on the stove, then taking her oldest friend's hands in hers and shaking them vigorously, whipping her up into a frenzy of emotion, holding and comforting her as she keened. “Whist now, Maidy, he's in the arms of the Good Lord,” she said. “His Mother Mary herself is holding him now to her sweet bosom, welcoming him into the land of eternal light.” As Maidy calmed, Brid sat her down and started the business of the Irish wake. “God bless you, Maidy, and all belonging to you, but how did it happen?” A chair scraped the floor and I knew Brid had settled herself by the hearth, where she would stay for three full days and nights, until my husband was covered over with earth and the women were all cried out. It was barely 6 a.m.

I stayed in my room and listened as they all arrived—the stage was being set for the theater of death—from the privacy of our small, familiar bedroom, with the worn blue candlewick bedspread, the faded flowery cushion that Maidy had fashioned from a discarded dress of mine, the long bolster pillow filled with the feathers from the bellies of the ducks John reared as a child.

I recognized the voices of each mourner as they arrived and imagined the scene in the kitchen playing out. Padraig Phelan, a pleasant schoolteacher and John's closest friend—they had served together during the War of Independence. He spoke too quietly for me to hear his words, but I knew the timbre of his low voice from the background of men's secretive war talk during my early years of marriage. He would have a bottle of whiskey in his pocket and place it discreetly on the sideboard in the parlor. He would have arrived in Father Geraghty's car from the town, and the priest would probably have drunk the whiskey before anybody knew it was there. And Mary Murphy, her son Cahill beaten to death by the Black and Tans when he was just fifteen; the boy's murder had precipitated John's full commitment as an IRA captain, fronting the unit in conflicts that would lead to his injury. Always a fierce, substantial woman, her strong character had been diminished by her son's death. Carrying the unsolved death of her son, she would walk the seven-mile pilgrimage from her home in Kilmoy to pay her respects, leave a basket of bread or biscuits behind her, but would barely sit down before leaving again.

Liam, John's farm boy (although he was in his thirties now), came in without introduction, but I knew the thud of his boots as he cleaned them off on the stoop. He would be empty-handed and, as the afternoon wore on, Liam would fall into a drunken stupor of grief until the loss of my husband, his beloved mentor, gave way to his maudlin mumblings at not being able to secure a wife. Behind him came our neighbors the Morans, Vincent and Carmel, with their various small children, who ran around outside, disturbing the hens and crashing through the muted atmosphere with their energetic squabbling and delighted cries. They loaded up their cart and left again soon afterward, with promises to return later that evening.

With the arrival of each guest I became less and less inclined to leave my bedroom. By nine the house was humming with people, their footsteps and loud chatter reverberating off the cast-iron frame of the bed. The house seemed, quite literally, to be coming alive. I didn't want to see any of them—even the dear ones. The only person I wanted to be with in that moment, the person who could reassure and comfort me in my hour of need, wasn't there. They were kind people and meant well, but their mission was truth and resolution—to confirm the black and white of life and death. So I stayed there, in the gray cloud of my bed. I rolled into John's pillow and smelled the earthy tang of his sweat, pulling the coverlet up over my head. He was in the next room entertaining the visitors with Maidy. He was down in the field tending the newborn lambs. I hummed and tried not to listen, but their voices crept through the gaps in the wooden door, the cracks of the walls.

“Can I see him, Maidy?” somebody finally asked. “Is he in the parlor?”

The scraping of a chair on the floor.

“No,” Maidy said.

“Sit down, woman,” Brid asserted, “he's not arrived yet. Heffernan will bring him over later.”

“Later?”

“He was moved from the house?”

“Ellie needed some time—to settle herself.”

The room went silent. I clenched the pillow.

This was so hard for Maidy, but they all knew it was my choice, not hers. John should have spent last night in his own house. It was the way. Nobody would speak ill of me outright—not there and then—but I would be the talk of the county. If I had had the closed coffin, I might have made the national news! I felt a flood of love for Maidy's generosity, her loyalty—and my spirits lifted briefly from feeling something other than this cloying, building dread.

However, the dread soon returned with the squawking arrival of Kathleen Condon.

“Oh, oh, such tragic, tragic news. How is Ellie? She must be distraught.”

Kathleen was my envious classmate from national school. She had been a nasty, outspoken child, and adulthood had taught her not much more than to couch her barbed comments with fake concern.

“Imagine losing a wonderful man like John—a war hero!”

“Kathleen,” I heard Maidy greet her, “what a beautiful cake. Thank you.”

“Sure, what else could I do, Maidy—for my
oldest friend
. Where is she? I expect she's getting all dressed up for the visitors. Ellie
always
likes to look her best.”

“She's still sleeping,” Maidy said. “She's taken it very badly.”

The room went quiet as the dozen or so bodies contemplated my grief.

“She found him”—Brid Donnelly broke the silence—“sitting at the table, drawing his last breath.”

“She was out feeding the hens.”

“It was a massive heart attack—she drove into town to get Doctor Bourke.”

“Drove? A woman?”

“Interrupted his tea . . .”

“He wouldn't have liked that.”

“A heart attack, you said?”

“Just like his father.”

I could endure it no longer.

I pulled on my clothes, sneaked out into the back passageway, lifted the latch on the back door and quickly, without looking back, made my escape.

I drove fast, looking neither left nor right, but keeping my eye on the gray line of the road, carefully avoiding the early mourners who passed me on their way up to my house to offer condolences.

Heads turned as I left clusters of well-wishers staring in indig­nation after me along the hedgerows. I didn't care. I wasn't ready for them, for their platitudes and their apple tarts. I wasn't ready to see anyone. I could not imagine I ever would be.

In Kilmoy I drove straight onto the paving outside my building and ran directly upstairs to my small apartment.

As soon as I got inside I thanked God for the comfort of this small second home. This was a place with which John had no real affinity, my own private sanctuary. For a short while I would be able to forget. I pulled over the heavy velvet curtains, and the noise from the world outside receded. Then I turned on the large radio, and as it warmed up the crackling baritone of John McCormack singing “The Mountains of Mourne” filled the air. I stood for a moment and thought about tinkering through to find a more cheerful tune, then decided it wasn't worth the bother. Mr. McCormack would do while I made myself tea. I plugged in the electric kettle and took out a china cup and saucer of my mother's. As a child I had studied the Willow Pattern and had dreamed of foreign places, blue pagodas, strange-looking people in long, squared-off robes. I took down the tin of imported Earl Grey tea from the cupboard above the sink, and the small silver teapot that held just enough for one cup. Then I sat on the chaise, against the embroidered cushions, and settled myself into genteel coziness. For a moment I felt I might stay there forever, hidden, keeping the world at bay. I tried to concentrate on some fashion magazines, then a book, then fiddled with the radio, but it was no use. Kilmoy would come knocking. John would be buried this day or the next. I'd have to get myself ready. It was pointless running away. I would have to face it.

I went to the bedroom and opened the door of the old mahogany wardrobe. It was where I kept my best clothes, for there was always the danger of them getting damp out in the house, with the exposed cottage walls. I searched through it, balking at the black woolen dress and matching coat that I always wore for funerals. I should like to wear navy, I thought petulantly. No, I should like to wear forest green, John's favorite color on me—or red! Damn them all! I pulled out the black suit nonetheless and laid it on the bed. I had a hat and a veil somewhere. I stood on a chair to look on top of the vast, deep wardrobe. The hat toppled from the large, green leather trunk I had traveled back from America with. It was covered in a thick layer of dust and I spluttered as a cloud of gray flew in my face. It needed dusting. I would dust. That would keep me occupied! Reaching up, I tugged at the handle and the huge, heavy case toppled to the ground with an almighty crash, almost knocking me from the chair.

Within seconds there was a loud knock on the apartment door.

“Ellie?” It was Katherine's voice. “Ellie, are you in there?”

I had to let her in, or she would think I was an intruder and call the guards. I opened the door.

“Ellie,” she said, “are you all right? I heard about John.”

There was no false pity, no dramatic pronouncements—my protégée just stood and looked me squarely in the face. Dear, reliable Katherine.