He called on me before he left town, Dr. White did. A courtesy call, he said, to tell me that he was moving on. I knew already but I pretended to be surprised. I wished him well and said I would be sorry to lose him as a colleague.
"You'll find somewhere more suitable," I said.
"Yes, I'm sure I will," he said.
"And you have a nice manner, which is what it's all about," I added, to praise him.
"Which is what
some
of it's about, certainly, Dermot," he said.
I winced as I did every time he was familiar like that. But I don't think it showed. I offered him a drink but he refused.
"It won't last, of course, Dermot, it can't. Would you like a little bit of advice from me before I leave?"
To humor him I said that I would. After all I had run him out of town. I could afford to be gracious.
"When the next young fellow comes in, Dermot, make him your partner, sell this house and take an office in Chester's clinic, go into semi-retirement, marry Hannah Harty, go and live in that big house of hers. It's better that way than a big malpractice suit or one of your old friends thinking you had been negligent."
He stood up, impudent young pup, and left without looking back.
I thought for a little while about what he had said. There was no wisdom in it. None at all. And what was this that he was babbling about—Chester's clinic? Chester had been organizing some kind of a medical center, a ludicrous place with expensive machinery where people could waste time and money. They were even going to have rooms for aromatherapy or some kind of New Age nonsense. And what a mad time he had chosen to do it! Just when a new road would come to take the patients straight into Rossmore from here. As a project, it was doomed before it even began. That was nothing for me to worry about.
People round here had their feet on the ground, they wouldn't go for this kind of nonsense all in the name of Danny O'Neill, some loser whom none of them could remember. But one thing was definitely clear and was much more important: my name was definitely up with poor Hannah Harty's. That was something that must be nipped in the bud. She is planning to make me a fancy salmon dish in pastry tomorrow. Better ring her now and tell her I'm not free.
Everything is going so well now, it would be a pity to complicate things.
Chester's Plan
I had always promised my Irish grandpa, Danny O'Neill, that I would go to Ireland but I didn't make it while he was alive. He used to tell tales of his home in Doon, which was some miles from Rossmore. And of the huge Whitethorn Woods and how there was a holy well there where miracles had happened. But somehow I never got to Ireland when he was alive. There was too much else to do, like get an education, and make a living.
My own father, Mark Kovac from Poland, had been a carpenter but he had TB and was never strong, and so, as the oldest, I had to support the family. I used to say to my mom that life would have been a bit easier if they hadn't felt it necessary to have nine children. But she only laughed and asked which of them I would send back. We worked hard, got good grades at school and we each got a job from the moment we were tall enough to stack shelves in a supermarket or collect cardboard and fold it in neat piles.
And I had some luck and met a banking guy who offered me money to start my own building contractor's business, and then I was able to give jobs to all my brothers and sisters, and I put my father on the board. He was so delighted to see mark kovac & family building contractors on the trucks.
I didn't need to put my own name on the company, I
knew
it was mine, and it looked more established somehow to have the father of the family on it anyway. Gave us credibility, a pedigree.
My father's people had all left a village in Poland that didn't exist anymore but my mother's father went on and on about this lovely place in Ireland. So when I was fifty I decided to reward myself with three months' vacation.
I had never married. No time, really. It sounds kind of hopeless, I suppose, but I never thought of it like that. I was too busy getting everything up and running in the business and now that that was done I found I had waited too long. My brothers and sisters were all married with children, and so I had plenty of family life around me if I needed it.
But then my doctor said that I was suffering from hypertension and therefore should take it easy. After Grandpa died, and there was all the Irish music at his funeral and the talk about Rossmore and the woods and everything, I got thinking about his country and I decided it might be a good time to go to Ireland and have a rest there, away from the business.
But at the same time, since I wasn't a person who was used to doing nothing, I could investigate this idea I had of building a tribute to Grandpa O'Neill. Something that would show to the people of his native place that his life and his traveling to America had all been worthwhile.
Everyone thought this was a good idea, and they assured me that Mark Kovac & Family Building Contractors could manage to stagger along without me.
"And maybe you'll even find an Irish colleen over there," my mother said. I thought she'd have to be a fairly long-in-the-tooth colleen to fancy me, but I said nothing like that. Over the years I got used to smiling at people and agreeing with them rather than having to have the last word. The last word isn't all that important, really.
And so I came here to my grandpa Danny O'Neill's place. A very good place to take it easy. Nobody in Doon remembered my grandpa, which was disappointing.
They knew the line of little cottages he came from but these had all been long knocked down because they had fallen into disrepair. And it was all so long ago, and O'Neill was a very common name in Ireland anyway.
So I decided that he
would
be remembered. I would see to this. I would make a monument to him, but not something vain, some thing that would be of great use in his hometown. I asked around for suggestions. They were many and varied. People thought of a little theater. Or an art gallery. Or maybe a small park where the children could play and the old people sit in the evening. Or a church hall or a museum. There were as many ideas as there were people offering them.
One old lady said I should go to pray at the well in the woods outside Rossmore and then I would see as clear as daylight what I should do. So I drove in and parked my car near the edge of the woods and went in. I met a big friendly dog, who accompanied me and seemed to know his way to the well, since he made the correct turn at every little wooden signpost. Then he sat outside respectfully while I went into the damp, dark cave.
The well was extraordinary. That was the only word. I'm as religious as the next man, I mean, as the son of an Irish Catholic mother and a Polish Catholic father, I wouldn't have much chance of escaping it, would I? But this was beyond anything I had ever seen.
People had put their petitions on the walls of the cave for all to see, they had left children's tiny shoes and socks with notes attached, praying for a recovery from rheumatic fever, or rosary beads with notes begging for the recovery of a beloved mother.
It was grotesque in many ways and yet so touching in others. Such a collection of frail hopes all gathered in one little space. It didn't give me any sense of well-being, holiness. There was no wisdom coming toward me from that statue. Instead I felt uneasy and wanted to be away from there. Yet as I came out I found the big dog again—a kind of sheepdog or a collie, I guess; he had been waiting for me as if I were his long-lost friend. I scratched his ears and walked back through the woods deep in thought.
Then an idea formed in my mind.
I would build a health center so that the people of this area wouldn't have to be on their knees in this cold, wet place praying to a saint who was two thousand years dead that a cure would be found for a loved one. Maybe, I thought to myself, this is the way the well worked: you got your problem solved once you left it.
The dog trotted along beside me happily.
He was never going to leave me now.
I took him to the nearest police station. They looked at him thoughtfully. He had no collar and he wasn't well kept. Someone had brought him to lose him in the woods.
I was shocked.
A lovely, friendly dog like that.
"You might give him a home yourself?" suggested the young officer.
"Okay, come on," I said to the dog, and he leaped eagerly into the car.
I decided to call him Zloty. It was the old Polish currency. He answered so readily that you'd think it was his original name.
Back home again in Doon, I was determined that the place would have some kind of medical center. If anyone needed specialist treatment, or a scan, or an X-ray, they had to take the bumpy road into Rossmore. Yes, I had heard all about this bypass road that was supposed to be built. But it could all be just dreams for the next decades. And anyway in Rossmore they didn't have all the facilities that patients needed—sometimes they had to make the long journey to Dublin, adding to their stress and strain.
Wouldn't it be great to have all these opportunities on their doorstep?
The people in this place were all very nice and easy to talk to. I stayed in the local hotel, and Zloty slept in a big shed. I met Ciaran Brown from the bank, and Sean Kenny, the local attorney, and the Foley family, and Maggie Kiernan, who told everyone how desperately she had wanted to have a baby, and eventually she did. There was a very ladylike woman, Hannah Harty, who was a bookkeeper and the soul of discretion in a very gossip-prone place. So when I bought a plot of land through Sean Kenny, he suggested that I ask Hannah to look after the paperwork for me, and nobody would know my business.
And there were two doctors in the town, a very crabby sort of fellow, Dermot, and a much younger, smarter guy named Jimmy White. Unfortunately I had signed up with Dr. Dermot before Jimmy White came to town, so I had to stick with him. He was a slow, lazy guy, just looked at my prescribed medication and told me to continue with it. Then he went off on a vacation. After a while I felt short of breath. I consulted Jimmy White, who sent me for a stress test and an ultrasound. And a heart specialist changed my beta blockers and I was fine again.
That was a bad time for everyone. Old man Foley died, then Sean Kenny's mother and Ciaran Brown's father died, all within ten days. We wore a path to the churchyard for funerals.
Poor Jimmy White was distraught.
"It would have to happen on my watch," he confided to me one night. "The people here think that the sun shines out of Dermot's arse and that all those old people wouldn't have died if he had been here."
"But that's impossible," I said. "I mean, they were old and frail, their time had come."
"Tell that to the Foleys, the Browns and the Kennys," he said glumly.
"That was certainly bad timing," I sympathized.
"Yeah, or maybe—as I think in my more paranoid moments— it was planned," he suggested.
I gave him a look and Jimmy White said hastily that no, of course it wasn't possible, even Dr. Dermot couldn't have killed them off by voodoo from his vacation. I thought about it myself for a while. Maybe that weaselly little doctor did actually wait until all those old folk were going to take their last journeys.
Was I becoming as paranoid as Jimmy?
Anyway I had plenty to keep me occupied. I hired a construc
tion firm in Ireland, which was fairly relaxed. Very relaxed. Finn Ferguson often said that when God made time he made plenty of it. Building permits were a nightmare; assembling a team was very different from back home. Everyone seemed to be handling several jobs at once, I would sigh to that nice Hannah Harty sometimes, and she was always very positive and full of practical advice.
Perhaps I should tell the foreman, Finn Ferguson, that if his wife wanted to go to America on a shopping trip, my sisters would look after her and take her to the right stores. It worked like a dream and the woman came back not only with three suitcases of merchandise but with the news that Mark Kovac & Family Building Contractors were huge in the U.S.A. Finn, the foreman, stopped treating me just as bumbling old Chester and called me "sir" after that. He still would have a beer with me now and then, and often brought a bone for Zloty as well. He would tell me of his worries about the new road that might or might not be built around Rossmore.
Once one of these huge firms got the contract for building the bypass and established themselves in the town of Rossmore, then a little company like Finn Ferguson's would be edged out of the jobs he already had. People would be seduced by big companies with huge earthmovers and cranes, and his living would go down the drain. I assured him that the thing to do was to specialize. To get a name for doing one kind of building very well.
When the Danny O'Neill Health Center opened there would be a beautiful glossy brochure about it, which of course Finn could use to get himself more clients.
This galvanized Finn to take a less leisurely attitude toward the building, I was very relieved to observe.
"You're a very decent skin, you know, Chester, I mean, sir," he said. "A lot of people say that about you. I heard Miss Harty telling Canon Cassidy when he came over here last week, she said you were the angel this place has always been looking out for."
I liked Hannah and was disappointed that she seemed to fancy Dr. Dermot. I asked her once if she had ever been in love, and she said no, but at the age of fifty-two she didn't think it was a luxury that might come her way. Her mother had always said that Dr. Dermot would make a good catch and she had invested a lot of time in trying to make that happen. But he was an independent man, set in his ways.