Chapter 3 The Man Who Waited

The wake was held in the co-op hall because Siobhan's cottage was too small and the church was too cold, and because in this village a wake was not a private thing. The whole of Dún Aonghasa came through the green door that evening. They brought soda bread and cold ham and a barrel of stout that Padraig from the shop rolled in on a hand cart, and they stood in clusters along the walls with their plates and their pints and their voices low, and every one of them looked at me.

I stood by the coffin at the top of the hall and shook hands until my fingers ached.

Father Byrne came first, in his good coat with the collar turned up, and he held my hand in both of his and said Siobhan had been a good woman and a great singer, and then he said, quietly, so that only I could hear, "She came to me in February and asked me questions I could not answer. I have thought about it every night since." He let go of my hand before I could ask him what questions. That was the first thing.

The second thing was the way the village arranged itself. The older men stood by the door with their backs to the wall and their eyes on the room. The women moved among the tables with plates and teapots and their faces soft and kind, and every one of them found a moment to come up to me and take my arm and say a thing that was not quite a condolence.

"Your sister was brave," said the woman who ran the post office. "Braver than was good for her."

"She had a temper on her, mind," said the woman from the shop. "There were those who did not like it."

"If you need anything at all," said a third, a tall thin woman with grey plaited hair and a face like a kind horse, "you come to me and not to the hall. Do you hear me? Not to the hall."

Declan was there with the young man from the pier, Cormac, who had the narrow face from the photograph and his father's grey eyes and would not look at me at all. He stood by the tea table with a cup in his hands and his shoulders up around his ears, and when I passed close to him the smell of pine and wet wool came off him so strongly that I stopped in the middle of the floor. He felt me stop. He turned his head a fraction, met my eyes for less than a breath, and then put his cup down and walked out of the hall.

The room went quiet for a moment when the door closed behind him. Then the talk came back up like water over a stone.

I found a corner and stayed in it. Grief in a room full of people is a strange kind of work. You are supposed to be sad and grateful at once, and the sadness has nowhere to go because everyone is watching to see how you carry it. I ate nothing. I drank tea. And I watched them back, because that is what I know how to do.

The man by the window was the third thing. He was old, white-haired, with a face that had gone soft and pink with age, and he wore a brown cardigan with a button missing and he had come in without a plate and without a drink and taken up a position by the window where he could see the whole room and the door and the coffin. He watched me for a long time. When I finally looked straight back at him he did not look away, he lifted one hand and touched two fingers to his own chest, over his heart, and then let the hand drop. It was a strange gesture, old fashioned, like something out of a story. I meant to go over to him. Before I could, the door opened and the hall changed.

I felt it before I understood it. The talk did not stop, exactly. It thinned. The men by the door moved aside, and the women at the tables put down their plates, and into the hall came a woman in a black coat with silver hair pinned up at the back of her neck and a face that was not young but was not old either, the skin smooth over good bones, the eyes a pale green that caught the lamplight and held it.

She walked up the hall like the floor belonged to her. She stopped at the coffin and stood there with her hands folded and her head bowed, and everyone in the room watched her do it. Then she turned and came to me.

"Niamh," she said. "I am Mairéad. I am sorry we are meeting like this."

Her voice was low and warm and it had a little music in it, the accent of the west coast polished smooth. She took my hand. Her fingers were cool and dry, and I felt nothing at all when she touched me, which was a relief after the heat of Declan's hand, and which I noticed and filed away.

"You knew my sister," I said.

"Everyone knew your sister. She was the heart of this village for a long time." Mairéad released my hand. "I am sorry to say a practical thing at a wake, but it is better said now than in a month. Siobhan's boat. The Mary Rose. She kept it on the co-op's mooring, and the co-op's mooring is not a private thing."

"She is not cold yet," I said.

"She is in the ground tomorrow, and the tide does not wait for grief." Mairéad's mouth curved, and it was a kind mouth, and it stayed curved while she said the next thing. "The Mary Rose will sail on Saturday. I will be taking her out. I wanted you to hear it from me and not from the pier."

"I do not remember agreeing to that."

"You are not a member of the co-op, Niamh. You have not been for twenty years." She said it without heat, as a fact. "The boat is co-op property. The boat goes to the person the co-op chooses. The co-op has chosen me."

Behind her, the room had gone very still. Nobody was eating. The old man by the window had turned his head and was watching Mairéad with a look I could not read, and his fingers were wrapped around the windowsill.

"Who chose you?" I asked.

"The co-op chose me." She said it again, slower, and I understood that she was telling me something under the words, and I did not yet know what. "Your sister's role in this village passes to the person the co-op chooses. That is how it has always been. You have been away a long time. I do not expect you to understand the way things are done here."

"I understand a great deal," I said. "I spent fifteen years asking questions for a living."

"Then ask them kindly." She smiled at me and touched my arm, and the touch was light and brief and left a cold spot behind. "Come to the hall on Friday. I keep an open table in the evening for anyone who wants to talk. You will be welcome. And Niamh," she added, already turning, "the Mary Rose had a locker in the boathouse. It was emptied before I took the mooring. If you were expecting to find something of your sister's in it, I am sorry."

She walked back down the hall and out into the night, and the room let out its breath, and the talk came up again.

I found Declan by the door and took his sleeve and pulled him out onto the step. The wind had dropped. The moon was up over the harbor and the boats were black shapes on the silver water.

"She took the boat," I said. "She announced it at my sister's wake. In front of the whole village."

"That is how it is done." He was looking at the door, not at me, and there was something tight in his jaw. "The co-op chooses. She had the votes before the funeral, Niamh. She has had the votes for a month."

"You knew."

"I knew."

"And you did not think to tell me before she stood over my sister's coffin and did it in front of me."

"I thought," he said, and stopped, and looked at me properly, and his eyes were grey and tired, "that if I told you before the wake you would have gone to the pier with a lawyer's letter and burned every bridge in this village before you had walked across one. And I thought that tomorrow you might want a priest and a hole in the ground and a few people who remember your sister kindly, and that the boat was not worth losing that." He was quiet a moment. "I was wrong. I am sorry."

I looked out at the water. The moon had a ring around it, a pale circle in the cloud, and the sea was flat and shining, and I was so tired that the pier lights seemed to double themselves and swim.

"The old man in the brown cardigan," I said. "Who is he?"

"That is Ronan. The healer."

"He touched his chest when he looked at me. Like this." I did it for him, two fingers over the heart. "What does that mean?"

Declan did not answer at once. When he did, his voice had gone careful. "It is an old gesture. Old people use it. It means he recognizes you."

"Recognizes me from what? I have been here since yesterday. I have never met the man."

"Ronan has been in this village longer than the hall has had a roof. He knew your mother." Declan looked down the pier, and his hands were at his sides, and the wind moved his auburn hair. "He probably knew her better than you did."

"Then I will ask him about her tomorrow, after the funeral."

"You do that." He turned to go back inside, and then he stopped. "Niamh. The locker on the Mary Rose. Did you know your sister kept a locker in the boathouse?"

"No."

"Neither did I." He held my eyes a moment longer than he needed to. "Mairéad knew. Nobody told her. She knew it before it was emptied."

He went back into the hall. The door swung shut and the noise of the wake came through it muffled by the wood.

I stood on the step with the moon on the water and the harbor lights and the twenty boats. And I did what I have always done when a room does not add up, which is to stop listening to what people say and start looking at the small things. The weight in my pocket was cold against my leg. The old man by the window had recognized me across a crowded hall before I had said a word. The boy had walked out rather than stand near me. And the whole village had come to my sister's wake and not one person had said the words I was waiting for, the plain ones, the ones that came out of every mouth at a Dublin funeral. Not one of them had said how she died.

I went back inside. The old man was gone from the window. In his place on the sill there was a small round stone, grey and wet from the shore, and beside it a single sprig of something that looked like rosemary but was not rosemary, and I put both in my pocket with the weight and said nothing to anyone.

It was nearly eleven when the hall emptied and I walked back along the shore road to the cottage. The moon was high now and the tide was coming in and there was a smell on the wind that I had thought was only the sea and now was not sure of. At the top of the road, where the track turns down to the boathouse, I saw Cormac. He was sitting on the low stone wall with his arms wrapped around himself, and he was watching the cottage, and when he saw me he stood up.

"You are not supposed to be here," he said. His voice was a raw thing. "He told you to lock the door and not come out."

"I went to a wake, Cormac. People go to wakes."

"The boat," he said. "The Mary Rose. She took the boat. Do you know what she will do with it?" He took a step toward me, and then another, and his face in the moonlight was a boy's face and not a boy's face at all, and his eyes had a light in them I had only seen once before, through a window, up on the headland. "She will take it out on the full moon. She always takes a boat out on the full moon. And once she has taken it out in front of the whole co-op, there is nothing anyone can do about anything."

I looked at him for a long moment. The wind came up off the water and carried a smell I knew from the farm at the back of my grandmother's house, the warm animal smell of a dog's coat after it has been out in the rain.

"Go home, Cormac," I said. "Get some sleep."

"It is not the boat I am worried about," he said. "It is the weight. Whose weight did she give you?"