Cast a cold eye, p.9
Cast A Cold Eye, page 9
When he went inside, he found Grainne stretched out on the bed, one arm crooked around a pillow. She’d taken off her sweater and kicked off her shoes and was sound asleep, breathing deeply and regularly.
Jack stood in the doorway and looked at her. Leaning on the doorjamb, he sipped slowly from the bottle until it was finished.
Jack, my boy, he told himself, you’re losing your mind in this strange country. First, you think you’re seeing things in the dark, and now you think you’re falling in love with a girl you’ve only just met. Whereas, he reminded himself, the harsh reality of the situation is that you’re about to spend the night sleeping alone on the couch.
He strolled back to the kitchen, threw away the empty bottle, and started on the second. Then he returned to the bedroom, quietly opened the closet door and took out two of the spare blankets. He gently spread one over Grainne, settling it carefully so as not to wake her. Then he carried the other to the living room and spread it out on the couch.
He sat for a few minutes with the beer, feeling rueful at suddenly being alone but comfortable with the thought that Grainne was inside and would be there in the morning. But the thoughts of shadows were still there too, like cold air touching the warmth he felt.
He stood up from the couch and walked across to the windows. Since they faced only down the hill toward the ocean, a hill that was more often than not hidden by rain and mist and fog, he had never bothered to draw the heavy drapes across them. He stood there for a moment, but with the light of the living room behind him, could see only his own pale reflection in the glass.
He went to the door and pulled it open.
The moon was still bright, the air still clear, and he could hear the ocean roaring at the bottom of the hill. He shivered once with the cold and held his arms tightly to his sides. Light from the door and the windows spilled out and formed a glowing pool near the house. Beyond was only moonlight and rocks and shadows.
A woman’s voice, somewhere beyond the light, cried in a long and piercing keening sound, “Oh, sir!”
He closed the door, locked it, leaned his back against it, and stood there, breathing hard.
After a while, when his breathing steadied, he went into the bedroom and made certain the window was closed and latched securely. He looked at Grainne for a moment, watched her sleeping, listened to her steady breaths, then switched off the light and walked back to the living room.
He sat on the couch in the dark, with only the light of the moon coming in the windows—he would not close the drapes—wrapped the blanket around himself, slowly finished the beer, and waited uneasily for sleep.
CHAPTER 7
“Father Henning, oh, God bless you for coming,” Peggy Mullen cried in the doorway. She blinked in the brilliant sunlight, rubbed her hands vigorously on her apron, then pushed back a stray wisp of hair from her face. She was a strong and sturdy woman, but small, wiry, and a little pinched in the cheeks. “Come in, come in! Did you walk it all the way? Come in, Father!”
She stood back and held the door open while the priest came into the house. “I did walk it,” he said, “but it’s a fine day for walking. No telling how long it will last, this weather, so best to take advantage of it. It’ll be full winter before too much time goes by.”
“Oh, you’re so right, Father,” she said. “Soon it’ll be nothing but cold and wet and snow. Here, give me your coat and come in and sit down.” She took the coat and carefully hung it on a peg near the door. “Can I give you a cup of tea?”
“Well, I’m just after having my breakfast,” said the priest, “but I suppose another cup’d do no harm.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” Peggy said. “I have the water on for a cup myself. Here, make yourself comfortable on the sofa.” She smiled and hurried off to the kitchen.
There were neither books nor magazines nor newspapers in the house, but there was a neat little stack of religious leaflets from the Paulist Fathers on the table by the arm of the couch. Father Henning flipped through them for a minute, then replaced them and contented himself with folding his hands in his lap and looking about the plain but comfortable room. Peggy Mullen had done a fine job of keeping the house through the years, he thought. She was always a great one for saving a penny without appearing to scrimp. All of the furniture was old—indeed, he thought, this very room had changed hardly at all in the four decades or so since she and Paddy had been married. He’d always felt at home here, but now, in the quiet house with only the cozy rattle of cups and saucers coming from the kitchen, he felt the loss of Paddy himself. Many’s the time they’d sat together on this same sofa, talking over the old times, recalling the long days of youthful summers when they’d run free and wild on the hills and dared each other to challenge the hissing waves at the shore.
Peggy Mullen reappeared carrying a tray with the tea things and a plate of biscuits. She set it before him and poured, seating herself on a chair across the low table from him, as if the grandness of his presence forbade her sharing the couch.
After they’d tasted the tea, Father Henning put down his cup—noting that Peggy had used the good service, reserved for special occasions—and sat back, with his right hand on his knee and his left on the arm of the couch.
“Well, Peggy,” he said, “and how are you getting on?”
She clasped her hands together in her lap and directed her gaze down toward the tea tray. “Ah, I’ll be all right in the end, I suppose, Father,” she said. “It takes some getting used to, is all, him not being here.”
“Aye, it does that.”
“For half a year, you know, the time he was so sick, poor thing, I had my hands full with him, needing this and needing that and not able to do a thing for himself. He had me running all the time, I can tell you, he was so helpless and pitiful there near the end. Besides keeping up all the rest of the house as usual and all. It’s a terrible thing to see a man so reduced, and him so big and fine in years gone by.”
“Oh, yes,” said the priest, nodding sadly.
Peggy Mullen shook her head. “But I’m only saying what everyone knows, Father.”
“It’s one thing to know it, but something else again to go through it yourself.”
“You’re right there, Father, that’s the truth of it.”
They sat in silence for a minute, and together reached forward for the teacups and drank a bit.
“Have you made your peace about it, Peg, is what I’m wondering?” the priest said quietly at last.
The woman lowered her head further and squeezed her hands tighter together. Her head bobbed up, then down, firmly. “I have,” she said. “He was a good man, God bless him, and a good husband to me, and I’m thankful I had him with me as long as I did. But we’re all getting up in years now, isn’t it so? It was his time, is all. It’s all nature.”
“That’s so,” said the priest. “And no escaping it.”
They sat in silence for a moment again, then Father Henning reached forward with a long sigh and took a cream biscuit from the plate on the tray. He bit into it with a solid crunch, and the movement and the sound marked a new step in the conversation.
“Peg,” he said, more loudly, more heartily, than he’d spoken before, “I’ve come today to put a proposition before you.”
“What’s that, Father?”
He told her about Jack Quinlan, who was renting the house on the hill facing the water, that he’d be here in Doolin for three months at the least, and was in need of a woman to cook and clean.
“I’ve met him and he’s a decent young fellow,” the priest added. “He’s been to see me.”
“Three months?”
“Three.”
“On holiday, is he?”
“A bit of that, I understand, and a bit for work besides. He’s a writer.”
“Books and that?”
“Aye.”
“Is he writing one here?”
“So I gather.”
“About Doolin, is it?”
The priest looked significantly at his empty teacup and Peggy Mullen hastened to refill it. When he’d tasted the fresh cup, he replaced it on the tray and said, “That’s my understanding.”
Peggy Mullen pressed her lips tightly together and said nothing. Her own teacup sat untouched.
Father Henning took another biscuit.
“It’d be a good thing for you just now, Peg,” he said. “It’d take your mind off things, and bring in a few pounds besides. It’s always handy to have a little put by. And your own lads can look after themselves for a bit, though you’d not be abandoning them entirely. Don’t you think it’s a good plan, Peg?”
“Cooking and cleaning, both?”
The priest nodded.
Peggy met his eyes briefly, then looked away. “Well, I’m not looking to leave the house,” she said slowly, “but it might be good to help fill the time for a bit. It hangs heavy on me now, not having as much to do as I did with himself laying sick inside. And it’s true, I wouldn’t mind having a bit of extra coming in.”
“You’ll do it, then?”
Peggy Mullen pursed her lips again but said, “I will, Father.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad of it, Peg.” Then he added more quietly, “And it’s by way of being a bit of a favor to me as well.”
“I know that, Father,” Peggy Mullen said just as quietly. Then, for the first time, she looked the priest directly in the face. “I’ll do the best I can to see what’s what. But I can’t make you no promises, Father. There’s little I can be saying or doing that’ll keep him off, not if he’s bent on seeing what there is to see. And if he’s here in Doolin at the time, sure, there’s no preventing his seeing it all, that’s for certain. But I’ll do what I can.”
The priest kept his eyes on the teacup. “God bless you, Peg,” he said.
“God bless Jack Quinlan,” Peggy Mullen said. Then she stood up and took the tray from the table. “Let me make a fresh pot for you, Father. This one’s grown cold as ice.”
When Grainne awoke that Saturday morning and found herself lying fully clothed on the bed in Jack’s room, she remembered instantly that she’d been unpacking when it had all caught up with her: the long drive from Dublin, the excitement of adventure in coming here at all, the long slow dinner and drinks. She wondered how Jack would react to being left all alone in the night, without so much as a word from her.
She found him tangled in a blanket on the couch and, for a long while, she stood over him, looking at him, smiling. So he was as decent a man as she’d thought he was. She arranged the blanket a little more snugly, taking care not to disturb him.
She took a quick shower, brushed her hair, and put on fresh clothes. In the kitchen, she went through all the cabinets, checking on food supplies while boiling water for tea. With a hot cup in front of her, she sat at the table and made a shopping list. Judging from the food on hand, Jack had been surviving on almost nothing at all. When she could think of nothing else for the list, she walked back out to the living room to check on him.
He was still sound asleep and Grainne thought he hadn’t moved at all since she’d looked at him before.
She returned to the kitchen and checked the cabinets again, just to be sure. There were two packages of scone mix—she smiled at his good intentions—and she took them down. She found a bowl in another cabinet and started making the scones.
After a while, when she had them in the oven, she went back to the living room. Jack was still asleep.
The wind had come up a little more since dawn and it fluttered the jackets of John MacMahon, Brian Flynn, James Brennan, and Martin Gilhooley as the four of them shuffled along, abreast of each other, in the dusty road. They wore almost identical clothes, the uniform of the Irish peasant: dark woolen suit, baggy with age and hard use, woolen sweater, its front knobby and rough from rubbing, heavy thick-soled shoes, woolen cap with a narrow peak. Scarves were pulled tight around their throats as protection from the wind, the ends of them flying in the back.
John MacMahon, walking at the right-hand side of the road, set the slow pace for the others. He planted his stick firmly on the rocky ground, leaned on it, moved forward, set it again, and the others moved with him. None of them spoke, for the climbing of the road took all their breath.
At either side of the road were stone walls, as high as a man’s waist or higher, stone piled carefully, solidly, on stone, walls that might have been built, so far as any of them knew, by their grandfathers’ grandfathers. Beyond the walls, grazing forever on coarse grass and such hardy vegetation, weeds and burdock, as could survive the salty winds, were muddy sheep and an occasional donkey that planted its long-whiskered nose on top of the wall and silently watched them pass.
Once, a dusty truck came chugging up a hill behind them. Flynn, Brennan, and Gilhooley moved aside, leaving the roadway clear. When the truck drew alongside, the driver called a wordless greeting above the noise of the motor, and Martin Gilhooley raised one hand. The truck moved ahead, rounded a bend to the other side of the hill, and disappeared from view. Only John MacMahon ignored it. He kept moving forward, planting his stick before him, eyes fixed on the treacherous stones that threatened his shuffling feet. In the dusty wake of the truck, Flynn, Brennan, and Gilhooley fell in beside him across the width of the road, and, without a word being spoken, continued on their way.
Willy Egan was sixty-seven years of age, looked twenty years older and had the strength of a man twenty years younger. Everything that needed doing on the farm now took a little longer than it had in the past, but it all got done, every bit of it. God willing, he’d be able to keep the place up for many years to come. There was nothing more he wanted. There was no woman in his house, that was true—a pretty thing named Maureen Collins, from County Mayo, had thrown him over in his youth and he’d never wanted another—but he could fend for himself as well as any man alone. He had the pipe between his teeth for constant company, a roof above his head, bread on his table, the animals to talk to when he felt the rare need of speaking a word aloud, a pint whenever he wanted it, and the fine old music in Nolan’s on the weekend.
The barn near his thatched stone cottage leaned away from the wind, as many did on the hillsides of Doolin. Willy was in there, tending to one of the cows that had turned up lame that morning, when the four old men appeared in the doorway and cast their shadows inside. Willy had heard them coming, shoes crushing gravel and sliding along, for a little bit before they got there, but he put off turning around and looking up and seeing them for as long as he properly could.
“Good morning to ye,” he said at last, and turned around on his stool to face them.
“Morning,” said Martin Gilhooley.
“Martin,” said Willy Egan. Then he looked at each of them in turn. “Brian,” he said. “James.” And finally he looked at John MacMahon. “John,” he said, “I see you’ve come again.”
John MacMahon nodded. “Good morning to ye, Willy,” he said. “Can you spare a minute to sit? We’ve walked the distance and need to catch our breath.”
Willy Egan sighed, patted the cow on her flank, and stood up from the stool. “I can,” he said, and led the way out of the barn.
There was an old wooden bench along the wall at the front of the house. They sat there, all five of them, dark huddled figures against the gray of long-ago whitewashed stone. Willy sat on the end, with John MacMahon beside him, and the others at the far side of John. All sat with their heads lowered against the brilliance of the sunshine in cold clear air. He offered them nothing to drink now, but that would come, and when the time was proper Willy Egan would provide.
“Well, you know why we’ve come, Willy,” John MacMahon said at last.
Willy lowered his head farther. “I do,” he said resolutely. “It’s near time again, and thanks be to God we’re all still alive to see it another year.”
“Aye,” said John MacMahon, “that’s the way to think of it, and no mistake.”
“All the same as before, is it?”
“All the same,” said John MacMahon.
James Brennan suffered a coughing fit just then and the others were compelled to be silent until he was done.
“Will you want to take a look, then?” asked Willy Egan when silence had returned.
“I must, you know that, Willy,” John MacMahon said.
“That’s so, you must.” Willy Egan sighed resolutely again, pressed his hands on his knees, and stood up. “All right, then. If it must be done, let’s do it.”
He turned away and walked around the corner of the house, through the passage between house and barn, and the others followed behind him.
In back of the barn, a fat old mare, her coat thick with early winter growth, stood with her hairy black nose resting on top of a stone wall. She snorted twice when she saw the men coming toward her but did not move. Her big black eye shifted slightly as she watched them draw near.
Willy Egan opened the latch on the gate and they all went in and stood beside the mare. She took her nose from the fence and turned her head a little to keep them in view. Willy went and stood where she could see him. He rubbed his hand on her long rough forehead.
The four old men came close and looked the animal over carefully. They walked to the other side and looked there too, then stood together again near Willy. John MacMahon, one hand leaning on his cane, stepped up beside her and ran his hand along her back and down her shoulder. Both the mare and Willy watched the movement of his hand.
The other three stepped back as John MacMahon looked at Willy.
“All right, then,” he said.
Willy stroked the mare’s nose a moment longer, then lowered his hand.
“Well, then, come and have a drop,” he said. “To mark the occasion.”
He led them back to the cottage and inside. They stood and waited while he bent and pulled a stone jug from the bottom of a chest of drawers. Then, in silence, they passed the jug from hand to hand, sipping the powerful poteen, brewed in the hills. When the jug came back to Willy Egan again, he took his own taste, then put it away.
