by Tim Buckley
7
Eoin and Mairéad were a very religious couple. Saturday evenings mumbled to the monotone of the rosary, the five of us sitting at the kitchen table. When I was old enough to be trusted with the responsibility of my own decade, I was terrified that I’d fluff my lines or that Cathal would make me laugh mimicking Eoin when my uncle had his eyes closed deep in prayer. Eoin brooked no disrespect in those moments and I had my ear clipped more than once. Even when we were older and no longer bound by the rosary’s timetable, a hush descended on the house when the uneven chime of the Angelus bells rang eerily on the radio. Eoin would take his turn one Saturday every month cleaning weeds out of the churchyard and Mairéad mended vestments for the priests.
Easter was a great time for the devout. Holy Thursday Mass, the interminable Good Friday services, confession on Saturday and Easter Sunday Mass to round off the week polished the halos of the faithful until they shone with self-satisfied virtue. My mother was whatever the opposite of religious is – I’m pretty sure Eoin and Mairéad considered her the Antichrist. They liked her, I think Eoin was exceptionally fond of her, in fact, but they despaired of her faithless disdain for the church. This was Ireland in the age before enlightenment, remember, and ritualistic congregation was the staple upon which rural communities sustained themselves. I’m sure they prayed for her and lit candles to save her soul from the eternal damnation that was surely waiting. My father, on the other hand, was one for the quiet life and his attendance record in St Colman’s was a function of whether Eoin’s admonishing disapproval was worse or easier to bear than his wife’s ridicule. Before the accident that took them away, then, the big church holidays were sure to create waves and Easter was the biggest of them all.
That last Easter came early, as early almost as Easter can. It was just weeks before the ill-fated expedition to Galway that left me an orphan, and all that week the sun shone from a cold, blue sky. One of the cows was having a difficult pregnancy and had been put inside in the byre, out of the cold. I knew her from the milking sheds and I decided she was lonely, being on her own all the time. So I spent as much time as I could in the barn with her, careful not to let Cathal or Seán see me. I talked to her and read her stories from my Secret Seven books. All the while, she would stare intently back at me so that I knew she was listening and understood every word.
That’s where I was on that Good Friday and Eoin, passing by the shed on his way to wash up for church, called in to me.
“Come on, gosson,” he said, “go on in and get yourself ready for Mass.”
“All right, Uncle Eoin,” I shouted out to him, “I just have to finish this page.”
“One more page then, I don’t want you keeping the good Lord waiting, today of all days.”
I finished the page and ran up to the house. As I came in the back door, I could hear them shouting.
“Ah, for the love of God,” my father was saying, “would you not just do it this one time? Just come to the church, sit through it and they’ll all be happy. It’s not that much to ask, is it?”
“Don’t do that,” my mother shouted back, “don’t you dare make it sound like I’m the devil in this. I don’t have to go if I don’t want to, and if that bothers Mairéad, well then that’s her lookout. I’m fed up of this feckin’ hypocrisy, fed up of pretending so that we look like whatever it is we’re supposed to look like. I’ve had it.”
A door slammed upstairs and there was silence for a moment that felt like an hour.
“Well, I’m bringing the little lad,” my father shouted. “You can stay here if you want to but we’re going.”
“Bring him if you like, I don’t care!”
I heard my father swear under his breath and then I heard the stairs creaking under his feet.
“Come on, there’s a good man,” he said, when he came into the kitchen and saw me standing by the door, “come on and we’ll go. Eoin and Mairéad and the boys are already gone.”
I stood there, rooted to the spot, while my father looked around for the car keys. I didn’t know what to do.
“Is Mammy coming?” I said, quietly, fighting to stop the tears that threatened to come.
My father stopped what he was doing and crouched down.
“She’s not, no. She has a bit of a headache. We’ll say a prayer that she’ll be OK by the time we get home, won’t we? Come on, now, we don’t want to be late.”
“I’m supposed to change my shirt,” I said in a whisper.
“Come on, you’re grand,” my father said, and marched me out the door.
I had never heard my mother swear before, and the word sounded especially foul in her mouth. But worse – far worse – were the words that came after. Bring him if you like, I don’t care. I don’t care. The words bundled me roughly in a feeling of loneliness, that my mother didn’t care if I stayed or went. She didn’t care. I never got the chance to let her fix that in the way that only parents can fix those things. She was gone before she could and she never had the chance to ruffle my hair and smile and say that I had misunderstood and that wasn’t what she meant at all. Sure wasn’t I her best little man? Wasn’t I?
8
Pete Baxter’s visit was the wake-up call I needed to make me realise that all was not well. What had started out as an amateur’s labour of love would get a lot more serious if the council decided that it had to be knocked down. What was worse was that, under the terms of our contract, I would have to pick up the tab for all of that. There could be fines to pay as well as the cost of demolition and taking away all of the debris and I had no idea how much all of that might cost. I wasn’t short of a few dollars, but I was recently enough poor not to want to throw away what we had. So I called Nathan and we agreed to meet in the pub that night. This was going to need more than coffee.
The pub was in the old schoolhouse, it had been there since the school moved to the new buildings on the edge of the town. Many of its regulars had been to school in that very building, and now spent too many nights drinking beneath the same roof under which they had learned to read and write.
“So Pete called over?” Nathan said, when I came back from the bar with a couple of beers. “What’d he have to say for himself?”
In theory, I’d employed Nathan as foreman for the project but, as Emily and I tried to find our way through Cara growing up, he’d become more of a friend than an employee. He had two kids of his own, albeit a lot older than Cara, and so he was a quiet and unassuming fount of the practical and the pragmatic. He was still handy, no doubt about that, but we’d found a few other things that we shared in common – a similar sense of humour, maybe, a love of sport and an appreciation of good beer. All of that and we were very possibly two halves of the same grumpy old man.
I told him what Pete had said and he nodded.
“No big surprise there,” he said. “I think you’re right, best get the boys in and hammer out a plan that they’ll stick to. And I was thinking, you should maybe consider taking a few of them on full-time. If there’s nothing else to distract them, we might be able to cut out a lot of the time we’ve been wasting.”
“You got anyone in particular in mind?”
“I do. Robbie and Stevie are good lads, a couple of the others too. Let me think about it.”
“OK, I’ll call everyone tomorrow, try and get them all in so we can get this done in time for next Tuesday. Not going to be easy though – it’s like herding cats with these guys.”
“Want me to sit in?”
“That’d be great, Nate, if you can?”
He paused for a moment.
“I’ll have to check with Emily, make sure she doesn’t need me for anything at the house.”
I chuckled.
“She has us both under the thumb, eh?”
He shook his head and took a swig of beer.
“You don’t know the half of it, Wilde.”
“Oh
?”
“Look…” he said, then thought better of whatever he was going to say. “Ah, forget it, it’s nothing.”
“Come on, Nathan, you can’t just leave that hanging out there. What is it?”
He sighed.
“Look, I don’t want to talk out of school, but… is Emily all right?”
“Of course. How do you mean?”
“I dunno, it seems like she’s not really herself these days. She’s stressed out about the vines, I get that, and she’s worried about this vintage. But she’s been flying off the handle with the guys working over there. The boys are scared stiff, scared of making a mistake that might cost them a bollock.”
That was news to me, and I was ashamed to admit that to myself. I knew she was working hard, I knew that crafting her own wine was the realisation of a dream that had scarcely seemed possible just a few short years ago, behind the till in a Dublin off-licence. I knew that she was worried about the next harvest and about a disease of the vines that had been doing the rounds of the local farms. But I hadn’t really seen much of the stress that Nathan described – was that because she didn’t bring it home or because I’d just missed it? Was I so preoccupied with my own everyday that I’d been blind to hers?
“I’ll have a chat to her,” I said. “See if there’s something on her mind, OK?”
“Just don’t tell her I said anything, eh? I wouldn’t go behind her back and I’d never want her to think I wasn’t on her side. I am.”
“I know that, mate, and so does Em. No worries, I’ll tread lightly. To be honest, it’s my bad that I haven’t noticed, there’s no excuse for that.”
“You’ve had your own shit to deal with.”
“Maybe, but still. And are the guys… you know, getting pissed off with her?”
“You know what they’re like – they’re good lads and they’d do anything for her. But even the best of them won’t take it forever.”
“Right. Like I say, I’ll talk to her. And thanks, mate, I appreciate the heads-up. Another beer?”
9
Christmas came and went in a blur of roofers, bricklayers and glaziers. There’s something about the people here that they’ll do whatever they can to get you out of a hole. I’d expected my new plan to meet with the stereotypical sharp intakes of breath and head-scratching while the subcontractors gave jargon-laden explanations as to why it couldn’t be done and how much more it was all going to cost. But there was none of that. Sure, there were targets they just couldn’t meet, ideas that were simply impracticable. But they were straight about it and I believed them. It helped, of course, that Nathan was there to translate and mediate and once he was happy, then so was I.
I realised fairly quickly that most of the delay and much of the rework that they’d had to do were down to me. I hadn’t been clear enough with the people doing the work for me and my vague instructions were never likely to end up with a result that only I had in my head. So, with Nathan’s help, we’d put together a plan that worked for everyone and, most importantly, satisfied the planning committee that the whole building would be watertight by the start of April. Now all that was left was to get it all done.
As it took shape slowly through the autumn, I grew more and more entranced by the place. There is something about the coast, and especially about cliffs that tower over wild ocean, that thrills me like nothing else. More than the rugged majesty of an Alpine landscape; more than the serenity of the Great Lakes; more than the barren austerity of desert scrub. I could lose myself in the ocean, in the sky above it and in the mystery of the world under the waves. The simple, clean elegance of the lighthouse tower was a picture of calm in the face of the elements that one day battered it and lashed it with rain but bathed it in sunshine the next. The little house was its faithful lieutenant, standing by no matter what. As the work got more technical, there wasn’t much I could offer to the teams working on site other than making coffee and running errands in town, and so Cara and I would spend hours just walking around, looking at the sea and imagining what this would be like when it was all finished.
Christmas had been a little fraught. A lot fraught, to be honest. Maybe it was just because Nathan had flagged it to me, but Emily’s mood seemed to grow more and more prickly. Nothing was right for her, and the only time the storms seemed to abate was when she was with Cara; feeding her or sitting with her or walking with her among the vines, the little sheep following them everywhere. She had slowly grown in confidence as a mother, less afraid of a mistake that might hurt Cara, more willing to act on instinct and trust her gut. But the more time she spent working on her wine and on the vines, the more of her time they seemed to demand. She didn’t have time to just sit or to waste with nothing, and so she didn’t even have much time to spend with Cara. There were days, indeed, when she didn’t see Cara at all, spending all day from morning until night in the vineyard. The contractors at the lighthouse were on Christmas holiday and so I had time to spare, but nothing I did for her was right and in the end I inevitably ended up leaving before either I lost my temper or she did.
Christmas Day itself was a disaster. It had all started brightly enough. We woke early and took Cara down to the living room where Santy had left her presents under the tree. There could have been anything in the brightly coloured packages, such was Cara’s delight in ripping apart the wrapping paper, but the little teddy bear and the mobile that would hang over her bed were met with wide-eyed wonder and those uncontrollable belly laughs in which only children can lose themselves. I had spent the month or two before searching for an antique locket that looked like one Emily’s grandmother had left to her in her will and which she had lost somewhere along the way. I’d found one in the prospectus for an auction in the city and gone up to bid for it. I won it – I was determined to have it – and I put her two favourite pictures of Cara into either side of the locket. I couldn’t wait to give it to her on Christmas morning. I was sure she’d love it and she did, she really did. I hung the gold chain round her neck and kissed her, and she stared at it in the mirror, opening and closing the locket until I was afraid she might break it. Really, the day could scarcely have got off to a better start.
Nathan’s wife, Carly, had invited us over for a late Christmas lunch with their family. We were to be there around four thirty and I had gathered up Cara and a bag of distractions and put everything in the jeep ready to go.
“Let’s go, Em,” I called out, coming back into the house to pick up the few bits that were left. “Emily? Are you ready?”
There was no reply.
I went into the kitchen and looked out of the window and over the vineyards behind the house. There, at the very far end and in the dress she’d put on for lunch, was Emily, frantically working at something in a haze of dust that was sticking to her sweat-damped arms. Cara was in the car so I couldn’t go down to where Emily was working, so I called her mobile. I watched from the window as she searched her pockets and the bag she carried everywhere, I could almost see the air turn blue.
“What?” she answered, when she eventually found her phone.
“What are you doing, Em? We’re leaving now, right now! Come on, let’s go.”
“Go without me, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Oh, come on, Emily, you can’t do this. Not today. You can screw me around if you have to, but don’t screw with our friends.”
“Just go, Wilde, I’ll be there when I can. Just leave the front door on the latch or leave the back door open – my bloody key’s not working.”
And she hung up.
I called her back, watching her through the window as she switched off the phone. I shook my head and swore at her. I opened the French windows that led out onto the back stoop so that she could get into the house whenever she finished whatever she was doing, then went back out to the jeep, slamming the front door behind me. Nathan and Carly were very good about the who
le thing, I knew they would be and that probably made me feel even worse.
“Don’t stress, Wilde,” Carly said, turning down the oven and covering over the vegetables that lay chopped and sliced on the countertop. “These things happen. We’re not in any hurry, so relax. She’ll get here when she gets here.”
“Can I go over to Jimmy’s?” asked Evan, their eldest. “Just for a bit?”
“Go on then,” Nathan said, “I’ll text you when we’re ready to eat, yeah?”
“Cool, thanks, Dad,” the youngster said with a broad grin, delighted to get out from under the adults for a while.
Michelle, their daughter, was in no such hurry to get out of the house. She was mesmerised by Cara who was at her very best and most beguiling, chuckling at everything, and everything bringing that same wide-eyed wonder to her face. So Michelle carried her round, rubbing all of the surfaces as they went, and introducing her to the menagerie of pets that lived in the house.
I folded myself into an easy chair on the stoop, one of Nathan’s beers in hand, and blew out a long sigh. Nathan grinned.
“Take it easy, Wilde. Cara’s happy, you’ve got a beer and Emily’s doing whatever it is she needs to do to be able to relax. It’s all good, even if it doesn’t feel that way.”
I shook my head.
“I just don’t get it, mate, I really don’t.”
“That’s women, mate,” he smirked, “you’re not supposed to get it!”
I closed my eyes and let my head fall back in the chair. I’d already knocked back a quick beer and the second was just starting to ease the tension that had caught hold of me back at the house. We’d been so lucky, so incredibly lucky. We had Cara, we lived in a great place, we were doing stuff that we were supposed to love doing, we would probably never have to worry about money again… and yet Emily wasn’t happy. Why? How could that be? I’d never thought of money as the answer to life’s problems, but money was the one obstacle that appeared on every path to contentment that I used to plot in my imagination. Be a writer? Need to earn money. Go live in some exotic tropical refuge? Need money. Live any of the dreams that spun round in my brain? Not without money. As Brendan says, money can’t buy happiness but at least you can put down a good deposit. And so the windfall that gave us all we would ever need – as well as ridding me of the immediate problems that had threatened to derail me – should have been the answer to everything. It wasn’t. Just like I should have known it wouldn’t be. But it should have helped. It should have made it easier to be happy.