Listen to the author reading this story:
On the last night you and I ever go out together, we drive to Ballyvaughan and wind up seeing the wrong singer. Driving home, John, who’s come with us, says he took this same road a few days earlier, after the funeral of a friend’s father. He avoided Corkscrew Hill that evening, didn’t fancy its looping limestone threads. The cold had got in on him at the graveyard.
‘Time to thaw,’ he says about the longer route. ‘Warm the marrow.’
Snatches of moonlight catch peaked waves before vanishing into the inky black of my wing mirror. I close my window against the fading salt air. Nobody speaks. You both seem content to let John’s funeral excursion lie. I can’t.
John and I go back and forth for a while, a reluctant and pressing exchange, until your hand moves to turn on the radio, but it stalls midair. Retreats. Your wrist is a pale strip without your brother’s watch. Your baby brother and those green eyes of his — gone.
‘What did you say he died of?’ I ask John, twisting round in my seat. ‘The father.’
Some inaudible answer comes, but I keep circling: a spaniel quartering ground, flushing birds into flight. You reach across, tap my leg, twice. Both times firm and unwelcome. A small correction that ends a thought, shuts an open mouth.
‘Chuir sé lámh ina bhás féin,’ John says.
The air shifts, like we’re climbing towards thinner oxygen.
‘He put his own hand…’ I say, half-translating for you.
The Burren’s limestone sheets pass in succession under soft, milky light. Bobbing and dozing, I sway in sleep until the turn and crunch of gravel. John’s house rises from the dark.
‘Great mistake of a night,’ John, says after the hugs and goodbyes, and our assurances that we’ve all enjoyed our wonderful mix-up.
‘God, you were fascinated with that man,’ you say, as we drive off, hitting the horn in final salute.
‘With John?’
‘No, with the dead man.’ You’re wearing that look you don when you’d rather say nothing, but tonight, you draw a breath and continue, a muscle ticking in your forearm. ‘You even asked if the coffin was open.’
I prop my chin on the heel of my hand and imagine the corpse-house both ways: lid open, lid closed. Lines of condoling hands would move slower with the lid open. Staring, curious. Complimenting the body, like I’d wanted to when Donal died.
A diviner from Couty Clare, Donal found water on our site, long before you and I ever met. The rods pulled me to the source, and I got to feel what he felt, that tug towards something invisible.
‘A curse,’ he said, ‘not a gift.’
His wake was one evening in late August. The first funeral since Dad’s, and I had yet to overcome the awkwardness. The glib, imperfect one-liners. Clammy hands squeezing rings tight. Soft rain pearling mourners’ heads before the shelter of funeral umbrellas.
Giant sycamores loomed over Donal’s hayshed. Its rust-red roof always wowed me, but that evening, it lurked like a corrugated witness. A flock of ravens swooped overhead, black shapes slicing the sky, as if in chosen ignorance. As if no one had ever hanged from the rafters below.
‘Jackdaws,’ someone said, as the birds drew evening into night.
‘Are they crows?’ said another.
Donal’s mare stood watching the crowd, from a paddock next to the shed, her fresh foal by her side. Had she seen him steal across the yard? Had he stopped to touch her, breathe her in? Quiet his hands before the knot.
‘Hard to know,’ came a voice from the line behind me.
‘God help him,’ said another, and a collective shiver passed between us.
Inside the house, we moved through his sitting-room-cum-temporary church. Donal’s hands, always fluttering and busy, now lay stiff and still. A desire to stare for an inappropriate time assailed me. To find some understanding in his face, proof that he was dead. I could find it if I just looked hard enough for his life.
His widow stood still, eyes shadowed by charcoal half-moons. Her blonde hair and Canadian accent struck bright against our East Galway bogland, where only three mornings earlier, her husband had decided to die. I filed past, looked at my friend, all swollen and waxy, and oddly made-up. When I reached to take her hand, my voice shook.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
A tear I’d tried to hold onto slipped onto our clasped fingers.
A pothole’s dip jerks me back to us. To our differences and their vastness. You’re still shaking your head, hissing air through your teeth, caught, I’m sure, on the image of the open casket.
I glance sideways. ‘You think I annoyed John?’
‘You kept steering the conversation there.’ You pause, thinking. ‘Clunkily, too.’
Clunkily? A new departure. Not the word but the dollop of judgement you’re dishing with it. I sit straighter. Our silence lasts a few kilometres this time. The mountain road folded tight by thick pines on either side, wraps the night around us, blocking any hint of moon.
The indicator blinks left towards Derrybrien. Twenty minutes to home.
‘Suppose I just wanted to know.’
‘Wildly interested, more like.’
You love using that word — wild — about me. About everything you spurn.
You: measurer of dishwasher plate-spacings, adjudicator of rules no one else remembers.
What would it take to loosen your grip? To engage. To face this truth together. So many unspoken secrets locked inside you, while I’m harbouring the misbelief you want to release. Need to. But I don’t want to think about you. Or us. The ending of us; one more death lying in wait, wings preparing to flap.
I opt instead, for distraction: if John is sixty-three and the friend likely similar, the dead man must’ve been ninetyish.
‘God, he was old. Must’ve been sickness. Didn’t want to suffer? Didn’t want—’
‘No, he wasn’t,’ you cut across. ‘The man — who we don’t even know — was fit and healthy up until…’ You inhale sharply, as you do. ‘Until, you know.’ So many words you can’t say. Refuse to say.
‘Oh, come on! Surely this interests you?’
You don’t answer.
I watch your profile, that look when you’re concentrating. Fixed on something other than me. And still, I find you briefly beautiful. I reach over, trace my finger along your stubble, follow jawline to earlobe. Hold it between finger and thumb. Faint pattering pulse.
‘There’s an acupuncture point here. For relaxation. So they say.’
You smile. ‘They always have a lot to say.’
A fox crosses the road. We stop. It stops. Stares back through the beams.
‘Has to be a hard life, little Foxy,’ I say. ‘Hope our chooks are safe, dreaming their chicken dreams.’
‘Finding worms in clay,’ you say, quick as silver. Your fingers brush the gearstick. Then mine. And I love you fiercely in this second. No — seconds.
Bun ós cionn, the fox disappears, tail last into the ditch.
‘We could talk about him. If you like. Your brother?’
The suggestion corrals us into our tiny tin box. You open your window, sit your elbow on the frame like it’s midday, then lean on the accelerator.
You say nothing after that. Shift in your seat, the road holding your gaze. But your jaw works, as if grinding words to powder.
Easier to read grief in others. Donal said that was my curse — that thing in me that follows the scent of death like a hound. Trailing behind the living like smoke. Not everyone senses it. But I’ve always felt it curling up the nape of my neck, settling in rooms long after the body’s gone. Maybe that’s what I’m sniffing for in John’s story, how the left-behind sound once the coffin is closed.
You downshift for the crossroads, tip the indicator a beat too soon. Tyres skimming the ditch; you take the turns faster near home. Not like John, with his careful detours.
The last time I saw Donal was in the waning dusk, as he walked the distance from his car to the cottage.
‘Why not pull up to the house?’ I’d asked.
‘People look,’ he said. ‘The mart’s a hard enough place.’ His hands were vibrating by his sides. ‘This. This is private work.’
I didn’t press him. But a current stronger than the groundwater beneath flowed between us. I never told anyone about his visits. We talked of his work — interlocutor between the land and the living, seeker of ancestral goodwill — and of how hard it was. How secret. How fiercely shameful.
The sign for Moyglass flashes. ‘Seven minutes to home,’ I say.
You laugh, slipping into the incredulous tone you use when you’re unimpressed with my theories. But this time, it’s you who circles back to the dead father.
‘You asked John if his friend had cried.’
Well done me, but I tuck that deftly inside.
‘And?’
‘He didn’t want to answer. But he gave in,’ you say. A vein throbs in your temple, a fault line in self-control. ‘To your interrogation.’
‘Well, did he?’
‘No.’ Then before I can ask: ‘Nor did he look like he’d cried earlier. Jesus. The detail.’
You wince at something beyond my reach.
I go back to West Clare, picture the coffin hoisted on shoulders. The Atlantic hurling wind at their backs.
‘Stiff breeze.’
Collars banded against the sky. Faces white-cold. Men linking arms with women in lipstick and heels. Funeral shoes and coats drifting towards the empty socket of waiting earth.
In this — my dream of it — John’s friend throws clay in after the coffin.
‘Bye,’ he says. Just the one word. Exhaustion ashen on his face. Not grief. No one cries.
The wind rises. People scatter.
I collect these details the way others collect stamps: grief, ritual, the trappings of the end.
I think of my dress hanging in the wardrobe. ‘I love that dress,’ I say, as we turn into our boreen. ‘Saving it up for my mother’s funeral.’
Though really, it was always your mother’s I had in mind. I smile at you in the dashboard light, but you don’t answer. I know with certainty that we won’t make it that long. I know that when your mother dies, you’ll go alone.
We pass our gate — five minutes, not the usual seven. I’m catapulted back to another gate. A different threshold. Back to that Friday when Donal came to divine the site. His rods in my hands.
‘Go with them, the energy’ll guide you,’ he’d said. ‘No mistakes.’
Lost to the magnetic pull, I barely heard my neighbour calling my name across the field.
‘Your father.’ She was crying, crossing the gate, arms waving, her tissues flaring white in the four o’clock sun.
‘Go,’ Donal said. ‘You might make it.’
I didn’t. My predictable lateness, Dad’s reliable promptness. By seven, he was dead. Always dying to be early, never satisfied with on time. ‘Hurry up, or I’ll go without you,’ he’d shout.
And he did.
I want to tell you about that day, how it all happened, how Donal told me he’d sensed it that morning. But you’ve already stepped out, heading for the coop, shining your phone. All safe.
‘I do love you,’ I say, that extra word escaping before I can grab hold of it.
‘I know.’
I start after you. ‘I had this friend—’
‘Who?’ you call back, walking ahead.
‘Nothing,’ I say to your back. ‘You know, it’s not the dress I wore to your brother’s…’
Your steel-capped heel drags hard on the path. You stop. And you do not turn around.
A glint of frost sparkles in the porch light. Cold seeps into my bones, with it the dawning that we’ve already ended but only one of us will say the words.
You turn the key, disappear like the fox, click the door shut.
I linger outside. Picture Donal’s mare —
her brown eyes taking in the last of him,
listening as the life left him.
Edelle Dwyer is a writer from Galway. Her first novel was shortlisted for the Oxford/42 New Writing Prize. Hard to Know, previously shortlisted in the Wells Festival of Literature, makes its publication debut here.
I loved this! So descriptive without the need for long rambling sentences. Beautiful writing. I hope to read more of her stories soon. Thanks for sharing