The Visitors

by Patrick O'Keeffe

  —It was not my uncle, and not one of Dad’s friends, Zoë said.

  —He doesn’t want to hurt you, or maybe he feels guilty, I said.

  —But it’s a lie, James. When he’s drinking, he tells me how much he still loves my mom. He says their marriage should never have ended, he regrets it did, but I’m just not going to call him or answer his calls for a long time.

  —That will send the proper message, my dear.

  On the walk back, the shadows of the corn stalks darkened the path. I sliced my hand up and down through the swarming midges and made jokes about The Three Musketeers. At the oak Zoë took the blanket from the bag and spread it. I leaned over her shoulder and unzipped the green dress down her curved and bony back while she fumbled with my shirt buttons and unzipped my pants. And things worked. And it was over within the usual time and you felt sore in the usual places. You were both lying back and that feeling was washing over you—maybe like when a well slowly fills back up. Zoë had put her sunglasses on. We passed a cigarette back and forth. And we didn’t talk for a long time.

  I sat up and buttoned my shirt. Zoë sat up. I zipped her dress up.

  —Only connect, my dear, she said.

  —If only, my dear, I said.

  We were laughing when I knelt beside her and crushed a mosquito that was digging into her upper shoulder. A drop of blood appeared. I dabbed the blood with my sock. Then I put my socks and shoes on, stood, zipped my pants, buckled my belt, and said we should hit the road before some trigger-happy farmer found two townies having their sweet way with each other on the bank of his so-called river.

  —You have watched too many bad American movies, my dear, Zoë said.

  —I’m ready to be back home, my dear, I said.

  I was looking across the stream, into the field. The cows were gone. A milking machine was buzzing.

  When the brown roof appeared, Zoë took off the sunglasses and said she was not breaking up with her boyfriend in Austin. They had been together for too long. In three years he’d finish medical school and they’d move back east.

  —I can’t start over again, my dear, she added.

  —You don’t have to say anything for my benefit, my dear, I said.

  —I know I don’t, my dear.

  Zoë slipped the sunglasses back on.

  I pulled into the driveway. We talked about knocking on the door but decided to wait. He and his aunt would see us out here. A few radiant stars shone on the edge of the dusky cornfield. Frogs were croaking.

  —Whatever happened between you and that woman, Sarah, my dear? You have never mentioned her.

  —Yes, I have, my dear.

  —Not once, my dear.

  —You’d remember it, my dear.

  —I would, my dear.

  —You mention the starving millions to Sarah and she starts talking about the awful food in her private high school cafeteria—

  —It’s not an uncommon response in our little world, my dear—

  —Her family didn’t trust me, my dear. They saw me as immigrant trash. I’d struggled at the community college, and had just started at the university. Sarah had written her dissertation, and the family complained that I should be more accomplished, that I lacked ambition. Of course, they were dead right there. But why didn’t you go to university in Ireland? Don’t they have them over there? Those sorts of questions they asked me every time we met. And I couldn’t explain it. And why the fuck should you have to. Once her lawyer brother-in-law railed at me as to why the bloodthirsty Catholics didn’t all leave Northern Ireland. Leave it if they were so discontented. I tried to explain to him it was about home. And there was a long and complicated history to it. He didn’t get it. Nightmares, Zoë.

  —Your average, ignorant American clan, James—

  —It was me who was ignorant, Zoë. They were being who they were, and if we don’t knock on his aunt’s door, my dear, we might be sitting out here all night watching stars and fireflies and listening to frogs that don’t turn into shit.

  We stepped out of the car and headed across the yard. I walked ahead.

  —But you must miss her, my dear—

  —No, I don’t, my dear. She hooked up with an old professor. He had recently divorced. It was his third, and Sarah got some sweet position where he worked.

  —How convenient, my dear—

  —But I needed her, my dear. And she needed me. Or I’d like to think she did—but we were in different places. And when it was good it was fine. When it was bad it was unbearable. And she mostly acted like she was doing me a favor, to tell you the truth. But I was new then. I was lonely, I could put up with things. Put up with people. I suppose I was afraid, and wanted to fit in. And Sarah helped me fit right in—

  —You were not in love with her—

  —Who and what I thought I was supposed to be—

  The steps were wet. Or it was the shadows of the flowerpots. I pulled open the screen and knocked once on the stained-glass door. The small empty porch and the glass lit up. The door opened and a tall, skinny woman with a long, furrowed sunburned face and blond streaks in her hair stood there. She was probably in her late fifties. I held on to the screen. I smiled. The woman did not. Behind me I felt Zoë was smiling.

  —We’re here to pick up Walter, I said.

  —And who are you? she asked.

  —We got held up. A nice river, like your nephew said, I said.

  —There’s no nephew of mine here, she said.

  —The gentleman with the backpack, Zoë said. —We dropped him off here and told him we would return. We’re late. The river was beautiful. It was hard to leave it. But you are not Walter’s aunt?

  —He’s not Walter. I’m no aunt. And he ain’t no gentleman, she said.

  —Well, fancy that, I said.

  —He left a while ago. Made him leave.

  —We should have been here earlier, Zoë said.

  —So if Walter is not his name, what then is it, I said.

  —Jeremy, she said. —And I ain’t seen him in almost twenty years. Not since the day he left. But he came to give money to our son. Said he wanted to do it years ago. Got close to doing it before, he said, but got cold feet. Cold feet. But I said to him it was too late. Years too late, because we don’t have no son anymore. My husband is here soon. And your vehicle is where he likes to park.

  —I’m sorry to hear about your son, Zoë said.

  —Me, too. I’m very sorry, I said.

  —Second time he got into a car, she said. —Drove too fast and drove into a telephone pole. If the pole wasn’t there, his car would have went on into the cornfield. But I have another son, and a girl—

  —So Walter is Jeremy, I said.

  —My son’s name was Walter, she said. —The man you dropped off here is Jeremy. His dad’s name was Walter—

  —He said his dad was a preacher, Zoë said.

  —Don’t remember anymore, the woman said. —And I didn’t ask him where he’d been all these years. Don’t need to know. Don’t care. He got up one day and left. Didn’t say anything about where he was going. Why he was doin’ it. But I don’t want to know why he done it. All’s I know is he did.

  —Do you know where Jeremy went? I asked.

  —I don’t know, and I didn’t want to take his money, she said. —He left it here. Don’t want his money. Right on the table. I’ll give it to my church. And my husband parks where your car is at.

  —We should be getting back, Zoë said.

  —I don’t mean to be unkind to folks, the woman said. —But I haven’t had the best day.

  —We apologize, Zoë said.

  The woman waved her hands at the bugs, stepped away from the door, and shut it. The key turned. The porch and the hall light were quenched. I released the screen door. Zoë and I headed down the steps and across the
yard to the car.

  —Christ, Zoë.

  —Bizarre, James.

  I backed up that driveway in a flash.

  —That gave me the creeps, my dear, but how sad, Zoë said.

  —Very sad, my dear, I said.

  —Way sad for her and for Walter, Zoë said.

  —Loosened from our dream of life, my dear.

  —We must be mindful of those we don’t know who show up after dark, my dear.

  —I hear you again, my dear, but let’s not talk about them.

  —Okay with me, my dear. Today was mostly perfect.

  —One of the best in a long time, my dear.

  I made the turn at the trailer homes. Lights shone in small windows. Barking dogs tore at the wire fence. I rolled the window up.

  —I must ring the family tomorrow, I said. —I should find out about Kevin Lyons.

  —How long has it been since you’ve spoken with them?

  —A long while.

  —Why a long while, my dear?

  —I don’t know, my dear, I don’t live there anymore.

  10.

  My father and Michael had identical alarm clocks. They bought them the same day, at the Market Yard in Tipperary town. Cheap clocks, enamel white, big-faced, with the round handle, two bells, and the little hammer sticking up between them. My father kept his clock on the bedside table. It woke him every morning. It didn’t wake my mother, who rose earlier and needed no clock. Every night, my father carefully wound his clock, and a few months after he died, Tess posted the clock to me. When I knifed the box open and saw what it was, I taped the box back up and shoved it into the farthest corner of the wardrobe floor.

  Tess once flung that clock down the blue corridor. I was standing outside the kitchen door when the door of my parents’ room banged open to their angry voices and then Tess running out and flinging the clock, which bounced against both corridor walls, the left one first, before it spun and skidded along the floor and stopped dead at my feet. The alarm was going off and I picked up the clock, flicked the alarm off, and pressed the clock to my ear. It ticked away fine. Tess was back at their door, screaming into their room, words like they were not going to tell her how she was going to live her life. This was September, in the year they built the pump house, the week before I boarded the red school bus. The row Tess and my parents were having was about Kevin.

  Michael gave Una his clock when she moved to Dublin. I remember it sitting atop Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, on the windowsill beside Una’s bed. I bought that book at the Sinn Féin bookstore near Mountjoy Square. I read it and told Una about it. She wanted to read it. I don’t know if she ever did, but I do know I never got my book back.

  I wound that clock once. It was a Sunday evening, about eight or nine months after I first visited her. Earlier that afternoon we were walking the canal bank on the Whitworth Road side. A swan bobbed out of the reeds and spun into the middle of the water. Una and I remarked on what a thrill it was to encounter the swan, but in the spinning, we noticed the arrow below its left wing. Not a full arrow, but a shaft butting out about two inches. The feathers around the arrow were soiled black. We didn’t at first see the arrow, because the soiled feathers were below the water, whose surface was covered with plastic shopping bags, half-sunken and rusty shopping carts, bald tires, but also frog spawn, petals, leaves, and dust from the wildflowers and the trees that grew on the canal bank. We held hands on our slow and silent walk back to her flat, and the instant we got inside, she threw herself onto her bed, curled up, and turned her face to the window. She moaned low and steady. I shut the two windows, made tea, and sat on the edge of her bed, mug in hand. I would have said the tea would help, and that I’d ask one of the Dublin Corporation men in the bar if they might do something about rescuing the swan. She didn’t move, speak, or take the tea. I stroked her hair, and when she was asleep, I went to her wardrobe for a blanket that I laid along her and fixed around her shoulders. I slipped off her shoes and stockings and tucked her feet under the bottom edge of the blanket. I did it like I had seen my mother do with my father when he arrived home drunk and bitter from Tipperary town, on those autumn days he sold cattle at the market. And before I headed back to my own flat I poured the cold tea down the sink, rinsed the mug, pulled the curtains on her windows, wound the clock, set the alarm, and placed the clock back on top of my book.

  She and I used to meet two or three times during the week. She made dinner. Grilled pork chops, tinned peas, and instant mashed potatoes. Spaghetti Bolognese every now and then. I washed the dishes and cleaned up things.

  We visited the city center cinemas. I paid for the bus fare and the tickets. She bought the sweets. And we walked the neighborhood to the west of Upper Drumcondra Road: left on Milbourne Avenue, right on Ferguson Road, left on Home Farm Road, right on Valentia Road. We stood on the footpaths and admired the yards and the houses. We held hands and kissed when the streets and footpaths were empty, and we talked about living in one of the houses. Marble fireplaces and sunlit kitchens and glowing wooden floors. We took the 16 bus into the city center and stared at shop windows, and we sat silently for hours at this one café window on O’Connell Street. Rain and sun came and went, and all those strangers walked on by.

  Not once in Dublin did I meet Kevin. When he first arrived in the city, he lived south of the river, but after their uncle Roger died, he moved north, to Phibsborough, where he bought the three tenement buildings with money inherited from Big Roger. Una told me that Kevin lived alone in a room on the top floor of one of the tenements. He and a few men he had hired were doing them up. The men drew the dole, and Kevin paid them under the table. And Una told me that some of the men were on the run from the law, and that Kevin lived without hot water or electricity. He taped sheets of cardboard over windows where the glass was broken. He’d a big problem with pigeons, but worse than pigeons were the rats that all his poisons and traps couldn’t kill.

  The day after my mother’s burial, Tess and I, hungover as fuck, and still wearing our funeral clothes, took a walk in the fields behind our house. We talked about the names we gave the cows when we were young. When a new cow came along, our father asked us to name it. Tess and I went through the fourteen names. We laughed and argued over which of us invented what name, and we walked over to each cow and said something kind. Then we crossed the ditch onto the road. Big Johnny drove past in his tractor. He pulled into the headland, got down, shook hands with us, and said he was sorry to hear about our mother. We thanked him and inquired how his son was doing, and how his daughter was faring out at medical school in Dublin. Never better now, lads. Big Johnny got back on his tractor. Tess and I went on walking, and I was about to tell her about Una. It was at that place on the road where the tall elms on the ditches give way to sky and light and open fields, and a few miles ahead, the hill where Auntie Tess, Auntie Hannah, and my father were born. Tess had stopped walking. She was staring at the hill.

  —You and me will always have each other, Jimmy, won’t we?

  —Yes, Tess, always—

  —Always be like we are, won’t we, Jimmy?

  —Yes, Tess, everything like before—

  —We’ll look after each other and talk to each other like always—

  —We will, Tess. We’ll always be that way.

  I couldn’t tell Tess then. Couldn’t tell—but the mind constantly stumbled toward Una. Such luck to be in love on that day. Love like that will smother all your other pain. And I did not stare at that hill the way Tess did. Her head raised. Eyes wide open. Like she was about to kneel on the road and adore it. Its top fields were ablaze with evening sunlight. Their miserable hill—but why did Tess have to talk like that? Ask you those sorts of questions? Cheat you into words you could not then and would not ever honor. I wanted to be lying beside Una in her single bed, making up stories about the voices passing on the footpath, reading Kafka and B
lake to each other, blowing cigarette smoke at the open window, the smoke wandering across the ticking face of her father’s enamel clock, then me slipping out of bed to boil a kettle of water for tea, boiling eggs, and placing the scalding eggs in the two yellow eggcups, with the hairline crack in each. Una had brought the eggcups with her the day she left home. She said the eggcups got cracked on the train on the way up, but you knew to look at those cracks that they had been there for a long time. Those were settled cracks. And boiling kettles of water for late-night baths in her tiny bathtub, washing the sticky hairspray out of her black hair. She cried every time I washed her hair. And I never asked her why.

  This is how it more or less ended. It was five or six months after the swan, so seven or eight months after her uncle Roger’s death, nine or ten months after my mother’s death, and I forget how many months after she gave me those ugly shirts. Una had written a poem. It was lying facedown on the table: eight short lines, written in pencil, titled “My Wounded Swan.” The petals, the frog spawn, the shopping carts and bags and bald tires with big holes were in the poem. Bombs made the holes in the tires. She was in the toilet when I picked the poem up. No. She was gone downstairs to see if the postman had arrived. Her soft footfalls in the doorway. She entered the room, dropped the post onto the floor, snatched the page from my hands, ripped it, and cast the pieces up in the air the way a magician might, like the pieces might change into pigeons, swans, cows, rats—whatever it is you want. Then she picked up her purse and walked briskly out the door. She did not close it. I ran after her and leaned over the banister. She was already in the hall.