by Gavin McCrea
“How are things going to be now?” I says when I open up to the dark morning and see Frederick there, blue-nosed and white-cheeked from the cold and the shock.
He doesn’t answer me, just stands there looking like the heart’s been torn alive out of his body.
I step back and hold open. The glow of the candles reaches out to take him in. He stoops under the doorpost—the house isn’t built for the foreign body—and I see then he’s brought Dr. Gumbert with him.
I bob a curtsy. “She’s in the bedroom.”
We all go in. While Gumbert looks her over, Frederick paces the flags, window to chimneypiece, as if impatient for her to rise out of her death to greet him. I stand and watch the fire in the grate perish.
“Didn’t you see anything ailing about her?” Gumbert asks.
“Nay,” I says. “It’s like she wasted overnight.”
Behind me I hear Frederick’s tread make a sudden halt. “She had a cough,” he says. “But we presumed it the effect of a cold. And she had pain from time to time but—”
I finish to save him from further excuses. “But the Lord Himself knows Mary liked to indulge in a headache.”
“Hmm,” Gumbert says, and goes back to his examining.
I poke at the fire though I know it’s in vain. In truth, I’m scattering the coals and choking the flames. Frederick doesn’t take up his pacing again. The room is still to the silence of his halting. I turn and am met by his eyes snuffed like yesterday’s lamps. I test a smile on him, but it makes no impression: a howl hitting a wall and no echo coming back.
“Are you all right, Frederick?” I says. “Can I get you something?”
“Nein. Thank you, Lizzie.” He goes to look out the window, and there he stays, looking, even though there’s naught to see, for I’ve darkened the panes.
Feeling more alone than I’ve ever felt, I turn from his back to the bed. Gumbert has his hand inside her night rail and is feeling round her belly. I don’t know which is worse: to follow the lump of his hand under the flannel or to move up to her face where the grimace waits.
I knew this was going to happen.
You’re not meant to know, but when you look back you sometimes remember a feeling that’s like a prior knowing. The face she made from the bed last night—her eyes rolling up before the lids had come down—was the same she used to make from the bloodied child sheets, and I had a sense that this was the last time I’d see it, that this was her farewell to me.
This is it, I thought. This is her now, gone.
I’d pictured her dead before. In those moments of selfishness and envy when thinking can’t be controlled or kept from the evil corners, I imagined what I’d gain if she were to die and pass over. I imagined a world that didn’t contain her, that didn’t brim over with her, and I felt freer in it, and better off. But flickerings of this kind can’t be compared to the knowing of real death. Such knowing occurs like an awakening, a sudden switch from night to noontide. “All these years,” it says, “all these years you’ve ignored the pallor of death worn over her. If only you’d opened your eyes you’d have seen she’s been dying since the first time she swole with a babby for him. Now the hour has come to grant it. She had no living child to make her suffer in the rearing, but instead had enough dead to knock her down and leave her eternal wrecked.”
And what an awakening it is! What a rousing! What a wrenching from what is comfortable and safe! For though I can still say in my mind that it was him who made her sick, the rage in my heart keeps being against me; against me for letting her be done by him; against me for watching by as he killed her by inches.
Says Gumbert: “Hmm, it’s probable her heart gave way.”
Says I to myself: “God forgive me, but I can well believe it.”
Frederick sees him out. I follow their whisperings as far as the sitting room. They slink outside to speak private among men. I go to the window and twitch the blind. They’re stood in the middle of the road, in the full force of the wind. Frederick’s head is bent so far forward it’s near resting on Gumbert’s shoulder. Gumbert’s mouth is brought to licking distance of Frederick’s ear. Looking at them, it makes me wonder do they think I’ve lost my senses altogether. Can’t I see them? Don’t I know what they’re talking about? “A bad death,” they’re saying. “A consequence of the lush and the search for pleasure.”
Frederick comes back in and leans against the wall. Scratches at his forehead. In his arrangement there’s hardness and there’s wildness. He hunts the room for something to accuse. By now I’ve learnt to know him and to trust him, but I’m not free of fear. Saints of men have been known to make dreadful acts under the influence of grief.
“What day is it?” he says.
“Tuesday,” I says.
He’s yet to cry; we’ve both of us yet to do it. I think to be held might help bring it on and get it past. I move into the room where it’d be easy for him to come and give onto me, if such was his desire and intending. And indeed he does come to me. But instead of an embrace he takes my hand and lifts it—lifts it as if to lead me to a dance or to kiss it—and then lets go of it sudden. Drops it so that it falls limp into my skirts. And a relief, it is, for he’d begun to squeeze it hard.
What he does now I wish Mary could be alive to see: he charges past me to her room, flings open the door, throws down by the side of the bed, and prays.
“Mary, Mary,” he says between his German orations, “Mary, Mary, forgive me, Mary.”
It’s a bad and awkward scene to watch. A voice speaks inside of me: “Get up out of that and let her rest in peace. I’ll not have you easing your conscience telling her things that matter little now.” And there’s pleasure in it at first, hearing what’s innermost, but I soon judge it cruel. To silence it, I set myself to making the place ready.
I think the end of every task will bring an end to Frederick’s supplications, but I’m wrong. He stays down: elbows dug, hands melded, throat scratched by the volume of godly words fetched up. When I’ve done all I can do on my own, I go to him and put a hand on him. Mary’s bottom lip has slipped from the top, and her jaw has fallen down. She’s glaring at us. And who’d blame her?
Frederick lifts and turns his face to me.
“What now?” I says again, for I need to know. Mary was the only true kin I had on earth. Nobody could split us. We were got in the same tin or we weren’t got at all. When I looked in the glass, two faces looked back. Is there a place possible with myself alone in it? “Tell me, Frederick, what’s to happen?”
Letting a quiet moan, he says, “We’ll talk about it after the funeral,” and then, as if a bell has rung, he starts his crying. The sorrow in me is a deep feeling too, but I don’t allow it, not yet. It’ll get naught done but pour itself more.
I send the neighbor’s boy out for Lydia and Father Logan. They’re here in no time and with all the bits needed to wash and compose her.
“Is he all right?” Lydia whispers, gesturing at Frederick collapsed over himself on the elbow chair. “Will he want to help?”
I shake my head. “He’s grand where he is for now.”
Lydia asks can she have the night dress we cut off Mary. She wants it to make new patterns with, and I give it to her glad. As Beloff used to say, “Every good bit of cloth ought be made into something else.”
After we’ve bathed her, they go out to Frederick and leave me alone to do the cotton. I can hear them murmuring on the other side of the wall, which takes some of the closeness out of the task, makes it seem a shared and dirty thing.
“You’re only getting in the way, Mr. Engels,” I hear Lydia say. “Go home and have a wash, get your letters writ and the notice published. Come back this evening when everything’s arranged.”
There’s some shuffling, and rattling, and the glug and slam of a glass.
“Do whatever you have to do,” he says. “Don’t hesitate to get the best. I’ll look after it.”
Then the door bangs. With the sound of h
im gone I’m calmer, and after a minute I settle down to it and do the best I can according to Logan’s instructions.
When I’m finished I call them back and Logan unfolds the habit he’s brought.
“Is that the best there is, Father?” I says.
“A simple funeral is wiser, Lizzie. You don’t want to grate on the feelings of any.”
“Didn’t you hear the man before, Father? There’s money to be spent. And isn’t it occasions like this that give money its value?”
Lydia comes between us. “How about we use this habit, Lizzie, and we’ll get her a good set of beads, the best we can find.”
Begrudging, I agree, and she goes for them.
When she comes back, they’re so good-looking and dear, I have to turn away while she weaves them into her hands.
Night is already down when the men come and put her into the box. We’ve to do the beads again, and her hair and the habit too, but once she’s out for show in the sitting room, I can say we’ve done her justice. We light more candles and put rows of chairs about. Flowers arrive, and sandwiches and raw spirit; gifts from round the town. Bodies known and bodies unknown to me pass through. On their way they boil water and make tea, pour glasses of whiskey and set out plates of beef and ham. Some linger only a minute, others stay longer to kneel and join the responses, or take a chair and share in the talk. At first, they’re afraid to speak above the breath, for fear of being the first to laugh, but soon the room is filled with the excitement that comes up at such gatherings, and they get louder and bolder, turning their talk away from Mary and towards their own living cares.
Some time after eight, the house thronged, Moss arrives. I haven’t seen him since Lydia’s wedding. Waist thickened, trousers unbraced and coat unpatched, shoulders lowered and skin mottled and eyes sunk: is this the same man I near wed? He’s come in the company of Jamie and Kit and Joseph and Dan and some other Fenian boys, a gang of seven or eight. They offer their condolences to me with manners that can’t be doubted, but once they’ve come away from me and taken up their drinks, they feign a menacing cast, stood together in a bunch and glowering about like it’s the peelers they are. It’s plain they’ve come in force to make a point, about rich factory men ill-using Irish women to death, or some such guff. I only hope they’ll tire and sooner go. I want no trouble.
Not long after, Frederick returns. Jamie sees him appear at the door and nudges Moss. Moss does the same to his neighbor, and soon they’re all shifting about in their boots and sniffing and rubbing their noses along their sleeves as if preparing for fisticuffs. Frederick doesn’t even see them. He has come with a man, a lank with a plume in his hat and a bag of tools in his hand; it’s this Mr. Plume who takes up the whole of Frederick’s attention. He tows him over the side of the box, and together they look over Mary. They huddle close like plotters. Size her up like a rural does a sow.
The room has gone quiet to watch them. Whispers go round, but don’t reach me. There’s such an air that if someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on, I might smother in it. The Fenian gang shuffle away from the wall and make a ring round the three: Mary, Frederick, and Mr. Plume. Moss comes to me with his cap in his hand.
“Lizzie, I feel obliged to tell you, for I think you ought know. They want to make casts of her face and hands.”
“Merciful Jesus.”
“Now, if you like, we can—”
“Leave this to me.” I push through. “Lads, step back. I’ll deal with this.”
I take Frederick into the bedroom, get rid of the bodies gathered there, and close the door behind us.
“Are you trying to mortify me?”
“It would be something to keep, Lizzie. Something we would have.”
“Something we’d—?”
“A memory. A souvenir. Is it such a bad thing to want?”
“This is a great shock for us all, Frederick. And we must each of us find our ways to bear it. But this isn’t the way.” My speech rises high out from me. “This is not the way!”
I run from the room and into Lydia’s biding arms. “Poor petal,” she says. “My poor poor petal.”
When Frederick comes out again, he looks tense and difficult, like he no longer feels his place among us. Under our hard gaze, he shows Plume out and, after a whiskey and some words with Father Logan, goes himself. He doesn’t appear again—thanks be to Christ—till the Thursday morning at the graveside.
There, he doesn’t join in the prayers. I’m sure he’s happy to have them—the marks they make in the wind that would otherwise roll across the field unchecked—but he has a look on his face, a superior look that says, “This is a habit I’ve long since grown out of.” Of course, if he’d been there at the closing of the box; if he’d seen how her hollowness and ash turned to a radiance that the oils and the candles couldn’t full explain, he’d now understand that religion isn’t something light to be taken up and put down, like a book.
Back at the house again, the party goes on till the place is drunk dry. It’s past midnight by the time we’re left alone; past midnight and well gone the hour to talk about our affairs. I don’t want it put off another day. But Frederick has other matters on his mind.
“I received this.”
I stop the dishing up and turn to him. He’s sat on a stool by the fire, holding up a letter.
“It’s from Karl.”
“Read it to me.”
“You won’t like it.”
“Frederick, tell it out.”
He unfolds it slow and reads. When he’s done, he bends forward, pinches the bone between his eyes.
“Is that what he has to say?” I storm the bucket. The crocks have rare known such fury. “Thinking about money at such a time. The man’s a savage.”
“How do I reply? How do I even—?” He starts to whimper.
“It doesn’t merit replying, Frederick. Let him souse in a bit of silence from you.”
“The poor girl loved me with all her heart. He doesn’t see it. He doesn’t care.”
“Put it away now. And wrap that blanket round yourself proper or you’ll freeze.”
When I’m finished with the dishes, I go to wring my hands over the heat. He swigs a sup from the bottle and hands me the end.
“You know what, Lizzie? I didn’t just bury her today. I buried the last vestige of my youth.”
“Does that mean you’ll be looking to get it back, your youth, or are you going to give it up and live like a grown man at last?”
A silence comes down on us like a heavy curtain falling. I give way first, for a man can keep holding the weight forever. “Listen, Frederick”—I crouch at his feet—“what’s to happen? I want to know how to think about us.”
He puts a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. “You can think about us however you want. You are free.”
I sit back onto the floor. “Freedom? I don’t know what it is. And I don’t want it.”
“Come on, Lizzie, get up from there.” He comes off his stool. “Don’t dirty yourself on the ground.” He takes my wrists and drags me to my feet with a force I’m sure he doesn’t intend. He looks as surprised as I am when we finish locked into a standing embrace.
My stomach is turned over and my head in a rush even before he lifts me up into his arms and takes me to the bed. I let him pull me free of my bodice and my crinoline, and I let him fetch me, gasping and fraught. Afterwards I cry and he holds me. Then he cries a bit, and tears at his hair as well, and I have to bite his hand to pull him out of his frenzy. Then we are quiet. We watch the candles lean and dart sideways with the draft.
“I’ll not live hid away like she did.”
“Are you talking about marriage, Lizzie?”
“I am.”
He shakes his head.
“I’m talking about a good life, an honest life. I want to live proper.”
“What does it mean, this proper?”
“I know you have your own ideas, Frederick. And I know they’re different and bril
liant, and there’s naught wrong with that. But I have a mind too, and, let me tell you, it’s full of worries.”
“Come, Lizzie, what worries you so?”
“I’ve not a family left. Only my half-brother Thomas and his rotten children. I’ve long given up chance of having my own. We’re not getting any younger. Isn’t it time to settle up?”
“For the love of God, Lizzie, these terms you use.”
“For those who survive it’s hard, Frederick. But we’re lucky. We’ve the bond that unites those who have been loved by someone now dead.”
“What has the marriage institution got to do with such a bond?”
“Naught. Naught at all. But it’d be a seal. It’d make it actual and known. And it’d be a great gift to me. You’d be giving me peace and comfort.”
“My gift is love and protection. You can depend on me without registering your dependence.”
“It wouldn’t mean the end to your freedom, Frederick, I swear it. You won’t have children by me. I’d put naught on your path to obstruct you.”
“Why are you insisting, Lizzie? What is this new mania?”
“It’s not new. It’s as old as I am.”
“Do not tell me you have always dreamed of being a wife, Lizzie, because I shan’t believe it.”
“Nay. Not a wife. What I’ve always wanted is to be able to hand myself over when I’m tired. To put down tools and know I’ll not starve for it.”
“Can’t you do that anyway, with my support?”
“I’m not sure, Frederick. As it is, I’m not sure if I can ever rest full.”
He lies back and looks at the ceiling. Picks at his whiskers and makes as if to contemplate. I pull the sheets up.
“I do not want you to be in hopes, Lizzie. I have to live according to my convictions.”
“What about the feelings of your heart?”