The Weight of Him(31)

“What are we doing today?” Anna asked, pulling him back to the table.

“We’re going to your granny’s,” Tricia said. “Auntie Lisa is cooking dinner for us.”

“Yes!” Ivor’s arms shot straight up by his head. Lisa was an even better cook than Tricia.

Billy suspected Lisa and his parents planned to stage an intervention. He almost looked forward to facing them. They were in for a shock if they thought they could sway him. He wasn’t backing down. Not this time.

“First, though, mass,” Tricia continued, “and after mass you’re all coming straight home to clean your rooms, and if that’s not done there’s no dinner at Granny’s.” Various groans and eye-rolls went up.

“We can’t clean today,” Ivor said. “You’re not supposed to work on Sundays.” A bite of too-hot sausage bounced amid a mess of scrambled egg on his tongue. Tricia had sworn off any more meat at breakfast, but seemingly Ivor had thrown a tantrum in the supermarket.

“You better remind the priests of that commandment,” Billy said. “No one ever worked harder on a Sunday to make money.” Tricia leveled him with a cold look.

Billy switched to a safer subject and touched his fist to John’s bicep. “Ready for the big match?”

John nodded, his expression hard. “You better believe it, we’ll annihilate Clooskey.”

Billy pushed away an uneasy feeling. It would be hard to witness John play today, with Michael no longer on the field next to him. The team retired Michael’s number and Billy had placed the jersey in his coffin. Tricia also sent Michael off with a professional family photograph and four handwritten letters. John had refused to write a letter, or to put anything else in the coffin with his brother.

“It’ll be a great match,” Tricia said. She would also see Michael’s ghost on the pitch this afternoon.

Later, when the children left the kitchen, Billy moved around the table and placed his hand on Tricia’s bony shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“You need to try harder with John. I worry about him, about all of them.”

“I’m trying harder with everything, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

She stood up. “We better hurry, we don’t want to be late for mass.”

*

Billy took a hankering to walk to the home place, wanting to follow Michael’s footsteps through the fields, a well-worn path the boy had often traveled to the farm.

“No, thanks,” Ivor said.

“Yeah,” John drawled. “I’ll pass.”

“Sorry, I can’t walk in these shoes,” Anna said. She was sporting little black heels.

“You go ahead,” Tricia said. “I’ll drive them.”

Billy hid his disappointment and moved to the gate and into the field. He pictured Michael singing his way along the trodden path. The boy had likely looked to the trees and sky every so often, watching the birds wheel over the world. He probably tried to get the birds to sing back to him. Billy started to whistle, to drown out the sound of Michael’s singing in his head. Sometimes he loved to hear it still. Other times it was too much. The only response came from his father’s cows, sounding their impatient noises.

At the crest of the hill, Billy’s childhood home came into view. Constant smoke puffed from the kitchen chimney. It didn’t matter if the weather dawned warm or wretched, his mother kept the fire going in the range year-round. Not just to cook, boil the kettle, and heat the old, draft-filled house, but because she liked to sit and look in at the flames. She imagined whole stories inside the leap of orange, blue, yellow, and red. He remembered the coiled clothesline still hidden in his car. He had yet to burn it.

Any other day of the week, Billy’s father could likely be found in the rust-red barn behind the house, drawing out the turf or scaring off the birds and their squirts of shit. There, or his father was down in the fields with the cows, checking on those about to calve, those that were sick or stricken with bloody, infected udders, and those among the big-eyed brutes with any hint of personality, be it strength, stubbornness, or force of kick. These feisty beasts were his father’s favorites, and he’d clap each on her broad back and shake his fist in her face, talking in tones twisted with affection and goading.

*

Billy entered his mother’s kitchen and its tormenting smells of roast beef with all the trimmings. His mother greeted him, her air cool. She returned her attention to the children and asked about mass and school, and Anna’s dance lessons, Ivor’s chess lessons. Lisa marched everyone into the dining room and told each where to sit. Billy was put at the far end of the table, opposite his father.

“Come out to the milk shed,” his father said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

“The dinner’s ready,” Lisa said. “You can show him that later.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” his father said. “You, too, Tricia.”

The three entered the empty shed and its heavy smell of cattle and overripe milk. His father led Billy and Tricia across the straw-strewn floor and down to the back wall, a pine shelf there that looked new, and on it some kind of ornament. When had his father ever displayed anything in the milk shed?

“Lisa got it done,” his father said. Billy studied the bronze Wellingtons, his throat closing. Etched on the gold plaque on the sculpture’s base, Our Michael, Boots No One Can Fill. Billy’s hand reached up and clasped a bronze ankle. His fingers and palm tingled. He remembered the similar sensation in the canteen, when he’d touched Michael’s photograph on the flyer. He couldn’t stop the horrible sound that ripped from him.