Callous

Mary Casey, seventy-nine years old, a tough Galway woman.

Her home was her absolute pride.

A small house in Claddagh, one of the rare, precious, coveted original fishermen’s cottages. You had to be intimately connected to procure one of these sought-after homes.

Alone in her own home, she was trying to get accustomed to the silence. Her late husband, Tom, would have been proud of her, but then, he most always was.

A fisherman, he had been drowned during the great storm of 2009.

  The sea giveth

   The sea taketh away.

Another pride of possession was a cross from the penal times, carefully framed in a heavy wood.

A picture of Tom, alongside.

Late on the first evening, she was in the kitchen, having a wee dram of poitín to ease the solitary air.

An almighty crash came from the sitting room.

Not a woman easily spooked, she went to investigate. The frame containing the cross was in three broken pieces on the floor; the cross itself was high on the wall.

Inverted.

She blessed herself.

On the mantel was a photograph of a young woman, Kate Mitchell, her only niece, living in Brooklyn. After Tom passed, she had had what the Irish call a dark premonition, so she’d made a will, leaving her only possession, her home, to the girl.

A faint sound came from upstairs.

Giggling?

No.

Couldn’t be.

Kids?

She sat in the kitchen for hours, her rosary beads moving through her frail fingers. But there were no further occurrences and she went to bed, slowly, with a sense of unease.

Midnight, a horrendous scream woke her, Mary sat up, rigid with fear.

A man at the foot of her bed. He said,

“We gave you a chance to move.”

He pointed to three huge water bottles, said,

“Uisce beatha.” (Holy water)

Mary was discovered two days later, sitting upright in bed, the cross from the beads embedded in her eye.

An autopsy

                Dismayed the pathologist.

He redid it four times, muttered,

“What in God’s name...?”

Reluctantly, very, he gave the results to the Guards, said,

“This is very odd.”

The commissioner, cynical in a fashion that passed for banter, said,

“Odd we can handle.”

The pathologist thought,

Oh, yeah?

Said,

“She was drowned.”

An American tourist exclaimed,

“Gee, I love Galway in the fall!”

They were having a drink in McSwiggan’s, where a tree is growing in the center of the bar (don’t even ask; it’s an Irish thing, i.e., beyond explanation)

A local, barely concealing his scorn, inquired,

“You mean, ’tis autumn.”

The visitor, taken aback, said,

“Yeah, I guess, right.”

The local pushed,

“You’d like it a whole lot better if you spoke right.”

The visitor turned to his wife, a hardy lady from Salt Lake City, asked,

“Did he just, like, diss me?”

His wife, a diplomat, tried,

“Maybe it’s that Irish irony.”

She didn’t believe that for a second, but as a Mormon, she was experienced in verbal abuse, leaned over to the local, suddenly pinched his cheek, said

“Cheeky devil, aren’t you?”