The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  ‘But the thing about your father,’ he sighed, ‘was – I see it now but I didn’t then – he made us all feel at home, us fellas over here so young and alone. And him with his stories. Ah, sure we adored him, as if it was his job to be adored and ours to adore him. I’ve often wondered why that was, and I think it was because he was all sort of hollow in himself – which brought out the best in others. We could forgive him anything and mostly we did. Most things anyway.’ Sean’s words shook her. They did not describe the man she’d lived with for almost half her life. Whatever her father’s failures as a parent and husband, he had evidently been as a beacon to Sean and the men he’d known in London. Men who were damaged, perhaps, as her father was, or not long out of the fields of Ireland and so clueless as to how to behave in a big city. ‘A man’s man’ her mother had always called him, and now, here in Sean’s dark and Spartan flat, Clare understood something of what that had meant. Sean booked her a lift back to the airport with a friend of his from Cork who would do the lift for her cheap. She thought about asking the driver to make a detour, to go down the road where she had once lived, but decided against it.

  When the plane touched down at Dublin the sky was still bright, shot through with orange and a stark watermelon red. She collected the box from the carousel, put it on the trolley and went to her car. She put the box on the passenger seat, drove towards the house. She couldn’t wait to get home and open it. But she was also afraid. For there sitting beside her was a reminder of her parents’ hope-filled dreams of returning and of the dreadful reality: their awful planning, their bungling, cobbled-together lives.

  When she got inside the house, she placed the box on the kitchen table. She ripped off the duct-tape she’d taped it up with, and stared at the red leatherette veneer, torn and loose in places. In the corners there were tiny blue doodles, childish attempts at drawing the box, possibly her own. She lifted the lid. The smell was musty. After a while there was another smell, an undersmell. She recognised it immediately as her father’s aftershave, Old Spice. She dived in, pulled out a bunch of notebooks. There were around twenty filled with his close, neat longhand. Beneath these were pages of typed text with sheets of metallic blue carbon paper between some of the pages. She found faded newspaper clippings. One featured a long poem with her father’s name at the end. Another was about him winning a Biro for a parody he’d written of ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. The feature went on to say her father had a ‘flair’, that his style was ‘crisp and succinct’ and that the judges ‘hoped he would carry on writing’. She rummaged to the end of the box and found a bunch of letters tied up in a dry coffee-coloured string, which easily loosened. The letter on top was dated February 1959, and printed in the top right-hand corner was an address: Finca Vigia, Havana, Cuba. The name, in type, at the end, was Ernest Hemingway. (Though the letter was just signed ‘Ernest’.) She flicked through the letters: all were written on the same Manila paper, and all were from the American writer. They seemed to get briefer as she moved back through them, as if Hemingway and her father had had more to say to each other as the months rolled on. She returned to the letter on top, which, she realised by the date, was the last.

  ‘Your last story is wonderful,’ it read. ‘You must gather all the stories you have written for the course and publish. Send to me and I’ll see what I can do. This story, The Light of the West, recalls to me a story of my own, Summer People, which you mentioned you had read and enjoyed. I thank you for that. You place your young characters in an authentic setting, and the debilitating pain the boy experiences once he is removed from that beautiful bog-land place and sent to that evil school is truly moving. I remember summers like you describe. No adult summer is ever like the summers of our youth. Please continue to write me of your progress when I move to Idaho in the Fall.’

  She rifled through the box but could not find the story Hemingway had mentioned. She stayed up till dawn looking and reading (stories about the deep snows of 1947 on the Ox Mountains; about a man lost in his own field; a musician whose gift is enhanced after an encounter in the woods with the fairies) but found no sign of The Light of the West, either typed or in longhand.

  The next day she entered her father’s ward and saw his bed was empty. She was scared. There were things she wanted to say: that she had found the red box, had travelled all the way to London to get it. She wanted to tell him she’d met Sean, who had missed and praised him. She wanted to let her father know she’d read his stories and thought them superb. But most of all she wanted to ask what had become of the missing story, a story she suspected was more memoir than fiction, and that might, if she could find it, recover for her some of her father’s past (and, perhaps, elicit some deeper understanding). As she stared at the thin and empty bed she felt so much regret, and so much love.

  Frantic, she noticed a crowd gathered round another bed up by the window. She walked slowly towards the bed, half closed off by a blue curtain. The amber sun poured onto the corner where the crowd was. The windows were open and, for a change, the air in the ward smelled piney and fresh. She looked over at a group of men gathered round a yellow-skinned man propped up by pillows. They were playing cards and telling jokes as they threw their Euro notes down on the white sheet. One of the men, a bedside neighbour of her father’s, in for a kidney-stone operation, was clandestinely drinking beer. Clare thought that the man looked happier and healthier than he’d seemed all week. As she went to ask this man about the empty bed, she saw that behind him, up by the yellow-skinned man’s head, sitting in a wheelchair in his pyjamas and leading the group boldly on in the game, was her father, exalted-looking as he dealt out the cards in the sunlight.

  The Lagoon

  She loosened her hand and walked towards the hedgerow. The holly berries were wizened, the haws dry and turning yellow. Smoothing her thumb across an ivy leaf, she thought of London, where there would be things to do on a Sunday other than walking and picking at hedges. At the turn for the Newry Road she could see the tide arriving in its horseshoe shape across the mud flats, after which, until Carlingford, there would be a five-mile stretch of beach; they had hoped to find a way down to it before the long walk to Riverstown or Gyle’s Quay.

  ‘Kate!’ She hated when he hollered like that, as if she were his property or child. She ignored him, and continued: part reproof for the shout, part wanting to get on to the Ballymascanlon Hotel for a Coke. ‘Over here! This way looks interesting.’ She trudged back, and looked warily up a long dirt track.

  ‘What’s down this way?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But it might take us to the sea.’

  They had walked the Newry Road many times but not noticed this path before. Two ivy-covered stone pillars and an oxblood-coloured gate with a frayed green rope dangling from its bolt marked the entrance. Nick unloosed the rope and pushed the gate across the grassy path. She felt uneasy. There was probably a farmer up there, a farmer with a large loaded gun, for this land was most certainly a farm. Sheep dung dotted the fields (divided by swathes of barbed wire that had collapsed in parts), rusty implements rested haphazardly by plastic-covered bales of hay. Nick was undeterred.

  ‘We’ll say we’re looking for our dog.’

  ‘We don’t have a dog,’ she retorted.

  ‘I do,’ he replied. A joke, for which she slapped his arm. She’d heard them many times, these quips, yet always fell into Nick’s trap. He seemed to enjoy his continual success with her, and she knew she had encouraged it by her feigned slowness.

  She walked up the path with one hand in his pocket. The path ran through the centre of a steep mound. At the peak she could see the ruins of a limekiln. Ravens cawed from its jagged corners; ivy grew in tight v shapes across crumbling rue-red bricks; a lone elm presided eerily in the field opposite. On their descent a small redwood copse gave way to a dilapidated farmhouse. There were no cars or tractors, and no sign of a farmer.

  ‘See, it’s fine. We’ll find a path down to some lovely beach now.’ Jus
t as Nick had uttered these words, a man appeared from behind the house. He strolled towards them, sat on the low blue wall of the house and lit up a cigarette. His white sleeves were rolled up, exposing his liver-brown, sinewy arms to the cold day. As he brought the cigarette to his lips, she saw that his nails were thick with dirt and tangerine tobacco stains. He did not carry a gun. He had a wiry frame, and with his cherub’s face and flat side parting had the mien of a choirboy.

  ‘Grand day,’ he said, shyly, as they approached. She felt embarrassed by their blatant trespassing.

  ‘We were wondering if there was a path down to the sea this way, maybe to Templetown,’ Nick said, squeezing her hand.

  ‘There was, but it’s all mud and quicksand now. I don’t think that’d be much use to ya.’

  ‘No,’ Nick replied, ‘we’ll have to wait till Riverstown then.’

  ‘Be the guts of three mile, Riverstown. Are yous out for a walk?’

  ‘Aye, that’s it.’ She glanced over at the house: the windows were covered with grime and bird-shit; the torn and yellowed nets hung as if at half-mast; the brown front-door lay open to a pile of detritus – newspapers, tins, bottles – all soaking up the pale sun in the hall. She thought, by his appearance, his yellow teeth, the state of the fields and house, the mustard shine to the embossed wallpaper in the hallway, that he was most likely a bachelor farmer. Perhaps his mother or sister had died and, like all the other bachelor farmers she’d ever met or heard tell of who were living out on the Cooley Peninsula, he’d done little or nothing with himself, or the house, since. His slate-blue eyes caught her poor opinion of his home and she felt her intrusiveness keenly.

  ‘There’s a good walk over there, down by that kiln.’

  ‘Where’s it get to?’ Nick asked.

  ‘You’ll know when you see it,’ replied the man. The morose and ominous way in which he said this frightened her. She wanted to turn back. On the other hand, she thought, I have Nick. If Nick turned out to be inadequate protection in this tumbledown place with the strange, child-like farmer, he’d be no good at all in a big city like London: continuing would be a kind of test. She squeezed his hand to indicate that they should do as the man suggested.

  At the kiln, the road curled around the field with the lone elm. The land here was waist-high with sea-grass and vetch and samphire. If they did have to make a run for it, she reasoned, all they had to do was climb over the hedge bordering the field with the elm and head straight for the Newry Road. Just as she was beginning to wonder what exactly the man meant by ‘you’ll know when you see it’, the path veered right, and there it was in front of them: a black lagoon.

  The formation was glacial. A panorama of sheer, coal-black rock, the vast innards of a mound, loomed over two dark pools, one the size of a small lake. The water was absolutely still, the rim of both pools covered in a stiff, pale-green lichen.

  ‘It’s amazing!’ Nick said, his voice echoing till it passed over the heather-topped peak. He walked along the rim of the bigger pool, then picked up a large stone from the undergrowth by the hedge and dropped it in. The splash made a thick black web, a heavy plop. After a few seconds the pool began to make loud gurgling sounds as if it had digested the stone. She watched Nick break a branch, about four feet in length, from a cherry blossom at the mouth of the path then lie down on his stomach towards the water and poke it in; the whole of the stick slithered beneath the surface. He hauled it out, and shook the dripping stick over the pool before discarding it behind him. How had she not known of the existence of this place in her own townland? Who had ever heard of such a hidden lake?

  She gazed at their reflection in the water. She thought she looked younger and fatter, with more gold in her hair than she imagined she possessed. Her hair was dark, from where had the gold come? She looked happy and as bound up with this person standing beside her as she could ever hope to be with anyone. Nick was his tall, strong and boyish self. His eyes, though, were greener, and when she looked back at him, she saw that indeed his eyes were greener, and that they had more life in them than she had previously noticed. She began to see beneath the boy and girl in the water, beneath the reflected clouds and the overhanging calamine-pink blossoms, to the murk that wafted below. The stone and branch had disturbed the depths; grasses and brown things to-ed and fro-ed. She pulled back towards the hedge.

  ‘There’s probably bodies down there; if you wanted to bury someone where no one would ever find them, this is where you'd come,’ Nick said. Again she slapped him. She did not want this thought, along with her suspicions about the doleful farmer, and her mother’s skein of objections to her and Nick’s imminent move to London (her mother had cried over it), all rattling around together inside her head. But Nick was right; here was a first-class hiding place; here, on the border, in the heart of high-octane IRA activity; and people had disappeared. Mountain caves and abandoned houses had been searched all along the Peninsula for any sign of them; even the newspapers had begun to refer to such people as ‘the disappeared’.

  She took a gulp of the icy air. The space seemed primeval; in a moment a pterodactyl might swoop down into this cavernous gloom and make off with the two of them. Yet Nick, oblivious to the extravagances of her imagination, persisted in walking close to the edge. He prowled, confidently, around the pools, vanquishing every rise and fissure before him. She watched him continue along the row of stones that divided the big pool from the smaller one, and perch precariously in the middle. Then, she noticed, just a few yards ahead of him, beckoning under the white full-bloom of a magnolia tree, a gate fixed to a charred wooden post. The gate was open and mercifully inviting them out of the place. She could see the tops of cars speeding along the road, and felt comforted by this.

  Suddenly, Nick screamed. She looked around and there he was, hanging from the thin row of rocks that divided the two black pools. His voice shook: it’s pulling me down Kate, it’s pulling me down. She was dumbstruck. She rummaged around the hedge for the four-foot stick but could not find it. She glanced back at the pool: Nick was gone. She heard the same deep sucking sound that the stone had made in the water earlier, as if Nick had sunk so far down the pool had swallowed him. She turned, raced out towards the entrance, and screamed for the farmer. He did not come. She ran back to the second pool: all glassy, still as death. She cursed herself for wearing a dress then quickly hitched it up and tucked it under her knickers. She walked along the thin row of rocks, knelt upon their jagged quartzy tops, leaned into the black water, the rock edges cutting into her flesh, and plunged in her arm. It folded over her and clung to her like molasses.

  ‘Kate!’ she heard the voice howl from the direction of the gate. She stood up, steadily, furiously, walked back along the stones and, after loosening the dress, ran down the path in a panic towards Nick, who was swinging from the gate, head to toe in an oily black mud.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said, slapping him across a wet leg.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here before yer man comes to chop us up.’

  All the way across the damp, scratchy grass she thought of London; of the fun they were going to have far from the gloom of the border with its secret paths and neglected farms. Soon she and Nick would be in a brightly lit, bustling city, and their walks would never again have at the end of them, the possibility of disappearing – at least, not into an ancient black lake hidden behind a limekiln.

  The Jailbird

  She had the same air about her, a goofiness sort of, and her teeth were the same, too, narrow and overlapping at the sides, so that with her dark hair and fringe she looked just like Patricia Arquette in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Whenever Martha would smile I had always a compulsion to lick her teeth. The caption said she was home.

  ‘See Martha Cassidy is back in town,’ my mother said, and I quickly closed the newspaper. She’d have something to say to me if it was I who peeped over her shoulder, there’s no doubt. The customers in the shop looked up. I thought they were listening to
the Joe Duffy show Ma had on head-thumpingly loud (as per usual) but obviously they weren’t.

  ‘They say she done well over there,’ Biddy Hughes said.

  ‘Josie will be pleased to see her,’ Mrs Barrington said.

  ‘Did someone die, Connie?’ Coco Conway said, all offbeat, and everyone looked, as he was, and is still, a big thick. Ma turned down the volume on the radio.

  ‘No one died, Coco. Just Martha Cassidy in the paper as she’s home,’ Ma said. If she thought I was going to stand there with the biddies gawping and waiting for a reaction she’d another think coming. I said, ‘excuse me Ma, but I’m off now for my lunch,’ and I took off the white shop-coat she’d make me wear as if we were a big shop when we weren’t, we were a one-horse outfit, and sloped out from behind the counter with my lunchbox and stripy flask she’d got me the month before in O’Neil’s in Dundalk. On my way out I heard Biddy Hughes say:

  ‘I hear Michael is feeding the foxes, Connie. Jack Daly won’t be too pleased, he has sheep up there.’ Once out, I stopped to eavesdrop, but the biddies just went back in time to seventeen years ago, to the big dairy scam that Martha’s father had been a part of, and one of the reasons the love of my life left for the big old US of A.

  ‘He was in with them fellas that’s why he done it. Watering down the milk! What a thing to be doing to make a bit of money,’ Biddy Hughes said.

  ‘Money for guns, too,’ Mrs Barrington said.

  ‘Indeed. And it’s he did, Biddy. Did. Sometimes I wonder if you went to school at all.’ Ma would correct other people’s grammar no matter what the topic of conversation or how prismatic its flow. It was a way of reminding them all in Castlemoyne that she was a cut above, what with her shop, her background as a champion amateur actress who, as she liked to claim, had read all of Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde.