In the Company of Others

by Jan Karon

  'Corrigan called. He paid a visit to Slade in prison. Got nothing out of him. No surprise.'

  'Will they continue the investigation?'

  'Corrigan says they'll keep it open, but . . .' Liam shrugged.

  He stood back, surveyed his work. Done.

  Liam's mobile gave its odd ring. 'Conor. Yes. Standin' right here.' He passed the phone over. 'Th' nurse.'

  'Fletcher?'

  'What's left of me, Rev'rend.'

  'How is she?'

  'Sleeping since we saw you, and at it again all mornin' 'til a half hour ago. Seein' spiders on the wall, snakes in the drapes--all real enough to convince Eileen they were there, poor dote. Dr. Feeney's increasing her dosage of lorazepam, you'd think she was a draft horse th' way we must pump it into her. But she's quiet now an' had a bite of oatmeal without givin' it back.'

  'Good. Great.'

  'Says to send up th' Protestant.'

  He went to their room for his prayer book, realizing again how much he liked the feel of it in his hand, the wear along the spine.

  William sat by the fire, anxious, a manila envelope on his lap.

  'Will she make it, d'ye think, Rev'rend?'

  'I don't know. She's brave and stubborn, William. Perhaps--with God's help.'

  'Ye're askin' his help, are ye?

  'Yes. Are you?

  'He wouldn't be after hearin' from me.'

  'Why so?'

  'What have I done for him, or for anybody, to tell th' truth? 't is best to ask for nothin'.'

  'Yet he gives us everything. For you, a wonderful home. People who love you. Good health.'

  'If I was to get his attention, he might be reminded to take it all away.'

  He laughed. 'Pray for her, William. I guarantee that God would like you to give him a shout.'

  William thrust the envelope into his hand. 'Will you carry it up to her?'

  'The portrait?'

  ''t is.'

  'You're making a gift of it?'

  'Ah, no, I'll need it back. I wanted her to see . . .' William choked up, cleared his throat. 'I wanted her to see me oul' face . . . one more time.' He took out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes. 'My compliments to her, if you'd be so kind.'

  'You want her to see that you're still a handsome man, is that it?'

  'No, no, Rev'rend, you're slaggin' me now.'

  He was going out to the Vauxhall when Liam came around from his work on the addition and spied the envelope.

  'His portrait?'

  'It is.'

  'He's sending it up to Mother?'

  'Yes.'

  'God above, and him eighty-some. Does it never end?'

  'She's in a bad way, Liam. Any chance you might go up?'

  'Don't ask me to do it, Reverend. I don't want to tally th' many reasons, but she's been no mother to me.'

  He nodded, walked away. Liam called after him.

  'Rev'rend.'

  'Yes?'

  'Sorry to disappoint you.' Liam tried to say something more, but could not. He turned and stepped quickly around the side of the lodge.

  'Hold up, Rev'rend!'

  William came toward him on the cane.

  'Yes, sir.'

  'I don't suppose I'd be welcome to ride up with ye.'

  'That's outside my jurisdiction.'

  'I wouldn't trouble her a'tall, wouldn't even see her. I'd sit quiet as any mouse in her reception hall, not sayin' a word.'

  'What would be the point, do you think?'

  'Just to be there, Rev'rend, just to be there.'

  'She's in no shape for company, William.'

  'No, no, I would wait in th' hall, which I've never laid eyes on these many years. You mustn't tell her I'm there, no, I wouldn't do that; 't would add to her troubles. Just let her see th' portrait, just hold it where she can look on it a bit, that's all I'm askin.'

  Should he be party to mixing it up with the long darkness between Catharmore and Broughadoon? What could be gained by it? On the other hand, what could be lost?

  Thirty-two

  'When I was here before, you had a question.'

  In only a few hours, her cheeks had grown more hollow, her eyes more sunken.

  'What was that peace . . . that visited me?' she whispered.

  'I believe it was God.'

  'We have so little time, Reverend, there's none available for the ridiculous.'

  He said nothing. The old dog snored in his corner bed.

  The hematoma was not on view today, but hidden beneath a kind of tent in the bed linen. Her fingers picked at the coverlet. 'If what you say is true, why would he do such a thing?'

  'Because he loves you.'

  'No one loves me, Reverend. I've made certain of it.'

  'I beg to differ. Seamus loves you.'

  'Seamus,' she said, dispassionate.

  'Liam loves you.'

  'There's no reason for him to love me, I failed him utterly as a mother. I withdrew from him and let his father enjoy his affections.'

  'Right or wrong,' he said, 'I believe I can speak for Liam in saying he loves you. Not in the way we think of love, but in the way of blood to blood, bone to bone. My father was a broken man who treated me brokenly--the same way he treated my mother, and her housekeeper who bore his son. Yet in that bond of flesh which is more powerful than any pain, I loved him with a reckless love that was regularly wounded but never killed. God puts it there, this love we often don't want, that we war against--yet there it is, all the same.'

  The room was being aired; behind the draperies, a breeze shifted the heavy fabric, pushed it out, sucked it back.

  'Why do you come when I call?' she whispered. 'What am I to you?'

  'One day you may call and I won't come. There will be an ocean between us. But call on God and he will come. That's his job--if called, he shows up.

  'As for what you are to me, I don't know, exactly. All I know is that you have a need and I'm appointed to fill it however I can. That's true for me since I was a boy. I have a question for you. Why do you call for me?'

  'Because you have nothing to lose in coming and absolutely nothing to gain, Reverend.' Sweat shining on her face.

  'Please call me Tim.'

  'That's a modern foolishness. I despise modern foolishness.'

  'You prefer a more classic or historic foolishness? '

  'You're a difficult man.'

  'You're a difficult woman. But I think we've touched on that before.'

  The tremoring, her voice shaken. 'All hope of forgiving and being forgiven is lost.'

  'I tell you this truth above all others, Evelyn--it's never too late.'

  'The cleric is all about hope--a tiresome feature of your calling. It is entirely too late for me. I haven't the strength for anything more or even anything less. I am what I am in this wretched husk--an old woman with ills and torments to last the rest of my days.'

  'Now you're being tiresome.'

  A pale ferocity in her eyes. 'What do you mean?'

  'Speaking always of your torments, your griefs, your many persecutions. The fact is, God visited you, he sought out your company, and you refuse to believe it.'

  'How can I possibly believe such an absurd notion?'

  'You make a decision to believe it. Unlike what you say of me, you have nothing to lose but everything to gain.'

  'Do you know what happened to my mother and sisters?'

  'I do.'

  'I opened the door,' she said, weeping.

  'You opened the door because you were going back to ask forgiveness, and to offer it. That's reason enough to open any door, anytime.'

  'I banked the fire, I pulled the chairs to the hearth, I hung the laundry over the chairs. There was the spark to the dry cloth.'

  'You were going back to ask forgiveness and to offer it. Please remember that.'

  The draperies sucking in. A thin keening rising from her.

  He bent toward her, praying, silent.

  'I was the survivor. Not dead like them, but alive
and alone, and yes, beautiful--it was a curse, something my sisters hated me for. I was left to recall every day and night of my life the horror I had seen and the suffering I had caused.

  'My God,' she said, panting. 'My God.'

  He had an intense desire to touch her, to lay his hand on her forehead, but he held back.

  'Tell me something,' he said.

  'I have told you everything of consequence.'

  'Tell me whether William is Liam's father.'

  He said it gently, yet his heart pounded. He'd been in such territory before--the territory of the hot spot, the truth that people reserve until last or until never.

  She turned her head on the pillow and faced him, ravaged now, beyond defenses. 'Why are you such a hard man?'

  'I'm actually a pathetically soft man.'

  'Is it important that you know this?' There was no bitterness, merely a question forwardly put.

  'It is. Things have gotten tangled up; they've gotten people tangled up.'

  'A web,' she said, panting. 'A snare. If you must know, William was the love of my life.'

  He thought of the old man sitting in the reception hall, the inscription engraved on the window pane.

  'I learned to hate him to the same degree I loved him. He was cruel and self-serving. He came home at last when Paddy was six, he thought he might have me again for his own. Nothing mattered to him--not my husband, not my son, not my fine house for which I had surrendered everything, not even my mother and two sisters whom I had lost for all time.

  'I toyed with William then, as he had toyed with me. I led him on, let him think he might take me to himself, that I had no care for my husband or child or anything but his unspeakable ways, the big boxer who'd been to Scotland and had his face bashed in, the man of the hour, the bloody self-serving gamecock of the world.

  'Aye, and he thought he had me, that I was all but done in the oven of his heathen lust. And then I took my husband's pheasant gun from the cabinet; 'twas a twelve-bore Purdey side-by-side from the twenties. The stock was carved Turkish walnut and Riley was very proud of it. I was the only person allowed to shoot it other than himself, and I was an exceedingly fine shot.'

  He watched a certain color return to her face, noted something like a grimace that might be amusement.

  'I took it to the beech wood where I was to meet William for the offering of my body, my flesh--the one prize he had not yet won. I was standing behind a bench Riley had put there, and I see William coming out of the wood, gawping at me like a bloody savage.

  'I raise the gun, then, and fire off a shot, for I intend to kill him and let the vultures take care of the rest. Oh, if you could have seen . . .' She was suddenly laughing, a raw, hoarse, half-hindered laugh, as if it were wrenched from her like an infant when it won't be naturally born. On and on, her shoulders heaving, and then the coughing.

  'All right,' he said. 'No more.' He put his hand on her head, felt the heat of her scalp with its coarse silk of hair.

  'I would have killed him,' she said, plucking at the coverlet, 'but he ducked as I fired, then did what the spineless do. He ran.' She looked up at him. 'I despised him all the more for that. For all his taking it like a man in the ring, for all his standing up to whatever black torment the public demanded, he ran before the fury of a woman. What do you say, Reverend? '

  'I say I would have run, too. Oh, yes.'

  They both laughed now. Hard and long; it hurt his sides.

  'Water,' she said, and he offered the straw, and she drank a little, and he opened the manila envelope and removed the portrait.

  'I've been asked to show you this.'

  She lay still against the pillows and examined it with a solemn gaze.

  'The oul' gallute,' she said.

  He laid it on the table.

  'Who did that portrait?' she demanded.

  'My wife.'

  'Your wife?'

  'She's an author and illustrator of children's books. She has a newfound gift for portraiture.'

  'Show it to me again.'

  He held it before her, feeling the odd beggar of pride in Cynthia's achievement.

  'Your wife is very competent. Where is she?'

  'At Broughadoon.'

  'I would like her to paint me in exchange for a pearl ring.'

  'I'll tell her of your offer.'

  'The setting is white gold. I wish to be painted while I'm at my worst.'

  'A very unusual request.'

  'I wish to see what life has written on my face. It will be for my own amusement. Perhaps there will be something left of the young bride in the portrait after Sargent. Riley loved my beauty, Reverend, all the while looking away from my misery, refusing to see it because it was not lovely, but deformed and carrying me away like someone caught in an undertow.

  'Suffering was all I had and he wanted to deprive me of it, as anyone in his right mind would. He wanted my beauty to be everything, to be all, to be enough.

  'But William would have let me have the sorrow; he was unafraid of it, for he had sorrow himself. Beauty would not have been enough for William; he would have wanted all that I had, all the pain, all that I was, and if we had married, perhaps I could have been healed, relieved in some way I can't know.'

  The draperies stirring, afternoon light shimmering on the walls.

  'What is your wife's name?'

  'Cynthia. She's nursing a fractured ankle, but has wanted to see Catharmore.'

  'Show it to me again,' she said.

  She looked at it, expressionless.

  'He's waiting in your front hall.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Just to be near, he says, not wanting to trouble you.'

  She tried to rise, felt a scalding pain, lay back. 'Tell him to get off my property at once or we shall call the Gards.'

  In the kitchen, Seamus gave him a fervent back-slapping.

  'Joseph and Mary! I've never heard the like. When has the woman laughed? I can't recall th' time, though I remember bein' much younger.'

  Something was shaken off them; they were laughing--cracking up, as Dooley would say.

  'I could kiss y'r bloody hand.'

  'Don't be doing that,' he said, bursting into another fit of laughter. Both of them at it again, bending over, carrying on like two pagans.

  'Great God!' said Seamus, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

  'Yes, Seamus, yes. He is a great God.'

  Sober now, the two of them, looking at each other. Tears in their eyes.

  Thirty-three

  'Walk out with me, if you will,' he said to Liam.

  'I'm cookin' tonight an' much to do . . .'

  'We won't be long.'

  They sat on the garden bench in the mild and seamless afternoon.

  'William is not your father,' he said.

  'What?'

  'You can let it go.'

  'How do you know this?'

  'I asked your mother.'

  'But she lies, my mother.'

  'She wasn't lying about this. William isn't your father.'

  Liam spoke in Irish, crossed himself, shaken.

  'The visit when Paddy saw them together--there was no real intimacy between them. She led him to believe there would be, and they arranged a meeting. She brought along your dad's old Purdey and fired off a shot. She aimed to kill him, she said, but he dodged and ran.'

  Liam stared at him in a kind of dazed wonder. 'He ran; she would have killed him.'

  In the library, he glanced at the sepia anglers, wondered once more if one was Liam's father. No matter. Knowing who was not seemed solace enough.

  In their room, he saw the look of despair on his wife's face. Too long, this sojurn, too long. He went to her and kissed her forehead.

  'Good news,' he said. 'You have a portrait commission.'

  She looked at him, wry and disbelieving.

  'Evelyn Conor. She says she wants to be painted at her worst.'

  'That's a new one.'

  'Payment is a pearl ri
ng in a white gold setting.'

  'I love white gold,' she said, listless. His own melancholy was one thing; hers quite another. He could hardly look at it.

  He told her about Evelyn seeing the portrait of William and finding it well done; told her how they had laughed, and Seamus, too.

  She showed no interest in his gazette. 'I can't pretend anymore,' she said. 'I cannot bear another minute of this dreadful thing sticking up in the air.' Tears. He was grateful.

  'Feeney's coming tonight. Let's press him to move ahead to the boot if reasonable.'

  She put her head in her hands, wept. 'Why?' she said.

  His wife never asked why. She seemed always to know why without having to ask.

  'I'll have dinner with you in the room tonight. We'll order champagne!' He was in the Pete O'Malley mode, desperate.

  'Tea,' she said, blowing her nose.

  He would fetch it at once.

  'Earl Grey,' she said.

  He should book Aengus Malone for the airport trip, reunite him with the hat on the antler. 'Put on your Darling Robe; I'll read to you when I get back.'

  She looked wistful. 'I'm going to miss all the dead people we're reading about,' she said. 'They seem so very alive.'

  O'Hara delivered this morning three beds of good quality--fires laid.

  The lad came to us with a pasty look & has eaten little; Fiona desperate to provoke his appetite.

  We will not according to our early plan delay the surprise of Brannagh until Christmas Eve, for that leaves such little time for the lad to enjoy the truth. Willie Collins brought her over this morning & away Eunan & I go in the red cart, bundled against a piercing cold. I do not tell him the pony is his, but plan to withhold this surprise until after we finish our calls.

  Is she a beauty, then, lad?'

  Yis, he says.

  Tis Ireland's only native breed, the Connemara. They say Spanish horses swam ashore from sinking ships & bred with our mountain ponies. In Brannagh, we have the best of horse & pony together.

  He is quiet as any mouse.

  Easy keepers, the Connemara, I say. Willie Collins tells me they needn't the fancy diet to stay strong.