Sisters on the Case

Dies Irae by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

BRUTAL MURDER! She could still, at ninety, remember the bold headline in the Hope Valley News, and she could remember listening from the top of the stairs to her mother and father arguing in the kitchen about whether or not they would go to the funeral.

‘‘Margaret, you don’t even know if they’ll hold a wake for him.’’

‘‘Wake or no, they have to bury the man, don’t they? You’ll go alone if you’re going, Tom. I knew he was trouble from the night I first laid eyes on him- a mouth like a soft prune and eyes you’d think were going to roll out of his head…’’

Yes, she could remember the very words, for they were her mother’s and therefore her own.

All three of them, her mother and father and the girl she was then, went to the funeral.

There were people there she didn’t even know, and she had thought she knew everyone in Hopetown. She was her father’s daughter in that; you couldn’t get him away, talking to everyone he met on the street. Her mother would always wait in the car. Her mother’s two cousins, first cousins-she called them Aunt Mary and Aunt Norah-stood next to each other beside the grave but with room enough between them for another grown person. Maybe there was, she had thought, and tried to imagine what Denny would have looked like with half his head blown off.

Father Conway always prayed as though he had a train to catch. Ed McNair, the sheriff, was there, and several deputies. Her father wasn’t wearing his deputy sheriff badge. Donel Rossa was there.

When the gravediggers loosened the straps to lower the coffin, what flashed through her mind was the story her mother once had told her of the man who brought his wife, coffin and all, home to Ireland and buried her on land he claimed was stolen from him. She’d never found out if it was a true story or one of many her mother made up. In time she had asked her Aunt Mary if it was true, for the sisters had come from the same village as her mother on the coast of the Irish Sea.

‘‘She could as well as not have made it up,’’ an answer the very ambiguity of which she had somehow found satisfying. She had discovered you could tell the truth with a lie. That may have been the moment when she first knew she was going to be a writer.

The sisters could barely have been more different from one another. Norah, the older, was thirty-four, tending to fatten as she grew older. She smiled a lot, but it never seemed to mean much, on and off. Mary said if she ever laughed it was under her breath. Mary, having met with a lifetime’s share of troubles, tended at thirty-two to make fun of both her sister’s and her own foibles. Rheumatism was already hacking away at her joints; she was more bone than flesh anyway, and her very blue eyes were sometimes shot red with pain. The devil trying to work his way in, as she put it. Norah was convinced he had already made it.

It was late on a morning of early August heat when Mary saw him come out from the shade of the last elms that arched Main Street. He stopped at the mailbox by Norah’s walk and seemed to study the names. Norah’s was first, Mary’s scratched beneath it as though it was an afterthought, which, in a way, it was. After deciding, perhaps, which of the women it was he saw in the field between house and barn, he came directly to her. He stepped with care to avoid the potatoes she had forked from the ground. He was unshaven, and younger than she had thought at a distance, and for an instant she felt she had seen him before. He was young-old or, better, old-young. His clothes weren’t shabby, but they’d not been in a wash-tub for a while. Nor had he. But his kind was not uncommon on the road, men without work, some wanting it, some not. The grain harvest, then silo-filling, were soon ahead.

‘‘You’re Mary O’Hearn, are you, ma’am?’’

She looked hard at him-something familiar again-and he moistened his lips before saying more.

‘‘You’re welcome to a cup of water there at the pump,’’ Mary said.

The pump with the well beneath it stood a few feet from the faded red building she had converted from barn to the house she lived in. Beyond the pump, and shrouded in rosebushes, was the outhouse she still used. Norah had indoor plumbing.

His eyes shifted from the pump to the outhouse, then back to her. ‘‘Would it trouble you if I asked to use the wee house?’’

It would, but she nodded, and dug the fork into the ground to lean on while she waited for him to go and come back. Cows’ eyes, she thought, dark and murky. If he was Irish, and she felt he was, a Spaniard had got in there somewhere. Black Irish, they called them with his looks at home.

When he came back he asked, ‘‘Don’t you remember the skinny runt of a kid that sang at your wedding? That’s what they used to call me, Skinny-runt.’’

Mary grunted, remembering not the child, but the man beside her with tears in his eyes when she suddenly looked up at him. She could still hear the high, sweet trill of song, but what she had always seen, remembering, was the tears. ‘‘What was it you sang?’’

‘‘The ‘Ave Maria.’ That’s what I always sang, the ‘Ave Maria.’ ’’

‘‘And your name?’’

‘‘Denny. Dennis O’Hearn, the same as yours. It was my father’s brother Michael you were married to, may he rest in peace.’’

There was almost mockery in the sound from her throat. Neither peace nor prayer came easy to her. ‘‘Your voice has dropped a notch or two since then.’’

‘‘I was afraid it wouldn’t ever,’’ he said.

She gave a snort of amusement.

She brought him a cup of tea with bread and jam where he sat on the bench by the door. By then, she was sure, Norah would have a crick in her neck, trying to see what was going on.

‘‘Bring your cup.’’ She led the way into the house through the kitchen and into the room she called her parlor. The house was cool and dark, more walls than windows. She lit the one electric lamp and moved it to where it cast light on the portrait above the couch.

‘‘That’s him,’’ Denny said, looking up at the tinted photograph, life-size, head and breast of a young policeman in his high-buttoned uniform. His mustaches bristled and his eyes had spark. ‘‘I wouldn’t think I’d remember him so well, but I do.’’

Mary turned off the light and they went outdoors again without speaking. He knew when to keep his mouth shut, Mary thought. Within months of her marriage to Michael O’Hearn, he was killed in the line of duty. She squinted in the sudden sun to have a longer look at Dennis. ‘‘I don’t see any resemblance at all.’’

‘‘My mother’s name was Castillo.’’

So she’d been right about the Spanish strain.

By midafternoon he had picked all the potatoes she’d harvested in two days’ digging. It was easier for her to dig them up than to pick them and she’d have paid a boy from the town a nickel a bushel. She put off deciding whether to offer him the sixty-five cents. She watched him wash his hands and face at the pump and shake himself dry. She thought of the dog she no longer had. He wiped the dust from his shoes, one leg against the other. City shoes, she decided, even though they were high-laced, broken in a hundred miles south on the streets of Chicago.

‘‘Have you no baggage?’’ she asked.

‘‘I left a carryall with the stationmaster. I’ve to pick it up before dark.’’

‘‘The mean bastard,’’ she said. ‘‘It would kill him to turn on a light if there wasn’t a train coming in.’’

He went back into the town before suppertime. And about time, Norah thought. She had watched, off and on, the whole afternoon and almost ruined a pattern trying to watch and use the scissors at the same time. As soon as he passed her house-a queer-looking dark fellow, half Indian, she thought, with the reservation a few miles north-she went across to where Mary was washing the smallest potatoes.

‘‘Have you lost your senses, taking a stray like that into the house? And letting him use your convenience.’’

‘‘Convenience!’’ Mary mocked.

‘‘You could catch something from the likes of him.’’

‘‘I could, and wouldn’t that surprise you?’’ Mary gave her a bark of a laugh.

‘‘Not in the least,’’ Norah said, fairly sure she was being made fun of.

‘‘I’m thinking I’ll fix a cot for him in the back kitchen.’’

‘‘So he’s coming back, is he? And why not? The hospitality of the house. And never a word to me, Mary.’’

‘‘Amn’t I telling you now?’’

‘‘When you’ve already made up your mind. There was a piece in the paper last week if you ever read it, a man’s watch stolen right from the table where he was asleep in his bed.’’

‘‘My old clock wouldn’t bring much,’’ Mary said. Then she told her sister, ‘‘You can’t call him a stray, Norah. He’s Michael’s nephew, his own brother’s son.’’

Norah sucked in her breath, needing all of it. Michael, more than ten years dead, ought to have been out of their lives, but he never would be-a man she had never met, never wanted to meet, married to a sister she was sure she had saved from the streets after he died. Many times since she wished she hadn’t and near as many times said so to Mary when goaded by her. Out of this roiling memory, she cried, ‘‘Did you invite him to come? Did you know he was coming?’’

‘‘What a crooked mind you have,’’ Mary said. ‘‘I didn’t know who he was till he told me. He sang at my wedding. A wisp of a boy then, he sang like an angel. Even Michael cried. His name is Dennis- Dennis O’Hearn.’’ Mary lifted her chin saying it.

As though he was a child of her own, Norah thought with another surge of anger. She was as barren herself as Mary. More so, an old maid.

The two Lavery sisters had been brought over from Ireland, one after the other before either was twenty, by the childless couple from whom Norah inherited the farm, lock, stock, and barrel. It was not written into the bequest, but confided to the priest as well as to Norah, that it was hoped she would take care of her sister if ever she returned in need. Mary had run away within a year of her arrival. She was not greatly missed. Except by the farmer who had grown too fond of her.

Norah could see the change come over Mary. It was always like that with her after she had been mean. Mary touched her toe to the mound of potatoes the size of marbles. ‘‘Will you take a handful of these for your supper?’’

‘‘I will. They’re sweeter by far than the big ones.’’

‘‘Aye. Why shouldn’t they be, coming to you for nothing?’’ She knocked the soap from the dish by the pump and filled it. ‘‘Bring the dish back the next time you come.’’ When Norah was halfway along the path, Mary called, ‘‘Listen for the telephone in case I ring you later.’’

Mary was never without a drop of whiskey in the house. She kept a small flask of it under her pillow to ease the pain at night. Everyone knew but nobody told in the town where she got it. It would be a sad day for her when Prohibition ended, and the end was in sight. They’d be shipping the real thing in from Canada, and it wouldn’t be half as good as what she got from Donel Rossa.

Rossa belonged to the first generation American Irish who farmed the rich soil of southern Wisconsin. His principal crop was corn, which he sold to a variety of consumers, some, no doubt, to members of his family said to have connections with the Chicago underworld.

Something Mary kept hidden in her heart was that soon after Michael was killed she began to receive, like clockwork and wherever she was, a pint every month marked ‘‘holy water.’’ Since her coming back from Chicago, it was delivered by Donel himself, and if ever she mentioned paying him for it, he’d say, ‘‘Ah, Mary, Michael O’Hearn was a fine man. It comes to you with his pension.’’ God and Mary knew the pension could take a supplement, but whenever question of where it was coming from bothered her, a tweak of pain put her conscience if not her bones at ease.

Donel was older than the sisters, closer in years to the old couple who had brought them over. Mary hadn’t become close friends with him until she moved out of Norah’s house, saying she’d rather live in the barn. The barn was an empty shell by then. Norah had auctioned off livestock, equipment, everything but the barn doors. And since Donel had had a hand, along with Father Conway, in bringing Mary back to where she wasn’t wanted, he’d undertaken to help make the barn livable.

He was the first one Mary phoned to come round that night after supper. ‘‘I’ve someone here I want you to meet. Come and bring the missus.’’

‘‘And I’ll bring a smile,’’ he promised.

A smile: his word for a bottle. As though she hadn’t expected it.

Norah, as usual, put off going over for as long as she could stand not to go. She wanted them to wonder what was keeping her and at the same time suspected they wouldn’t miss her if she didn’t show up at all. They never tired of singing the old songs over and over, and she could hear the thump of Mary’s stick on the floor as she beat time. When there was a quiet minute she imagined them passing the bottle to all there except Margaret and Tom’s lump of a girl pretending to be asleep on the couch. Norah got her shawl from the hall stand, went out the front door and locked it behind her. You never could tell at night.

She moved with caution along the path, guided only by her memory of it in daylight. Rossa’s voice was the loudest. It always was. She didn’t like him. He treated Mary better than he did his wife, for one thing, but closer to the truth of it, Norah was sure he did not like her. She could never forget the look he had given her when she clapped her hands at news of Mary’s marriage. The smile on his face had seemed to say, So now it’s all yours, all yours. He’d been right, of course. And he was the one who came to tell her Mary’s husband was dead, so soon. She would swear it was his cold eye that kept pity from coming over her. Now as she neared the barn, she tried to listen for a new voice among the familiar. The Angel Gabriel couldn’t be heard over Rossa and the thump of Mary’s stick.

Dennis O’Hearn wasn’t bad-looking when you saw him up close, she decided, but she would never have taken him for an Irishman. There was a hangdog look to him, big sad eyes that reminded her of the dog Mary wanted to bring into the house when they lived together. Now he picked up on a tune Margaret hummed for him and put the words to it. Norah had not heard it before, a nursery song, nor had she heard a voice like his, deep and dark and soft as velvet. Her love for music was the truest thing in Norah’s life. It drew her to High Mass on Sundays, and prompted her to buy a piano as soon as she had money. It stood mute in her living room save for the few chords she had taught herself to play so that she might know there was music in it.

It was strange the way Dennis O’Hearn’s and her gaze met and locked as though their eyes had got accidentally tangled. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand to hide a smile, she felt. And she sensed her color rising to the roots of her hair. She caught at the foot of the girl stretched on the couch. She’d had to push it aside to make room for herself. The young one pulled her foot away so fast Norah almost lost her balance. She flashed her a smile when she’d rather have pinched her. The upstart mimicked her smile back at her.

The room was stuffy and smelled of the men, sweat and tobacco smoke and the cow barn, and a whiff of Mary’s liniment. Mary called this one big room her parlor. Norah always thought it resembled a gypsy’s nest. To be sure, she’d never seen one. But, for example, instead of a door to the kitchen, the frame was hung with a curtain of beads Mary had bought off a peddler’s wagon. The beads rattled if a wind came up or when someone passed from room to room. Mary’s nook of a bedroom was to one side, chopped out of the kitchen. If Dennis O’Hearn roamed through the house at night, it occurred to Norah, Mary would hear him part the curtain. Would she call him in to the side of her bed and ask him to rub liniment into her knees? Surely not. But Mary was that way. She was as easy with men as she was with women.

The songs they sang came, most of them, out of The Golden Book of Songs. Norah had a pristine copy of it on her piano at home. Mary’s copy looked like an old prayer book that had lost its covers. She tried to picture how this lot would fit in her parlor, where the piano took so much of the room. Mary, when first she’d seen it, let out a whoop. ‘‘Holy Mother of God! It looks just like Reverend Mother!’’ They wouldn’t fit at all, Norah decided. They just didn’t belong there.

‘‘Can you sing ‘Mother Machree,’ Dennis?’’ Rossa asked. ‘‘I don’t think it’s in the book. ‘There’s a place in my heart which no colleen can own,’ ’’ he started, not waiting for Dennis to answer. Suppose Dennis could play the piano, she thought. There were people who played by ear and he might. He picked up on ‘‘Mother Machree’’ and he knew the words by heart. Before he could finish, Rossa demanded ‘‘That Old Irish Mother of Mine.’’

‘‘Give me a minute,’’ Dennis said.

‘‘Let the man wet his whistle,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Isn’t there a drop left in the bottle?’’

Rossa sent his wife out to the car for the spare he kept hidden there.

‘‘Norah.’’ The girl’s mother leaned toward her. She’d seen what happened between her and the upstart, but that wasn’t on her mind at all. ‘‘Do you remember the queer woman at home who’d come out on the castle grounds just before dark? She’d sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ Don’t you remember? A veil round her head so you couldn’t see her face. But every night she’d be there…’’

‘‘You know better than ask Norah about something back home,’’ Mary said. ‘‘She’d turn to salt if she said the word ‘Ireland.’ ’’

That was Mary.

‘‘I remember-I remember the roses on the castle grounds,’’ Norah said. ‘‘And the wreath they sent of them for our mother’s funeral.’’

‘‘Oh, for the love of God!’’ Mary said, out of patience.

Dennis sang ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer.’’

There was no beat Mary could thump to liven ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer’’ and she felt the party turning into slop. She pulled herself up from her chair and announced she was going to fire up the kitchen stove and make tea. She swiped at the curtain with her stick and set it jingling.

‘‘I think I’ll go home now,’’ Norah said. ‘‘It’s been such a grand evening.’’

Dennis was on his feet before she was. ‘‘I’ll walk you home, Miss Lavery,’’ he said.

‘‘Then you don’t need to come back,’’ Mary snapped, quick as a dart.

You could hear the chirp of the crickets.

‘‘Oh dear, dear me,’’ Rossa said then.

Tom Dixon added treacle. ‘‘Stay a while longer, Norah, and we’ll all go out together.’’

Mary would have as soon seen them all go out then. A man as fond of the military as Tom was known to be, you wouldn’t have thought such an appeaser.

But it was Dennis O’Hearn who set things right again. ‘‘Please come back and sit down, Aunt Mary. I know how to fire up the stove, and I’ll put on the kettle for you.’’

‘‘Denny, will you put the kettle on?’’ took on a familiar ring in the next few days, and finding that it pleased her, he brought her a cup of tea every morning as soon as he heard the creak of her bedstead. It was what he had done for his own mother till the day she died.

‘‘She never wanted more than a half cup. She’d send me to spill it out if there was more, and it had to be hot as blazes. Then she’d let it cool off before she drank it.’’

‘‘She wanted you more than she did the tea,’’ Mary told him.

Denny shrugged. If it was so he didn’t understand it.

Mary did not lie long abed on these harvest days- or many others, for that matter-but with morning tea and afternoon tea and the cup she would say she was perishing for in the evening, she learned enough about Denny to know why he had come to her. The last of four boys and by ten years the youngest, he could remember his father saying he should have drowned him the day he was born, the runt of the litter. Until he discovered, when Denny started to school with the sisters, that he had a voice the nuns called sacred. ‘‘He’d hire me out for weddings or funerals for a dollar or two. He’d give me a nickel and spend the rest before my mother got her hand out.’’

It was not the first time Mary had heard a story like it.

‘‘Would you like to hear me sing the ‘Dies Irae’?’’ he offered.

‘‘I would not.’’

Most of Mary’s necessities were obtained through barter, and while she was frugal she was not miserly. But Denny wasn’t long with her before she began to calculate the toll it took of her preserves and garden produce to bring home a pound of bacon. The first time Donel Rossa stopped by after the night of Dennis’ arrival, she broached the possibility of finding a job for Denny in the valley.

‘‘So you’ve decided to keep him,’’ Rossa said. ‘‘You’re a soft touch, Mary.’’

Mary caught something in his tone too intimate for her taste. ‘‘Did you have something to do with him coming, Donel?’’

‘‘Whatever makes you ask a question like that?’’

‘‘It struck me he might be something else that came with my pension.’’

Rossa found a place clear of their feet to spit. ‘‘You’re sharp as a tack this morning, Mary.’’

‘‘I should be. I’ve sat on a few.’’

Rossa laughed. He toed the spittle into the ground. ‘‘You know, Mary, the holy water is going to run dry. I’m not saying the state’ll go dry. God forbid. The Dutchmen have a powerful thirst for their beer, and they’ve a throttle on the legislature.’’

Mary pulled him over to the bench and hung on to his arm. ‘‘Sit down here and tell me what you’re saying.’’ She was never long on patience.

‘‘It’s time I’m thinking about, time and change. I have a horse that climbs the fence whenever I start up the truck. He goes wild. But any day now I’ll go out and see him nuzzling the radiator and the next thing you know, he’ll be willing to go tandem with it. It’s what the wear of time does to man and beast.’’

‘‘You’re an old fart, Donel.’’ Only Mary could say it with affection. She pointed to where Denny was crawling from one currant bush to another, at the bottom of the field. ‘‘He’ll be coming up from there any minute. I sent him back to strip them clean. Now he’ll be counting every currant he puts in the basket.’’

‘‘Have you sent him around the town to make inquiries?’’

‘‘He’ll need more starch in him for that,’’ Mary said.

‘‘Well, there isn’t a hell of a lot of that in the family… Ah, now, Mary, I’ve offended you,’’ Rossa said, for her chin shot out. ‘‘Michael had the heart of a lion. What about Norah? Isn’t there work she could put him to?’’

‘‘She’d eat him alive!’’

Rossa changed the subject in a hurry. ‘‘The nuns brought him up pretty well, didn’t they?’’

‘‘He can do his sums,’’ Mary said. ‘‘He’s not a child, you know, and he’s strong as a bull. He was digging ditches for the city of Chicago till they ran out of money.’’

‘‘I hate to tell you what that qualifies him for on the farm, Mary.’’

She grunted. ‘‘And isn’t the world full of it?’’

Denny came up as Rossa was about to leave. His face was as red as the currants. ‘‘Do you want to do a day’s work for me on the farm now and then?’’ Rossa asked him. ‘‘A dollar a day and your grub.’’

‘‘On the farm,’’ Dennis said, as though to be sure.

‘‘Didn’t I say on the farm? Would I be sending you to Australia? And you’ll have to walk the five miles or hitch a ride on the road.’’

‘‘I could pay Aunt Mary for my keep,’’ Denny reasoned aloud but in no hurry to take up the offer.

Why? Mary wondered, when half the country was out of work. And why the ‘‘Aunt’’ Mary, which had been dropped after the first day?

‘‘That’s the idea, lad,’’ Rossa said as though to a child.

It wasn’t starch Denny needed. It was yeast. But Mary was pleased, too, at the prospect of getting him out from under her feet now and then, as long as it wasn’t to Norah.

Norah had no great opinion of herself, though most people thought the opposite. Trying to get Denny out of her mind, she kept at the sewing machine until her eyes were bleary and her foot going numb on the treadle. She excused her back-and-forth trips to the window as the need to relieve cramps in her leg. She said the Hail Mary every time but she knew very well that her true intention was to catch sight of Denny going about his chores. She even numbered his trips to the outhouse, and noted when he carried Mary’s pot with him, though it turned her stomach to think of it. Not often, but often enough to give her a surge of pleasure, and only when Mary was not in sight, he’d send a little salute her way-the tip of his fingers to his forehead to her. Sometimes she left the window open and sang while she worked, harking back to songs of her childhood even as Margaret had to ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer.’’ It wasn’t true that she despised Ireland. That was Mary belittling her. It was Ireland that let her go. Mary was the one with a passion for America.

But this was Norah’s busiest season. The hand-me-downs were patched and freshened at home, but in most Hopetown families the oldest child got a new outfit at the start of the school year, and as often as not Norah was chosen over Sears, Roebuck to provide the girls’ dresses. No one, at least to Norah’s knowledge, ever remarked on the similarity between Norah’s new dresses and last year’s fashion in the Sears catalogue.

The morning Rossa came by and talked with Mary and then with Denny, Norah guessed rightly what it was about. She intercepted Denny on his way into town for Mary that afternoon. ‘‘Will you be going to work for Donel?’’ she asked outright, to be sure of a yes or no before Mary interfered. ‘‘He’s a hard man, Dennis.’’

‘‘I was thinking that myself and I’ll have to walk five miles before starting the day’s work.’’

‘‘Doing what, do you know, Denny?’’

‘‘It’s on the farm. I made sure of that.’’

Where else? Norah wondered, but before she could ask, Mary was at the barn door shouting to him.

‘‘Amn’t I waiting for the sugar? Get on with you, man.’’

Dennis went on and Norah sought out Mary in her kitchen. ‘‘I’ve sugar enough to let you have five pounds, Mary.’’

‘‘He’ll be back in time.’’ She was picking over a great basin of currants, her hands stained bloodred. ‘‘Thank you, anyway,’’ an afterthought.

Norah settled on a kitchen chair she almost overflowed. It creaked with her weight.

‘‘You’re fading away to a ton,’’ Mary said with pleasure.

Where the inspiration came from Norah would never know. The thought just came up and out. ‘‘I’ve decided it’s time to get rid of all those things of theirs in the cellar.’’ ‘‘They’’ or ‘‘theirs’’ always referred to the couple who had brought her over from Ireland. ‘‘There’s some I kept for you, if you remember, when you first wanted a place of your own. You might want to take a look at them now.’’

A little twitch of Mary’s nose betrayed her interest and Norah pressed on. ‘‘The wash boiler-pure copper-I ought to have sold it,’’ she began, ‘‘and the mirror. It wouldn’t hurt you to take a look at yourself now and then.’’

As soon as the jelly was sealed in jars, Mary took Dennis with her to Norah’s. They went first to the cellar door, but Norah waved them around. It was his first time in her house, and she didn’t even ask him to wipe his feet.

Dennis’ great dark eyes took in everything Mary gave him time to see. She nudged him on with the knob of her cane. He wasn’t a dumb animal, Norah thought, but she smiled and bit her tongue. Above all she wanted him to see the piano. Mary shoved him past the parlor door.

Norah had to lift the door to the storage room where it sagged on the hinges and scraped the floor.

‘‘Maybe I could fix that,’’ Denny said.

‘‘Some rainy day when Mary has nothing for you to do.’’

‘‘That’ll be the day,’’ Mary said, but by then her curiosity was picking up and she was the first into the room, where there was only a whisper of light from the ground-level window. Norah pulled the electric switch. Mary let out a squeak of pleasure at things she thought on sight she had a use for. Then she settled down to a careful selection. One glance at her own reflection eliminated the mirror. Nor did she want Norah’s junk. Denny figured the most in her calculation, of course. The clothes wringer, for example, would have to be fastened to the sink board in the kitchen, where the only running water in her place came in. She’d not have needed it for her bits and pieces, but laundering a man’s wear could put a terrible strain on her knotty hands. Denny carted the wringer to the cellar door. Norah, her arms folded, watched. With an eagle’s eye, Mary thought. ‘‘Couldn’t you go and sit down somewhere?’’

‘‘I’d be willing to help,’’ Norah said.

‘‘Isn’t that what I’m talking about?’’

On Denny’s next trip between the storeroom and the cellar door, he brought back an old kitchen chair he’d seen near the furnace. He even dusted it with his bare hand. Norah sat.

‘‘God save the queen!’’ Mary cried.

Norah’s eyes and Denny’s met, even as at the party, but not this time by accident. What she felt was like an electric shock. She was sure they had struck a bond.

Mary thumped her stick against a humpbacked trunk that stood beneath the window.

Norah snapped out of her reverie. ‘‘Leave that!’’

Mary all but clapped her hands. ‘‘Is it the bones of a lover?’’ She’d read the story long ago. ‘‘Watch out for yourself, Denny!’’

She was enjoying herself, Norah thought, making fun of her. That was Mary. Her own thoughts turned to what she could do or say that might engage Dennis. There wasn’t much left in the room-the big wardrobe, the mirror, some picture frames she’d thought she’d use, but hadn’t, the trunk, full enough, but not of bones, and the rusted garden tools even Mary wouldn’t want. And here among them, half shrouded by an old umbrella, where she herself had hidden it one winter’s night, was the old man’s shotgun.

Mary hobbled to the outside door with a yardstick to measure whether they could get the wardrobe out that way. She had begun to think of making a room of his own for Denny. There was room enough in the barn, sure.

Norah got up and took the chair back herself to where it had come from. When she returned she saw that Denny had discovered the gun. He was bent over, trying to see it better, but not daring to touch. ‘‘Aunt Norah?’’ He looked round, his eyes jumping out of his head.

‘‘Not now,’’ she said, and chanced a wink.

He winked back.

There was no way Denny could transport the big cupboard from house to barn without help. Mary cursed the rheumatism and Norah refused to make a fool of herself trying. It was decided between the sisters that the wardrobe could wait till Donel Rossa’s next visit. Mary and Denny left by the cellar door. Norah locked it, turned off the light, and went upstairs. She wasn’t sure what had happened to her, but whatever it was had never happened to her before.

Mary put up her first crop of tomatoes by the end of the week. Dennis kept the kitchen range at top heat under the copper boiler, and though Mary denied her need for the clock, just to be sure she set the alarm for each step. The sweat ran down both their faces, and when a great drop fell from the tip of Mary’s nose into a bowl of tomatoes she cackled, ‘‘Sure, they needed more salt.’’

In the evening they sat at the kitchen table where Mary marked labels ‘‘Mary’s Best’’ for the jars she would seal with a final turn before bedtime. Hope Valley Market would take all she could provide. Through the open window they could hear an occasional car go by and the singsong chatter of katydids, and closer overhead, the frantic buzz of an insect caught on the sticky tape that dangled from the light. Sometimes music wafted their way from Norah’s radio.

Dennis tilted back in his chair though she’d asked him not to do it. He sat upright suddenly and, pinching his nose, began to sing, ‘‘ ‘I’m just a vagabond lover…’ ’’

‘‘My God,’’ Mary said, ‘‘where did you learn that?’’

‘‘From the radio. Didn’t you ever hear Rudy Vallee?’’

‘‘I’d just as soon not,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Try it without the clothespin.’’

He grinned, cleared his throat, and sang it in his own voice. The voice of the child she remembered was gone, but there was a deep, sad music in what she heard.

‘‘Do you miss the city, Denny?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Neither do I,’’ she said. It seemed many yesterdays since she’d come out from Chicago on the train with Donel Rossa to Norah’s chilly welcome.

Both sisters were alongside the road when the threshing combine on its way to Rossa’s came rattling through town and stopped for Denny. Men aboard the last rig gave him a hand up, and all of them waved at Norah and Mary, who watched until the blinding sunrise washed them out of sight. Children, up at dawn to follow the caravan through town, went home to breakfast and the sisters turned into their own walkways. Mary resented Norah’s being there, but it was not in her heart to part without a word.

‘‘Will you have a cup of tea? The kettle’s on the back of the stove.’’

Norah would rather have gone home. More and more she felt the presence of Dennis to be everywhere in Mary’s house. She even avoided seeing the cot where he slept in the back kitchen. But what she said was, ‘‘Let me close the front door and I’ll be over.’’

‘‘Oh, for the love of God,’’ Mary said. Doors were anathema to her.

Norah pulled a chair out from the kitchen table.

‘‘I’m leery of that one,’’ Mary said from the stove. ‘‘I can’t break him of the habit of teetering on the back legs of a chair. You’d think they were rockers.’’

‘‘I won’t teeter,’’ Norah said. The chair creaked when she sat down. ‘‘And I won’t be staying more than a minute.’’

Mary brought the teapot and swirled the tea before she poured it. It was on the tip of her tongue to say This’ll put hair on your chest, but she held it back. She was trying to cure herself of saying the common things like it she had picked up God only knew from where.

Norah helped herself to sugar. Whatever milk Mary had was always on the turn in summer. She could have kept it in the well like the couple used to. ‘‘Did you want the old trunk in the storeroom badly, Mary? I could empty it out.’’

‘‘What would I be putting in it?’’

‘‘And what will you put in the cupboard when you get it over?’’

‘‘Won’t he be getting clothes one of these days and needing a place to hang them?’’

Norah was sure now she shouldn’t have come. She felt hurt, pushed out. She wanted to push back. ‘‘I’ve been going through the things I’ve kept in the trunk all these years-I was thinking I’d make a rag rug of them someday but I never did-her petticoats and his flannel shirts. The shirts would fit Denny, you know. I could shorten the sleeves for him.’’

Mary’s face shriveled up like an old woman’s and the spittle sprayed from her mouth before she could speak. ‘‘Keep his filthy shirts to yourself. They’re all yours. Do you think I’d let him put them on his back?’’

‘‘It was a long time ago, Mary.’’

‘‘If it was forever, would I forget it?’’

‘‘I know how you feel.’’

‘‘You know how I feel! There’s more feeling in this teapot than in you.’’

Norah struggled to get up. ‘‘I don’t have to take this from you, Mary. I could turn you out if I wanted and nobody’d say I did wrong. It wasn’t my fault he made a strumpet out of you. Didn’t you beg them to bring you over? ‘I’ll do anything that wants doing,’ you wrote. I read them your letters-she couldn’t read-and I remember him sitting there laughing to himself. ‘Isn’t she the lively one now?’ he’d say. He treated me like dirt from the day you arrived. The two of you making fun of me behind my back. I never told on you. I never complained to her, but she knew. She’d sit at the sewing machine and cry to herself.’’

At the mention of tears her own eyes filled, not at what she remembered, but at the feeling of emptiness building inside her. ‘‘I’m trying to help you if only you’d let me. I’ve tried ever since the day you came back. Even Father Conway says I could not have done more.’’

‘‘Nor cared less,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Will you go home out of here, Norah? You’re like a great, fat hen, scratching everything into your nest. Cluck, cluck, cluck. Can’t you leave him and me alone?’’

‘‘You think you own him body and soul,’’ Norah blurted out. ‘‘You’d hire him out to your bootlegger friend, but you wouldn’t let him wash a window in my house.’’

Mary put her hand up to shield her face. Norah looked about to strike her. And Norah had never wanted more to hit her across the mouth. But she pulled back and made her way toward the door. She stopped and looked round at a burst of laughter from Mary.

‘‘Oh, my God,’’ Mary shouted. ‘‘You’re in love with him!’’

Norah quick-smiled. ‘‘You can’t say that, Mary. Haven’t you always said, ‘Poor Norah. She can’t love anybody except herself’?’’

Rossa stopped for a word with Mary when he brought Denny back on his way into town. ‘‘I was wrong about him, Mary. He’s not all muscle. He’s got a brain up there. And get him to sing ‘Home on the Range’ for you.’’

‘‘Aren’t you the one,’’ Mary said, sparing herself having to thank him.

Christopher Columbus could not have had more to tell returning from America than Denny coming back from Donel Rossa’s farm.

‘‘Did you learn how to milk a cow?’’ Mary asked.

‘‘And how to squirt milk in the cat’s mouth,’’ Denny said.

Mary remembered learning to milk and the kick of the cow who didn’t think much of how she went about it, and she thought of Norah’s going on about how she had begged to be brought over. She’d known when she landed she’d never go back. In steerage, sick as a dog all the way.

And him threatening to send her back if she didn’t give in to him. ‘‘Lie down on the bale there and turn up your arse.’’ She’d never got over it, even with Michael. And Norah saying, ‘‘I know how you feel.’’ Norah had gone home and pulled down the blinds on the windows that faced the barn. When she came out of the house it was by the front door and she never looked across. Nor had she hung a stitch on the clothesline.

‘‘I didn’t get to do much milking,’’ Denny said. ‘‘It’s terrible hard on the wrists, you know.’’

‘‘Is it now? Would you teach your granny to milk ducks?’’

Denny told things in spurts. He’d have told them better, Mary thought, if they’d had a tune to them- how the men on the wagon took the pitchfork away from him and made him load the sheaves by hand. ‘‘I couldn’t get the hang of it, you see. They said I’d be murdering them.’’ And Mrs. Rossa’s pies: ‘‘The look of them made your mouth water. Only she’d made a mistake and put salt instead of sugar in them. You should’ve seen Donel. I thought he was going to hit her. But he put his arm around her at the last minute, and told the men, ‘I’ll make it up to you,’ and he sure did. Two bottles. He told me after he was taking an awful chance. One of the ones he didn’t know could’ve been a spy, a Revenue agent.’’

Rossa had kept Dennis a day and a night after the combine pushed on to the next farm, and to hear Denny tell it, nothing as wonderful had ever happened to him before. He discovered Rossa’s collection of guns that he kept locked in the harness room. Rossa was a hunter. He showed Denny how to load and carry a shotgun, and had taken him out at dawn that very morning to shoot at the crows where they were cleaning up grain left in the harvest stubble.

‘‘I told him about the gun in Norah’s storeroom. You didn’t even see it, I bet.’’

‘‘I’ve seen it,’’ Mary said.

‘‘It’s a shotgun, Donel says. I knew that myself when I seen his. He says if Norah would let me borrow it, he’d help me clean it up and oil it. And he’ll take me hunting with him in the fall. They hunt small game with it-squirrels and rabbits. He told me you can make a better rabbit stew than Mrs. Rossa.’’

‘‘Once in my life,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Once in my life. Donel skinned it for me and I pretended it was an old rooster.’’

Denny pulled his chair closer to hers. He wet his lips. ‘‘Would you ask Aunt Norah for me?’’

She should never have taken him over there, Mary thought, but she’d been all over that with herself. And she ought not to have made fun of Norah, blurting out that she was in love, though she didn’t believe it for a minute. From the way Norah was carrying on since, Mary wasn’t sure what was going on with her.

‘‘I’ll have to think about it,’’ Mary said. She’d begun to feel sorry for her sister, the boob, the big, blubbering boob. ‘‘There’s enough to do in the onion patch to keep you busy. And for God’s sake take off the clothes you’re wearing and soak them in the tub.’’

‘‘I will,’’ Denny said. ‘‘I sweated a lot. Donel says we should keep the gun ready just to fire off and scare the Revenue men if they come snooping around. He says they might.’’

‘‘I said I’ll think about it,’’ Mary said.

How many times in those three days had Norah said, ‘‘How dare she!’’ and attacked with fury every chore she could put her mind to. She scoured the kitchen and bathroom sinks, the toilet bowl, the front steps. She finished the last of the schoolgirls’ dresses, folded them, and called round for them to be picked up. Her anger fed on memories of one good thing after another that Mary had spoiled for her. Even the piano. The dead piano in her parlor- Mary’s joke.

But her anger and her feeling of shame wore down, and that morning when she heard Rossa’s truck pull up to the barn, she looked out through the crack of daylight between the blind and the window frame, and watched Denny’s return. She pulled up all the blinds and boiled an egg for breakfast.

‘‘I could have done this myself,’’ the girl said, wanting to hand in the dress without a hello or how-are-you when Norah opened the door. Margaret surely taught her better.

‘‘Come in and let me look at you,’’ Norah said.

‘‘Dad’s in a terrible hurry.’’

‘‘No, dear. You are.’’ Norah smiled and backed into the house. ‘‘I know your father.’’ Tom Dixon was a great talker. Mary got to know more about what was happening in the town from an hour with him than Norah learned reading a month of the Hope Valley News.

The girl had little choice but to follow her indoors.

‘‘If you had more time,’’ Norah said, ‘‘I’d ask you to play your latest piece for me.’’

‘‘When I pick up the dress, maybe,’’ the thirteen-year-old said. She was even less fond of Norah’s piano than of the one at home. She could kick hers and the place she’d kicked wouldn’t show.

‘‘You’ll have to put the dress on, dear, if I’m going to pin it up.’’

‘‘Mother said…’’

Norah stopped her. ‘‘Elaine, I know how to alter a dress.’’

The girl took the dress into the bathroom and put it on.

Why they named her Elaine, Norah would never know. From a poem Margaret had read, she remembered. Or was it after someone in Tom’s family? He was English. She certainly wasn’t Norah’s notion of an Elaine. No wonder they called her Lainie.

What was her hurry? Norah wondered when she let her out of the house and watched her lope across the way. Did the girl hate her that much? Norah did know she was fonder of Mary and her ramshackle house. It struck her then: Denny.

Lainie burst into Mary’s kitchen. ‘‘She’s spooky!’’

‘‘That’s enough,’’ Tom said.

Mary chuckled. ‘‘I think it myself sometimes.’’ She turned up her cheek for a kiss. ‘‘Is it you that’s growing or me that’s shrinking?’’

‘‘Where’s Denny?’’ the girl asked.

‘‘Didn’t I tell you?’’ Tom said to Mary. He was right. The girl had reached the age where one word said it all: boys.

‘‘I’ve fixed him a jar of tea. You can take it down to him in the far field and make him share it with you.’’

‘‘You have the devil in you, Mary,’’ Tom said.

She gave that rattle of a laugh. ‘‘Sure, it’s broad daylight.’’

And the blinds were up next door. Wouldn’t Norah be watching with the frozen heart of a chaperone? Mary pushed their tea things out of the way. ‘‘I’ve a question or two for you, Tom. You’re wearing your badge, I see.’’

‘‘If I didn’t the sheriff would take it from me.’’

‘‘I thought maybe something was up. The Revenue men going round, say. Or is Donel filling Denny’s head with goblins?’’

‘‘I’m on the side of the Feds. I have to be,’’ Tom said. ‘‘It’s the law.’’

‘‘Would they be after Donel, do you think?’’

‘‘I’m not in their confidence, Mary.’’

She let it go. ‘‘Wouldn’t you think they’d have more to do in this country than put and take laws like that one?’’

‘‘It’s a country for and by the people,’’ Tom said. Scratch a veteran and find a patriot. Mary could beat time to it.

‘‘You know Donel’s put down money on a building in town,’’ he added.

‘‘Is that a fact?’’ she said, all ears.

‘‘I’ve heard he’ll be opening a business of some sort, a big one.’’

‘‘And quitting the farm?’’

‘‘The farm’s quitting a lot of us these days, Mary.’’

Mary envisioned the main street of Hopetown as she had last paid it attention. Vacancies galore.

‘‘What kind of business, do you think?’’

‘‘It’s a ways off,’’ Tom said.

‘‘He plans ahead,’’ Mary said. She was thinking of Donel’s palaver about the horse and the truck. ‘‘And he has money. Sure, that’s what makes the mare go, Tom. Money makes the mare go.’’

‘‘I’ll put the dishes in the sink for you,’’ Tom said, getting up.

‘‘Leave them. There’s something I’d like you to do for me while you’re here: Give Denny a hand with a cupboard he’s to bring over from Norah’s.’’

She made her way to the telephone and gave it a mighty crank.

‘‘Are you feeling better, Norah?’’ The very tone of Mary’s voice, the purr of concern, put Norah on guard.

‘‘I’m doing fine,’’ Norah said.

‘‘Ah, that’s good news. I was worried about you,’’ Mary chirped. ‘‘I was wondering if you felt up to it, while I have Tom here, could him and Denny pick up the cupboard? I can’t count on Donel these days.’’

‘‘I’ll go down and unlock the door,’’ Norah said.

‘‘Would it be less trouble if I sent Denny ahead for the key?’’

‘‘I said I’ll go down.’’ She’d send Denny ahead for the key, taunting her, that’s what it was, Norah thought.

She was sure of it when all four of them crowded down the cellar steps. The girl giggling and Denny coming down backwards to give her his hand. A gentleman!

‘‘Hey! It’s creepy in here,’’ the girl squealed.

‘‘Couldn’t we have more light?’’ Mary called. ‘‘Tom wants to look at your furnace while he’s here.’’

Denny opened the storeroom door for her, where she pulled the switch that lit up the whole cellar. Denny seemed to light up with it, as though she had conjured the light for his delight. She could not conceal the pleasure of looking at him, but she turned on Mary. ‘‘Is that light enough for you?’’

‘‘Ah, Norah, you’re still not yourself. It’s Denny made me come along and speak to you for him. I think he’s afraid of you, God knows why.’’ She gave a swipe of her hand at Lainie, who’d crept up, never wanting to miss anything. ‘‘Go there with your father, girl. He’ll need your advice.’’ And to Norah, ‘‘Can we come in for a minute?’’ Her stick ahead of her, she was already in the storeroom. Canny as a scavenger, she saw the gun, but didn’t let on at first. Then: ‘‘There it is!’’ She looked up at her sister. ‘‘It’s the gun, Norah. It’s been on his mind ever since we were here. If I’d known at the time, I’d have said something.’’

Norah’s brief shock of pleasure went dead. She felt let down by Denny, betrayed, him letting Mary in on the little bond she’d thought between him and herself. Afraid of her? Mary’s nonsense. Nobody was afraid of her. He was shy. That’s what she loved about him.

He stood there holding his breath, waiting for the next word.

‘‘What about the gun, Denny? Can’t you tell me yourself?’’ She didn’t want to hear any more from Mary.

‘‘Aunt Norah,’’ he started.

‘‘Just plain Norah, Denny.’’

He nodded. ‘‘Could we borrow it, Aunt Norah?’’

‘‘Who’s the ‘we,’ Dennis?’’

‘‘Mr. Rossa and me. He’ll help me clean it up and take me hunting with him in the fall.’’

Norah did not like Donel Rossa. She didn’t trust him-all his trips to and from Chicago, and his ‘‘holy water,’’ his ‘‘smiles’’ as he called them. He was in the business, she was sure. Why he coddled Mary, she never knew, but she did know how he treated her. Like she was a crook, like she’d befuddled the old lady into leaving her everything. In truth, he made her feel about herself the way she felt about him.

‘‘Have you ever fired a gun in your life, Denny?’’

‘‘I have-in the amusement park in White City. I shot down the whole row of ducks and I took the prize. It was a kewpie doll I gave to my mother.’’

‘‘Oh, my God,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Tell her about the crows in the field this morning.’’

Denny repeated the story much as he’d told it to Mary. He wasn’t sizzling, Mary thought, but he was holding his own. And so was Norah. Mary could see her guard going up. She was afraid of losing something, of something being taken away from her, and she didn’t like Donel, Mary knew.

Tom and the girl had come to the door.

‘‘Rossa knows guns,’’ Tom said. ‘‘He’ll teach you proper. I’m not a hunter myself, but I know one when I see the gun in his hand.’’

‘‘Dad won’t even shoot a fox,’’ Lainie said. ‘‘I’m a better shot than he is.’’

The bold thing, Norah thought. Next she’d want to go hunting with Denny and to hide in a duck blind with him.

‘‘Could I show you, Aunt Norah?’’ Not waiting for leave, he darted across the room and took the gun in hand. He brushed away the dust and broke the breech. Not easily. It needed his strength.

‘‘Empty,’’ he said of the cartridge chamber. ‘‘You must never take a chance.’’ He locked the gun again and held it crosswise to himself and waited.

They were all waiting. Except Mary, who had neither patience nor use for guns, especially this one. She was determined Denny could become the apple of Donel’s eye. ‘‘What good is it to you, Norah? Couldn’t I have taken it the day we were in here cleaning out for you?’’

‘‘You could not,’’ Norah said. ‘‘Shall I tell you why?’’

‘‘There’s no need.’’ She turned round to the door. ‘‘Come on, Denny, let’s go home.’’

Norah spoke out so that all of them would hear. ‘‘You may borrow the gun, Denny, if you give me your word as a gentleman, it stays in this house when you’re not out hunting with it. But you must give me your word.’’

‘‘I do,’’ Denny said with such fervor it made Mary laugh.

She laughed, but with no great pleasure. Norah had won something though she wasn’t sure what. Her back was to them when Denny put the gun back from where he had taken it.

‘‘Thank you, Norah,’’ he said, up close to her face.

Norah thought it eloquent, that soft, rich voice. Simple and eloquent. ‘‘We’ll have a key made for you, Denny.’’

His smile went through her.

Tom was already testing the weight of the cupboard. He had rarely visited the sisters that they did not end things with a quarrel between them. He wanted away. ‘‘Let’s go, Denny. I want to get home before the cows come in.’’

Lainie was there first, lifting the other end of the huge pine box with its clattering doors. ‘‘Lay it down flat and you could put a couple of bodies in it,’’ she said to her father just above a whisper.

‘‘Never mind,’’ he said. But he let her help. He always said she was more help to him than ever a boy would have been.

Denny wanted to telephone Donel that very night and tell him he’d be able to go hunting with him in the fall.

‘‘When you next see him, it’ll be time enough,’’ Mary said, and when he drooped like a spent daisy, she explained, ‘‘Donel Rossa has more on his mind than teaching you how to shoot rabbits.’’

‘‘I know that, but I could start working on the gun by myself. It’s terrible rusty.’’ He suddenly brightened. ‘‘I know what I’ll do-I’ll go in town to the hardware store and they’ll tell me what I need.’’

‘‘I’m sure they will,’’ Mary said. ‘‘And maybe they’ll tell you how to pay for it.’’

A storm blew up in the night and set the beaded curtain rustling. Old bones, she thought. That’s what it was made of. She hadn’t listened to it much since he had come and she had a terrible premonition that she was going to lose him. It was a new kind of pain, as though she needed it. She reached for the flask under the lumpy pillow. She was going to lose that, too.

Rain came with the wind and in the morning she knew they were not going to pick a second round of tomatoes or plough under the potato field. She also knew that one thing she had to do about Denny was keep him busy. She waited for him to come up from emptying the slops and wash the bucket at the outdoor pump. By the time he came in he was soaked to the skin. From the storage bin under the sofa she brought out a checkered wool shirt of Michael’s she’d intended to wear herself someday. The someday had never come. ‘‘It’ll keep you warm hunting ducks,’’ she said. ‘‘Put it on for now.’’

At the first break in the weather they went out to the padlocked back door of the barn. ‘‘This is where the cows came in,’’ Mary said, and Dennis, with his nose in the air, said, ‘‘I can tell.’’

Piled along the cement frames where once there had been stanchions were several sheets of beaverboard and the lumber they had not used in carving a place of her own for Mary. Donel had been generous and he dreamed big dreams. She would remind him, when the right time came, of how they’d planned a second room, and maybe a second stove off Mary’s parlor. She pointed out to Denny the slit of light in the roof, a boxed vent to where a chimney pipe might be raised.

It was her dream at the moment, not Denny’s. He wandered off. He was a city boy, sure, and he’d met cows for the first time in his life at Donel’s, and he’d caught the smell of them here.

She was startled when he called out to her, ‘‘Aunt Mary, someone’s standing in the doorway.’’

As she turned to see the man, he greeted her, ‘‘The top of the morning to you!’’

‘‘Oh, my God,’’ she muttered. It could have been Donel with his make-believe Irish, but it was not.

He was holding an open wallet for her to see his identification. When she reached him she saw little except the government insignia, for her heart started to pound. She thought he was from Immigration. She’d never lost the fear of being sent back.

‘‘What is it you want, mister?’’

‘‘My name is Spillane. I’ve orders to search the premises for corn whiskey, ma’am. You’ve nothing to fear if you’re clean, Mrs. O’Hearn.’’

He stretched his neck to see behind and beyond her into the cavernous barn and he took a good look at Dennis when he came up. Whoever he was, his pale eyes had no warmth in them and he had stoked her fear. She disliked him on sight.

‘‘What kind of name is Spillane?’’

‘‘It’s Irish, as Irish as yours.’’

‘‘And you a Revenue man,’’ she said with scorn, the full use of her tongue restored.

He put the wallet back in his pocket. ‘‘So you’re one of those Irish women,’’ he said. ‘‘I have a warrant in the car if you want to see it.’’

‘‘Never mind. Take him around, Denny. And be sure to show him the still.’’

‘‘Where, Aunt Mary?’’ Denny had missed the point.

‘‘Oh, for the love of God, go where you like, Mr. Spillane, and take care you don’t miss my bedroom.’’

He did not miss much. He went to his car and brought a flashlight. A touring car with the windows all open to let out the stink, Mary thought. He’d be losing his authority soon. Maybe that was what ailed him. But he made Denny lift the cover from the mouth of the well. He searched its depth with the beam of the torch. He looked up at Mary where she watched from the back stoop and he’d have heard her laugh. He reached out and snatched the cup from where it hung by the pump and threw it into the well.

‘‘May you die of thirst,’’ Mary shouted and went into the house.

When he was gone, Mary poured herself and Denny cold tea from what was left in the breakfast pot.

‘‘What did he mean by one of those Irish women?’’ Denny wanted to know.

‘‘Why didn’t you ask him?’’ Mary snapped. She’d known exactly what he meant: They should never have been given the vote. Not, of course, that she had ever used it.

‘‘He didn’t talk much. I didn’t like him either, Mary.’’

‘‘Did he say anything to you at all?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’

‘‘Well, what?’’

‘‘ ‘Where’d you get those great, big beautiful eyes?’ ’’

‘‘The bastard,’’ Mary said.

‘‘Yeah. Now can we call Donel?’’

Donel came in the afternoon. He heard them out, but he shook his head. ‘‘Did you have to make an enemy of him, Mary?’’

‘‘Was I to make a friend of him, then?’’

‘‘It’s what I’ve been doing all my life, and I eat three square meals a day.’’ He dropped his voice. ‘‘They’re all over the place, so do me a favor, Mary, if he comes back, give him a cup of tea.’’

‘‘I know what I’ll put in it then, him pouring the last drop in my bottle down the sink.’’

‘‘You’ve had worse things happen to you.’’

He was out of patience-short of time, she realized, and he hadn’t offered to replenish her holy water. She saw a glint of anger in his eyes. She wouldn’t want him for an enemy, either.

‘‘And I’ve had better!’’ In spite of herself, she couldn’t yield the last word, but she rang a good change on it with a nod toward Denny. ‘‘Till this one.’’

Denny grinned. ‘‘Donel,’’ he said, ‘‘I got the loan of the gun.’’

Donel grunted as though to give his memory a jog.

‘‘I plan to clean it up myself,’’ Denny went on, ‘‘and be half-ready at least, when we can go hunting.’’

‘‘That won’t do at all,’’ Donel said. ‘‘It’s not a musical instrument. It’s a weapon.’’

‘‘I know,’’ Denny said.

‘‘You think you know. That’s worse than not knowing at all.’’

‘‘I’ll learn.’’

Mary was proud of the way he said it.

Donel said, ‘‘That’s better. Let’s have a look at it while I’m here.’’

‘‘I have to keep it at Norah’s,’’ Denny said, ‘‘but I’m to have a key.’’

Mary’s eyes and Donel’s met, for they shared a deep and silent association with the words. When Mary had run away to Chicago, she found a haven and employment with a friend of Donel’s to whose house Donel had a key.

‘‘He’ll make friends at Murray’s Hardware,’’ Mary said. ‘‘They’ll get him started.’’

Donel looked at his watch. ‘‘I’ll take you in town with me now and introduce you to Murray. If you can bring the gun, he’ll know what you’re talking about.’’

‘‘I will,’’ Denny said. ‘‘I’ll ask Aunt Norah. It’s a single-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun.’’

‘‘It’ll do,’’ Donel said without enthusiasm. It was one of the cheaper guns on the market. ‘‘And where in hell did you get the shirt you’re wearing?’’

Norah made a quick choice of where to hide when she saw Rossa stop and wait in the truck for Denny to come to her door. She wasn’t ready yet. She listened as Denny rapped and called out her name. The note of concern was endearing. She sat on the cushioned lid of the toilet and waited to hear the truck pull away. In a snatch of memory she heard Mary’s cackle: ‘‘God save the queen.’’

The bathtub, she thought, staring at it, was big enough for him to flop over in. He’d splash and grin. She thought of getting a bar of Lifebuoy soap.

Denny knocked on her door again late in the afternoon. He had come back on foot carrying a brand-new canvas knapsack.

‘‘I must have heard you in my sleep,’’ Norah lied. ‘‘I lay down with a headache after my lunch, and wasn’t I dreaming of you?’’

‘‘What was I doing?’’

‘‘You were playing the piano,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s just come back to me now.’’

‘‘You were dreaming, all right,’’ Denny said.

They went down through the house to the cellar, and Norah pointed out a workbench near the coal bin he could use.

‘‘Couldn’t I take it over there to work on?’’

‘‘You could not.’’

While she watched him unpack the knapsack she listened for a telephone call from Mary or the rap of her stick on a window. ‘‘Isn’t Mary feeling well?’’

‘‘She’s all right.’’

Which told her nothing. ‘‘I wondered if it was a doctor I saw stopping in this morning.’’

‘‘Not for Aunt Mary. She thinks they’re all quacks.’’

He’d been given instruction, Norah thought, on what he could say and what not. She was furious, not so much at what she might be missing, but at the idea of Mary’s taking advantage of his innocence. She had made up her mind from what she’d seen of Mary’s visitor that morning that he was on a mission from Donel Rossa. He might even be bringing her the monthly holy water. He looked like a bootlegger and his long-nosed car suited the notion.

‘‘Will you save your tin cans for me, Norah? Donel says I should set them up on the fence posts in the far field and practice.’’

‘‘You know this is all my property, Dennis.’’

‘‘Oh, I do. Donel said I should ask you.’’

‘‘I’ll save you the tins.’’

‘‘Thank you, Norah.’’ His smile was like honey.

It would do for the day, she thought. ‘‘You’d better go now. She’ll be waiting for you.’’

‘‘She will. She’ll want to hear.’’

‘‘To hear what, Denny?’’

‘‘About Donel’s construction business. Mr. Murray shook hands with him. It’s going to be great for Hopetown-for the whole valley.’’

Norah smiled. ‘‘How nice!’’ she said.

‘‘Mary! Come outdoors quick!’’

‘‘Quick!’’ she mocked.

And when she got to the stoop: ‘‘Look!’’ he insisted.

‘‘I can hear them,’’ she said.

Fading fast into the morning mist even as their cries grew dimmer, the Canadian geese were going south.

‘‘Would God they were coming back.’’ She drew her shawl tighter. ‘‘For God’s sake put your shirt on, Denny. You’ll catch your death of cold.’’

‘‘I won’t.’’ He still washed, naked to the waist, at the pump by the well. He shaved at the kitchen sink.

They had eggs for breakfast that morning, and though she knew he was only half listening, she told him, and probably for the second or third time, she thought, of how as children she and Norah waded in the stream at home, groping the sand with their toes for duck eggs. Whoever found one got the top when her father opened it for his breakfast the next morning.

‘‘Did you and Norah fight over it?’’ He was listening after all.

Donel stopped on his way into town. He was a little early, due at the lawyer’s office within the hour to sign the final papers. The teacup trembled in his hand. He put it down. ‘‘I’ll be glad to get this over with,’’ he said.

‘‘Will you have a drop from my bottle to settle you?’’ Mary said.

‘‘Not on your life, macushla.’’

He had brought her the last ‘‘smile.’’

He stretched out his hand and held it steady, but his teeth were clenched. He took up the cup again. ‘‘I’m clean, Mary.’’ He toasted her-or himself-with the lukewarm tea: ‘‘Slainte.’’

Let Norah ridicule him all she liked, Mary thought, but they would never know a man more Irish.

Norah was on the lookout. She had been from the moment she heard Rossa’s car drive into the yard. The family car, no less. He sometimes drove her and Mary to Sunday Mass in it. Lately he’d been driving it into Hopetown. It was more befitting a businessman than the Ford truck. She knew Denny would be going back to the farm with him-to shuck corn and then to go hunting with him in the morning.

He would come soon for the gun and take it away for the first time. And what would she have left? A bag of tin cans with holes shot through them. She caught a whiff of her cologne. She’d used too much of it. And dreamed too much. She’d worn out a paltry thrill remembering it. Only once had she come even close to telling him she loved him.

He’d been at the cellar workbench that day, his back to her, and what she told him was of her love for music and how beautiful she thought his voice was. When he seemed to stiffen, she thought it safer to talk about the piano and how she’d hoped someday to even play it herself. She’d been pleased at the moment for what she said then: ‘‘But it’s my heart and not my head that’s musical.’’

And Denny, looking around to her in the expectant silence: ‘‘Couldn’t you sell the piano?’’

‘‘I don’t need the money, Denny.’’

‘‘Aunt Mary would have,’’ he said.

Denny came out from the barn with Rossa. He put his knapsack and a box of Mary’s preserves, no doubt, in the rear seat of the sedan. He stepped back and watched Rossa drive off. Without a glance her way, he went back in to Mary.

He would not come till the last minute, waiting for Rossa to return and hurry him away.

She watched the traffic coming into town, not a car a minute, but picking up these days. She couldn’t believe it had anything to do with Donel Rossa’s new enterprise, Hope County Construction. County no less.

She moved away from the window and then went back to straighten the curtain. By sheer chance she saw the black long-nosed touring car drive past the house and on into Hopetown. When she thought about it, she wasn’t a bit surprised.

In the late morning she heard Dennis open the cellar doors. She called down to him to leave them open, that she would close them when the sun was gone.

‘‘I didn’t want to bother you,’’ he said at the bottom of the kitchen stairs. ‘‘Donel didn’t think he’d be this long. Mary says it’s the lawyers that’s holding things up.’’

‘‘Ah, yes, what Mary says.’’ He was like a silhouette between her and the shaft of daylight. ‘‘I’m coming down,’’ she said.

‘‘You don’t need to, Aunt Norah.’’

He didn’t want her to. He wanted to go off, gun in hand, without even a thank-you-very-much. ‘‘I’m coming down.’’

He lifted the storeroom door for her when she went in to switch on the lights. ‘‘I was going to fix this for you, wasn’t I? When I come back from Donel’s.’’

She followed him to the workbench. ‘‘What if Rossa doesn’t come, if something happened to change his mind?’’

‘‘He’d let us know,’’ Denny said. He took the gun from the rack he had built for it and broke it to be sure the chamber was empty.

‘‘You are such a foolish boy, Dennis. You believe everybody. The Revenue agent in the rain that morning: I could have told you the truth about him. But Mary spat at me when I even mentioned him.’’

‘‘That bastard,’’ Denny said.

‘‘No, Denny. He’s worse. He’s a gangster. I would take my oath on it. And isn’t he back today for the celebration?’’

‘‘He’s back?’’ Denny questioned as though he didn’t understand her.

‘‘You don’t forget an automobile like that, Denny. When Donel left here this morning, it came by right after him. What an odd coincidence, I thought at first and then I realized: Of course, they’re going to the same place.’’

Denny groped his jacket pocket and brought out a cartridge. He loaded it into the open gun and closed it.

She was a second or two understanding what he had done. ‘‘He doesn’t need you, Denny. He’s one of them.’’

‘‘You’re crazy,’’ he said.

He edged her aside, when she tried to block his way to the door. ‘‘It’s Mary needs me, don’t you understand?’’

‘‘No, I don’t understand and I never will. You can’t have the gun, Denny. It’s mine. I want it back.’’

She tried to take it from him, but he was by far the stronger. She tried to twist it free.

The explosion rocked the house. Smoke and debris clouded the air. She knew she was losing consciousness, but now she couldn’t let go of the gun. It was frozen in her hands. And her hands were wet with blood, her sleeves, her breast saturated. She could taste it. So much blood.

Then nothing.

When the girl, Lainie, got home from Denny’s funeral, she put the Mass card in the box of clippings she was saving from the Hope Valley News. It didn’t belong there, and yet it did. It would always carry her remembrance of the lone high voice from the choir loft singing the ‘‘Dies Irae,’’ Day of Wrath, and the single sob it brought from her aunt Mary.

For as long as she lived, Norah would say that she had killed Denny-in spite of the coroner’s finding that his death was most probably caused by a bullet fired from the cellar doorway an instant before or an instant after the gun in her and Denny’s hands exploded.

Mary swore she had seen Spillane when she started over at the sound of gunfire. So she, too, bore willing guilt. But it was Donel who could beat his breast the hardest.

Norah had been right. Spillane was a low-level member of the Chicago gang Donel had been in business with for years. He had thought he was breaking away from them that fall. ‘‘The boss’’ thought so, too. He suspected at first that Donel was tying in with another gang and using Mary’s place for storage. Spillane investigated even the well. Donel no more than Mary doubted his claim to be a federal agent.

When the news of the construction business came out-Hope County Construction-‘‘the boss’’ wanted a part of it. Donel refused. As he told Mary, he was clean. He thought he was, but Spillane caught up with him before he reached the door of the lawyer’s office that morning. The boss expected him to postpone the contract signing and expand the partnership. The boss promised he would get well paid, whichever way he played it. Donel told him to go to hell.

Why Denny and not Mary if Spillane was his killer? It was probably the boss’s decision. Denny was Michael O’Hearn’s nephew, and Michael had been killed-in the line of duty-in an exchange of gunfire that also killed a young and promising member of the gang those many years before.

Spillane was never found, dead or alive.