Rosie O'Dell (6 page)

Smothered snorts rose from the mourners, and the old lady looked around and
nodded and smiled her acknowledgement. Two male colleagues of Professor Joyce
O’Dell’s from the university, familiar to me from the funeral home, now
approached and towered awkwardly over Gram,
looking at each
other. Then they crouched and spoke gentle words of encouragement that she come
along with them to the car.

Gram O’Dell listened impatiently for a few seconds and then shouted, “Oh shag
off, ye frigging dirtbags! It’s the likes of ye up there in that Department of
English who are encouraging my boy to write that filthy poetry all the time,
every syllable of it down in the gutter.” Fiercely, she twisted her tiny body
back and forth, delivering sharp and painful blows to their faces with her
elbows. “I told him long ago to stop writing those dirty verses,” she said in a
lower register as the cowed academics slunk from her holding their heads. “And
he puts that face on him that gets him off with murder every time and he says,
‘And just how would you happen to know my poetry is so dirty, dear Mother? You
wouldn’t be reading it on the sly, would you?’ leaving his own mother without a
word in her cheek. His own mother! What was the little frigger like at all!” She
shook her head with a big smile of remembrance. “Now where was I before I was so
rudely interrupted by those two porno prof types? Oh yes, Gudrid the Viking slut
and the little brat Snorri O’Dell.” She raised her face and held forth again.
“Sure, it’s a known fact that the Irish were over here in Newfoundland centuries
before those Viking pirates came across. St. Brendan himself sailed across the
wide Atlantic Ocean in a tiny curragh when your famous Norseman was still only
raping and pillaging Ireland and happy enough to have that little bit. But I
digress. Now you may well ask yourself assembled here today, why is she prating
away like this about names? Sure, the old bag is not even Irish and didn’t she
turn around and name her own son, Joyce? But that was not me. His father went to
work and did that. I wanted to name him Adrian after the popes, and me a
Protestant, for the love of God! But oh no, that man, his father, who was born
and lived and worked all his life over here in Newfoundland without so much as
ever setting a lawless foot upon the old sod, goes ahead and names his son
after—how did it go?— ‘the greatest writer produced in this century not just by
Ireland but by the entire human race, ’ so that this selfsame son could come
home crying from school because the boys were saying, ‘What kind of a name is
Joyce for a boy? What are ya, a fruit?’ and his father would say, ‘Go back and
show what kind of a boy you are: rip their jeesly heads off and shove them so
far up their arses that no one would even notice they were ever removed from
their shoulders in the first place.’ Ha-ha-ha. And people wonder where his son
Joyce got his poetical talent! And now these two little girls are left right at
the worst age without their own dad. But then again, how long could our
merciful Father in heaven be expected to put up with the way my
boy Joyce was forever carrying on?” Here, old Gram O’Dell raised her two tiny
fists in the air, tilted her head till she was looking straight up, and
screeched, “Are ya happy now, ya bastard in the sky?” It was harrowing. Then she
lowered her head and softly explained to the audience as an aside, “That was
James Joyce’s term of affection for God, ‘the Bastard in the Sky.’” She turned
her eyes abruptly up again and raised her voice many decibels, “I’ll give you
happy, ya big bastard bully in the sky, when I get up there next to you in a
little while. I’ll scratch the eyes out of that inflated holy head.” Now she
folded her body forward as if she’d been punched in the stomach and started
wailing like a banshee over her knees, “The boy was brazen, yes! He was fit for
anything bad on the go, yes! But he loved his friends and his fine words and his
finer whisky and, finest of all, his wife and his two little girls, and if
that’s not good enough to curb the vengeance of God Almighty”—here her crescendo
reached its shrieking apogee— “what in the name of bloody goddamn hell
is
?” Now she stopped and remained as still and quiet as a statue.

Mom slowly exhaled. At last it seemed to be over. But no one looked sure. Then,
while the crowd stood there wondering what to do next, Rosie touched my arm and
stepped away from me and walked by Mom and Nina and Dad and Pagan to her
grandmother’s side. There she bent a little and said in the quietness, “That was
really good, Gram. Dad really liked that.” The old woman’s ravaged face turned
towards her and spread into a smile that hinted at the beauty that had caused
fights among rival men, Rosie had told me yesterday, on the sandy beaches of the
St. Barbe coast sixty years ago. Rosie pulled one of Gram’s ancient claws out
from where they were jammed between her bent knees and held it, yellow and sere,
in her pink and cream hands, and gently led her away. No one else stirred for a
few seconds until Mom put her arm around Nina O’Dell’s shoulders and steered her
towards the path out. Nina looked behind for Pagan, and seeing her beside me,
she clutched Dad’s arm and sobbed as she walked disconsolately away from her
husband deep in the hole in the ground. It was a sight that branded itself on my
brain, the huge crowd coming alive to follow the young girl leading the old
woman by the hand, both walking slow, one bent and crooked and halting, the
other upright and straight and sure.

“
DO YOU KNOW THAT
English doctor by the name of
Rothesay?” Mom asked Dad at the supper table.

“No, but I know of him,” Dad replied. “One of my partners did
the accounting work for the doctor who retired and sold his practice to him two
or three years back. But I’ve never met him personally. Why?”

“He was at the funeral home yesterday.”

“Was that the tall dark handsome guy I saw hanging around you?”

“If only!” laughed Mom. “He came over to say hello to Pagan and I happened, by
a stroke of good fortune, to be there with her. It was the first time I’d talked
to him. I’d seen him at the General last year, but I’ve never seen him once at
the Janeway where I am mostly these days, which is strange.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like kids.”

I was about to spit back at Dad, “Don’t be so foolish. He was really nice to
Rosie and me.” But I let it pass.

“Nina said she’d never met him before yesterday and he told her he’d only met
Joyce once in his life. I saw him at the Basilica and at the cemetery too.
Doesn’t that strike you as odd for a busy doctor who was not even an
acquaintance?”

“What better way for a new doctor to establish himself than to go to big
funerals and cluck over the corpse about how he’d still be alive if he’d only
had the sense to be his patient?”

“An ambulance-chasing doctor. That’s a new one. Someone should tell him that
over here doctors don’t have to chase ambulances, ambulances have to chase
doctors. How come he’s here in Newfoundland, anyway, do you know?”

“Here’s a shot in the dark. Moolah. They can make way more money under medicare
here than under their national health scheme, so they’re all coming to Canada.
The country is maggoty with them. When was the last time you heard a doctor
being interviewed on the national news who didn’t have a limey accent?”

I forgot for the moment there was something about Rothesay’s effect on Rosie
that I hadn’t liked yesterday, and vented my irritation with my dad: “How come
you always think everyone is only out for themselves all the time? That Dr.
Rothesay came over to talk to Rosie, and he was really nice to her. He admired
Mr. O’Dell and his poetry greatly, he said, and was sorry he didn’t have the
chance to become friends with him before the tragedy. What’s so strange about
someone being nice?”

They both annoyed me further by exchanging a smile before Mom said, “Maybe
you’re right, Tom. It’s okay to wonder about people’s reasons for doing the
things they do, but maybe we were being a little too cynical.”

Dad reached over and put his arm around my shoulders. Then he
rose to his feet, gently squeezing the nape of Mom’s neck with one hand and my
shoulder with the other. “I’m going to nip down to the office. After those
surreal scenes at the funeral parlour and the cemetery, I need to come down to
earth with a bankruptcy file.”

“There were some hairy moments, all right,” said Mom. “But Nina and the girls
managed to get through it okay. Especially Rosie. I’ve never seen such poise and
self-possession in a young person like that.”

My mother’s opinion contrasted with Rosie’s own earlier that afternoon. Sitting
slumped on the side of her bed, she had looked lost and defeated. She murmured,
without lifting her eyes to mine, “I’ve got to find some way to stop this
hurting inside me, Tom, or I’m going to end up doing something really weird like
Gram. I’m going to go right around the bend, I just know it.”

“I would too,” I had replied, “unless there was someone…” And I made her a
promise that I was going to be the one person she could always and forever
depend on, no matter what or where or when. She looked up and nodded, trying to
smile, and I sat down on the side of the bed next to her. She leaned against me
and I put my arms around her and held on to her for a long time. Sometimes I
felt no movement from her at all, and sometimes I felt her shuddering as she
wept anew.

Since arriving home for supper I’d been meaning to tell my parents the decision
Rosie and I had made for me to stay here in St. John’s, but I hadn’t had the
nerve. I was braver now that their talk had started to bug me, and an
opportunity came as Dad left the table. “We’re going to have breakfast at
A&W tomorrow morning on the way,” he said. The plan made with Brent’s
parents was to drop me back to Twillingate for the week that Mom and Dad were to
be in Bonne Bay. “It’ll save your mother the trouble of cleaning up before we
leave,” concluded the gallant knight.

Mom said evenly, showing no gratitude for the magnanimity, “Save
everyone
the trouble of cleaning up before we leave.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Dad, I’m not going back to Twillingate tomorrow.”

“What? You have to. We’ve only got a one-room cabin. What are you talking
about?”

“I’m staying at Rosie’s house. She needs someone her own age to be with her and
help her get through all this.”

A hint of a smile played at the corners of my father’s lips. He looked
at my mother. She glanced at him and turned to gaze upon me, her
face a picture of the joy and anguish of motherly love. I could tell they were
sharing this thought: How darned cute was this heartbreaker of a son of ours at
all! They were really starting to piss me off. I stood up and walked angrily to
the kitchen phone. “Anyway, it’s all decided. I’m calling Rosie to tell her I’m
coming over.”

“All decided? What the hell are you—? Wait now, wait now.” Dad turned to Mom.
“Have you and Nina talked about this?”

Mom shook her head, and asked me, “Where were you planning to sleep
there?”

“I’m bringing my sleeping bag over. There’s a couch in the downstairs den.
We’ve got all that figured out, Mom.”

“Let me call Nina and see what’s happening.”

It was clear from the telephone conversation that Rosie had just told her
mother of our plans too. After some palaver, Mom hung up and said to Dad,
“Rosie’s best friend is at their cottage on the Terra Nova River. That’s a
hundred and fifty miles away. And most of her other friends are scattered around
everywhere. So we think their idea is a good one.” She looked at me. “I’ll call
Brent’s mother, my sweet, and explain everything to her.”

“No, Mom,” I said. “I’ll call them. It was me who decided this.” I dialled,
feeling their worshipful eyes on me. Where, they were thinking, did they get
this paragon? They couldn’t get it through their heads that it had nothing to do
with them, that the last thing on my mind was impressing them. God! I couldn’t
wait till Rosie and I grew up and moved away together.

Brent was not pleased with my desertion. “I was really counting on you coming
back. And so was Dad. He likes having you around more than me.”

“No he doesn’t, Brent. And he’ll have more time with you now.”

“Is this because you think that if that bear chased us I would have run faster
than you and let her catch you instead of me? I wouldn’t have, Tom. I would have
stayed and helped you fight her off.”

“I know that, Brent.”

“Then why? You told me you couldn’t stand that Rosie O’Dell. And now here you
are moving in with her. My best friend frigging lied to me. You liked her all
the time, Tom. I can’t even depend on my best friend’s word.” He almost sounded
like he was about to cry.

“Yes, you can, Brent. But this suddenly came up. She needs someone her own age.
Anyway, we’ll be getting together again in just one week. Mom and Dad are
picking you up on their way back. I’ll tell you everything then.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going back in there with them. Shag it now.
You’ll only be hanging around with her all the time anyway.”

I made a half-hearted attempt to change his mind, but was secretly glad when I
didn’t succeed. I wanted to spend the weeks with Rosie, uninterrupted. I was a
bit surprised at the vehemence of Brent’s reaction, though, and felt bad over my
perceived betrayal. It would be decades before I realized that the little prick
had had a covert love going for Rosie all during that time too. It was a good
thing, I would surmise, that we hadn’t in fact gone to the dump that morning. My
last sight would have been Brent’s arse and rocketing heels disappearing in his
dust as I was being gnawed to death.