Country Days (11 page)

O
N A BRIGHT
sunny summer’s morning, I sat in the kitchen wondering whether I should drag myself upstairs to do some hoovering or yield to temptation to go out into the garden on the pretence of doing some gardening, but actually to get away from housework. The kitchen door burst open and my friend John from outside the village rushed in with an absorbed look on his face.

“I need you badly,” he announced.

“It’s nice to feel needed,” I told him.

“Don’t be funny,” he warned me. “I have serious business on hand.”

“Like what?” I demanded.

“I must find a grave for a body,” he told me.

“Where did you find the body?” I asked in amazement.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you the whole story, but put on the kettle first and we’ll have a cup of tea while we discuss strategy.”

“John,” I told him, “people disposing of bodies don’t have time to have cups of tea.”

“Ah,” he said, “there is no hurry that way. There is
one thing about the dead: they have more patience than the living.”

“And where is that patient body waiting?” I asked.

“In London,” he told me.

“But where do we come into the story?”

“Sit down now,” he said, “and while we are having the tea I’ll try to explain the whole story, and don’t interrupt me because you’ll confuse me and I have only barely got the story clear in my own head.”

“Right,” I said, “off with you.”

“Well, this is it,” he started: “a woman died in London a few days ago.”

“I’d say a lot of women died in London a few days ago,” I interpolated.

“Don’t interrupt,” he cautioned, and continued. “This woman had no family and apparently no relatives, but she had left instructions with her solicitor that when she died she wanted to be buried with her mother. Now, her mother was from Kinsale and the solicitor assumed that she was buried there, so yesterday he contacted the Kinsale clergy. They checked things out the best way they could and they think that the family grave is not in Kinsale.”

“And what has all this got to do with us?” I wanted to know.

“Well, the undertaker talked with an old woman in Kinsale who thinks that the Carter family are buried in Innishannon.”

“Ah,” I said, “that poses a problem.”

“Yes,” he said, “we must find the grave.”

“But how did you get involved?” I asked.

“I know the undertaker and he rang me,” he said.

“He didn’t by any chance know if it was the old or the new graveyard? Though you could hardly call the new graveyard new, as it is over a hundred years old, so she could easily be buried there as well.”

“He had no idea,” John said.

“Well,” I decided, “there are a lot of possibilities, so we had better start a process of elimination. We’ll start with the new graveyard.”

Such a grand sunny morning was ideal for a walk about our restful graveyard, which is spread out around the church at the top of the hill. However, as I had half expected, there was no headstone with a Carter name on it. Having spent many evenings cutting the grass with a group of locals, I already had a fair idea who was resting in every corner. Local farmers with scythes used to come in after milking the cows to cut the grass, and many of their families had lived here for generations, so not only did they know each family grave, but they told interesting stories about them as they cleaned around the headstones.

“Well, she is not here anyway,” I told John.

“Except she could be under one of those marking stones,” he answered. The marking stones were just big pointed stones sticking up through the ground with nothing written on them; they were used before headstones.

“Somehow I have a feeling that it’s down below
she is,” I told him, referring to the old graveyard at the end of the village.

So we went down through the village to the old graveyard which surrounds the tower at the end of the village. Lying beneath the wood on the bank of the river, it is a peaceful place for the repose of bones at the end of life.

“Now where on earth would one start to look here?” John demanded as he looked around at the tilted headstones and sagging tombs. We took a side of the graveyard each and worked systematically back and forth.

A few hours later we met back at the base of the tower, with two blank faces.

“Nothing doing,” John declared.

“She must be under the marking stones,” I decided.

“We’ll never find her there,” John despaired as he gazed around the rows of marking stones scattered around the mounded graveyard at both sides of the old tower.

“Let’s sit down,” I said, “and review the situation.”

So we sat down on a low tomb and tried to figure out the next step.

“How old is the Miss Carter who is dead?” I asked John.

“No idea,” he said, “but somehow I gather that she was fairly old. So let’s say that she was eighty, just to give us a guideline.”

“Now, we will assume that her mother lived until
Miss Carter was an adult, which she probably did. That would mean that her funeral was here within the last fifty or sixty years, give or take a decade or two.”

“Some of the old people around should remember that,” John decided.

“But will they remember where?” I asked, looking at the wild state of the old graveyard, which was lovely in its own way but did not exactly provide a military row of precise records.

“We’d better have tea at this stage,” John decided. “Grave-hunting is thirsty work.”

As we drank our tea we discussed our problem with my husband Gabriel, who because he had lived in the village shop all his life knew everybody, and knew who amongst them possessed the best memories. He advised us to start with Billy in the forge.

Billy downed tools and scratched his head when we introduced him to our problem.

“Carter! Carter!” he repeated, as if to jog his memory. “They weren’t farmers or horsey people, anyway, though I have a vague memory of the name in the village.” The horse that Billy had been shoeing stamped his hoof restlessly on the stone floor as his young owner looked at us, obviously wondering had we nothing better to be doing that delaying Billy.

“Let it with me,” Billy said, “and something might come back to me.”

As we left the forge I asked John how long we had
to find a resting place for Miss Carter.

“She is flying into Cork airport tonight,” he said, “and the burial is supposed to be tomorrow.”

“I hope that they’ll have somewhere to bury her,” I said. “When do they plan to dig the grave?”

“This evening,” he answered.

“That undertaker must have great faith in you,” I said. “Where to next?”

“Let’s try Ger,” he said.

Ger lived alone in a farmhouse overlooking the village; as our parish poet, he recorded many local happenings in song and because he had a great memory was a sound source of local reference. When we called he was playing the violin and gave us an impromptu concert; Ger was a fine singer who liked to accompany himself on either the piano or the violin. A talented man who found fulfilment in writing and music, he farmed as a sideline.

Ger was immediately interested in our story.

“The Carters,” he said to himself again and again, as if knocking on the door of his subconscious and hoping to awaken a memory. Suddenly he punched the palm of one hand with his fist.

“I have it!” he declared. “There were Carters living up Chapel Hill when I was going to school.”

“Any more about them?” I asked hopefully.

“The daughter was a nice-looking girl,” he said, with a smile on his face.

Our Miss Carter was beginning to take shape.

“Can’t remember any more off the top of my
head,” he said, “but call back again and I’ll have put on my thinking cap.”

Our next port of call was Ernest, who had an interest in the history and people of the place. As we drove over to meet him, I recalled the first time I had become aware of his talents. Some Americans had called into our shop to trace their ancestral roots, but they had drawn a blank with me. Ernest had come into the shop for groceries and was standing near by.

“Ernest,” I asked, after introducing him to the Americans, “this lady’s ancestors were Higgins from around here, but there are none of that family name here now. Have you any suggestions?”

“There is an old man called Higgins living alone away up at the other end of the parish, and I think that a lot of his ancestors went to America,” Ernest told them. They were absolutely delighted. It was a breakthrough in their search that had up to then been going nowhere. They wanted to take a gift to the old man when they went to visit and looked for suggestions.

“A bottle of whiskey,” Ernest told them.

When they had gone on their way, Ernest said to me, “Whether they find their ancestors or not they’ll have a great evening with Tade, and by the time they have the bottle drank, they’ll all be related.”

The following morning the Americans called back to see me, delighted with their visit to Tade, and insisted that I listen to a tape of Tade telling them
stories. On one of the tapes Tade told a story about a visit he had made to London and how one of his nephews had taken him to a strip club. It was a very funny story and the Americans laughed heartily as they listened to it. I asked them if they had ever met anybody like Tade.

“Never,” they told me; “if we had him in America, we’d make him Mayor of New York.”

When I recounted the story to Ernest, he smiled and said, “I knew that when Tade saw the bottle of whiskey he’d grow roots in all directions. There is no way of knowing but that they were the real thing.”

As we drove in to Ernest’s yard, I hoped that he might solve this problem as easily.

“Carter,” he said, “now let me think. There was a little man called Carter living up Chapel Hill when I was going to school.”

“That’s right,” I said, “Ger remembered that as well and that the daughter was good-looking.”

“Trust Ger to remember that,” he laughed.

“Could they be buried down in the old graveyard?” I asked.

“Could be,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you know now, the man to tell you that is Jim. His father used to look after that place when I was a boy and Jim spent a lot of time down there with him.”

So we made our way to Jim’s house, which was down the road on the river. He was out at the door to meet us.

“I was expecting ye,” he laughed. “Called over to
Billy earlier on and we were discussing it after ye had left.”

“Did you come up with anything?” I asked.

“Well, now,” he said, rubbing his hands, “this is a tricky one. There was a Carter man in the village long ago and he was a baker. Now, I don’t think that he was from the village; I think that it was the wife who was from here.” He tapped his walking stick off the floor, as if checking off his facts, as he went along.

He walked around in a circle with his eyes closed and said slowly, “They left the village – they weren’t here that long actually – and I think that the wife was brought back to be buried here.”

“In the old graveyard?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, of course,” he said with no shadow of a doubt in his voice.

“Any idea where in the old graveyard?” John asked cautiously, almost afraid that if he rushed things he could disturb Jim’s train of thought.

“Now, let me try to remember,” he said, and I could nearly see his mind turning back the pages of his life. He screwed up his face in concentration and then he shook his head.

“I’d have to go down there now to have it come back to me,” he said.

“Right! Hop in,” John said, opening the door of the car, though “hop in” would not exactly describe Jim’s careful climb into the front seat.

When we arrived at the old graveyard, Ernest was there before us.

“Now,” I said, “we have the experts here together.”

“The Carters are buried at the right-hand side of the path,” Jim said decisively.

“You’re right there,” Ernest agreed, “but where, is the question?”

They walked around the marking stones almost as if the feel of the ground would bring back forgotten memories.

“It could be somewhere around there,” Jim said, pointing his stick at a mound of grass that had grown undisturbed for years.

“Maybe more to the front,” Ernest decided.

“Yes,” Jim agreed slowly.

“And after that your guess is as good as ours, but it’s somewhere in that area,” Ernest declared.

Later that evening I met the grave-diggers at the foot of the old tower.

“You know where the Carter grave is, I think?” the older of the two asked.

“Yes,” I said more confidently than I felt. I walked over and pointed to a spot; at the same time I looked up to heaven and prayed silently.

“Lord, only you alone know if this is the right place, so please direct the shovels.” The
gravediggers
started their job and I walked back home through the village.

That night, before darkness had fallen, I returned to the old graveyard. Around the newly dug grave was a mound of rich brown earth. I stood there wondering about Miss Carter, hoping that she was
going into her mother’s grave as she had wished. Then I saw, thrown sideways on the mound of earth, the corner of a coffin plate. I stooped down and wiped the fresh earth off. The name on it was “Carter”.

The following day she arrived into the old graveyard accompanied by a priest and the undertaker; birds sang in welcome. When she was laid to rest, John and I placed a bunch of wild flowers on her grave. Her wish to be buried with her mother was granted with the help of both local and divine intervention.