Selected Stories

Sitting with the Dead

His eyes had been closed and he opened them, saying he wanted to see the stable-yard.

Emily’s expression was empty of response. Her face, younger than his and yet not seeming so, was empty of everything except the tiredness she felt. ‘From the window?’ she said.

No, he’d go down, he said. ‘Will you get me the coat? And have the boots by the door.’

She turned away from the bed. He would manage on his own if she didn’t help him: she’d known him for twenty-eight years, been married to him for twenty-three. Whether or not she brought the coat up to him would make no difference, any more than it would if she protested.

‘It could kill you,’ she said.

‘The fresh air’d strengthen a man.’

Downstairs, she placed the boots ready for him at the back door. She brought his cap and muffler to him with his overcoat. A stitch was needed where the left sleeve met the shoulder, she noticed. She hadn’t before and knew he wouldn’t wait while she repaired it now.

‘What’re you going to do there?’ she asked, and he said nothing much. Tidy up a bit, he said.

He died eight days later, and Dr Ann explained that tidying the stable-yard with only a coat over his pyjamas wouldn’t have hastened anything. An hour after she left, the Geraghtys came to the house, not knowing that he was dead.

It was half past seven in the evening then. At the same time the next morning, Keane the undertaker was due. She said that to the Geraghtys, making sure they understood, not wanting them to think she was turning them away for some other reason. Although she knew that if her husband had been alive he wouldn’t have agreed to have the Geraghtys at his bedside. It was a relief that they had come too late.

The Geraghtys were two middle-aged women, sisters, the Misses Geraghty, who sat with the dying. Emily had heard of them, but did not know them, not even to see: they’d had to give their name when she opened the door to them. It had never occurred to her that the Geraghtys would attempt to bring their good works to the sick-room she had lived with herself for the last seven months. They were Legion of Mary women, famed for their charity, tireless in their support of the Society of St Vincent de Paul and their promulgation of the writings of Father Xavier O’Shea, a local priest who, at a young age in the 1880s, had contracted malaria in the mission fields of the East.

‘We only heard of your trouble Tuesday,’ the thinner and smaller of the two apologized. ‘It does happen the occasional time we wouldn’t hear.’

The other woman, more robust and older, allowed herself jewellery and make-up and took more care with her clothes. But it was her quiet, sharp-featured sister who took the lead.

‘We heard in MacClincy’s,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.’

‘It’s never wasted.’ There was a pause, as if a pause was necessary here. ‘You have our sympathy,’ was added to that, the explanation of why the journey had not been in vain.

The conversation took place entirely at the hall door. Dusk was becoming dark, but over the white-washed wall of the small front garden Emily still could see a car drawn up in the road. It was cold, the wind gone round to the east. They meant well, these women, even if they’d got everything wrong, driving out from Carra to visit a man who wouldn’t have welcomed them and then arriving too late, a man whose death had spared them an embarrassment.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Emily offered.

She imagined they’d refuse and then begin to go, saying they couldn’t disturb her at a time like this. But the big, wide-shouldered one glanced at her sister, hesitating.

‘If you’re alone,’ the smaller one said, ‘you’d be welcome to our company. If it would be of help to you.’

The dead man had been without religion. Anyone could have told them that, Emily reflected, making tea. He would have said that there was more to their sitting at the bedsides of the ill than met the eye, and she wondered if that could possibly be so. Did they in their compassionate travels hope for the first signs of the belief that often came out of nowhere when death declared its intention? Did they drive away from the houses they visited, straight to a presbytery, their duty done? She had never heard that said about the Geraghtys and she didn’t want to believe it. They meant well, she said to herself again.

When they left, she wouldn’t go back upstairs to look at the dead features. She’d leave him now to Keane in the morning. In the brief time that had elapsed a day had been settled for the funeral, Thursday of next week; in the morning she would let a few people know; she’d put a notice in the Advertiser. No children had been born: when Thursday had passed everything would be over except for the unpaid debts. She buttered slices of brack and stirred the tea in the pot. She carried in the tray.

They hadn’t taken their coats off, but sat as still as statues, a little apart from one another.

‘It’s cold,’ she said, ‘I’ll light the fire.’

‘Ah no. Ah no, don’t bother.’ They both protested, but she did anyway, and the kindling that had been in the grate all summer flared up at once. She poured their tea, asking if they took sugar, and then offering the brack. They began to call her Emily, as if they knew her well. They gave their own names: Kathleen the older sister, and Norah.

‘I didn’t think,’ Kathleen began to say, and Norah interrupted her.

‘Oh, we know all right,’ she said. ‘You’re Protestant here, but that never made a difference yet.’

They had sat with the Methodist minister, the Reverend Wolfe, Kathleen said. They’d read to him, they’d brought in whatever he wanted. They were there when he went.

‘Never a difference,’ Norah repeated, and in turn they took a slice of brack. They commented on it, saying it was excellent.

‘It isn’t easy,’ Kathleen said when the conversation lapsed. ‘The first few hours. We often stay.’

‘It was good of you to think of him.’

‘It’s cheerful with that fire, Emily,’ Kathleen said.

They asked her about the horses because the horses were what they’d heard about, and she explained that they’d become a thing of the past. She’d sell the place now, she said.

‘You’d find it remote, Emily,’ Kathleen said. Her lipstick had left a trace on the rim of the teacup and Norah drew her attention to it with a gesture. Kathleen wiped it off. ‘We’re town people ourselves,’ she said.

Emily didn’t consider the house she’d lived in for nearly thirty years remote. Five minutes in the car and you were in the middle of Carra. Mangan’s Bridge, in the other direction, was no more than a minute.

‘You get used to a place,’ Emily said.

They identified for her the house where they lived themselves, on the outskirts of Carra, on the Athy road. Emily knew it, a pleasant creeper-covered house with silver railings in front of it, not big but prosperous-looking. She’d thought it was Corrigan’s, the surveyor’s.

‘I don’t know why I thought that.’

‘We bought it from Mr Corrigan,’ Norah said, ‘when we came to Carra three years ago.’ And her sister said they’d been living in Athy before that.

‘Carra was what we were looking for,’ Norah said.

They were endeavouring to lift her spirits, Emily realized, by keeping things light. Carra had improved in their time, they said, and it would again. You could tell with a town; some of them wouldn’t rise out of the doldrums while a century’d go by.

‘You’d maybe come in to Carra now?’ Kathleen said.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’

She poured more tea. She handed round the brack again. Dr Ann had given her pills to take, but she didn’t intend to take them. Exhausted as she was, she didn’t want to sleep.

‘He went out a week ago,’ she said. ‘He got up and went out to the yard with only a coat over his pyjamas. I thought it was that that hurried it on, but seemingly it wasn’t.’

They didn’t say anything, just nodded, both of them. She said he had been seven months dying. He hadn’t read a newspaper all that time, she said. In the end all the food he could manage was cornflour.

‘We never knew your husband,’ Norah said, ‘any more than yourself. Although I think we maybe met him on the road one day.’

A feeling of apprehension began in Emily, a familiar dread that compulsively caused one hand to clench the other, fingers tightly locking. People often met him, exercising one of the horses. A car would slow down for him but he never acknowledged it, never so much as raised the crop. For a moment she forget that he was dead.

‘He was often out,’ she said.

‘Oh, this was long ago.’

‘He sold the last of the horses twelve months ago. He didn’t want them left.’

‘He raced his horses, we’re to understand?’ Kathleen said.

‘Point-to-points. Punchestown the odd time.’

‘Well, that’s great.’

‘There wasn’t much success.’

‘It’s an up and down business, of course.’

Disappointment had filled the house when yet again a horse trailed in, when months of preparation went for nothing. There had never been much reason for optimism, but even so expectation had been high, as if anything less would have brought bad luck. When Emily married, her husband had been training a string of yearlings on the Curragh. Doing well, he’d said himself, although in fact he wasn’t.

‘You never had children, Emily?’ Kathleen asked.

‘No, we never did.’

‘I think we heard that said.’

The house had been left to her by an aunt on her mother’s side. Forty-three acres, sheep kept; and the furniture had been left to her too. ‘I used come here as a child. A Miss Edgill my aunt was. Did you hear of her?’

They shook their heads. Way before their time, Kathleen said, looking around her. A good house, she said.

‘She’d no one else to leave it to.’ And Emily didn’t add that neither the property nor the land would ever have become hers if her aunt had suspected she’d marry the man she had.

‘You’ll let it go though?’ Kathleen pursued her enquiries, doing her best to knit together a conversation. ‘The way things are now, you were saying you’d let it go?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Anyone would require a bit of time.’

‘We see a lot of widowing,’ Norah murmured.

‘Nearly to the day, we were married twenty-three years.’

‘God took him because He wanted him, Emily.’

The Geraghtys continued to offer sympathy, one following the other in what was said, the difference in tone and manner continuing also. And again – and more often as more solace was pressed upon her – Emily reflected how fortunate it was that they had escaped the awkwardness of attempting to keep company with her husband. He would have called her back as soon as she’d left them with him. He would have asked her who they were, although he knew; he would have told her to take them away. He’d never minded what he said – the flow of coarse language when someone crossed one of the fields, every word shouted out, frighteningly sometimes. It was always that: raising his voice, the expressions he used; not once, not ever, had there been violence. Yet often she had wished that there had been, believing that violence would have been easier to bear than the power of his articulated anger. It was power she had always felt coming from him, festering and then released, his denial of his failure.

‘The horses. Punchestown. The world of the race-course,’ Kathleen said. ‘You’ve had an interesting life, Emily.’

It seemed to Emily that Norah was about to shake her head, that for the first time the sisters were on the verge of a disagreement. It didn’t surprise her: the observation that had been made astonished her.

‘Unusual is what my sister means.’ Norah nodded her correction into place, her tone softening the contradiction.

‘There’s many a woman doesn’t get out and about,’ Kathleen said.

Emily poured more tea and added turf to the fire. She had forgotten to draw the curtains over and she did so now. The light in the room was dim; he’d been particular about low-wattage electric bulbs. But the dimness made the room cosy and it seemed wrong that anywhere should be so while he lay only a few hours dead. She wondered what she’d do when another bulb went, either here or somewhere else, if she would replace it with a stronger one or if low-wattage light was part of her now. She wondered if her nervousness was part of her too. It didn’t seem that it had always been, but she knew she could be wrong about that.

‘I didn’t go out and about much,’ she said because a silence in the conversation had come. Both visitors were stirring sugar into their tea. When their teaspoons were laid down, Norah said:

‘There’s some wouldn’t bother with that.’

‘He was a difficult man. People would have told you.’

They did not contradict that. They did not say anything. She said:

‘He put his trust in the horses. Since childhood what he wanted was to win races, to be known for it. But he never managed much.’

‘Poor man,’ Kathleen murmured. ‘Poor man.’

‘Yes.’

She shouldn’t have complained, she hadn’t meant to: Emily tried to say that, but the words wouldn’t come. She looked away from the women who had visited her, gazing about her at the furniture of a room she knew too well. He had been angry when she’d taken the curtains down to wash them; everyone staring in, he’d said, and she hadn’t known what he’d meant. Hardly anyone passed by on the road.

‘He married me for the house,’ she said, unable to prevent herself from saying that too. The women were strangers, she was speaking ill of the dead. She shook her head in an effort to deny what she’d said, but that seemed to be a dishonesty, worse than speaking ill.

The women sipped their tea, both lifting the cups to their lips in the same moment.

‘He married me for the forty acres,’ Emily said, compelled again to say what she didn’t want to. ‘I was a Protestant girl that got passed by until he made a bid for me and I thought it was romantic, like he did himself - the race cards, the race ribbons, the jockeys’ colours, the big crowd there’d be. That’s how it happened.’

‘Ah now, now,’ Kathleen said. ‘Ah now, dear.’

‘I was a fool and you pay for foolishness. I was greedy for what marriage might be, and you pay for greed. We’d a half acre left after what was paid back a year ago. There’s a mortgage he took out on the house. I could have said to him all the time he was dying, “What’ll I do?” But I didn’t, and he didn’t say anything either. God knows what his last thoughts were.’

They told her she was upset. One after the other they told her any widow would be, that it was what you had to expect. Norah said it twice. Kathleen said she could call on them in her grief.

‘There’s no grief in the house you’ve come to.’

‘Ah now, now,’ Kathleen said, her big face puckered in distress. ‘Ah, now.’

‘He never minded how the truth came out, whether he’d say it or not. He didn’t say I was a worthless woman, but you’d see it in his eyes. Another time, I’d sweep the stable-yard and he’d say what use was that. He’d push a plate of food away untouched. We had two collies once and they were company. When they died he said he’d never have another dog. The vet wouldn’t come near us. The man who came to read the meter turned surly under the abuse he got for driving his van into the yard.’

‘There’s good and bad in everyone, Emily.’ Norah whispered that opinion and, still whispering, repeated it.

‘Stay where you are, Emily,’ Kathleen said, ‘and I’ll make another pot of tea.’

She stood up, the teapot already in her hand. She was used to making tea in other people’s kitchens. She’d find her way about, she said.

Emily protested, but even while she did she didn’t care. In all the years of her marriage another woman hadn’t made tea in that kitchen, and she imagined him walking in from the yard and finding someone other than herself there. The time she began to paint the scullery, it frightened her when he stood in the doorway, before he even said a thing. The time she dropped the sugar bag and the sugar spilt out all over the floor he watched her sweeping it on to the dustpan, turf dust going with it. He said what was she doing, throwing it away when it was still fit to stir into your tea? The scullery had stayed half-painted to this day.

‘He lived in a strangeness of his own,’ Emily said to the sister who was left in the room with her. ‘Even when he was old, he believed a horse could still reclaim him. Even when the only one left was diseased and fit for nothing. When there was none there at all he scoured the empty stables and got fresh straw in. He had it in mind to begin all over again, to find some animal going cheap. He never said it, but it was what he had in mind.’

The house wasn’t clean. It hadn’t been clean for years. She’d lost heart in the house, and in herself, in the radio that didn’t work, her bicycle with the tyres punctured. These visitors would have noticed that the summer flies weren’t swept up, that nowhere was dusted.

‘Three spoons and one for the pot,’ Kathleen said, setting the teapot down in the hearth. ‘Is that about right, Emily? Will we let it draw a minute?’

She had cut more brack, finding it on the breadboard, the bread saw beside it, the butter there too. She hoped it wasn’t a presumption, she hoped it wasn’t interference, she said, but all that remained unanswered.

‘He’d sit there looking at me,’ Emily said. ‘His eyes would follow me about the kitchen. There was a beetle got on the table once and he didn’t move. It got into the flour and he didn’t reach out for it.’

‘Isn’t it a wonder,’ Norah said, ‘you wouldn’t have gone off, the way things were, Emily? Not that I’m saying you should have.’

Emily was aware that that question was asked. She didn’t answer it; she didn’t know why she hadn’t gone off. Looking back on it, she didn’t. But she remembered how when she had thought of going away what her arguments to herself had been, how she had wondered where she could go to, and had told herself it would be wrong to leave a house that had been left to her in good faith and with affection. And then, of course, there was the worry about how he’d manage.

‘Will you take another cup, Emily?’

She shook her head. The wind had become stronger. She could hear it rattling the doors upstairs. She’d left a light burning in the room.

‘I’m wrong to delay you,’ she said.

But the Geraghtys had settled down again, with the fresh tea to sustain them. She wasn’t delaying them in any way whatsoever, Kathleen said. In the shadowy illumination of the single forty-watt bulb the alarm clock on the mantelpiece gave the time as twenty past eleven, although in fact it was half an hour later.

‘It’s just I’m tired,’ Emily said. ‘A time like this, I didn’t mean to go on about what’s done with.’

Kathleen said it was the shock. The shock of death changed everything, she said; no matter how certainly death was expected, it was always a shock.

‘I wouldn’t want you to think I didn’t love my husband.’

The sisters were taken aback, Kathleen on her knees adding turf to the fire, Norah pouring milk into her tea. How could these two unmarried women understand? Emily thought. How could they understand that even if there was neither grief nor mourning there had been some love left for the man who’d died? Her fault, her foolishness from the first it had been; no one had made her do anything.

The talk went on, back and forth between the widow and the sisters, words and commiseration, solace and reassurance. The past came into it when more was said: the wedding, his polished shoes and shiny hair, the party afterwards over on the Curragh, at Jockey Hall because he knew the man there. People were spoken of, names known to the Geraghtys, or people before their time; occasions were spoken of – the year he went to Cheltenham, the shooting of the old grey when her leg went at Glanbyre point-to-point. The Geraghtys spoke of their growing up in Galway, how you wouldn’t recognize the City of the Tribes these days so fashionable and lively it had become; how later they had lived near Enniscorthy; how Kathleen had felt the draw of the religious life at that time but then had felt the receding of it, how she had known ever since that she’d been tested with her own mistake. In this way the Geraghtys spread themselves into the conversation. As the night went on, Emily was aware that they were doing so because it was necessary, on a bleak occasion, to influence the bleakness in other ways. She apologized for speaking ill of the dead, and blamed herself again. It was half past three before the Geraghtys left.

‘Thank you,’ she said, holding open the hall door. The wind that had been slight and then had got up wasn’t there any more. The air was fresh and clean. She said she’d be all right.

Light flickered in the car when the women opened the doors. There was the red glow of the tail-light before the engine started up, a whiff of exhaust before the car moved slowly forward and gathered speed.

In the room upstairs, the sheet drawn up over the raddled, stiffening features, Emily prayed. She knelt by the bedside and pleaded for the deliverance of the husband who had wronged her for so long. Fear had drained to a husk the love she had spoken of, but she did not deny that remnant’s existence, as she had not in the company of her visitors. She could not grieve, she could not mourn; too little was left, too much destroyed. Would they know that as they drove away ? Would they explain it to people when people asked?

Downstairs, she washed up the cups and saucers. She would not sleep. She would not go to bed. The hours would pass and then the undertaker’s man would come.

The headlights illuminated low stone walls, ragwort thriving on the verges, gorse among the motionless sheep in gated fields. Kathleen drove, as she always did, Norah never having learnt how to. A visit had not before turned out so strangely, so different from what had been the sisters’ familiar expectation. They said all that, and then were silent for a while before Kathleen made her final comment: that what they had heard had been all the more terrible to listen to with a man dead in an upstairs room.

Hunched in the dark of the car, Norah frowned over that. She did not speak immediately, but when they’d gone another mile she said:

‘I’d say, myself, it was the dead we were sitting with.’

In the house the silence there had been before the visitors disturbed it was there again. No spectre rose from the carnal remains of the man who was at last at peace. But the woman sitting by the turf fire she kept going was aware, as dawn lightened the edges of the curtains, of a stirring in her senses. Her tiredness afflicted her less, a calm possessed her. In the neglected room she regretted nothing now of what she had said to the women who had meant well; nor did it matter if, here and there, they had not quite understood. She sat for a while longer, then pulled the curtains back and the day came in. Hers was the ghost the night had brought, in her own image as she once had been.