The Visitors (21 page)

The day before, I’d driven Zoë to the airport. I had stayed at her
place the night before that. During the forty-minute drive we listened to music. The airport drop-off was chockablock with traffic and people.

—Good-bye, dear James.

—Good-bye, dear Zoë.

We kissed. I watched her move gracefully through the crowd. Behind me the car horns beeped but I didn’t stir till Zoë disappeared through the revolving airport door.

The kitchen was pitch dark. My fingers were moving in the grooves of the red-brick wall. Close to ten on the stove clock. I stood on the rug in the middle of the room and looked toward the large windows and the sliding glass door. Everything out there was in the dark. The charred smell of meat and charcoal. Then a light switched on behind me. I turned. He was sitting at the end of the couch, in the beam of the floor lamp. He had changed the t-shirt. The long feet were bare and the light shining on them made me see Saint Francis’s feet in that picture. He looked up at me and said hello. I said hello back. On the coffee table before him were a beer bottle and a paper plate with a half-eaten hamburger and crushed potato chips.

—There’s cheese on some of the hamburgers, he said.

—I’m very hungry, thank you, I said.

I walked over to the table and helped myself. Then I sat at the other end of the couch. He went to the fridge. He came back, put a beer before me, and sat back down. I said I’d had an odd sort of dream. I’d been having them the past few days. But I’d said it only to say something. And I added that a woman I was seeing and some other people were in the dream. I didn’t say who the other people were. He asked did I want to tell about the woman. I said we were very fond of each other, but there was someone else on her side, but whatever she and I had was lovely, and I didn’t want or need or expect anything more. He and I didn’t talk then for a while. The stereo was playing a song that was popular during those years we lived in Dublin. Another song that his sister and I loved began to play. We used to dance like mad to it on
the paint-splotched tiles in her flat. I’d bought the single for her. One Saturday afternoon I sat on the top deck of a 16 bus and clutched the small square plastic bag. Before the song ended I was trying my best not to see his brother lying dead on the cold steps of a London church. Then a New Order song from the early nineties came on. When it ended I asked would he mind playing it again. No problem. He loved the song himself. And I took my sweet time eating the two cheeseburgers.

Save it for another day

It’s the school exam and the kids have run away

When the song ended the second time, he turned the stereo off. He adjusted the dial on the central air and went to the sliding door. He held his hand above his eyes and pressed his face to the glass.

—Not a soul out there, he said.

—You’re expecting someone, I said.

—Not a one, he said.

He sat back down.

—When Tommy rang from London with the news, it was late in the day, he said. —I was down at the home place, and I called the mother and we talked for a long time. She was more worried about me than she was about herself. And then I got into the car and drove up here, and I sat here with the light off all night. I brought a twelve-pack and two packs of smokes, and I kept thinking about things that could have been done to save him. Times I might have rung him, or tried to get him help, but mostly I was thinking about him when he was this little fella I saw every day. Fat, shy, but willful as fuck. He’d cry at the smallest thing. And I hated him for that. He was too soft. And I hate him for what he did to himself, and I hate him for what he did to me and to us. You know what I mean.

—Go on, I said.

—The father used to say to me when I was young, Kick back at them, Kevin, the priests and the teachers, kick back at every fucking
one of them and run away laughing as fast as your legs can carry you. There are some few things they have to tell you, he’d say, but don’t ever let them tell you what to do, and don’t ever let them fool you into thinking that you’re one of them. The job they get paid to do is to make you one of them. Did your father ever say things to you like that?

—He cherished obedience, I said.

—So the mother would get mad at the father for saying those things. She’d say to him not to talk to me like that. What kind of life do you think he’s going to have if that’s the way he’s to go about it? But my father would laugh at the mother and say, He’ll have a great life, a great life he’ll have. I could hear him saying it when I sat here that night, saying it with a smile on his face, after coming in from work—a great life, Nora, he’ll have. The paper beside him resting against the milk jug and the sugar bowl. Cutting the food into small pieces. The pool of HP Sauce at the side of the plate. You’re ready to see something, you are?

—Whatever you like, I said.

—You’ve had enough to eat?

—More than enough, thanks.

I stood on the other side of the counter. He wrapped the uneaten hamburgers and put them in the fridge. He came around the counter with two beers and opened the door next to us. He switched on the light. I walked behind him, down a short carpeted stair that wound around once. There was the smell of fresh paint. When we reached the landing, where the back door was, he stopped and raised his head.

—Listen to it, he said.

—Listen to what? I asked.

—You didn’t hear the bird?

—I heard nothing, I said.

—Don’t worry, you’ll hear it, he said.

—I hope so, I said.

At the end of the short flight of stairs he turned on a light. We stood in a hall and faced two shut doors. To the far right another door led to
the garage. The door to our right was his bedroom door. He said the stream sounded the sweetest from that room. The trees outside his window tempered it. He opened the room on the left and pulled a light string. He walked inside, stood aside, and asked me to come in. At first I thought it was your ordinary tool room, he being the sort to show you those, but the tools on the wall looked like they were from a museum—his father’s tools, arranged on hooks, like his father had arranged them. Or the way I recalled them. The plywood desk built up on cement blocks. The old red bus seat. On the wall, the photograph of the hurling team. I’m not sure if it was the one I saw on his office wall in Boston.

—Everything like it was, I said.

—That was all I wanted from there, he said. —Nobody went near that shed with years. There was a hole in the roof. The dampness and the rain destroyed things.

I stepped closer to the tools.

—You remember the evening I was there with the father? I asked.

—I don’t, he said. —My father let so few in there. Your father was let in.

—You were kicking a football against the back wall, I said.

—The father would never allow that sort of behavior, especially if he was in there. He’d send us running. But have a gawk in there.

He was pointing to a box on the desk. I walked over and lifted the flap.

—His notebooks, I said.

—Rain coming through that hole ruined most of them. That’s what left.

—You read them, I said.

—No, but you will, he said.

—And what makes you think that? I asked.

—Because that’s the sort you are. And they’re your present for coming to see me.

I touched the notebook on top. Nothing was written on the cover. I took my hand away and stepped back.

—He wrote the dates on the wood, I said.

—I don’t remember that at all.

—Either way, I can’t take them.

—You have to take them.

—But they’re none of my business.

—They’re no one’s fucking business anymore, he said. —I knew you would be into them. But I don’t want to hear anything in them. Not one word. I loved him more than anyone else in the world, but I never once wanted to see what was inside his head.

—When did he write them?

—At night, he said. —A lousy sleeper. He’d wander around the house and check and recheck the front door and the back door and the windows when we went to bed.

—When my father got up from his knees that’s what he did, I said.

—My father spent very little time on his knees, he said, but after he checked the door and the windows he’d take the flash lamp and slip quietly out the back door and down the path to the shed. I’d kneel on the bed and watch him from the bedroom window, the light of the lamp going back and forth on the path. And the light from his cigarette flaring up when he took a drag, and the low rattling noise of the chain when he pulled it quietly through the handles like not trying to make any noise. He only opened the shed door wide enough to slip in. Then the door closing and the light going on in the shed. The light shining in the cracks of the wooden door. Sitting at night in the shed he built for himself. I don’t think anyone else did that where we grew up.

—That’s for sure, I said.

—Odd fucking life, ha! But he’s a long time gone from this world.

—He is, but I don’t think I should take them.

—Jimmy, don’t insult me.

—I must try my best not to do that, Kevin.

—Put them in your room. Read them in the morning. I’ll be gone for a few hours. You’ll meet my daughter tomorrow.

—From Boston, I said.

We were looking at each other. He at one end of the desk. Me at the other.

—Yes, from there, but another daughter. I met the mother in a night class at Bunker Hill Community. A class on real estate. I sat in the seat behind her.

He pressed his finger hard on the left side of his neck.

—She had this small black mole right there, he said. —She hated it. But when I sat behind her I used to stare at that mole till it put me in a trance.

I turned to a useless, battered mallet, then a useless, twisted awl.

—She’s married, he said. —We’re fair-enough friends. But I am very close to the daughter. She was the first one. So you’re not into the college life anymore?

I walked over to the doorway and looked in at him.

—I’ll get over it. I will. We go the fuck on, like always, I said. —But when I first started there was nothing like it. You stripped off this old coat that someone else made for you and made you wear for too long, and there was nothing like sitting in the classroom and talking about the life in books. I’d work jobs nights and weekends, I made friends, I had a wild time, but maybe the best part was the library. I’d walk up and down the shelves, pick out books at random, stack the books high on a desk, and sit there turning pages, stopping off in some places, not in others. It was all a chance. I knew that. I’d learned that much, but never before was I so content as when I sat there with no money, no fucking confidence, in a town and a country that was then so foreign to me. And all of them vanished. Every one of them. And that was what I wanted. It was like when I was a child and I’d do my best to hide from the work, and the father and mother never wanted to see you with a nose in a book before dark. Take your nose out of that book and
find something useful to do! Can’t you see all that’s to be done! Are you that blind! And hiding from Anthony, who’d come along and box the book out of your hand—

—I’ve no idea what Anthony ended up doing.

—An auctioneer down in Cork. Doing brilliant in their boom.

—We were never friends like, but you know that, but the two of us did a job once. We lifted the twenty or twenty-five pallets of fertilizer from a creamery in north Kerry. Anthony drove one of the tractors. I drove the other one. It was a very long drive. There were a few of us involved. One long summer’s evening and night. Big Johnny was the one who was behind it. He organized the tractors. And he paid us for it. We needed the money. None of us had any, but we hid the bags of fertilizer all over his farm. Hid them behind hay bales. One of the pallets broke and we’d to lift every bag by hand, like lifting bags of sand—

—I don’t forget how heavy they were—

—But the sun was up. I was walking home across the fields and the Ryans were hunting in their cows, the other Ryans. I don’t know if they were related to Big Johnny—

—They have to be—

—But I lay down in the ditch till I knew the cows were gone. The grass was long in the ditch. Ryan passed right by me but I was as still as a rock. If he saw me he’d wonder what the fuck I was doing lying in his ditch at dawn. I forget what I told the mother and father about why I was out all night. But Big Johnny had fertilizer enough for two or three years.

—Big Johnny had more land than anyone else.

—Big Johnny thought he was Robin Hood riding through the glen. He said he did it because of the creameries closing, but he was the one who profited from it. No jobs anymore on the miserable building sites in England, lads, he’d say. Are ye going to spend yer lives on the dole, lads. Look what the Tans did not so long ago, lads. Look at what they did to the men in Dublin, lads. Look at all who had to go abroad, lads.

—A fine history teacher lost in Big Johnny, I said. —I thought he was a saint. The rosary beads out at Mass. Waiting in line for Confession. You’d never think him—

—But you were always so naïve, Jimmy.

—I’m glad I traveled all this way to hear that from you.

—I had a small fling with Big Johnny’s daughter. The nun. We met a few times before the two of us left.

—An adventure down in the glen for you, I said.

—But Jimmy, my daughter is at that age when she’s mad asking what it was like when I was young and who was I friends with. I’m bringing her here tomorrow afternoon. I told her she was going to meet my very best friend from those days. It’s only a joke but you might have to pretend a bit—

—So that’s why you paid for me to come here, I said.

I took the stairs in a few steps. I crossed the big room and walked through the sliding door to the deck railing. A warm night. A wet wind rising. The full moon shining on darkened trees. Brilliant indifferent stars and the din of the stream. The sliding door opened. His footsteps came briskly toward me then stopped.

—I’m very sorry about Seamus, I turned and said. —But I’ll head back tomorrow.