by Jan Karon
'Delizioso, Bella!' The poker club tutorial hadn't eluded him altogether. 'Salute! '
All glasses raised to the cook. 'Salute! '
Some flicker in her eyes--of what, he couldn't say.
He saw Anna touch Bella's arm; saw the girl flinch, thought again of Dooley and how he must call tonight without fail.
Liam went across the lodge to work on the unfinished room. Everyone else carried their portion of 'afters' into the library, where the Labs drowsed by the fire. Feeney sat with him on the sofa and swiftly devoured a serving of tiramisu.
'I've asked Bella to come up and assist me in the ankle exam. Stay here if you will, I'll be down directly with a report. You might say a prayer, Tim, for your wife's cooperation.'
'In what, exactly?'
'In doing what has to be done.'
'Which is?'
'The pain tells me she must have an x-ray, and no quibbling.'
William poked up the fire, and there went the combing of the mustache, the placement of the cane by William's chair, the match to the pipe. There shone the pint at their elbows and the old checkerboard in its pool of light from the lamp. He was moved by the grateful satisfaction of the two men, each a harbor for the other.
In the kitchen, he stuffed himself into the farthest corner, away from the gurgle and slosh of the dishwashers, and dialed.
'Hey, Dad.'
'Hey, yourself. What's going on?'
'Not much. Big fly problem in the barn. How about you?'
'Not much. A lot of rain.' He would ask and get it over with. 'Are you still done?'
'Look, Dad, you're worried, I can tell. Don't worry. There's nothing to worry about.'
'The two of you . . . both of you . . . mean so much.'
'What else can I do?'
'Don't quit,' he said. 'Not yet. Hunker down. Talk. I'll be home soon, we can talk together, the four of us.'
In the silence between them, a cow bawled in the Meadowgate barn.
'Keep going, son. It's too soon to quit.' He heard the odd desperation in his voice.
'Hey, Dad ...'
'Yes?'
'Thanks. Thanks a lot. Gotta go.'
'Whoa. Wait a minute. We love you, buddy.'
'Love you back.'
He chose a book and took it to the sofa and opened it at random. He wanted to see his boy--Dooley would return to school at month's end. He missed Barnabas, and Puny and her two sets of twins; he wanted to fill up the Mustang at Lew Boyd's and eat a cellophane-wrapped egg salad sandwich and a pack of Fig Newtons and sit around in a plastic chair with Mule and J.C. and Percy and shoot the bull. He found he was completely over the notion of running up and down the road with Walter and Katherine; taking his chances at this inn or that, packing and unpacking. Bottom line, he was no good at vacations, and come to think of it--this was no vacation.
'Will she be able, do ye think, Seamus?'
'If Dr. Feeney can't help her, nobody can. They say it's up there with peelin' off your own skin.'
'God above,' said William, 'she'll need a priest, for all that.'
'Aye, but she won't allow Father Tad to do his priestly bit in her company.'
'I hope he's sneakin' it in, then, when she's not lookin'.' William gave a honking blow into his handkerchief. 'Th' oul' heathen.'
There was the paw on his foot; the one scratch, the two. He peered down, hardly recognizing the little guy without the shoe. The pleading eyes, and again the paw on his foot; the one scratch, the two. No way was he going to search for the misbegotten shoe.
He patted the cushion where the Labs were sometimes allowed.
Pud leaped up, lay down, sighed. And here he was, three thousand miles from home and scratching another man's dog behind the ears.
Feeney came along the stair hall and joined him on the sofa. 'Studies say we live longer with a dog in our lives. I should get a dog.'
'No doubt about it. How did it go?'
'She says you must take your time, Bella's with her. Now, then--she didn't quibble. I'll fetch you early Monday at eight o'clock. If I'm with you, things may get done more quickly, though granted, hardly anything gets done more quickly these days.'
'What's going on?'
'She told me about the mishap in the shower. There you have it. The pain, the swelling all over again.'
'Anything serious, do you think?'
'I'm thinking a disruption of the ankle joint, which would be good news compared to other scenarios. She has too much history with this thing to suit me. I've given her another pain medication, she'll sleep well and be fine 'til Monday. I should have cracked my bloody whip the night it happened.'
'She doesn't take to whip-cracking.'
Feeney had an affecting, albeit crooked smile. 'I'm a widower with no face across the table in twelve years. Don't know if I could be married again.'
'Why is that?'
'Women are very strong-minded.'
He laughed. 'I'll say. But that's a good thing. I was an old fogey straight from Central Casting--living alone, set in my ways, walking the dog for an evening's entertainment. What she saw in yours truly I'll never understand, but she's made something of me. Definitely.'
'That's the problem, Tim. They want to make something of you.'
More laughter.
'She says you have Type One diabetes.'
'Correct.'
Feeney cocked an eyebrow. 'You went at the tiramisu pretty good.'
'Just this once,' he said, shamelessly reciting the diabetic's unholy mantra.
'Your Irish ancestors were Protestant?'
'Seven generations back we were Catholic, with a couple of priests to our credit. I fear we took the soup in one way or another.'
'But for the soup, you may not have been here this evening.'
'What about Mrs. Conor? Anything you might need from me?'
'Pray, would be my advice. She's not such a bad old thing, if you know her history. Why don't we move to the front hall? Open the door and get a breath of air?'
They stepped out to the entrance hall, to the fishing gear and deer head, where Aengus Malone's hat swung from an antler like a totem.
He opened the door to the washed August night; Pud bolted outside, nose to the ground. Feeney moved boots and waders from an iron bench and they sat down among the clutter of other lives.
'How much do you know?' asked Feeney.
'She was young, met William, they fell in love. He didn't return as expected.'
'Aye. His career as a prizefighter was on the upswing, and soon after their meeting, off he makes for England and other parts.
'She was desperately in love with him, and took a lot of chiding from her family when he didn't come back and marry her, as he vowed. She was a very proud girl, and likely boastful, so the insults and harassment grew, became a kind of sport among her kin and neighbors. Her beauty was probably no help, for all that--you've seen the painting.
'She didn't care for three of her four brothers, but she loved her two sisters a good deal, though they fought like cats. The father had died some years before and the upkeep of the family fell to the women--the boys were not much accountable. Two went over to England, one to Canada, the youngest was finished off in a pub fight. Thomas. He'd been Evelyn's pet, her bright and shining star, she called him, something of a poet and dreamer.
'Evelyn and her mother took in washing, did piecework, kept a few hens for egg money; the two sisters were in service to an Englishwoman. It was a hard life in a cabin with a mud floor and no window. Yet it's the sort of thing the tourists come looking for even today--the famine cabins, the oul' thatched cottage--a torment to live in the bloody things. Evelyn's mother was desperate for a better life for herself and her girls and seemed to think William was becoming a rich man out there in the boxing world. She and Evelyn's uncle put the pressure on Evelyn to find William and somehow force him to marry her.'
'She was expecting a child?'
'Still th' virgin, she says. I tell you all this in confide
nce, of course.'
'Of course.'
'None of this is talked about in the family--Paddy and Liam refer to the issues of her past simply as Mother's Remorse.
'And so she has this fierce pressure on her. But how does a young woman in the west country of the 1930s make contact with a roving prizefighter who himself didn't know where he'd next lay his head?
'But they kept at her like midges, and one evening they had a regular brawl about it. Evelyn had banked up the fire for the night and pulled their four chairs to the hearth with a wash laid over them to dry. Her mother-- Maeve it was--called her names I won't repeat, and the sisters, who were on their night off from service, sided with their mother. Evelyn did her own bit of verbal damage--it was an unholy thing, she said, there was some physical violence among the three sisters--she trembled like a leaf when she told me this years ago. And so she stormed out of the cabin and went down to the farm pond, thinking she might drown herself like the kittens her mother forced her to dispose of when she was a child. It was a cold night, she said, and she was out in hardly a stitch and no shoe to her foot.'
The distant tapping of Liam's hammer.
'I wonder whether to say it, for it makes no difference to the tragedy of that night, but she was kept warm by a neighbor lad--her first time in the arms of anyone other than William. When it was over, the guilt was on her, as you can imagine--a crucifying thing to a Catholic girl trying to better herself in the eyes of God and man, and, also to the point, trying to keep herself unspoilt for the one she hoped to marry.'
Feeney got up and walked to the door, stood looking into the black night. The air was cool, seasoned with the wild scent of summer rain.
'She felt her life changed forever, ruined in some way beyond what had happened at the pond. She said she forgave her mother and sisters, even Thomas for letting himself be killed, as she put it. She wanted nothing more than their forgiveness, even for her proud ways. She was reminded of how her mother tenderized tough meat by pounding it to shreds with the edge of a dinner plate. She felt her heart ravaged in such a manner, she said, and softened with the need to begin again if Providence would allow it.
'It was the early hours of the morning when she went up to that airless cabin and opened the door. The fire literally exploded. It was of course oxygen flooding into the buildup of unignited gases. 't was an inferno.'
He felt the terrible weight of his living bones. The sound of rain dripped into their silence.
'Her uncle forced her to view the remains. I won't go into great detail, but fire does a wicked thing to human flesh--it leaves only the blackened torso, very little of the limbs. She was driven nearly mad by the sight.'
'I can't imagine what it took to survive this,' he said.
'She learned to survive by withholding love, or any sort of human feeling, from everyone--especially herself. Later, that withholding would affect her husband and sons--Paddy and Liam say they have no memory of any tenderness from her.'
Feeney returned to the bench, sat with his hands on his knees. 'As Liam said, she talks of dying, hopes to die. She thinks it would serve her right, which is why I was gobsmacked to hear her say she wants to live. And yet, faced with the liver business and the very thing she's been keen to do, she's terrified.'
He needed to make sense of this. 'A spark to the laundry and then the chairs smoldering ...?'
'Exactly,' said Feeney. 'They may have died of asphyxiation long before she opened the door.'
'But she opened the door.'
'Yes.'
'Her remorse haunts this house,' he told Feeney.
'As it does the house above. I'm sorry to tell you all this, but it seems you should know.'
'I'm glad you told me, it changes things.' The truth always changed things. He wondered how much more Evelyn Conor had confided to her doctor and erstwhile bridge partner, but he said nothing.
'You've been good medicine for Broughadoon, Tim.'
He had no idea what to say to that. 'Mass tomorrow. Will Cynthia be up to it?'
'Good for the soul, bad for the ankle. I wouldn't pester it in the least if I were you.'
'Perhaps you'll give me Tad's phone number, ' he said. 'I'd like to see him before we leave.' But would they ever leave? If it wasn't frogs and flies, it was hail and locusts.
'He's just off to his brother in Wales for two weeks. His annual August retreat.'
'Too bad. I'd hoped to see more of him.'
Pud returned, shook himself, followed them into the library to the bookcases with their fluted pilasters, to lamplight and peat burning against the night, to two gray heads bent over the board. The Labs looked up at them, lay down again, slept.
Only a while ago, he'd wanted the comforts of home. Yet now he felt keenly the kind and solemn spirit of this room, and knew again that he was supposed to be here, that the easy familiarity of Fig Newtons could, if only for a time, be sacrificed.
Twenty-five
William appeared dubious, distracted; Seamus refired his pipe. The proverbial pin could have been heard dropping as he and Feeney watched the progress of the checkers game.
'Phone call, Rev'rend.' Liam gave a high sign from the hall. 'From th' Dub.'
'O'Malley!'
'Says he has good news an' bad news.'
He sat at the desk in the kitchen; Liam worked on a laptop at the table; the smell of coffee lingered in the room.
'Hey, Tim, how's it goin' at ol' Broughadoon? '
'We're missing the riffraff, Pete. Great to hear your voice.'
'She's back.' Pete breathed into the phone.
'And?'
'For four days. A trial run. But get this--it's scarin' me to death. When I think about it, ask th' Collar is th' message I get. I need your help, Tim--I don't have a clue what to do.'
This was a phone with a cord, which meant he couldn't go trotting off to another room for the private affair of counseling. C'est la vie--family night is family night.
'You're asking me to tell you what to do?'
'That's why I'm callin'. I'd appreciate it.'
'You're sure of this?'
'Dead sure.'
He crossed himself, breathed out, dived in. 'How about doing nothing?'
'Oh, yeah?'
'Don't tell her you've changed or finally gotten your act together or everything's going to be different. That's what they all say, and then it doesn't happen. It takes time for good stuff to happen.'
Pete's ragged breathing was a minor gale.
'And whatever you do, no flowers, no mushy cards.'
'You can count on no mushy cards, but I thought flowers for sure.'
'Don't do it,' he said.
'I don't get it.'
'Think about it. You send flowers now, make a big noise, and that's the end of it, you go back to doing the same old, same old. Best not to say or do anything you can't live up to down the road.'
He was breaking a sweat. Marriage was serious business, and Pete had taken him by surprise. He'd actually trained for marriage counseling--not because he wanted to, but because he needed to. During his first couple of years in Mitford, marriages were breaking apart like ice caps--mother, father, children, floating off on solitary floes into the ether, and he with nothing much to offer but unctuous prayer for reconciliation.
He'd worried that his counsel wouldn't be taken seriously, anyway--what did a bachelor priest know of such desperate matters?
The more he observed the wreckage, the more anxious he became to effect genuine healing--most anybody could do a Band-Aid, he was in for stanching the hemorrhage. How did the dynamics of marriage differ from other relationships, anyway? What did God want for marriage in the first place? He prayed about it as if his life depended on it, searched the scriptures, attended a series of weekend seminars in Asheville. He received a certificate to hang on the wall, some assurance, perhaps, to the wretched souls who sat on the bench in the church office and spilled their guts.
Over time, he counseled quite a few couples in
mild distress, and a total of eight in desperate straits. Ten years later, he'd done a discreet check on the eight. Two were lost on the floes; six were hanging in there, which was way above the national average. When he rejoiced over the results of this survey, however unscientific, Emma had raised an eyebrow and pointed up. It's not like it was all you, she said, which went without saying.
'If I can't say or do anything I can't live up to,' said Pete, 'what am I gonna say an' do? I was thinkin' maybe a great dinner in th' kind of place that fries your Amex; I could live up to that when the economy takes a little uptick. An' maybe a nice bottle of champagne, a little foie gras ...'
'Fish and chips,' he said.
'Come on.'
'Don't show off, don't flash anything around. Go easy. Besides, you probably did all that the last time she left you and came back for a trial run.'
'You're right.' Pete sounded depressed.
'Forget what it does to your Amex, it takes a lot of energy to go out for fancy dinners and be the hale-fellow-well-met and keep flowers rolling in. For now, how about spending that energy on her, focus it all on her? Just love her, and let her know it. Hold her hand, tell her how much she means to you, and here's a big one--listen to what she has to say, Pete. If you let her talk, and if you really listen, she'll tell you everything you need to know.'
A stricken silence in Dublin.
'Have you tried any of this stuff?' asked Pete.
'Pretty much all of it. But hey, no guarantee on anything. Just my two cents' worth.'
'I don't know. The big dinner an' th' flowers--that was goin' to be my best shot. But I could prob'ly do a bracelet if I have to.'
'Maybe you need to fork over a few euros to a professional.'
'No way. I'm lookin' for a freebie here.'
'Okay, all the strategies I just suggested--that's the small stuff. Here's the big one.'
'Shoot.' Pete heaved a sigh that cleaned out the phone line.
'Ask God every day to give you the wisdom and courage to be all he made you to be--for your wife, for yourself, for him. If you give God a chance in this and do the best you can, he'll help you do the rest. When you were here, you said it would take a miracle to save your marriage. Unless there's something you haven't told me, you don't do miracles.'