“Oh.”
“We don’t get on,” she admitted. “She always makes me feel like the cat who may well look at the queen, if you get me drift.”
Only family loyalty held me from agreeing with her. We smiled in wry understanding.
“Oh,” she remembered. “Last night, that film director was around the house.”
“He was?”
“Yes. I doubt somehow he was lookin’ for me.”
I shrugged, guiltily. “Molly?”
She turned and gave me a radiant, conspiratorial smile. “Yes?”
“He won’t come back and bother you, will he? Seamus?”
“He bloody well better not. I’ll take the shovel to him meself if he does.”
“God protect you.”
Her face turned thoughtful. “Claire”—she touched my arm—“just mind you be careful up there, at Bally Cashin.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook herself free of a shiver. “I don’t know.” She looked uneasily up to the house. “Something festers there.”
Chapter Eleven
Where is everyone?” I leaned the bike and came in through the parlor door, blinking in the sudden dark.
“Here’s Claire!” they called from inside. They’d been waiting for me.
“What’s he done now?” I called, frightened.
“Who?” Aunt Bridey said.
I remembered Molly’s warning. “Johnny,” I said, to throw them off.
“Och, he’s helping Jenny Rose.”
So he’d come back here. “Where is she?” I asked.
“She’s milking the goats,” Ned said. “Seamus forgot and took off. She’ll be right in.”
Jenny Rose did all the grunt work, I remarked to myself. But you couldn’t say anything. I cringed to think what they would say about Johnny.
“The solicitor’s on his way,” Bernadette informed me grandly.
“Johnny’s helping milk the goats?”
“Oh, yes.” Dierdre curled her hair around one finger. “He won’t just watch,” she said knowingly.
I stiffened. Mr. Come-in-the-door-and-drop-down-on-the-couch-’til-he-left-the-next-day was now off to milk the goats, was he?
“He’s made Seamus a deputy,” Dierdre said.
“Who did?”
“Why, your Johnny. He gave Seamus that detective’s card and all,” Uncle Ned said as he squared off all the bills and envelopes before him on the table. “The kind NYPD detectives’ family members keep in their wallets. So when they take their driver’s licenses out when they get pulled over for speeding, the cop will say, Oh, all right, off with ye.”
Bridey said, “Last night he gave that to him.”
So that was the tip, I thought, relieved.
“Come on, Ned.” Bridey nudged him. “Get those bills away so I can polish. Mr. Truelove will be here any minute.”
“Seamus isn’t here now, though, is he?” I said just to make sure. The image of the broken cat wasn’t something I could easily let go of. I tell you the truth, now that I was safe in Bally Cashin, the whole thing made me feel heavy and sad. I’d just begun to get used to Seamus. To think of him as a lovable old Saint Bernard who’s always in the way.
“Sure, he has a lot to do as a deputy,” Dierdre said. She loved Seamus, you could tell.
“His first job was take Johnny’s luggage from Dayday’s to Auntie Molly’s Bed and Breakfast,” she added.
“That figures.” I laughed, sitting down in the comfortable chair.
“We didn’t want Seamus about when Mr. Truelove tells us what’s in Peggy’s will.” Dierdre smiled, relaxed. She’d shampooed her hair and set it and there were rims of pressure where the rods had held the soft hair down. She was waiting to comb it out later, it seemed. Peggy now, is it? I thought. Things must be looking up.
“Well, you know Seamus,” Liam confided, looking furtively about. “He repeats everything.”
Not everything, I thought sadly, pulling myself back from Liam’s breath. As usual, he’d started early. I took my boots off under the table and sat on my feet. I hoped they weren’t going to start criticizing Johnny right away. I knew what was coming. They weren’t the type to keep quiet about show-offs and blowhards. I reminded myself to keep in mind he was, after all, the father of my children. I mustn’t end up agreeing with them. And I certainly wasn’t up to defending him. I braced myself for the attack to come. Unconsciously, I touched my wedding ring.
Uncle Ned turned his gaze to my hand. “Johnny sure comes galloping onto the scene,” he said.
“Now that,” Dierdre floored me by saying, “is a man!”
“I’m sorry?”
“One magnificent specimen,” Bridey added, approvingly, drizzling the oil on the cloth. Then she squeezed half a lemon into it.
“Aye,” Uncle Ned agreed. “He fits right in, your Johnny does.”
Aunt Bridey rubbed the top of the table roughly with the linseed oil and lemon juice. “What you’d call a real man,” she said. “Knows what he wants. Did you see him enjoy my cake? With relish, he ate my cake.” She shook her head. She pulled up her sleeves. “I swear Seamus is getting more and more good for nothing. I don’t want you giving him another pound until he gets to his chores.” She looked up at me. “Did you not see him?”
“I must have just missed him,” I said, not lying, really.
Liam yanked the polishing rag from her hand and did it on his own. “He also got a detective’s benevolent association card and kept it in his cap, in the outside band, and he looked like a reporter for the Sun,” he said. “All he needed was a clipboard, he could get in anywhere.”
It was such a shame. You could tell they all loved Seamus. I almost loved him myself.
Someone clopped on the door.
“I didn’t hear a car,” I said.
“It must be Mr. Truelove.” Bernadette jumped. “He parks up on the road.”
“Once he had to stay the night,” Liam whispered. “The bridge washes out all the time.”
I said nothing.
“That was a bad night for us all.” Bernadette looked at Liam.
“He wouldn’t want to go through that night again.” Liam looked at her.
“He can’t digest his mushrooms, poor man,” Bridey said to me.
“Poor us.” Bernadette lifted her shoulders.
“Aye. That night was a penance for us all.” Bridey scurried across to ditch her rag and the oil in the cupboard bottom.
Liam got up and strode across the floor. He rubbed both hands together and gave me a meaningful eye. He was expecting something good. He opened the door. Indeed, it was the talkative little Mr. Truelove.
His hat was in his hand. “God bless the house,” he mumbled, coming in, a briefcase crammed with papers at his side. He brushed disgustedly at his shoulder. “The bloody larks!” he complained.
“And for the rich they sing,” Liam remarked.
“Give him something,” Bridey instructed Bernadette. She tiptoed across the kitchen and came back with a Turkish towel. Bridey brushed his shoulder with it. “Brings luck,” she said, but she didn’t say it too loud. “Everyone knows Mr. Truelove only wears the one jacket,” she said to the side. It wasn’t that he couldn’t spare the money, it’s just people are the way they are.
We all stood about until he settled himself at the table.
Jenny Rose stepped in lightly and Johnny stepped in behind her. For all his girth, he’s light on his feet. I can’t deny his face lit up when he saw me. Of course he didn’t really know anyone else. Everyone sat down where they could and Liam and Johnny lifted in the bench from outside. Liam pulled a bottle of duty-free bourbon from his pocket and took another swish. Oh, here we go, thought everyone.
Mr. Truelove’s sensitive eyes began to water from the linseed oil fumes. He ruffled through his papers, stopped, took out his handkerchief and held it to his nose. “Madame,” he appealed to Aunt Bridey. “Would it be too much the bother if I were to sit elsewhere
?”
Mortified, Aunt Bridey instructed Ned to go and bring in the embroidery stool. “It’s heavy,” she warned, “and mind you don’t scratch my floor.” The Cashin women all seemed to share that trait, owning the floors. Johnny went with Uncle Ned and the two of them, squatting with their heels together, carried it back in. “Zen,” Johnny said, nodding his head sagely when they put it down a little bit off-center. Everything good and off-center for Johnny is Zen. It makes the back of my neck prickle. Mr. Truelove settled his bottom upon it.
One paper on top, he cleared his throat, then mired through the legal terms.
Dierdre shook her head around and around, then came to rest it looking out the window, right at the spot where their poor house had been. She moaned at regular, appropriate intervals.
It irked me, the way Johnny sat there as if this were his family, too. But, you see, to him it was. He’d planted himself. Then Mr. Truelove said, in a ceremonial voice, “I would like to read a letter from Peg and would everyone mind coming together, this way we could put her spirit to rest.”
“What’s this? What’s he trying to do?” Liam objected. “Make it into a religious ceremony?”
“I come to know Margaret, er, Peg, rather well over the years.” Mr. Truelove smiled to reveal unfortunate teeth. “She and I had more than one thing in common.”
Here Dierdre moved around uncomfortably.
“She wasn’t overly fond of the bank’s investment policies and neither was I.” He blew his nose. The dandruff fell like snow from his lightbulb-shaped dome to his shoulders.
Every one of us leaned from the edge of his or her seat.
Then Dierdre started to cry softly. Mr. Truelove, moved, spoke directly to her.
“As for the matter of a wake, she didn’t want any sort of ceremony whatsoever.” He looked over the tops of his glasses and whispered, “She didn’t want to give the locals a chance to scoff after her, she always said. You understand. Just a quick incineration.”
“What?” Bridey cried, her coronet askew. “Cremated? Peg?”
“Yes.”
“Can she do that?” Uncle Ned asked.
“She can do anything she wants now she’s dead.” Liam hiccupped.
“No, I mean is it Christian?”
“It’s allowed, certainly,” Mr. Truelove stated.
“Allowed with the Protestants, you mean,” Bridey said.
I turned around to see how Jenny Rose was taking this, but her head was bent. She was sketching Mr. Truelove in pencil on a new shirt cardboard.
“The saints were burned,” Bernadette pointed out. “Burned at the stake.”
Dierdre put her little sherry glass down with a refreshing bang. “How could she do this?”
Liam leaned across the bench we sat on and took my hand in his. “Isn’t it awful? No pretty grave to tend. No soft blowing petals in the breeze.”
“Shut up!” Bernadette said. “You’re drunk.”
Dierdre cinched her hefty waistline with her hands. It was a strain for her to wear black, you could feel it. She had at least a lavender buckle on the belt and she touched it again and again, as if remembering who she was. “When will I get the money, though?” she asked politely. “Will I have to pay for that beforehand? Now I’ve lost the house…”
“Well, it must cost that much less,” Uncle Ned reckoned, “what with the police handling the, uh, ‘incidentals.’” He said this as delicately as he could. “There can hardly be a mortician if she’s not to go belowground, there’s that much less to do.”
No one had a word to say. He continued, itemizing upon his fingertips. “There won’t be the gravediggers, that will save you a bundle right there. You’ll have no need for flowers, incense. I wonder if we really even need the priest…”
Johnny sat on the bench with his hands folded in front of him as if he were back in Brooklyn in grammar school. I really hated him. Zen was my word. My thing. Or nonthing. Fickle Brownie lay contentedly at his little feet, I noticed with a stab of annoyance.
The telephone rang out.
“Leave it ring.” Liam dismissed it with a magnanimous sweep.
Ned got up and went inside to quiet it. We sat silently, craning our ears, until he came back in. He looked pleased.
“Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy,” he said importantly and sat down.
“Well, what does she want?” Bridey said.
“Plans for the fishing.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, yes,” he remembered. “And someone should go over to take back Jenny Rose’s canvases. They shan’t be able to tend to them now, she says. Willy will be back to London tomorrow.”
“Will he now?” Aunt Bridey said.
“She says the conditions in the rooms there in the big house are too damp,” he added apologetically to Jenny Rose. “No good for the well-being of any canvas.”
“Why wait ’til tomorrow, then?” Jenny Rose stood. “Let him leave now, before I get my murdering hands upon him.” She paced the room furiously. She picked up the sketch she’d been working on and ripped it in two. “Tell him to throw them away. Throw them out the window! I won’t have them anymore!”
Mr. Truelove beheld his image torn in half. “When Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy will have her way,” he said philosophically and to no one in particular, “Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy will have her way.”
“She thinks she can cook this up on top a all this, does she?” Aunt Bridey was beginning to look like my mother just before she’d stood up in church that time Father Sweezy’d announced from the pulpit we should all go down and sign a petition for some politician. “Uh-oh,” my dad had said out loud, but it was too late. My mother had already stood up in the church, packed as Palm Sunday, and she waved her big fist in the air and shouted at him up in the pulpit, “How dare you! How dare you?” Right in front of everyone. I’ll never forget it. None of us will.
It had been a terrible moment for our family. We girls were still very young and you know how young girls are, they don’t like their mothers calling attention to themselves, let alone causing an uproar and uproar she did cause. They wouldn’t let her back in the Rosary Sodality for years. I think they still don’t want her in the Propagation of the Faith to this day. Now that I am older and aloof, I agree that the state and the church should be separate and I think it was rather splendid what my mother did. So I sat there in Aunt Bridey’s kitchen and vowed to mention that to her when I got back home. Because I don’t think I ever had.
Anyway, Aunt Bridey was getting that Cashin girl glow around the bicep. “You’ll keep your personal asides to yourself, Mr. Truelove,” she rose up to her full height and announced. She trembled as she spoke. “You’ll be here for one reason and for one reason only!”
Ned, his elbows out, sucked his empty pipe at Bernadette, his eyes twinkling. That’s your mother, he seemed to be thinking, that’s the stuff that drew me to her!
“Mother Bridey might be queen of Bally Cashin,” Liam cut in, “but all the tributes still go to Audrey Whitetree-Murphy herself.”
Right away, Aunt Bridey seemed to quell. The wind just went from her sails and her head went down. I knew what she must be thinking. For her own son to say that!
Up until that moment, you wouldn’t get away with a word against Liam, no matter how much trouble he’d made. Not with me around. But I don’t go for grinding your heel into someone’s ear when her head’s already on the ground. And it’s not drink that does that, that makes a person mean. I’ve known plenty of drunks. It just seems that some of them have to drink because that bitter place at the bottom of their heart is so painful that it’s pushed so far away, it takes a raging numbness to allow it out. That’s what happened to Liam. There was a hate at the bottom of his well and he couldn’t get to it without numbing the well walls first. It was just a horrible thing to be near.
“It’s a shame, too,” Dierdre said, unsure, but you could tell Dierdre didn’t have the gumption anymore either to stand up to the name Audrey Whitetree
-Murphy. Not even for her sister.
Uncle Ned, no stranger to trouble, said, “Why not let’s get this will business over with.”
“But Mr. Truelove goes on and on,” Liam protested thickly.
“Like the long-winded Brannagan,” Uncle Ned remembered. “Do you remember Brannagan? The fastidious railroad time-checker from Clonmel? ’Twas just after his promotion. He was determined to make a fine job of it. After weeks of pages detailing the comings and goings of each train, well, the depot foreman threw up his hands and he said, ‘Enough of this, Brannagan. It’s too much!’ So right away Brannagan changed his reports. Now they read: ‘On again. Off again. Gone again. Brannagan.’”
Nobody laughed so he laughed himself.
Ignoring him, Liam scoffed, “Aunt Dierdre quakes at the presence of gentry. Like they all do.”
I thought of my father and how we act around him and I thought, it’s true. It was true what Liam said.
Liam leaned over toward Johnny. “Pompous pissheads!” He rattled a three-minute egg timer back and forth in his hand.
“That’s not true,” Dierdre said hotly. “I’ll say what I please. I’m not one to sugarcoat what I’ve got to say.”
“Oh, no, sure, you’re not.” Liam yawned. “Bull.”
Dierdre fluttered the purple beads around her neck. They snapped and careened across the floor.
“You watch your tongue, Liam,” Bridey warned, bending over to pick them up. Someone would break their neck.
“Come away with you, son.” Uncle Ned patted the bench gently. He’d been through so much with him. “Come take your seat and we’ll hear the rest from Mr. Truelove.”
But Liam went and stood before his mother on the floor, leaning over her and spraying. “If it wasn’t for Willy, I’d have blown up that Bishop’s seat long ago.”
Bridey pushed him away nervously. “Go on, now, you’ll have the American faction thinkin’ it was you blew up the slate house.”
I think I must have raised my eyebrows.
He saw the disapproval on my expression. “And you!” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I didn’t think you’d be fickin’ around with the locals. I never took ya fer that!”
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