Tonight she’ll work the dinner rush and then stay on to sling pints on the pub side of the restaurant until one. At least now she has the afternoon off.
When the bus pulls up, Abbey gets on and pays her fare. She’s going to the Hugh Lane Gallery. Then she’ll head back to Angela’s and get changed for work. People head upstairs. Abbey takes a seat behind the stairwell, next to the window. O’Connell Street is bustling. A group of teenagers in track pants and dark jackets sits around a fountain on the divide. Across from them, pigeons flock to a man throwing crusts. A young girl standing outside Beshoff’s taps two plastic straws against the stone wall.
The bus pulls out and Abbey closes her eyes for a second, pictures being back in Windsor. She remembers the Famous Players movie theatre on Ouelette Avenue at the end of the mini mall; the bars that line the strip near Riverside to draw in the drinking crowd from Detroit; the smell of yeast for twenty blocks around the brewery; how guys who worked the line at Ford and Chrysler would cruise the main street in their new cars, trying to pick girls up from the driver-side window. And there was the McDonalds on Huron Church Road, her birthday party at Chi Chi’s.
Frank had moved Abbey to Windsor from the county when she was eight. Before that they lived in Woodslee on a
quiet concession that ran between Highway 98 and the 401. Across the road there was a farm with cows. Abbey’d gone over a few times to help milk them. Most of the nearby crops were corn or hay. Towards Leamington, twenty kilometres away, there’d be tomatoes. Her father liked to look outside at the farmhouses and fields that dotted the road, say things like “no one here but us chickens.”
Before they moved to Windsor, Abbey used to ride a school bus from the house her parents rented to St. John’s School fifteen kilometres away. In the morning she’d stand at the back window, scarf and gloves on the square bamboo table next to the door, to watch for the bus coming, small as a toy truck, down the back road. It took five minutes for the bus to get to her stop from the time she saw it crossing the old highway. Time enough to kiss her mom good-bye, to pull her lunch out of the fridge, check her bag for all her books, push open the screen door and make the trek down the driveway. From there it was across the street to the other side of the road. She stood next to the mailbox and waited. Some mornings if Abbey was running behind, her mom would watch the back road for her, sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee in her hands, eventually yelling, “Bus! Abbey!” And Abbey’d have to hurry, packing books and a gym shirt into the school bag, her mom shouting “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” because Frank had the car and if Abbey missed the bus she’d have to stay home from school. Her mother’s hand hitting her on the backside as she gathered her things; the radio on top forty. Abbey would run out of the house with her jean jacket pulled up on one arm, the other sleeve trailing behind.
Then she’d hear the clap of the screen door behind her, her feet kicking up gravel as she ran down the length of the drive. She remembers how sometimes she ran slow, hoping the bus would whizz by her.
There were things Abbey should have noticed; this is what she realizes now. The way everything but the bus—number 602 orange and given to backfiring—how everything but that bus and Mrs. Larevee, who drove it, was unpredictable. Sometimes there was breakfast set out, sometimes not. Even though Frank was usually up early to go to work, there were times her mother would snap at her to keep quiet, stop stomping around because Frank was still in bed. There was a whole month like that once, Abbey coming home after school to find her dad passed out on the couch, four
PM
, shoes kicked off on the floor, one arm thrown over his eyes. Abbey asking “Is Daddy sick?” and her mother answering, “No, he’s just sleeping.”
Abbey can still picture her mom down to the smallest detail: t-shirts and jeans, bleached hair tied into a pony-tail, her face made up. A brown leather necklace with a yellow feather on the end of it. An arced scar in her left eyebrow. Abbey’s mom made TV dinners. Took her on trips to the beach. The three of them would go to BelleRiver on Tuesdays, to the Charcoal Pit for gyros and burgers. She paid for Abbey’s first skating lessons. She helped her pick out a kitten at the SPCA. But, for all that, she wasn’t really there.
A year later when Max, Abbey’s cat, went missing, Abbey wanted to post notices on the board at Zehrs. She’d made an ad herself. Her mom promised to call the paper but never got around to it, was too busy doing other things. There was a
constant stream of strangers trekking through the house, and late-night parties where Abbey was sent up to bed to lie there, listening for hours to the music, the sets of feet trampling up to the bathroom across the hall from her room. One night a guy called Dave walking in to Abbey’s room before finding the light switch and turning around.
Before they moved, Frank held a family meeting. Paced around the kitchen. Abbey and her mother sat at the table.
“The rent’s going up the first. We’ll have to find somewhere else.”
Abbey’s mom lit a cigarette. “How about back to the city?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“An apartment wouldn’t cost much more than this place and you’re driving in anyway.”
Frank looked over at Abbey and she smiled up at him.
“She’s in a good school.” He nodded towards the upstairs hallway. “And she’s got her own room.”
“There’s no work out here.”
“Work out of the house.”
“People won’t come here for a hair cut.” Abbey watched her mom exhale, cough. “And the sink’s too small.”
“There’s Ned’s place up the road, it’s five hundred a month.”
“It’s a fucking shack.”
Abbey smiled at her mother’s swearing and her mother winked back. Frank ran the back of his hand over his face, rubbed his moustache back and forth. Abbey was looking at him to see what he’d say. He looked at Karen imploring her to help out. She shook her head.
——
The Gallery is on the far side of Parnell Square, a banner over its doors. Abbey walks towards it thinking about the old house, about moving to the apartment that her mother picked out. About unloading the last boxes and turning to find her gone. Abbey remembers sitting on those boxes the whole night, waiting for her mom to show up, how Frank refused to start unpacking. Sometime around three
AM
he ordered Chinese food. Eventually he put Abbey to bed in what would be her room, gave her his sweater for a pillow. When Abbey woke up the next morning, even the cutlery had been put away. What happened to him, she wonders now. What makes a person decide to haul themselves up by the bootstraps and carry on?
Four rows of large brick Georgian buildings make up Parnell Square. Under “Hugh Lane” Dermot had written
Charlemont House / Patrick Scott retrospective / Maid Combing her Hair / There is No Night
—the last underlined three times. A well-dressed couple carrying a guide to Dublin goes past Abbey, through the double doors, holding the right side open for her. She puts her hand on the door and follows them in. They drop some coins in the glass donation box. The first room is filled with stained glass; a woman wearing a walkman stands in front of a large window, her face reflecting red and yellow. In the next room, Patrick Scott’s giant orange sun. Abbey turns around a few times to take in all of his paintings. Hears the sound of her shoes on the hardwood as she leaves the room. A sculpture of a horse by Degas stands in the hall outside. Then, in the third gallery, a large canvas. Abbey walks right up to it. Finds a bench in the middle of the room and sits down. This would be the one Dermot wanted to show
her: a man in the foreground with wide eyes. Dark rocks to the left and right of him. The ghost of a horse—quick white brushstrokes—standing in the field. The night sky painted a thick blue. A fixed distance between everything in the frame: the man, the horse, the sky. And behind them all, a quiet. And the dark swell of the sea.
II
Excavations
A Drink at the Door
THE muck of the bog is still on them, on their boots, in their cuffs, in the lines of their hands. Car after car, the Bord na Móna workers come down the N59 from Oughterard, tires spinning off the last of their mud. Lough Corrib to their left, a row of beech trees wagging in the wind. Behind them, the mountains appear and disappear, depending on the turn of the road. The clouds threaten rain. Two miles out of town the cars pass rock island, old Aughnanure Castle, an empty souvenir stand. Then the fields begin, some with barbed wire, others with stone fences. A herd of sheep, their backs to the road, bare their red and blue tagged hides to the drivers. Starlings cling to the power lines. A horse and rider circle a paddock. After a while, the houses begin. Then the shops. Bait and Tackle. Larkin’s Fiddles. Ride Away Bike Repair. A sign for Doris’ Day Spa that points down a side road.
It had been a rough afternoon at Maam, the weather constantly changing. Around three, the spoon harrow had bucked up behind the tractor. Tomás felt it, turned
the engine off, stepped down from the cab to see what he’d gone over. A brown stump visible under the milled crumb. Peter and Angus shoveled it out in twenty minutes, hauled it over to the side of the field, the oak’s roots like antlers. A line of stumps along the trench. The first set of eleven fields giving them a rough go. It was a bad draw to get this kind of ground. The lads in the next unit were already milling their second set. Sometimes the “pay by results” system worked to a unit’s advantage, but this year Tomás felt sure the bog was against them. Friday the tractor had broken down and Peter was up at the main office when it happened. Didn’t answer his pager. Had most of the tools. Liam came over to give it a look but he wasn’t that good a mechanic. Two hours of work were lost, and then the rain came, so they called it a day.
Tomás’ crew last year had been one of the best he’d ever had. Angus and Liam were on it, and a mechanic named Robbie. The fields were easy, the work went straight ahead. The Wetland Unit came and did their surveys and turned up nothing. The crew went from milling to ridging to harvesting in three-day cycles. The weekly tour of the pubs was a pleasure and the lads were easy to be with. Everything had moved along as it should.
Outside Galway proper, the traffic lights start. Angus signals out the window with his right hand and the lads turn their indicators on to follow. They hang a right onto the asphalt expanse of the Corrib Hut parking lot, shut their engines off and get out.
“What did ye’s want?” Angus pulls out his wallet.
“Bud,” says Liam.
“That’s grand,” Peter agrees.
“Gin,” says Tomás.
“Harp,” says Egg.
Money changes hands. A car pulls up into the space beside them. Two girls get out and smile at Liam. Angus heads for the door that reads “off license,” goes in without turning around.
The lads lean against the side of Tomás’ truck and wait for Angus to come out with the drink. Then they’ll be off to the wake, to raise a glass for Eileen McGilloway at the house in Spiddal. Deoch an doras, a drink at the door. Liam lights up a smoke. Tries to remember the last time he saw Deirdre. Summer, maybe Salthill—the time they’d gone down to the arcades then back to his flat in Galway. Or maybe it was the walk in Cleggan. There’d been nothing after she’d gone back to Dublin, not even a call to say hello, though he did get a “Cruise the Mediterranean” brochure in the mail last October. The girls come out the pub door. The older one, maybe eighteen, is wearing a short skirt and denim jacket, too much make-up. The other carries two bottles of cider under her arm. The one in the skirt unlocks her car door and turns to Liam.
“Would ya give us a light?” She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket. When he leans forward with the lighter, she looks up at him, the cigarette in her mouth, brown eyes flecked with yellow. After he lights it she stands back up like she’s waiting for something.
“Off ya go, now,” Liam says, watching her settle into the driver’s seat, start the engine, back out.
Peter walks over to his beat-up Escort and pulls a duffel bag out of the back seat. Takes a clean shirt out and holds it
between his knees while he strips off the dirty blue one he’d been wearing. Then he bends over at the waist and runs his hand through his short brown hair. Wipes his face with the dirty shirt in his hand. Puts the clean one on—an Irish football jersey from the Cup in ’90. Banging the heel of his right boot against the asphalt, Peter looks over at Liam.
“Are you heading home to change?”
“Na. Thought I’d go in like this.” He pulls at the bottom of a dirty beige shirt.
“Fair enough,” Peter replies, knocking the heel of his left boot against the pavement, watching the mud drop off.
The Wake
THAT evening the McGilloway house is run through. The whole village has come out for the wake. Eileen McGilloway had sometimes held letters up to the light and read them, later giving herself away in conversations, but she was generally admired. And she had seemed as permanent a fixture in Spiddal as the old church, the pier, Hughes. The last thing Eileen said to her daughter had come over the low hum of the phone line: “Now the bread is splitting, I have to go.” Deirdre barely got in “good-bye” before the click and silence settled over the receiver. She’d made great bread, Eileen McGilloway, and there were other things too. She could knit, recite the old stories verbatim, she had a famous stew with a secret ingredient she’d yet to hand down.
The living room is full of talk, of men in suits that haven’t been worn since Gerry Folan’s wake last winter, of women in skirts or dresses. Margaret Keating rearranges the food trays, fills them back up. Conneely is on the couch by the fireplace, his face red from the drink.
Over by the mantle, a group of teachers discuss Irish history curriculums.
“I’d not mind seeing that taken off the list.”
“What else is there?”
“Sullivan.”
“That man couldn’t find Beal na Blath on a map to save himself.”
“We should all be after O’Ceallaigh. That’s the ticket.”