The Visitors (26 page)

Rat poison. Nora had made enough beef stew to last for the week. Roger was turning hay and said he was way too busy to come in and eat. Seamus offered to take the stew out to Roger, and each lunchtime Seamus left the house with the bowl of stew and the bread and went to the lean-to at the back of the shed and stirred the rat poison into the bowl. Then he added salt. Roger loved the stew. And Roger loved salt. He’d clean the bowl in no time. Sop the gravy up with bread. Didn’t even bother getting down from the tractor. Seamus handed the bowl and the bread up to him then stood and waited. But on the fourth day
Roger told Seamus to tell his mother to go handy on the salt. Still Roger wiped the bowl clean and shoved the bread into his mouth and handed the bowl down to Seamus. Hours later, Roger drove the tractor into the ditch. A local teenager found him. Roger was paying the teenager to help him out with the hay.

—He told me this in about five minutes, Jimmy. And then he hung up on me.

Kevin called the number again. No answer. He called the other number and talked to the Donegal woman. She said Seamus walked out the door a few minutes ago. When she saw him again she’d let him know his brother rang. A day later, Tommy rang Kevin to say that Seamus was dead.

—So that’s what the bold Seamus says he did, Jimmy.

He drained the can and went back to the grill. I followed him. He picked up the fork and lifted the lid. He poked the chicken pieces. His shoulders were hunched, like those of an old man, and I watched that hollow place between a man’s shoulder blades.

All the time in the world, Miss Una. All the time in the world.

He shut the lid then took another can from the cooler. He opened it and turned to me.

—But, Jimmy, the drugs made him mad.

—That’s what it was, Kevin.

—Drugs and vodka. We know what they do to the head, Jimmy.

—We do, Kevin, that’s what happened.

—So you agree with me, Jimmy.

—Of course, Kevin.

—Take Deirdre to the stream. I need to find out what Walter is up to. Mind her, won’t you.

—I promise you I will, I said.

I headed toward the stairs. He said my name. I turned back to him.

—Sorry about the clock, he said.

—I thought it might bring some comfort—

—You keep it, Jimmy. It’s your father’s. That one’s yours.

—Fine, Kevin.

—You’re the one I could tell it to, Jimmy. We ended up here.

—We did, Kevin, was all I said.

He opened the sliding door. Anton was singing a Neil Young song and running the water. Washing lettuce and tomatoes. Slicing cucumbers. He slid the door shut and stared at me through the glass. I stared back. Faces that revealed nothing. And then a glare of sunlight on the glass caused him to vanish. But I knew he was still there and looking and I kept looking. And my mind went to him crying in his car. Tess was telling him to go away. Go away for good. If you took away all that other stuff, pity was all you had left. Pity that made us equal. Pity that made him braver than I ever let myself admit. Pity because of the weight of them. Shame in myself.

I rolled my pants legs up. We each sat on one of the big rocks. We were facing the bridge. The sunlight was low in the trees whose shadows trembled in the rolling water. On the count of three we dropped our feet in. Deirdre laughed and screamed then pulled her feet back out. She hugged her knees. Water splashed onto the stones. I kept my feet in. The hem of the sunflower dress was soaking wet.

—On summer evenings, Deirdre, when I was your age I went to the river with my younger brother and two sisters.

—Was Daddy ever there?

—Sometimes your daddy was.

—Was it like this, Jimmy?

—The water was not fast, Deirdre. There were a few rocks on the bank. The river divided a hay meadow. It drained the water. The cows drank from the river when the grass grew back. This was after the hay was cut. And there were no big trees. Just a few bushes.

A cracking noise came from inside the trees near the bridge.

—Jimmy, that might be the goat.

—Should we go and have a look?

—Let’s stay here for now, Jimmy.

—Here is fine, Deirdre.

—Daddy and you were never best friends.

I looked into the water. The shadow of a hawk appeared. I looked up. The hawk sailed high above the trees.

—Did your daddy tell you that?

—I just know. I have friends.

Anton laughed loudly. Then her father laughed.

—Your daddy and Anton are having great fun up on the deck. Is your dress dry?

—It’s almost dry, Jimmy.

—Your daddy and I were never friends.

—I’m right, Jimmy.

—Indeed, Deirdre.

A noise again from inside the trees. It was closer this time. Deirdre gripped my shirtsleeve.

—Someone’s there, Jimmy.

—A deer, Deirdre. Maybe the goat.

She let my sleeve go.

—Your daddy is going through a very hard time right now.

—That’s what Mommy says.

She grabbed the shirtsleeve again and pointed into the trees across from her.

—Did you hear it, Jimmy?

I shaded my eyes and stared. Things buzzed. Birds were singing. Insects skated above the water. I asked Deirdre to change places with me. I said it was my turn to sit next to the trees. And so we did, and I told her to put her feet into the stream one more time. She laughed and shivered. Finally, she said the water was awesome. I asked if her dress was dry. She said it almost was. And then we heard it.

—The whippoorwill, wow, Jimmy.

—It’s early this evening, Deirdre.

It sounded again. Up near the bridge. We looked there. And I pointed to the hawk and told Deirdre to look up. The hawk moved in wide circles and we watched it until it vanished over the treetops on the far side of the bridge.

—Daddy said he dated your sister.

—He told you that.

—In the car this afternoon. Do you miss her, Jimmy?

—More than anyone else.

And a noise in the trees again, like rotten branches being stepped on.

—There’s someone in there, I’m sure of it, Jimmy.

—The deer or the goat, Deirdre. No need to worry.

I watched up and down. I listened.

—We should go back to the deck, Deirdre. The midges are getting bad.

—Let’s stay a few minutes more.

—Whatever you like, Deirdre.

—I want to visit where Daddy grew up.

—You will someday.

—Will you be there?

—Probably not.

—But you must write me.

—Promise you I will.

Then a loud crash inside the trees.

—The deer. That’s all, Deirdre. They come down here in the evening for water.

—It’s not deer, Jimmy. I know it.

—Only a deer, Deirdre, but your dad is expecting us.

—Let’s go, then, Jimmy.

—I’m very hungry, Deirdre.

—Me, too, Jimmy.

—Don’t tell your daddy about the noises in the trees.

—I won’t. I was just scared. I know it was only a deer.

—That’s all. Or the goat. But we don’t want to worry your daddy.

—I understand, Jimmy.

—I know you do, Deirdre.

—I don’t want to go back in the morning, Jimmy, but I told Mom I would.

—Then you must go back, Deirdre.

—You’re right, Jimmy. I must.

I said we should walk through the yard. I threw our shoes over the unfinished wall and stepped over it. Deirdre stepped onto it and held out her hand. I held it and she jumped down. I picked up our shoes. Sunlight bloomed red on the long porch window. We walked in the dappled light. Walked in the shadows of the treetops. And we laughed in the pillar of midges. The grass was warm and soft. Smoke from the grill poured out over the deck. Like smoke on a battlefield when the battle is over. The chicken smelled delicious. He appeared at the corner of the deck. He called his daughter’s name, and when we walked into his shadow he waved and Deirdre skipped ahead. She called, Daddy! Daddy! He laughed and called her name again. And he called mine. I waved and called his then looked down at the grass. Zoë was going through the airport gate. Tess was walking her dog along the riverbank in a midland town. Una’s shadow darkened her single bed in that flat on Drumcondra Road. I would have seen her shadow on that bed many times. But the first is the one that stayed. And my mother was watering her yellow flowers with a plastic green can that my father bought in the Market Yard in Tipperary town the same day he and Michael bought the clocks. I used to fill that can at the yard spigot and bring it to her in her garden. And then I looked up because he was telling us to hurry on. The chicken was well ready. Anton had made a smashing salad. And when he waved again he looked like someone on the deck of a ship that was slipping out of the harbor, and his daughter and I were in that crowd on the shore. Weeping and waving back.

Kevin had dropped Deirdre off, and was back at the house with over an hour. Pizzas were delivered from Cold Spring. Kevin paid. We ate them at the picnic table. Anton ate with us, and when he went back to the wall Kevin picked up the seashell necklace Deirdre had forgotten.

—How careless of her, how selfish.

He spoke those words in a glum way, but then he put the necklace down and said he was so excited about the two-hour hike we were about to take. He’d taken it a few times on his own. The morning after he’d heard about Seamus, he got up at seven and did it. Uphill and downhill on a winding path through the trees. Then a shady, boggy laurel grove. After the grove, a broad dry riverbed that led to hilly meadows where a herd of Friesians grazed.

—Sounds like home, I said.

—Strawberry Fields, I call them, Jimmy.

—And nothing to get hung about, I said.

He reached across the picnic table and patted me on the shoulder then said we’d head out when Walter rang, though he wasn’t waiting all day to hear from him, but he was terribly pissed at him for not ringing back last evening. Kevin had rung his foreman that morning. He did before he and Deirdre got into the car. The foreman said Walter hadn’t shown up for work. Kevin rang the foreman again when he arrived back, right before he ordered the pizzas. Still no Walter. The foreman also said Walter hadn’t done the job he was supposed to do, but then Kevin stopped talking about Walter and began to laugh about
something Deirdre had said in the car. I forget what that thing was. And I forget one other thing about that afternoon, but in the seven years that have passed since then I’ve asked Deirdre on the phone many times, So you don’t remember the thing you told your father in the car that made him laugh? But Deirdre doesn’t, and she also forgets what she and her father talked about on the two-hour drive back, but she knows they had a great time, they stopped in Danbury and ate burgers and fries and drank Cokes under an umbrella, but Deirdre says she wishes she remembered the last thing her father said to her at the rest stop outside Hartford, when she got out of the car—her mother’s car was pulling in a few spaces up—but Deirdre never forgets the noises in the trees when we sat on the rocks in the stream, and she says those noises came and went in her head when we were eating supper on the deck, and everyone was in high spirits, we were waiting to hear the whippoorwill, her father and I even took bets as to what time we might hear it—when he went inside and came back out with the whiskey bottle, we did—except that none of us heard the whippoorwill again, and Deirdre never forgets taking off the necklace and leaving it on the picnic table. But I had the necklace. I mailed it to her. Six days after that afternoon, I did, after she and I had talked on the phone for a long time, but her father’s laughter drowned out Walter’s feet on the gravel path and the deck stairs, though Walter was always so quiet. And it was me who saw him first. I did the moment he stepped off the top step. I happened to be facing that way. My face changed. Kevin was looking at me, still laughing then, still talking then. He saw the change and turned to look where I was looking.

—Well, speak of the devil, Kevin said.

The tattered backpack was strapped high on Walter’s back. He wore the good shoes he’d worn on our drive with Zoë, and one of the shirts that Una gave me. Which shirt it was is the second thing I forget. Kevin stood up from the picnic table. Then I did. Kevin took a few steps toward Walter, stopped a few feet from him, and asked Walter if he’d like a slice of pizza, he’d heat one up in the microwave for him. Walter said he was grateful, but he wasn’t hungry, and then he pushed
up the bill of the Indians cap. He pushed it up high so that his forehead was exposed.

—So you didn’t bother going to work today, Kevin said.

—I’m at work, man, Walter said.

He took off the backpack and laid it on the deck floor. He unzipped it a few inches, reached in, and took out a wrinkled brown paper bag. The sort you put your lunch in. He left the bag there at his feet, straightened up, and put the backpack back on.

—Killed your bird, man, he said.

—You killed what? Kevin said.

—You asked me to deal with the bird.

—I didn’t say to kill it.

—What other way do you think there is, man?

—Well, there must be more than one of them.

—Get them others for you some other time.

—So what’s the story about that other job?

—What about it?

—I talked to my foreman. That’s your what about it.

—Won’t do it, man.

—You get paid to do it. So you have to do it. Don’t get on your high horse with me.

—Two kids. A woman. Didn’t understand her, man. Don’t know Spanish. Woman was crying, man. A kid in the crib. Kid was crying. She said the kid was sick. Couldn’t work ’cause of the kid. Could say the word
sick
—

—We’ve a work order next week to install a new kitchen and bathroom in that apartment. Not a penny rent paid in three months. I looked after you. Didn’t I? Don’t I? And who do you think you are that you don’t have to do your job? What fucking country do you think you’re living in?

—Ain’t doing it, man.

—There ain’t no ain’t about it. And I ain’t asking you, I’m telling you.

—Ain’t. And you’re the devil, too.

—A figure of speech, Walter. A joke. Not an insult.

Kevin lowered his head. He shoved his hands into the khaki pockets and began to pace back and forth between Walter and me. He paced like a caged dog. Walter’s eyes followed his. Then Kevin stopped directly in front of Walter, so that I couldn’t see his face, and Kevin raised his head, turned sideways, and with his left hand pushed his hair back from his forehead, the way his father pushed his John Garfield fringe, pushed it back, but he didn’t have his father’s fringe. Didn’t really have a fringe at all, his hair being short, but pushed it madly a few times, then shoved that hand back into his pocket, shrugged, and, in a cheerful way, he asked Walter if they might finish this conversation inside the house.

—Okay with me, man.

Kevin turned to me.

—Why don’t you go for a walk, Jimmy. None of this business is yours. It won’t take me long. I’ll give you a shout when it’s over. We’ll go on that hike.

—I can bury the whippoorwill, I said.

He said nothing, having already turned. He was opening the sliding door. He stepped inside. Walter walked in front of me and stepped inside. Neither a look nor a word. Like I was not there on that deck. His sunburned face, the high forehead, and the noble nose I’ve never mentioned. Kevin slid the door to, without looking out. I heard him tell Walter to sit on the couch. And I heard him ask Walter if he’d like some coffee. He was making some for himself. I never heard Walter’s reply, but the truth is that I wanted to get off that deck. And I was trying terribly hard not to think about the wrong and the right. And you still don’t talk about the wrong and the right. You don’t to Tess, Deirdre, Stephen, or Hannah, but what you did when you headed toward the deck stairs was tell yourself it wasn’t about wrong and right. It was really and only about what people wanted, and people believed they deserved whatever the fuck it was they wanted. Americans did.
Americans like me and Kevin Lyons—but you told Zoë. You did because Zoe didn’t know any of them. And Zoë would understand. And so you and Zoë sat on her deck on weekend evenings that subsequent fall, and the maple leaves dropped slowly around you and turned red and yellow on the deck floor and you both smoked pot and drank whiskey. And one night after too much of those you confessed to Zoë that you didn’t know anymore which part of it was the hardest for you to bear. The part when Walter took a gun out of his backpack in that front room and killed Kevin with one bullet to the head and then killed himself with one to his own. Or the part that you will never tell the others. Their row on the deck. What Walter the lunatic refused to do. And Zoë leaned over you and put her arms tightly around you and kissed your head and said, James, Walter was crazy. He’d lost everything, James. Crazy and violent, James. You were never really a part of it, my dear, you just so happened to be standing on that deck. And I admit I’m just happy you weren’t in the room, my dear.

In so many words that’s what Zoë said.

Zoë. Sweet Zoë. A name I then used to say quietly to myself. And I still conjure up Zoë. In the secret life, I do. Zoë, who at the end of that fall semester quit her English studies at the university, broke up with her boyfriend in Austin, and moved back east to live closer to her mother and father. Zoë enrolled at Fordham Law School. Zoë fights now for those on Death Row. And you quit the studies soon after Zoë did, but you stayed on in that town. You became an English teacher at the best local high school. A professor at the university who liked your work put in a good word for you. He and the high school principal were racquetball friends. And the week after you were offered the job, you met Emma on a Sunday afternoon at a book sale in the public library. She was holding four fat English novels that were written before 1900. You had three books on gardening. Emma looks a bit like Zoë in the face. But otherwise they are not alike. And not too long after you and she met, you left that flat on West Washington Street and moved in with Emma, who teaches math at a high school outside the town. And
two years later you and Emma bought a house in the town. A blue two-story with three bedrooms, an unfinished basement, a roof and a driveway that need repairs, though there are lovely old shutters on the windows, a wide deck out back, a backyard that you both wish were bigger, but on all sides the maples shade it. And in what feels like the most contented of times you stand at the deck railing and stare into the splendid maples. And what you see then are glimpses of what you never did see. Seamus Lyons is prying open a tin of rat poison with a soup spoon in the lean-to at the back of his father’s shed. His hands shake when he sprinkles the poison onto the stew. Tess and Kevin are sitting on a bench on the deck of the Holyhead ferry. A cold wind blows stinging seawater onto them. Their arms are around each other. And Walter unzips the backpack, reaches his steady hand in, stands calmly up from the couch, and levels the gun at Kevin. Kevin laughs. You must be fucking joking me, he says. And those words you imagine to be his last. And you bite your lip and turn from the deck railing, walk into the house, and stand next to Emma, kiss her, wipe down the countertop. Whistle while you unload the dishwasher. Add a little water to the rice cooker. Set place mats and silverware on the table. Change the music. And while doing all this you and Emma are talking. Though you are never talking about what you see when you stare into the maples. No. Friends are coming over for dinner. And that house wasn’t blue when you bought it. You painted it a light blue before you moved in, and after you moved in you dug and planted a flower garden in the far corner of the yard. You never mentioned to Emma why you did any of that. Either way, Emma was delighted with it, but on that warm August afternoon I picked up Deirdre’s necklace from the picnic table and dropped it into my pocket. Then I crossed the deck and picked up the brown paper bag and headed down the deck stairs. It was on my mind to walk down to the wall and ask Anton how the work was going. No. What was on your mind was to go down and tell Anton there was aggro between the two men in the house, and it was making you a bit nervous. I had paused on the middle step, was staring down at the
sunny gravel. The reason I paused was because I wanted to go back and tell Kevin that the shirt Walter was wearing was a present from Una on my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday. But then you imagined Kevin looking at you like you were bonkers. Interfering.

—Why don’t you go for a walk, Jimmy.

I stood on the gravel path. Sunlight through the trees made patches of the yard grass a vivid green. The grass was still flattened from where you and Deirdre had walked from the stream the evening before. Anton was lightly tapping a stone with a small hammer. His shirt was off. His back was to me. Lines of sweat ran down it. And I felt it wrong to disturb him. And so I turned to the miles of trees behind the house. The goat was grazing at the edge of them. It raised its head and stared at you. Then it bounded into the trees. And so I headed toward them.

I was standing in the fire pit when I heard the first shot—a big fire pit, perfectly round, with crumbling walls—and I was lifting out rocks that had fallen off the wall. The shot didn’t sound the way I thought a shot might. It sounded like a beer can when you tear the ring back. Though I knew immediately what it was. And I was running toward the house when the second shot was fired. But then I stopped. Stopped, panted, swatted at the insects, stared into the quiet trees, and then went back to the fire pit. When I finished flinging out the rocks I gathered up armfuls of withered leaves and flung them out. The goat stood a few feet away. It chewed and stared. Anton’s voice had echoed by then. My name shouted three times. But I kept at what I was doing, and for a minute or so I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that Walter and Kevin had stepped back out onto the deck. The whole thing was sorted out. Beers were opened. Cigarettes were lit. But there I was, on my knees, digging a grave with a flat sharp stone. The fire pit had no floor, and I dug through the layers of ashes from fires lit in the past. It took about fifteen minutes. It wasn’t hard. I had this fierce energy for it. A square hole. Ten by ten. Twelve inches deep. I pared the walls with the stone until I was satisfied that they were straight. I wished I had a spirit level with me. And when I was done I stepped out of the fire pit
and plucked a few maple leaves and the goat was still there and still looking at me when I knelt again in the fire pit and layered the grave with the leaves. I opened the lunch bag to the sound of the sirens. I took out the whippoorwill’s body. It was about half of a body. No head or neck or shoulders. He’d blown those right off. Blown them off the evening before by the stream—but you go back and forth on that. Some days you think him, not the deer. Not so on other days. And when and if Deirdre brings it up you always say the deer—nevertheless, dried black blood on dull brown feathers. The body fitted the grave perfectly. I scraped the clay back in with the stone. I stamped the clay with my hand and put some more maple leaves on top and put the digging stone on top of them. Sirens still wailed. Then up from my knees and out of the fire pit. I said part of a prayer. One my father recited on his knees. I might have said more of it but I recalled only a part. The goat was gone. I headed into the trees. Away from the house. Hearing only the birds and the insects. Sunlight flashing through the branches like it did on the first day. I was thirsty. I might have drunk a beer. And I’d forgotten the cigarettes. Then the trees were behind me and I was standing near the edge of a wide ravine. I had no idea how long I had walked. I stepped right up to the edge and stared in. Sharp rocks, roots, bushes, and, far below, the thick treetops. I felt dizzy but kept on staring. The goat appeared a few feet away. It planted its hooves on the edge and looked out. It had no fear. My mother is walking through the field behind the house where I grew up. My father is at the top of the field. He is mending a fence next to the sycamore tree. We played in that tree when we were children. My father built a swing on it. Tess asked him to. My mother is taking my father a mug. The handle of the mug is broken off. She walks in a hurry. She forever does. The mug holds a raw egg and a corkful of whiskey. My mother took this to my father every day when he was working. My father is wearing his woolen pants with the suspenders. His shirtsleeves are rolled up. There is tangled white hair where his shirt is open at the neck. My mother is wearing an apron. Her hair is up in pins. It’s August. And
they talk about whether the rain will or won’t hold off. My father looks at the sky and turns to my mother and says there’s no fear of rain—there’s no fear of rain, there’s fear of rain, was the way he used to put it—and he drinks the contents of the mug in one swig and hands it back to my mother and puts his hand into his pocket and takes out a box of matches and his Sweet Aftons. He lights one. They talk about hay needing to be brought home from the meadow where the river is. She has jobs waiting in the kitchen. It’s close to milking time. And she looks down at me and asks me kindly to go and turn the cows in. I can’t remember what her face looked liked. Can’t remember, but I stepped back from the edge of the ravine. Stepped back, unzipped my pants, and pissed over the edge, this long and lovely piss into nothing, while thinking about those who turned away from people and places. Dreamers. Recluses. Fools. Artists. Saints. Queers. Misfits. Lawbreakers. The goat was gone, for the last time. I turned back. I told myself to not forget the clock and the notebooks. And I didn’t. I stopped for a while at the fire pit and looked down at the grave. When I came out of the trees a heavyset blue-eyed policeman walked quickly toward me and abruptly held his hand up. Three or four more policemen were standing on the deck, which was wrapped in the yellow tape. Police cars parked around the house like boats at a marina. Spinning sirens making no sound. I told the policeman I was visiting the guy who owned the house, and that I knew Anton. The policeman shook my hand. He was Anton’s first cousin. Anton was at the morgue. He’d told his cousin about me. Said I must have gone hiking right after lunch. Then the policeman looked down, kicked at the grass with his right foot, rested his hand on his gun, looked up, and said that the body of the guy who owned the house was found on the large rug in the middle of the room and the other guy’s body blocked the sliding door. They had to cut the glass out of the sliding door to get in. Gun was in the other guy’s hand. And I turned from the policeman’s flashing blue eyes to the deck and said that it was the most beautiful house I’d ever been inside.