Shadows in Heaven

by Nadine Dorries

  Josie raced off to fetch Father Jerry and was not entirely surprised to find the church doors flung open, light spilling out into the graveyard and all the candles lit. Father Jerry was standing in front of the altar and appeared to be waiting for her. His black cloak was already fastened across his surplice.

  ‘Who is it?’ he shouted to her, his voice booming and echoing off the ancient church walls. His face was grey, his manner agitated.

  ‘Father, ’tis Sarah Malone.’

  ‘Has she gone yet?’ he barked, already moving swiftly through the door.

  ‘No, not yet, but nearly, Father.’

  He pulled his cloak more tightly across his chest, almost in an act of protection. ‘We have to save her.’ He flew out of the church and down the Tarabeg road to the Malones’, with Josie trying to keep up, gasping, ‘’Tis too late to save her, Father, she’s lost too much blood. I’ve seen it before…’

  Father Jerry had no time to explain. It was not Sarah’s life he was hoping to save – that had been claimed already. It was her soul; that was his job and nothing else mattered. He had to win. He had no words of comfort to offer, not yet, not until his work for God was done.

  Rosie was making her way to the schoolhouse when she stopped at the sight of Father Jerry running and Josie in his wake.

  ‘’Tis Sarah, she’s going,’ explained Josie.

  ‘Going? Going where?’ Rosie could not take in the meaning of Josie’s words; she felt almost disorientated. The village of smiles felt suddenly empty and cold.

  ‘She’s nearly dead, Rosie. ’Tis why I’ve been for Father Jerry.’

  ‘Dead?’ was all that Rosie could manage in response. She wanted to follow Josie but had to go to the school and her feet felt weighted to the ground. ‘We are a frontier in the battle,’ had been Father Jerry’s words last night. ‘It is nothing new, he – we will not speak his name – will never give up. We have been fighting the same battles, and losing many, since the death of Christ. You have an important job to do, Rosie. The children depend on you.’

  Rosie was torn. With Father Jerry’s words ringing in her ears, she turned and reluctantly headed to the schoolhouse.

  Ten minutes later, Father Jerry came downstairs to join Josie in the Malone kitchen.

  ‘Has she taken the sacrament?’ were Josie’s first words to him.

  ‘Aye, she did and the good Lord will receive her, of that there is no doubt. She is safe. She was still alive when I arrived, her heart was beating and she took a breath after the sacrament, but, she has gone now. She was without sin, she is saved, thanks be to God.’ He laid his hand on Josie’s shoulder. ‘May God bless you in the work you have to do. I’ll be back later. I have to go across to the schoolhouse after I’ve taken Mass, but I will be back later today.’

  With that he turned on his heel and was off up the path and back through the doors of the church, never once stopping to flinch from the searing pain down his back and legs. The pain was his constant reminder of why he was there and what he had to do. He had failed, but it would never happen again.

  *

  Teresa was in the presbytery kitchen when she looked through the window and saw Father Jerry leaving the Malones’ and heading back up to the church. Laying her apron on the table, she moved along the wood-panelled corridor and opened the door to his room. The metallic smell of blood hit her nostrils, but the room was spotless. Her eyes lowered to the area in front of the chest and the dark, damp stain on the floor.

  Closing the door, she made her way back to the kitchen. All was not well. The only other time this had happened was the morning after he’d buried Angela McGuffey. She would have his breakfast ready for him and help prepare him to face whatever it was. As yet she was unaware that it would be the most tragic day anyone could remember in Tarabeg since the time of the famine.

  *

  ‘’Tis a bad business,’ said Ellen as she and Brendan O’Kelly near collided at the Malones’ door. Her eyes were red, she was in shock.

  ‘Mass will be full today,’ she said to Josie inside.

  ‘Aye, everyone will know in a few minutes, and then after Mass they’ll be heading straight here.’

  The two women stood and looked at each other over clenched hands. Their eyes tried to make sense of what they were in the midst of.

  ‘Let’s just do what we have to,’ said Ellen. ‘There is nothing else we can do.’

  The curtains throughout the house remained closed. Herbs had been hung on the wall in bunches, and the windows were closed after exactly two hours. They’d been opened to let Sarah’s soul escape to heaven, and then they were shut in case she tried to slip back in again.

  Father Jerry returned just as soon as he had fulfilled his duties and Josie had finished the rituals steeped in superstition and the laying out. He prayed and led the mourners, and the house felt to Mary Kate as if, even though it was full of people, it was in fact empty. She slipped between bodies and legs and under callused hands that stroked her hair. She was kissed by toothless women with leathery skin draped in black shawls smelling of other kitchens. Money was pushed into her hand by men wearing frayed hats, cumbersome boots with no laces and raggedy trousers.

  Throughout that day and the following night, Josie sat at Sarah’s head, at first keening and then chanting the prayers of the rosary. Sarah was never left alone. The kitchen filled with women. They stood in twos and threes around the foot of the table, huddled against the kitchen wall, talking in mournful whispers while the candles threw their long and looming shadows up the walls and across the ceiling, over where Sarah lay.

  Mary Kate blinked up at the undulating shadows and mistook them for angels. The hand of Ellen Carey slipped across her shoulders. ‘I’m taking the babby over to my house, would you like to come with us?’ she asked kindly.

  Mary Kate shook her head. She could not speak for the lump in her throat and she could not cry for the painful weight in her diaphragm. Her Grandma Nola was lost to her, neither seeing nor hearing her. The only people who noticed she was there were Rosie and Keeva, who had not stopped crying since the moment they’d arrived. They had to look after the mourners, but they always made sure that one of them was holding her hand, and they didn’t leave go.

  With Sarah’s death came the rain. ‘Angel tears.’ Mary Kate heard the words floating away from one of the huddled conversations. ‘Angel tears,’ Mary Kate whispered back, but no one heard her and no one asked where were Mary Kate’s tears. The men crowded into the yard and stood outside in the street, the weight of their boots trampling the cinder path to dust as the mud began to seep through.

  Teresa oversaw the scullery and the kitchen, with occasional help from old Mrs Doyle. A wake involved huge amounts of tea and stout and sandwiches. Some people had travelled miles to pay their respects, spending a whole day to get there on a bike or a donkey, and they were fed on arrival. A death was news and everyone in the west was desperate for news. ‘Sorry for your troubles,’ was the chant from everyone as they approached Michael, who seemed not to recognise the visitors or hear their words. Paddy and Seamus plied him with whiskey and the rest drank stout, the men bringing their own pewter mugs with them for fear of missing a pull from the barrel should there not be enough.

  Mary Kate peeped out of the shop window, which had been draped with a cloth, and watched as Paddy rolled another barrel across the muddy road. She had spent most of her time in the empty shop, where no one gathered. ‘Daddy…’ She tried to talk to him, but as he lifted his head she could see he was far away, somewhere else, caught between drink and despair.

  P. J. Barrett, the man sitting next to him and almost holding him upright, slipped a penny into her hand. ‘Go and find Nola, colleen,’ he said. ‘Leave yer daddy to us.’

  And Mary Kate, dejected, turned away. Clutching the penny, she took it into the shop and placed it in the till. Although she couldn’t cry, she could feel the pain of her heart breaking.

  The trill of the bell of a bike as it reste
d against the wall didn’t arouse interest as it would have once done; instead it brought a feeling of dread because it meant yet another stranger would walk with head bowed and hat clenched to her mother’s side and into the candlelit room, able to do the one thing Mary Kate was not allowed to do, touch her mother. She hated them all. People she knew her mother had no time for peered over her coffin, and yet the daughter she loved was kept at the door. She knew if Sarah could feel her pain, she would be crying out for her.

  Nola barely left the wooden chair next to Sarah’s head on the opposite side to Josie. ‘Look after your daddy,’ she had said as Mary Kate hovered at the door, wringing the bottom of her blouse round and round between her fingers and thumbs.

  ‘God, only twenty-nine,’ she heard one woman say. ‘And the boy never knowing who his mammy was.’ And then, in the lowest voice, ‘They say ’twas the Maughans’ curse. Seven years…’

  ‘No, stop. ’Twas not. Was it? Seven years?’ And on and on it went.

  There was a point when Mary Kate slipped onto the settle, next to Nola and rather than telling her to go back, Nola put her arm around her shoulders and hugged her to her. ‘You’re too young,’ she whispered into her hair. ‘Too young for this.’ And the tears fell down Nola’s cheeks and soaked into Mary Kate’s hair and wet her forehead as they seemed to have been doing for days.

  Mary Kate tried to force the tears to her eyes. She thought that if she did, if she could cry too, the pain she was carrying around under her ribcage might ease. It was becoming so heavy, so hard to carry. It kept weighing her down, dragging her to the chair, and when there was no chair free, to the floor. It had pulled her down next to Nola and she wasn’t sure she could stand back up again.

  She placed her arms around her grandma’s rotund and comforting belly and buried her head into her side. Her nostrils filled with the scent of mothballs and earth and there they both sat, Mary Kate afraid to talk in case Grandma Nola asked her to leave. But it seemed that Nola was worn down into the chair too, as the hours passed and night fell.

  The candles at the head of the coffin gasped and coughed to the end as the wicks drowned in the molten wax. She watched the extinguished tendrils of cloudy grey smoke as they wound their way up to the thatch. They were like the bedraggled wisps of Shona’s wild hair floating in the air and they scared Mary Kate.

  ‘’Tisn’t Bridget’s fault.’ A woman she didn’t know stood before them and spoke to Nola as Josie changed the candles.

  ‘Has Bridget been? I haven’t seen her,’ Nola replied.

  ‘No, not yet. She wasn’t sure of her welcome. I came to ask.’

  Nola wiped at her eyes before she spoke. She unfastened Mary Kate’s hands from around her side, dropped a kiss onto the crown of her head and sat her upright. ‘Tell Bridget her job was to deliver the babby and that she did. Sarah was sat up in the bed when I left her, long after Bridget had gone home. The happiest woman in all of Tarabeg, Sarah was, and Bridget knew that. She was feeding the boy and loving it. She was smiling, telling me to be away to me bed. Tell Bridget that if she doesn’t come, there will be talk. It’s for her own sake and she is as welcome here as always.’

  Nola had said the same thing over and over to every visitor who came into the house.

  ‘Tut, tut, tut,’ came the response, followed by prayers to Our Lady and all the saints in heaven. Mary Kate became used to the sudden gasping intake of breath, the silence when the listener made the sign of the cross and the ‘God love us, no,’ that invariably followed.

  Josie sat under the closed window, guarding it with her life and looking through, dreading the sight of Sarah’s soul tapping on the pane, demanding to be let back in.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ asked Mary Kate. ‘Why can’t the window be open?’

  Josie looked at her sideways, as if reluctant to take her gaze off the window, suspicious that Mary Kate had been sent to distract her. There was something in the air in Tarabeg and those that needed to be were on their guard. She slipped her arm around her. ‘Because surely the soul of any mother would try to reach her little girl, ’twould be something Sarah would try to do, to want to come back to you, Mary Kate. Jesus, child, what mother would want to leave you and your daddy and that fine babby.’

  And that was one of the moments when Mary Kate felt that she might fall down. When the room spun and shadows fell.

  She stopped herself by concentrating on the chanting of the rosaries by Josie. ‘Forgive our sins, oh Lord. Grant her eternal rest that she may lie in peace. Save her from the fires of hell.’ And on Josie went, chanting, praying, hour after hour, occasionally relieved by one of the other women. Nola had let her stay on the chair, as if she sensed that standing was the hardest thing for Mary Kate to do. And there she passed her hours, eating when told, drinking when a cup was put in her hand, by whom, she had no idea. Her mother, just out of her reach, the darkness always there, and the women chanting, chanting.

  At one point Nola laid Finnbar on her knee and then forgot she had left him there until he alerted her with his now familiar wail of hunger. ‘Oh, God, Mary Kate,’ she said, ‘we have to take him to Julia. Her own is only four months and she has enough milk for two. Have you seen your daddy?’

  Mary Kate hadn’t. Not really. Not the daddy she knew. Not since the moment she’d heard him crying, ‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’ as he staggered around in the street, barely able to breathe or speak until Paddy got enough whiskey down him to stupefy his grief.

  ‘Granddaddy Seamus will be back again soon,’ said Nola as she hugged Mary Kate into her. ‘He’s organising everything up at the farm. Father Jerry is coming back and he’s mad about Bridget, so he is. He’s away up to the house to see her.’

  ‘Where is Bee?’ Keeva asked from the sink.

  ‘She’s on her way. She and Captain Bob and Ciaran were in Galway,’ said Nola.

  ‘Galway? What for?’

  ‘I’m sure we will find out soon enough.’

  Mary Kate stood at the back door as she watched Ellen handing Finnbar over to Julia, who lived on one of the neighbouring farms. ‘I’m happy to come down each day,’ she said. ‘Once I get the flow going, it spouts by itself and I can fill a jug to feed him.’

  Mary Kate looked at her breasts, which hung all the way down to her belly. This was a common enough practice among the women who helped each other out.

  ‘I did the very same thing when Keeva was bleeding with the split nipples. Gave Bridget time to heal her properly.’

  Ellen nodded. ‘That would be best, but if you could keep him for a few days, until after the committal? Here, take some food.’ And Nola filled a basket from the shelves in the shop for her to take back home with her.

  As Finnbar left, strapped into the shawl across Julia’s back, Mary Kate came her closest to tears. She wanted to run after the little brother she had held and already loved, but then she heard her mammy shout her name. ‘Mary Kate.’ Her mammy had come back!

  Her heart flipped. ‘Mammy,’ she whispered, turning on her heel to look behind her and follow the sound of her mother’s voice. ‘Mammy’s here,’ she said, looking up to Ellen, whose hand she was still holding.

  ‘Mary Kate!’ The shout came again, and Mary Kate pulled Ellen out of the door.

  ‘Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!’ she shouted, then stopped dead in her tracks. It was not her mammy, it was Bee.

  ‘Mary Kate!’ Bee sobbed, running towards her, her arms open, tears streaming down her face.

  That was the moment Mary Kate broke. When she knew she was connected to her mother’s kin. As she fell into Bee’s arms, the invisible thread that bound Angela, Sarah, Bee and now Mary Kate wrapped around them and for the first time, her tears fell.

  *

  It wasn’t until they were on their way to the graveside that she felt the pain of finality. Then the farewell to her mother hit her with the force of the thresher. Her head clouded as she watched them lift the coffin out of the room, the brass handles aflame in the candle
light, the dark oak burnished red by the sunlight that streamed in through a part in the curtains. Her father, her Granddaddy Seamus, Pete, Paddy, Tig, Captain Bob and Brendan moved haltingly backwards, negotiating the coffin around the door jamb. Her father staggered slightly and was steadied by Granddaddy Seamus, who put his arm out and grabbed him. ‘Steady, man, steady. Don’t drop her,’ he said.

  They were followed by the other men of the village as the road outside the shop thronged with people dressed in their mourning clothes and black shawls. They stood, some alone and praying, many huddled in groups and talking in whispers as the moment approached for Sarah to leave her house for the very last time.

  The procession began moving towards the graveyard that faced the mountain St Patrick had lived on, with the river close by. And that was when Mary Kate realised that her mother was leaving the house and would never, ever return. She would never again comb out her hair and laugh with her. There would be no more kisses dropped on her brow while Mary Kate pretended to be asleep, her mother holding the candle aloft as she made her way to her own bed, whispering, ‘Sweet dreams, my beautiful girl.’

  There was a tightness in her chest that she could feel moving upwards, about to erupt. She screamed for her mother, to wake her. Held out her arms to reach her, to tear the wooden coffin away from her flesh and bones, to feel and touch and smell her. She tried to leave Bee’s side and run to her mother, but her feet were rooted to the ground. She heard a gasp from the crowd, felt the hands of Captain Bob lift her as her blessed release from the pain she had carried in her heart for days eased. Darkness came and the wave of misery that had threatened to drown her finally took her down.

  Chapter 24

  Six months later

  ‘Try and finish the food Josie’s cooked for you.’ Captain Bob pushed Bee’s plate back towards her, still half full of the breakfast Josie had insisted they eat with them before they left.