Deadly Confederacies

by Martin Malone

  Huey says, ‘You know, Robbie, we came here to bless your home, but also to see if it were a suitable place for a retreat. We have some money to invest in a property.’

  ‘This is soooo ideal, Huey,’ I say, coming wide awake, ‘the sea is nearby. And …’.

  Tiger says, ‘It’s the energy.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  Huey says, ‘It and you … there’s a very grey energy here.’

  ‘Is that bad? ’Cos I like grey. It’s my favourite colour.’

  Huey says, ‘Now you’re being flippant.’

  ‘No. I like grey, really. Remember, Huey. I used to live in a grey tracksuits … gee, all of the time.’

  Joey says, ‘How much?’

  ‘What?’ I say, partly because I hadn’t expected to him say anything apart from emit a grunt.

  ‘To buy you out,’ Tiger clarifies.

  ‘I need to get it valued before …’.

  ‘Fifty thousand,’ Huey says, quick off the mark. He is a man who’d sussed his price well in advance of making an offer.

  ‘There are five acres,’ I say, ‘I don’t know the value of …’.

  I get to thinking that fifty thousand isn’t much. Not when I would have to find a new gaff. I feel a wire in my temple getting hot.

  ‘About what it’s worth,’ Huey says.

  It’s like my car, I think; worth more to me in real physical terms than monetary. I dwell on how much it would cost me to replace my Ford. The house is worth more than Huey has offered, but I have no idea by how much.

  ‘We’ll take care of the animals, too,’ Joey says.

  That does entice, but only a little.

  ‘No,’ I say, flatly. It kills me to kill the offer.

  Huey spreads out his hands and says, ‘So be it.’

  They take up the offer of a ride home. Sometimes the rain is wind-flung against the car. I try to jump-start the conversation, but none is interested in making talk. Least of all Huey – when a talker stops talking to you, you know you’ve lost a friend. He may look better than he did all those years ago, he may sound more confident, have more money, a belief system, but I say to him, as I pull in outside McDonald’s, ‘Huey, one thing about you hasn’t changed: you still sulk when you don’t get your own way.’

  He looks long and hard at me, and says, ‘Bless you my brother … and light and happiness upon your soul.’

  Our meeting up is proof that old friendships, very often like old romances, fail to rekindle and aren’t worth the effort. Strange things are happening in the cottage. Noises, creaks, like a bone snapping. This morning before my eyes a grey stain appeared on the walls: a handprint. I legged it out of there.

  I am too afraid to go back in. I’m sitting in the Ford, biting my fingernails, not a kick in its engine. Occasionally, a shadow crosses by the kitchen window. Now and then it stops. It’s as though someone is leaning forward to peer out through the glass. I feel as though the inside of my head is blazing. The same old stuff always happens when a situation gets out of hand.

  Later, when strangers approach, they ask why I’m throwing rocks at the cottage and breaking the windows. They can’t see my ocean-drenched Father.

  ‘It’s a donkey,’ a woman says, who’d gone in to check, who I never expected to see again.

  The world just won’t stop playing its fucking tricks on me.

  The Red Caboose Motel

  I just sit, listen to the silence, watch the candle burn away in the quartz candleholder in front of my father’s photograph.

  There are places, situations and people that I can’t wait to leave behind, and a grieving mother is one of them. An uneasiness grows within me that I cannot contain. Something else pulls at me to linger for a while longer, but my soul has already taken flight. The price for not staying is a dose of guilt. It occasionally clings. But mostly, when I break away, I feel like the root of a tree breaking surface to witness light.

  And it’s funny too that the black sheep of the family is now the one who does most for her; the physical things and the hardest part, the listening, the being there in the dead weight of deep silences, where no word lives or could ever survive.

  The holiday had been my idea; I thought the prospect of visiting her grandchildren would give her something to look forward to, a daub of sun in her grey canvas. It does, but she also makes it sound like a pilgrimage by saying things like, ‘This’ll be my first time to the States without your father,’ and ‘We’ll be over there for our wedding anniversary.’ All that sort of stuff drains the energy from you.

  Alan lives there, her son, my brother. More her son than my brother – there’s a gap of fourteen years between us, and I suppose we didn’t live under the same roof for anything longer than four to five years. He has done well for himself, especially for someone who looked like he had been going nowhere with his life. Dad sent him to the States when he was fifteen, when Alan was on the cusp of getting into all sorts of trouble. Mam had always been careful to say that it had been Dad’s decision to let him go – she said this when I mentioned at the time that Alan was a little young to be leaving home. She said, ‘Michael is over there.’ Michael’s one of our other brothers – he came back from the States a few years ago, and has been regretting it ever since.

  Today, this morning, into the silence, Mam drops a bombshell: ‘Monica asked me if it was okay for her to come along with us.’

  Monica’s is Mam’s older sister. She lives in London, not far from the waxworks museum – she likes to tell people this in a quiet way, as though it is a boast of sorts. Mam didn’t think it funny when I said she looked like she’d escaped from there. Monica has two bockety hips.

  She is a widow; her husband killed himself. He hated the Irish, yet he married Monica. They’d hated each other for the latter part of their married lives. Last year she brought home some of his ashes and spread them on a racecourse. He hated horse racing, too. Gambling, he believed, was a disease thought up by the Irish.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, though why I said that I don’t know – of course it’s okay. Why not? It’ll be someone else to sit in with Mam’s silences.

  ‘I know youse don’t see eye to eye, but I thought if she was along you and Alan might have more time to spend together …’.

  Meaning that Monica hadn’t invited herself along – Mam had done the inviting.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ Mam says.

  ‘No.’

  The photograph of Dad under candlelight is of him sitting in a railway carriage. He loved trains. When he got his free travel pass he travelled all over the country – I doubt if there’s a track and its station that he didn’t get to know. His father had loved trains too; he was a porter. Once, as a tip, he was given the keys to a Ford Cortina. This man said he and his family were emigrating to Australia, and he wanted to leave with a grand gesture. It made the newspaper – Grandad smiling. He wore his peaked porter’s cap, his navy British Rail uniform, dangling the keys to a decent car. I resemble him – the hooded eyes, the chunky build, the ears and the long nose. When I look at old family albums, I sometimes come away with the feeling that I’m a living ghost.

  So I book the holidays and, at Aunt Monica’s insistence, two wheelchair assists. My brother meets us at Boston airport. He looks fit and healthy. He says, smiling, looking at our aunt and our mother, ‘Maybe I should have brought an ambulance instead of a people carrier.’

  They’d travelled light, with almost empty suitcases: they intended to return home with the spoils of shopping: tortured credit cards and fleeced bank accounts, savings husbanded by husbands no longer present to guard against the dragon mall. I’d been the one tasked with bringing a veritable tuck shop in my suitcases for Alan’s kids – they love Crunchie bars and Tayto crisps.

  About a week into the holiday, Alan says he’s bo
oked the midweek break for the Red Caboose Motel in P.A. in Amish country, near to where the Witness movie was made. As it turns out, a day before the trip Mam’s stomach comes at her and she says she isn’t up to the journey. By now, Monica had been wearing at her nerves, and she needed a break from her. Alan’s wife puts on a brave face – she’d been looking forward to getting the two old dears out of her hair for a couple of days. Probably me too. But I’d made myself useful, and hadn’t hung around the table waiting for my breakfast to be served or looking to be brought somewhere, like the consignment stores. Though the two women have money, they are war babies, and had grown up knowing how to resurrect clothes and give them life. Cheap quality is what matters to them, not lasting. No matter how often they’re taught the lesson that cheap doesn’t last, they never learn.

  ‘You’ll like it there,’ Mam says to me, ‘your Dad loved it … we were there four or five times.’

  Alan looks at me, doesn’t say what he’s thinking – it’s the spot where Dad took ill and died. This is the real reason Mam’s stomach had come at her – she prefers to be at and near the places where Dad and she had been together, and not the last time and final place.

  Shortly after midday, we pull in at the Red Caboose Motel. The sun is out; it has weak warmth, like a phony smile. We hadn’t spoken much on the journey from New Haven. When we did have something to say, it was usually to give out about Monica in the back, who had got doddery in her old age. She had a nephew of mine parked either side. It wasn’t much fun for the kids as she had taken to farting in front of people and apologising for it, but never moving away or thinking to open a window. She called it passing wind, said with a tiny smile as though to say wasn’t she the bold thing.

  Dad used to call her ‘The Lady’. He didn’t like her very much; he thought her a snob. She couldn’t hear us talking about her over the noise of the air conditioning. Besides, after ten days of putting up with her, we weren’t really bothered if she did happen to overhear.

  She wanted to see Amish country, and Alan hadn’t got it in him to turn her down, even though he thought the five-hour car journey might be too long for her to fully enjoy.

  Our plan is to book her into a caboose and leave her to babysit the kids while we sip at beers and talk about Dad and how he’d loved it here. It’s my first time to visit, and I could tell in an instant why he had fallen for the place. He was an open-air man, had worked on the land all his life. Because I’m much older than Alan, I can remember stuff about him that Alan couldn’t have known because of the time gap, and that was why he insisted on bringing me here, to see the place where Dad had passed away, to swap memories. Because Dad was an easy sort of man to remember.

  Alan goes to draw our keys from reception. About forty rail carriages, renovated sleeping cars, are laid out in four or five rows. Old railway companies show the ghosts of their former existence on their timber-framed sides, with names like Alaska, Pennsylvania, Great Northern, Delaware and Hudson, Union Pacific, Union Line. All familiar-sounding names to Alan, as he’d emigrated to the States when he was 15, and had ended up working as a city cop.

  The kids are beginning to get itchy feet just as Alan returns.

  ‘What time are we eating?’ Aunt Monica says above their voices, looking at the kids, like she’s calling them to order, to get in line – the old come first. She has short, iron-grey hair, reddish cheeks, and grey eyes I doubt very much had ever cried with laughter.

  ‘You’re in number thirty-four,’ Alan says, then telling his kids to bring Monica’s bags to her caboose.

  ‘I don’t eat hamburgers,’ she says quietly.

  She wears red trousers that a prostitute would think too bright, and a white blouse the sun shies away from; strings of cheap jewellery dangle from her neck. She’s a baggy throat full of unsaid words.

  ‘Am I sleeping on my own?’ she says.

  ‘In thirty-four,’ Alan repeats, and then says, ‘the boys are in thirty and we’re in forty-one … yeah … over there.’

  She says, ‘I’d love a cup of tea.’

  Later, Alan says she’s a passive-aggressive person in the way that she goes to lift her bag, catches your eye, and holds it until you feel obliged to take it for her. He’d probably studied stuff like that in the cop academy. All I really know of her is that she has a sense of entitlement, and that her wheelchair ruse is a means for her to skip the line at the airport and at customs.

  We put our bags in the caboose and go outside. Close to the front of the motel runs a railway line that a steam train passes by a few times daily, and under a veranda an Amish man with a straw hat has a black buggy for hire and two beautiful chestnut horses to pull it. Beyond the tracks there are rows of pumpkins and tobacco crops. To the other side of our wine-coloured caboose is a granary tower, a purple-painted house, and cornfields that make me think of the Children of the Corn movie.

  ‘You don’t remember this,’ I say, ‘but when I was a kid the Dad had a train set that he used to keep on a large double bed. It had green baize and bridges and tunnels with miniature trees, and a train station, and the carriages had these little figures inside sitting at tables with lamps.’ I stop talking and we look at each other, and I can see the imagining going on in his blue eyes. Then I continue, ‘He had to dismantle it when our brothers came along. He put the boxes in the loft, but they went missing from there. We think an uncle stole it. It was a Hornby set, expensive … I think Dad got it from his own father.’

  Jack, one of the kids, runs over to say Aunt Monica wants to know when’s dinner, and why there isn’t a kettle in her caboose to make tea. Plus, the boy says, she’s left her pills in the car. Alan’s kids are bright, typical American lookers, all blond and blue-eyed and bushy-tailed. I try to imagine how they would have looked if they’d grown up back home in less than kind financial circumstances, because there’s nothing surer that’s how it would have been for them if their Dad hadn’t emigrated. He was so young to do that, though – far too young – but he was beginning to get into trouble, like I said, teetering on the brink of stepping outside the law. Ironic, given his present-day police role.

  He tells his son we’ll be eating at five, in two hours, and to tell his aunt he would bring her down a pot of tea and biscuits in a few minutes.

  ‘She’d put years on you,’ he says, watching Jack climb the steps to her caboose. Turning to me, he says, ‘She’s a liability. Did you hear her at dinner last night?’

  ‘Farting?’

  ‘Not farting, no … she said she was lucky to have diabetes or they wouldn’t have operated on her foot for free.’

  ‘She said that? I missed it.’

  ‘Yeah, she said it.’

  ‘She keeps repeating things, you know … and to her it’s like you’re hearing it all for the first time; every gory, boring detail … I think it’s worrying.’

  He nods, and says in a wondering whisper, ‘It is.’

  He speaks with an American accent. Then, Alan has lived much longer here than he had at home. His kids love their Irish heritage. In particular, they love Tayto crisps and books about Irish history: the Celts, the Vikings, anything with swords and death and black plagues.

  After dinner, he shows me where Dad had dropped dead: next to the railway line, where he had been with his grandkids putting coins on the line for the trains to crush. I ease a bunch of wild blue flowers beside the track and say a silent prayer. A loud prayer from me would be a bit like hearing an ass braying ‘Amazing Grace’.

  That night, I drink a couple of beers. Alan admits that he doesn’t do alcohol any more because it had become a problem for him; he drinks non-alcoholic beer to fool himself. He is four years into fooling himself, and I congratulate him and feel a little guilty for drinking the real stuff. He has the TV on. We can’t see each other as the beds are back to back, with a dividing partition that’s wallpapered with a 1950s pat
tern of drab vertical brown lines on magnolia.

  He says, ‘The dad used to get up every morning and go for a long walk. We stayed a week here at a time, and he loved it, and talked about how he wished he’d come out here years ago and hadn’t listened to Mam, because, Davy, you know he had a job offer. He’d wanted to emigrate.’

  We talk as night crosses into morning, mostly about Dad. He fills me in on bits of his own life too, the general shape to it, but mostly it’s about the things he did with Dad when he’d visited here: bonding, father and son stuff. Alan had been back to Ireland a couple of times, and he’d worn his cop uniform at Dad’s funeral, primarily to show his old teachers that he hadn’t gone through life as the waster that they said he would be. But he also wore the navy uniform with pride. The uniform suited him. But I’m aware that, although we are brothers, we have been strangers thus far for nearly all of our lives – and I’m not sure if flesh and blood is the bonding connection people say it is.

  In the morning, I’m first up and about. The air hits me – a beautiful aroma of pumpkins tinged with tobacco. In the fields, two Amish men in dirty straw hats load laths of tobacco on to a cart. A haze in the distance is the last visible breath of the night. They work for about twenty minutes, until they’ve loaded the cart, and then rein the horses around to face into the road. The cart rolls to a large barn, where they begin to unload the tobacco. I decide to breakfast in the motel’s dining car, and notice Monica walking toward the cornfields, but looking like she doesn’t know where she’s heading. Part of me wants to ignore what I’m seeing, but only that small part of badness in some or all of us – the bit about ourselves we don’t like and spend a lifetime trying to fix.

  I catch up with her just as she steps into the corn.

  ‘Monica?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  I take her elbow gently, and turn her from the first tall row of stalks. Her eyes are as hazy as the hills. She doesn’t recognise me.