By the Lake (42 page)

“I’m sorry. Sorry.”

“We know, Patrick. We know. We were looking for you everywhere.”

“I heard. Word was brought. I had to dress.”

With the same slow steps he went down to the room, made the sign of the cross, stood for a long time gazing at the dead man before touching the hands and the forehead in a slow, stern leave-taking.

The loud talk and the laughter his entrance had quelled rose again. Patrick made an impatient movement when he returned from the room but the talk and noise could not be stilled a second time. When offered sandwiches, he made a dismissive gesture, as if what had happened was too momentous to be bartered for the small coinages of food and drink, but he accepted the large whiskey Jamesie poured as if he was absent and the hand that gripped the glass was not his own.

“Who laid him out?” he demanded.

“I did,” Ruttledge said.

“I might have known.”

“I told you,” Tom Kelly whispered. “Our critics have landed.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

With a peremptory wave of the hand, Patrick Ryan indicated that he wished to see Ruttledge alone outside the house. They stood by the lighted window and could see through the bowl of flowers to the lighted candles and the white stillness of the bed.

“Why didn’t you wait for me, lad? Were you that greedy to get stuck in?”

“Nobody could find you,” Ruttledge said patiently. “They looked everywhere. They couldn’t wait any longer.”

“They might have known that important word would have always got to me,” he said.

“They didn’t know. Someone said you could even be in Dublin. They thought the funeral would be over before you got word.”

“I suppose it was that molly of a hairdresser who helped you botch the job.”

“Tom Kelly gave great help. Any faults were mine,” Ruttledge said.

“It was some face to give a poor man leaving the world,” he complained bitterly. “Some face to give him for his appearance in the next.”

“People seem pleased enough.”

“People know nothing, lad. All they want is to be riding and filling their gullets. But there are people who know. The trades know. I know. Anyhow it’s matterless now, lad. It’s done,” he said as if growing impatient of his own thought. “I’ll be over to your place next week. We’ll finish that shed. It’s been standing there making a show of both of us for far too long.”

People were no longer coming to the house and many were beginning to leave. Only those intending to keep watch into the day remained. Kate indicated that she was ready to leave. They took their leave of the dead man. With the watchers on the chairs around the walls and the whiteness of the linen and the flowers and the candles, the small room looked beautiful in the stillness of the ceremony. Ruttledge looked at the face carefully and did not think, in spite of all that Patrick said, that it could have been improved greatly. Jamesie and Mary insisted on walking them all the way to the lake. After the warmth of the house, their own tiredness met them in the coldness of the morning breeze from the lake. The moon had paled and the grey light was now on everything.

“Are you sure you should be coming all this distance?”

“It’s an excuse to get out and draw breath. We’ll be in there enough. Anyhow, everything went great.”

“Patrick Ryan wasn’t too pleased with our work,” Ruttledge said.

“You can quit about Patrick. Everybody knows Patrick,” Jamesie said. “If the Lord God came down out of heaven he still wouldn’t manage to please Patrick. Everybody, everybody said that Johnny looked just beautiful.”

“No matter what they say, Jamesie here is the best of the whole lot of them, Patrick included,” Mary said, her eyes shining.

“Jamesie is special,” Kate smiled agreement.

“Maybe I wasn’t the worst of them anyhow,” he said carefully. “We should start digging the grave about noon.”

“What tools do you want me to bring?”

“There’ll be lots of tools but bring, bring the sharp steel spade and that good pick and the crowbar.”

“Do you think will Jimmy Joe McKiernan come with the hearse or will he send one of his men?”

“I’d say one of his men but you’d never know with Jimmy Joe. There’s probably too much politics and trouble going on for Jimmy Joe to come, though it was Jimmy Joe himself who handed me the box and the habit.”

“Kate here was a great help,” Mary praised as they embraced above the lake.

“I did very little. It was a privilege to be with you.”

“The children aren’t coming. They hardly knew Johnny but Jim and Lucy are coming from Dublin in the morning,” Jamesie informed them as they parted.

“We’ll see you soon.”

“Please God.”

As they descended the hill, they walked into the white morning mist that obscured and made ghostly the shapes of the trees along the shore. Hidden in the mist, wildfowl were shrieking and chattering wildly out in the centre of the lake. At the corner the old grey-suited heron rose and flapped lazily ahead before disappearing into the white mist. They were too full of tiredness and reflection to talk.

“What was it like preparing the body?” Kate asked finally as they were climbing towards their own house.

“I’m not sure except I am very glad to have done it. It made
death and the fear of death more natural, more ordinary. What did you do?”

“Made tea, poured drinks, helped Mary make sandwiches. Did you ever see anything like that entrance?”

Ruttledge shook in silent laughter that was a thinner, paler version of his uncle’s. “Sergeant Death appeared and found he had arrived too late.”

As they climbed the hill to their own house he decided not to tell her yet that Patrick Ryan was coming the following week to complete the building of the shed.

Big Mick Madden joined Jamesie and Patrick Ryan and Ruttledge in the digging of the grave. They had to search for the family plot amid the headstones and long grass out from the monastery walls, and found it marked with a rusted iron cross in a rusted circle a blacksmith had made. Some of the marks the hammer made on the iron still showed on the rust. Once the long grass was cleared, Patrick Ryan measured the grave with a tape and marked the corners with small pegs. All four men who had watched the march from the Monument to the graves of Shruhaun on Easter Sunday began to dig. Outside the graveyard wall the priest’s cattle grazed on the grass-grown ruins of the ancient settlement. They were sleek and fat from the rich grass, many calves resting with their mothers on the uneven ground. The grave sank quickly at first, but as it deepened the pace slowed: it was no longer possible to swing the pick, and each slow inch had to be scraped out with the crowbar and steel spade. They worked turn and turn about and began to talk more.
Around them the bees moved about on the red and white clover and small yellow flowers. The occasional motor or lorry passed in a cloud of white dust. Away across the lakes and the bogs, the mountains stood in a distant haze of blue. As they worked, the shadow of the monastery walls drew closer to the open grave.

“This place was swarming with monks once. They had big disputes over books. They used to raise welts on one another,” Patrick Ryan asserted.

“The likes of us would be just slaves,” Big Mick Madden said. “They ruled the countryside from here. If we stepped out of line they’d gather a crowd for a quick trial on the shore and we’d be rowed out into the middle of the lake with a stone around our necks.”

“It’s all at peace now,” Ruttledge said, looking about at the traces of the streets and huts and the buildings that could be traced through the lines and indentations on the short grass where the cattle lay.

“You wouldn’t know, lad,” Patrick Ryan argued. “It’s just more covered up. The crowd in charge are cleverer these days. They have to be. People have more information now about what goes on.”

They reached pieces of rotted board, bones, a skull.

Jamesie gathered the bones into a plastic bag. “My mother was buried on the village side of the grave. If my turn is next it looks as if I’ll be going down to my old father.”

“God rest the dead.”

“Rest in peace.”

“Amen.”

“My old boy is fixed over there.” Big Mick Madden pointed out another iron cross within an iron circle close by, slightly more elaborate than Jamesie’s family cross; the outer arms of the cross were shaped and beaten into a suggestion of rose petals. “It took him two whole days to die.”

All the antagonism he held towards Jamesie had disappeared.

“I remember it well,” Patrick Ryan said. “Big John, your father, was a huge man, at least twenty stone, and wouldn’t harm a child. A big crowd gathered round the house. I was there both evenings. Between every breath he drew he’d say, ‘It’s a huar,’ as if he was labouring hard. After each loud rattling breath you’d hear, ‘It’s a hu-ar,’ and everytime ‘It’s a huar’ came out, the crowd used to burst out laughing. Poor people were easily entertained then.”

“I remember,” Big Mick said. “I remember it well. I got home from England the night that he died.”

Suddenly the steel spade hit the rock. They could dig no further. As they were scraping the rock clean, the graveyard gate opened and John Quinn came towards them with a spade on his shoulder.

“We might have known,” Patrick Ryan laughed as John Quinn approached. “You’d want to be out early to best John Quinn. Arriving too late to get in the way of work but in plenty of time for the free drinks in the village.”

“I heard but I heard too late. I was very sorry to hear about poor Johnny, the best shot this part of the country ever saw or ever will see,” John Quinn said as he shook Jamesie’s hand. “I was very sorry.”

“I know that, John. I know that well.”

“Look what we have gone and done!” Patrick Ryan shouted out, and John Quinn’s arrival was lost in the dramatic cry.

“I marked the grave out wrong. I kind of knew as soon as we saw the bones. We have put the head where the feet should go. We have widened the wrong fucken end.”

They then widened the other end of the grave. Even John Quinn helped and they teased him about his women as they worked. He was flattered by the teasing and responded with an earthy zest in which the singsonging cajolery was mixed with cunning and boastfulness.

When they were gathering the tools to go to the village
for the customary gravediggers’ drinks, Ruttledge asked Patrick Ryan, “Does it make a great difference that his head lies in the west?”

“It makes every difference, lad, or it makes no difference.”

“In what way?”

“You should know, lad,” he said, enjoying such full possession of the graveyard that even John Quinn’s presence went unheeded. “You went to school long enough by all accounts to know.”

“The world is full of things I don’t know,” Ruttledge said.

“He sleeps with his head in the west … so that when he wakes he may face the rising sun.” Looking from face to face and drawing himself to his full height, Patrick Ryan stretched his arm dramatically towards the east. “We look to the resurrection of the dead.”

The shadow from the abbey now stretched beyond the open grave, but the rose-window in the west pulsed with light, sending out wave after wave of carved shapes of light towards that part of the sky where the sun would rise.

“You never lost it, Patrick,” Jamesie said, while Ruttledge bowed his head.

“Begod now, even with good neighbours all around you and everybody getting on well together and helping one another in the end, it’d nearly make you start to think,” John Quinn said.

That evening the Ruttledges drove round the shore so that their car could accompany the hearse. Already there were several cars along the far shore, and they parked the car behind a line of cars and walked to the house. Once they reached the hill they were amazed by the number of cars parked in the fields all the way along the pass.

“I’ve never seen such a gathering,” Kate said.

“Jamesie and Mary are very well liked everywhere. It’s not because of Johnny. He’s been too long away.”

At the gate to the house they met sudden consternation. The
glass and polished chrome of the hearse waited outside the gate. Cars were backing out to allow the hearse to enter the small street and turn. Because of the panic there was much erratic reversing and revving of engines and clouds of smoke and loud, confusing directions. Jimmy Joe McKiernan climbed from the hearse and stood in the lane observing the panic in detached, silent amusement. Though he wore a black suit and white shirt and black tie he still managed to appear casually dressed, quiet and anonymous; he had caused the panic by arriving an hour too early for the removal. Seeing the Ruttledges, Jamesie came toward them in high excitement.

“Jimmy Joe himself has come. He thought the removal was at six instead of seven.”

“He’ll just have to wait,” Ruttledge said.

When the cars had been cleared, the hearse moved very slowly down to the house past the privet hedge and the big rhubarb leaves and the beds of scallions and parsley in the small side garden. The mule came to the iron gate to inspect the hearse as it passed. The brown hens, used to all the traffic by now, went on pecking in the dirt as the long shining hearse turned, pausing to cast a yellow eye studiously on the scene before returning their attention again to the dirt.