The All of It: A Novel (2 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
, sinking fast—he would die but a few minutes later—Kevin said weakly, “It’s for me to tell you, Father.” He lay in a narrow rut of mattress on the extreme right side of the double bed. Enda had again absented herself to the cattle-fold. Father Declan, from his close-drawn chair, reached out and touched the dying man’s arm. “For me to tell,” Kevin repeated. “’Tis a harsh thing, Father.”

“It’s my purpose to hear it, Kevin, and for God in His mercy to judge and forgive.”

A low and awful rasp came from Kevin’s throat; a sudden moisture caused his forehead to gleam. His eyes made a frantic sweep of the room.

“Here, man…. Steady. I’m here, Kevin.”

“Aye, Father.”

Twice, in gulps, Kevin swallowed. “Enda,” he began, “my fear’s for Enda, Father, that you’ll rage against her, being human as you are.” Again, the frantic look away.

“Kevin, you
know
, surely you must: I’d not ever go against Enda.”

“Human you are, like the rest of us, despite the collar, forgive me, Father—” Again, from his throat, the low, dark churr; then a spasm that crazied his body and lit his eyes in subjugation.

Father Declan asked: “Do you want Enda?”

But Kevin shook his head and, thick-tongued, whispered, “I’ll tell thee, but swear to me first”—with a brilliant last strength—“swear to me, Father, you’ll stand by Enda.
Swear it
.”

“I swear, Kevin. And I say again to you, it’s not for me to judge, but for God, and for Him to understand and forgive.”

“
God
!” Kevin uttered passionately. With a frenzied movement he appeared to try to lift himself up towards the word that had burst so violently from his lips. Briefly, his hands did battle with the air, then dropped like shot birds, smallened and still, onto his heaving torso. He opened his mouth, but no words came. The seizure had silenced him forever.

Through the thunder of the ensuing silence, Father Declan spoke his name: “Kevin…. Kevin….”

Kevin heard and nodded. But his face had gone lax, and his eyes, nested in resignation, were lustreless.

Father Declan knew the sign: that suspension of physical and spiritual pain which is given to some just prior to death. He put his lips to Kevin’s forehead and spoke gently into his ear: “I’ll get Enda.”

He walked to the door of the house, which stood open to the noon’s light. Outside, he hurried to the back yard. From the cattle-fold, Enda saw him and came running to his side. “He’s not gone?” she whispered imperatively.

He sought her eyes: “No, but you’d best be with us now, Enda dear.”

She plucked at his sleeve: “Did he tell you of us?”

“He tried. He meant to. But he had a seizure.” Then, with a gesture of helplessness, “You should know, Enda—the seizure—he can’t speak.”

“Ah,” she breathed, looking off.

“Come,” he told her.

Inside, she approached the bed and knelt by its side. Her eyes rested deeply on Kevin’s face but—it was as if some agreement had been reached between them—she made no move with her hand towards his fixed open one.

Summoning all his strength, Father Declan commenced the sacrament of extreme unction.

E
NDA HAD PLED
, “You’ll see to it, Father? have the death notice printed just as I’ve said it to you, just as Catherine McPhillemy had it done when Sorley died?”

Father Declan’s eyes met the black of her own. After a low, white cry of grief—Kevin lay but minutes dead on the bed—she had begun a murmurous weeping alike to the run of the hillside rivulet outside the house. Moments later the weeping ceased and gave way to the appeal she put to him with a compellingly odd urgency: “You’ll see to it, Father? Have the death notice printed—you will, Father?”

“You ask too much of me, Enda,” he’d protested, “wanting me to see to the printing of a lie. ’Tis a
furtherance of the sin.” The charge—it was his duty to make it—caused in him, by the responding lance of Enda’s eyes going suddenly darker and condemned, a rush of pity, and he said kindly, in a reasoning way, “It’ll be another thing you’ll have to account for, another guilt you’ll have to bear…. A public notice of that sort—it should be the truth, Enda,” he shifted his feet, faltering before her tears. “And as we both know yourself and Kevin weren’t married,” he warmed to the subject now, “and as the two of you wouldn’t hear of letting me marry you before Kevin died—”

“Kevin told you, there’s a reason,” she interrupted.

“And died, he did, God rest his soul, before he could give me the reason,” he replied, “so I’m further in the dark,” fixing her in his gaze.

“So it’s for me to tell you now, Father,” she answered urgently.

“Not now, Enda. And not here. In the confessional stall is where I’ll hear it.”

She shot him a warrior’s look: “If I give you my word, Father, that our reason, Kevin’s and mine, for not marrying—that you’ll understand it once I make it known to you and that it’ll not add to the lie, but
explain
it—will you not, I beg you, have the notice printed? There’ll be, you see, no peace for me ever again if you don’t.”

“Enda—”

“Please, Father,” she whispered, “Please.”

He turned his gaze to the dead man, then back to her. He told her, “God forgive me, I’ll do it.”

Her eyes softened. “And I’ll do whatever penance is proper; whatever you lay on me, Father.”

He said, “I’ve not been postured like this before.”

“I appreciate that you’ve not, Father. But it’ll come right for you when I tell you.”

“So I’ll go now,” he told her. “I’ll see to the undertaker….” She helped him with his coat. “I’ll be back to you no later than five o’clock…. You’ll be all right, Enda?”

“Aye, Father.”

Down the rutted lane he stopped at the first cottage—Catherine McPhillemy’s—to tell Catherine Kevin had died at last. “I’ll go straight to Enda,” Catherine said. In Roonatellin, he stopped four times, giving out word of Kevin’s death.

At the district newspaper office, to the fussy man with steel-rimmed glasses, he said, “Print it just as I’ve written it out if you will, please.”

“Of course, Father. It’s entirely legible.”

He took out his wallet. Having entered into the sin of the lie, he would pay for the worldly end of it out of his own pocket.

D
ENNEHY
(
Roonatellin, County Mayo) September 22, 1982 at the age of 63, Kevin, beloved husband of Enda; deeply regretted by his loving wife. R. I. P. Funeral on Friday (September 24) after 11:00 o’c Mass at St. Fintan’s Cemetery
.

A
T NOONTIME THE
quiet rain that had persisted throughout the morning turned to a slanted, splattering downpour that beat against his face and seeped down into the collar of his green slicker, sogging his neck. Yet he persisted at his casting, sometimes almost blindly, the teem being that thick.

He kept thinking he shouldn’t be there in the rain and cold, the midges eating him alive—worse than any telling of a hair-shirt—and the river swollen to boisterousness; shouldn’t be there because there’s no point to fishing if you can’t concentrate. Yearning, he recalled the times in his life when he’d fished well through midge-ridden days in weather even meaner than this, and how, adroitly, Nature had put her claim on him and made him
one with the very ground at his feet, and how, with every cast, past the gleaming green reeds of the shoreline shallows, he’d projected himself towards a specific spot in the river’s very heart, a different shading in the water that was like a quality of seriousness, or at a laze in the current’s glide, some
felt
allurement of expectation which became (ah, fated fish) the focused haven of his energy.

Hopeless, today: everywhere he looked he saw Enda’s face; in every sound he heard Enda’s voice: in all the world (or so he felt) there was only her and himself….

At half-twelve Seamus came lumping through the rain. “You must be wanting your lunch, Father.”

He managed a smile. “Not yet. But have yours, Seamus. I’ll take a sandwich later…. And stick to the hut.”

But the boy maddeningly lingered.

Some time ago, he’d given up on the Silver Doctor and replaced it with a Blue Charm. Now Seamus caught him in the act of discarding the Blue Charm for a Silver Rat. Under Seamus’s eye, his hands, red and clumsy from the cold, shook.

“Thomas warned me ’twould be a useless day,” Seamus vouched.

“Will you stop it, boy!” he cried. “Is there nothing in you but complaints?
Go
, I’m telling you, and permit me to get on with my fishing.”

Seamus gave him one of those low, sidelong glances common to youths these days, then said, “Just as you will, Father,” and walked away, bent, as he’d come, against the downpour.

Alone again, with the Silver Rat secured, he raised his rod and set to afresh: cast, strip, cast, strip, cast…. Once, he looked up and took in the density of the cloud-cover over the mountains, the peaks lost to view, and, from the southwest, a further, blacker pile-up of scud being winded in from the sea.

A terrible day.

And what would Enda be doing now, this first day after Kevin’s funeral, this Saturday? If he had to name a time and a day of the week that called to mind Kevin and Enda as a pair, it would be mid-morning of a Saturday-shopping-day. That was when you’d see them, in all weather, sailing on their bicycles down the long hill into Roonatellin to do their week’s marketing. They always rode right alongside each other like gleeful, strong children, their heads high and their faces lit in a transport of excitement as the wheels of their bikes rolled faster and faster…. Out in his old Ford, making his Saturday calls on the shut-ins, he’d often come upon them as they rode towards town; always, he would honk and wave, and one or both of them would give a swift, hand-reflex kind of a
salute, but he never knew whether they took in who was greeting them, for their eyes never lifted from the thrilling coming-on thread of the road. The sun on them or rain, or a switch of wind whipping them—it didn’t matter—they exuded some high, terribly intense, obliterating joy, which—it haunted him now—more than once had inflamed his imagination to raw conjecturings…suppressed to the greater marvelment that, to Enda’s able arms, God had given no child to hold.

Would he ever get over the sadness of the truth of it?

Enda: when he’d returned to her after seeing to the publishing of the lie, running out, at the sound of his car, into the dusk-shadowed yard: “You’re back, Father, thank God. And you went to the news-office?”

“I did. It’ll be printed just as you wanted in the morning’s paper.”

“Come in, Father.”

All had been done: Kevin laid out, washed and shaved, clothed in his black Sunday suit, his rosary twined between his fingers. At each corner of the bed a candle burned; the spaced glimmerings offered the only light in the room.

“Catherine helped me,” Enda said simply.

They knelt at the foot of the bed and separately prayed.

When he stood again, Enda stirred but remained
at her kneel. “I’ll tell you the all of it now, Father,” she said, looking up at him.

He disowned a secular urge to reach down and lift her up. He told her instead, “Here, Enda”—turning a chair around for her—“sit here….” And as she complied: “Now, Enda dear, understand me when I tell you you should better save for the confessional what it is you’re wanting to tell me.”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No.” She stiffened, hawk-like.

“And why not?” he challenged.

“It has not to do with God.”

“Everything has to do with God,” he replied firmly.

She shook her head, denying. “If you’ll but hear it you’ll see ’tis outside God.” Then, flushing, her eyes hard on his: “I’ll tell you now or never.”

The threat (for so it struck him as being) made him cry out to her: “Enda!”—admonishing.

She flinched; her eyes went wide, but she held firm. “Now or never,” she repeated.

In an effort to size her resolve, he regarded her deeply. She met his gaze levelly and fiercely. It was then of course he should have reminded her of the Church and of himself as an agent of God, and, unless she relented, refused her the hearing. But he saw she would not relent, her resolve being,
he could tell, as iron. And…
there
, touchable for its closeness, was Kevin’s body, shell of his life, reminding; but profounder was Enda herself, waiting out the long moment of his ruling silence with a dauntlessness that sworded him through with pity and fascination.

It was as he continued to study her that the persuasion came upon him that for all her seeming strength of will, she was in some way fearful. If such was the case, he told himself, he had no choice but to allow her her say.

Still, he felt he must state his misgivings. “It’s against my better judgement to hear you as you oblige me to,” he began solemnly, bringing his hands together, his eyes staying on her, “but as it means so much to you, I will, nevertheless.”

“As you put it, Father, that is to say, if it means pressing it on you, it needn’t be done,” she answered proudly.

What could he but admire her? He made a gesture of measured conciliation, then: “I appreciate, Enda, that it’ll be no easier for you to tell than for me to hear.”

Her brow cleared. She said, “Thank you, Father.” She stood up. “I’ve water boiling. I’ll just give us some tea…. Take a chair for yourself.” Still, though, she hesitated. “You’ll need to be patient, Father,” she qualified.

“I will of course, Enda.”

“—not stop me over the first thing I tell you—”

“I won’t.”

“—hear me through to the end, I mean.”

She turned from him towards the bed and stood for what seemed to him to be an immense length of time, her back to him as she looked at Kevin’s face. In his chair, he waited, feeling large and uncollared. He shifted his feet. His shoes made a soft, scurring sound on the floor.

She shuddered.

As long as it would be granted him to live, he would remember how, then, her spine straightened as she filled her lungs with a diver’s deep breath, and how, just before she plunged into the violent waters of her telling, she turned back to him, her eyes glistening and entreating and charged with courage, and, finally, how the sped words fell: “You have to know, Father—Kevin and myself, we’re brother and sister.”