Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  Much laughter, the kind Pandora had always imagined erupting in places such as this, where the ones laughing and the one laughed at had known each other since birth. No secrets here, she imagined. No secrets, and it would be a difficult thing to manage dying alone.

  “He wasn’t my fella,” she said, so quietly now that only Kathleen could have heard. “He was just a friend.”

  “Ah. And a fine loyal one too, he looked to be, in his brief time here.”

  Brief time. Oh, she had no idea.

  “So maybe you shouldn’t be as quick to give up on him as you’ve seemed these past days.”

  No idea that Ethan wouldn’t, couldn’t, have a change of heart and come walking through the front door tonight, tomorrow, ever. Not a soul in this village did. If the last secret she shared with Ethan stayed where secrets should, not a soul ever would.

  Kathleen lingered at the table another couple of minutes, then seemed to sense that any more optimism might be overdoing it, and pushed back from the table to leave.

  “Before I forget…” Pandora dug into the pocket of her pullover sweater. “Did you leave this on the dresser in my room yesterday? I didn’t notice it until this morning, but the way I’ve been looking at the floor most of the time, there could’ve been a garden gnome up there and I might not have seen it.”

  She set it on the tabletop between them, a lump of gray-green stone that fit her palm perfectly. And make no mistake, the hand wanted to hold it. It had been carved and polished so smooth and round that it begged for caressing.

  For a moment too long, Kathleen merely stared.

  The image itself, as near as Pandora recognized, was prehistoric—one of those ponderously proportioned female figurines that seemed all belly and boobs, tapering like an egg with a blunted head, tiny feet. As for this one’s origins, Pandora imagined it had probably come from some still-breathing artisan with a fondness for the Stone Age, or maybe just plump breeders with oversized parts.

  Kathleen’s hand moved to claim it, on the verge, Pandora was certain, of blaming her own carelessness. Then Kathleen stopped herself, as if realizing she had no right to do what she was about to. She recovered well—if Pandora had had another ale, she might not have noticed—and instead nudged the icon back toward Pandora’s hand.

  “A souvenir for a long-term guest, of whom we’ve become very fond. I meant to tell you and it slipped my mind,” Kathleen said. “Anybody can leave you a silly wee cake of soap, can’t they now.”

  Liar, thought Pandora.

  Although considering what she’d done with Ethan, she felt a good deal less than deserving.

  * * *

  But of course, Kathleen’s fib hardly settled the matter of where the statuette had come from. They had no maids here; the place was not so big that whatever needed doing couldn’t be handled by Kathleen alone, with the exception of wrestling new kegs into place down in the cellar.

  For a couple of minutes, Pandora turned herself queasy with thoughts that it might have been Fergus who’d slipped in and left the fertility trinket as some perverse rural prelude to an attempted seduction. But the more she considered it, the more absurd it seemed. For one thing, Kathleen no doubt would’ve snatched the thing up after all, then bounced it off her husband’s skull. For another, Fergus hardly seemed the type to rely on creeping guile. Narrowbacks, Pandora had heard that the Old World Irish sometimes called their New World descendants—whether a reference to a taller, leaner stature or a dismissive conviction that they weren’t up to their ancestors’ capacity to shoulder heavy burdens, either way it was none too flattering. Well, Fergus seemed a broadback through and through, and if he wanted you, she imagined that he would come straight for you. Not without charm, but straight-on just the same.

  By whose hand, then? No one she could fathom. If the thing had borne the least resemblance to a hanged man, she might’ve had cause for worry, that her actions of the other morning hadn’t gone unseen. But no…whatever this meant, it felt incidental to Ethan’s suicide.

  On the most appealing level, it was enough to hold the thing in her hand—its smooth curves, its comforting solid weight—and believe in magic.

  Over the past three days, she’d needed a mother. For the first time in years, she wanted a mother. But one who was enough of a realist to admit that young men who were still boys inside sometimes killed themselves; a mother who could empathize with the loss without emptying buckets of judgment on her head, or delivering sermons on karma and wasted potential.

  So for now, it was enough to believe that she’d found two such mothers under the same roof: one to prod her out the door again…another to hold in her hand.

  V

  She came awake without knowing why, slowly enough that she couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t. She recalled an ugly noise in a dream that was already fading…a cry like the squall of butchered hog.

  As she turned over and burrowed into the quilts, she heard it again: an agonized bellow that had worked its way into her dreams. Jesus—it was the sort of shriek that made you curl into a ball and hope to go unnoticed, praying for a best-case scenario: some drunken unfortunate still lurching around after last orders, stumbling into…what, a crosscut saw, by the sound of it? Just his bad luck, please. Let there be nothing out there that might move on, unsatisfied, and start looking into windows.

  She sat up and drew the covers around herself as tight as cerements, as beyond the window and curtains, Glenmullen roused to an angry nocturnal life. A shout from the north, a keening wail to the west; other voices, one and two at a time, joining in. From down the block she could hear the clacking of a doorknocker; a minute later and it had come to The Mouth of Oran, an urgent fist battering at the front door downstairs. Barred by a heavy oak beam, the door had, until this moment, seemed merely quaint.

  Next, the sounds of someone opening up—Fergus, emerging from the private quarters that branched off the pub. She could hear a low rumble of voices belonging to men who sounded as though they would give anything to have remained in their own beds, the conversation weighted by a terrible gravity. She strained to pick up something from it, but their talk surrendered nothing. Gaelic; they had reverted to Gaelic.

  She waited in the dark as the visitors left and the door thudded shut; a moment later, the sounds of more words, more haste. She wanted to crawl into a closet, except the room was so old it didn’t have one.

  How old was the staircase out there, too, the one she’d walked every morning, every night? Suddenly it sounded grim with age, centuries of creaks and groans turning their spite upon her. She knew which of them it had to be; Kathleen’s feet had never sounded as heavy as this.

  At her door, finally, a knock that she could feel on her breastbone.

  “Kathleen?” she called out, knowing better.

  “A word with you, Pandy, if you please.”

  And if she didn’t? No problem, Fergus would just eat the door off the hinges.

  She slid from the bed and into the room’s autumn chill. In the dark, she threw on the clothes from yesterday, same as the clothes from the day before that. Out in the hall, Fergus waited in oppressive silence, until doomsday or whenever she opened the door, whichever came first.

  “Downstairs,” he said. “’Tis a talk for downstairs.”

  Once there, Fergus surprised her by continuing to play the host, taking his place behind the bar while having her sit on one of the cracked leather-topped stools. Braced upon the bar, his arms looked as thick as her legs. His face was square and lined from an earlier life of raw weather, his hair curled like filings of iron…and her back felt very, very narrow.

  “We’ll drink,” he said, “and as we share those drinks we’ll talk as those who have too much respect for one another to go taking the piss. Bushmills for you?”

  Like she would argue at this point? He set them up, the bottle and two glasses.

  “Where’s Kathleen?”

  “She’s tending to other matters. And as we talk,�
�� he pushed on, “you’ll be wanting to rid yourself of any notions you may have been holding to that all we are here’s a bunch of sheep-shaggers and bog-trotters with no good idea what goes on in the midst of us.”

  “No, I never…” she started to protest.

  “Course you did. Yez all do when you come here, and most generally that’s the best thing for us both, but tonight that goes out the window.” He tapped her glass. “You’re not drinking.”

  She remedied that, felt the smooth burn all the way down to her belly.

  “And whatever it is you tell me, out with all of it, and don’t feel as you have to spare my delicate sensibilities,” he said. “I’ve a pretty fair idea why yez both came here, you and the lad…less so why yourself has stayed as long as you have, not as we’ve minded. But it was him brought you here, right?”

  “If by him you mean Patrick…?”

  “Let’s call him what he is: Saint Patrick the Fallen. No point in confusing him with the other. Visit his bones, then, did you?”

  She nodded.

  “And where’d you go?”

  “There’s a huge yew tree,” she whispered, “about a mile—”

  “I know where the yew tree stands. Only lived here my whole life, haven’t I?” The breath began to whistle through his nostrils. “How’d you know to go there?”

  She explained about the web sites, the bulletin boards; how the electronic cult of Patrick had inspired her, along with Ethan, to go circling the whole of Ireland.

  “Ah, jaysus,” Fergus groaned. “Says so on your Internet, so that makes it gospel, does it?”

  No idea what was really going on, and still she was beginning to feel like the most gullible person ever born.

  “You and the lad…something happen between the two of you you’ve been keeping to yourself? More than just himself going his own way and you lagging behind to moon about it? Something bad, I mean.”

  “Ethan hanging himself from the yew,” she spat, with a sting in her eyes and a pit again opening in her heart, “is that bad enough for you?”

  “Ah, jaysus. And you without a word to another blessed soul!” Fergus brought a hand to his mouth, steadied himself again the bar with the other. “The body—what’d you do with the body?”

  It felt as if she were describing acts committed by someone else—not someone who should’ve known better, but rather someone who in those minutes had been so much stronger of body and will. How else could she have scaled the tree, then crawled out onto the bough from which Ethan hung? How else could she have maneuvered the dead weight of his body up and onto the limb, then undone the noose from the puffy, stretched flesh of his neck? How else could she have found it within herself to haul him along the bough and back to the yew’s massive trunk…then lower him into the rotting hollow to join the bones, she’d thought, of Patrick Kieran Malone?

  While she hadn’t done these things without tears, without hating Ethan, she had tried to force herself to see the beauty in his exit, the still repose of his body depending from its stern loop of rope. Of course they had, half a decade ago, spent sleepless nights talking about suicide; fantasizing about it, sketching verbal rhapsodies of deathly scenarios. Of course they had written embarrassingly awful poetry about the loving embrace of their graves.

  Of course she had thought he’d outgrown it too.

  Years later, assaulted by the sight and the smell of it, she conceded that she could have found it beautiful only if it had been someone she’d never known.

  “Aw, Pandy,” Fergus said with crushing sorrow, “why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  “What, I was supposed to send him back to be buried by the people he most wanted to be away from, so they could pretend they’d loved him all along? Sorry, but no. He would never have forgiven me if I’d done that. I know he’d rather everyone think that one day he walked away from everything he knew and didn’t look back.” Surely anyone who understood would not condemn. “Ethan’s father broke his wrist when he was thirteen. He wouldn’t tell me why. It’s the only thing he ever refused to tell me. I just know it was another typical day at home.”

  “A terrible thing,” said Fergus, not without sympathy, “but the yew…”

  “I know about yew trees. I know what people used to believe about them, maybe still do in places like this. It just felt like the last thing I could do for him.”

  “What, the symbol of eternal life? Of renewal from decay?” he said, now with scorn. “A gateway to a new and better realm? Those would be the things you know about yews?”

  In a small, weakening peep: “Yes.”

  “Then what you know’s worse than nothing. Have you never heard of a yew to stand as a barrier between the right and the wrong?” He shelved the bottle. “What you know’s just enough to get this place noticed by the eye of God once again, and it was kept well enough when he was looking the other way.”

  Fergus swept up their emptied glasses, then went for a jacket and told her she should do the same, because she would soon enough be shivering from more than the chill.

  “And as if it matters now, the bones those Sisters brought?” he said. “It was never the yew where they took ‘em. What you paid visit after visit to is something else entirely.” He shook his head in rebuke. “Well, you came here to plunge yourself into the thick of all that’s holy and all that’s not, and damned if I let you not look upon what it is you’ve done.”

  The last thing he grabbed, from behind the bar, was a shotgun.

  “For all the good it’s likely to do,” he said.

  VI

  It wasn’t just the power of suggestion and the sight of so many bucolic people stirring with such urgency after two in the morning. A few steps beyond the door of The Mouth of Oran, the feeling enveloped her as surely as the damp chill: Something here had gone terribly wrong. With each breath she felt it as a thickness in her lungs, a sour taste upon her tongue. In the distance, as the beams of powerful flashlights swept to and fro, even the light seemed sickly.

  Fergus’ legs were scarcely longer than hers, but still she had to struggle to keep pace, catching up whenever he stopped to confer with one person or another. Again, language was used as a barrier, so that any clue as to what was happening was denied her. They cloaked themselves in their darkest wools and tweeds, as if to blend into the night. Their eyes were never still, searching trees and the blue moonlit clouds. Like Fergus, many carried weapons normally reserved for the hunt or for the fields.

  And right now they hated her, didn’t they? Or was that much, at least, her guilty imagination?

  “A wee story,” he said once they were past the heart of the village, “so you can get your brain around what it is you may be soon seeing. And it’ll put the lie to what we told you about the name on our sign. Ever heard of Saint Columba, have you?”

  She didn’t think so, and before he could say another word: “Fergus, are we safe out here?”

  “Safe enough for now, I suppose, if Gerry Fallon’s aim is as good as his word.”

  “How good is his word?”

  “Well, there’s been some debate on that.” She couldn’t tell if he was serious, or thought she deserved being kept unnerved. “Saint Columba, as I was saying. Holy man, as you can tell from the saint part, ‘bout fifteen hundred years ago. Did a good amount of travel in the name of his lord and savior. Came from the Donegal area, though it’s his travels in Scotland that are best known. Before it was Scotland. ‘Twas the Picts living there in Columba’s time. Had himself a friend named Oran—brother, some say—and the pair of ‘em and a dozen others went to the isle of Iona, off Scotland’s coast, bent on founding a monastery. One of his earliest acts was to banish women and cows from Iona, which alone makes him a peculiar enough fella in my estimation.”

  Fergus led them off onto a side lane that wound past a thicket of hedges and a gauntlet of gnarled oaks, a breeze stirring their leaves with a papery murmur.

  “Columba and his crew, they tried to raise a ch
apel but weren’t having much luck in the construction of it, what with the walls falling over all the time. A clear sign that the isle didn’t much care for them and their business, but folk like that, you’ve got to kill ‘em first to deter ‘em. So they decide they need to consecrate the ground, then settle as the best way to get that done’s with a burial…and a live burial, at that. Oran says he’ll be the fella. Take one for the team, I suppose as you’d say now. He laid his corpus down into the foundation pit, and didn’t they shovel him over.”

  The lane led them across an arched stone footbridge that she’d traversed a time or two in her wanderings. In the day, as picturesque as a postcard; tonight, the bridge and the brook beneath it hoarded the moon, reflecting sharp angles and points of light as baleful as soulless eyes.

  “Some days later Columba decides he wants to make a final farewell, so they dig back down and scrape the dirt from Oran’s face, and aren’t they surprised stupid when they find the head has a few things yet to say: ‘Heaven is not what it is said to be, nor is Hell what it is said to be. The saved are not forever happy, and the damned are not forever lost. The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all.’”

  “I’ll bet that went over well,” Pandora said.

  “Oh, like the ton of bricks. So Columba decides, ‘Nah, that’s not Oran any longer, Oran wouldn’t say such things. What that is down there’s a demon that’s got inside him.’ So they shoveled him over again quick as they could and that was the end of that. Except it must’ve made enough of an impression on at least one of those other lads that he saw fit to make sure the tale didn’t stay down there with Oran. The truth, no matter how unpalatable to some, it has its way of not staying buried.”

  By now they’d left the lane for a narrower path, crowded by weeds and thick tufts of grass. Someone’s private land, she was sure, even before they rounded a bend and she saw the peaks of a cottage outlined against the sky.