The Lost Souls' Reunion (29 page)

They were the last I was to hear from her.

We sat a long while, the mist pouring in through the open window. The room was bitter cold, but Myrna's fever was high. Though I did not know why, I began to hum low. The humming cooled and soothed her. She was frightened to go on. I spoke to her, through the tips of fingers on a palm, as Myrna had taught me to speak.

The spirit outgrew the body. It was as strong a spirit as I have ever felt, as strong as her bones were weak. Then I saw my grandmother and she took the Myrna that rose out of Myrna by the hand and I cried for being left behind. Her voice in me now. It spoke from a far off place that was closer to me than my own skin, ‘The cards are yours and all that I ever owned is yours.'

The humming began again in the room of its own accord, for a time.

Then all was silence.

I put my heart to the bony chest and found it faint but beating, I put my lips to hers and breathed into her the love and regard I had for her. When I went back into the living room it was already morning, Eddie and Carmel were at the table.

‘Is she gone?'

‘Not gone entirely,' I answered. ‘But she will never be back.'

I spoke without tears. Carmel wept and I went to her and put my arms around her.

‘We will sit with her until she goes,' I said. ‘I will sit with her for a while. Then I have to go. There is something Myrna wants.'

*   *   *

I slept over the body of Myrna and woke when the morning was still not fully underway. I ran to the gates of St Manis. Sister Mauritius had posted the caretaker and gardener to turn me away. I went across the field and tried to enter by the gap in the hedgerow. They had crossed the lawn and waited for me there too.

‘Sorry, Mary Sive. We have the orders.'

As I walked away the wind lifted a little and the humming that had filled the room where Myrna lay now filled the whole sky. All was movement as the wind grazed trees and hedgerows and grasses and threw the sea up to reach the sky. The sun shone on the bare land of winter and the bare land stirred and the gentle humming passed over all and brought with it the message that the growing time was upon us and the bare time of winter was at an end. The humming brought life and death. Death to those who had served their time; life and purpose to those whose time was beginning.

The green shoots of the first flowers pushed through the earth to answer that call. The trees reached deep beyond the cold hard ground into the moist earth below and drank deep from it to push out the new buds of the new year.

All ending and all beginning in this moment.

Growth in the new year is a slow thing, so slow it is almost still.

To the knowing heart it was spring.

36 ∼ Death the Visitor

T
HE CARD OF
white light in black surroundings. Death has come to visit.

*   *   *

Thomas awoke in the afternoon as lunch was cleared away. The men were preparing themselves. This was to be a different day, a day when one of them was going into the ground.

Joe and Margaret were running around, supervised by Sister Mauritius.

‘This man needs a black tie, give him one.'

‘This man has no white shirt. Give him Black's one.'

‘We dressed Black in it, Sister,' Joe murmured.

‘Well, go to the cupboard and get one.'

Thomas watched the men come and go, their startled looks at the change in routine.

He rose and took out his own black suit, his tie and white shirt. His black shoes, saved for special occasions, had a film of dust. He laid out all his garb and he gathered his shaving brush, razor and soap stick. Mauritius met him as he crossed the ward.

‘Where do you think you are going?'

‘To wash up.'

‘For what reason?'

‘Tony Black's funeral.'

‘You are going no place.'

‘You cannot stop me.'

‘I can have you restrained.'

Thomas unbent himself, all stiffness gone. The giant returned.

‘Do not speak to me like I am a child.'

‘Well,' Mauritius was flustered. ‘You have behaved like no child would.'

‘I have that. I have behaved like a man wants to with a woman. I believe if you had behaved as a woman wants to with a man, life would be significantly easier around here.'

Sister Mauritius had no words except, ‘Consider yourself homeless after today.'

‘It will be my pleasure.'

Thomas walked on to the washroom. Later, dressed, he leaned over to wipe the dust off his patent shoes, which had not grown any less dull underneath. The two blurred halves of his own face stared back at him, the drawn limpness on the left, the firm set of sorrow on the right. He could not see his eyes. He looked for them a long while before rising on the first stroke of the chapel bell.

A dozen broken men attended the funeral service of Anthony Black.

The curate from Scarna said the Mass and he was stuck for words when it came to the sermon, because he knew nothing about the man except that he had been a sailor. He talked about death being a harbour from the high seas of life and he heard the hollow nature of his words as he looked at the sea of faces that showed that death was no harbour but the high sea itself and each of these men would put into it soon.

He broke off, then asked if anyone who knew Anthony Black would care to say a few words.

A very tall man in a well-cut black suit stood slowly, leaning on his stick. The curate watched nervously as Sister Mauritius turned from the front row and asked the tall man to sit down again. The man did not falter or sit. Silent Thomas spoke for his friend

‘Tony Black did not lead an exemplary life. He was true to his own character. It is the best way to be and it was the best way for him. He died well. I was with him and he was not afraid. I think he would like to have been buried at sea, but I'm sure he truly does not care where he ends up,' there was a throat clear, ‘once the place has malt, women and tobacco.'

The broken men laughed and Sister Mauritius and the curate shifted in the hope that that would be the end. Thomas had more to say.

‘Tony Black taught me a shared death is easier. We should celebrate his going because it was a release for him. We should celebrate because his life was worth celebrating. But we will not. Because this is a place where people are expected to live and die without celebration. It is to St Manis that we come to die in the company of strangers. No one chooses that and that is not how it has to be. Black was a stranger to me, who became a friend. God bless Black and all here.'

He sat and the curate finished the Mass quickly and the congregation was dispersed.

The coffin was wheeled out to the ambulance to be taken for burial. Thomas followed it.

Sister Mauritius followed him and asked where he thought he was going.

‘That is the second time today you have asked me,' Thomas looked down at her as he spoke.

‘The residents don't attend the burial.' Mauritius felt unsure under his gaze. He seemed to grow taller by the hour.

‘I am no longer a resident.'

Thomas Cave walked down the long driveway and out of the tall gates that had held him in for almost two years and he knew they would not hold him again.

*   *   *

At the graveyard the curate, who had travelled in the ambulance, mumbled prayers and threw soil as the coffin was lowered. He had already begun the walk back into the town by the time Thomas arrived.

Thomas spoke some words to the grave-diggers who were covering the coffin.

They agreed to give him five minutes and he stood, intending to pray and finding he could not. Instead he looked at the state of the large plot, there were no weeds but no care had gone into it. A plain headstone with no words but the names of those who lay there.

Thomas shed tears. He knew Black's was not the worst of deaths, but it was the most indifferent, buried with a single bystander.

Thomas knew now his dearest wish was to die as he had not lived – to die in the company of loved ones who had been given all that he could give them. The sun was of afternoon and yet all around Thomas there were shadows as if the light was that of evening. He saw them when he looked up from the fresh grave into which he had poured his realization and from which he had taken resolve.

He studied the shadows. They shifted endlessly, so that they seemed to occupy the space between them and him. The closer the shadows came the more Thomas Cave realized that he knew not only them, but the light and darkness that formed them. He had created them.

They were images he had taken as photographs, their shadows the negative images that consumed him with all the feeling his existence had denied. Mine and my mother's eyes among them.

We covered his face and form in shadows, whispered and shrieked from everywhere.

We made music out of high notes of laughter mixed with low wails of despair, and all sounds in between. Thomas left Black's grave and the shadows danced before him and followed after him and ran through him as if he had not a body at all to protect his being. Mine and my mother's eyes led the way.

He knew only to follow us and soon he was walking down the wide market street of a grey town with thin sticks of people coming in and out of doorways and not staying long in the biting cold the day was fenced in by. They stopped and stared at him – a man so tall, clad in black with hair as brilliant white as the shirt he wore and walking with the aid of a stick – he must have looked like death himself come to carry off all those that came near him.

The shadows led the way and the shadow music was the only sound he heard.

We took him out of the town on the route that Carmel and I and Myrna had once walked in dead of night. Now it was early evening.

He was afraid that the shadows might lead him astray for his having betrayed their live flesh selves but he knew that his heart would have found the way, even if the shadows had not chosen to appear.

When he walked along the thin stretch of coast road the shadows grew impatient with him, soon they had run on ahead and he could barely see them at all. A car stopped and a man got out to see if he was all right and Thomas stood and thanked him and said he was fine, just a dizzy spell.

Perhaps, said the man, you have walked too far, would a lift be in order? No, said Thomas briskly and did not look back at the man who shrugged and drove on his way.

Ahead, the shadows had come across another car, parked across a laneway. We raced on to surround and wake the all-eyes-and-bones man who sat inside staring at the house at the top of the laneway without flinching. This man looked so hard at the house he could not see us.

We put needles and pins into him and hunger in his belly. And he shook his head and rubbed himself and felt it time to get a drink and something to eat. He had been there all night and day and already the little window cleaner had come down to him and advised him to move on or the police would be called.

So it was that the shadows dispensed with Jonah Cave and sent him in the opposite direction to the one in which Thomas Cave travelled.

Thomas Cave arrived at the bottom of the brambled laneway, the shadows had formed on either side of it, all but for mine and my mother's eyes, which led the way to him, back to ourselves.

And Eddie was the first to see the tall man with the white hair and shirt and dark suit and he, for he was one of the townspeople too, whispered, ‘It's death. Come to get Myrna. Or a civil servant.'

Then he saw that it was Thomas Cave from the home. He called me from the back bedroom. Without a word I opened the door and he walked through it.

*   *   *

He looked at me a long while and I at him. Then I introduced him to my family.

‘This is Carmel, my mother. You have met Eddie before. He cleans the windows at St Manis.'

‘Used to clean the windows,' Eddie spat as he spoke.

What was in the air stopped Thomas from making to shake the hands of Eddie and Carmel. I had fought with Eddie that morning, when he had learned of events at St Manis Home.

‘That's a day's wages a month you've lost me. Now we don't even have you earning money. Where else do you think I'm going to get you a job? There's no one will take you if you've been let go from St Manis! Where else, do you mind telling me?'

‘I suppose, Mr Cave, we might ask you to tell us why it happened that I have lost work and so has Sive?' Eddie spoke gruff and did not look the big man in the eye.

‘You'll hear soon enough,' was all he could get from Thomas.

‘Fair enough so,' Eddie said quietly. ‘I'll just go to the bottom of the lane and see if the lunatic son of yours is still parked there and ask him please move on, seeing as how no one else is doing anything about it.'

‘He is not there.'

‘Well he'll be back soon enough I'm sure and I am sure I won't be told either whether him and you, Mr Cave, have anything to contribute to the running of this house with Sive not going to work any more.'

Eddie shook his head and got his coat, slamming the door violently. Carmel went after him. We heard them walking down the laneway, Eddie shouting and Carmel pleading with him to be quiet.

*   *   *

Thomas and I sat at the table, looking at each other. We had grown used to not touching each other in company. It was a while before he put his hand out across the table to me. I took it.

‘It would never work if I came here,' Thomas said.

I nodded and said, ‘You have come through my door. I have someone I want you to meet.'

We went into the back room, it was here the shadows had congregated having driven Jonah Cave away. Thomas saw the shrunken figure in the bed.

‘Myrna,' I said to him. ‘The woman whose image did not develop.'

Thomas looked at me in disbelief, then he looked at the shadows and knew I was not lying.

I took his hand and walked him to the bed. I put our hands on Myrna's breastbone and pushed the last of her breath out of her. She opened her eyes to witness us and gave it willingly.