Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  Malachi had gathered his counsel, his blood kin, and his inlaws about him for a communion of indignation at what was happening to Lizzie, and also to people his house with witnesses to his joust with the evil forces. He’d begun that joust with interrogation of Lizzie.

  “What is your name?”

  “Lizzie McIlhenny You know that.”

  “Is that your full name?”

  “Lizzie Cronin McIlhenny In God’s name, Malachi, why are you asking me this?”

  “We’ll see what you think of God’s name. Why are you four inches shorter than you used to be?”

  “I’m not. I’m the same size I always was.”

  “Why are you asking her these things?” Kathryn Phelan asked.

  “To find out who she is.”

  “Can’t you see who she is? Have you lost your sight?”

  “Just hold your gob, woman, and see for yourself who she is. Don’t I know my wife when I see her? And this one isn’t her.”

  “Well, she is.”

  “Are you Lizzie McIlhenny, my wife?”

  “Of course I am, Malachi. Can’t you see it’s me? Who else do you think I am?”

  “Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost?”

  “I do, Malachi, I do.”

  “You do what?”

  “I believe in God the Father, Son, Holy Ghost.”

  “She didn’t repeat it exactly,” said Crip Devlin.

  “Let me ask her,” said Ned Cronin. “Are you the daughter of Ned Cronin, in the name of God?”

  “I am, Dada.”

  “She didn’t repeat it,” said Crip.

  “Repeat it,” said Malachi.

  “Dada.”

  “Not that, repeat what he said.”

  “I don’t know what he said.”

  “Ah, she’s crafty,” said Crip.

  “You’ll repeat it or I’ll have at you,” said Malachi. He grabbed her and ripped her nightgown, then pushed her backward onto the bed. When she tried to get up he held her down:

  “Ask her where she lives,” said Crip.

  “Do you live up on the hill with the Good Neighbors?”

  “I live here with you, Malachi.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lizzie, your wife.”

  “You’re four inches shorter than my wife.”

  “I’m not. I’m this same size since I was a girl.”

  “You really are insane, Malachi,” said Kathryn. “You’re torturing her.”

  “We’ll see who’s insane. Do you believe in Satan?”

  “I don’t know,” Lizzie said.

  “Crafty again,” said Crip.

  “By the Jesus,” Malachi said, “we’ll get the truth out of you,” and from the table he took the cup of milky potion he and Crip had prepared for this encounter, set it on the bedside table, and lifted a spoonful to Lizzie’s mouth. “Take it,” he said.

  She smelled it and turned her head. “It’s awful.”

  “Drink it,” Malachi said, lifting the cup to her lips. Lizzie pushed it away and some of the potion spilled onto her nightgown.

  “Oh you’ll take it, you witch,” Malachi said, shoving the cup to her lips and pouring it. Some of the fluid entered her mouth and she screamed and spat it out.

  “She won’t take it,” said Crip. “And if any of it falls on the floor she’s gone forever.”

  “She’ll take it or I’ll break both her arms,” said Malachi. “Hold her legs, Colm.” And the dimwit flung himself crosswise on the bed, atop Lizzie’s legs.

  “Like this?” Colm asked.

  “That’s it,” said Malachi.

  “There’s rewards in heaven for them that beats the devil,” said old Minnie Dorgan, rocking her body on a straight chair in the corner, plaiting and unplaiting two strips of cloth as she watched the exorcism. She blessed herself repeatedly, and dipped her fingers into a jar of holy Easter water she had brought with her. She sprinkled the water at Lizzie and then at Malachi.

  “If you get the drink into her, the witch is dead,” said Crip.

  “We’ll get it,” said Malachi.

  “That’s enough of this crazy talk,” Kathryn said, putting herself between Malachi and Lizzie.

  “Get out of my way, Kathryn.”

  “I’ll get out and get the police if you don’t leave her be.”

  Malachi walked to the door, locked it, and pocketed the key.

  “You’ll go noplace till I say you will,” he said. “And neither will anybody else in this house. Build up the fire, Mab.” And Crip Devlin’s child, silent and sullen, threw twigs and a log on the dying fire. It crackled and flared, creating new light in the bleak room, into which not even the faintest ray of a moonbeam would penetrate tonight.

  Kathryn whispered into Lizzie’s ear, “I won’t let him hurt you, darlin’, I won’t let him hurt you.” And she stroked the distraught Lizzie’s forehead and saw that her eyes were rolling backward out of their rightful place.

  “You’re a vile, vile man to do this to her,” Kathryn said.

  Malachi looked at the women and walked to the hearth. He picked up a long twig and held the end of it in the fire until it flamed; then he pulled it out and shook out the flame and walked toward the bed.

  “You bring that near her,” said Kathryn, “you’ll have to burn me too, Malachi,” but he quickly put the stick between his teeth, grabbed his sister with his good right arm, and flung her off the bed and into the lap of Minnie Dorgan, who sprinkled holy water on her. “Mother of God,” said Minnie. “Mother of God.”

  “You’ll not be burning her, Malachi,” said Ned Cronin. “You won’t burn my daughter.”

  “It’s not your daughter that’s here, it’s not the wife I married. It’s a hag and a witch that I’m sleeping with.”

  “It’s my daughter, I’m thinking now,” Ned said.

  “Have you no faith, man?” said Malachi. “Don’t you know a demon when it’s in front of your eyes?”

  And he had the twig in his hand again, and he lighted it again, blew out its flame again, and put it in front of Lizzie’s face.

  “Now will you drink what I give you?”

  When she threw her head from side to side to be rid of the idea he touched her on the forehead with the burning stick, and she screamed her woe to heaven. “Now you’ll take it,” he said, and with terrified eyes she stared at the madman her husband had become; and she knew no choice was left to her.

  “Leave her be!” screamed Kathryn, and she tried to move toward Lizzie. But Minnie Dorgan and Ned Cronin held her.

  “Give her the drink, Mab,” Malachi said, and the child raised the cup to Lizzie, who stiffened at the odor of it and, retching dryly, said weakly, “Please, Malachi.”

  “Drink it, you hag, or I’ll kill you.”

  And she took the cup and drank and screamed again as the foul concoction went down her throat, screamed and spat and drank again, then fell back on the bed as the cup’s remnants splattered on the floor.

  “It’s done,” said Malachi.

  “And it’s spilled,” said Crip. “There’s no telling what it means.”

  Colm, lying across Lizzie’s legs, sat up. “I’m goin’ home now,” he said.

  “Indeed you’re not,” said Malachi. “You’ll stay till we’re done with this.”

  And Colm fell back on the bed with a weakness.

  “When will we be done?” Ned Cronin asked. “For the love of Jesus end this thing.”

  “We’ll end it when I’ve got my wife back,” Malachi said.

  “How will you know?” asked Ned.

  “We’ll see the demon leave her,” Crip said. “But time is short. Ask her again.”

  “In the name of God and heaven,” Malachi said, “are you Lizzie McIlhenny, my wife?”

  All in the room watched every inch of Lizzie, watching for the exit of the demon. But Lizzie neither moved nor spoke. She stared at the wall.

  “We’ve got to go to the
fire,” said Malachi. “We’ve no choice.”

  “It’ll soon be midnight,” said Crip, “and then she’s gone for sure, never to come back.”

  “We’ll carry her, Colm,” said Malachi, and the dimwit rolled off Lizzie’s legs. Then he and Malachi carried the now limp figure toward the hearth as Mab stoked the fire with a poker. Lizzie’s nightgown was off her shoulder and Malachi ripped it away and it fell on the floor. Mab moved the grate back and Malachi sat Lizzie on it so she faced the fire.

  “Are you goin’ to make a pork chop out of me, Malachi?” she asked. “Won’t you give me a chance?” And on the dark side of the room the women fell on their knees in prayer.

  “Do you know what I’m doin’ here, Ned Cronin?” Malachi called out.

  “Jesus, Mary, and holy St. Joseph,” said Ned, “I pray you know what you’re doing.” And he knelt beside the women.

  Malachi leaned Lizzie toward the fire and when it touched her it set her calico chemise aflame. Kathryn Phelan wailed and screamed at her brother, “You’ll live in hell forever for this night, Malachi McIlhenny. It’s you who’s the demon here. It’s you that’s doing murder to this woman.”

  Malachi let go of Lizzie and she fell away from the fire, burning. He watched, with Crip beside him, and Colm holding the now unconscious Lizzie by one arm.

  “Away she go, up the chimney,” Malachi said. “Away she go!” And he waved his good arm into the flame.

  “I saw nothing go,” said Crip.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women,” said Kathryn on her knees.

  “Come home, Lizzie McIlhenny!” yelled Malachi, waving his arm, watching his wife’s body. The room was filling with smoke from Lizzie’s burning clothes and flesh.

  “Beast!” screamed Kathryn.

  “Do you think that’s Lizzie that’s lyin’ there?” Malachi asked.

  “I saw nothing leave her,” said Crip.

  “More fire,” said Malachi, and Colm leaned Lizzie back toward the flames. Another edge of her chemise caught fire and now half her torso was exposed, the flesh charring from below her left breast to her hip.

  “Let her down,” said Malachi, and from the floor beside the fireplace he took a can of paraffin oil and threw it onto Lizzie’s stomach. Her chemise exploded in flame.

  “Away she go!” yelled Malachi, waving his arm. “Away she go!” And he threw more oil on her.

  Kathryn Phelan ran to the wildly flaming Lizzie and threw herself on top of her, snuffing the fire, burning herself, and sobbing with the grief known in heaven when angels die.

  The last painting Peter put on exhibit for his luncheon guests was The Protector, a portrait of Kathryn Phelan smothering the flames on Lizzie’s clothing, her own maternity dress aflame at one corner, the smoke obscuring half her face, the other half lit by firelight. Kathryn’s burns were not severe but her act did precipitate, two days later, the premature birth of Peter Phelan, child of fire and brimstone, terror and madness, illusion and delusion, ingredients all of his art.

  I had asked him why he chose to resurrect Malachi, such a dreadful figure in the family’s life, and he said he could not answer with any accuracy, that the Malachi he was painting wasn’t the Malachi of history, that, in whatever ways his paintings reflected reality, they would fall far short of the specifics of that reality, which was always the fate of anything imagined. “We try to embrace the universe,” Peter said, “but we end up throwing our arms around the local dunghill.” And yet he felt that whatever he imagined would somehow reflect what was elusive in the historic reality, elusive because its familiarity and its ubiquity in real space and time would make it invisible to all but the imagining eye.

  In this context, what he had intuited from the Malachi story was the presence of a particular kind of thought, a superstitious atmosphere aswirl with those almost-visible demons and long-forgotten abstractions of evil—votive bats and sacrificial hags, burning flesh and the bones of tortured babies—the dregs of putrefied religion, the fetid remains of a psychotic social order, these inheritances so torturous to his imagination that he had to paint them to be rid of them.

  He had always rejected as extraneous any pragmatic or moralistic element to art, could not abide a didactic artist. Nevertheless, his work already had an effect on the moral history of the family, and would continue to do so through the inevitable retellings of the story associated with the paintings; and these retellings would surely provide an enduring antidote to the poison Malachi had injected into the world. The work would stand also as a corrective to the long-held image of Kathryn in the family’s communal mind.

  “As much as we loved her, none of us can undo the two generations’ worth of trouble and anguish she caused,” Peter said, and he quoted Francis as saying long ago, “She didn’t really know nothin’ about how to live.” Peter agreed there was some truth in this, but he added that Kathryn surely knew how not to live under the mad inheritance that had destroyed Malachi and Lizzie; and that the thing she knew best was denial, the antithesis of Malachi’s indulgent madness. After Malachi, Kathryn had even denied herself the pleasure that had probably been hers with the conception of Peter (the subsequent children were conceived under duress).

  And, by convincing her husband to make the deathbed request to Sarah, she had imposed on the girl the scullery-nunnery existence that made Sarah deny and eventually destroy her own life rather than admit that lives of sensual pleasure were not only possible, but sometimes eagerly pursued outside the cloistered innocence of this house. She became a mad virgin, Sarah, the dying words of Michael Phelan her dungeon, the courage of her saintly, sinless mother the second-generational iron maiden of her fate.

  No chance at all to rescue Sarah. No bequest for Sarah.

  No chance to rescue Tommy either. His spinal injury turned into a plague of unpredictable immobility and, when he went back to his job as a sweeper at the filtration plant, the pain struck him so severely that he collapsed and rolled into the thirty-five-foot depths of one of the plant’s great filtering pools; and, having been unable to learn to swim any more than he could learn to think, he drowned, another martyr to the family disease.

  And not much of a chance to lure the maverick Chick out of his Floridian indignance and back to the family circle. He telephoned Peter from Miami Beach, acknowledged the bequest, offered lively thanks for what he said would be his hefty down payment on a sporty inboard motorboat he’d been longing to buy, invited his brother to come down and go ocean fishing, said Evelyn sent her best, and hung up, maybe forever.

  By the time lunch was about to be served, the light rain had become heavy, a storm gaining strength, according to Peg’s reading of the weather story in the Knickerbocker News.

  “It’s going to rain all night, and some places might get floods,” she reported. She was at the table, where Peter had told her to sit. The rest of us were standing half in, half out of the dining room, waiting for Peter to seat us. Molly was still in the kitchen, organizing the meal.

  “The Senators won’t play ball tonight,” Billy said.

  “George’s Democratic picnic must be rained out too,” Peg said.

  “Democrats like the rain,” Billy said.

  “The Irish like the rain,” Peter said. “Three days of sunshine and they start praying for thunderstorms.”

  The roast lamb lay in slices on the platter in the center of the table, and on the sideboard the leg itself, on another platter, awaited further surgery. Molly had asked me to carve but before I could begin Peg suggested Billy do it, for he did it so well. And so he did, and when only half finished he asked Molly, “You got any mint jelly to go with this?”

  Molly looked in the pantry and the refrigerator, reported back, “No mint jelly, I’m sorry, Billy.”

  “There’s mint jelly in the cellar,” I said, and I took the flashlight, opened the trapdoor, and found dusty jars of mint jelly and strawberry jam.

  “Sarah put those up,” Molly
said, “after the war. We got the strawberries from Tony Looby’s store, and Sarah grew the mint out in the yard.”

  “You certainly know your way around this house,” Peg said to me. “How’d you know they were down there?”

  “I was fixing something one day and I saw this stuff.”

  “This house would fall apart if it wasn’t for Orson,” Molly said. “He also kept the Lake House from collapsing around its own ears. Orson is a treasure.”

  “Just waiting to be dug up and spent,” I said.

  “You’ll never be spent, Orson,” Giselle said.

  “Oooh-la-la,” said Peg, and everyone looked at Giselle, who smiled at me.

  “Orson,” said Peter, “take control of your wife.”

  “I would prefer not to,” I said. “I like her the way she is.”

  “We’re ready to eat,” said Molly, coming in from the kitchen with the potatoes, hot from the oven.

  And then, one by one, we sat where Peter placed us, and we were seven, clockwise: Peter sitting where his father had always sat, in the northernmost chair in the room, the first formal resumption of the patriarchal seating arrangement since Michael Phelan died in 1895; Giselle next to Peter to have the impending grandchild in the closest possible proximity to the grandfather, then Roger, Peg, me, Molly in Sarah’s chair (her mother’s before it was hers) nearest the kitchen, and Billy at Peter’s right, completing the circle.

  Giselle’s pâté, Camembert, and English biscuits lay in tempting array on the sideboard, forgotten, and alien, really, to the cuisine of this house. But we made ready to devour Sarah’s mint jelly on Molly’s leg of lamb, with the marvelous gravy made from the drippings, small new peas out of the can, the best kind, potatoes mashed by Peg (she said Billy mashed them better), bread by Peg out of the Federal, and the two bottles of the rich and robust Haut-Brion 1934 (a momentous year for both the Bordeaux and the Phelans) that the extravagant Giselle had brought. Peter contributed the saying of grace, which he pronounced as follows: “Dig in now or forever hold your fork.”

  I suggest that this luncheon was the consequence of a creative act, an exercise of the imagination made tangible, much the same as the writing of this sentence is an idea made visible by a memoirist. If Peter brought it about, I here create the record that says it happened. If, through the years, I had been slowly imagining myself acquiring this family, then this was its moment of realization, and perhaps the redirection of us all.