Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  By October, the leg stopped oozing, the flesh having pulled together. Anna imagined the molecules of muscle and skin beneath the surface growing stronger again. The scar was raging red, and she doubted that it would ever be a subtle scar. No, this was going to be a racing stripe that could be viewed from across a dimly lit room. But for now, Anna was the only one who saw the scar, shrouded as it was by her long dress.

  Part of Anna’s daily walk to a nearby meadow and back had been designed to build up her strength again. One day she asked Glenis to take her to the coastline so that she could see where she had been found. Glenis agreed to hitch up the horse and drive the cart to the shore where Anna had been found.

  On the designated morning, the mist was thick, and Anna at first worried that the drive to the coast would be out of the question.

  Glenis laughed. “If we let go of everything due to fog, we’d stay in our beds all day long. This will blow off by midday or sooner.”

  Anna could not tell if they were going south or east or west, because the roads curved and turned, and even when they approached the sea coast, she was still confused by where exactly they were. Glenis set the brake on the cart and swung down when they found an agreeable spot with cliffs in sight. Anna grabbed her walking stick and eased herself down, still keeping most of her weight on the good leg. She followed Glenis through closely shorn ground cover with hints of sheep nearby: Bits of sheep wool clung to stickery bushes, and round scat dotted the ground.

  “This is where it began,” said Glenis. “The farmers who live closer to the cliffs saw the lights from a ship, and they knew right away that it was too close to the rocks. We need a good lighthouse here, that’s what we need. There have been too many swollen bodies tossed ashore with their eyes eaten out by the fishes.”

  Anna flinched. “Glenis, please! My nephew was with me, and I don’t like thinking about him without his eyes.” She had learned that Glenis was unblinkingly honest.

  Both women faced the Atlantic, and their dresses blew against their legs. A path led down the cliffs to the shore.

  Glenis pointed to the left. “That’s Kinsale there with the ships and the smoke from the port town.” She nodded with her head for them to continue walking.

  “If he’s dead, he won’t be needing his eyes. The fish might as well have them. Then, of course, we eat the fish…”

  “Glenis!” snapped Anna. Then she reconsidered. She needed Glenis to help her. “Look, I’m sorry. Where I come from in the city, we don’t see death every day like you do. I don’t have sheep, or cows, or even chickens. But I am desperate to find my nephew. I know he’s alive, I know it. And I’m responsible for dragging him with me on a trip that he didn’t willingly go on. And my brother is so badly injured. Can you see why I can’t rest until I find him? Wouldn’t you do the same?”

  “Aye, I’d want to set things proper. I’d want to know if the sea had taken him or not.”

  Glenis was younger by a few years, a fact that had shocked Anna when she’d learned it. Glenis was twenty-eight, six years younger than Anna. Aside from the three children that Anna knew of, another had died in childbirth and a fifth had died of pleurisy in his first year. As if Glenis had been reading Anna’s thoughts, she asked, “You’ve no children then?”

  Anna knew this inquiry could go down a slippery slope. She spoke with caution, trying to see ahead of each turn.

  “I had three miscarriages and then my husband left me. Not just because of the miscarriages, but it was part of it. He left me for another woman. We were granted a divorce,” she said, knowing that the divorce part was going to be the showstopper. Divorce had only become legal in Ireland in 1997.

  “They do that in America? So you’re free to marry again, free to go your own way? You’re not Catholic for sure.” Glenis cocked her head toward a turn in the path leading to the ocean, and they continued along it.

  “We are Catholic, but in an irregular sort of way. We don’t attend often.”

  “And is that because of you being divorced? Were you banned from church?”

  “No. It’s because I wanted to try other churches when I was a kid. And then I decided that I could figure out my own relationship with God.” Anna stopped herself from going on about the Catholic Church; it would have nothing to do with the moment in time where she and Glenis stood. What would Glenis think about her friend Jasper, who was gay, or women who demanded more power in the church, the right to conduct services?

  “Could you now?” Glenis put her hands on her hips. A gull swooped up on an obliging air current and floated in space, surveying the two women.

  Anna did not want to debate religion with Glenis because she felt inadequate with the particulars of religion and distant from the Catholicism that her own parents had abandoned.

  “Will you show me again where they said I was found? Let’s walk down the trail until my leg howls.”

  Anna followed Glenis along the hairpin footpath, giving weight to her walking stick, sucking in the charged air off the ocean. Glenis looked back to judge Anna’s ability.

  “I grew up on these trails, so they’re no different to me than walking around the cottage, or down the lane to the neighbor’s for trading milk. But you’re not going to last long. Remember, it’s not just the walking down part; we must come back up again, and I’ll not carry you.”

  Anna was already sweating with the effort of keeping her full weight off her injured leg. Streams of sweat ran down her back and collided with the waistband of her skirt. Getting to the beach looked insurmountable; getting back up again looked impossible. They were on a level stretch of the path, a plateau before the next corner and descent. She placed her feet into the well-grooved path, followed for hundreds of years by people and animals.

  “You could be right. Could we stop here and rest?” asked Anna.

  “We’ll stop here and rest and be grateful to get back to the top again.”

  Anna looked up, and the top of the cliff already loomed far away. She found a soft spot among the rocks and sat down. Glenis did the same. Anna’s leg throbbed.

  “Why would someone have been looking along the shore when I was found?” asked Anna.

  “This is part of the major shipping lane that connects our Cobh to England and France. Ships often anchor a mile off the shore and send smaller vessels to take off passengers and freight. In storms such as the one that you were found in, ships can go aground. All that is found on the shore from their wrecks is fair for the taking. And we are all raised on the sea—we know the rhythms of her, and some of us can tell when she has spit out something that needs saving. Such as yourself.”

  “After I was found, did people look for other survivors?”

  “To be sure we did. The beaches were scoured. Old Mr. Sweeney’s wolfhounds were borrowed for the task and sent galloping along the shores for miles in each direction. If there was a scent of man to be found, those hounds would have picked it up. That was the odd thing. Not another person, dead or alive, was found, and not a bit of wreckage. Seems odd, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I think everything about this is very odd,” said Anna. She lay back on her elbows. When she did, she found Glenis’s face silhouetted by the sun and her hair ignited in russet tones. But Anna thought she heard an edge, a place where Glenis was made of grit and scar tissue. Was Glenis suspicious of her story? Anna knew it would be best not to explain herself unless Glenis asked her a direct question. Endless police suspects had incriminated themselves over the ages by blathering on rather than just being silent. Nothing wrong with being silent. Anna, however, had been only partially successful. She sat up again, dislodging the cloak of the sun’s shadow on Glenis.

  “I’ve no sense of direction. How far is Kinsale?”

  Glenis faced the ocean and pointed to the left. “That way, about four miles. Beyond that another fifteen miles is Cork, a mass of people if ever there was one. Cobh is the main harbor for Cork, a spit of an island sitting in the bay.”

  “Shoul
d we try to go back now?” asked Anna. “Thank you for making us stop here and not trying to get to the bottom of the cliff; I am exhausted by coming this far. You’re wiser than I am. And thank you for tending to me and letting me stay with you in your home. I’ve never had anyone be this kind to me, not like this.”

  Glenis put her hand on Anna’s elbow and helped her up. “Surely friends help friends. That’s how we all get by. It’s nothing. Come on now, we’ll walk slow, like two old ladies all dressed in black.” Glenis shook her head as if to dislodge the image she had just created. “No, let’s not picture ourselves dressed in black yet. Let’s not mourn anything on this fine day. Step lively, step as lively as you can, my friend.”

  They walked the path together. Glenis hummed a tune, but Anna thought only of Cork, with a mass of people where a teenage boy might blend in. If he was still alive.

  Chapter 13

  Joseph’s first order of business, if he was going to travel about the manor at night, was to oil the hinges on his door and the six doorways that led to the lower levels of the kitchen. Through the kitchen were the servants’ quarters. What would be most like 3-IN-ONE oil or WD–40? Whale oil was available, and lard could be easily acquired, but he worried that the entire house might smell like something had died.

  To begin, he took a tiny bit of whale oil from one of the library lamps and persuaded a drop or two into the hinges of his own door first. His door was the most important one. Once his door was silent, he’d be free to work on the others. How did people sleep around here with these humongous doors screeching like bugles? He worked the hinge back and forth during the day until he was satisfied with the smooth glide of metal gliding on oil. Then he allowed two days for everyone to get used to the change from screech to silence when he opened the door to his guest chambers.

  Several days later, he poured a small amount of whale oil from another lamp, this time from the gun room, and oiled the hinges of the door that led from the wing of the house filled with bedchambers to the great rooms. The main doors to the house were important. The hounds outside howled as soon as the doors to the manor opened, so he had to work on them when the full bustle of the day’s activities distracted the dogs. By the time he had worked his way to the main doors, he had practiced on dozens of others, and he’d become both efficient and fast. Joseph then worked his way to the kitchen. By oiling one door every few days, he arrived there three weeks after the start of his project. Now he could get to Taleen without alerting the colonel or Mr. Edwards. Now he could do what he’d wanted to do since the first day he’d seen her. It was as if she was calling to him each night. He could hear her voice in his head. No one had ever said his name the way Taleen had the few times they had been alone.

  Joseph found any excuse to talk with Deirdre, hoping that Taleen would be in the kitchen. He had tried not to stare at the girl, not to feel the heat of her narrow body, or let his eyes linger on her white neck with the tendrils of black hair that escaped from her hair cap. Each time she turned her head and lifted her eyes to his, he thought that his body would explode.

  Joseph knew the way Taleen’s hands would feel on him before she ever touched him. He knew they’d not be all that soft; she worked ferociously hard in the massive lower-level kitchen, taking directions from her mother, Deirdre, who was the almighty ruler of the servant realm. But he imagined the temperature of her hands, warm, as if they came from bathwater.

  When Taleen did touch him, his body suddenly remembered her touch. They encountered each other on the stone stairway. He had been descending, clattering like the percussion section of a band with his British boots. She had skittered up the steps in a birdlike way, not quite touching the steps. But that couldn’t be; he knew she had to touch the steps. Or could she have been like the mallards on the pond that seemed to run along the water while their wings beat downward to keep them afloat? The two of them arrived at the narrow turn in the stairs at the same time. She reached her arm out, perhaps to stop him from crushing her, but she ended up with her palm pressed against his solar plexus. What had his father told him about grounding wires and electricity? He wasn’t sure now, as that time of his life grew dimmer every day—except for the memory of the grounding wire, whatever that was, because that is how he felt when Taleen reached out and touched his suddenly vulnerable torso beneath the arch of his ribs. A current of alarming energy ran from her hand and galloped jagged lines along his spine, raised a huge ruckus at his penis, and then sped down his legs and out the soles of his highly polished boots. The moisture in his mouth had gone south as well, leaving his tongue thick and ponderous.

  “Taleen,” he managed to say, and he was richly rewarded when her slender face erupted in a smile. She placed her hand on his forearm and kept it there for ten seconds, then an amazing twenty, then he put his other hand on hers, and there they stood.

  “I touched you once before, when they plucked you out of the sea. You were naked and cold. My mother set the men to banking fires. I placed my hands on your feet and started to warm you.”

  Naked? His twenty-first-century brain sat up. She’d seen him naked? A red tide began at his chest and, like the Nile River, ran north. He felt the heat of the blush rising, igniting everything in its path until it reached his ears. Suddenly they heard more footsteps, coming from the top of the stairs in a sharp rhythm. An outside force threatened to burst them apart.

  “The far garden wall tonight,” said Joseph, two seconds before Mr. Edwards converged on them. Joseph and Taleen shot apart, he descending, she climbing upwards.

  Later, when Joseph knew that the colonel had retired for the night, he slid out of his room, boots in hand, and padded to the end of the hall, through the next hall, then to the lower level, through the two main rooms, then out the side door, where he sat and pulled on his boots. All the doors opened and closed in smooth, oiled silence. He had counted on a clear sky because he’d wanted the full moon to be with them. And because the entire universe was now turning in his favor, the sky was indeed uncharacteristically clear. The full moon shot buckets of creamy light along the garden path. He stayed to the grasses and hugged the massive garden walls, built to encourage the fruit trees by warming them. And there, at the end of the old wall, was the new wall construction. He had just visited the stonemason during the day. There, there she was, and next to her was the dark outline of the dog Madigan, looking every bit like a small dragon, with his long snout and impressive fangs.

  Joseph had never been this close to another person before, not in this way and not with this intention, so he had never needed the words to describe the flush along his neck. If there were such words, he had never heard them from Oscar or the guys on the wrestling team. Did such words exist? He turned shy so suddenly that he worried he might weep. Words fell out of his mouth.

  “I felt you once in my legs before I ever met you. I can’t tell you how,” he said. “It’s like a memory.”

  Without hesitation, Taleen reached for one of his hands, then the other, until they faced each other with only a sliver of space between them. As if they had always meant to find this spot along this garden wall at this very moment, they pressed into each other. Joseph released a sigh from his old life and drew in a fresh, clean life layered with Taleen.

  Madigan suddenly jumped up and flung his paws on either side of Joseph’s shoulders, smashing the girl between dog and boy. Madigan’s long snout was eye level with Joseph.

  “Madigan, it’s no trouble now. Get down. Here, come down,” said Taleen with a laugh in her voice, pushing the hound off them.

  “He’s protecting you. That’s good,” Joseph said, finding the sweet spot behind Madigan’s ears, rubbing with firm pressure.

  “Is it protecting that I need?” asked Taleen. Before he could answer, she did the most extraordinary thing that Joseph had ever experienced. She stood on the tips of her toes and reached for his face, pulled him close, and rubbed her cheek along his, first one side and then the other. He had seen cats do the very
same thing when they were marking something as theirs, leaving their scent.

  The October chill did nothing to cool them. They sank to the ground, and their clothes fell off like leaves. Her skin was deliciously soft, marked by surprising muscles along her thin arms and legs. He touched her breasts and a puff of sound escaped her lips. When she touched his sex, everything that he had ever believed about himself changed, and he wept unashamed. He slid his hand across her hips and found the sweet mound of hair.

  “Taleen?”

  She answered with a press of her body. They made love cautiously the first time, absorbing the pain of newness. Taleen clasped him to her, and they found the pleasure of it again and again.

  Madigan huffed to the ground, resting his head on his paws. From time to time, when Joseph would pull his face from the tangle of Taleen’s hair, Madigan stared up at him with his amber eyes, as if to say, So now it’s the three of us.

  Chapter 14

  Joseph ran his hands down one sleeve, where he met the confident cuff and the slight resistance of the wool against his fingertips. He inhaled the intoxication of love and power intertwined, pulling snug his young testicles, expanding his smooth chest. He was on top of the social heap here. He pictured a triangle of social importance, and he gloried in being at the pinnacle. The air on top was invigorating, and the advantage of being able to look down made him feel invulnerable. In high school, his body had ached from the weight of being so far down in the social heap, holding up the entire structure, just as the servants here held up the manor.