There was a low bubbling sound in the corner of the room. Tom sat forward. He waited. Perhaps it was just an ember sliding through the grate. There was a squeak—so low he wasn’t sure he’d actually heard it. Tom stood up, trying to see across the shadowy space of the room.
He heard the soft rubbing squeak again, and he knew his grandmother was in the room. She chuckled, but the sound was like a bitter whisper.
“Not sex, no. It was the baby.” The rocking chair moved more slowly than he would have thought possible. “You come here, boy.” She swiveled around and pulled the drape cord. The nightsky was cloudy, the moon barely visible.
He walked toward her, and he could see her rheumy eyes, the shape of her face.
She reached out and pinched the flesh of his arm. “It’s dead now—that’s why the work stopped.” She nodded. “It’s dead because she’s dead.”
He stepped back, and she gave him a dreadful smile.
“In a ditch, boy. She’s lying there—”
“No—”
“You’ll see. When they bring ’er back,” she said. “You think I’m crazy don’t you?” Rose laughed. “But mind, see if I’m right. He’ll have to get another woman. Noreen won’t give ’im anymore.” She pointed toward the desk, and Tom saw her skinny arm quiver. “You’re in that book—just like your brothers and Delia. But he needs another woman to finish it. Another life.” Her dark eyes gleamed. “That’s why I’m here, to help.”
Tom wanted to run, but he stood there, afraid her hands would fall on him the second he turned.
“You’re going to see,” she hissed. “And you’re going to help, too. You interfered, and it killed her.”
Her hand snaked out and caught his shirtfront. She dragged him forward until he was wedged against the arm of the rocker. He felt the wood pressing on his thighs, and he caught a whiff of her scent. She smelled so old. He tried to turn away, but her fingers crawled higher, and she gripped his neck and pulled his face to hers.
“Your touch killed her. I set my finger on that life, and when she ran off, I had to kill her. She was going to kill herself,” Rose spat viciously. “Don’t you know if she killed herself your father would never have finished?” She turned on him. “She wouldn’t have left if you hadn’t interfered, hadn’t kissed with her.
“You killed the life that fed the work of a lifetime. My boy would’ve done me proud. But you stopped it.” Her voice went hard, and he felt her sharp nails digging in the skin of his neck. “Do it again, and see what happens.”
He felt a sudden stabbing pain in both eyes. He tried to pull away, but she held onto him. He felt his skin break out in a sweat. The pain moved a notch higher and he moaned softly. Mother Mary, it’s like spikes being pounded in.
He blinked, but he couldn’t see. There was nothing but darkness. His hands flew up, he was sure his shaking fingers would find gaping holes. But in his panic, he couldn’t tell. He would’ve sworn there was blood running down his cheeks. His breath came out in hot choked gasps.
She squeezed his throat, his hands tore at her wrists, and then the pain stopped abruptly, his vision cleared.
“You interfere again and I’ll blind you—and that’ll be just the beginning of what I do,” Rose said. He felt a sharp pain in his groin, he gasped, and she shook him off. Tom stumbled and landed on his hands and knees. His face was damp with tears. “Answer the door,” she said.
A second later, there was the sound of rushing horses and a heavy wagon skidding to a stop. Tom heard the crump crump of footsteps hurrying along the path. Someone shouted and pounded at the wooden door of the house.
A farmer with a heavy mustache stood on the step. He stared deeply into Tom’s eyes, then dropped his gaze. He held his dirty hat in both of his big hands. “Where’s yer folks, lad?”
“Asleep.” Tom hung on the brass knob. The man had an anxious look about him.
“Might you have a sister, now?”
“What is it? Who’s there?” Noreen’s voice drifted down. Tom heard his father stirring above him. Cedric’s door opened in the hall.
The man spoke more quickly. “Name of Ellen?”
“My cousin.” Tom felt the words bubble up on his lips.
The man wiped his eyes with his dirty sleeve. “I didn’t see her, she ran in front,” he pointed to the horses. “She—I didn’t hit her, she jumped to get out of the way and fell over the side of a low stone bridge.” He suddenly took Tom’s shoulders in his hands. “Pink cloud. This here’s Pink Cloud, right?” The man nodded, as if he were answering his own question. “The name were written in a little book she carried. Ellen Wood of Pink Cloud, County Meath. I drove all night.”
His parents were rushing down the stairs.
“I can’t tell ’em lad. She’s in the cart,” he whispered, backing down the steps and moving away from the house. “Her neck’s broken.”
So, Tom told Cedric and Noreen that Ellen was dead.
***
It was raining the day they were burying Ellen. Tom walked along slowly behind the pallbearers, their shoulder muscles shifting under the black woolen jackets, her wooden casket swaying. Just a light steady drizzle, he kept thinking—nothing so dramatic as the huge pelting drops she’d run out into only the week before.
Now that Ellen was on her way to the cemetery, Tom found he hated his aunt. His hatred had come to him quite suddenly. It was because May sat guard over Ellen’s coffin the whole three days. She ate whatever anyone brought to her; she snatched her sleep in fits and starts; nod off, then shake her head like an old dog and begin moaning again.
It was a stupid reason to be angry, but there it was; he hated Auntie May because he wanted to say goodbye to Ellen in his own way, but he couldn’t—not with her mother right in the room.
The first night, after the farmer brought her in, Tom lay awake tossing in his bed until dawn. His arms were crooked under his head, and he tried to think of what would please Ellen. Earlier, while they were laying her body on the sofa, he rummaged in the wagon and found the little red leather book the farmer told him about; it was blank beyond her name. Tom recognized it, it belonged to Cedric. He wondered when his cousin took it from the desk.
Maybe Ellen was going to keep a diary, think of the book as her friend and confidante—as Tom himself had been.
Did you ever have a nickname, he asked her once.
Never had time for one, I guess, she said, her hand plunged deep inside the sock she was darning.
They both laughed, and then she laid the sock aside, settling it on her knee and touched his hand very lightly. Tom, she said, her eyes dark sapphires in the firelight, I don’t think anyone had enough time for me to bother about it. He looked at her questioningly and she went on. I mean, I don’t think anyone ever liked me that much.
I do, he said. I like you that much—and more. He jiggled her fingers in his. C’mon then—what about Nell, or Nellie?
Ugh! Makes me sound like a fat old washwoman, she giggled.
Ellie? would you like me to call you Ellie sometimes?
Ellie, she nodded, squeezing his hand hard. We have a secret, now, she said—just like real lovers. Tom saw the color high on her cheekbones, her eyes glinting with tears.
He remembered the last day, the way her blue eyes shone, the way her voice made him tremble inside. Then sitting cross-legged on his narrow bed, Tom wrote the same words she’d spoken in the kitchen as tribute for her.
You’re sweet. I love you.
Hesitating, he nibbled the tip of the pen, then added,
I have your secret now—just like a real lover.
He looked down at the flyleaf and frowned. Somehow, there ought to be more. A man, he told himself, would write more. But what more? Hard as he tried, he couldn’t think what else Ellen might want to have written in her book. Maybe, sometimes it’s all right to say or do the simple thing, he thought. It was an odd grown up kind of notion, but it seemed right.
He closed the book. The ink had smudged, bu
t he was sure Ellen wouldn’t mind. She wasn’t a one for scolding over trifles.
He lay back, his mind churning until he was content with his plan to memorialize her. He meant to sit by Ellen’s side, hold her hand and watch her sleep. When the two of them—he and Ellen—were alone, he would slip the red book in the pocket of her dress. He wanted to lean over her still form, stroke her baby yellow hair, and kiss her lips once, lightly, before they sealed the lid.
An innocent goodbye, a last farewell—but they couldn’t even have that—all because Margaret made a show of her grief.
Now standing by the gravesite, listening to the useless words of the somber priest, his throat felt tight, his mouth filled with a sour taste. He watched three black rooks sitting on a tree limb, preening themselves.
The first shovelful of wet heavy dirt struck the coffin with a thump. The sound was so final, he thought; no, he amended inwardly, if you thought about it, it was no more final than the farmer’s knock at the door. Both sounds heralded death.
Goodbye Ellie, he whispered into the wind. I love you. He felt the release of tears.
He looked up. Rose’s mouth was working, her eyes greedily following the sexton’s progress as if she herself was being filled instead of Ellen’s grave. His mother’s face was dark with a strange grim satisfaction. She shuffled her handkerchief from hand to hand, anxious, he guessed, to get back to her work. His Aunt May buried her face against Cedric’s shoulder and cried a long wailing note.
Ellen was gone and he was left with all that hate. The thin red leather diary was still inside his shirt front, pressing heavily—an unbearable weight—against his chest.
- 3 -
“She’s rotting, boy, don’t you think?” Rose Smith sat by the fire, her feet in a bucket of hot water, her knobby arms and chest wrapped in a heavy shawl.
Tom didn’t answer the old woman, he gave the smoldering peat a sharp stab with the iron poker. The turf tumbled downward and began to smoke; it would certainly go out, if he let it be, he hoped it would.
Since Ellen died the year before, his grandmother was thriving. She was stronger, less prone to maundering. She made sense when she talked—at least around him. The rest of the family still thought she was dotty, but Rose was as lucid as the clearest stream when she spoke to Tom. He sighed—that was part of the problem—she spoke to him often, everyday.
Somehow taking caring of her turned into his job. He tried to fob it off on Delia, but his mother put an immediate stop to it. No, Delia was going to help Margaret in the kitchen, be a kind of cook’s apprentice. He maintained Winston, the youngest—now five—could look after a woman in a chair, bring her tea, fetch and carry. Winston, his mother declared was going to be in charge of the hens. Everyone else was older and stronger and needed for the heavy work in the fields.
“Must be tight, lying there all day, day in and day out, the wood pressing down on your face.” Rose turned bright malicious eyes on him. “Ever think about it?”
“Think about what?” Tom opened a small closet to the left of the mantel and shook out a cloth. He began polishing the low brass fender. She might fall asleep if he moved quietly.
“Death, you ninny.”
He didn’t look up from where he stooped, but he heard the water slosh in the bucket. “Get me a towel,” Rose said. He handed her a clean rag from the closet. She grunted.
“Good enough for me, eh?” She began drying her feet.
He shrugged.
Rose laughed. “Think it rains in on ’er? Cedric was never much of a carpenter. Yer brothers are no better, nor May’s boys.”
“Her name is Ellen.”
“You mean was.” Rose scuffled to the rocker and eased herself down. “Sure,” she began swaying in the chair, “it’s probably a regular Brighton beach in there, tides comin’ and goin’. Bet she gets flooded regular like.”
Tom tried not to listen, but the image of Ellen laying in her grave with water rising made him ill. He clenched his fist. He had to say something. “Ellen’s dead. She can’t feel—”
“How do you know?”
Tom averted his eyes. The old hag was right, of course, how did he know? Maybe Ellen was suffering in the cramped cold space. He hated to think she was suffering.
“Course you see her in your mind’s eye,” she tapped her temple, “tucked in like she was sleeping—”
It was true, he hadn’t let himself think of the changes—
“Not the way, she is: eyes sunken in, lank hair spouting from the skull. There’s not much to her,” Rose said. “The flesh running off, the bones rising through.”
“Stop,” he whispered.
Rose leaned forward in the rocking chair. “Cedric’s still hangin’ on to his idiot dreams of being a gentleman farmer an’ breeding race horses; but I told ’im he’s only fit for one thing—writing.” She nodded sharply, and Tom saw the loose flesh on her throat quiver. “Maybe if you help me, I’ll help you,” she said.
He looked at her, puzzled for a second. It hit him all at once. The night noises had begun again.
“Your Aunt Margaret,” Rose said. “Not the best choice, to be sure, but the only available one.”
Her hands gripped the arms of the rocker. Tom saw the lawn and sky behind her through the window. He stood by the mantel, and toyed with a lacquered box his father had given Noreen for Christmas.
“You haven’t forgotten our little talk that night?”
He swallowed. “Mother burned the manuscript.”
Rose chuckled. “Did she? What’s paper? It’s words that matter.”
He thought of Cedric’s vagueness. “He’d never remember all.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” she shrugged. “But a book is a thing with a life of its own. It grows in secret.” She grinned at him. “Go upstairs and see. It’s all there; some’s under the mattress, some’s in the closet, some’s tucked behind the eaves.”
He hesitated, on the verge of going. “The desk is gone. And when does he write? I’ve never seen him, since—” he looked down, unable to say it, afraid he might see Ellen weeping on his shoulder in the kitchen.
“When do you dream?”
He was tired of her questions, confused. “What difference does it make?”
Rose began to laugh. “What difference does it make? Oh, you really are a fool.” She sat forward. “We’re all in that book; unless he finishes it, we’ll be gone forever.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No?” She fixed her dark eyes on him. “You just mull on this: as soon as the last person dies who remembers you, you die again.” She whispered, “I’m old, but I don’t want to die. Help me, and I’ll help you.” She looked out the window, toward the burying ground, and when she turned toward him again, Tom saw she was smiling. “I’ll bring her back. You’d like that wouldn’t you?”
He shook his head. Things had gotten out of control. He closed his eyes and a low whine came out of his throat.
“You would like it. I know.”
Tom opened his eyes and saw Rose perched on the edge of the chair like some ravening bird. Her eyes glittered, her face was shrunken, her hair wild.
“Ellen,” he said her name. No sound came out of his lips.
“You can swiv her this time,” Rose hissed.
Tom knocked the lacquered box to the floor and ran out the front door.
***
“Why doesn’t he finish? You said it was all there. Why doesn’t he finish it?” He was sick of hearing her talk about Cedric’s book.
It was summer now, and Rose clamored for fresh air. She was in the short padded chair with wheels that Bob made for her. Tom pushed it across the lawn. She could shuffle after a fashion and get around the house, but more and more she made Tom steer the chair. The chair was a botched thing, uneven and difficult to maneuver. After a rain, the wheels left ruts in the thick grass. He often thought about dumping it over, but he was afraid to try.
She badgered him almost every day, and she crept int
o his dreams at night and he saw her wrinkled sneering face and heard her cracked voice taunting him even in his sleep.
He begged Noreen to let him off. He offered to do anything, he threatened to run away, but Noreen’s mind was made up: Tom would look after his grandmother.
He wanted to scream in his mother’s face, she’s a witch! But something in his mother’s eyes stopped him. He began to think Noreen kept him at the task for that very reason, that she wanted Tom to keep Rose in check somehow.
“He hasn’t finished because she’s not with child,” Rose said. He knew she meant Aunt May.
Cedric had bought Rose a set of false teeth, and she clicked them. The sound made him grimace.
“You hear them, boy, don’t you? Cedric and Margaret straining in the night?” she laughed.
He struggled with the chair up a slight incline. He dug in and pushed. Rose wanted to go to the top of the rise.
“Noreen doesn’t hear them, but you do.” She clicked her teeth again. “Does it make your little twig tremble?” she asked. “Does it make you think of her?”
“Shut up.” Tom stood still.
“Noreen doesn’t want to hear them, but you do, eh?” Her grizzled brows arched upward.
“My mother knows what you are.” Tom crossed his arms.
“Not like you, though, eh?” she said.
Rose licked her finger and wet her lips, rubbing them in a slow circle, her eyes fixed on him.
Tom moaned. He felt the old woman’s finger tracings on his own lips. She was working some peculiar spell. It was like kissing Ellen all over again. He would have sworn Ellen stood that close, her soft lips touching his. He felt her tongue. He smelled clean hair, closed his eyes. He felt himself stiffen and turned away, humiliated. Oh Lord, what if he—the sensation stopped.
“Help me, and you can have her again. See there.” She pointed to the west. “There’s a church. Outside the door is a kind of crude carving, a sheila na gig. You get it and bring it here. Know what it is?”
“No, and I don’t care.”
She giggled, and Tom saw her hands twitch down to her lap. He suddenly felt slim delicate fingers probe gently near the buttons of his trousers. He groaned. He was in the grip of a vision so powerful he lost track of whether his eyes were opened or closed. Oh God, the smell of her warm, clean skin. He felt himself falling, and then he was lying on the damp grass on his back drowning with Ellen.
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