Chapter Nine
Nine
When it comes to matters of local protocol, Cal tends to triangulate Noreen’s opinion, Mart’s opinion, and Lena’s if she has one, which she mostly doesn’t.
This lets him avoid both the risk of missing some exclusively masculine angle and the risk of becoming the fall guy in an elaborate setup if Mart feels things are getting boring around here.
Lena has no opinion on whether Cal should go to Rachel Holohan’s funeral, but Mart and Noreen are both adamant that he needs to be there.
Noreen, with a fresh little worry-line running across her forehead, assures Cal it doesn’t matter that he barely knows the family—“ ’Tisn’t about that, there’ll be plenty there that’s the same as yourself, it’s just so they know we’re all there for them.
Sure when our mammy died I remember Valerie Nagle showed up, d’you know Val?
with the hair? Ah, you do—I hadn’t spoken to her since we fell out when we were sixteen, but it meant the world to me, we’re back friends now…
” Mart’s take is different. “Strength in numbers,” he explains.
“You sit with us in the hotel after, Sunny Jim, and do what we do, and ’twill all be grand. ”
“I’ve been to funerals here before,” Cal points out. “I’m not gonna disgrace you.”
“Not this one you haven’t,” Mart says, and he stumps off, crook-backed over a wheelbarrow heaped with some substance that smells like it should be bubbling.
Mart is right: it’s not like the other funerals Cal has been to.
Those were people like Dumbo Gannon, who had a heart attack on his sofa, and Senan’s father-in-law, who was just plain old.
The grief had the same tornado ferocity that Cal remembers from his mother’s death, but like his, it was something within nature, something that would eventually wear itself a resting place.
The grief in this cold church has no place anywhere and never will.
It’s a ravenous creature out of folktales, hunting forever with no rest or respite.
Kilcarrow church is modern and ugly, an incoherent combination of concrete, red carpet, and pine. People are weeping, but the acoustics muffle their sobs to a jagged pulse under Father Eamonn’s surround-sound intonations. The stained-glass windows are dulled by the darkness outside.
It’s a big church, but it’s crowded—Cal can’t tell whether this is support, rubbernecking, duty, or a little of all three.
Just about everyone he knows is there, including a couple of guys who only come down from the mountain a few times a year, and plenty of people he doesn’t.
He’s at the back, wearing his good clothes—he doesn’t own a suit, his life here not offering many occasions that require one, but he does have a pair of navy pants and a blue shirt, and shoes he can polish.
To his surprise, Lena, who hasn’t been to church since her own mother’s funeral, is beside him.
She gave no explanation, and he hasn’t asked.
She’s wearing a trim blue dress and the kind of shoes he didn’t know she owned, and her hair is pulled into a smooth bun.
He finds both of them slightly unsettling, like they’ve strayed into some alternative universe where they lead very different lives.
To his even greater surprise, Trey is on his other side, with clean jeans and brushed hair. “What?” she said, at the look on his face when she walked in his door that morning.
“Nothing,” Cal said. “I didn’t expect you to come along today, is all.”
Trey, rubbing dog hair off her jacket, shrugged. “Rachel was sound.”
“You’ve got school.”
“I’d be the only one there. Everyone’s going.”
“Kid,” Cal said. He knows Trey well enough to spot when she has an agenda. “We talked about this. We’re not gonna do anything yet.”
“ ’M not doing anything. Everyone’s always saying I oughta be more sociable with this place, and now when I—”
“When did I ever say that?”
“Noreen does.”
“Since when do you listen to Noreen?”
“Rachel was sound,” Trey said. “And fuck the Moynihans,” neither of which Cal could argue with.
It takes him a while to notice that something is screwy about the seating arrangements in the church.
Rachel’s family is up front, on the right-hand side.
Right-hand side is for family, Cal knows that much, but he would have expected the Moynihans to be over there too, seeing as Eugene and Rachel were practically engaged.
Instead, they’re taking up the front left pew.
Neither family looks at the other, even once.
The coffin is white, heaped all around with flowers.
Girls who look like Rachel go up the aisle two by two, carrying things to lay on top of it, things she loved too dearly to leave behind.
In this strange setting they pick their way like nervous deer, ready to leap at any startle. Most of them are crying.
Father Eamonn says smooth nice things about Rachel, and smooth compassionate things to her loved ones.
Then he takes a minute, bending his head to build suspense.
Father Eamonn has a cascade of jowls and he talks funny, letting his voice rise and die away in an arc that’s presumably meant to sound spiritual but that to Cal’s ears just sounds phony.
“Tragedy,” he says, lifting his head, “can bring a community together, or it can tear it apart. Each and every one of us in this church today has a duty to make sure it does not tear us apart.”
He pauses impressively. Trey is picking something off the pew in front with her fingernail. Cal nudges her and shakes his head.
“We will feel the temptation,” Father Eamonn says, gripping the pulpit to lean closer to the mike, “to assign blame. This is a temptation to sin. Judge not, lest ye be judged, says Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. If we have the audacity to take judgment into our own hands, we are defying Our Lord’s word, and we are inviting his harshest judgment on ourselves.
Let us pray today that we will all have the strength to resist that temptation. ”
Something moves through the church, a scattered rustle almost too low to hear, a mutter that goes on too long.
Outside the church, the line to shake hands with Rachel’s family is near-silent. People have their heads down against an ill-tempered wind that drives fine rain in their faces whichever way they turn. Lena pulls her jacket hood up.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun,” Noreen says, next to her. “Honest to God, I can’t. I’m watching reality shows, what’s that one where they make eejits of themselves in Ibiza, just so’s I won’t forget what it looks like.”
Step by step, the line shuffles forward.
Rachel’s brother and sisters, home from their faraway places, look dazed by the brutal impossibility of the day.
Claire and Fintan look near to dead themselves.
Their faces have fallen in around their bones, and Claire’s eyes are swollen as if she’s been beaten.
One of her sisters is trying to keep an umbrella over her, but her too-big black dress is clinging with rain.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” Lena says. “Rachel was lovely, all her life.”
Claire holds on to her hand. “She went to you,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and stilted, like words have come unmoored from their meanings. “That night. Did she say anything to you?”
“She was there about the cat,” Lena says. “Those scratches he had. I told her it was nothing to worry about.” The lie comes harder than she expected. “She took great care of that cat.”
“She was mental about him,” Fintan says.
He clears his throat, and then does it again.
“Pure mental.” Lena remembers him back in school, the time he ate the copper sulfate on a dare and the substitute teacher freaked out, and Fintan pretended to collapse and the teacher ran out of the room and never came back, and everyone was twisted laughing.
He had no idea this was lying in wait for him.
None of them had any way of knowing. Trey and her mates have melted off to sit on the churchyard wall, unbothered by the rain, inscrutably watching the strange adult rituals.
“I’m glad she went to your place,” Claire says. She hasn’t let go of Lena’s hand. Hers is fever-hot. “You were always kind. I’d like if the last face she saw was kind.”
Lena can’t remember if she was ever kind to Claire, or if she was ever kind at all. “You only hadta look around that church,” she says, “to see how much she was loved.”
Claire and Fintan nod, pressing their lips tight against more tears.
Over to the other side of the church door, at a discreet distance, is another line.
People are queueing up to tell Eugene Moynihan they’re sorry for his trouble.
Now and then they glance up against the rain, checking who’s joined them and who’s watching.
The afters are in the Kilcarrow Arms, an old red-brick mansion that sometime in the 1950s turned into a haphazard combination of hotel, restaurant, bar, and function room.
Even when it’s not giving people food poisoning, the Kilcarrow Arms doesn’t have much to recommend it, being shabby in a non-quaint way and staffed by people who look like they’re making plans to lose a fake nail in your drink.
It coasts on the fact of being the only place in town with a room that can hold a couple of hundred people.
Cal isn’t sure how long this shindig is meant to last, but if he has to, he can sneak Lena and Trey out to get a burger somewhere.