The Lost Souls' Reunion

by Suzanne Power

  ‘This time,’ Jonah said, ‘you will not be able to hide behind silence.’

  Thomas did not stir. Jonah sat in the chair next to his bed and waited. The old man’s breath was so quiet he did not appear to live.

  Jonah leaned forward and pushed him slightly, with the tips of his long fingers. The body tensed in an instant at the touch, all resistance. But it did not shrink away from it.

  Jonah pinched the flesh on the back of the old man’s arm until it turned red and then white and began to bruise under his fingers. Still no reaction, no sound.

  He cast his eye around the curtained quarters, sighing, his breath came in shallow bursts of steam into the cold air, air filled with knives. His eyes glistened with the need to begin and the frustration of not knowing how. He opened the wardrobe doors and began to pull out the albums. Flicked through them. Snap, snap, snap. All names, all faces he should be familiar with as Thomas’s son. All strangers.

  ‘You will have to move eventually,’ he spoke to the back of Thomas. ‘You will have to get up sometime. I can wait until you do. I will stay until your bladder is aching. I can stay until you shit yourself.’

  Thomas listened.

  ‘Like old times,’ Jonah smiled. ‘Old times.’

  A slight shift in Thomas’s shoulders brought Jonah to his feet then. He leaned forward and whispered into the ear of his father, his lips so close he could almost bite it. He covered it in breath beads, so cold was the day.

  ‘You never knew what to do with a woman once you had your way with her.’

  Thomas’s face, hidden from view, was wet with tears. He looked into the life he did not have and he closed his eyes on it. All morning he had waited by the door. Mauritius had told him if he left the building he could not expect to gain entry to it again or collect any of his possessions. The old and frightened man in him had retired to his cubicle, suddenly afraid to leave his world.

  ‘If I am like this now, how will I be when I am in the world proper? She will be smothered,’ he thought, as he waited for me to come and get him.

  I had not come. He rose up from his chair and made to leave and instead lay on the bed. The eyes of Margaret and Joe were waiting to report to Sister Mauritius. Even the men were talking. Peter came and whispered, ‘Thomas?’ and went away when he got no reply.

  He tried to reason with himself and reason failed him. If he had been young, like me, he would not have come either to take away an old lover. He was glad for me that I had not come and taken on all that he was. He ached for himself and the public shame of all of this.

  Then Jonah had come. Jonah talked on and finally the curtains were pulled back briskly by Joe O’Reilly.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the offspring of the great Casanova here. You’ll have to be on your way. The lunch’s on its way up. Not that this lad will have much of an appetite.’

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Jonah said. And, just before he left, ‘You will have to give it up with her. She is only after what money she thinks you have. You know her type. My mother was one.’

  Thomas’s voice came then, and it was so that all could hear, ‘You will not go anywhere near her or you will have me to deal with.’

  There was no reply. Thomas heard the sound of Margaret and Sister Mauritius pursuing Jonah, calling to him. But his footsteps continued out the door.

  * * *

  Sister Mauritius sat in the chair, still warm from Jonah.

  ‘You know that man attacked one of our staff? What kind of a family did you raise? I have not called the police but I will do so if you are not off the premises by Friday. The member of staff is looking for danger money now, thanks to you.’

  Thomas could not help smiling.

  Sister Mauritius stood up. In the middle of the ward she made the general announcement.

  ‘The funeral of Mr Anthony Black, postponed from this morning, will take place this afternoon, at three.’

  Thomas thought of where he might go and he found he could think of nowhere. He thought of his friend, Black, shortly to be placed into the ground. He thought of himself as a weak old man who had no clear notion of anything he had stood for. He had passed this on to the son who was not his, the legacy of being one who has always watched and has no right to join the world in its ways.

  35 ∼ The Last Words of Myrna

  I LEFT THOMAS with Mauritius and I walked through the gates and prayed he would find the courage to follow me when I came the next morning.

  I know now that we had both invited the day of discovery on us. We had persuaded ourselves that we had been hiding from the world. But we had done everything but declare ourselves openly.

  All this went through me as I moved through the night air, heavy with mist.

  The night was calmer than my thoughts. I should have known it was a death night, unnaturally still. The mist met my warmth and turned to beads of moisture on my skin. My tears linked the beads and together they wove a damp shroud of sorrow and non-seeing. What hope for Thomas and me?

  I should have opened the eyes I had not used; I should have listened to all that the stillness was calling. But I was too lost in myself.

  * * *

  I was in the door before I knew all that had changed and the change caught me by the throat and took words away. Carmel was sitting by the fire, crying, Eddie with his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Myrna,’ Eddie explained. ‘She’s taken a turn for the worst.’

  ‘Where have you been all night, Sive?’ Carmel’s voice was accusing. ‘She’s been asking for you. Again and again. She’s been shouting words we don’t understand. Now all her voice is gone.’

  ‘Should we call the priest?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘No,’ Carmel and I spoke together.

  ‘No need for them here,’ I continued. ‘We have our own ways.’

  I went into the back room, alone. Leaving Eddie to argue with Carmel, in hushed tones.

  ‘If we don’t call a priest they won’t bury her.’

  ‘Don’t talk now, Eddie. Let Sive tell us.’

  I closed the door so their voices would not carry.

  It was dark but for the lamplight which cast two dark shadows in the place where Myrna’s eyes had been. When she opened her eyes they were as black as the shadows that had been placed in them.

  She smiled thinly.

  ‘Where is he? Thomas Cave?’ she spoke in a grainy whisper, squeezed through a tightened throat. ‘I was calling to you, to bring him with you.’

  ‘He did not come with me. I don’t know whether he will come at all,’ my voice liquid with tears. ‘We won’t speak of him now. You must save your talk.’

  She raised a hand.

  ‘Your grandmother is here, waiting for me to come off with her. She thinks as I do. If you can, do not be apart from him at all.’

  The mist that had shrouded me in its warning had come to claim her, had coated her in a death sweat. She fought the still night and her ragged breath cut through the air. The glassy night sea and coal black sky carried the echoes of her breathing to the far off places. I traced the lines on her forehead and I read the stories in each line. I read the life that had been lived and was coming to an end.

  I wanted to know all that I did not know of her, to fall into the days that were hers, but they were already lived and gone.

  ‘You have been a mother to me,’ I said softly.

  I pressed my lips to the whispers of hair on her forehead.

  She tried to moisten parched lips with the tip of her dry tongue. I licked my own finger and ran it across them. I heard her words form in my ears, though those lips did not move to form them. These words came out of her heart and into mine.

  ‘You have been a daughter. I am swimming in the death sea, Sive, it is warm and calm because I am glad to be in it.’

  They were the last I was to hear from her.

  We sat a long while, the mist pouring in through the open window. The room was bitter cold, but Myrna’s fever was high. Though I did not
know why, I began to hum low. The humming cooled and soothed her. She was frightened to go on. I spoke to her, through the tips of fingers on a palm, as Myrna had taught me to speak.

  The spirit outgrew the body. It was as strong a spirit as I have ever felt, as strong as her bones were weak. Then I saw my grandmother and she took the Myrna that rose out of Myrna by the hand and I cried for being left behind. Her voice in me now. It spoke from a far off place that was closer to me than my own skin, ‘The cards are yours and all that I ever owned is yours.’

  The humming began again in the room of its own accord, for a time.

  Then all was silence.

  I put my heart to the bony chest and found it faint but beating, I put my lips to hers and breathed into her the love and regard I had for her. When I went back into the living room it was already morning, Eddie and Carmel were at the table.

  ‘Is she gone?’

  ‘Not gone entirely,’ I answered. ‘But she will never be back.’

  I spoke without tears. Carmel wept and I went to her and put my arms around her.

  ‘We will sit with her until she goes,’ I said. ‘I will sit with her for a while. Then I have to go. There is something Myrna wants.’

  * * *

  I slept over the body of Myrna and woke when the morning was still not fully underway. I ran to the gates of St Manis. Sister Mauritius had posted the caretaker and gardener to turn me away. I went across the field and tried to enter by the gap in the hedgerow. They had crossed the lawn and waited for me there too.

  ‘Sorry, Mary Sive. We have the orders.’

  As I walked away the wind lifted a little and the humming that had filled the room where Myrna lay now filled the whole sky. All was movement as the wind grazed trees and hedgerows and grasses and threw the sea up to reach the sky. The sun shone on the bare land of winter and the bare land stirred and the gentle humming passed over all and brought with it the message that the growing time was upon us and the bare time of winter was at an end. The humming brought life and death. Death to those who had served their time; life and purpose to those whose time was beginning.

  The green shoots of the first flowers pushed through the earth to answer that call. The trees reached deep beyond the cold hard ground into the moist earth below and drank deep from it to push out the new buds of the new year.

  All ending and all beginning in this moment.

  Growth in the new year is a slow thing, so slow it is almost still.

  To the knowing heart it was spring.

  36 ∼ Death the Visitor

  THE CARD OF white light in black surroundings. Death has come to visit.

  * * *

  Thomas awoke in the afternoon as lunch was cleared away. The men were preparing themselves. This was to be a different day, a day when one of them was going into the ground.

  Joe and Margaret were running around, supervised by Sister Mauritius.

  ‘This man needs a black tie, give him one.’

  ‘This man has no white shirt. Give him Black’s one.’

  ‘We dressed Black in it, Sister,’ Joe murmured.

  ‘Well, go to the cupboard and get one.’

  Thomas watched the men come and go, their startled looks at the change in routine.

  He rose and took out his own black suit, his tie and white shirt. His black shoes, saved for special occasions, had a film of dust. He laid out all his garb and he gathered his shaving brush, razor and soap stick. Mauritius met him as he crossed the ward.

  ‘Where do you think you are going?’

  ‘To wash up.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘Tony Black’s funeral.’

  ‘You are going no place.’

  ‘You cannot stop me.’

  ‘I can have you restrained.’

  Thomas unbent himself, all stiffness gone. The giant returned.

  ‘Do not speak to me like I am a child.’

  ‘Well,’ Mauritius was flustered. ‘You have behaved like no child would.’

  ‘I have that. I have behaved like a man wants to with a woman. I believe if you had behaved as a woman wants to with a man, life would be significantly easier around here.’

  Sister Mauritius had no words except, ‘Consider yourself homeless after today.’

  ‘It will be my pleasure.’

  Thomas walked on to the washroom. Later, dressed, he leaned over to wipe the dust off his patent shoes, which had not grown any less dull underneath. The two blurred halves of his own face stared back at him, the drawn limpness on the left, the firm set of sorrow on the right. He could not see his eyes. He looked for them a long while before rising on the first stroke of the chapel bell.

  A dozen broken men attended the funeral service of Anthony Black.

  The curate from Scarna said the Mass and he was stuck for words when it came to the sermon, because he knew nothing about the man except that he had been a sailor. He talked about death being a harbour from the high seas of life and he heard the hollow nature of his words as he looked at the sea of faces that showed that death was no harbour but the high sea itself and each of these men would put into it soon.

  He broke off, then asked if anyone who knew Anthony Black would care to say a few words.

  A very tall man in a well-cut black suit stood slowly, leaning on his stick. The curate watched nervously as Sister Mauritius turned from the front row and asked the tall man to sit down again. The man did not falter or sit. Silent Thomas spoke for his friend

  ‘Tony Black did not lead an exemplary life. He was true to his own character. It is the best way to be and it was the best way for him. He died well. I was with him and he was not afraid. I think he would like to have been buried at sea, but I’m sure he truly does not care where he ends up,’ there was a throat clear, ‘once the place has malt, women and tobacco.’

  The broken men laughed and Sister Mauritius and the curate shifted in the hope that that would be the end. Thomas had more to say.

  ‘Tony Black taught me a shared death is easier. We should celebrate his going because it was a release for him. We should celebrate because his life was worth celebrating. But we will not. Because this is a place where people are expected to live and die without celebration. It is to St Manis that we come to die in the company of strangers. No one chooses that and that is not how it has to be. Black was a stranger to me, who became a friend. God bless Black and all here.’

  He sat and the curate finished the Mass quickly and the congregation was dispersed.

  The coffin was wheeled out to the ambulance to be taken for burial. Thomas followed it.

  Sister Mauritius followed him and asked where he thought he was going.

  ‘That is the second time today you have asked me,’ Thomas looked down at her as he spoke.

  ‘The residents don’t attend the burial.’ Mauritius felt unsure under his gaze. He seemed to grow taller by the hour.

  ‘I am no longer a resident.’

  Thomas Cave walked down the long driveway and out of the tall gates that had held him in for almost two years and he knew they would not hold him again.

  * * *

  At the graveyard the curate, who had travelled in the ambulance, mumbled prayers and threw soil as the coffin was lowered. He had already begun the walk back into the town by the time Thomas arrived.

  Thomas spoke some words to the grave-diggers who were covering the coffin.

  They agreed to give him five minutes and he stood, intending to pray and finding he could not. Instead he looked at the state of the large plot, there were no weeds but no care had gone into it. A plain headstone with no words but the names of those who lay there.

  Thomas shed tears. He knew Black’s was not the worst of deaths, but it was the most indifferent, buried with a single bystander.

  Thomas knew now his dearest wish was to die as he had not lived – to die in the company of loved ones who had been given all that he could give them. The sun was of afternoon and yet all around Thomas there were s
hadows as if the light was that of evening. He saw them when he looked up from the fresh grave into which he had poured his realization and from which he had taken resolve.

  He studied the shadows. They shifted endlessly, so that they seemed to occupy the space between them and him. The closer the shadows came the more Thomas Cave realized that he knew not only them, but the light and darkness that formed them. He had created them.

  They were images he had taken as photographs, their shadows the negative images that consumed him with all the feeling his existence had denied. Mine and my mother’s eyes among them.

  We covered his face and form in shadows, whispered and shrieked from everywhere.

  We made music out of high notes of laughter mixed with low wails of despair, and all sounds in between. Thomas left Black’s grave and the shadows danced before him and followed after him and ran through him as if he had not a body at all to protect his being. Mine and my mother’s eyes led the way.

  He knew only to follow us and soon he was walking down the wide market street of a grey town with thin sticks of people coming in and out of doorways and not staying long in the biting cold the day was fenced in by. They stopped and stared at him – a man so tall, clad in black with hair as brilliant white as the shirt he wore and walking with the aid of a stick – he must have looked like death himself come to carry off all those that came near him.

  The shadows led the way and the shadow music was the only sound he heard.

  We took him out of the town on the route that Carmel and I and Myrna had once walked in dead of night. Now it was early evening.

  He was afraid that the shadows might lead him astray for his having betrayed their live flesh selves but he knew that his heart would have found the way, even if the shadows had not chosen to appear.

  When he walked along the thin stretch of coast road the shadows grew impatient with him, soon they had run on ahead and he could barely see them at all. A car stopped and a man got out to see if he was all right and Thomas stood and thanked him and said he was fine, just a dizzy spell.

  Perhaps, said the man, you have walked too far, would a lift be in order? No, said Thomas briskly and did not look back at the man who shrugged and drove on his way.