The Light of Evening (30 page)

“Making our escape, are we?” Nurse Flaherty says, materializing, in a raincoat and plastic bonnet, obviously having been informed of this defection.

“I’ll be up and down in a matter of hours,” Dilly says, determined not to be ruffled.

“I won’t allow it.”

“You can’t stop it.”

“My good woman, if anything happened to you on that journey we’d be responsible, it’s us who’d take the rap … so get back into that bed and I want no argument.”

For an instant they face each other, sworn enemies, but Dilly is determined to be unflinching.

Seeing the little nurse return with her clothes and the walking stick, she asks as calmly as she can, “Did you get Bronco?”

“I got his wife … he’s out on a run … we’re to ring back.”

“Who gave you leave to ring Bronco?” Nurse Flaherty asks her.

“No one,” the little nurse replies, cowering, waiting to be thumped.

“Take off that hat and coat, Mrs. Macready, and you’ll be brought your breakfast,” the nurse says and hearing that she has already had a breakfast, she is told that she can’t bolt it anyhow until the consultant comes on and that won’t be for at least an hour.

As she goes, vehemently shaking the rain from the plastic bonnet, Dilly reads menace in the cut of her back.

Dilly sits in the outside porch by the front door, gathered into herself, not looking at those who come and go, her hands fingering her rosary beads, just willing Buss to hurry, imagining that

by now he must be more than halfway, it being well over an hour since she rang and implored his sister to ask him to come posthaste. The porter, with a croak in his voice, keeps coming in and out of his booth to tell her she is in a draft, urging her into the inner hall because the March wind is bitter.

“I’m fine here … I’m fine here,” she says and pulls her collar that bit higher so as to be inconspicuous.

Her husband will think she had been discharged, will welcome it, back to their routines, the blended soup, tomato or mulligatawny, the fire laid each morning but not lighted until six, their routines, their hard-won harmony. He may even bridle at the thought of being brought off to a solicitor, but she will remind him of being dragged for that crooked outing, afternoon tea in a deluxe hotel, a big reception hall with a black papier-mâché dog, its orange-rimmed eyes, and a card that read “Collection for the Blind,” the drawing room so opulent, loveseats, armchairs, china shepherdesses along the mantelpiece, painted water lilies on the glass firescreen, a roaring fire, a picture window that looked onto a millstream, the big mill wheel stationary, tea for four, the white and the brown sugar cubes mixed into the one bowl, scones with jams and clotted cream and then the bombshell, Terence asking them did they love him as a son and if so would they show it, prove it by willing Rusheen and all its lands to Cindy and him. What with the strangeness, the grandeur, and the bluntness, they put up no fight at all, just acquiesced in it, he presently announcing that he had made an appointment with J. M. Brady & Co., the well-known solicitors.

When she sees her son come up the steps, flushed and agitated, she knows there has been foul play. She knows by the rage in him, the way he swoops through the swing door, not allowing an elderly woman to pass, his overcoat unbuttoned, and she smarts at the sarcasm in his voice, “Well, ma’am, I hear that you were thinking of creeping out on us.”

“I want to see the homestead … to walk round it … it’s a small thing to ask at my time of life.”

“Nothing crookeder,” he says, refixing his rimless glasses to see her all the clearer.

“Nothing crookeder,” she answers.

“So why does it have to be so sly, so underhand?” he asks.

“I’m sick, Terence … make no scene here …” and as she says it she sees the expression on his face, savage and infantile, her own son, her once-upon-a-time white-haired boy, ready to strike her dead.

“Don’t strike me, Terence … not here,” she says and as if by prompt, Nurse Flaherty appears waving a thermometer and a plaid car rug, a soul of solicitude, saying how the little daft nurse had forgotten to take her temperature, something that is a must before any patient is allowed out.

Silenced, cowed, she is made to sit on a chair, the glass pipette in her mouth, unable to speak, hearing them expound on the unwiseness, nay the madness of her decision as her eyes cast around for the sight of Buss. Her temperature is slightly up as Sister Flaherty says, but her pulse is racing, in fact, like a dynamo and they each take her arm and she is conducted into the inner hall with the heave of the defeated. She does not struggle, she has lost her battle, listening in disgust to their false concerns about bad roads, rotten roads, trees down everywhere, a freezing vehicle, and the likelihood of her catching a cold that would undoubtedly go down to her chest.

They have reached the bottom of the staircase when she turns and sees Buss come through the door, doffing his cap as if he is entering chapel, and springing backward, she runs toward him with a surge, saying his name, her hat falling off and with it the two tortoiseshell side combs, her hair wild, disheveled, when she staggers, then stumbles, Buss’s big slow hands and arms opening but failing to save her from crashing onto the hard, vast archipelago of colored tiles.

Bells, nurses running, two men in white coats, like two butchers to her stunned eyes, being lifted onto a wheelchair, and Nolan, as from nowhere, shouting, “What’s happening to the missus?

It is Nolan’s hand Dilly reaches for, not theirs. It is Nolan to whom she whispers to keep them away, and it is Nolan who hears her last baleful utterances, again and again: “It’s beyond the beyond the beyond now.”

Moss

there were two men, an old man and a young man. A few stars still in the sky but pale and milky as stars are in the early hours before they slip away.

Ned, the young man, garrulous as if he were drunk, which he wasn’t.

Climbing the mountain road, a godforsaken stretch, the odd carcass of a dead animal, ruts and runnels, and in the fields of richly bronzed bracken a few scutty Christmas trees that never flourished.

They park the van by the television mast, a steel god looking down on the valley below, the cable around it juddering in the wind, the threads and messages within, passing unheard, and then a tramp over toughened heather terrain until they arrive at the boundary wall and climb it. Already feeling like felons.

Flossie knows the owner and has gone there on the quiet umpteen times to shoot woodcock and even once shot a wild turkey, which Jimmy said had come all the way from the Appalachians. Flossie was an apprentice then and Jimmy was boss. Going together, because the loveliest and most luxuriant mosses throve in that wood, so many varieties, the oak moss, the brook moss, the stair-step moss, and the green-gold moss that has no equal for color, not in any curtain, not in any carpet, not in any mountain range.

The owner, a bachelor, the last of his tribe, living alone, con-

fining himself to kitchen, scullery, and pantry quarters, holy pictures on every wall, walls covered with Sacred Hearts and a medley of saints, a mammy’s boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down.

Ned stands, then walks, then stands again, flabbergasted. He has seen woods, he has even worked in woods, young woods, putting down spruces and the like, but he has never set foot in a place like this, the peacefulness of it, spooky, the way the trees seem to have stood there undisturbed for generations, have a greater claim on the place than either man or woman.

For the best part of a year he has been pestering Flossie, asking when can he go with him to gather the moss to line a grave, to learn the trade and be the one to pass it on. Flossie only does it for close friends or relatives or kids crashing on their way home from discos. But each time he has been turned down, Flossie in his gruff way saying, “You see I’m not Jimmy” and nothing more. Flossie learned the art from Jimmy, who learned it from a Cornish man, and the Cornish man having got it from a Breton, and the Breton from God knows where, maybe the Appalachian Way.

With Jimmy gone, Flossie preferred going alone, gathering the moss for those creatures that have meant something to him and now for the woman he scarcely knew but had a bond with, a bond never acknowledged by him and never ever by her.

A ghostlike mist hangs over and above the trees and above that, pockets of it run and frisk about, like the Pooka man playing hide and seek.

A hush and the two men advancing into the very heart of the forest, where even Ned has had the sense to pipe down. Flossie knows the trees with the best hangings, can already picture in his mind peeling back the beautiful copious strands, the green, the wetter green, and the orangey yellow, some meshy, some compact, some, even in winter, with little pinky purply flowers

bedded in them. He already thinks what a beautiful sight it will make on the four walls of the woman’s grave. He has brought six black plastic bags, two for Ned and four for himself, and instructs the young boy not to rush it, the one thing he must not do is to rush it or the mosses will crumble, fall apart, and be useless. Slowly and with infinite care he begins to peel from the roots of the trees, the beech, the oak, and the elm, as Ned watches and follows, unfurling strand after strand, yet now and then Flossie has to shout, “Jesus, don’t rush it, you’re destroying it” and painstakingly they gather their crop and lay the strips along the boulders to dry off.

‘“Tis a pity to be taking it,” Ned says, struck by the rich colors, now that the sun is half up.

“Ah, ‘twill grow again … ‘twill grow even better … that’s nature for you,” Flossie tells him.

Ned doesn’t know death, doesn’t want to know death, yet he is proud to be gathering a carpet that will be cut and trimmed and hung on lines of wire, then pegged to the grave to make it splendid. He knows their house with the rhododendrons and piles of trees around it, two avenues, the back avenue completely overgrown, a haunt for the courting couples. Once he saw the woman with a man’s hat on her, painting the bottom set of gates a silverish color.

“Was she a cousin of yours?” he asks.

“Mind your own feckin’ business,” he is told.

“Sorry, sorry,” Ned says, cowers, and after an awkward silence asks what color dead bones are and is told that they’re a dirty brown and all broken up, except for the skulls, the skulls stay intact, often three or four skulls in the same grave like they’re one family, still fighting it out.

“Did you know her?” Ned asks.

“Sort of” is the answer.

Only a kid when he saw her cross the water park and head for the river. He could tell just by the way she walked back and forth

what was on her mind, pacing, not saying a word to him, eyeing him, wanting him gone out of there, to scoot it because of what she had come to do. Only a kid hut he knew and he knew that she knew he knew, him standing there with the two big goose eggs that barely fitted into the palm of his hand, goose eggs that he had just stolen and she pacing and the river so wild and free and sporting, hungry for anything to be thrown into it, a stick, a rake, a person. She was white as a sheet and fuming at the gall he had by not moving off, her shoes in one hand and her stockings in the other and the waterfall a hundred yards away, spouting a yellow-green foam. He can still see it and hear it and all else, for it was something he had never forgotten nor ever would forget, the picture had never faded, the pallor of the woman, her eyes desperate, darting, wanting him gone because of what she had come to do and without the words begging him to show her a kindness by going away. But he didn’t go because he thought he shouldn’t go. Only a kid but he knew that he must stand his ground. The roar of the water so gushing, the power of it, the thick curdling surface ready to suck anything into itself and go its willful way. He stood his ground, he could still recall it, he with the two big white goose eggs in his hand, the one about to drop, and she with the saddest look he had ever seen and without the words imploring him to let her do what she had come to do. But he wouldn’t and he didn’t and after a long time or after what seemed a long time she walked away, away from the river and back up toward her own place, Rusheen. Not spoken of ever again. How could it. Seeing her at Mass and things over the years. He owed her the moss.

“You see I’m not Jimmy,” he said aloud, and the boy looks at him with a baleful look that is full of wonder.

The pelts of moss are drying out in the bit of sun, the sun’s warmth seeping into them, making the colors to quicken.

Cortege

the wet green world into which the rain has poured and now sunshine lighting upon everything, fields of grass a pulsing green and rivers overflowing, swishing the shores, black-green at the bends, branches forking this way and that and where the odd leaf had clung on, brown and hunched like brown hunched birds, yet the crows swooping and joyous, the rained-on roads drying out, ranges of mountains in the distance a molded blue, at one with the horizon.

Bringing her home to the woodlands she knew.

The hearse is in front and the two mourning cars behind, having made their way cumbrously through the suburbs that sprawled out of Dublin and beyond, picking up a bit of speed on the motorway, then losing their bearings in the first big town because the eejit of a driver, a Dublin jackeen, took the wrong fork, took the Cork road rather than the Limerick one, and her father’s mood changing from one of lament to a scalding irritability. Her father, his friend Vinnie, and Eleanora are in the front car, Terence and Cindy behind, playing their car radio so loud that music could be heard when they came to a standstill in the market town enquiring if a hearse had been sighted, passing through.