Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Cal gets in his car and heads for Lena’s early the next morning, as soon as the sun is up. He and P.J. need to see to Mart’s sheep, but P.J. has his own work to get through first. Cal has a while. If it turns out not to be long enough, he can try again later.
He was right about the change in the weather.
The air has a new hard bite, and frost lies white over the fields, patterned with long meandering lines of black dots where farmers, dogs, rabbits, birds have gone about their accustomed business.
The cloud is paler; small sounds, the burr of an engine or the ring of metal on metal, come clear-edged from far away on the cold air.
Old songs in the pub start like this, with a man rising early and setting out to see his sweetheart, appreciating the beauties of nature along the way. This doesn’t feel like a song.
No one else is out on the roads except Con McHugh, pushing a wheelbarrow of sheep lick buckets along the back lane that winds between his land and Flapper Deery’s. When he sees Cal coming, his head snaps up and he steps out into the road, arm raised, to block the car.
Con is the youngest of the McHugh brothers, a big, rumpled, sweet-natured guy who seldom gets a word in edgeways. Cal has always liked him, but then, he always liked Bernard. He stops the car and rolls down his window, but he keeps the engine running and his eye on the hedges around.
“Sorry for your trouble,” Con says, at the window.
Cal is taken aback. He would suspect sarcasm, except Con isn’t the type. Instead he’s startled to find his throat swelling. “Thanks,” he says.
“He was a great worker,” Con says. “Kept that farm going all on his own for years. You wouldn’t find finer sheep anywhere.”
“He was good to me,” Cal says. “I would’ve had a hard time settling in around here, if it wasn’t for him.” Which, while it barely scratches the surface, is the truth.
Con nods. He takes off his woolly hat and examines it. “I was meaning to say to you,” he says. “About the, that chair. Just if—” He shifts, glancing at Cal like he’s expecting a rebuff. “If ye’d got around to it, yourself and the young one. ’Cause I know ye’re busy.”
“It’s coming along pretty good,” Cal says.
“It’ll be ready in plenty of time for Christmas.
” Senan has talked to Angela, Angela has talked to Noreen, and Noreen is talking to everyone and their mama.
All across the townland, under this pale sky, things are rearranging themselves.
Cal catches himself making a mental note to ask Mart how this is going to unfold, and what he should do in order to avoid fucking up.
He turns off his engine. “How’s Aileen doing?” he asks.
Con’s face relaxes into a smile. “Ah, she’s great. The midwife says they’re both doing great, thank God. She’s getting big now; she says by Christmas I’ll have to roll her along.”
“Give her my best,” Cal says. “Any time you want to take a look at how the chair’s going, see if you want to make any changes, come on over. If you don’t get a chance, I’ll phone you when it’s ready.”
A movement beyond the wall makes them both turn quickly, but it’s only Flapper Deery’s pony trotting up in hope of treats.
Cal understands who Con doesn’t want walking in on this conversation: his own brothers, or at least some of them.
The McHughs are known for sticking together to the point of lunacy, but even that has been frayed at the seams.
“I was talking to Malachy Dwyer,” Con says. “He says tomorrow night he’ll bring a few bottles down to Mart’s place. If that suits, like.”
He means the wake. Malachy is the local moonshiner; Cal has experience of his poteen, which has a reputation for being the purest in several counties and which kicks like a mule.
Mart would rise up out of his coffin if they tried to bury him without getting hammered on Malachy’s finest. “Sounds good to me,” Cal says.
“I’ll check with Senan and the guys, let you know if tomorrow night works. ”
He has a question. He’s not sure of the right way to ask it, but he’s going to have to navigate these things for himself now. He asks, “There gonna be trouble at the wake?”
“No,” Con says, instantly and with force. “God, no. It’s not…” He trails off. “Mouth won’t come,” he says in the end. “Tadhg mightn’t either, I don’t know. But the rest of us’ll be there. Bernard and all, like.”
Cal understands what Con is telling him.
For the people who have weight around here, this is finished.
There’ll be holdouts, on both sides—probably Cal should avoid Mouth for a while—but the townland as a whole is beginning the slow process of laying the sod and leaving the grass to grow over this last month.
Ardnakelty is skilled in this, having done it a thousand times; it can do it again.
“Bernard’s a good guy,” he says. “See you there.”
He starts the ignition, but Con stays put. “Say hiya to Lena from me and Aileen,” he says.
“Will do,” Cal says. “Thanks.”
He puts the car into gear and lifts a hand to Con as he moves off. In the rearview mirror, Con hefts his wheelbarrow and heads on down the lane, his boots leaving black marks in the frost.
Lena’s Skoda is in her front yard. Cal parks next to it, where she’ll see his car from her kitchen window. Then he sits down on her front step and waits.
He thinks, mainly, about Mart. Up until now he’s had no time to do that; when he got home last night, the friendly woman Guard was waiting on his doorstep to take down his account, and once she left he was asleep almost before he could get under the bedcovers.
His mind hasn’t had a chance to start absorbing things—he catches himself thinking that Mart isn’t going to take well to being murdered, and wondering what he’ll do about it.
Cal wishes he were a religious man, not so he could believe that Mart is in heaven—an image he has difficulty picturing—but so he could believe that Mart had a bird’s-eye view of what went down in the Moynihan house yesterday evening. He would have got a kick out of it.
The frost glitters in the strengthening light.
It’ll be good for the plowing, if the rain holds off to let the land dry out.
The cold strikes up from the stone into Cal’s ass, but his jacket is solid enough that the rest of him stays warm.
The jacket still smells of Mart’s tobacco smoke, but he has no other that’s fit for this weather.
After a while Lena comes out of the house, closing the door behind her to keep the dogs in.
“Are you here long?” she asks.
“Little while,” Cal says. “Half an hour, maybe.”
“I was hoovering,” Lena says. “I didn’t hear you come.” She sits down on the step, a couple of feet from Cal, and pulls her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands against the cold.
“I was going to call over to you yesterday,” she says. “Only then I heard about Mart. Noreen said you found him.”
“Yeah,” Cal says.
“How’re you doing?” Lena asks. She’s turned to look at Cal full on.
“Not sure yet,” Cal says.
Lena nods. It feels like a long time since Cal last saw her face.
She’s thinner and pale, and the lines from her nose to her mouth have deepened, but the way she’s looking at him, like she’s actually there on the step and seeing him, gives him a flicker of hope.
He was afraid she’d be the way she was that day at her kitchen table, right next to him and gone far beyond reach.
Her voice doesn’t sound like an echo any more.
He wants to know what she was coming to say to him, yesterday.
“Few of us went over to Moynihans’ yesterday evening,” he says. “Tommy’s done here.”
Lena is unsure whether he’s telling her this as reassurance, or out of pride in his achievement, or as justification for using her as a tool. “How?” she says.
Cal tells her. When he’s done, Lena sits looking at her front yard. A wren is flipping in and out of the hedge, scrounging in the frosty grass. She needs to fill her bird-feeders; winter is here.
“What does Tommy say was in that note?” she asks.
This clearly isn’t what Cal was expecting. “There wasn’t any note,” he says. “He was just trying to guilt-trip Eugene.”
“Let me guess,” Lena says. “The note said she was doing it ’cause of Tommy. She couldn’t stop him, and Eugene wouldn’t be able to even if he tried, not unless he had something massive to use. This was for Eugene to use.”
Cal has turned sharply to look at her. “Tommy said it was mostly her worrying that Eugene was gonna dump her.”
“I suppose he would say that, yeah,” Lena says. “There was a note. And Tommy didn’t kill Rachel.”
Cal says, “What.”
“When me and Sheila were no help to her,” Lena says, “Rachel went to Dymphna Duggan. Mrs. Duggan told her there was only one way to stop Tommy.”
Cal says, after a second, “Jesus Christ.”
“She told her where Noreen and Dessie kept the antifreeze,” Lena says. “That shouldn’t have me raging, not with everything else. But there was Noreen, in bits over this. Her own antifreeze.”
Sometime soon she’ll have to buy a bottle of antifreeze and put it in Noreen’s shed, so nobody will miss the one discarded somewhere along the road to the bridge, or spinning away downstream.
The antifreeze to ease the leap into the river, the river because the antifreeze would take too long, and each to make sure the other one didn’t fail.
Lena thinks of Rachel on the bridge, the night around her starting to blur, the river’s roar and the utter loneliness filling her ears and her mouth like dark water.
Cal says, “You sure about this?”
“I’m sure,” Lena says. “Mrs. Duggan told me herself.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s true. From what I hear, she likes getting people worked up.”
Lena shakes her head. “She doesn’t tell lies. If she did, people’d stop believing her; she couldn’t be having that. And anyhow Yvonne McCabe saw Rachel going into Duggans’, that night.”
“Rachel would’ve texted someone. Not left a note.”