Himself(49)
She was a magician with a big white rabbit. She could reach into her black hat and pull out a man’s worst fear or his greatest reassurance. The dead saw everything. She saw everything. Feck.
The first to come through last Tuesday had been Mrs McHale’s husband. In life he had ordered, with great pride, a threshing machine from Westport, which had his right arm off on the second day he’d used it. Mr McHale had bled to death in the far field. His arm was recovered and bandaged back on again so that his hands could be joined together for his final prayer. As if in protest, his hands refused to meet. So a framed picture of St Isidore, the patron saint of farm equipment, was placed between his punctured fingers. Mr McHale was not a popular man. The cause of Mr McHale’s demise was sent back to Westport, where it was re-oiled, resold and gave twenty-five years of uneventful service to a farmer just outside Castlebar.
A little after nine that morning Orla had been scraping the porridge pan for the chickens when she saw Mr McHale walking towards her with one arm significantly longer than the other.
‘Here, Dolly,’ called out the dead farmer. ‘Tell my missus I don’t want my good shoes going to the bloody charity box; she should keep them for the boys.’
Mr McHale flickered slightly in the early morning sun. He didn’t look bad considering he’d been dead for over a year.
‘And tell her to get off her fat arse and sort out the rats in the barn,’ he said. ‘They’re getting big enough to ride around the town, so they are.’
‘Right so, Mr McHale,’ said Orla, and she watched the dead man turn and walk through the hen house.
After Mr McHale they came thick and fast.
When Orla walked in the forest she saw faint nooses filled with twisting lumps of men. When she walked in the village she saw the faint forms of skipping children in white dresses. Some of the dead wore quaint costumes and glided. These tended to hold their fingers up to their lips and vanish. But some were as real as Orla’s own hands and would stand before her scratching their arses and swearing.
At the graveyard they sat about in groups, lolling against the stones or swinging their legs on the wall, just like she did. When she approached, some melted into the ground and some walked forwards holding their arms open.
Soon Orla began to feel wanted. She began to feel important. She would lie between the gravestones of Patrick James Carty 1901–1925 and Joseph Raftery 1880–1913 and listen to the dead. Paddy and Joe would politely vacate their eternal resting place and flitter up to the top of St Patrick’s church, where they would stretch their dead backs out against the roof and smoke invisible cigarettes.
Down below, the spirits would gather and jostle.
‘Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. Wait your turn.’
Orla listened to them in rapture.
What she heard, she knew, could set the town hopping.
The only problem was how to deliver their messages.
She wasn’t allowed in the shops because of the thieving, and she wasn’t made welcome at the school any more, for being wayward. If she turned up at Mass they’d ignore her and if she went up to their doors, well, it would be the mop bucket. Orla listened, then she regretfully explained to the dead that they’d chosen the wrong girl. But the dead just folded their arms and shook their heads.
Two days later Orla had a remarkable idea.
The next morning she arrived at the graveyard with stolen paper, pen and ink. She only knew the four letters of her name but that didn’t stop her, because on that day, note after note was written, each in an entirely different hand. Some were executed in fluid copperplate and others were in hard-pressed capitals. Some were no more than smudged spider scrawls and some were sprinkled with excitable loops and florid crosses. As the sun died, Orla stretched out her aching hand and the dead smiled and drifted away arm in arm through the church tower, looking as relaxed as she’d ever seen them.
By the next morning the messages from the dead had reached the living. They were found in letterboxes and pinned to doorways, propped behind clocks and folded on kitchen tables. Adulteries were exposed and grievances were aired. Real fathers were named and bastards discovered. Old sins were brought to life and played out for the rest of the village to watch.
But the letters could not be refuted.
The stories they told were incontrovertible and the handwriting, in every case, was a perfect and demonstrable match to that of the deceased. These were the words of the all-seeing dead and the living knew this.
The town looked around itself in horror.
Spinsters were accused of witchcraft and black cats were strung up. Windows were smashed and bureaus were forced open. Insults were smeared from door to door as the villagers sought the source of this terrible, evil outpouring of truth. Orla smiled and returned to the graveyard with a rake of paper and a fresh pot of ink, and who knows what would have happened to the village if Benny Ganley hadn’t caught her in the act.
Benny, a helper at St Patrick’s with a drinker’s nose and a hand that shook under the collection plate, was walking through the graveyard when he saw a little pair of feet sticking out past a headstone. As he rounded the grave he saw the child propped up against the marble slab with her face bent to her work. She was biting her lip with concentration and Benny watched in amazement as her tiny hand travelled over the paper, neatly and cleanly, without snag or hitch. Occasionally she stopped and cocked her head and nodded, as if listening intently.