by Tyler, Anne
Quivering with determination that she would not be left out, Maggie clambered up onto the wall.
“Hey Maggie, it’s too high for you,” Kerry called.
“Come down the side,” Grace shouted.
Maggie took no notice. She leaped out as far as she could and appeared from the huge splash she had made still quivering. She climbed onto the raft beside Dara and Kerry.
“It’s not that cold,” Kerry said soothingly.
Maggie was shivering not from cold but from fright.
Now they had all done it, even Maggie, and in the evening light, pleased with themselves, they climbed back up again. Dara straightened her legs, Tommy Leonard did a back flip which Kerry said was terrific and insisted on getting Tommy to teach him.
Suddenly Tommy felt important again.
Grace told Michael that she thought he dived better than either Tommy or Kerry because he had more style and less showing off.
Jacinta said they could get a much better angle if only they could have a proper springboard attached to the bridge.
Maggie climbed up again. This time she was going to try a dive. Just as she was poised to go her foot slipped.
Maggie Daly fell at an awkward angle, not into the deep water that flowed under the bridge. But to the side where her head hit the corner of the raft with a sickening crack.
For years afterward they remembered that sound. It was so sharp. It was like the crack of a rifle shot, or of a big twig snapping on the mossy earth up in Coyne’s wood.
And they looked unbelievingly as Maggie lay splayed half in the water and half over the raft.
At a very awkward angle indeed.
It wasn’t the blood coming from the corner of her eye that was so frightening. It was the way Maggie lay.
As if her neck was broken.
They didn’t have to go for Jacinta and Liam’s father. Dr. White heard the screams himself.
He was coming out of the presbytery where he had been talking seriously about Miss Barry’s limited life expectancy if she were allowed to continue in her present ways.
His heart lurched when the sound of panic and crisis reached him. He started to run. As he ran he knew the thought that was going through his head like a refrain was unworthy. Please God let it not be Liam or Jacinta, Please God not Liam or Jacinta. Please God.
Charlie who worked in Daly’s was coming out of Conway’s pub when he heard the commotion.
Charlie was a man who frightened easily. He ran back into Conway’s and ordered himself a brandy.
“That’s not like you, Charlie,” Mr. Conway said.
“There’s been an accident on the bridge,” Charlie said.
Mr. Conway lifted the flap and ran out from behind the bar.
“Mother of God may it not be John Joe,” he cried, and ran down Bridge Street to see if he could find his big bostoon of a son John Joe, whom he had given three blows in the ear earlier on.
He saw John Joe running up toward him and his face flooded with relief.
John Joe was crying, fighting for words.
“It’s Maggie Daly,” he cried. “They think she’s dead. She can’t be dead, can she?”
Mr. Daly was given a sedative. Dr. White was able to get him on to a bed and to roll up his sleeve while it was injected into his arm.
Mrs. Daly was different. Her face was white and still. But she was calm to the point of being unnatural.
“It was the will of Our Lord,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “He wanted Maggie this evening. Tonight she is with our Blessed Lord and his Holy Mother. She is in a better place by far than Mountfern.”
Martin White looked at her angrily. How could a mother be so philosophical? What kind of God would want Maggie by dashing her to her death from a bridge at fifteen years of age with the complete understanding and acquiescence of her mother? A vein started to throb in his forehead.
“It’s all right, Martin.” Sheila Whelan was gentle at his side. “Everyone has to mourn in their own way.”
“This is grotesque,” he whispered.
“No, isn’t it great that she has this kind of faith?”
“It’s not faith, it’s hysteria. Her child is dead, she hasn’t shed a tear.”
“You’re always very good to people here in this place, don’t start making judgments on them. Not now.”
It was a timely warning. Martin White looked gratefully at Sheila Whelan. He spoke now in his normal voice.
“I’ll leave you with Mrs. Daly, Sheila, and I’ll try to sort out the children. They’re almost all in shock.”
He left the Daly’s house, walking through the little knot of people who had already gathered around the door to sympathize.
The children were in Fergus Slattery’s house.
Miss Purcell had made cups of tea and opened a tin of biscuits.
Dr. White had told them to get out of their wet things and put on their clothes.
He had asked Fergus and Miss Purcell to get them rugs and blankets. Fergus had turned on two electric fires. One at each end of the room.
He had been coming out of his house when he heard the screams. He was at the bridge in moments, at the same time as the doctor. His eyes had met Martin White’s, and the doctor had shaken his head.
“Get them into your house, Fergus, and let someone tell Seamus Sheehan to come down.”
Fergus shepherded the children into his house and sent them off to various rooms to change.
Then he went to telephone the Ryans. John wasn’t there. Kate said it was his only social engagement in the year, a meeting of the county Historical Association. As a published poet and a man finishing a book about Fernscourt, he was now highly regarded there.
Fergus cut across her pleasantries. “I have your twins here in the house with me. They’re fine, they’re both here.”
She caught the tension in his voice at once. And knew something terrible had happened.
“What is it? Tell me immediately,” she said.
He did. Without frills. She would hear within minutes. He wanted her to know that what could be done was being done, and that he would look after Dara and Michael.
“God, why does it have to be the night that John is out, the one night in the whole year? Will I come up there? Eddie could push me.”
“No, there are too many people up at the bridge. There’s nothing you can do. The children are all right here. I know it’s hard, but stay where you are.”
She saw the reason in this.
“I’ll call Patrick,” she said firmly. “Otherwise he’s bound to get a garbled version too, above in the lodge. Are his two there?”
“They’re here,” Fergus said grimly.
He looked at Grace and Michael clinging to each other wrapped in a blanket, Grace unable to stop shivering and refusing to be parted from Michael even to the point where she could remove her wet bathing suit under her dress.
Kerry was sitting on a chair, his handsome face drawn with shock. Tucked into his side, almost under his arm, was Dara Ryan, white and still disbelieving what had happened. Kerry absently stroked Dara’s dark hair, which had a curiously inappropriate artificial rose stuck in the side.
Fergus didn’t like to see the young Ryans so firmly enmeshed with the O’Neills. But this wasn’t a time for such thoughts. He tried to put the haunting little face of Maggie Daly—those huge worried eyes and all that massive hair—way out of his mind. What could have possessed a frail nervy little thing like that to jump from a high bridge? And why didn’t some of the others stop her? Looking around the stricken group in his house Fergus realized that this is what they must all be thinking too.
The night seemed to go on forever.
John Joe Conway’s father excused himself from the bar and went into his workshop at the back. There would be need of a small coffin.
John Joe followed him out and railed at him. Why did his father always have to think of business, and making money, when someone was dead, for God’s sake? John Joe kept
saying the word over and over because he couldn’t believe it.
His father was short on explanations and excuses.
“What would you like us to do with Maggie? Leave her lying there looking at the sky? The only thing we can do for the dead is to give them a decent burial. If this is ever going to be your place John Joe, you’ll have to learn that.”
“I don’t want to run a business, I don’t want to be grown up,” John Joe said.
His father gave him a long look. “I know son, it’s not the greatest thing in the world being grown up and being in business. But look at the alternative.”
For the first time in their lives John Joe Conway and his father looked at each other with something like understanding.
Rachel was in her room reading when she heard the commotion from the bridge. At first she thought it was just horseplay and high spirits. Then she became worried. She closed her book and came downstairs. Loretto was standing fearfully on the doorstep, her hand at her mouth.
“There’s been an accident,” she said to Rachel. “Jack Coyne’s just run up to see what happened. I couldn’t go myself.”
“Of course not.” Rachel knew the story of how Barney Quinn had been taken from the river in his new truck that he was so proud of. She put her arm around Loretto’s shoulder.
“Come back in. Can you make us a cup of tea? Jack will come and tell us soon. We can’t help by peering out here.”
Gratefully Loretto went back into the kitchen.
They were barely sitting at the table when Jack Coyne rushed in. He had tears in his eyes, something the women had never expected to see.
“Poor stupid little girl,” he said over and over before he could even manage to give them her name.
“Poor stupid little thing, she hadn’t begun to live and now she’s lying under the bridge with a broken neck.”
Even though Jacinta and Liam’s mother had come down to collect them, they wanted to stay with the others. They wanted to stay in the unreal world of Mr. Slattery’s, where there were cups of tea and people pressed biscuits on them, where the night began to fall outside and the electric bars of the two fires began to glow red in the room where nobody turned on the light.
Fergus was in and out, reassuring without fussing them. Comforting them by the very fact that he didn’t say it was all right, he said it was terrible.
Marian Johnson arrived to know whether she could take the O’Neill children back to the lodge. Fergus looked into the room and raised his eyebrows in a question. The children had heard her voice in the hall. Kerry shook his head. Grace said nothing, just huddled closer to Michael.
“I’m sorry, Marian, they think they should stay here for the moment. I’ll get them home later, or their father will.”
Marian was disappointed not to be able to participate.
“One feels so helpless,” she said to Fergus. “I just wish there was something I could do to help.”
He felt a wave of affection for Marian. She was ridiculous and snobby at times of course, but she was lonely, and what was so vile about regarding Patrick O’Neill as possible husband material? Marian was a decent honorable person for all her nonsenses. Fergus added to his list of things he disliked about Patrick O’Neill the way he made a fool of this woman. Leading her on to believe there was some interest, when everyone knew he had installed his mistress in rooms above Loretto Quinn’s huckster’s shop.
Sergeant Sheehan had seen a few sad things in the course of his work. And many accidents that were the result of thoughtlessness. He had no daughters, only sons, he would always have liked a little girl. He thought fondly that a daughter would have hung on his every word in a way that his wife did not. A daughter would not have been ambitious for him and wanted his promotion and preferment, and even for him to meet people of importance and be recognized by them. He knew it was a sentimental notion. People with daughters had just as many problems with them as he had with his sons.
Look at poor Mrs. Meagher and that Teresa for example. And Dr. White’s little girl could be a bit of a madam, they said.
But poor Maggie Daly. Nobody had ever anything to say against her. Even her own disagreeable mother could only complain that the child was not constantly in the church at prayer.
Seamus Sheehan’s hands were gentle as he lifted the broken body off the raft and laid it on the stretcher.
He and Martin White had been up to their waists in water pulling the raft toward them. The doctor had pronounced life extinct.
Seamus Sheehan had closed Maggie Daly’s huge frightened eyes tenderly and arranged her thin body with the arms straight by her sides. He was watched by a crowd of about fifty people.
The child looked incongruous and unsuitable for death in her skimpy blue bathing suit. Young Grace O’Neill had lifted a shabby print dress in a faded color and given it to him.
“That’s what she was wearing.”
“You’re meant to be back up in Mr. Slattery’s house.”
“I couldn’t bear her to be without her clothes. You know Maggie,” the child said.
Then Michael Ryan had come running to take Grace away.
Sergeant Sheehan thought the shabby dress was even less suitable. But he laid it over her, before they drew the sheet over her head.
Quietly and with great dignity in front of the shocked and silent crowd Dr. White and Sergeant Sheehan carried Maggie Daly back up to the stretcher. The ambulance had come from the town very quickly. But now that there would be no need to speed back the men stood waiting while Maggie’s own people lifted her body from the river. She would be taken to the hospital; the post-mortem formalities would have to go ahead. The date for the inquest would be fixed and then the body would be released to come home to Mountfern, to lie surrounded by candles in her own house, and then the church and then the graveyard.
A great sense of heaviness came over Sergeant Sheehan. He wished he could stand in the water and cry all alone.
The sun was becoming a red ball of fire, and mocking them with its beauty and its sense of peace in the light it shed over the small town.
Fergus realized that when the O’Neills went home everyone else would.
Patrick’s big car drew up outside his door and he came in with his quick light step.
Grace had somehow managed to disentangle herself from Michael, and was in her father’s arms.
Then Fergus saw him put a hand on Kerry’s shoulder.
“I’ve come to take you home,” he said firmly. “None of us are going to help Maggie by sitting here in the dark. Maggie is at peace now.”
It was a good thing to say somehow. Fergus wished he had said something like that himself. It seemed to break the stranglehold.
The children began to move normally, not like puppets. They even got ready to go back to their homes.
Tommy Leonard said he’d walk up River Road with the Ryans.
Liam pulled Jacinta and said to come on, their mother would be annoyed and would come looking for them again.
“I can’t believe it,” Dara said. “It’s not something you can believe, I keep looking around for Maggie, I feel she should be here, coming with us. She should be running to the door ahead of us.”
Dara had put into words what they all felt.
Their group was never together without Maggie, and running to the door is exactly what she would have been doing, hurrying people up, apologizing to Mr. Slattery for having stayed so long, asking anxiously where they were going to meet next morning in case there was some change, and they were all going to meet without her.
There was a charged silence when Dara spoke. It was almost too true in its realizing the way they were all thinking.
Suddenly something in Jacinta snapped. “Well, if it hadn’t been for you, Dara, she’d never have done it,” she said. Taking no heed of the horrified looks she went on. “Stop being all upset now that it’s too late. You were horrible to her yesterday and had her crying and running after you, and even today you were just showing
off and didn’t throw a word to her.
“Maggie would never have done a dive like that unless she was trying to show that she was as good as the rest of us. Show Dara, please Dara. That’s all Maggie ever wanted to do. It wasn’t much, and now she’s dead, she is dead from trying to please Dara …”
Jacinta began a laugh which veered from tears to laughing, and the sound got higher and higher.
Patrick O’Neill let go his daughter and strode over to Jacinta. The one quick crack across the face was all it took. Jacinta was silent.
“I want to go home,” she said eventually.
“Take her home, Liam. I suppose your father will dislike me more than ever now but try to tell him it had to be done, will you?”
Patrick took his children out of the door, down the stone steps and into the car. Fergus saw him lift Kerry’s bicycle and fling it into the boot as lightly as if it had been a toy.
Tommy Leonard and Michael took one of Dara’s arms each.
“She was hysterical,” Fergus said. “It takes people different ways. She didn’t mean a word of it. None of it is true.”
The little procession went silently to the door.
“It was a terrible accident, that’s what it was. An accident,” he called after them into the night. And it stirred something in his mind, something about people telling him it was a terrible accident three years ago when Kate Ryan had gone into the town in an ambulance.
As expected the hospital released Maggie Daly’s body within twenty-four hours.
Mr. Conway had been in there to see to things.
Mrs. Daly wanted her laid out in the house.
Dr. White protested. This was a child, it would be too distressing for everyone. A child didn’t have the tradition that a lot of the older people might know and want. Better to close the coffin and leave it overnight in the church.
Mrs. Daly had said with that ominous calm that she thanked the doctor for all his services so far, but his words were useless. Friends and neighbors would come to pray for Maggie’s soul by her body in the way it had been done for centuries.