The Light of Evening (2 page)

“You won’t feel pain … only discomfort,” he had said.

“Don’t ask me, doctor, don’t ask me to do it,” she had begged, and he could not understand the fears and eventually her blurting it out: “We were reared in the Dark Ages, doctor,” and he tut-

tutting that, then opening a rickety folding screen for her to go behind and undress herself.

Before a week, him calling in person to speak alone with Cornelius in the sitting room, and their coming out and telling her that she would have to go to Dublin for observation. Observation for what? As if she were a night sky.

Indoors she pulls on her fawn camelhair coat and brown angora beret, then drags the butt of a worn lipstick across her mouth without even consulting a mirror and listens for the beeps from Buss the hackney driver, who has promised to be there at eleven sharp. Dipping her fingers in the holy water font, she blesses herself repeatedly and says to the house, “I’m off now, but I’ll be home soon, I’ll be home soon.” To her amazement Buss has stolen a march on her and come into the kitchen unawares, and flustered now, because her hour has come, she says with almost girlish effusiveness, “You’re the best man, Buss, and the best shepherd in the land.”

Jerome

the talk is of dying, of death, as they drive along, not just old people but young people in the prime of life taken, as Buss keeps telling her: Donal, a father of four, at his petrol pump five days previously, suddenly complaining about a pain in his chest and dead before morning, poor wife and children shell-shocked.

“Is it the climate?” Dilly asks.

“Is it what we’re eating, is it that we’re eating the wrong foods?” Buss replies. Neither knows the answer. All they know is that there have been far too many deaths and far too many funerals, graveyards chock-a-block, standing room only, coffins piled up in cramped, over-filled graves.

“It’s the young people that I feel sorriest for,” Buss says and she recoils, seeing this as some sort of castigation of her and, feeling nettled, she grows silent.

Nothing but lorries, the Monday morning toll of them. One lorry in front and another behind, restless to pass. The one in front with a load of wettish sand that is blowing back onto the windscreen, scumming it up.

“Hard to see,” Buss says, taking the bit of rag that he keeps to hand on the dashboard, intending to wipe the windscreen, when the lorry behind them decides to pass and a contretemps ensues with the lorry in front. It pulls up outside a building site, lurches across the road, sand spattered in all directions and the drivers of both lorries belligerent.

“Another bungalow going up, nothing but bungalows,” Buss says as they drive along, hoping to revive the conversation.

She is thinking that at seventy-seven she is of course not young, she should be ready to go but she is not, cravenly asking for a few more years. He coughs a few dry coughs and asks if she’s going just for a checkup, because he is quite happy to wait, doesn’t mind one bit, his voice so conciliatory that she melts and the little huff passes.

“The shingles,” she answers evasively.
Devils
he calls them, his sister Lizzie laid up with them for the best part of a year, crazy from them until the good Lord guided her in the way of the healer. A healer! The beauty of the word a balm. In a mounting astonishment she hears how this man heals with his own blood, pricks his own finger, rubs the blood onto the scab, smears it all over the patient, repeats the procedure after eleven days, and then after the third visit not even a scab, the miracle completed.

“A nice sup of blood he uses up,” Buss says and goes on to sing the praises of a man with a vocation, as holy as any priest, a man who would go a hundred miles to help a person and not charge a tosser for it. All his sister was implored upon was not to scrape them, not to itch them, to let the rub, to let the blood do its work. A nicer man he tells her she could not meet, a lovely house and farm, a lovely wife, applying his gift, a gift that has come down the generations, five generations so far.

“He never studied, not a paper, not a textbook … the books he reads are the people that come to him,” he tells her, adding that he has a special affinity for the old people, knowing how down-and-out they get and with scant sympathy from the young. She is emboldened to ask and Buss says why not and that maybe Providence had sent it their way.

The side roads are narrow, sheltered, the pebbledash houses with painted white stones as ornaments on either pier, the birds walking, scudding, singing, all the signs of spring and the saplings with that flow of purple in their veins. They have decided to chance it, the healer’s farm being only twenty miles off the

main road and in her now, gusts of hope, the morbid gloom of earlier brushed away. Something so sacred about this man using his own blood, as did the Savior. She thinks their car will be turning back from Dublin toward home, a dinner on, that bit of bacon she had put to soak for Cornelius simmering away, the cabbage in the same pot for flavor, cooking slowly, not like the modern fad for rapid cooking. She listens with amusement at Buss’s tirade about the workman on the tractor, never off that tractor for the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.

“He wouldn’t be the best of workers,” Buss says sourly, resenting a man perched on his backside, the sharp blade thinning the hedges that do not need thinning, just to rook the government.

“What hedges are they?” she asks out of friendliness.

“They’re white thorn and briar, and all he’s doing is to strew the road with thorns and splinters, pure spite, just to give a person a puncture.”

Dilly and Jerome the faith healer are in a small downstairs room off the kitchen. There is a single bed, a rocking chair, and a black metal reading lamp, its hood resting on the pillowslip as if it too is a patient. For modesty’s sake Jerome draws the slatted blind, though there is nothing in the field outside, not even an animal. She lifts her sweater, then awkwardly unhooks her pink broderie anglaise brassiere that reaches way below her ribs and peels down the elasticated roll-on that she put on, for appearances, and that has been killing her since they set out. He clicks on the lamp and trains the beam along her body, front, back, and sides and with a seer’s knowledge is able to tell her when the shingles started and when they started to abate. Fortified by such accuracy she asks him for the rub, for his blood that will heal her.

“It’s not only the shingles, ma’am,” he says and swivels the lamp away from her, quenching it.

“I know, I know that, but if you can cure one thing, you can cure another.”

“Oh God, if only I could,” he says, recounting the droves of

people who’ve come with the same hopes as her, the same dream and it breaking his heart because all he lives for is to cure people and send them away happy.

“Maybe you could try.”

“A fella has a gift for one thing but not another,” he says helplessly and makes to leave the room in order that she can dress.

“Is there any other healer I could go to?” she asks.

“Not that I know of …  you’re better off now with the men in Dublin, the specialists,” he says.

“But you see … you saw,” she says.

“I’m only guessing … I’m a simple sort of fella,” he says, abashed.

Their eyes meet and part, each staring into the forlorn space, a shaft of disappointment, he because he is unable to help her and she because she is thrown back into her own quagmire of uncertainty.

Flaherty

dilly has been admitted, registered, x-rayed, tapped, and thumped, hammer blows to her chest and between her shoulder blades, a stethoscope onto her heart and upon being told to breathe deeply, made a fool of herself by coughing incessantly; different nurses leading her hither and thither, up and down the long corridors, the smells of wax polish, oranges, and Dettol. She has glimpsed into the wards, people with visitors, sitting up, others half doped back from their operations, and she has observed the various statues and holy pictures, particularly the vast painting of the Sacred Heart in the upper hall, the carmine red of his robes so rich and opulent, a lone figure in a desert landscape.

Bidding goodbye to Buss was a wrench, goodbye to the world as it were, poor Buss tipping his peaked cap over and over again as he stood by the outer glass doors, not allowed in any further but reluctant to go.

She is in her bed now, in a corner of the ward that is quite secluded from the main section. Her little niche with a view of the garden outside, the dark thin tapering branches, still leafless, scribbling their Morse onto the night sky. The sky, not pitch dark like country sky but flushed from the reflection of cars, buses, and streetlamps. She is on edge
—
the strangeness of things, strange sounds, coughings, moans, and the suspense of what is yet to be. The questions they flung at her on admit-

tance, having to rake up so much of the past. What did her mother die of? What did her father die of? She couldn’t answer, which only proved how callous she had been. No, she had not given them enough love and that too a blemish on her soul. Another question that freaked her: Why had she gone in the first place to her local doctor at home? She had gone out of terror, pure and simple. Their matter-of-factness, so very heartless.

Nurse Flaherty is standing over her bed, arms akimbo, looming, as if to question why she is not yet asleep.

Nurse Flaherty is a big woman, her hair the color of gunmetal, drawn severely over the crown of her head and frizzed at the back, where it is held down with a wide brass slide. From the moment they met earlier, there was an innate antagonism between them, Nurse Flaherty that bit sarcastic, wondering aloud how Mrs. Macready managed to get the best spot in the whole ward and who was it that pulled strings, then remarking on her shortness of breath, dismissed the suggestion that it was from climbing the fourteen entrance steps, both steep and unfamiliar.

“Seventeen steps,” Nurse Flaherty corrected her.

“Are you sure, nurse?”

“Seventeen steps,” Nurse Flaherty said, thereby establishing her sovereignty.

Nor had Dilly liked it one bit when, as a young nurse was folding her clothes to be put in safekeeping until she was discharged, Nurse Flaherty kept commenting on them, weren’t they gorgeous and some people must be rolling in it. One garment in particular had taken her fancy, so much so that if its owner ever got tired of it, she knew who to pass it on to. It was a tweedex cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons that Dilly had knitted throughout an entire winter and rarely wore, kept in tissue paper with camphor balls for that special occasion. Then the quizzing as to where she came from, which county, which the nearest town, and having discovered the exact locality, pouncing on her, with “Are you on the lake?” It transpired that the nurse knew

Dilly’s son, Terence, the optician, met him at the annual Christmas spree when nurses, doctors, chemists, and the like met in that hotel out in Dunlaoghaire for a dinner dance, such a nice young man, sat with a load of girls for the starter and later asked her up to dance, a gentleman.

But now she seems even bossier having, as she says, read the report in the doctor’s file,
au fait
with Dilly’s medical status, the immune system weak from the shingles, the blood pressure sky-high, vessels blocked and furred up, lumps and bumps, the ticker erratic, hence that blackout in the bakery in Limerick, and with triumph concludes that she has the full picture.

“You should have had a Pap smear years ago … every sensible woman does … it’s the gold standard …” the nurse says, shaking the thermometer vigorously, as though aggravated by it.

“Well, gold standard or no gold standard, I didn’t,” Dilly says flatly, then foolishly enquires if there’s something she should know and know now.

“They won’t know until you undergo the knife … they’ll know then if you’re riddled with or not.”

“Don’t, nurse, don’t.”

“You asked, didn’t you?”

“Now I un-ask,” she says and, changing the subject, remarks how nice it is to be by a window with a view of garden and shrubs and those fine trees.

A black-and-gray striped cat has positioned itself on the win-dowsill outside, staring in at them, meowing and with its paws assaulting the steel window frame, determined to get in.

“She’s talking to you,” the nurse says.

“Send her away,” Dilly says.

“Sibsibsib,” the nurse says in a coaxing voice.

“Send her away.”

“She won’t go … she comes every night … she had kittens in a shoebox in that locker of yours a few weeks back … curled up inside it … this end was empty on account of the decorat-

ing … so she made it her headquarters … one kitten died and she keeps coming back for it.”

“I don’t like the look of her,” Dilly says.

“Oh, she could operate on you … she could get to your ovaries,” the nurse tells her and with a strange elation sings as she goes, “Coosh the cat from under the mat, coosh the cat from under the table.”

Jangled now, Dilly is thinking who might rescue her from there. It cannot be Cornelius, nor Dr. Fogarty, nor her hard-boiled son, Terence. It has to be Eleanora. She pictures her beyond in England with the shelves of books up to the ceiling and white flowers, usually lilies, in a big pewter jug, insouciant, mindless of this plea. She recalls the letters she wrote in the nights, on pink paper, on vellum, on ruled or jotting paper, pouring her troubles out in order for her daughter to know the deep things, the wounds she had to bear: