The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  His gaze settles on the round windows in the east wing above the kitchen. These four portholes, which pour light into the loft, have always baffled him. Why, twelve miles inland from the sea, did a nineteenth-century architect insert four ship’s windows into the design of a Georgian house? He turns ninety degrees to the left, in the direction of the river and the light reflecting up from the water. Constant river traffic in those days, boats and barges coming up on the tide with supplies for the town. The architect acknowledging the river’s presence, he thinks. More to it than that, something more deliberate and specific. His eyes linger on the portholes, mulling their enigma. Clearly visible to passing vessels. He imagines a head appearing at one of the portholes … a woman’s face. The lady of the house, standing there by prior arrangement maybe. A love sailing away, forbidden love – the architect himself – leaving, and this the last glimpse. Remember me always.

  Go home, Lily! He chases the cat back up to the house. Little madam, venturing this far down the avenue. If anything ever happened to her … Above, a fly-past of swallows, or starlings – he can never tell the difference. He watches them for a few moments. No high jinks, no murmurations this time of year. Rounding the last bend on the avenue he steps onto the grass verge and walks between two rows of the oak plantation he planted six years ago. One morning a few months after Josie’s death, four words arrived to him out of sleep: twelve thousand oak saplings. Memorial of Josie. Sequesters of carbon. His mother said nothing when he told her his plan. Thinking, What’ll you plant for me?

  Nervously, his eyes scan the tree trunks. He’s barely able to look. He moves along the row. No sign of canker, no oozing. He examines the leaf tips. No dieback. He moves from row to row, going deeper into the plantation. He has avoided checking them for weeks. Fourteen thousand oaks were felled in Guagán Barra last month. He could lose the entire twelve thousand. Phytophthora ramorum is general all over Ireland, one of several plagues arriving from the east. Dutch elm, sudden oak, beech wilt, sweet chestnut blight. Bleeding canker. He can see the future – the end of wood-lined roads, parks, riverbanks, towns no longer sheltered by ash.

  He walks on. Trees calm his naked nerves. The sight of a tree, especially in winter, bare against the sky, beautiful. He stands and strokes a trunk. So young and tender and innocent. It’s easy to be innocent when you’re a tree. Maybe he should say a prayer for them. Make a deal with God: Spare my oaks and I’ll cover this land with trees. Trees will be my legacy, like the great oak and beech stands on the Duke’s estate three miles away. A few hundred years from now, someone will stand here before gnarled trees and huge crooked roots and discern something of these times, of this family. That German forester who wrote about the hidden life of trees, how they are bound together in families, communicating through a web of underground fungi. Mycelium. Sending warning signals when danger approaches, feeding the weak with nutrients. He squats down, listening. Around him, the trees are alert, leaves talking, roots entwining, branches bowing down in grief for lost loved ones.

  As he makes his way out of the plantation he is gripped by a spasm of pain. The pain is behind, in the vicinity of his kidneys. He rubs his back. If he dropped dead now, he might not be found for days. No one would miss him. After a day or two of not hearing from him Ellen would be worried and walk up to the house and let herself in, and, finding the remains of his breakfast on the table and the scavenging cats, she would raise the alarm.

  At the end of the avenue he turns left and walks along the road towards the town. To his right the glitter of water, familiar, beautiful, unknown too. You get used to beauty, he thinks, you grow immune, you devour it with greedy eyes. On the other side of the stone wall, little black and white, thin-legged birds hop along the riverbank, turning their heads jerkily to the right and left. Some kind of tits or finches or wagtails. The luckiest of all creatures, birds. Escaped from reptilian existence eons ago to flit through sunlit meadows and rise into the heavens. Soul carriers in the running sky, translating nature’s vibrations into song for human ears. No worries either, God will always provide. The way they fly down and befriend captive men, men in camps, men at the edge of reason.

  He looks across the river to the Boathouse on the wharf, and beside it, among the willows, eight architect-designed houses with exposed stone and glass walls and red cladding. Built during the boom five or six years ago and over-priced at the time, scarcely half of them are occupied now. Susceptible to gleam and glass and glossy brochures, he almost bought one as an investment. Up above the town, Clonduff House, partly concealed behind trees, nestles into the hill. From this perch the Blake family look down on the town and the surrounding countryside. If they deign to look at all, that is. Behind the house and the sloping lawn, the barns, stables, milking parlour, glasshouses and poly-tunnels are well hidden from the town. Unmarked trucks with their cargo of Clonduff Farm organic fruit and vegetables come and go through the back gates of the estate, the fruit and veg destined for the shelves of Fortnum & Mason’s and Harrods. Modelled on the Prince of Wales’s enterprise in Cornwall, Luke thinks, though more discreet and with not as much as a nod to the townspeople below. Still, the Blake place is not a patch on Dunmore Castle and estate, the Duke of Berkshire’s place three miles away. There are hierarchies everywhere and, compared to the Berkshires, the Blakes are only second-fiddle aristocrats. As a young man Luke’s father and grandmother were invited for the pre-hunt hot toddies on the lawn of Clonduff House every St Stephen’s Day – a nod, Luke supposes, to their almost castle-Catholic status. From up there, his father told him, there’s a splendid view out over the town and surrounding countryside and Ardboe House – their house – below on the river plain, the closest of all the big houses in the valley.

  A car drives out of the town along the Dunmore road, then slows and turns left onto the bridge. Luke salutes the driver, then walks on. As he enters the town, a huge SuperValu truck edges its way up Main Street between parked cars. A band of gulls passes over the rooftops, a long way from the sea at Errish now. Luke pauses on the footpath outside SuperValu and the glass doors slide open. A jeep turns into the yard of O’Donnell’s Hardware and, as it disappears, the grey double doors of O’Grady’s garage next door open and John O’Grady secures the bolt in the ground. There’s no stir yet at either the Tavern Bar or the Sportsman’s Inn across the street.

  ‘Luke O’Brien, you should fuck off back to Dublin.’

  Startled, he turns. Dilly Madden is beside him. Wild snow-white hair, pale face, red lipstick, red dress, pink beads – in full manic regalia today. She puts a hand on his arm. She must feel the hop in his nerves. Still, he welcomes this intrusion into his thoughts. This is my life now, he muses, when the yelp of a madwoman and the clasp of a madwoman’s hand are the most welcome things in my day. He has a soft spot for Dilly. She was his mother’s only friend in her last years. Two brazen, broken, outspoken women. Drinking, throwing back their heads laughing. Sans decorum.

  She is clacking her tongue now. ‘What’s keeping you here, Luke?’ She sounds sane. Her voice is soft, concerned. ‘In the name of God will you go back to Dublin, like a good lad. Sure there’s nothing for you here.’ The tiny lines of a smoker radiate out from her mouth. She’s whiskery too. His mother was the same. Hormonal, more testosterone in some women, or something to do with the menopause maybe. Josie was the worst, always sprouting tough black hairs. ‘Hairy baconface’, Lucy called her. His cruel sister.

  ‘I know, Dilly, I know. You’re right.’

  He wonders when she got out of St Declan’s. She was sectioned in April – the daughter put her in. Sometimes she goes in of her own accord, taking Dillon’s hackney into Waterford. In for the shelter, she says. She was inside when his mother died. He visited her a few weeks later, having a great need to talk to someone who knew and loved his mother. Dilly didn’t want to hear about the funeral. She wanted only to talk about herself. She told him things that day that he wishes he never heard.

  ‘Lock up that house, L
uke, and go back to your teaching job. This bloody town’ll kill you if you don’t. I’m telling you, it’ll eat you alive. Mark my words.’ She had cancer a few years ago and wore a bad wig for a while. ‘Above there in that big house on your own … A young man like you? It’s not right! You should be living your life.’

  He nods. Wonders if she remembers what she told him that day in Declan’s.

  ‘I will, Dilly, I’ll go back at some stage. But … ah, you know yourself, I don’t like leaving Ellen.’

  ‘Don’t mind Ellen. Ellen is grand, there’s not a bother on Ellen. She has a nice warm house and a good pension. You can’t be nursing old women all your life – you’ve done enough of that now.’ She tut-tuts again. ‘Where’s that nice girl you used to bring down here before? Your mother thought a lot of her. Go back to her!’

  Poor Dilly in Declan’s day room that day, doped to the eyeballs. What do you do here all day, Dilly? He was only trying to make conversation. Do you read, Dilly? I’m not here to read, she said, I’m here to be mad. And then the talk came in torrents. She gave birth to a child when she was sixteen, fathered by her eldest brother, Michael. Michael Madden, respected town councillor, prosperous businessman, married for forty years with a grown-up family. Down the toilet it went with a plop, she said, I didn’t know what was happening. She tapped her head with her index finger. There’s a kink in every family, she whispered.

  He touches her shoulder gently. ‘I have to go, Dilly, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’ He has to get away from her pained body.

  He enters SuperValu and picks up a basket. Potatoes, carrots for the eyesight, McCloskey’s granary bread. Comté cheese. Coke. He buys the same staples every time. A sirloin at the meat counter. From the fridge, Denny’s hickory flavoured rashers, a half-pound of Denny’s sausages … Always Denny’s. Around a long time, 1904 at least. Leopold Bloom waiting at the butcher’s counter and the next-door girl asking for a pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. Bloom sneaking a look at her, fine pair of swinging hips on her. A bit mean of him, all the same, calling them hams. He puts his hand on a Clonakilty black pudding, then changes his mind. Cooked spicy pig’s blood. He moves along the fridge to the chickens, naked under cellophane, open pores where feathers were plucked, fat breasts injected with God-knows-what to plump them up. Short painful life in cages. Never eats them any more. Joyce liked chicken. His eye doctor in Paris called to the flat one evening. Clothes strewn everywhere, the state of the place, and Joyce and Nora sitting on the floor, a pan with a chicken carcass between them, a half-empty bottle of wine beside them.

  At the end of an aisle he casts a quick glance up ahead. Tea, coffee, breakfast cereals, Mrs Whelan, his old English teacher from St Mary’s, now retired. He nods, smiles. ‘Lovely day, Mrs Whelan.’ It is indeed. He dawdles a bit, not wanting to be seen rushing to the wine. Aisle of flour, sugar, raisins, currants, sultanas, cornflour, Bird’s Custard. Cowardy cowardy custard. The sight of the red, yellow and blue container brings a flash of nostalgia. Sunday dinner, Mammy, Dadda, Josie, Lucy and, every summer, Ellen home from America. As he reaches for a microwaveable carton it strikes him that, other than Ellen, Dilly Madden might be the last person in the town who cares about him. As he places the carton of custard into his basket he catches the sweet scent of vanilla. Lucy loved the scrapings of the saucepan: custard, rice, semolina, porridge. Let the bottom brown, Mammy. Laced with sugar, melty, silvery sheen. His mouth begins to water. He’ll lob a spoon of ice cream into a bowl of hot custard later – delicious, the hot and cold sweet melt. Lucy is in Brisbane now. 28 Pear Street, Auchenflower. Came home alone for Mammy’s funeral two years ago. Wonder if her kids have inherited her tastes and habits. Oliver and Ellie. Sunny days in the back garden – the back yard they call it, like the Yanks. Jim lighting the barbecue in the evenings. The pretty wooden house that Jim built. No, renovated. He built the deck and the barbie, even the cot when Oliver was born. Jim Mitchell, a carpenter from Banagh, fifteen years her senior. In a past era, it would have been regarded as an elopement. Jim must be nearly fifty now. He’s ageing well, looking fit and tanned in photos. He doesn’t have the smarts that Lucy has. Luke goes on Facebook some nights and peeks at their life, hits ‘Like’, and occasionally adds a comment. Oliver is seven; he looks a bit soft, a bit girly. Might be gay. It’s obvious in some, there’s no hiding it. Screamers, Oisín Kelly called them – they come out of their mothers screaming it.

  He checks his watch. Brisbane is ten hours ahead. Lucy will be going to bed now. Or making the kids’ lunches for school or laying things out for breakfast. No, tomorrow is Saturday. Winter there. He stops and reaches for a bottle of bleach, then changes his mind. Need to allow for the weight of wine. Rioja, or maybe a Barbera … cúpla buidéal, it being Friday. Or a nice crisp white maybe. An image of the evening ahead rises: sitting out on the lawn as the sun sets, sipping a dry white, chilled to perfection.

  Outside, he leaves the bags down on the footpath and lights a cigarette. One of these winters, he’ll visit Lucy. Christmas dinner on the beach. He hasn’t been much of a brother – he should have gone out that time Ellie was ill. Febrile convulsions. Nearly lost her. Josie had epilepsy all her life. Wonder if Lucy admitted the fault line to the doctors. The falling sickness. The suggestible nature of certain words – he can feel the gravitational pull of those. Lear had it. Tis very like he hath the falling sickness. The sudden, frightening way that Josie used to fall forward. Once, while she was on the ground, Lucy chalked around her limp body. He remembered that when Ellie was sick. He was afraid something was coming home to roost for Lucy, some bad karma.

  He throws away the cigarette butt. Too early to go home – the day is stretching out before him. He heads up the hill towards the square. The shopping bags are heavier than he expected. John O’Grady, sitting inside the garage window, looks up as he passes and Luke nods at him. He doubts if John is a trained mechanic at all; probably just fell into the family business. Never married, sits there in the window all day waiting for customers.

  Suddenly he remembers: Caesar it was, not Lear, who had epilepsy. King George, too. Such a medieval-sounding ailment, consistent with a flat earth, Galileo, burnings at the stake. Haemophilia is like that too. The poor devils, thinking they had only one skin.

  Up ahead John-Joe Cleary crosses the street, heading for the Sullane Valley Hotel for the €5 lunch. It used to be a fine place; had the meal there after Dadda’s funeral. Now, the clientele is OAPs and bachelors. Wonder what’s on the menu today. John-Joe was a good friend to Dadda always, helping out around the farm for years. He still helps out up at Blake’s during the hunting season. Every now and again he goes on a bender. A quiet boozer, never a nuisance. Probably waiting for the mother to die and leave him the house. You’ll never miss your mother till. Never saw him with a woman. Probably a bit afraid of women, thinks they’re complicated. Keep life simple, get the €5 lunch every day. Before you know it, you’re fifty. Wake up one day and you’re sixty. Not long left then. An ease when it’s all over.

  Luke crosses the street, slows as he passes the hotel door and reads the chalkboard menu. Bacon and cabbage today. Inside, it’s dark, with no sign of John-Joe. Too late now to enter, he thinks. Anyway he’s not hungry. Wouldn’t mind a chat with John-Joe though. Often has the impression John-Joe keeps something back, that he knows more about Luke than Luke himself knows. But Luke trusts him – John-Joe is faithful to his father’s memory and to the family. Some residual sympathy still exists for the family, going back to the double tragedy in 1941 when his father’s twelve-year-old sister, Una, fell down the well on New Year’s Day and their father dropped dead in the yard six months later. Those who remember are dying out now, and the sympathy is waning.

  The sun burns down on his head. He continues along Main Street, past Kealy’s bar. His father was wearing a tweed waistcoat with a pocket-watch when he walked into Kealy’s and first laid eyes on his mother on a summer’s evening almost forty years ago. Who do you think you are, you
and your waistcoat? she thought, as she pulled his pint. Fifteen years her senior and countless stations above her, he was instantly smitten. She’d been a barmaid in Coventry, escaping, for a few years, the drunken father and cowed mother and the two-roomed cottage full of kids on the side of Croghan mountain. He spent a long time courting her, convincing her. The waistcoat still hangs in the wardrobe, its girth too great for Luke.

  He crosses the street to the shade and sits on the windowsill of a boarded-up terraced house. Half the houses and shops in the town are boarded up. The feeling of decay and dereliction always in the air. Stagnancy. Listlessness in the young men – nothing to do, no work – hanging around the town. He feels a little light-headed. He reaches into one of the bags and brings out the bottle of Coke and takes a few slugs. The street is deserted. At the top of the hill, teachers’ cars are parked in a line in the lay-by outside the primary school. Inside, he pictures little heads bent over desks. Not long now before the summer holidays.

  He heads out the Dunmore road. He does not want to go home. He remembers the can of gloss paint waiting in the basement. He turns left onto the bridge, leaves down his bags and leans on the wall. Below him, the glimmer of water, the play of sunlight and wind and trees and sky on the surface, the currents and underwater motion almost invisible. Reeds, green and nervy, rise from the shallows. He turns his head. Half a mile downriver, the concrete bunker of the abandoned chicken factory is just visible beyond the trees. Decades’ worth of chicks hatched out at one end. Birth to death in a hundred yards. Other dark goings-on there too for years. Poor boys from the terraces desperate for summer jobs and Vinnie Molloy, supervisor, pervert, brute, had the giving of the jobs. For certain favours rendered. Conor Mahon. Sean Byron. Kevin Kelly. Trying not to cry out with the pain. Always the poor who get raped.