Where Old Ghosts Meet (18 page)

“So why would she want to take a run at me?”

“An old battle from years ago. Her brother wanted the teaching job on the island, the one Mr. Molloy was given. He was local, see, from down Red Island way. He had just grade eleven, whereas your grandfather was more educated and also from away, which made him not only better in some people's eyes, but more important. He was also a friend of Father O'Reilly, and he wanted him in the job so that was the end of it. There was quite the racket brewing at the time and Treese wasn't beyond spreading rumours around. However, another position was found for the brother and all was smoothed over. But Treese never forgot the ‘slight' to the family and has held a grudge ever since.”

“Maybe she had good reason to be annoyed. I'd say Father O'Reilly was looking out for his own interests.”

He looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I'd say he wanted him to be a permanent fixture on Berry Island, for the company. He liked having him around, it seems.”

“You're a bit of a crackie yourself, I'd say.” He laughed. “You weren't impressed with the padre then.”

“No,” she said reluctantly, “I didn't take to him much. He's not your uncle or anything like that, I suppose.”

“No, no.” He laughed again and then added, “It's the same today. Someone you know gives you the nod for a job and you're in. It's simple as that.”

She looked across at him. He had that infernal look of amusement on his face again. Normally his attitude would have irritated her, but again, she found herself liking his frankness. “I'm surprised he accepted a job when he didn't really want it. From what I hear he just didn't seem like the type.”

“That may be true, but back then, not many said no to authority. I was only a youngster at the time but I'd say he didn't really care too much one way or the other, and he likely wasn't aware of the racket that was afoot.” His finger traced the rim of the bottleneck, round and round. “Mr. Molloy was a man of few words so it was hard to tell how he felt. When he was pleased he had a habit of saying, ‘Well, well.' Anger, on the other hand, made him pace like an animal, small even steps back and forth on the floor, his jacket pushed back to one side with a white-knuckled hand spread wide to hold it in position. Words were not needed then. Soon as the pacing stopped, you could watch out.”

The man in the corner moved, his chair scraping the floor.

They both turned to look but nothing seemed to have changed. Gerry threw his head back and tipped the bottle. The muscles in his neck contracted. Finally, with lips pursed he made a small sucking noise and lowered the bottle. He gave a contented sigh and then his face was still. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes lay slack and open, exposing thin white furrows on his tanned skin. He took another swig.

She followed his lead, allowing the cold carbonated bubbles to rest for a moment on her tongue. The liquid was cool and refreshing. She drank again, this time deeply.

He had begun to pick at the label, digging for a starting point with his thumbnail. A loose spot in the corner gave way and crinkled into tiny damp accordion pleats. “He let me down, you know.” For a brief moment his cocky self was gone and he looked vulnerable as he picked away at the label. His head came up then and he gave a short careless laugh. “It's all past and gone now. But I sure as hell didn't see it that way at the time. It was like he got me all fired up to take on the whole bloody world, and more besides, and then when I'm ready to go, he tells me not to be so goddamn foolish. Jesus, at the time I was mad as hell. I wanted to smack him one right there and then.” His fist jerked upwards and tightened into a hard ball. A devious smile spread across his mouth. He regarded the half empty bottle, trying with his thumb to smooth away the wrinkle. “My dreams were all bound to him. I hung on every word that fell from his lips, every move he made, every shift in his imagination. I stored it all away, like a precious stash, deep inside. I was in awe of him.” He paused and drank again.

“Did you have dreams, Nora?” He turned to her, his old jocular mood back.

She shifted but remained silent, feeling a tiny jab of intrusion, like the sudden prick of a needle penetrating a soft fingerpad.

“You're right,” he said. “Guard your heart. Keep them to yourself.”

But the dream surfaced nonetheless, vivid and uninvited: Alicia Markova, prima ballerina, the breathtaking grace and elegance of the ballet. That was what she dreamed of. She had the physical attributes, the athleticism, the vision, but she had never even owned a pair of pink satin slippers, let alone learned to dance. She had studied pictures of the ballet, committing every detail to memory. She had read every book on ballet in the public library, devouring the words, and today the dream still lived in her imagination, vibrant and lovely as ever, for her eyes only.

“
Thuras amac
. Do you know this expression?”

She was jolted into the present. “Sorry, yes, of course. Yes, did you say
thuras amac
? This is Irish. A
thuras
is a journey and
amac
means out or outward, so I suppose an outward journey would be the direct translation.”

“Well, down this way when I was a child, it was often used as an expression meaning a bit of a disturbance. Someone might say, ‘Now, that was a right ould
thuras amac
last night.'”

“Really!”

“Yes, but
Thuras Amac
was the name he gave to an imaginary ship. The last half hour every day, all hands boarded the
Thuras Amac
. ‘All aboard,' he'd call out. ‘Hoist the mainsail, McGrath to look out!' That was the signal to cover up the windows in the schoolroom with coats.” Gerry laughed a deep throaty laugh that filled the tiny room. “We were pirates then, heading for the high seas, at least that's how we youngsters saw things. We loved it.” He looked across to the old stove in the corner. “There was a stove just like that. When we were shipshape and all seated around the fire he'd throw open the doors of the stove and the red glow of heat and light would spill into the darkened room. We were there with him, every man jack one of us, ready and willing to be transported to wherever he chose.”

He began to mimic the boys' excited voices: “‘I knows where we're to, sir. It's called Tahiti, sir. This is an island, sir, in the Pacific Ocean, but it's not even a small bit like Berry Island because the sun is always shining here and it's lovely. The people are all the colour of the kelp below on the beach and they go around wearin' half nothin'. There's millions of big bright flowers grow all over the place and the trees is full of yellow oranges and the water in the sea is warm as the rock pools on a hot day below to the beach, and so the cod fish couldn't live in that water at all. Too warm, see.'”

Gerry set his beer on the table and assumed an air of authority. “‘Very good, Pat,' he'd say. ‘Now one day in the year 1769, as the hot sun disappeared below the crust of the earth, a great ship with white sails reaching high into the heavens sailed over the horizon and anchored off the shore of this island. The ship was called the
Endeavour
. The captain on board …' That's how he'd go on, Nora, encouraging us to be colourful and imaginative in our speech and writing, but at the back of it all was learning, learning about the world beyond our island. ‘Knowledge is power,' he used to say. Times like that, if he told us we were off to the moon in a dory we'd have believed him. It was something we all looked forward to at the end of the day and nobody wanted to miss the trip. It even became a game that we played in our spare time, down by the water, but then it was all about pirates fightin' and robbin' and killin' each other. I believe that half hour every day kept many youngsters in school. Nobody wanted to miss the
Thuras Amac
. School wasn't compulsory then, so normally any excuse and the children were gone.”

Nora tried hard to picture this quiet distant man who was her grandfather surrounded by serious little faces, all still and attentive, burning bright with the fire of imagination: a pirate ship, scarlet blossoms, big ripe golden oranges, outstretched hands, a grey stone building, iron fencing, a lonely little boy standing on his own in a schoolyard. Images slipped in and out, forming a curious montage of past and present, light and dark.

“Was it a nice school?” Her voice was distant.

“Well, it was pretty basic, a wooden frame building, clapboard walls, peaked roof. That was all. It was painted red.” His eyes brightened. “A poor excuse for red, the weather saw to that, but red nonetheless.” He chuckled. “Inside was fresh and clean and white and cold. I used to wish they had done the paint job the other way round, red inside, white outside! It would have made more sense to me anyways.”

Nora kept very still, half afraid that he might tire of reminiscing. “Go on,” she said with just a hint of urging.

“We travelled the world on that ship,” he said. “Up the Yellow River into the interior of China, climbed the Great Wall, beating off hoards of fierce tribesmen.” Gerry was a little boy again laughing heartily. “It was grand,” he said with a certain longing. “We sailed across the Arabian Sea and into the stifling heat and colour of Bombay.” He looked right into her eyes. “He had an uncanny knack of making everything seem very real.”

He got up, went behind the counter and helped himself to two more bottles of beer and continued the conversation, barely breaking stride. “My favourite journey, the one I remember best of all was our trek through the tropical jungles. We had read several of Kipling's stories. Now, can you imagine being a child living on our little island having
The Jungle Book
read to you and knowing that at three o'clock we were all headed there on our very own ship? It was pure bloody magic no matter how old you were. Jesus, I could hear and smell the jungle.” His eyes were shining. “We all thought we'd been there! I still do,” he added, laughing. He passed her a bottle of beer.

“Another day,” he pushed on, “we went to Paris, to the great cathedral of Notre Dame. ‘The walls rose from the ground like the cliffs out of the ocean.'” The hand that held his beer bottle rose into the air to demonstrate. “‘The glass in the windows blazed with crimson and gold and blue, all the colours of a fierce sky at the close of day.' We had no concept of a cathedral, so that's how he described it to us. That day he balled up a bundle of old rags and stuck them under his jacket. Up and down the schoolroom floor he went, dragging his foot, his great hump half hiding his face, his hair askew, clanging the school bell. Quasimodo, high in his cliff tower, addressed the upturned faces in our little schoolroom.”

He shifted around and spoke to the bottle held in his hand. “I came to understand the extraordinary power of the imagination. I saw how easy it was to get people to believe and accept almost anything, provided the mind was open and it was presented in the right way.”

A damp patch of perspiration had begun to collect around his temples, but he seemed oblivious to the heat and discomfort. “At times like that he was a different man, full of strength and energy and conviction. There was fire in his belly then, real passion. It seemed to me that he was at his best when he was being someone else.” He turned to face her. “I was fascinated by that.”

It was a while before either one spoke and then she said, “He must have been an extraordinary teacher.”

“Well…” The word left a trail of uncertainty in its wake. “If you were smart then he was the best kind but he had a hard time dealing with the ‘dunderheads,' as he called them. He had no patience at all with slackers and even less with those who were just plain stunned. He didn't seem to take into account that many of the youngsters had never even seen a book until they came to school and that their parents oftentimes could barely read or write or couldn't read at all. But he couldn't see that. He put it all down to laziness and that was the end of it.”

He drew the back of his hand across his forehead and sighed. The dark hair on the back of his wrist was flattened by sweat into an oily slick. “There was a fella by the name of Joey Coady. He was a bit of a hard case, like a jack rabbit, off in all directions. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this but …”

He rubbed at the damp patch on his wrist until it disappeared and the dark hair stood up on end. For a moment he looked uncertain but then decided to continue. “There was one day he had Joey to the board. I remember it all so clearly, big white numbers on a blackboard: 26 X 17, that's what he wanted him to do. Multiply the two numbers. Joey hadn't the clue. Mr. Molloy started pacing the floor, back and forth, hand on hip. We all knew what was coming. Joey still hadn't learned the tables or didn't know how to do what was asked of him, but that day he laid the cane on that youngster and left big purple welts on his arms and legs that lasted for weeks. He went right off the head, lost it completely.” He rubbed his hand back and forth on his forearm. “It was terrible to watch. Somewhere inside that man there was a mean cruel streak that reared up in him every so often, and there was no telling where it came from. It always seemed to be directed at the most unfortunate … like Joey, poor youngsters who had no one to pick up for them and couldn't pick up for themselves either.”

Her hand came to her throat, her voice thin. “Did that happen often?”

“Often enough. Not as bad as that day, but every time it happened I felt sick to my stomach, but back then I could never bring myself to blame him.”

She reached for her drink. The beer had become warm and sickly, but still she drank deeply as if somehow she could wash away what she had just heard. She felt claustrophobic and was thinking about making a move when suddenly Gerry stood up and went across to the juke box. Rummaging in his pocket, he scanned the flashing dials, dropped a few coins into the slot, punched the buttons and returned to the table. “Another one?” He pointed to her half-full bottle but she declined. He helped himself at the bar again and came and sat down just as the slow whine of a female country singer hit the air:
I go on walkin' after midnight / Out in the moonlight
just a hopin' / You may be somewhere / Out walkin' after midnight /
Searchin' for me.