‘Will they have her in an open coffin?’
‘Apparently.’ Martin White was grim.
‘The children shouldn’t go.’
‘Of course they shouldn’t, it’s not the goddamn middle ages, but that madwoman will probably go out to the highways and byways finding children to terrify them.’
‘I wouldn’t be afraid of seeing Maggie lying in a coffin,’ Jacinta said suddenly. ‘In fact I’d prefer to. Anything would be better than seeing her all broken on the raft.’
Martin White and Kate Ryan exchanged surprised glances. They hadn’t thought of it like that.
They brought Maggie’s body back that evening. Twenty-six hours after she had died Barry Conway’s hearse drove down Bridge Street and parked almost opposite his own premises.
The front parlour in Daly’s had been made ready. Candlesticks burned and holy water fonts hung on the wall.
Her father looked a broken man, her sisters from Wales looked unfamiliar and startled. Kitty, who had been going to come home from Dublin for the weekend, sat white-faced in a corner. Charlie brought more and more chairs into the parlour.
They were not going to sit there all night, it was not a wake in the old sense of the word. But between nine o’clock and midnight almost every single man and woman in Mountfern would call to tell the family how sorry they were about what had happened.
They would look at the face, and say a prayer. Then they would leave their mass card, a silver or black-edged card stating that the holy sacrifice of the mass had been offered for the repose of the soul of Maggie Daly. Most of them wrote Margaret Daly. Maggie seemed the wrong kind of name for a dead person.
‘I’m not going to go,’ Kate stormed to John.
‘Of course you’re not to go,’ he soothed.
‘No, I mean even if I had my own two good legs I wouldn’t go.’
‘Easy, Kate, easy.’
‘The children? Do you think Jacinta was right? Would it be better for them to see her . . .?’
‘I think it might.’ He was quiet but firm. ‘Don’t forget they have already seen her dead. This has to be better.’
‘Will you tell Dara?’
‘Yes.’ His heart was heavy. ‘I’ll go up now.’
‘If you like, Dara, I’ll walk along to Daly’s with you. Is that what you want to do, or would you prefer to remember her the way she was, laughing and running around?’
‘Will her eyes be open, Daddy?’
‘No, pet, they’ll be closed.’
‘I couldn’t bear to see her eyes, but I would like to say goodbye to Maggie in some way.’
‘You tell me when you want to go, I’ll come with you.’
‘Michael?’ It was the first time she had mentioned him all day.
‘He says he would like to say goodbye to her also. You always say the same you two, it never changes.’ His smile was gentle.
‘It must be the only thing that doesn’t. Everything else has changed. For the worse.’
‘Call me when you want to go, Dara.’
‘Is Michael ready now?’
‘Yes, he is, love.’
‘Can we go straight away?’
They walked in complete silence by the river.
They didn’t even look into Loretto Quinn’s. They might have seen Rachel sitting by her window. And Loretto sitting downstairs with all the memories of the night that Barney died clear in her mind. They didn’t look into Coyne’s Motor Works. They might have seen Jack Coyne doing something he hadn’t done for a long time. He was sitting at his table with his mug of tea in front of him as usual.
But Jack Coyne was not reading the newspaper, which is what he usually did at night, hunting bargains through the small ads. Jack was reading aloud to himself a verse of poetry.
He had been trying to remember it all day and in desperation had gone up to the brothers. Brother Keane had lent him an anthology.
And he had found it under Yeats.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild.
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
He didn’t read any more of the poem. He didn’t even know what it was about, but it seemed to sum up what had happened in Mountfern.
Tommy Leonard stood at the door.
He knew that sooner or later Dara would come to Daly’s.
He moved over to join the three Ryans. ‘I wanted to wait so that we could go together.’
‘Thank you,’ Dara said simply.
John Ryan almost felt he should let them go in on their own.
Just as they got to the door of Daly’s Dairy, Dara paused. The others stopped, thinking she didn’t want to go in.
‘We should ask Jacinta and Liam to come as well,’ she said.
Michael ran up to Whites’; in minutes he was back with the two White children behind him.
‘Grace’s father didn’t want her to come,’ Dara explained. ‘He doesn’t understand that this is the best thing we can do.’
Just then a car drew up. Grace got out and she walked slowly, almost hesitantly over to the others.
‘Father didn’t want me to come, but Mrs Fine saw you all walking down the road so she called him, and he drove me here at once.’
Nobody asked where Kerry was. It was as if they had forgotten him.
Unaware of the sympathetic looks they were getting from the adults, the six children walked into the house. They went to the front room where the candles flickered and they heard the rise and fall of prayers.
Maggie looked like a wax doll. Her face was a clear almost transparent white. Because she had been injured so badly by the fall her hair was arranged to cover the sides of her face. The great cut over her eye wasn’t visible.
She was dressed in a white gown with long sleeves, and had a rosary threaded through her hands.
She didn’t look what they thought of as dead, she looked odd. Too still, and as if she were acting a part.
Mrs Daly sat by the coffin. ‘Thank you for coming to pray for Maggie,’ she said.
The children knelt down. They hadn’t intended to, but that was what Mrs Daly seemed to expect.
They said a decade of the rosary together, then they stood and looked again, a last look.
It was as if they had forgotten the presence of her family and the other adults in the room. They talked to each other in low voices.
‘It doesn’t look too frightening,’ Tommy said.
‘She doesn’t have that worried look she sometimes has,’ Grace said.
‘She won’t have to worry about things any more,’ said Michael.
‘It can’t be possible that she won’t get up,’ Jacinta said.
‘She was very nice, you know, very, very nice,’ said Liam White.
‘I’m terribly, terribly sorry, Maggie,’ said Dara.
Eddie Ryan arrived at the door of Daly’s.
Sheila Whelan exchanged glances with Martin White and Judy Byrne who were standing in the corridor.
She was about to discourage him.
‘It’s all right,’ said Eddie. ‘I know nobody would want me here.’
‘It’s not that . . .’ Sheila began.
‘I’m too young to see anyone dead. But I brought some flowers.’
Sheila looked at the wilting collection in his hands. Some of them were wallflowers taken from Judy Byrne’s window boxes, some were the purple wild valerian that grew in the cracks of walls. There was a selection of cowslips and some dandelions.
There was little life or bloom in any of them since they had been squeezed in a hot hand.
They were almost entirely weeds. To Eddie Ryan they were flowers.
Sheila took them gently from the boy’s hand. ‘Thank you very much, Eddie. I’ll see that these are put in a special place. Mrs Daly will be very grateful that you had such a kind thought.’
‘They might need a bit of water if they’re to go on the coffin,’ Eddie s
aid anxiously.
And Mrs Whelan said she’d see to it, never fear.
Everyone said that it would break your heart next day to see the children at mass. They sat so still near the front of the church. The nuns were all there from the convent, and all the brothers too. The men had come from the building site; many of them knew the Dalys in one way or another.
Rachel asked Kate if it would be out of place for her to attend the service. She didn’t want to do anything that would be out of place.
‘You’ll be expected to be there,’ Kate assured her. ‘Weren’t you one of her great friends?’
The small coffin covered in summer flowers stood at the steps of the altar. Father Hogan had asked Sister Laura if she could assemble some of the better singers in the school to act as a choir.
She found a dozen of the older girls whom she hoped would not cry. Girls who were two classes ahead of Maggie. She arranged they should sing ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Panis Angelicus’, and at the end of the mass they would have ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’.
There was no time for a rehearsal, Sister Laura said to them, it had to be right first time. She put all her sorrow and loss into conducting the hastily formed choir. It meant that she didn’t have to think of why the Lord saw fit to take Maggie Daly so soon in such a strange way.
Rachel had been to one Catholic service in her life. A big Italian-American wedding where the church had been filled with mink coats and expensively decorated by a florist. She had particularly remembered the incense, it was a heady thing and went up your nose, making you slightly light-headed.
She got the same feeling in the church in Mountfern. Tommy Leonard and Michael Ryan were serving the mass; this meant they were attending the priests as assistants of some sort, Rachel noticed. They wore choirboy surplices, both of them were pale and they swung the thurible with the incense around the coffin that held the body of their friend. Rachel didn’t see Patrick in the church, though she knew he was somewhere there. She hadn’t told him she was coming nor asked his advice. This was nothing to do with Patrick or her wish to fit into his community. This was all to do with the death of Maggie Daly, her friend.
As the pure high voices of the girls from Mountfern Convent sang the words of the Twenty-third Psalm, the tears came down Rachel’s face. It seemed curiously inappropriate to hear the children singing the words about ‘He leadeth me the quiet waters by’. It was odd to be able to think of quiet waters as a kind of heaven when the child had ended her life in the water not two hundred yards from this church.
Rachel remembered the excitement on Maggie’s face over the dress. The look of disbelief when she saw herself in the mirror that day up at the lodge, the way she had clapped her hands with pleasure.
Rachel thought about Maggie’s anxious look and her unsureness: ‘Are you sure I’m not staying too long, Mrs Fine?’
‘Is it really all right if I keep this ribbon all for myself?’
‘I used to want all my hair to fall off and start again until I met you, Mrs Fine, now I think it’s grand, I’m delighted with it.’
‘Tell me what it was like for you growing up, was it all Jews and Jewesses where you lived or were there ordinary people there too?’
And on that last day: ‘I did wear the dress once, Mrs Fine, but it wasn’t really the right time to wear it. You know me, I’d get it wrong. But next time I’ll make sure that it gets a proper showing.’
Rachel heard that Sheila Whelan had suggested Maggie should be buried in her new dress, it had meant so much to her.
Mrs Daly had not even considered it. The child would not go to Eternal Life in the trappings and vanities of this life. She would wear a white shroud.
The dress still hung on the back of Maggie’s door.
Rachel felt an overwhelming urge to ask for it back, but she knew it would be misunderstood.
She couldn’t bear to think of Kitty Daly wearing it some day. Or it being given away and worn by some other girl in some other town who had no idea how much it had meant in the short frightened life of a girl who was being buried before her sixteenth birthday.
Uncaring of the careful make-up and the streaks that must be all over her face, Rachel let the tears fall. She looked across the church and saw Kate Ryan, still in her wheelchair. There were tears falling on her face also.
They followed the small coffin to the grave. In the background the river sounds went on, familiar and almost unheard now by everyone who lived by its side. The June sunshine came down on the graveyard, and marble headstones shimmered and shone as if they were lovely exciting things instead of the record of death.
The children stood almost huddled together for comfort. Kerry was a few paces behind.
As the last holy water was shaken and the last prayers said, the grave diggers began to fill the great dark hole in the ground, a space that looked far too big for Maggie.
The children waited motionless until the very last sod was in place. They gathered up the flowers and wreaths and laid them on top. Only then would they leave.
As they walked through the other headstones – the Celtic crosses, the plain iron cross shapes, the marble slabs – they remembered all the times they had spent examining the words on the tombstones in the churchyard. Fingering the inscription to William James Fern who died young at Majuba Hill in the Transvaal. He had been young all right but not as young as Maggie. And the tombstone of James Edward Gray which had been so neglected and they had tried to smarten it up for him. They decided that they would go again and do something to James Edward Gray’s resting place.
Maggie would have liked that.
‘I suppose you think it’s barbaric that people will come in here to spend hours drinking on account of the funeral,’ Kate said to Rachel.
‘No, I think it’s very comforting somehow,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m becoming more and more assimilated you know. Not looking from the outside in any more.’
‘I’ve always said they gave your mother the wrong baby in that hospital, you’re more Irish than we are.’ Kate said it as a high compliment.
‘It was the last thing I expected when I came here,’ Rachel said. ‘I used to hope that he would find it a disappointment, and decide to go back, back home to New York. I never thought for one moment that I would feel it was home myself.’
Kate looked at her in concern. Despite her praise for Mountfern there was a very lonely note in Rachel’s voice. As if she had been abandoned.
‘You do know how much you mean to everybody here.’
Rachel smiled. ‘Yes, I feel very much at home, very peaceful here. More so than Patrick does in ways. He expected so much, and I expected so little. That must be it.’
‘What kind of things do you expect now?’ Kate spoke gently.
‘I’ve no long-term plans any more, no strategies, hardly any hope. I just go along one day at a time.’
Dara walked up to Coyne’s wood with Leopold.
Mary Donnelly said you should never underestimate Leopold. There were times when no human being could give you the company and solidarity you needed and Leopold often rose to those times.
More to please her than from any great hopes of companionship Dara took Leopold to the wood.
To her surprise he was very well behaved, pausing considerately to enquire her intentions at every turn rather than racing off wildly in one direction or sitting down whimpering and refusing to follow.
Dara thought that secretly Mary must have been training Leopold. He actually looked much better too, as if somebody had been brushing him. Dara had never thought you could make any impression on that coat but in fact it looked quite shiny and his eyes were bright rather than alternately dulled with despair or rolling in a madness.
She sat on a tree trunk and Leopold went sniffing and snuffling but keeping a courteous eye on Dara in case she decided to move. She didn’t move. She sat there with a long daisy, and threaded the heads of other daisies on its stem to make a flowery bracelet.
She hadn’
t wanted to spend any more time with the others. Tommy Leonard had been nice, he said it was bad at a time like this to go off on your own, you needed others around you whether you felt like it or not. Michael said he was going to go up the river and fish on his own. He hoped Dara didn’t think that was rude. She squeezed his arm. She understood completely, as people always said they seemed to feel the same about everything.
She didn’t expect Kerry. This was a part of the wood she had never been with him. It was a place off the main path, a big bank of fuchsia hedge surrounded it. Kerry came in softly through the trees.
‘If you’d like to be on your own I’ll go away,’ he said.
He was still in the dark grey suit he had worn at the funeral. He had opened the collar of his shirt and his black tie was loose around his neck. She had never seen him more handsome.
‘No, no, I’m glad to see you.’ She spoke simply.
She sat playing with the daisies, her hair falling over her face as she bent in concentration. She wore a plain white tee shirt and a denim skirt, changed from the good navy dress with the white collar she had worn at the funeral. She looked very young and lost.
Kerry squatted down beside her. He picked a daisy and started to make a collection of daisy heads on one stem too. For a while they said nothing.
Leopold realised that this was somehow important. He stopped his burrowing and sniffing. He sat politely with his head on one side as if waiting for the conversation to begin.
‘I wish I could do something to help you,’ Kerry said.
‘I’m all right. It’s just so terrible for Maggie.’
‘It’s like being asleep,’ Kerry said.
‘And she wouldn’t be in purgatory or anything. You know, waiting to get into heaven.’
‘Oh Dara, of course she wouldn’t!’ Kerry laughed tenderly at the very idea.
‘Well why were we all praying that she’d be forgiven her sins and soon see God? She can’t be there yet can she?’
‘Where?’
‘Heaven. She’d not have gone straight to heaven unless she died coming out of confession.’