by Ross, Orna
The day after, Mom and I set out on what was to be our last day out, to Laragh with the kids. Our little miracle babies, born through the wonders of science, by then seven years old.
I parked in St Kevin's Church, crunching the gears to a halt -- even after twenty-six years in Ireland, I haven't got used to driving a stick car -- and walked round to the passenger side, to help my mother down. Illness and its treatment had made her frail but she still had beauty. Her tan, faded during her prison years, had been resurrected by travel afterwards in Italy and Greece, so that now, at the end of her life, she looked like a white settler in an African colony, leathery skin against long ashy hair that she twisted into a knot at the crown of her head.
Dean was already unstrapping himself and hopping out, poised to run. Are all children always in such a rush? My two can never just wait. "The Hand!" he shouted, leaping to the ground.
Aimee fumbled with her seat belt. Tumbling out, she took up her brother's call. "The Hand! The Hand!" Their name for the water feature in the church grounds, the bronze arm and hand of Saint Kevin.
I walked at my mother's pace, feeling too large as I always did beside her though I am thin now, or reasonably so. By now, I have come to know myself to be what Shando calls present. Myself. A chunk of marble beside a silken gauze. The kids were trying to climb the sculpture.
"Don't get wet, you two," I called, one of those useless motherly interjections that nobody expects to have any influence.
I showed Mom the plaque and read the poem aloud for her. St Kevin and the Blackbird. The poem that ask us to imagine the feel of the warm eggs in our hand, the beat of the bird's breast, the scratch of its claws. To imagine what it would be like to have trained your whole body to succumb, to "become a prayer, entirely".
"'Since the whole thing's imagined anyhow'," my mother read, sitting on the nearby bench, her legs to one side, like a lady riding side-saddle. "imagine being Kevin..' Nice. We should learn it by heart. Poems have to become the marrow in your bones."
All my life, she'd said things like this and ignored how I ignored them.
I saw Aimee was climbing too high, dangling from St Kevin's arm.
"Aimee!" I shouted. "Get down. Now!"
She did and I relaxed and when I looked back, Mom had fixed me with a baleful stare and was putting the manuscript in my lap. "I need you to finish this for me."
"I thought it was finished."
"It has loose ends, bits that need tidying up. And I'd like you to add an afterword."
I was disinclined to please her but I had some better reasons too. "Mom, I can't. I wouldn't know how."
"I need you to. I have no energy for it."
This was a pity-pull on her illness, on the fact that we both knew she hadn't long, but I wasn't going to let myself be manipulated by that. She sighed and reached up to remove the grip that held her hair in place at the crown of her head. It tumbled down, the same colour as the cloud-filtered light around us. She was making an effort to keep her composure.
"Star. Please. You must."
A thinness had taken over the skin around her eyes. Another person wouldn't have been able to tell, but I knew I was making her tired. Now I know why.
This, then, was my life before I read the book. At night, my two children safe in sleep in the bedroom next door, my husband's heartbeat under my hand, down the corridor, trying to get some sleep, my mother. By day, in the rooms around and below us, our home and work, our life's purpose. Beyond us, Wicklow and Ireland in all its beauty. And in my core, despite all my efforts, a heart still pumping jealousy and fear.
If only I'd agreed, taken the manuscript from her, there and then. Nothing would have pleased her more. I knew it. And so, I said no. That's what I live with now.
I never spent one minute more in my mother's company than I had to, so I never got to where I could have said to her, "Why did you do it, Mom?"
Or "Did you do it, Mom?"
She didn't. She didn't do it. That's what the book makes clear. Not only that, but she thought I did. A thought that would make me mad as hell -- the gall of that, the nerve -- if I hadn't done the same to her. And if she hadn't written this, in her letter, even thinking what she thought.
Sometimes, not too often, really not often at all, I allow myself a small imagining. Not a why-oh-why, or a what-if; something closer to a dream.
I am out of prison and back in Doolough and you have read the book. It is dusk in summer and we are walking towards the lake. The fading light has greyed the water that we can glimpse through the trees. The wildflowers are out -- wood avens, honeysuckle, greater bladderwort -- and on the lake's eastern shore, a cluster of white water lilies.
I tell you to keep your eyes alert for young hedgehogs or badgers or foxes that might be coming out to feed. We go down to the water, admiring the stillness that makes it look half-solid, like mercury. We circle round it, pushing through the spot where the pathway knots with nettles and strings of the weed we call Sticky Nelly. I pick fuchsia and show you how to suck the flower for honey.
We deal no reproaches, we let no shadow fall.
We stay out until the bats start to appear and then we leave the lake and turn back the way we came down. I pick another flower, an orchid for my daughter's hair, and we walk, with you just a shade ahead of me, through the slow-gathering darkness, back to the house where my father no longer lives.
She didn't do it. Now that I know, I wonder how I ever could have thought she did.
I didn't think. Blinded by anger, I believed the surface story. I never wondered, I never imagined, I'm not the type. Maybe, deep down, so low I didn't quite know it was there, I thought she had had help. From the great helper himself. Shando, for pity's sake. My only excuse is that I believed her capable of anything and I thought any man would do anything for her.
What does it say of me that I could so misjudge the man I married? What does it say of me that I could think him a murderer -- even for a flash, even deeper-than-deep down -- and still take him as a husband?
Maybe, as he says, I am being too hard on myself. After all, he thought she did it too.
But she didn't, she really didn't.
And now I am left here, forever trying to re-imagine it all.
Which brings me to the straggliest, loosest thread of all: what precisely happened in this house in the years before my mother ran away to America? Her book gives us the scene in the bathroom with Miss September, but nothing after that. She tells us what she told that demented psychotherapist in Santa Paola, but did she not say? She shows us the rebirthing weekend but again leaves so much unanswered.
Always, she is skipping in and around and away from the topic. And then, at the end, it is me she puts beneath him. I'm glad to say that never happened, though it could have. He was a tyrant, my grandfather, but the slinking sort, always scheming and conniving. A snail, leaving a slime wherever he went.
My mother searches hard to find the reason why he was the way he was, and the war can't have helped, but does it explain him? Not to me. That man's elemental hatred, male for female, that's what my mother and I really should have talked about. Because if she didn't do it, and I didn't either, it could only have been him. Who else was there? Shan? Pauline? The idea of either is ridiculous.
No, once your head is clear, nothing else makes sense. It was him. And we should have known it.
Sometimes, I play her trick and make myself imagine him collecting his stash of pills, hiding them where she couldn't find them, salivating over them like a miser over gold. I see him opening the tissue paper or handkerchief in which he kept them on the night he went, I see him putting them between his wasted lips, his tainted teeth...
With what poisonous thoughts? With what mixed motives?
Unanswered questions. My life is full of them.
Imagine us, then, on our last Christmas together in Laragh: two women in a winter churchyard, one a little overweight and reaching middle-age, the other still lovely but on the edge of old.<
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"It's your story too," she said to me and, unable to give her what she wanted, I called out instead to the children, "First to the car gets to choose the story we'll play on the way home!" Bribery, as usual, worked better than nagging and they jumped down, St Kevin's Hand forgotten till next time.
I can't turn back time. I can't change the facts. So I ask you to imagine us just as we were that day. The children, their new, young bodies running, four short legs pumping up the hill to the car that will take them home, to presents and to Daddy and to Christmas dinner. My mother and I behind them, a gap between us as we walked.
I was thinking: what was the point in this drive to write? Whether it succeeded, or failed, or hovered somewhere in between, it hadn't made her happy. That precious book of hers that she wanted me to read so badly would vanish, sooner or later, along with everything else. There were so many books -- far too many -- and only a fraction survive and then not for long. A few centuries if a writer was really gifted and really lucky, a tiny beat of time on planet earth.
So I reasoned as we walked back to the car and drove, in drowsy silence, home.
Now, it's my turn to imagine, what it would be like if I could go back to that day and read the manuscript and learn what we needed to know, while she was still alive to know it. If I could go with her for a walk down by Doolough Lake and look at all the Irish country things she showed me, and see them through her eyes. Accept an orchid for my hair.
"She felt a need for reparation," Shando says, as I try to work it through with him, why she volunteered to be punished for a crime she hadn't committed. "She was taking herself out of the situation, letting us get on with it."
"What a way to do it."
"She didn't choose it, that was the way it presented itself."
"But...It..."
"Yes?" he encourages. His eyes are soft and grey, like clouds.
"It..."
He holds still, deathly still, like I am some shy animal he's just surprised in a wood and I don't know what to say. It's too late. Too late. The saddest words in the English language. But is it really? The thing I didn't understand is how your relationship with somebody can go on changing after they've gone, especially when there's a big book full of their words to have and hold.
And if she were alive, she and I would still be scraping against each other. That, too, is true.
Sometimes I even think it's all just as it should be, like Shan says.
My favorite thing to do now is to go walking by Doolough Lake, imagining all the things I would have said to her if I'd read her book in time -- and saying them anyway. I speak them out loud and listen to her whisper, through the water and the mountains, back to me.
It's her book, not mine, so I leave you with her word. Imagine. Just imagine. Because, as she said to me that last day in Laragh, before I knew enough to understand: it's all imagined anyway.
THE END
BLUE MERCY
Orna Ross
Copyright © 2012 by Orna Ross
The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved.
Published by Font Publications, London, UK.
All enquiries to [email protected].
ISBN: 978-0-9573412-1-0
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