The Visitors (2 page)

Around noon the next day, I opened out the door and hooked the screen. I sat in the chair, drank coffee, and picked up a book. Five minutes later I stood in the doorway and shook out the rug and the cushion he’d sat on. I turned my face away from the dust and shouted at the squirrels. The traffic along Huron murmured in the evergreens. I dropped the rug into place, put the stack of books on it, swept the floor, emptied the ashtray, and while I was doing all that, I kept seeing the old woman lying in the dark street in her bathrobe. And I was seeing cars tearing down the street. Then his burned face at the screen door. But he was lying. I felt sure of it.

An hour later I was standing on the sidewalk in front of her house. The chair and crate were still there. Vines circled her porch railings. Their white blossoms resembled crushed trumpets, and lazy bees floated around them. I stepped onto her bottom step, and it took me five minutes to get the balls to mount the other steps, cross the porch, and knock on her door. The second time, I knocked louder. And before I left her porch to walk down the driveway, I lifted the flap and looked into her empty mailbox. In the middle of the backyard were two rusted iron chairs underneath a weeping willow. At the back were the same patchy evergreens that grew behind my place. Cardinals and blue jays screeched at two swinging, empty feeders. I went up the flagstone path that led to her screened-in porch, which was cluttered with magazines and newspapers, and had a big metal office desk covered with stacks of paperback books. I stood back and stared up at two windows. The one
on the right was open and a yellow curtain was blowing out, like a fan was going inside. I shouted hello into the air a few times. On my way back up the driveway, I found a fifty-dollar bill. I shoved it into my arse pocket. A few minutes later I was wandering the aisles of the supermarket. And at the liquor store I bought a big bottle of Chilean wine, cigarettes, and a six-pack of American beer.

Around half-eight that evening, the light in the room turned gloomy, and the leaves rattled in the trees. I’d heard on the radio that a storm was imminent, and so I switched on the lamps, shut both windows, walked onto the sidewalk, and stood in the shade of the maple. Across the way a young couple I knew jumped out of their porch seats and darted indoors. When the rain arrived I was standing at the screen door, watching it pour over the ledge above the doorway, and when I got tired of that I put in a CD, stood at the sink, rolled my sleeves up. With the pissing rain, the running water, and the music, I didn’t hear his feet on the gravel, and I don’t know if he ever knocked, or how long he stood there and looked in. His lankiness against the screen startled me, but I crossed the room, switched the outside light on, unhooked the screen door, and asked him to come out of the rain that dripped from his flattened hair and green windbreaker, which had a faded logo on the left breast, the sort American football coaches wore in the seventies, I think. He stood inside the door, glanced away from me, and asked if I minded him stopping by. I said if I did I wouldn’t have invited him in, and I inquired as to why he was not wearing the baseball cap.

—Never wear it when it’s raining, he said.

In a lighthearted way I inquired if he’d come across any old ladies lying in the street. He was easing the backpack off of his shoulder and didn’t answer. I gathered up socks and underpants from the chair and flung them into the closet. On the way to the toilet to get him a towel, I told him to sit in the chair.

He draped the towel over his head like a boxer or a basketball player and began to dry his hair. When he was done the towel lay around his shoulders like a prayer shawl. I asked if he wanted to take the
windbreaker off. No. Then I asked if he’d like to take the shoes off. No again, if it was okay with me. I told him I didn’t give a fuck, that I’d asked only for the sake of politeness. He wore tattered dress shoes, the same ones he had on the night before. The soles looked sturdy. There was a lace in one row of eyelets.

When I handed him a cigarette, the lighter, the washed saucer, he said he was in the library earlier, and a guy who works there made him leave, and so he went to the park, lay under the trees, and slept. The rain on the leaves woke him, and he remembered he’d left his shirt in the library, but that guy would have thrown it out. I was filling the coffeepot and said that losing things was a nuisance. I dropped the bread into the toaster and inquired if he liked marmalade. He said that was cool and I said something about golden oranges ripening in the Florida sun, warm blue water, and gorgeous, lazy sunbathers in Miami.

—And if it’s milk you want, I have it, I said.

—Don’t need it, he said.

The lights blinked off then on. Music stalled, the toaster popped. We watched the screen door, and he was still watching it when I put the coffee and the plate on the floor beside him. He began to eat like he’d done the night before. I lifted out a CD and put in another. I took a beer from the fridge. The rain had stopped and I stood on the futon bed and opened the window to the slow drip from the gutter, that gamey smell of wet summer streets, trees, and mown grass. Fireflies floated out of the grass in the yard next door. I turned back to him. With eyes downcast, he placed the plate on the floor and said he needed a favor. I said to go ahead, and I got off of the bed and sat in the armchair.

In the next couple of days, he needed a drive about ten or fifteen miles outside of town to visit an aunt of his. If I drove him he’d find his own way back. I sipped the beer and asked how many miles did he say it was, but I’d heard. He told me the distance again, and I asked what day it was he’d like to go. Four days from now, Monday, if it was cool with me, sorry to ask. He pulled the towel from around his shoulders
and pressed it to his eyes. I said no worries; stop by on Monday, around one. And I also said that I thought the aunt lived in Florida. He said this aunt was his father’s sister. She was old. He never knew her. I said no more about her, but I asked if he minded whether I brought a friend with me.

—Her name is Zoë, I said. —She lives in the neighborhood, and we arranged to get together next week. A student, a teacher at times, the boyfriend in medical school, in Austin. She’s dark-haired, funny, and smart as a whip, a bit impatient, exactly my type.

He said it was cool with him. I asked how he intended to get back to town, and he said his aunt might pay for a cab. Or he’d walk or hitch. I said if I drove him there I’d drive him back. I’d do the job right. He said he was grateful. I said a drive in the country with Zoë and him would be an adventure. Then I picked up the beer and asked if he should put on dry clothes, because if he got sick we would not be going anywhere.

On my way to the closet to fetch him another towel I hummed along to the music, and I’d shut the closet door when those shirts came into my head. I opened the door, reached in back, and pulled the shirts from their hangers. One had a blue boxy pattern that in my head was red. The blue in the other was lighter than I’d recalled. I handed him the towel and the shirts, said I was heading outside, and if the shirts didn’t suit him, he could give them to the shelter or to Saint Mary’s. I never liked the shirts, I told him, though it looked like they’d fit him. He stood, then laid the shirts and the towel on the chair and picked up the backpack and unzipped it. I turned, flicked on the light, and opened the screen door. A few slow lines of rain dripped over the doorway ledge. Moths danced around the naked bulb, which was spotted with the shit and remains of other insects.

A branch ripped down by wind lay in the middle of the street. The very green leaves shone in the streetlight. I lit a cigarette and picked the branch up and threw it onto the yard opposite. Rainwater flowed loud and hard in the gully. The smell rose from the sewer. I waited for a fast
car with a dodgy muffler, a blinking pizza sign on its roof, to pass before I crossed back over and stood underneath the maple. A young woman jogged up the middle of the street. She wore a pink baseball cap and black skimpy shorts. A breeze shook the wet leaves. Raindrops fell onto my head. The smell of the sewer faded. I flicked the cigarette into the gutter and heard the jogger’s sharp breath and her sneakers striking the wet street. I wished her a good night.

—Hi, she said.

I stood on the footpath and stared up at the old woman’s door before I quietly mounted her steps and crossed her porch then stood at her window. The curtain was drawn. The house was in darkness. When I was stealing back across her porch I saw the pair of sneakers behind the footrest, and I picked one up by the lace, headed down the steps, and held the sneaker under the beam of a streetlamp. I did think it was white when I’d picked it up, but I wanted to make sure. I put the sneaker back where I’d found it. Then I was staring down her pitch-dark driveway. About ten feet from me, a set of eyes shone very low to the ground. I thought for a second she was lying there—but it was an opossum or a skunk. They foraged around the trash cans and rambled freely through my backyard, their too many young ones trailing behind. The shining eyes moved a few feet before vanishing. The traffic hissed on Huron. Headlights shot through the darkened evergreens.

I opened the screen door to him standing by the chair. The backpack was on. He had changed into a shapeless polo. The gray hair was slicked back. A few stiff wisps sprang over his forehead. In the low lamplight his cheekbones looked purple and his darkened eyes looked weary. The music had stopped, and he did not look at me when I said the night was fine but for raindrops falling from the leaves. He said he’d hung the towels in the bathroom. I said there were no worries regarding towels.

—Grateful for the shirts, he said.

—You’re welcome, man, I said.

He buttoned the windbreaker to the neck. I shoved open the screen door. He stepped outside. When the door clicked shut I hooked it
without looking down. He stepped onto the grass at the edge of the light. A moth spun around his head. He coughed and the moth tumbled into the dark. Then he pulled the pack higher on his back, turned sideways, and stared up the driveway.

—Something I need to say, man, he said. —Should have said it last night, but it didn’t seem right because of the old lady.

—Tell Zoë and me in the car, man. It’ll give us things to talk about.

—Have to tell you now, man, when no one’s around.

—You’re not in some kind of trouble, I said.

—No, he said.

—That’s good to hear, man, I suppose, I said.

—Know someone you know, he said.

—You do. Someone in town? At the university?

—Not here, man. Before here. You know Kevin Lyons.

I waited a minute or so.

—There must be a ton of men in this country with that name, I then said.

—Needs and wants you to go see him, he said.

—I can’t afford to go to the fucking corner, I said.

—He’s paying for it—

—That’s very generous of him, but you have the wrong man—

—No, man, he said. —Talks like you. Your dad and his dad were best buddies. Two brothers. Twins, I guess. Sister in Scotland, somewhere over there—

—Our dads were best friends, I said after a while. —And the sister, she lives in London, the last I heard, and she just so happened to buy me those ugly shirts I gave you. Isn’t that quite the coincidence, Mister Mysterious Walter. But I should be better at throwing shit away.

—Grateful for the shirts. Needs you to go see him, he said.

—I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know him. I ran into him once in Boston—

—Said he saw you there twice, he said.

—Whatever. I forget, man. It was a while ago—

—Said you never went to his wedding. Just saying what he said to say, man—

—You seem to know more about me than I do, man, I said.

I went to the table and picked up the beer. I came back and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke through the screen.

—So you work for Mr. Lyons, I said.

—Done work for him. Need to deal with this bird—

—That’s an odd one. What sort of bird—

—A whippoorwill, man—

—Oh, like in that song, I said.

—Makes him crazy. Can’t sleep at night over it. Asked me to deal with it—

—Well, poor Mr. Lyons, I said.

—You still taking me to see my aunt, he said.

—I should have nothing to do with you, but Zoë would enjoy that trip, I said. —I know she would. And so would I.

—Grateful, man, he said.

He stepped out of the light. His feet crunched the gravel. I pressed my face against the screen, swiped a cobweb from my lips, and asked loudly for him to come back.

—I’m here, man, he said, though I could not see him.

—The old woman, that was a lie, man, I said.

—She was there, man. Didn’t plan on knocking on your door last night—

—You said she wore white sneakers.

—Don’t remember, man. An old lady—

—What about karma, man? What the fuck about that?

—Lying in the street before this house, man—

—Lyons paid you for this nonsense, didn’t he? I said.

—Just doing like he asked. That’s all, man. Grateful, he said.

—No one can make me go anywhere, man, I said.

—Needs and wants you to go see him, he said.

Michael Lyons was the father. Nora was the mother. They had four children. Kevin was the eldest, Una was a year younger, and the twins, Seamus and Tommy, were four or five years younger than Una. Michael once worked in the copper mines in Gortdrum, but when I was growing up he built indoor toilets, milking parlors, and pump houses—things people were then building. One summer he dug a well, built a pump house, and installed an immersion heater for my family.

My father and Michael were best friends, although my father was at least twelve years older than his friend, who was around my mother’s age. Michael had a round, handsome face, thick, wavy dark hair, and large dark eyes. He wore a trilby hat to Mass. A little feather with flashy colors was tucked inside the band. He was the only man at Mass who wore a trilby. The others wore cloth caps.

Lyons’s white cottage was about three miles from our house. It was the third one on the right, if you turn left at the Creamery Cross, which is still called the Creamery Cross, even though the creamery was shut down the year after Michael built the pump house, and before I left for the States the creamery yard was already overgrown with weeds and grass, the three buildings were skeletons, and the casting was gone from the two roadside pumps. The windows in the creamery buildings were smashed inside a week after the shutting. Boys walking home from National school dropped their schoolbags in the middle of the road and held rousing stone-throwing contests. My brother Stephen was one of those boys, and so was Seamus Lyons.

Behind Lyons’s cottage was Michael’s shed. I was once inside it. It was a spring evening, and I was with my father—a few months before Michael built the pump house. Against the back wall of the shed a red bus seat was tucked underneath a plywood desk. Above the desk, tools were arranged on hooks. Beside them hung two framed photographs of the Limerick hurling team. The photos were cut from Sunday newspapers. On a shelf next to the tools was a row of notebooks—copybooks, we called them. In National school we used them. Their pages had blue horizontal lines, and my father bought them at O’Shea’s grocery and post office, which was on the right of the cross, directly across from the creamery entrance. O’Shea’s shut about six months after the creamery did.

A number was written in red ink on the wood beneath each notebook, and I gripped the back of the red bus seat, stood tiptoe, plucked one out, laid it on the desk, and opened it. Michael turned from chatting with my father, and he smiled and said what was written in the copybook were records of his jobs, which were of no interest to a boy of my age. I told him I was sorry and shut the notebook.

If I saw anything written in it I don’t recall it, in that I don’t recall a column of building items with prices in an opposite column, nor do I recall reading sentences that sounded like a voice that spoke only to itself. But I well recall my father’s red face, his outstretched hand, his shaking finger pointing at the shed doorway, when he bluntly ordered me to go outside and not dare come back into the shed again. And I well recall Michael staring at the side of my father’s face as my father reprimanded me, and that Michael’s own face looked tormented then. I had turned from my father’s face to Michael’s, and when my father was done, Michael turned to me, and he smiled again, and politely asked that I put the copybook back where I’d found it. And so I gripped the bus seat, stood tiptoe, scrutinized the tiny red numbers, and slid that notebook back.

—An attentive boy, Michael said.

—I’m not too sure about that, my father said.

—Your sister’s godson. Tess’s, Michael said.

Two years before this, Auntie Tess had died in Dublin. She was a nurse, the younger of my father’s two sisters. She never married. No one in the family attended her funeral, in Dublin. Not even Auntie Hannah, who was too decrepit to leave the City Home in Limerick.

—Him all right, my father said.

And he dropped the match onto the floor and stamped on it.

—Looks a bit like her in the face, all right, Michael said.

And he stared down at the match.

I stood on the cobblestone path. Kevin was kicking a football very hard against the side wall of the cottage. Nora opened the window and shouted at her son to go and kick the ball someplace else. To have some sort of decency and not kick the blasted ball so close to her shrubs. Then she shut the window. The ball spun past me and skinned my right ankle. Kevin ran up the path after the ball. He elbowed me off the path and shoved his mouth up to my ear.

—You must think now you’re it, he said.

And then he kicked the ball around the shed.

I was eleven. He was fifteen or sixteen, and as tall as the men in the shed. And he’d never noticed me before. Not once had he said a word.

I stepped back onto the path, stared in at the men, and wiped my ear with the corner of my shirt. On the other side of the cottage, the leaves on the silver birches sparkled in the fading daylight. Kevin was now kicking the ball against the back wall of the shed. The men were talking. The well and the pump house. The date to start. Sometime in June or it might have to be July. Take two months at the most. Maybe more depending on the weather. Never know. Then the other jobs Michael had done and the ones he was doing and then what it was like down in the copper mines. Frightfully dark down there. Never seen anything like that dark. What the dead wake up to. What we all will wake up to some fine day. Then the talk turned to last Saturday’s horse races. Who was home first. Who was placed. And who made no appearance. A hand slapping the plywood desk followed by Michael’s
bold laugh. The kitchen window in the cottage glowed. Nora’s shadow came and went on the windowpane. Her hand moved above her eyes. Their supper was ready. But Nora did not call the men. She knew that men in the shed meant business. I had stepped closer to the shed doorway. At my feet the cobblestones looked pale like eggs. And the ball went on striking the back wall. The rhythm and the power never once diminished. And not once a pause in the men’s talk. And if the noise of the ball agitated them, they didn’t show it. Their heads bowed, hands deep in pockets, their feet apart. The ashtray on the plywood desk brimmed with burned-out Sweet Aftons. On the back of Sweet Afton boxes were two lines by Robert Burns that I then loved to read.

Flow gently, Sweet Afton, among thy green braes,

Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise.

Anyway, Michael’s spotless shed was tidier than any house I had ever been inside, tidier than the house I grew up in, where my mother and my sisters faithfully scrubbed, swept, tidied, dusted, cooked, twice a day scalded milking churns, milked cows, fed calves, hens, chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, dogs, and agitated at whoever happened to be near their brooms, mops, wooden spoons, dusters, the underclothes they scoured, soaked, then washed, their worn-down scrubbing brushes, their battered pots of boiling water, their daily bread dough, and their constantly employed frying pan.

But I heard my father tell my mother in our kitchen that Michael never let any of his children inside that shed. And I heard him tell her that the only adults Michael let in were the ones he was doing jobs for. And they were let in only once.

My father visited Michael. They sauntered up and down the road. Or they crossed the ditch opposite Lyons’s cottage and walked through the fields and meadows. And Michael visited our house. He appeared on Saturday mornings and sat in the chair across the range from my
father and told him dirty jokes. In those jokes
hole
rhymed with
pole
, and once
hole
with
coal
.

My mother did not like Michael telling those jokes. She didn’t want anyone in her house hearing about holes and poles, and every time Michael left, she complained bitterly to her husband that he’d let no one else get away with such vulgarity. Her husband had one response: He demanded that the television be turned on so that he could watch the horse races. His wife always obeyed—though at the same time, my mother was fond of Michael, and her way of handling his vulgarity was to pray for him. One saint she prayed to was Saint Francis, whose picture sat atop the television. A huge crucifix hung from his neck. His right hand rested on a massive sheepdog, and birds swam in his dazzling halo. At his naked feet a bowl of milk that a cat and a rat sipped from. And not even once did my mother show her disapproval to Michael’s face. Not her. Not my dead mother. She smiled and bowed when she lifted the teapot from the range to fill Michael’s and my father’s tea mugs, and she smiled and bowed when she added sugar and milk then stirred each mug with a teaspoon she kept in her apron pocket.

I longed to hear Michael’s jokes, the sharp rhymes, and his daring laugh at the punch lines, when he gripped his knees and his greasy John Garfield curl toppled down his forehead, and then his fingers shooting up, hastily fixing that clump back into place. During the telling of those jokes, my father sucked his lips in, his forehead was long and wrinkled, and at the punch lines, a smile flared at the corners of his mouth. It flared for seconds only—a smile so quick that you’re still not sure you ever saw it, like something shining brightly and rapidly falling down a country sky on a dark night.

Michael died the spring after he built the pump house. A male neighbor told us about the death. The neighbor’s name is gone, but I recall the rap of his knuckles on our opened door. It was a Saturday morning, in August, between nine and ten. We were eating breakfast. My oldest brother, Anthony, had just arrived back from the creamery.
My father was sitting in his chair and reading the newspaper Anthony had brought from O’Shea’s, and while my father read, his hand darted from behind the paper, and his finger, broken the year he worked on building sites in London, tipped the cigarette ash onto the blackened top of the white range.

Anthony sat at one end of the kitchen table. I sat at the other. Stephen, the youngest, sat next to me. The hood of the red secondhand Massey Ferguson 35 crammed the kitchen window. A fly buzzed around the marmalade jar. A knife was sticking out of the jar. Hannah, my youngest sister, was washing dishes. Tess, the second eldest, was cutting bread at the table. My mother was frying eggs. She pressed the spatula down hard on each egg and shouted at me and my brothers to stop complaining, because even if the undercooked or overcooked egg was not to our liking, any sort of egg was better than no egg.

Seconds before the knuckles touched the door, the two sheepdogs barked in a way that warns you a stranger has entered the yard, and at the knock my mother dropped the spatula, ran her hand through her black hair, quickly retied her apron, then dashed down the short hall to greet the neighbor, and before she led him in she shouted at the dogs to pipe down, and when he was in she invited him to sit in the chair across the range from my father, the chair Michael sat in. But the neighbor didn’t sit. He stood close enough to me that I smelled cowshit and old sweat, and he shoved his dirty balled-up cap from one hand to the other and bit down on his bottom lip, his cheeks reddening and his eyes shifting from the floor to my father and then to my mother, who stood by him with her arms folded. Her eyes had that look that said this man was not bearing good news.

—Hello, God bless, he eventually said. —Lovely weather. Hello to all the lads. But sorry to have to stop in but, at such a frightfully bad time of the day but, and sorry to have to be the one with the news, but God rest him Michael Lyons died at the table this morning. Didn’t even get to finish his mug of tea. Didn’t even open the boiled egg. Nora
in an awful state. Mercury in the blood. Picked that up in Gortdrum all them years back. Still in the system. So they’re saying anyways.

Every pew in the church was full at Michael’s funeral Mass. We knelt halfway up the church. Hannah was beside me; Tess was next to her, then my father and my brothers. My mother knelt behind me. Kevin was first up the aisle. All I recall is a sports coat flapping open. Next came Nora. Michael’s older brother, Big Roger, had his arm around her back, his hand clutching her left side, her dress was ruffled around his fingers, and her head looked snug in Roger’s armpit. She pressed a balled-up paper hankie to her mouth, and the black veil she wore looked like the one my mother was wearing. The twins were next. They wore dark suits, wrinkled white shirts, and bow ties. Una was last. She walked slowly, chin up. The dark raincoat reached her knees. Her tights were black and a velvet band held her long hair back from her forehead. After she passed I hopped up, stared, and my mother jabbed her fingers into my right arse cheek. I turned to her. Through the veil the solemn eyes declaring: Kneel down, don’t bring attention to yourself, know your place, don’t disgrace us, don’t disgrace me.

I don’t remember seeing Una again for five years. The news was that she was a bit distant, she’d her father’s eye, and she’d secured a place in the civil service, which was the sort of job bright young women and men aspired to.

In January 1984, I moved to Dublin. Una had been living there about two years. My mother often chatted with Nora after Sunday Mass, and in one of my mother’s letters was Una’s address, and my mother wrote that I should visit Una; the mothers agreed it would be grand for us to see someone from home. In another letter, my mother asked that when I did visit Una to let on nothing about the you-know-what. This you-know-what concerned Big Roger and Nora. Big Roger began visiting Nora not too long after Michael died. People saw Big Roger’s car coming and going and they saw Big Roger walking in and out of the cottage. In another letter, my mother said that Roger Lyons’s
car was stationed in a brazen manner outside you-know-who’s cottage. By “brazen manner” she meant the car was parked in front.

Una’s flat was in a three-story shabby Georgian house on Drumcondra Road, next to the canal bridge, Binns Bridge. I lived off Drumcondra Road farther down, on Botanic Avenue, and one Sunday afternoon, in late July, I put on my black drainpipe pants and a shirt I’d bought in a shop on Talbot Street the week before and headed up the high and wide footpath, with the grassy slope and the old trees to my left, and the B&B with the shamrock sign on the pole to my right, and pushed open her small iron gate with my hip. A messy hedge spilled over the crumbling left pier. The yard was one gray cement slab. I walked across it, pressed her bell, shoved my hands back into my pockets, then took one hand out and fiddled with my pants zipper. The peeling gray paint on her door looked like the main door to my own flat. I counted three full minutes, and was turning to leave when I heard the harsh turning of locks. The door opened a bit, her face appeared. I stared at the door then the cement slab. There was perfume, the brand I never knew, the scent I can’t describe, but also in the hall was the smell of yesterday’s boiled cabbage, a smell you came across then only in flats where country people lived.