“Ma’am? What happened to just plain Ruby?”
“Shhh!” Moira cautioned.
Then she rolled her eyes in the direction of the staircase just past her shoulder. From a riser a half-step down we saw a glimpse of Snoody’s head.
“I see,” Ruby said. “Come in, Moira.”
Moira rolled the cart across the room to the fireplace, then silently set out the supper things on the table. Ruby followed her.
I moved back into the red room just enough to be out of Snoody’s sight, and listened as he crept up the staircase. He stopped outside the door, as if eavesdropping. I could hear his nose.
Finished with our table, Moira returned with the cart to the door. Ruby stopped her there.
“Moira?” she asked.
“Ma’am?” said Moira, turning.
“See you tomorrow?”
“Nae, I doubt it …”
Moira motioned with her eyes again, and ran a finger over netted hair. I tried to imagine her as a girl in Carlow, pulling petals off daisies in a spring clover field with the boy next door, Liam. But there was the only Moira I could know, standing in front of me with the great bulk of her wrapped in baker’s white, and her feet in the stout black sexless shoes favored by servants and nuns. And somewhere in this sad, riddled house, her girlish love grown to become a master bound to a wheelchair.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, truly.”
And so was I.
“So that’s what you mean by Moira holding back?” I asked Ruby when we sat down to a supper of poached salmon, asparagus with mustard and dill, boiled potatoes with parsley, soda bread and rice pudding.
“It’s the way it was this morning, too,” Ruby said. “Snoody waiting in horror at what she might say. You should have seen the hateful look he gave her when she blurted out your uncle’s riddle.”
“The one she made up?”
“Yes.”
“Then we have two additional, greater riddles.”
“Please—don’t hurt my head anymore tonight,” Ruby said, groaning through a forkful of salmon.
“Why did Moira create the blind man riddle in the first place—?”
Ruby slammed down her fork and interrupted, “So he’s going to bang my head anyway.”
“And could the answer—the lesson about plurals—be the key to all the other secrets here? Is that what Liam meant?”
“Meant by what?”
“After he told me the riddle, he said, ‘When you solve it, you’ll start seeing answers to questions that have burnt you hollow.’”
Ruby held her head in her hands, and said, “I’m so tired I could cry.”
I thought I was tired as well. But after two hours of lying still, I rose from the bed. Ruby had drifted off effortlessly, an ability I greatly admire.
She advised me once, during an especially restless night for me, “Get comfortable, and think of a time you did something so awful you wished you could curl up and die. You’ll fall asleep right away. That’s how I do it.” The prescription never worked for me, though. Maybe for all the awful things I have done in my life I will be condemned to remain alive.
I touched Ruby’s warm, smooth face. I envied her there in the bed, curled on her side, her shoulder rising and falling with the easy breaths of a deep sleep, even if it was brought on with a wish for death.
Quietly and without light, I put my clothes back on, minus the cap. I crossed over to the dresser and felt around on top for the basin and the soap and towels. I washed my face. Then I went to the door, half expecting it to be locked, as if we were Snoody’s prisoners, and opened it just wide enough to slip out into the hall.
The very old, very big house was making its night sounds. The staircase warped and creaked; a mouse skittered across the oak floorboards in the hallway; the ping of water dripping from an ancient faucet somewhere down below sent echoes up through the stale black air; bats scratched along inside walls on their folded wings, foraging for insects.
I flattened myself against a wall and moved through the darkness, like a burglar, careful to walk nearest a wall, where a floor is less likely to snap underfoot. I stopped at each door, listened, then tried the knob. Nothing was locked. But one after the other, the bedchamber doors opened only to empty rooms and more empty night sounds.
I moved to the staircase, and took a few steps upward, then stopped and thought better of it. Uncle Liam used a wheelchair, but even though there was an elevator in the house, his bedchamber would likely be at ground level. So I reversed course, and headed slowly downstairs.
Near the central hallway at the bottom of the stairs I learned my choice was right. I heard the faint sound of a radio, and followed this into the small, musty-smelling parlor where Liam had had me come to hear his riddle; where he gave me the secret key to filling my hollow place, in haste because Patrick Snoody was said to be coming up the back way.
I whispered into the dark, “Uncle—?”
There was only the indistinct sound of a radio, the old “wireless” as Liam called it. I stepped deeper into the dark parlor, aware of the unsmiling oil portraits of unknown Irish gents staring down at me, and tall cases swollen with books, and unused furniture crammed every whichway, as if all of it was caught in a vast spider’s web.
Then I saw the amber light of the radio dial. And smelled the sharp stink of a cigarette. I moved to the light, and heard my name whispered.
“Neil, boy—?”
Billie Holiday was singing “Gloomy Sunday” on the radio, tuned so low that four steps farther off I would not have been able to identify the song. My uncle was lying flat out on his back on the maroon horsehair couch, hands clasped around his belly. His wheelchair was parked nearby. On a low table at his side was an ashtray and a packet of Silk Cuts.
“Where did you get the cigarettes?” I asked him.
“Never mind, I got my sources,” he said. “Light me one, and take one for yourself if you know how to shut up about it.”
I reached for the packet and matches and lit two. Liam took his and sniffed the smoke before putting it in his lips. He inhaled, coughed, and muttered, “Oh, damn that’s good.” I sat down at the end of the couch.
Liam said, “I see you’re a man what likes his sneak-about in the tiny hours.”
“I’ve got my reasons. One of them being that I’m working on the riddle.”
“‘Tis a right terrible tease. I don’t know too many what can answer it soon.”
“Oh, well—I’ve figured out the easy part.”
“The easy part?”
“One eye, two plums. It’s the rest of it that’s got me up walking the floor at night.”
“I’m not following you too easy now, boy.”
“But I think you are.”
“Do you?”
“I’m like the man in your riddle, isn’t that right, Uncle? I have to keep in mind that only one of my eyes is bad—but that it doesn’t mean I’m blind. Also, when I’m looking at a plum tree, say, it’s useful to remember that even the simplest things can be more or less than they seem.”
Liam hacked some more on his cigarette, and laughed softly as he said, “Aye, that’s the lesson for us all. You’re much brighter than you look, boy.”
“Ruby says so.”
“I think it’s maybe that baseball cap of yours. Silly thing throws me off, I’m always thinking the circuits must surely be short in a head of your age covered over in the colors of a boy’s game.”
“If you think baseball is child’s play then you don’t understand the first thing about America.”
“Actually, Neil, I once attended a baseball game, many years ago when you were a wee tad. Your mum left you with a neighbor lady, and I took her up to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants play.”
“Did you enjoy the game?”
“Sorry, I don’t believe so. ‘Tis a purely American sport involving infinite time, chance and redemption. Therefore, the game is unfathomable to the European.”
“You understand th
e game better than you think.”
“That, I don’t know. But I would dearly love to see New York again.”
“Same here.”
“Do you hear what’s on the wireless?”
Billie had finished singing an up tune, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” and had now moved into the moody “Moaning Low.” So far as I was concerned, both these numbers were big improvements over the suicidal “Gloomy Sunday,” which I did not enjoy hearing in Liam’s moldering crypt of a parlor.
“That’s a very fine station,” I said. “Tonight it’s all Holiday, I gather? Last time I was here, I remember they were playing all Stan Getz.”
“Lucky we are to have such a fine entertaining program. We hear all the best American music, Neil, we always have.”
Liam reached an arm over the radio and tapped it appreciatively. He said, “And I mean that’s going way back to when your Grandmother Finola gave your dad and me this very wireless. Like I told you. Here it’s all these years later, and still I’m lying in the dark listening to the faraway voices.”
“It was like this for you and my father, with the radio in the dark?”
“Exactly like this, Neil. Including the smuggled cigarettes. We had the good low music, and we made up our dreams of what we’d do as men. It kept us awake sometimes until the first light.”
“What’s keeping you awake tonight, Uncle?”
“I confess the music here’s making me think of peachy young ladies, like your own bonny. And the irony of all them smiling American girls in that sad, ugly, dirty, wonderful city of yours. Your daddo, please God—he loved New York so very much.”
“Do you often lie here in the dark of night like this?”
“Aye, I’m an old cripple who gets far too much rest.”
“What do you dream of the most?”
“My own spent youth. God, what money I’d give to pull up these legs and go dance a fine jig with bonny!”
Liam took a long drag off his Silk Cut and some of the smoke slipped down the wrong pipe. This gave him about a minute’s worth of coughing spasms. I mashed out my own cigarette in the ashtray and decided I had had enough of them for a good long while.
“This night, though, I’m lying here especially dreaming of those fine old days when I’d come visit you and your mum in New York,” Liam said, recovered. “You were quite the lad, Neil. Always with a good big ear for stories from around these parts. Do you remember listening to the stories told in your parlor?”
“Yes.”
“And do you remember your favorite topic, the one that gave you the frightening dreams?”
I thought for a moment of long-ago evenings in the parlor, hearing tales … Mother wearing a dress from the dead table, which I was so happy to see she had trimmed with a bit of new ribbon in honor of Liam’s visit, and me in my short pants … The Atwater-Kent, and the big map of the world with the red pins in it marking off battles of the war in the Allied advance, with my father somewhere out there among the pins, lost … Liam and Father Tim telling their endless stories of Ireland, one more elaborate than the other as the whiskey bottles emptied … All the many stories of Irish funerals….
The door of a dead man’s sheepeen removed from its hinges, resting horizontal atop chairs, the corpse covered in linen, hands folded over his chest with a stone crucifix, his big toes tied together, racks of candles burning around his head, new boots waiting near his bare feet, his bed burning outside in a pit, to ward off troubles with the færies … The mourners, bellies hard from eating mutton stew and fadge, drinking and arguing, and smoking clay pipes of tobacco damp with holy water, and taking snuff in hopes of a quick resurrection for the soul of their precious friend.
“Neil—are you there?”
I took my uncle’s hands, outstretched in the dark.
“I remember,” I said. “The funerals …”
“Aye, you adored being spooked. I’d see you the next day in the street with the other boys, organizing them all to act out a right Irish funeral. I thought it peculiar at first, but I came’round to an understanding.”
“An understanding of what?”
“There was something that wasn’t young about you when you were young, Neil. You wanted to dance and play a regular boy’s games, and have your own daddo watching you. But he couldn’t because he was gone off to war. So instead you made up games in the New York streets of funerals from the Irish countryside.”
I let loose of Liam’s hands, remembering this.
The sheepeen, hunkered at the bottom of the hill, with the great graystone manor house on the hill … The crooked stream, with boulders along the banks covered in patches of whitened grass, like the lace shawls on pianos.
“Once, you told us a story about a funeral that took place in a village where there was a great house on a hill,” I said. It sounded, even to me, as if I were a man talking in his sleep. “There was the sheepeen, and beyond it a crooked stream …”
“Ah, that one! My, but it gave you a proper fright. The tale of a man come back from the dead to haunt his mates.” Liam coughed and laughed, darkly in the murk of this room. “I cast it to the memory of back home, in County Carlow.”
“In the village of Tullow?”
“Aye … Tullow.”
The mention of the village name caught Liam unawares for some reason I could not then begin to know. I only knew, from the sudden rales in his breathing, that I had somehow shaken him.
Liam said, “I’m growing terrible tired now. Take my hands again, boy.”
I took them.
“You must know that Aidan would have dearly loved your Ruby Flagg,” he said.
“Thank you, Uncle.”
“I’ll now be giving you this advice, Neil, as is my duty: do right by your bonny, and never lose her. You’ll not wish to wind up in life lying helpless and lonesome on your back, listening to some faraway melody with lyrics that’s stabbing your heart with the memory of old love.”
Ruby was not asleep when I crept quietly back upstairs and through the door to the red room. In fact, she was not in bed.
And in fact, I was lucky she could tell in the dark that it was me sliding through the door instead of Snoody. Otherwise, my head might have been used to smash a china pitcher.
“Where the hell have you been?” she said, shoving at me as I crossed the room for the bed to take off my clothes once again.
I thought, This I can hear from Neglio. But I said nothing.
Ruby kept shoving, and said, “I’m out of my mind worrying about where you are in this buggy old place.”
“Take it easy, will you? I was only downstairs, talking with Liam. I told you I’d look for him tonight, and I waited until you were sound asleep.”
“Yeah, you waited, all right! God, Hock!” Ruby picked up a pillow from the bed and slammed me over the head with it. “How could you leave me alone with that Snoody prowling around the way we’ve seen him?”
“Well, I didn’t see him this time out. Can we just go to bed?”
“So you’re planning to stick around this time?”
“Promise.”
I stripped, and Ruby dropped her robe to the floor. We climbed back into the canopied bed. Facing me, Ruby wrapped a leg and both arms around me. Liam was right. I would not like being alone and stabbed in the heart at the end of my time.
“We should be like this every night, from now on,” I said.
“Very romantic.”
“Only do me a favor, never hit the one you love.”
“Bears do.”
“No kidding around, Ruby. I mean it, we should be together.”
“That’s a proposal?”
“What’s your answer?”
“I’ll get back to you.”
Ruby turned from me, curled up on her side and fell asleep.
While I, overheated and wakeful and envious of Ruby’s easy sleep, spent the next hour thinking about men without eyes.
Then, without looking, I could see the two o
f them drawing near …
Cold night rain falls soft and thick, pressing down on the day’s warmth, steaming the ground. There is not a breath to be drawn in the close and smoky sheepeen. So I am leaning in the doorway, hungry for a breeze that will not come, and gazing out toward the crooked stream. Which I know is there, hidden in all the rolling mist.
They come, as if creatures rising out from the water. A soldier in a blue uniform I do not know, pushing a man in a wheelchair. The two of them, bumping along through dampened stone and turf, drawing closer and closer to the sheepeen.
I hear their talk. As clear as rain over my head and the arguing at my back, in the sheepeen.
“Every man in the place will stand us a round, I bet,” says the man in the wheelchair. “Superstitious rabble! They’ll think us spirits to be bought off with a jar.”
“Ease up on the lads, brother,” says the man pushing. “And let loose some money of your own. You’ll have no nature in you until you gladly stand the house.”
“Just get us there … get us there.”
“Might there be women?”
“You had your bloody share!”
“Will there be music, do you suppose?”
“Oh, bugger the music! It’s all so much booziness set to a tune, a farrago of truth and lies appealing to the soft-headed.”
“You’ll be a sorry old man some day, brother.”
“I’ll be alive, I will! That’s more than you can say.”
The man in the blue uniform laughs, all the rest of the way, his laughter forming wet clouds of frosted breath.
I step back inside, and close the door. But I cannot shut out the sight of them, the door no better barrier than a dirty window.
They now stop, just outside. The man in the chair raises his legs straight out from the knees. His chair is shoved hard, again and again, until the door comes battering down to the force of stiff dead legs.
The crowd inside falls quiet. In a minute or two, there is a great noise from shuffling feet. Every man is standing, with a cap in his hand for silent waving.
The man in blue lifts his hands from the back of the wheelchair, then raises clenched fists high in the air, and shouts to the stillness, “Whirl your liquor’round like blazes, boyos!”
Drown All the Dogs Page 24