I walked the hundred yards or so to the turn-off for the Passage Road, keeping my pace slow, and there was no sense of urgency and no sounds at all except for my own light footsteps and the gentle pull and shatter of my breathing. Then the Finger Post pressed itself into view, a ten-foot post on an anchoring four-foot rubble-and-mortar mound, with three arms pointing out the varying directions, to the city, Passage West and Carrigaline. When Dixie would try to frighten Jimmy and me, he’d tell us about how, back in early times, fifty years before the Famine, the English had hung people from those arms, and it was sung about, and believed by many, that the ghost of a man from Donnybrook named Phil Carty, who’d been strung up there in chains for his part in that long-ago rebellion and left to rot, could still be seen on certain nights slumped against the post’s mound, drenched in blood from the beating he’d taken and weeping for the life he’d lost.
Remembering this put a shiver through me, but it was a pleasurable dread, made easy by familiarity, and I laughed into it and kept moving forward. But as I drew closer to the signpost, I saw that the dark held something else.
Set back on the road, no more than a dozen paces away against the high wall, a man stood staring at me. To my child’s eyes – and even still, in memory – a giant, comfortably over six foot, because I knew that wall well and he was easily head and shoulders above it. But in the moment, my shocked mind made him probably half as tall again, wrapped in a long buttoned-up overcoat, his marble-white face a forlorn blur behind the sheets of mist.
My bones turned soft. I wanted to cry out, but the air only dribbled from my mouth until my chest burned, and a chill that had nothing to do with the cold of the night ran the length of my spine. Ahead of me the man’s stare didn’t slip, and even though I could make out very little of his face other than its whiteness I felt helpless and stuck beneath that stare.
There are days even now when I wonder if it was real. Because it’s possible, I suppose, that I’d suffered a moment of breakdown, brought on by an accumulation of the darkness, mist, the thought of ghosts and the imminence of my brother’s death. Grief does funny things to the mind, and a ten-year-old keeps so much room in the world still for magic. All I can say is that it felt real, and the details have remained with me in a way as rich and vibrant, as true, as any other single moment of my life. It’s as real to me as this room around me now, so real that I remember the feeling of the mist against my eyes and the way the man’s hair lay buttered to his forehead. The wide fixation of his stare and the sadness it held; the slightly bowed clench of his mouth over the strong chin. Conditions and distance blurred the details, and yet in memory they feel beyond question. The entire encounter could have lasted no more than a few seconds, but shock somehow froze the moment solid, so that it continues to retain its shape, its permanence, the way photographs do. I might have stood there forever had he not moved, but then his mouth slipped open as if to speak, to call or warn me, and a hand lifted from his side, and that proved enough to crack the spell. I came to with a jerk, reared back hard and ran.
Logic would have turned me for home, but in the dark there was no room for that, and no time to think, and I charged westward, following my original plan, down into the black well of the Passage Road, a narrow boreen penned in on both sides by ancient walls and a heavy overhang of oaks and sycamores. I ran blindly, my feet pounding the road, chasing to catch the frantic rhythm of my heart, and when a terrible wailing ruptured the night I began to cry, which caused a further melting of the world, my terror so immense that I’d almost reached Sally’s house before I recognised the howls as my own. Even then, though, I didn’t stop, couldn’t. I ran, certain that the figure was behind me, and that any second I’d feel the grab of a cold hand. Then I took the twist in the road and the row of little homes came into view ahead and on my left, and I didn’t slow my pace until the front door stopped me. I beat at the old timber with my fists, and called out in desperate shouts for Sally, and that was almost the worst moment, because I could hear the rising sounds of voices inside, and then the shamble of footsteps, and I was so near to being safe. ‘Sally!’ I cried, and hammered at the door, and when, finally, it opened into a softer lamplit dark, I tumbled in and flapped a hand behind me at the night. But the road was empty.
They brought me to the fire, which had almost burnt out, and I sat on a hard chair and stared into the embers, weeping for breath. Sally and her eldest brother, Mick, stood waiting, Mick holding the lamp so that they could better see my face in the light. A minute or two later, another brother, Richard, came through from the back of the house in his vest, thumbing his braces up onto his shoulders, his smoke-stained hair corkscrewing up from the top of his head.
‘It’s Jimmy,’ I said, when I could make the words. ‘They’re saying he mightn’t last the night. He’s been calling for you, Sal. You’ll have to go up to him. Mam says he won’t die without you.’
‘Christ almighty, child,’ she said, kneeling before me and undoing the buttons of my coat. ‘You’re soaked to the bone. Let me get you dry.’ She used a towel on my head, rough in her usual way, then wrapped me in a blanket and pulled me into her arms. I held myself tightly to her neck and began to cry again. The smell of oil from the lamp was strong in the room, but its glow relaxed me. At the fire, behind Sally’s back, Richard stooped and added a sod of turf, and a few sticks of kindling, and stirred the rose-coloured ashes with a heavy iron poker. Mick started to say something, but hesitated, set the lamp on the table and left the room, returning after a moment with a bottle and a cup. He poured himself a drink, swallowed it in a quick throw, then lingered over a second.
‘There was a man,’ I said, when I’d settled back a little in the chair. ‘By the Finger Post. A stranger. He was just standing there, against the wall. I got an awful fright.’
Mick put the cup to his mouth again. ‘What kind of a man?’
I closed my eyes and the image returned. I shuddered hard. ‘Tall,’ I told them. ‘The tallest man you ever saw. He had on a long grey coat, and he must have been there in the mist for a long time because his hair was clung to his head. His face was the colour of milk, and he had a kind of a sadness about him that you’d nearly feel in your stomach.’
They were all staring now, leaning in.
‘Did he say anything?’ Sally asked, still on her knees before me.
I shook my head. ‘No. It looked like he was going to, but that’s what got me running. God, I thought he was behind me the whole road down. My heart is still going a gallop.’
Sally looked across at Mick. He emptied his cup with a hard swallow.
‘What?’ I asked, confused and again growing afraid. ‘Do you know him? The man?’
At first, no one said anything. Then Mick shrugged. ‘Maybe. But there’s no need to be worrying.’
‘But who is he?’
‘It sounds like your grandfather,’ Sally said. ‘Mick is right. You hadn’t reason to be afraid. He’d have been there to watch over you, that’s all.’ She stood, then leaned in again to kiss me on the cheek. ‘You can stay here with the lads tonight, and come up in the morning. No sense in you getting soaked a second time. They’ll get the fire awake and make tea. The night won’t be long going.’
‘You’re not walking up on your own?’ I said, reaching out and gripping her sleeve. ‘But it’s so late. And supposing he’s still there? The man, I mean.’
‘If he’s who I think he is then he won’t harm me. And if it’s anyone else, sure don’t I have my pistol? So that’ll be his bad luck. Anyway, I’ve no fear of the night-time.’
We sat up all night, drinking tea and chatting, I telling them about school and Mick talking about the horses in Windsor, where he worked as a coachman, and about Sir Abraham Sutton, a one-time Lord Mayor of the city but who’d never been the same after burying his only child, a daughter, Miss Kathleen. A beautiful young thing, and as attached to him as his own shadow, she’d contracted tuberculosis while accompanying him on his monthly charitable r
ounds and within six months had coughed up her lungs and wasted away to nothing but skin. ‘The rich die the same as the poor,’ he said, emptying the last of the bottle into his cup. ‘And money won’t spare them the suffering.’ The darkness held, but hours had passed and I could feel the dawn breaking.
An hour later, after drinking yet more tea and eating bowls of steaming porridge, Richard suggested that we walk the road back together. The night’s mist left behind a raw cold, and the snatches of cloud that revealed themselves through the occasional breaks in the tree branches were as heavily grey as a wintry sea. But the early morning was lit by the racket of birdsong, and as we walked, just for something to say, I made a small game of identifying robins, blackbirds, wrens, sparrows and wood pigeons by their calls, and the two men listened and nodded, though I knew their thoughts were with other things.
When we came to the Finger Post, nobody mentioned what I’d seen, and we quickened our pace, which had until then been leisurely, and turned in to Douglas. And once we got to within twenty or thirty yards of the cottage I felt it, the air of death, and I broke from between my uncles and ran ahead.
The front door was wide open, and our little home was crowded with people. Faces considered me with sad, fascinated eyes, and hands settled in sympathetic fashion on my back. Neighbours mostly, but the priest, too. I looked past the pack of bodies for May and Annie, and saw them beside the burnt-out fire, both of them crying. Dixie and Mata were standing around, isolated with their grief, feeling themselves too big and awkward for the limited space, and trying not to be in the way. I pushed through into the bedroom doorway, and stopped. Sally had my mother in her arms and was whispering something that might have been a prayer, and my father stood above them, his head turned away. There was a clean smell of freshly cut flowers; someone, probably May, had been into the Hall Field to gather the snowdrops and the early primroses. I tried to avert my eyes from the bed, and Jimmy, who was still sitting upright as usual among the pile of coats and cushions, head down and twisted leftwards. But it was impossible not to stare. The scene was one I knew well, and yet everything was different. This, I realised, taking a few steps closer, pushing past Sally and my mother to stand at his side, was death. The silence of it frightened me. The vacancy. I knew the shape, but what remained was a husk, nothing more than flesh and bone. The life inside, the laughter and even the recent agony, was gone. The face, impossibly young-seeming, looked only vaguely familiar, and I knew even at ten that it was because I’d forgotten the sight of it in a state of ease, with the muscles slackened. I leaned in and kissed his cheek, and the coldness of the skin brought tears to my eyes but I didn’t pull away, not until my father put his hands on my shoulders and whispered, ‘All right, Nellie, love. That’s enough. He’s gone from us.’
We’d all been waiting weeks for this end, and now that it had arrived I wasn’t ready. I put my arms around him and hugged him tight, and sobbed in his ear that I loved him as much as any heart could and that I always would, that I’d think about him every day and would make sure Puck was fed and watered and well looked after.
My father took charge then. I moved back in answer to his hand, and he straightened up as best he could and cleared his throat.
‘Take Mary out into the other room a while, Sal,’ he said, his voice so low that I could hardly hear him.
Sally looked up, without seeming to register the words.
‘Come on,’ he said, with more force. ‘Take her out and see to the kids, will you?’
He waited a second, then moved to the foot of the bed and lifted the timber crate of books from their place in the corner of the room.
Realisation came slowly, first to Sally, who gasped, and, after a second or two, to my mother. Her broad face twisted and she began to wail and claw at her hair. ‘No, Jer. Please, don’t. Not that.’ As she begged, her legs gave and she spilt to the floor, but the words and the howling kept on, deep broken sounds that lost all shape yet somehow retained their meaning.
My father’s eyes were glass. Focused, I think, on the minutes that lay ahead for him, but probably remembering things, too. His entire adult life, maybe even longer than that, he’d never been more than a few steps away from war. And now, as I looked on, he just stood there, holding the wooden box under one arm, until Sally had lifted my mother once again to her feet, then began to shepherd the women towards the doorway. Ahead of them, I stepped backwards out into the crowd, which parted a little for me.
‘Please, Jer,’ my mother implored, as he eased her from the bedroom. ‘Don’t do it.’
I noticed, for the first time and only because of the way he turned and caught the light, that his own cheeks were wet too, streaked in tears. ‘You think this is what I want, Mary? But what choice is there? I have to get him straight. If I don’t, we’ll never fit him in the coffin.’ He broke off then, and his right hand gripped the bedroom door a moment, and within the frame, clear from everyone else, he was a portrait of pain, this strong man who must have believed he’d already seen all the horror that life could raise but who was finding himself now on the brink of its most terrible moment yet. His eyes stared without focus, and we all stared back at him without wanting to, because there was nowhere else to look.
When he pushed the door shut there was a long silence, half a minute’s worth, maybe more, and then the bestial sounds of him weeping from his chest louder and louder above the dry crunch of breaking bones.
* * *
Lately, I think a lot about endings. I have no fear of death, but I’d rather not see it coming. Because I’ve already known enough of it in my life. Some days now are good, and others less so, and on those down-days I can feel it in the air. You just know. The coloured lights and comfortable darkness of Christmas are gone, and February has blown in cold and wet, the rain constantly scratching at the glass. I turned sixty-two only days ago, and everyone came and held my hand and kissed my cheek, but I could only taste a spoonful of the cake they brought, and I let Billy blow out my candles. Since then, since before then, I’ve had this ache in my throat, of the sort that grown men and women get when they need to cry. And through the longest part of the day, those two or three beaten hours that stretch out from noon, I close my eyes and find again the faces of those who have gone before. And the sense of waiting feels unbearable.
This is how death can be when it’s slow in arriving. Time becomes a tide on the turn. You stop wishing and counting days, and start looking at the things you’ve left behind. While my daughter has gone to collect Billy from school, the house keeps a baited silence, and all the people I’ve ever been in my life huddle close. In that same instant, I am sixty-two and I am young, a smiling wife and grieving widow, mother, grandmother, millworker, house cleaner, and happy, frightened, broken-hearted child. And in recent weeks, the self that has come to exist most solidly for me is the ten-year-old, the one who stood all those hours in Jimmy’s bedroom doorway, who ran the Passage Road for him in the cold rain with a devil or an angel to heel, and who lay awake so many nights straining to listen and cowed to quietness at the thought of death, that first real feel of it, and what it must mean. The passing years are supposed to soften what has gone before, but they don’t. Because for most of us, the past has nowhere to go. The best we can do is live beneath its weight.
If I could talk of all this or write it down, then I’d do so, but I haven’t nearly the understanding or the eloquence. I am not stupid, but with only a few years of basic schooling and a life lived in meagre ways, I lack the skills, the tools for properly explaining myself. I speak to Billy in my simple way, because he hangs on my words, my voice, and the best I can do is tell him about the things I’ve seen, learned and been told, and to hold him steady while he straddles ancient worlds. We’re as close as clapped hands, he and I, and perhaps, if he is listening carefully, he’ll hear what gets told between the lines of what I say, and catch the whisperings of my heart. If we are both lucky or blessed and if it is meant to be, maybe he’ll someday find a
way of passing them on, to someone else who’ll care enough to listen. He’ll remember and talk of me and the moments of my life, he’ll tell my stories as they’re meant to be told, and through them and him I’ll get to live a little bit again.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of some of this collection’s stories have appeared previously, in slightly or significantly different form: ‘The Border Fox’ in the Kenyon Review and London Magazine; ‘A Sense of Rain’ in Southword; ‘Wildflowers’ in the Honest Ulsterman; ‘Fine Feathers’ in Agni; ‘Last Christmas’ in the Saturday Evening Post; ‘A Death in the Family’ in Ploughshares. Additionally, ‘The Boatman’ was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award and appeared in the Chattahoochee Review.
I want to acknowledge the Arts Council of Ireland/An Comhairle Ealaíon for the award of a literature bursary, which enabled me to focus on completing this collection at a time when I really needed the support.
My deepest appreciation goes to my editor, Robin Robertson, for giving these stories – and me – a chance in the world. I’ll be forever grateful for what has really proven a life-changing opportunity. And this collection was blessed to have two editors, Robin and also Daisy Watt, to put it through their very exacting wringer. Their care and attention to detail has made the book what it is, and hopefully at this stage only the intentional kinks remain.
The writing of a book is just part of the battle, and for knocking it so beautifully into shape and getting it out onto bookshelves and into readers’ hands I have to thank all the wonderful and dedicated staff at Jonathan Cape and Vintage. I couldn’t wish for better. My thanks also to Jane Kirby, who got the book across the water, and to the team at Harper, and most especially Terry Karten, for showing faith in my writing and bringing my stories to a US audience.
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