The All of It: A Novel (10 page)

“Indeed.”

“Like I said, I watched from the side, and if my lips weren’t seen to be moving it didn’t mean I wasn’t praying!” She smiled briefly. “Kevin didn’t try to
impresss
Mr. Burke—to show off, I mean—just set to the job in a regular manner. I saw, though, that he was careful not to get in Mr. Burke’s way or to have a tool in his hand that Mr. Burke might be reaching for…. He kept up a nice, soft talk with the donkey, reassuring it like, and patting its neck every now and again…. Every so often I saw Mr. Burke give a sly look at how Kevin was getting on, but he never said a word, not even when Kevin dropped everything to give
the fire a needed tending. It wasn’t until Kevin’d finished tapping in the last nail and led the donkey about checking its comfort with the new shoe that Mr. Burke finally spoke up to say it was a good job—that he could have done it
faster
, but no better…. The men, sure-eyed as they were, they’d watched every move Kevin’d made; they nodded to each other after Mr. Burke spoke up, and the next one in line—he had a horse—turned the lead straight over to Kevin.” She raised her hands in a triumphant gesture.

“Did you not want to shout at the victory?”

“Of
course
, Father,” she laughed, “but for once, I held myself in….” She paused; then: “As the day wore on, Kevin loosened up with Mr. Burke and the others as they stood about—told them how he’d been on the move for months searching for a place to settle and how much Roonatellin favored his wants, it being on the sea and all, and that as far as he was concerned, it seemed to hold all the answers he was looking for in a place
if
, and of course it was a large if, if he could find enough work to keep himself afloat. Open as the skies he was…. Some of the men—I could tell which from their faces—some listened to what he was saying and measured him for his words; others, I could see, just tolerated the talk as a means of passing the time. But when he got around to telling of his interest in the Connelly smallhold,
all
ears
pricked up, I can tell you! And when he let out with how he’d got Father Daniels’ kind permission to live on the place pending word from the widow Connelly about his leasing it from her, or her selling it to him on a long-haul basis, well, there wasn’t an
eye
not pinned on him, and not all of them friendly! Kevin kept on, though, open, like I said, as the skies, figuring, I guessed, to lay all his cards to view as a means of finding out what he was up against.” Her mouth parted in a slight smile: “If you could have heard him, Father, how he spoke of the cattle-fold,
hymning
it as you might say as the finest one in all the land and was there a man alive, given the chance, who wouldn’t work his hands off in order to call it his own….”

Something in Enda’s reporting of that long-ago conversation of Kevin’s with Mr. Burke and the other men struck him suddenly as odd. Out of kilter, though in what way was not at once clear to him, he having allowed himself (as he told himself but a few moments later) to become so thralled in Enda’s secular telling as to have totally lost sight of himself as a priest. But the felt oddness, like the distracting niggle of a thorn housed just under the skin, persisted.

“Father?”

At the sound of her voice, nethered and intense and richly compelling—whose but hers had that quality of visceral density?—he spoke her name,
“Enda!” exhaling it, as one does an “
Ahhh
” when something that was a mystery comes clear, and, in a headlong rush, barked: “Kevin, in all his talk with Mr. Burke and the others—he failed to mention your name!”

He must suddenly have looked fraught and strange, even a touch wild perhaps; her startled face caused him to suppose he must.

Had he? Shown so obviously his ecclesiastical teeth, so to speak? Revealed himself as being back on the scent of sin?

For he was, of course.

Later, despising himself, he would remember how he freshened to the inquisitor’s role, how, mantled again in the dogma of purpose, he settled, as inquisitors will, deeper into his chair.

“Why?” he asked in a voice as abstractly benign as a needle, “Why did Kevin not mention your name?”

“Oh,” she shrugged, “I don’t know, except as men tend to cut out women when they’re talking between themselves. Anyhow, they didn’t know of me.” And, as he remained silent and waiting: “It wasn’t till the end of the day when Kevin was alone with Mr. Burke, the two of them closing down the forge, that I came forward.”

“And when you came forward before Mr. Burke, how did Kevin introduce you?”

From the way her mouth tightened he knew she
was fully on to the change in him. Still, she answered promptly, “He told Mr. Burke, ‘This is Enda.’”

“That’s all?”

She nodded.

“And what did Mr. Burke say to you?”

“The usual,” she replied with a bored briskness, “That he was pleased to meet me and how was I? The like.”

“Nothing else?”

“Oh, he nattered on of how he’d taken notice of me during the day and that he figured me as being Kevin’s wife…. Asked me if I liked Roonatellin as much as Kevin…. As I said, the usual.”

“And did either Kevin or you make the least effort to set him straight about yourselves?”

He might as well have put the question to the wall.

“Enda?”

Her eyes strayed to the dishes set out on the table.

“Enda!” he commanded.

With a doglike obedience, she turned her gaze back on him, but she did not speak, only sat with a dog’s sufferance, her eyes resting patiently on his face.

He supposed her contrite. He said, gently enough, “I’m waiting your answer.”

Above her eyes, her white, translucent brow—broad as his hand were he to encase it—was smooth and cool. “If you’ve a charge to make against myself
or Kevin,” she said, “then make it, Father. But give off with the worming.”

Her caustic tone had in it the overtones of a snub. That, and the hard, taunting, unwomanly way she sat now, looking at him as if he were some blackguard unworthy, as if they were somewhere other than in her home, some place of rough and dubious stimulation,
as if what mattered did not matter
, all came to a boil in him. He lost not a second, but reared hotly forward in his chair and spewed out his accusation: “Kevin
and
you, given the chance of a fresh and honest beginning, you adhered to pretending you were a married couple—”

“
Adhered?
” she interrupted with a maddening grandness, “The word’s unfamiliar to me.”

So that he had to tread water: “You didn’t,” he growled, “you
didn’t
—having, as I said, the chance for a clean start, either with Father Daniels or with Mr. Burke—you didn’t make your true relationship known, just committed yourselves deeper to treachery and deception.”

“It was
them
,” she blazed, “
them
as judged us as being married.”

“As you
wanted
them to.”

“As we
let
them,” she corrected imperiously.

“And just what, what do you mean by that?” he bawled back at her, bracing himself for a fiery retort.

But none came. Only—after a moment—qui
etly: “Poor man, that you can’t see it.” Then, at the sight of him in pieces of frustration as he was, her eyes filled with pity and, wearily, in a pulling kind of way, she told him, “We never
said
, not
ever
, to anyone in Roonatellin that we were married. It was them as supposed we were, and we let it stand that way as being simpler for us. If we’d corrected what they’d decided about us—told them we were brother and sister—they’d have gone about trying to settle our lives for us, myself expected to
want
to marry and Kevin seen by the women as a hope, the lot of them leeching on our privacy and pecking at our freedom, busy at arranging ourselves to fit the slots of their desires…. Their thinking we were married,” she concluded simply, “it cleared it for us to be and do as we pleased.”

He heard her, understood her, but, God forgive him, in the state she’d got him in of feeling demeaned and pocked as an object of her pity, and in the grip of some heretofore unknown brand of a crazed and crazy pride which imperatively and absolutely required that he recoup his dignity and score, he bludgeoned her with: “And what exactly,
outside the usual
, did it please you to be and do?”

Disbelief—no, dismay of the deepest sort arrested her features, but, like a feral dog after a lamb, he was not to be stopped. “Tell me,” he
insinuated, “was it the other part?” Then, crudely, “The sexual part that—”

He never finished.

She rose before him like a pillar of fire. “You could think that?” she cried, “Of Kevin and myself? That we kept it up?
Shame!
”

“I must know!” he raged. “’Tis my duty!”

“Then God damn your duty for the filthy thing it is.”

He welcomed the force of the lash as being deserved.

Despairing, he saw the twist of contempt on her face and the tears which blazoned her eyes. “You’ve laid a wound on me,” she said; then turned from him with: “I’ve things to do.”

Of course she had, he thought distantly: any minute now everyone would be arriving.

In a voice fractured by grief, he said, “Allow me to help—”

Her answer, made with her back to him, was tersely excluding: “It’s faster done alone.”

Near smothering in sorrow and self-disgust, he sat and watched her as she built up the fire and got some lamps going and rearranged the plates on the table. At the last, at each corner of the bed, she lit a fresh candle, holding the wick of the new to the flame of the feebler old. In the brighter light, Kevin’s face shone whiter, moon-like, yondered truly.

There was the sound of an approaching car.

She went to the window. Peering out, her profile as it was seen against the harsh yellow beam of the nearing headlights was eyeless and black, as futile for its tellingness as a penny-purchased silhouette.

“It’s the first of them coming,” he said hollowly, a fool at the obvious. Aching, he stood up. He smoothed his hair with his hands. He drew a chair—could it be as heavy as it felt?—to the foot of the bed. He said, “Sit here, Enda. It’s your rightful place.”

She came at once and sat down.

He reached for his overcoat.

“You’re not
going
?” she asked.

“I don’t see how you could want me to stay.”

“It wouldn’t be proper for you to go.” She made the reply as an admonitory fact.

“Would you have me then at the door?”

“If you will, please,” she answered formally.

Now, from the yard, voices were heard, and from down the lane, a further succession of car lights showed.

He crossed the room.

He put his hand to the latch.

He said, “Forgive me if you can.”

Then he lifted the latch and swung open the door and called out gently into the night, “Come in; come in…. Enda is waiting.”

O
NCE, IN THE
afternoon, as he was working the bottom stretch of the beat, he looked back and saw the ruin he’d left in the wake of his day’s efforts: there, all along the bosky rim and reach of the river, the crushed heather, the trampled furze, the flattened sedge: havoc of desiring.

But here now! (Might as well get a sermon out of it.) Every decent-hearted angler knows that tomorrow’s rewards are kindled by today’s disappointments. So to the sure-to-come “poor fool” look Seamus would cast upon him and to Thomas’s “I-told-you-so” blatherings, he’d give his answer: “Another time, Seamus” “Next season, Thomas. I’m telling you now to write it down that I’ll want a beat the first Saturday of the next season.” (That
to go in the sermon, too: a specified time-avowal of renewed undertaking.) Repeat it: “So mark it down, Thomas. Next spring, the first Saturday of the new season. And gratitude to God for the future chance….”

That moment yesterday, after Kevin’s burial, still beside the new mound of the grave, Enda’s whispering to him, “Will you drive me home please, Father?” and, to his answering nod, her moving closer to him, indicating that way to the lingering others she was in his care. The mourners then, seeing they had done all they could, began to drift off, back to their cars and the main road of their suspended lives. Left, then, beneath the cloud-thronged sky, he and Enda stood alone….

In the aftermath of the hellish scene he’d created with her, he had done naught but review his life in terms of the crime he had committed against her. It was one of his frequent, impassioned mulls from the pulpit:
To work one’s imagination on someone else is evil
.

More than his humiliation, greater than his self-loathing, profounder than the scourge of remorse, had been the pain of the ceaseless image of himself as she must see him—as a weaseling priest on the cheap.

The day after the wake—that would be but the day before yesterday—he had gone in his agony to
see her but had found her in a surround of keeping women so thick she had not been able even to stand when he entered the door, that close they were around her, their feet and legs twined spiderlike beneath them, their hands busy with their teacups, their tongues working in comparing ways over other losses, other deaths. Caught in this cosseting, funereal web, she appeared blind to his presence. Catherine McPhillemy had delegated herself to fuss over him. He had stayed, hardly speaking, but a few minutes.

…But yesterday, together at Kevin’s grave, all had been different…. They had stood silently, unmoving, statues among crosses, until Enda, coming to life, had lifted her hands to her throat and slowly untied the knot of the black woollen shawl that covered her head, putting to flight in the risen, capricious wind those unruly strands of hair which a heavy rope of braiding could not contain. Fully exposed, her face in the cloud-cast lavender light was marvellously beautiful. Looking at her—he could not but honestly look at her, especially in his anguish—he retreated into a memory of himself as a young, uncommitted man who, in a large book not his own, had gazed at the photograph of a found, autochthonous, terribly telling, carved, stone visage of a woman from a far-gone time, and had been filled with a first flaying
sense of his life fleeing from him in an unequal chase.

“You look done in,” she prompted him gently.

Mired in sorrow, he answered, “I am.”

As a supplicant, he took her having provided him with the chance to say so as a kindness. Given the grace of it, he was incapable, though, of putting it to use: all in a moment, the vitality of his active regret had given way to a deadly listlessness: What could he care of the present when his future, like his trodden past, would yield naught but nullity? The nearby twisted, stippled thorn-tree (Kevin’s coffin was earthed deeper than its roots) was as himself.

She had tracked his gaze. “You wonder it can live,” she said wanly. And when he did not respond: “About yesterday, when you came—that we couldn’t talk—”

Emptied of the energy to care, he made an interrupting, dismissing gesture: “It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does,” she said. “As between us, it does.” Then, with a fervent, equalizing candour: “We’ve need of one another.”

At her words, he suffered the immediate mix of the rescued: shyness; want of confidence; awe at deliverance; relief; speechlessness; trembling. In his thumb’s grip, the bible he held seesawed wildly.

She searched him with her eyes. She took a step closer to him—began a gesture, checked it, then
completed it: touched his face with her hand and spread across the flesh of his cheek the moisture of a tear.

A sudden gust of wind ballooned out the length of his vestments. “You’ll take a chill,” she said.

He had found his handkerchief. “You too,” he told her, wiping his eyes.

“So we’d best be on our way,” she answered.

“Enda—” he began, but, in a new rise of emotion, faltered.

She shook her head. “We’ll not talk more of it,” she said firmly.

“I must—” he told her.

“No.” She stooped and snapped off a twig of heather and placed it on Kevin’s grave. “Come now,” she said.

They walked slowly, descending the cemetery hillside carefully, skirting headstones and crosses and clumps of gorse. The sheep that earlier, timid of the mourners, had skittered away were straggling back, grazing again.

“
Them
,” she spoke with a tender tolerance, “they don’t know.”

On the level ground of the road, he opened the car door for her, then went around to his side and took his place in the driver’s seat. He started the engine and set the car in motion.

“If I were younger, I’d learn to drive one of these,” she said. “But it’s too late now…. Be
sides, it’d be a waste, Kevin having got that three-speed bike for me but a year ago.”

After that they spoke no more until he made the turn off the main road onto the valley lane leading to her house. Halfway down it, he told her, “I’m going salmon fishing tomorrow. It’s the last day of the season.”

“You only chance then.”

He nodded.

At her house, she let herself out of the car. The wind got at her hair again. She told him, “I’ll be at early Mass Sunday as usual. And tomorrow, Father, you’ll surely have the luck at your fishing.”

He’d not turned off the engine. “I mean to try,” he mustered.

She placed the car door against its clasp, then put her thigh to it, that way to close it as gently as possible.

In the rearview mirror he saw her, standing and waving, watching him out of sight.