The Herbalist (7 page)

Dan checked on madam upstairs, and then got
on with doing something in the living room, leaving me behind the counter.

It wasn’t long before Carmel joined
us. I tried to tell her about the herbalist, but she only half listened. She was too
busy being Lady Muck:
Do this, do that …

Dan wasn’t too bad, took to a bit of
simpering.

‘She’s not bad, eh,
Carmel?’ he said to his wife in the middle of the afternoon.

‘No, she’s good.’

Carmel didn’t even crack a smile. They
both seemed awfully impressed that I could sell a few groceries without making a hames
of it. They laughed when I climbed into the window to rearrange it
by colour, putting in only the brightest products. The difference it made was
remarkable. I knew that because everyone that came into the shop remarked on it.

Dan said to come in for a few hours on their
busy days so Carmel could rest. She didn’t contradict him: she looked mighty
teary. When Dan left, she checked my neck for tide marks. I had hopes for more than a
casual arrangement but quickly realized that a run-for was all Carmel saw me as.
Do
this. Do that. Good girl yourself, Emily.
She kept looking me up and down. Got
it into her head that I needed a dress that was ‘more practical’. She
marched me up to Behan Brothers and bought me a dress on tick. Black with a mandarin
collar and capped sleeves.

‘A tidy brooch would set that off and
some clip-on earrings,’ Carmel said.

I’ve landed on my feet
, I
thought. When we got back, Carmel totted up my wages and then subtracted them from the
cost of the dress. She told me that when I’d worked off two and six, the dress
would be paid for and I’d get cash wages.

‘Now you’ve something decent to
wear next time.’

I marched home with the brown-paper package
wrapped in twine. I couldn’t seem to explain it so Mam would understand. She
thought it was my fault all the money was gone on a dress.

‘You vain little witch.’ She
smacked the table.

I did a lot of bawling before Mam got it
into her head that I wanted to see my earnings as much as anyone. I shoved the dress
into the corner of the wardrobe in its wrapping. Never liked that smart dress after, too
good for work and not fancy enough for a dance.

Carmel went upstairs to rest. It was a
relief to be away from Emily’s chatter. The girl’s eyes seemed to take
everything in. That was a silly strange thing to think, but Carmel didn’t really
care. She wanted him back so badly, the boy born sleeping. She could think only of him –
the pain in her chest never ceased, and it would never cease, this loss, this cutting of
her heart from her. Carmel’s arms ached with the emptiness every second of every
day. She wanted him back.
Give him back
.

Dan said she’d been hysterical, that
she’d clutched the baby for two days, wouldn’t hand the child over. She
didn’t remember hysterical, but she remembered Dan tugging him from her and
somehow it felt like her husband was on the side of death and of everything that had
conspired to take her baby’s breath from his body.

She called him Samuel.

‘It’s not a Catholic
name,’ Dan had said.

‘It’s fucking biblical, just
like Daniel!’

The foul language had almost knocked him
backwards. Her too.

‘May God forgive you,’ he kept
saying.

God. How could she believe in Him now? Yet
she didn’t dare say that out loud. As if there were anything else left for Him to
take from her.
Do your worst; your worst is done.
Yes, she had adored Christ,
his virgin mother and all his saints and angels, but how could she now, how could she
now? These were all thoughts, not things she could say to Dan, to anyone. She wrote some
of them down, letters to no one, saying over and over,
Why, why, why, my perfect
little son
.

Lizzie Murphy said offer it up. Grettie B
said he’s an angel in heaven. Then she covered her mouth when she realized her
mistake. Carmel’s unbaptized baby wasn’t allowed into heaven, only to
limbo. Father Higgins wouldn’t give him a blessing. She’d
had to beg Dan even to ask.

‘The child is not the Church’s
responsibility.’ That’s what the priest had said.

You’d think the worst was over, but it
wasn’t. He couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. He had to be buried in
unholy ground with the lost souls, criminals, suicides, with no rites, no blessings. And
Carmel wasn’t permitted to be present.

She sat at the dressing table and wrote to
Finbar. The letter was a rush of anguish that shamed her, and caused her to cry afresh
when she reread it. She could never send it. She heard the girl Emily moving downstairs,
but didn’t care, let her root around all she wanted; there was nothing Carmel
cared about down there. Nothing Carmel cared about left anywhere.

Doctor B had had to dope her the night Dan
left with her child and a shovel. The medicine was to stop her doing harm to herself. To
wipe out the feelings, the loss, the absence. It was all about absence – of breath, of
life and now even of dignity and holiness.

She had washed him – she was able to do
that, soaped between his toes and fingers – and dried him slowly, patting gently. She
had wrapped him in the crocheted blanket. He wore his white christening robe. She could
prepare him for it, but she could not part with him, she could not let him out of her
arms. She had screamed and called Dan a devil.

After Dan left to bury the baby, he stayed
away from their bed for a few nights. He must’ve slept somewhere else in the
house, or maybe in the shed. They passed each other in the shop during daylight hours,
frozen solid in their loss. She was told to pray, to get over it, to try to conceive
again, to get on with living. Carmel would do none of those things: she had been forced
to release Samuel from her arms, but she would not so easily give up her grief – why
should she? It was all she had of him, of Samuel. A name Dan would not say.

And where had he buried their baby? That
tormented her till Dan took her to the cemetery one evening at dusk. He showed her a
ditch that ran alongside its shadow side. She walked behind him, weeping, accusing.

‘You don’t recall where you
buried your son.’

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t for
talking by then; he had begun to say
whist
a lot. ‘Whist, woman, whist
your crying.’ Carmel watched the dirt under her feet as she walked, and all sorts
of things passed through her mind: that Samuel was cold, that he was crying somewhere,
that his soul would never see the face of God, would never join with hers. That he was
lost.

‘You can’t remember where you
put my child.’

She was sobbing now; the sun was low in the
sky, turning the fields a golden yellow. She could smell the yew trees, smell spring and
death in the earth, or so she thought, so she felt. Dan had stopped.

‘It’s here.’

‘It?’

‘The grave.’

‘There’s no grave – he’s
buried in a ditch like an animal and you don’t know where he is.’

She was sobbing hard. Where did all the
tears come from – was there no end to them? Dan took her hand.

‘I do know, I marked it.
Look.’

Carmel saw a large smooth stone; it had a
hole in its centre where rain gathered.

‘And see here. I scored the stone, so
we’ll always know.’

He guided her fingers over the surface as if
she were a blind woman. She felt deep, scored letters. She knelt down, and saw the side
of the stone where Dan had etched
SAMUEL HOLOHAN – R.I.P.

‘It must’ve taken you the whole
night.’

She stood to meet his eyes.

‘Two nights. It took two.’

Dan’s face was wet with tears.
‘I’m broken, Carmel, I’m broken too.’

And so they both cried, standing beside the
stone that marked their baby’s burial place, neither able to comfort the
other.

Sarah spent the morning weeding; she had
received a letter from James. He had copied part of a poem. ‘My love is like a
red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June. My love is like the melody,
that’s sweetly played in tune.’ She recognized it from their old English
reader. Why hadn’t he copied the whole poem? He wrote that he was sorry, very
sorry. Then he talked about the weather, how good it was. At the end he wrote, ‘I
want to see you again.’ It sounded like an order.

She was trying not to think about James; he
confused her. Working the garden was Sarah’s cure for ills, but it didn’t
stop nonsense thoughts rattling in her head. Thoughts like the fact that James had kept
other boys away from Sarah all through school and afterwards, whether he was even
talking to her or not. Now here she was, twenty-three, and he was still playing cat and
mouse.

But did she want her life to be any
different than it was? Most of Sarah’s classmates were married. Did she want
marriage? She certainly didn’t want three in nappies like her cousin Mary. Though
that would be better than ending up like Annie Mangan. One morning, after years of
perfect attendance, Annie just didn’t show up. Never came to school again. Her
family had her in America, lodging with a second cousin, doing very well for herself.
Then they had her as a librarian in New York City. They had her very busy.

Sarah had forgotten about Annie until
recently. In February, just after Sarah’s birthday, James had said he wanted to go
steady. A few days later she was standing at the kitchen window, gazing out at the
snowdrops on the slope outside, her hand in her pocket secretly holding the birthday
brooch he had given her. He had whispered his love to her. Next time the snowdrops
pushed up, it might be an engagement ring she held. She was trying to take in what that
might mean when out of nowhere Mai asked if she remembered Annie Mangan.
Of course she did; they’d been good friends. Mai told her Annie
hadn’t been sent to America; she’d been sent to a laundry and was there
yet.

‘It was all hushed up at the
time.’

‘How do you know about it,
then?’

‘I confirmed the girl’s
condition.’

‘What happened to the
child?’

‘The nuns that run the laundry took
it. They take all the girls’ babies –’

‘What girls?’

‘There are lots like Annie
Mangan.’

‘Why are you telling me this – why
now, after all these years?’

‘Poor Annie didn’t get there by
herself. Do you understand me?’

Sarah recalled Annie’s smooth plaits,
how they’d hung right down past the bench. How she’d sat stock-still during
class. Annie was an example to them all, the Master used to say, attentive, with a
wonderful posture. The back of her brown jumper was coated in fair hairs. Sarah was
always dying to reach out and brush them off. She tried to imagine Annie fat with child,
but couldn’t.

‘Do you understand me,
Sarah?’

‘I think so.’ Sarah wasn’t
sure she wanted to. ‘So when’s Annie coming back?’

‘Ah, what do you think?’

Mai looked at Sarah as if she were the
biggest eejit ever to walk the planet. Mai flared up sometimes, but it never lasted more
than a few seconds. They were opposites like that: Sarah tended to brew. Like now, using
weeding as an excuse.

Sarah plucked a cowslip and lay down – the
scent was heaven. A cabbage butterfly flitted past, a blackbird sang, Sarah stretched
out her arms. Life was fine here, just fine. The shadows of the long grasses played
across her skirt. What if all the secrecy was a ruse by James? Only for that, they could
get married and set up home, or go off travelling together. Would she like that? Sarah
didn’t know what she wanted – just knew that when she saw James again, it would be
him she wanted.

Mai called her. Sarah stood and waved. Her
aunt crooked her finger, which meant
I want a word
. What if someone had seen
her and James on the road? Mai sat on the bench and waited for Sarah
to climb the slope to the backyard. She patted the space beside her. Sarah sat down.