The visit, p.9
The Visit, page 9
‘Senan’s?’ I saw the pieces fall into place. Colm gets the money and a ticket back to England, telling himself he’s done the right thing. Casey gets the land and rid of Patrick. Patrick gets the same sorry treatment his father did. I stood and Casey rose with me, uncomfortable at being looked down on for even a second. ‘I’m sure you had nothing to do with that idea?’
‘That family had a rough shake of things, that much is true.’ He tapped his hat against his chest and looked at some memory on the ground. ‘But lookit, it might not go that far. If he packs up and leaves quietly, maybe Colm will hold fire.’
I rounded my desk and went face to face with him, as if up close I might be able to see what it was that made him capable of sending a young man away to a place that’s a hospital in name alone. His intention was to use me as messenger, to deliver his ultimatum to Patrick.
He smiled the smile of a man about to make a winning move. ‘You know for all this talk, Jim, you haven’t asked me what it was I wanted to talk to you about?’
‘Well, I’m all ears.’ I sensed him holding his tongue from making a smart reply and felt my face redden and my ears all but twitch.
‘Do you know what one of my men found on his Massey this morning? A bloody stag’s head dumped on the bonnet. Crows taking turns picking at it. I suppose you’ll still tell me that this is a youngfella that’s right in the head?’
I cursed Patrick for not heeding my advice. ‘The days of rounding people up like strays are on their way out, Peter. It won’t happen on my watch.’
‘Terrible what we used to do to them. Wasn’t it yourself who drove poor old Sean to Senan’s? God rest him.’ He looked at me as if he knew things about me that I didn’t know myself.
‘If you’ve said your piece, Peter, I’ve work to do.’
I looked at my desk, a man in checkmate, reduced to sweeping an arm across the board, letting Siobhán’s note of caution be a poor excuse for saying nothing more. He put on his hat and saluted by raising two fingers from the brim. ‘Give my best to Siobhán and that lovely little girl of yours.’ He walked through the station, laughing and joking with the men under his spell while a weakness came over me as if he’d cast some other spell to rob me of my strength.
The land wore a fevered look all the way down to Rita’s. Every living thing in need of a day’s rain. Cattle and horses were stilled in fields, loitering close to troughs of water. Birds flew low in search of worms that wouldn’t be found in dry earth. Patches of pale-yellow rash streaked the grass, and the river moved through it all in an endless sweat.
I drove with the windows down and left them open when I pulled in outside the concrete farmhouse beyond Ballybough. You could stand at the end of the field behind Rita’s and boot a football across the Barrow into Kilkenny.
I took the box from the back seat and walked to the front door, the same as a few years back, after Siobhán told me about this bruised woman she’d seen in town and got talking to. I knocked louder and Rita appeared from the side of the house, sleeves rolled, drying her hands on a brown dress.
‘Ah, Jim. I heard you knocking. I was round the back.’
‘Rita. How are you keeping?’
‘Grand.’ I handed over the box and she took it with arms like thin, strong ropes, her eyes registering what had been brought. She’d long gone past embarrassment about accepting it. ‘From Siobhán, I suppose. She’s very good. Tell her I was asking for her.’
‘I will. That’s been a warm week.’
She looked at the sky and shielded her eyes, the box balanced between her opposite hip and elbow. ‘I’ll be glad of some rain when it comes. Still, we should enjoy it.’
‘How are the children?’
She smiled. ‘I had a letter from Eileen earlier in the week. She’s getting along fine. She’s living in Salford now.’
‘Will she be home to see you soon?’
‘She won’t. You know it’s nearly a year since she left. Time does what it wants.’
‘What about the lads?’
She tossed her head. ‘The lads. I’d be lucky to hear from them if they were living next door. Eileen said she wrote to them in London but heard nothing back. Will you come in for a cup of tea?’
The place was sparse and clean. There was a head of cabbage on the countertop. I sat and she turned the kettle over the fire. I ran my fingertips over the tablecloth. Imagined her cleaning it for nobody but herself. Dusting the empty house. Climbing the stairs to bed. Waking in the morning to do it all again.
She sat next to me and put her hands on her thighs, then smiled what might have been the saddest smile I’d ever seen, while waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘I suppose ye’re fierce busy ahead of the visit?’
‘We’re kept going, no doubt. What about yourself? You’re not getting lazy on me?’
‘Ah. There’s always something for doing.’
‘Will you be in town for Kennedy?’
‘Oh God, I will.’ She looked like a woman trying to remember what excitement was supposed to look like. ‘Where will you be sent?’
‘Nearby. Dunganstown.’
‘Oh, won’t it be great to see him without the crowds?’ She went to the kettle, then took two cups from the cupboard and brought them to the table. ‘I don’t have any biscuits to go with it, Jim, sorry. You take yours black, don’t you?’ she said, pouring.
We sat in silence and she didn’t touch her tea. It was hard to imagine the same house once filled with children and an air of threat and violence hanging like heavy gas, waiting for a spark. A little kingdom of fear, ruled by the small man of country muscle who’d opened the door to me that first time I called. John Kirwan. Who balled his fists when I told him I was here to talk to his wife and looked at the few things Siobhán had sent down and told me he didn’t need charity. His eyes set on Rita when she came to the door, her smile swollen in one corner, assuring me that there must have been a mix-up before inviting me in for tea. He might as well have been a ventriloquist, his lips tight, but his words coming from his wife’s mouth.
He was gone one morning when she woke. A couple of shirts and trousers, his only jacket, toolbelt and hat gone with him. A harmonica that she hadn’t heard him play since their first year of marriage, taken from the drawer next to the bed. The meagre things he judged essential for starting a new life, or abandoning the old one at least. Rita was left with four children, who eventually reached leaving age too, so she ended up alone in a house that John still owned. A married woman, so not even able to draw the dole. From whatever corner of the world he fled to, he kept a grip on his wife’s throat.
‘No word from John?’
She drank at last. ‘No. God forgive me, but there are evenings when I hope to see a guard in the driveway, coming to tell me he’s after dying someplace.’ She shook her head. ‘If he walks in that door, there’s nothing I can do only let him.’
I shook my head. I had little comfort to offer. ‘I can’t imagine he’ll be back, Rita. Six years is a long time.’
‘Thirty years with him was a long time.’ Her eyes were wet and she looked at her tea, both hands wrapped around the cup. They betrayed her age and hard life, in their deep lines and thin skin and swollen joints. I wondered if Rita could remember a time when her body hadn’t been damaged by another, when her cheekbones, ribs, and gut had never met fists and boots.
‘How’s your little one?’ she said, trying to pretend the glaze of a tear was a sparkle at the thought of Catriona.
‘She’s flying it. Chattier by the day.’
‘Ye’re blessed.’
I swallowed another mouthful. ‘We must spin her down sometime.’
‘I’d love to see her. If ye ever need someone to keep an eye on her.’
‘You’re very good, Rita. Is there anything you need done around the place?’
‘Not a thing. Tell me, what’s Siobhán up to these days? There’s too much in her head to be in the house all day. You don’t need me to tell you that.’
‘She’s keen to go back to work. Just waiting for school to start again.’
‘Tell her not to wait too long. She could do anything, that woman.’
She stood with me and we went to her doorstep and looked across the field at the river, halfway between the port and the estuary.
‘Are you away home for the evening?’
‘Not yet, Rita. I’ve one more call to make.’
‘No rest. Tell Siobhán to come and see me.’
‘I will indeed. Mind yourself.’
She touched my arm then went back inside and closed the door.
The sound of my engine sent a few birds circling overhead. I turned the car away from the river and took the long route, avoiding town, cutting past the workers in summer fields, the evening sun stalking me. I thought about Rita and what she would do for the rest of the evening and how slow the time might go.
If you told me I’d get thirty more years with Siobhán it would sound like far too little, but her thirty years with John Kirwan felt like eternity. I thought of busy work days that slip away, days that don’t seem to have enough hours and how we have no control over time at all. How it passes through us. How we’re just oxygen for it, telling its old stories and predicting its future. How it uses us up and when it’s finished with us and we’re gone, with all our love and hurt and memories gone with us, time will be there still, breathing through every soul, the only thing that knows no end.
I felt Sean Hatten’s handkerchief in my pocket as I drove to see his son. It was Rita who unlocked some fragment of the mystery of why a man like Sean carried this delicate thing from farm to fertiliser plant. I was sitting where I sat this evening, listening to her cry, not long after John had left. I took it from my pocket and offered it to her. Before she dried her eyes, she looked at it, then looked at me and handed it back and said her tears weren’t worth Mount Carmel lace. She spread it on the table and traced a finger over the pattern and told me about the Carmelite nuns and an industrial school opened before the famine, where girls were taught needlework by way of employment and how by the turn of the century those girls and women’s fingers had made some of the most sought-after lace in the world.
The past is no different to lace. Mostly holes and dark spaces of lost memories, with some strands and patterns linking together to make something we carry with us. The most we can hope for as time passes is a recollection of some bright moments from some bright hours. My mother, kissing my arms where thorns scratched them while I picked blackberries. My brother Declan’s hair blowing in my face while he straddled my crossbar, freewheeling down Shanahan’s hill. Siobhán, walking towards me while the organ filled every inch of that church in Clonakilty. The first night I went to Catriona’s cot on my own, holding her while she howled into my shoulder, pink and helpless. And that morning with Rita, a battered, broken woman, with children to raise and no money to do it, the rest of her life uncertain, unwilling to wipe her tears with a piece of fabric because she judged it much too beautiful.
12
Patrick waded from the safety of the bank, through a green scum of duckweed, and the itch drowned in cool, silken water. His father told him that duckweed travelled on the feet of birds and spread as fast as wings could flutter, and that everything in nature has a way of finding its place. He turned onto his back and laughed and wondered if that included the head of the deer he killed. A heron stood on the bank downstream, its neck stretched out and the yellow blade of its bill angled to the surface. He closed his eyes to the sun and remembered his father’s strong hands, softened by the river and gripping his torso while he taught him to swim, never angry if he failed and resurfaced in a fit of coughing. The dark of the water scared him into thinking that something was reaching from the bottom, trying to pull him down, or worse – that there was no bottom. Only his father’s voice could calm him. The way he said his name so gently. Patrick, it’s fine. Let’s try again.
He imagined all the unwanted kittens and pups that the river must have swallowed – squirming in cloth-sack coffins – and looked at the sky and imagined Kennedy’s helicopter, its blades slicing clouds and the sound of it like a hundred tractor engines on its way to land over at O’Kennedy Park. He heard a couple of men in town, complaining that Jackie wasn’t coming, while they mixed cement to refix slabs that the President would never see, let alone walk on.
When he was finished, he lay on a flat rock and drew the last warmth from it and felt a perfect communion with everything around him. The water to clean him, the sun to dry him, the ground to feed him, the birds to sing to him. He wondered how his father would deal with the tractors. He’d probably go hat in hand to Casey and take any explanation given no matter how unreasonable. He was stirred by the voices of two men in the next field talking about beef prices and he lay as still as the heron until they were gone, then stood and dressed.
He picked his way through John Walsh’s field, sidestepping fresh and stale discs of cow shite. He carried wet clothes under his arm, just washed in the river. ‘Patrick, it’s fine. Let’s try again,’ he repeated to himself as he walked, calming as he neared home with his body cleansed, any cuts and scrapes rubbed with dock leaf. He parted the cloud of the job that was taken from him, the sun lighting his thoughts, imagining walking with Rose after a morning together by the river. Her voice that spring morning, when her words were trying to catch up with her brain while she spoke about horses and Casey’s prized thoroughbred – Altar, or Arthur, or Antler – he couldn’t remember. She said it was the finest animal in Ireland and people in town said the same. He’d only seen it once from distance, and tried to convince himself that the horse’s reputation was just another thing bought and paid for by Casey’s money. He wondered if Rose liked the pincushion and if she’d keep it hidden somewhere in her bedroom, a secret to remind her of him.
He hopped the final stone wall and slipped at the sight of Field at his doorstep, in the stance of a man delivering news of a death. He dropped one of the washed shirts and left it, not wanting to be seen pawing in the dirt.
‘Two days in a row,’ Patrick said. ‘Town must be quiet.’
Field turned. ‘Patrick. Can we go inside?’
Sweat glistened on Field’s skin and Patrick imagined that the sergeant had a tough night of sunburn ahead. He looked older when he squinted, lines from the corners of his eyes like tendrils, roots spreading in search of water on his parched face, ears like an old man’s – so big he could probably hear the grass growing and the flight of the white butterflies through the wildflowers. Patrick remembered walking Main Street at his father’s hip, admiring the much younger Field’s uniform while he saluted the pair of them.
He passed without word, glancing to the sun-browned bloodstain on the Massey, before going through the open door to the shade of the house, glad to have done some tidying, as the sergeant followed him in.
13
I tried to let on I wasn’t desperate to sit down, wishing I could have gone straight home from Rita’s. It was as if the sun was focusing a beam on me all day, burning itself out trying to melt me into a puddle. Blazing away all the early-morning optimism about my health, and any confidence that I had enough in me to deal with Kennedy and Casey and Rita and Patrick.
Patrick made no move to stop me, as if he’d forgotten I was there as soon as he turned his back. He was standing in the middle of the floor, like he didn’t know what to do with himself, uneasy to have somebody beyond the front step, then he put a pile of wet clothes on top of a cold stove.
I tried to see the place through his eyes. A dark museum that told the story of his life. Of what had been and might have been. Of what would be no more, once Peter Casey had his way. The collection of things that told of a time when the Hatten family wasn’t fully doomed to failure – the chrome-plated stove that Maura had likely taken a martyr’s pride in, the radio that she’d deemed more useful than the land she sold to pay for it. The jaundiced faces of Christ and his apostles in the pictures on the walls, and the huge dresser with its stacks of unused saucers and plates like a shrine to the dead woman of the house. A pair of knitting needles on an armchair as if she’d just gone out to the shed. A trace of her in the sewing machine with a broken balance wheel at the end of the table.
Then all the evidence that she’s gone from the place. The gun in the corner, next to bamboo fishing poles and lobster pots. Her once spotless kitchen table, lined with hunting knives and unidentifiable wooden works in progress, sawdust on the floor swept into a pile. A fistful of wildflowers in a far too small glass on the sill above the sink.
What came over him one morning, this strange and quiet lad, that made him want to pick some flowers and put them in water? I looked at him and he wiped his nose and shifted his feet, as likely to swing a punch as he was to offer a seat. How does an unknowable creature like Patrick Hatten come to be?
When he sat, I joined him at the table.
‘Listen, Patrick. I’ll get right to it. You’re in proper bother.’
He folded his arms and flicked his chin up and a turn of his eyes said When am I not?
‘I don’t mean with me. You need to listen to me.’ I tapped the tabletop and he met my eye for as long as a blink. My finger came away powdered by sawdust. ‘This isn’t about some aul one complaining about you taking a shortcut through her field. Peter Casey has done a deal with your brother, Patrick.’ This time he held my gaze and didn’t blink. ‘Colm is back from England. That’s who you saw here yesterday.’
Patrick shook his head, rattling it like a money box to see if what he needed would fall out. ‘That wasn’t Colm. Why would Colm drive away when he saw me?’
‘There’s a good chance that he’s a very different man to the boy you knew. I have brothers I haven’t seen in years. I don’t expect them to be the same if we ever meet again.’
