Chapter Four #2
Cal turns to look. The door is swinging closed behind Tommy and Eugene Moynihan, Eugene brushing rain from his coat sleeves, Tommy pulling off gloves. The swirl of cold air they’ve brought with them skims into the alcove.
“That’s some fuckin’ brass neck,” Senan says, low.
The card game has paused mid-hand. Tommy nods to the pub, with a fine balance of his usual geniality and a gravity to fit the circumstances. Only a few heads nod back.
“A pint of Guinness and a bottle of Heineken there, Barty, when you’re ready,” Tommy says. After a moment Barty puts down his glass-cloth and starts pulling the pint.
Tommy finds a table and arranges himself at his leisure on the banquette, and Eugene copies him.
Eugene favors his mama more than his daddy: he’s middle height and narrow all over, with dark hair and a face that’s good-looking as long as you get it at the right angle and don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.
He’s the kind of smug little prick who Cal reckons spent much of his schooldays getting his head flushed down the john, although apparently not regularly enough to do much good.
Today his subpar chin has a defiant set that doesn’t suit him.
No one says a word. Bobby’s mouth is open and round; P.J. looks as shocked as if Tommy just unzipped his pants and pissed on the floor. Mart’s face and Senan’s are grim.
“Ah,” Tommy says, smiling over at the card-players, “the aul’ Fifty-Five. Who’s winning there?”
Red Geraghty mutters something.
“You took a tenner off me at that, last time I was in,” Tommy says, waving a finger at Red. “Deal us in there, go on. Give me a chance at revenge.”
The card-players glance at each other. One of them starts to say something, but a small sharp movement from another guy cuts him off.
Cal is starting to understand why no one’s been talking to him. Whatever’s going on here is the kind of complicated that could take years to explain.
“I’ll go easy on ye,” Tommy says, grinning. “I’ll leave ye the shirts on your backs.”
Out of nowhere, Francie leans back on the banquette and starts to sing.
“In Dublin city, where I did dwell
A butcher boy I loved right well
He courted me my life away
But now with me he will not stay…”
Francie has a good voice, the right fit for the slow melancholy song, deep and rich enough to take up all the space in the pub.
Seán óg’s has plenty of musical nights, when the scrawny old guys in the opposite corner bring out the fiddle and the tin whistle, or someone has a guitar, and everyone takes their turn at singing. This isn’t that.
“There is an alehouse in this town
Where my love goes and sits him down
He takes another on his knee
And he tells to her what he won’t tell me…”
Tommy Moynihan is smiling slightly, nodding along like he’s appreciating the entertainment. Eugene is glancing sideways at him and trying to do the same, but his smile comes out as a tooth-grinding smirk.
Senan starts to hum along with Francie. Mart takes it up, and then Bobby and P.J. and someone outside the alcove. After a minute, Cal joins in. Mart’s eyes move to him, briefly, and then back to Tommy.
“He went upstairs and the door he broke
He found her hanging from a rope
He took his knife and he cut her down
And in her pocket these words he found…”
The hum has spread throughout the pub, a low drone rising beneath Francie’s voice. Not everyone is joining in: some guys stare down into their pints or fiddle with their phones. Eugene’s smirk has tightened into something closer to a snarl.
“Oh dig my grave both wide and deep
Put a marble stone at my head and feet
And in the middle a turtle dove
So the whole world knows that I died for love.”
The deep hum holds and fades, and the pub is silent. Everyone watches Tommy and Eugene.
Eugene makes it about twenty seconds before he cracks. His face is red with outrage. He struggles to get up, shoves the table away, and storms out of the pub. He tries to slam the door behind him, but it’s slow-close and won’t slam.
Tommy looks around the room, taking his time. His jowls are weighted down with disappointment in every one of them.
“Eugene’s not in great form,” he says. “Sure, who am I telling; ye all know the trouble the poor young fella’s had. I thought a pint and a bit of company would do him the world of good, but it looks like we’ll have to come back when everyone’s feeling a bit more like themselves.”
He takes out his wallet and puts a twenty on the table. “Please accept my apologies,” he says, with sad dignity, to Barty. “If I’da known it’d cause you this kind of disturbance, I’da gone elsewhere today.”
He stands up, straightens his coat, and casts a last look of profound reproach around the room. Then he follows Eugene out. The door creeps shut behind him.
Red slaps down a card on the table. “How many of your ewes needed a hand with the lambing this year?” one of the guys at the bar demands of his buddy. “If you had Suffolks—” Barty, left with an unclaimed pint, leans against the bar in resignation and takes a long swig of it himself.
“Right,” Senan says to P.J. “We’re getting you a coupla chat-up lines whether you want them or not. Here”—to Bobby—“what line did you use on Róisín? If it worked for you, it’ll work for anyone.”
“I asked her did she know how long till the bus stopped next,” Bobby says. “My mammy’s bowels were at her something fierce. ’Twas the rich food.”
“Christ almighty,” Senan says, from the heart.
“There’s hope for you yet,” Francie tells P.J.
P.J. looks back and forth between them all, trying to puzzle out what he’s expected to do with this information. “Back when I was single,” Cal tells him, “I mostly just went in with ‘Hey, how’s your day been going?’ ”
P.J. looks like he suspects Cal of yanking his chain. “That’s not going to do the job for this fella,” Senan informs Cal. “She’ll say, ‘Grand’ or ‘Shite’ or whatever, and he’ll just stand there. The man needs a line.”
“OK,” Cal says. “Then what you’ve gotta do is find one that works with your strengths and your weaknesses. Like, if you don’t figure you can pull off being all flirty—”
“He can’t,” Francie assures him.
“Then you use that. Like, ‘Hey, I’d love to talk to you, but I’m no good at picking people up. How ’bout you try to pick me up instead?’ ”
“Not bad,” Mart says judiciously, nodding to Cal. “I’d say that’d get you a shift off the AI. Probably not a feel, but.”
P.J. thinks that over. “But what if she doesn’t?” he asks. “Chat me up, like.”
“Merciful Jaysus,” Senan says, raising his eyes to heaven.
“She mightn’t,” P.J. says.
“She might not,” Cal says. “But she might laugh, and then you’ve got a foot in the door.”
“She might not,” P.J. points out, clearly feeling himself on firm ground with this line of argument.
“The bitta uncertainty is what gives the flavor,” Mart explains. “ ’Tis like betting on a horse. You’d get no crack outa it if you already knew you’d picked the winner.”
“What’re you shiteing on about?” Francie demands. “I’d be only delighted if I knew I’d picked a winner. The same with women. If I was after suspense, I’d go to the fuckin’ pictures. I’m after the ride.”
“When was the last time you did either one?”
The argument gets into its stride. Cal looks around the pub. Red has won the hand and is raising his fists in triumph; the guys at the bar have moved on to swayback in Scottish Blackfaces. Barty is halfway down Tommy’s abandoned pint.
Ardnakelty, unlike Trey, has this firmly down as a suicide. Cal isn’t as relieved as he would have expected to be. Apparently suicide, or this one at least, makes demands of its own.
The good-tempered Guard comes to Lena’s place, too.
Someone told her about Rachel’s visit, which makes Lena the last person who saw Rachel alive, or anyhow the last one who’ll admit to it.
The Guard’s name is Breege, and Lena likes her; she manages to give the death its weight, without either pretending she’s personally devastated or implying that she can make it all better.
Lena explains how people sometimes bring her their animals, and tells her about Rachel’s cat’s ringworm, and Breege nods and writes it down.
Lena says nothing about Eugene, or Sean, or haters, or the rest of it.
Whatever drama was going on there, it wasn’t hers and she’s not touching it.
If anyone wants Breege to know the story, they can tell her themselves.
They won’t. Even Rachel’s parents, if they know it, might or might not share it.
Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen below the official inquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it’ll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice.
Whatever those conclusions are, they won’t meet Lena’s standards.
They’ll be based almost entirely on whether and where it suits this place to assign blame.
The decision will be made gradually, collectively, via multiple intertwined algorithms complex enough to blow a computer to smithereens.
Rachel herself will barely even factor into the equation.
Lena finds herself thinking about Rachel, the little she knew of her, the same way she thinks about Sean: deliberately, to protect against that erosion.
She feels no guilt—the townland would gleefully heap that on her, if they knew the details of Rachel’s visit, but Lena rejects it.
Guilt would be arrogance. It would mean believing that she could have stooped like the Virgin Mary from a pedestal and, smiling in her infinite compassion, lifted Rachel out of her despair and set her back on her feet, all fixed.
Lena no longer believes that any man or woman can be another’s salvation.