“Is that the arm?” Sean asks.
Abbey leans forward and left to get a better view. “I think so.”
And then, without saying anything, Sean reaches out and takes Abbey’s hand. The palm soft and warm, smaller than his. He doesn’t look at her. Waits for her to let go. His heart hammering away in his chest.
“Sean.”
He doesn’t look over. Thinks that if he ignores Abbey, she’ll hold on.
Her voice is quiet. “Sean. Look at me.”
He lets go of Mary’s collar, turns to face Abbey.
“You’re very sweet. But,” she squeezes his hand, “there’s nothing—” letting go of his hand, pointing back and forth between the two of them. “I’m sorry.” She screws up her face as if she wishes she didn’t have to say it. Sean shrugs and stares at the ground. After a minute Abbey takes his face in her hands and kisses his forehead. Feels how flushed he is before she turns away.
Dermot is aware of the thirty or so pairs of legs behind the ropes. Every now and again someone calls out to him, asks where things are at, but he doesn’t look up. He’d seen Abbey somewhere behind the ropes, Sean and Mary beside her. Angus
and Tomás were watching for a while before they headed back into the crowd. Earlier, he’d run into Liam in the parking lot. They’d nodded hello. Inevitably, Dermot thinks, the boy will run into Deirdre. They’ll meet somewhere in the middle of the bog, or back in town, or eventually she might take up a pen as Sophie had done, and write Liam a letter.
He’s yours. You have a son
. And what happens after that is up to them.
About two centimeters down, Dermot thinks he has something. The roots thicker in one spot so he has to use his fingers to gently pull them apart. He calls Jack over to take a photo. Brushes another layer away. Realizing all of a sudden that he’s found the tip of the head. Rust coloured tresses come up like lost vines, the start of a braid evident.
When Michael has the arm up to the shoulder, when the top of the head is uncovered, when they realize her legs are curled up against her, that underground she is resting her chin on her chest, they stop, look up. Word is out. The crowd has come back and people jostle, trying not to fall over the perimeter ropes that surround the pit. Everyone wants to see a face, but all they can see is hair, a thin slip of her forehead. Michael makes plans to cut the wedge below her, to try to hack out the whole square of peat she’s resting in. “Her knee’s bent anyway. It’s getting down far enough that’s the concern.” They guess at safe parameters, mark off what must be ten centimetres from the soles of her feet.
Last Tethers
MICHAEL and Gerry, both of them exhausted, look at the part of the head that Dermot’s uncovered. Jack, on his knees, takes three photos. Una stares down at the skin of the woman’s forehead. Dermot keeps working. Pulls away another layer of peat, wants, against reason, to see her face. To see her unencumbered, come up from the ground, like a body coming up in the bath.
Abbey watches Dermot from behind the ropes, sees his right hand gripping the brush handle, swinging back and forth in an even rhythm. His eyes never leave the ground. When Abbey met Dermot at the Old Bailey, one of the first things he’d said to her was, “If I had it to do over again …” But he never finished the sentence because he knew there was no going back. And Abbey saw something wonderful in that, in him having lived a life that he could sit with. She loved how he knew it wasn’t ideal, how he’d have done it differently, but how he accepted it just the same. And the fact that he didn’t rally against it comforted her. But now things are different. The world has
opened up and he’s going in to meet it. For the first time, Abbey sees in him the possibility of moving on. That he might go back to Dublin. Find Rory. Stand up to it, after all.
When Dermot has uncovered the dead woman’s eyes, brushed away the layer of peat over them, Abbey has to look away. Wonders, then, if this woman is watching—if she’s standing somewhere in the crowd, if she’s witnessing her own exhumation as if it were her birth. Abbey’s grandmother died giving birth to Frank—that was something Frank had wanted Abbey to know. He said, once, that every woman he ever knew had left him; his mother, Stella, was simply the first.
Abbey believes that when Stella Shaw gave birth to Frank, she knew he would wrestle with her dying all his life. But even in that last instant, the baby’s head just through, she probably didn’t regret his birth; was ascending the stairwell, could hear the clamour of those who had gone before her in a room somewhere above. The baby suddenly apart from her—a boy, Frank, being held up for her to look at, although her eyes were already reeling. Stella standing at the far door, the same way this woman in the ground must once have done, knowing it would open for her, and without so much as a sound, going in.
Looking around, Abbey sees a clutch of familiar faces from Spiddal, a few dozen men and women from other towns, and Dermot, who is intent on the digging, who hasn’t looked up to find her. The breeze is coming over from the nearby lough and Abbey, tired of being jostled in the melee of people trying to get a view, sets out towards the lake. “I was given up.” That’s what her father had said, time and time again, and if
she listens now, if she concentrates under the din of voices, she can hear him saying it. “I was let go.”
The lough is choppy and grey and the wash of waves against the shore leaves spray that settles in drops on Abbey’s shoes. There’s a small treed island about a quarter of a mile out in the water. A stone wall there, ruined. And a wood fence that starts out from the pier before it disappears in a copse of trees. Abbey sits on the edge of the lake contemplating the company that is her dead father, and so, when Frank sits down beside her, Abbey isn’t frightened. She sees him dip his bare feet into the shallow bank of the lake. Wiggle his toes. But the water doesn’t ripple. He looks over at Abbey and tries to smile. He reaches out to touch her, but his hand never arrives. Instead he just stares at her as if to say he’s sorry.
“Whatever happened to Mom?” It’s what Abbey has always wanted to ask. Frank shrugs as if to say maybe she’s still in Ontario, standing across from the movie theatre where they left her, that maybe she’s here in the space between them, that maybe she’s buried in the ground. He shrugs again as if to say,
I’m dead and I have no idea
.
One night, a month before the fire, in a state of atonement, he’d told her:
This isn’t what I thought my life would be. I’m sorry I wasn’t a good father
. He’d spread his hands on his lap and looked up at her. Maybe all this time, since the funeral, he’d been trying to remind her of that. Trying to tell her that more than anything, he just didn’t want to be left alone.
When Abbey was ten, eleven, twelve, they’d played hide and seek. Frank would hide in out-of-the-way places, in the fold-out couch, or in the storage attic that was above the trap
door inside the closet. He’d leave the closet door open so that it would be easier for Abbey to find him, had even called her name to bring her closer. What Abbey remembers now is how often he’d come out before she’d given up, as if he was afraid of the moment she’d throw her hands up in the air and stop looking.
“I’m sorry.” It’s all she can say. But she means it. Sorry she stood on the grave, sorry he’d told her everything and she hadn’t really listened, sorry she used him as a reason to run when running away had always been her inclination. And in that instant of apology, Abbey regrets everything and nothing all at once. Realizes we have no choice in it, that we are surrounded in the muck of our history whether we like it or not. Like the woman in the bog. Like Dermot, like Frank.
Abbey takes off her boots and socks and dips her feet into the lough. The water is cold. Waves lap over her toes. She looks across to the Island and its fence and then she looks behind her, hoping to see Dermot. But all she can see is the slope of the bog that leads up to the excavation. She looks over to where Frank was sitting, but he’s gone. The waves crest and fall. The birds on the Island trill and go quiet.
In the cordoned-off area, Dermot sits back on his knees, his temples throbbing. The nerves up and down his left arm tingle. Looking down into the bowl he’s dug out of the peat, he sees the woman’s forehead, the thin needles of her eyebrows, the caved-in nose. Her hair steeling out around her.
“I’ve uncovered more of the face,” Dermot says.
Michael climbs the ladder out of the pit. Comes over, stands beside him.
“Jesus. Jack, come here with the camera.”
They stand there a minute before taking photos. The woman’s eyes squeezed shut, thin traces of roots woven over them like a veil. The fine arc of her eyebrows above.
Michael is the first to speak, says, “Cover her back up with a thin layer of peat. We can’t have the skin exposed.”
Dermot stands up and reaches over to the pile of peat he’s just wiped off her. Then he leans down, looks at the folds and creases of her skin, the protrusion of cheekbone under what looks like leather. Her forehead is smooth, fine wisps of hair still evident. Dermot wants to salute her. Instead he buries her again under the wet muck. A mediaeval woman in a bath of peat, roots grown out of her ears, out of the hole that was her nose. A leather cinch around her neck like the strap Michael’d shown him. Dermot thinking
I know what it’s like. All those years
. Putting a layer over her for safe-keeping and then another. Knowing that sooner or later she’ll be rid of it all. His hand over her. Over the way she is perfectly herself. The peat covering her eyes, her nose, her lips. Layer after layer until she’s gone again.
Standing at the Close
DERMOT takes Abbey home and neither of them speak. Sean sits in the back of the car with Mary, and the girl puts her dirt-stained fingers to the side window. She smudges circle shapes onto the glass, laughs at what she’s done. Michael is in the truck that is taking the block of peat, the body of a long dead woman, towards Dublin and the National Museum. When they finally wash the white roots of bog plants from her lips, when they pull the turf from her mouth as if it is a dark tongue, they will stand back and wait for her to speak. They will lean forward against all reason, and she will say nothing.
When Dermot begins to pack his things the afternoon after the dig, he too is silent. Abbey sits on the bed waiting for the reel of thoughts that will lead her to her father, even though she knows they are gone.
Standing at the close of the field, Sean tests the last post and kicks away the stone beside it. He watches it roll a few feet into the grass before it settles. The good weather
has arrived, the days are already longer. He looks towards the cottage and decides he won’t come back. Then he looks towards Spiddal and is struck by the fact that things are changing day by day. The construction still underway. The village expanding. Behind him the crows caraw, lift up from the clothesline when Dermot enters the yard.
When Dermot passes by Sean, he reaches out and pats him on the back. He keeps going then, with Flagon at his heels, the sound of a bulldozer droning on the far side of the bungalows. He walks with his boot laces undone, with dried dirt still caked on his hands; he walks, and only at the bridge does he pause long enough to look back, to see if Abbey is following.
The old church is basked in sunlight so that even the cider bottles tossed in the corner, the plastic wrappers scattered about, even the green spray-painted graffiti that’s gone up, seem to have a glow about them. The stagnant pools of water have gone, the goat willow climbing the nave wall has grown, its leaves flitting about in the breeze that drops down through the ceiling holes. The walls rebuilt with small stones are holding, the chapel closed in on three sides. Dermot sits in the first pew and the wood creaks as it did when he went to mass as a boy. He sits and he closes his eyes, feels the sunlight warm his face. When he gets back he will call and have the property put up for sale. He’ll pay the boy for the fence. He’ll ask Abbey to go with him to Dublin although he knows she will not have him. He could tell her that he’s yet to become the man he wants to be, but she will know better than to believe him. Already he has a sense that time is waning, just as he’s come round to figuring things out.
Walking out of the old church, Dermot hears a hundred doors close behind him, he hears voices as if down a long hallway, he hears his own rasp of breath, the clomp of his footfall as he makes for the bridge. Abbey will be coming from the cottage, she will be crossing the field on her way to him. This is how it goes between them, this much is certain.
Twenty feet ahead of Dermot, Flagon starts barking. It’s when Dermot comes through the trees that he sees Abbey, raises his hand. Abbey stops, waves back, smiling. They hold still a minute and the breeze settles down around them, the long grass standing up, the clouds out over the ocean fixed firmly in place. They walk towards each other then and the world goes back to its means. The cows swat flies with their tails, the wire is nailed to the last post, the dead watch the living. Call out, even if no one chooses to hear.
Acknowledgements
MANY thanks to Lynn Henry, a wonderful editor, and to my agent Carolyn Swayze for finding this book a home. To George McWhirter who waded through the early drafts with great insight. To Jack Hodgins for the same. Thanks to Kerry Ohana and Angela McGoldrick. To everyone at Raincoast Books. To the National Museum in Dublin. To D for his notes and generosity. To my mother for braving the bog. And to Glenn, for his patience, humour and wisdom.
On
this page
, the first epigraph is from Dermot Healy’s poem “Rosses Point” in
The Ballyconnell Colours
, published by The Gallery Press. The second epigraph is from Michael Hartnett’s “Anatomy of a Cliché,” published in his
Selected and New Poems
by The Gallery Press.
AISLINN HUNTER was born in Belleville, Ontario, and moved to Dublin, Ireland, for a few years before making her home in British Columbia. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. She is the author of two previous books,
What’s Left Us
(Polestar, 2001), which was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the ReLit Award for Fiction, and
Into the Early Hours
(Polestar, 2001), which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poetry. She lives in Vancouver with her husband Glenn and their dog Fiddle, where she is working on her forthcoming novel,
The World Before Us
, to be published by Doubleday Canada.