Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  Bronagh looked out across the dark road, which turned increasingly neon blue the closer the fire tender from town climbed toward us. All the fight had drained out of her. She waved her men back in the car and adjusted her cap, so we couldn’t see her eyes.

  “Just tell me this,” she asked Aoife, but made sure we all heard. “Are you ready for this? All of it? Enquiries, maybe interrogations, court app—”

  “Thanks for coming, Bronagh,” answered Aoife, and snapped the empty shotgun closed with a clack!

  Bronagh recognized the gun she’d seen since we were little girls, but couldn’t resist one last fishing expedition. “Got a license for that thing?”

  “You wrote it out yerself,” said Aoife, keeping the sarcasm out of her voice. “But if you find any steel shot in those fellas’ backsides, feel free to come back and arrest me.”

  WHERE I’M FROM, funerals are usually a solemn affair where even the corpse is bored. They begin with folded hands at Sacred Heart Church, where we gawk at who got seated closest to the casket, and there are lots of downcast eyes during the In Paradisum hymn. When it’s over, everyone’s invited to Father Malloy’s for sour white wine and a conversation about how “life is changed, not ended.” And then, when the father is pickled, a few of the living go for a pint at McSorley’s to gossip about the deceased.

  But for Jim, those rules were changing before his body was even cold.

  We all knew the final journey of the town’s slain mascot would be different when the mourners started drifting into town, one starry-eyed face after the other. There were the morbidly curious, of course, and some journos who had heard rumors of the sex-and-violence trail the seanchaí was rumored to have cut across all of County Cork. It was said he had been slain by three sisters from the area. Hot stuff. The funeral was bound to look great on camera. And the people have a right to know, don’t they? I suppose that’s why TV vans with satellite dishes soon occupied the square so you couldn’t even see the cross in the middle of it. Jonno made a killing serving them all overpriced beer and telling lies about “the butcher of Castletownbere,” who paralyzed girls with only the sound of his voice. He even got his name in the paper that way and framed the article over the bar. I’m guessing it’s still there.

  But the typical pilgrim dragging her worn-out tennies along the Glengarriff Road was usually a young girl, hopelessly devoted to a man she felt was “just misunderstood.” Old Mrs. Crimmins was the first to notice this wasn’t just a random trickle of crazies. On Wednesday before the service, as she watered her daffodils, she saw clusters of ten, maybe fifteen, women passing by the bed-and-breakfast. Most carried knapsacks and water bottles, and none had enough cash to stay in any of her rooms, even for one night. All of them called him “Darling Jim,” long before the press got wind of that nickname and made it the catchphrase the town is still trying to get rid of.

  “Something strange about the way they talk,” she tried to explain to Jonno, who’s the one told me about it. “Won’t look ya in the eye but are already somewhere else. I wouldn’t let a single one of those manky hippies sleep in my house.”

  But the scattered clumps of wanderers on the roadside soon grew to whole caravans. It was as if the lost tribes of Israel had bypassed Egypt and come straight to our town instead. Bronagh arrested two fourteen-year-old girls who had refused to disperse and had chained themselves to the lamppost outside the Garda station because they’d got it in their heads that Jim was on a slab in the morgue. As it happened, he was in an icebox in the harbormaster’s shack to throw groupies off the scent until it was time to dress him for the final journey. Three grown women camped out in front of Father Malloy’s rectory so they could be the first to see the mourners come. Oh, yes. A proper circus with nothing in it but clowns. If people thought the Walsh sisters were nuts, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

  ON JIM’S LAST day aboveground, the church was so mobbed Bronagh had to call in help from as far away as Kenmare. Five patrol cars’ worth. The stone steps leading from Main Street up to the heavy oak door at Sacred Heart was a panoply of girls with flowers painted on their cheeks, sobbing grannies, and cameramen shoving at one another for a better shot. Mary Catherine Cremin had brought her father’s best camera and mounted a telescopic lens big enough to catch the mole on Father Malloy’s cheek.

  My sisters and I had decided not to attend. With most of our days that week spent apart from one another in front of yet another garda pressuring us to confess, it seemed wrong, somehow. None of us gave an inch, although Fiona cried so much during the interrogations the cops thought she was the one Jim had attacked.

  But when Saturday came, I couldn’t resist.

  “We’re out of milk,” I told my sisters, who stayed home to keep the curious from peering in our windows. “I’ll be right back,” I lied. And so I picked out a baseball cap one of Aoife’s American gentleman callers had once left behind, and biked down toward the noise of a thousand expectant throats. It sounded like the Colosseum around feeding time, and made me shiver more than when I thought of what Jim probably looked like inside his casket. An elderly couple pointed at me and snapped a few photos as I rode past. For a brief moment, I wished Jim were there to whisper into their ears what he’d told that Swedish fella—and immediately hated myself for it. Why wasn’t Evvie answering my text messages, anyway? I wondered what the girls looked like down in old Sochi, as the church spire came into view, and I hoped to God they were ugly.

  I didn’t see Aunt Moira right away.

  It was only as I snuck in through the back door near where the nuns are buried that I saw the still-empty altar. A white casket, even more spotless than Jim’s Vincent, refracted the light streaming in through the stained-glass windows. Father Malloy was bent down to console a figure kneeling in front of it, hands clasped in prayer.

  “Please, I’m begging you,” he said. “We must begin. Come this way.”

  My aunt was wearing a mourner’s costume so black the ravens in our backyard would have been jealous. I couldn’t see her face, because the veil covering it was so tightly sewn it looked like a fencing mask. Even so, I ducked around the corner when she rose and looked my way.

  When Father Malloy let everyone else in, it sounded like stampeding elephants. I didn’t dare remain inside for the service. What, I wondered, would happen to me if some of Jim’s devoted disciples discovered me there? The Southern Star had already run several articles, with headlines blaring GARDA HOT ON MURDERERS’ TRAIL, echoed by the Irish Mirror all the way in Dublin, which had dubbed us THE STILETTO SISTERS. Of course, there was no proof to convict or even indict us; Aoife had seen to that. And that dog walker near the murder site had seen nothing but the tweety birds that day. Besides, it had rained so much after we left that no footprints or tire tracks remained.

  Fiona had described that Kelly woman to me, the one from the cottage out in the mountains, and I think I saw her before sneaking back out to my bike. She was beautiful, in a black silk dress that came to her ankles, and tears streaming down her face, like in a proper opera. Kelly gave Aunt Moira’s hand a reassuring squeeze before the father intoned the benediction. If she’d got her hands on me, that would have been the end.

  But it was after the service that the true madness showed its face.

  Jim, you see, was beginning to divide opinions around Castletownbere’s dinner tables, especially since Bronagh had started to do her job right for a change. That Tomo fella had done time in both Cork and Dublin prisons and had a criminal record longer than most. It was said he’d met Jim at school, some rough corner of the state reform program, but that couldn’t be verified. Stories of girls raped or murdered didn’t sit well with most anyway, even those who had heard the fairy tales and listened to that mellifluous voice. That meant interment in Glebe Graveyard was out, and so was anything within town limits. Wouldn’t do to seem soft on mass murder, no matter how adorable the chief suspect. A compromise was therefore struck.

  Saint Finian’s was a strange old
burial ground, stuck on the side of the road and with no church on that side of the asphalt to keep it company. It looked ancient when we were children, and time had done nothing to make it less decrepit. Since Jim left behind no relatives who could be found, the city council decided to allow his many fans to erect a headstone there and place him underneath it. There were secret donors to pay for the damn thing as well, people said. From all corners of the country. Fucking hell, I thought, how many times did he flog that damn story about the wolf’s demolition tour? As hundreds of sobbing women trailed his white casket up the winding road, dodging traffic as they went, the city fathers soon lived to regret that decision.

  TV cameras caught the procession, keening as if possessed, as it streamed in the narrow iron gate and beyond. I had snuck out of church before the service finished and ended up in the grass near Aoife’s cottage, pointing our father’s old binoculars at the spectacle. A cloud of dust whirled in the air, obscuring my view, because more than twenty people scrambled to throw dirt on the casket as it was lowered. Their screams carried across the slopes of the mountain like vultures on carrion. Kill her or love her, Jimmy boy, I thought to myself, shaking my head. These poor souls didn’t much care which you chose, did they? The crowd only thinned out as darkness began to crawl across the ridge and cover the road with a fine sprinkle of rain.

  But a few faces were still visible, even from that distance. I could see two girls who looked no more than twelve, smoothing the dirt in front of the headstone. I couldn’t help thinking of old Fiona’s pharaohs and wondered if they had got a send-off this insane. A woman was taking her time placing a candle and lighting it. Her dress whipped around her scrawny body in the wind, but she didn’t care. She just kept striking matches until she ran out.

  When she left, there was one woman remaining on the grave itself.

  She had her back to me and was again on her knees in supplication to a God who had taken everything from her more than once. She lifted the veil and turned her head, as if she could sense my intrusion. I pulled my eyes off the binoculars, as quickly as I could.

  But Aunt Moira saw me. I know she did.

  And I’ve been paying for it ever since.

  IT’S A FUNNY old thing, time. It doesn’t heal all wounds the way they say. But it does make everybody forget details. I suppose it’s nature’s own discreet mercy.

  First, people can’t remember around the edges of a thing that happened, even if they were there themselves. Did Jim kill three women or only two? Were his eyes hazel, as most insisted, or did they look green? Questions like that. Given enough time, people will forget the actual event altogether and just settle for the myth. And so it was with the murdering Walshes, because we were acquitted on all charges. After four weeks of trudging down to Main Street to stare at the same wallpaper or being driven to Cork City to meet gardaí with even more gold on their epaulets, the cops let us go.

  Bronagh, bless her heart, knew we’d done it, of course. Most of Castletownbere and the surrounding area did, too. It conferred upon us the instant status of living legends, desperate women not to be trifled with. My previous reputation as a sex witch couldn’t even compare to this new level of notoriety. None of us could unshackle ourselves from the myth, so we just nodded at people and kept to ourselves.

  Eventually, the TV cameras and freelance snoops left our front yard, where they’d trampled it to mud for months. The boys from Sacred Heart whispered when any of us walked past, but not like they did before, when they’d sneak looks at our backsides. Now they didn’t dare look us in the eye. Fiona even said people had begun to think we possessed some kind of dark magic. All I wanted was enough of that voodoo to get Evvie to return my calls.

  Time had done nothing to blur the most painful parts of Moira’s memory.

  “Gone wrong in the head” is how I heard Jonno try to describe what had happened to her. She’d been coughing up a lung since catching a bad case of pneumonia from sitting on Jim’s grave for over a week. We all dreaded running into her in town, but that never happened. I snuck past the bed-and-breakfast once or twice and saw a for sale sign in the window. A few weeks later, it was gone, and a work crew was busy repairing the chimney, which had been badly in need for some time.

  On the days when Fiona taught at school (you didn’t honestly think the headmistress would dismiss a genuine celebrity, did ya?) and Aoife shuttled tourists around the area in an old Vauxhall she’d bought with the insurance money from the Mercer, I tried to find traces of our aunt. Call me morbid or sick, I’ve been called worse and lived. But I wanted an answer to why she hadn’t shown up on our doorstep, breathing Old Testament threats and waving her Bible about. Having her in one place had kept me calm for years. Knowing she was everywhere and nowhere gave me the willies. I snuck out with the binoculars like some demented border guard, hoping to catch a glimpse.

  What worried me more than anything is that she never returned to the cemetery—which was always swarming with women, by the way. The place was forever flower-strewn, and Bronagh had to place a permanent guard to make sure nobody made off with Jim’s headstone. In the end, she even had to pour concrete around the casket and be done with it, rather than having to call Macroom HQ one fine day and say someone had stolen the corpse, too. As it was, avid disciples had already salvaged Jim’s Vincent Comet and sold most of it for a fortune on eBay. The last relic, half a brake line, was wrapped around the skull on Jim’s grave, like a crown of thorns. I ate many dry ham sandwiches staring at it, waiting for the widow to reappear. Only she never did.

  One ordinary Tuesday, down by the old beach near Eyeries, I saw a green scarf catching the wind.

  It had been a Christmas present to Moira from the three of us not long ago, and our aunt wore it around her face like someone still stuck in the 1950s. She was poking in the dirt by the tree where I’d knifed her precious Jim into next Sunday. At first I had trouble breathing, and then I calmed down. There was nothing to find. Perhaps, I reasoned, she had taken up residence in the forest. Did she spend all her waking hours in the spot where her fiancé died? Not even Aunt Moira was that sentimental. Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth, even before she became loony. She hopped about like a sparrow, unable to find ground that suited her. She’s looking for something, I thought, feeling sick about it. She’s searching and won’t give up until she finds it. But there was no more proof to dig up, because the cops had been out there with the bloodhounds and all.

  I crawled away and biked home as fast as I could. Something about the way she’d moved had unsettled me more than the fear she knew something I didn’t. Like a crab, or an unfeeling animal, prodding until whatever it was after broke like an eggshell.

  “Have yis heard the news?” asked Aoife a few days later, setting two grocery bags down on the counter. “Jonno says Aunt Moira moved away. He saw her at the bus station this morning, loading suitcases on the bus to Dublin. Sold her place, apparently.”

  I felt a gray pallor lift from my heart, and I hugged her like a mad-woman. “I could kiss ya,” I yelled, leading her around the living room in what was supposed to be a waltz, and we both ended up on the chair. We couldn’t afford to buy new furniture yet but had covered the gashes in the sofa with duct tape. Every time I walked past, I thought of Jim. I can’t imagine how Aoife felt. Fiona shook her wise old head and lit up a ciggie for the three of us to share.

  It was another week or two before I realized that Aoife’s day trips had grown longer than before.

  “Ya driving them all the way to New York through some underground tunnel now, or what?” I tried, but my twin just grinned and said something about having to take on more shifts to make ends meet. When she thought I wasn’t looking, that muscle right between the eyebrows curled up and looked serious, the way it does on me when I have something to hide. So I decided not to press it.

  You’ll be relieved to know I finally got hold of Evvie, who all this time had been in the arms of some Abkhazian architect woman who was apparently “soo
o smart and sensitive,” and we had a fight that kept my sisters up three nights in a row.

  The last time I can remember me and Aoife sitting down together was the following week, when all three of us had invited Jonno up for dinner. While Fiona prepared the steaks he’d brought, me and Aoife sat outside, breathing in the last light of the day. I should have noticed that there was something about her, something beyond reach that didn’t seem natural, but then none of our compasses had worked perfectly since meeting that bastard, had they? She was wearing my favorite leather jacket, the one with the hand-painted Oscar Wilde portrait on the back. I could hear Jonno’s hollow bear laugh at something Fiona said. I didn’t want to spoil the mood, but there was something I had to know. Because, like I said, I know a thing or two about the nature of time. And it bothers me when something about it doesn’t fit.

  “When you went back to Jim that day,” I began, not looking at her, “you were gone a long time. Too long to just take the knife back.”

  The wind rolled in from the sea, drowning out what she answered, so I had to ask again. This time, Aoife tried to smile, as if she were over the entire thing.

  “I rolled up his sleeve,” she said, keeping the cigarette in both hands as anchorage, “because I wanted to see that tattoo properly. Fiona had told me about it. Everyone had a theory of what it looked like. And when he was on top of me, he shoved it in my face like a boy scout merit badge. But he beat me with the other hand, so I never got a look.” She took a breath, and it dawned on me that we’d never really talked about that night, only plotted a murder to avenge it. Her stomach heaved underneath the silk dress she’d filched off Fiona.

  “Listen,” I said, “you don’t have to—”

  “Yes, I do. I wanted to make sure he was really dead, do you understand? So I stabbed him myself. Didn’t want you two to carry the whole burden, in case old Bronagh grew a new brain or something.” She exhaled. “It wasn’t a wolf, in case yer wondering. That tattoo. At first I couldn’t see what it was supposed to be and brushed some blood away. Then I got it. It was twins. Two boys, holding hands. In a forest. Like in that story of his, I suppose.”