A bucket of ashes (14 page)

“What? No. No, he wasn’t makin’ any noise at all. I think maybe he was already... you know.”

“Could you see him?” Will asked.

Claire stared at him for a moment, then looked away, as if considering the question. “Um, no. I think so, no. He must’ve been behind something. There’s all this stuff in there, or was—crates and barrels, a table, the cranberry sorter... All of it was on fire, and there was so much smoke I could hardly see. Anyways, come to find out my skirt’s on fire and some bushel boxes stacked up near the door had started burning and fell over, so I couldn’t get out that way.”

“What did you do?” Will asked.

“I grabbed a shovel and smashed a window and crawled out that way, and then I ran back to the house fast as my feet could take me, screamin’ till my throat was raw. The boarders come runnin’ out with a bunch of them gallon buckets the cranberry pickers use. One of them got on a horse and went to fetch Ma, and we all—”

“You weren’t home?” Nell asked her mother.

Adding another peach to her nearly full basket, Mrs. Gilmartin said, “I was on my way to St. Cat’s to bring some chicken fritters to Father Donnelly. I’d made extra just for him. I only got about half a mile down the road before George came riding up to tell me what happened. By the time we got back, the fire was almost out. But the cranberry shed can’t be saved, just the sorter, ‘cause it’s metal. The shed’ll have to be torn down. And I ain’t got the money to rebuild it. I’ll have to use the barn this year. And I’ll have to build more crates and pallets, buy more barrels...” She shook her head, saying, “It’s a calamity, that’s what it is.”

“How do you think the fire started?” Will asked her.

“I reckon Murphy got careless with a match. Maybe he got drunk and fell asleep with a lit cigarette. Or maybe he knocked over a candle.”

“Did you happen to notice any strangers on the property around that time?” Nell asked.

“Only folks on the property were my boarders and the fellas I hire to tend the bogs, and they been workin’ for me for years. Wouldn’t none of them set fire to my cranberry house. Why would they?” Jogging the basket up and down as if testing its weight, she said, “I got to bring these to Father Donnelly. He’s expecting me by noon. So if you folks don’t have no more questions...”

“Do you mind if we take a look at the cranberry house?” Nell asked.

“Can’t see the point of it, but help yourselves. Just follow that path,” she said, pointing. “It’ll take you south through them woods. You’ll pass the bogs on your right, next to the pond, then the path splits off in two directions. You want to keep to the left, headin’ east. There’s another little patch of woods, and then you’ll come upon what’s left of the cranberry house.”

Will said, “May I ask why it’s so far from everything else?”

“That’s to make it easier to get the cranberries to market once they’re cured and sorted. “If you was to keep following that path through the woods, you’d come right out onto Mill Pond Road.”

“I appreciate you letting us see it,” Nell said.

“Ain’t much to see, but you’ll find that out for yourselves. Claire, I expect you to get busy plucking and dressing that bird. It better be in the pot by the time I get home.”

As Mrs. Gilmartin was walking away, Claire turned to Nell and said softly, “I’m sorry about your brother, Miss Sweeney. But I’m glad he got laid to rest in the churchyard, by a priest. He got buried proper, so he’s with Jesus now.”

“I hope so said Nell, reflecting on Claire’s theological naïveté in believing that a lifetime of sin could be negated by the simple expediency of a Christian burial. She declined to mention that she had applied just that morning to have her brother’s body unearthed from that very churchyard. “Claire, I wonder if you would help us find our way to the cranberry shed.”

“But...” Looking toward the dead chicken, she said, “Ma wants me to—”

“We won’t keep you,” Nell said as she curled an arm around the girl’s shoulders and started down the path that led to the cranberry house. “But I
would
like to chat with you a bit.”

“What about?”

“About my brother’s funeral, for one thing. Your mother doesn’t know you went to it?”

“Oh, Ma would have a conniption if she knew. She said he was a godless hoodlum, and that he got what was coming to him. You won’t tell her I was there, will you, miss?”

“Of course not. But I am curious as to why you went, given that he was a total stranger to you, and a criminal, at that, one who was responsible for burning down your cranberry shed.”

Claire looked down, her hands buried in her apron pockets, and jerked her birdlike shoulders. She walked that way in silence as the path entered the woods. “I kind of felt… I dunno. Like a person ought to have someone there when he’s laid to rest, even someone that didn’t know him.”

“But you did know him, didn’t you?” said Nell, seeing Will, out of the corner of her eye, give her a look of surprise. “He wasn’t a stranger to you at all.”

Claire looked at her sharply as she stopped walking. “I... I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

“Your mother told you I was Jamie’s sister, but she never told you my name. Yet you called me Miss Sweeney. You knew my brother was hiding out in the shed, Claire. You talked to him. You befriended him. He talked about me.”

“Ma said she’d whip me to the bone if I told anyone.”

“But you didn’t tell,” Will pointed out. “The clever Miss Sweeney sorted it out on her own.”

“I’m not trying to get you in trouble,” Nell told her. “I’m just trying to piece together my brother’s last days. If you could help me to do that, I would be very grateful. And I promise your mother won’t find out what you’ve told me. Curling her arm around Claire’s, she continued on down the path through the woods, Will following behind. “How long did you know that Jamie was hiding out on your property?”

“He told me that was what you and his Ma used to call him—Jamie. I called him Jim, on account of that’s what he told me his name was—Jim Murphy.”

Duncan had been the first one to call him Jim, Nell recalled. He’d said ‘Jamie’ made him seem like a little boy.

Rephrasing the question Claire had neglected to answer—she seemed a bit mentally unfocused—Nell said, “When did you realize Jamie was living in the cranberry house?”

“It was the first time I went down there to start cleaning it up.”

“Which wouldn’t have been the evening of Sunday the thirty-first, as you told us,” Nell said, “but some time before that.”

“It was the Saturday before, and it was in the afternoon. I mean, not Saturday the
day
before, but—”

“Eight days before,” Nell said. “That would’ve been July twenty-third. Four days after...”
Murdered Susannah Cunningham of Boston, aged 37 yrs.

Nell squinted from a sudden onslaught of sunlight as the path emerged from the woods to continue along the eastern edge of a field next to Mill Pond. The field had been planted with four rectangular cranberry beds of about an acre each—carpets of low green vines speckled with ripening berries. Between each bog, and extending to the path on which they walked, were makeshift roadways of wooden planks. The path, which widened as it passed the bogs, was rutted with years’ worth of close-set wheel tracks, probably from wheelbarrows used to transport the harvested berries to the cranberry house.

Will said, “So you’d gone to the cranberry house that afternoon to start setting it right, and you found James Murphy there. That must have been quite a shock.”

“I screamed, but couldn’t nobody hear me way out there. He stood in front of the door, blocking it so I couldn’t get out, and he told me to calm down, talkin’ real soft and slow. He said he didn’t mean to do me no harm. I didn’t believe him at first. I was never so scared in my life.”

“Did you know who he was?” Nell asked.

“He asked me that. I told him I figured he was one of them fellas they’d been looking for, the ones that killed that lady. He told me it wasn’t him that done it. But he said the cops didn’t know that, and they’d hang him if they caught him.”

Nell’s relief at hearing this was tempered by the knowledge that Jamie might have just been saying that to get Claire on his good side.

 “He seen my crucifix,” Claire continued, “so he said he knew I was a God-fearing girl and would do the right thing. And then I remembered I’d seen him once or twice at St. Cat’s, and I thought if he went to Mass, he couldn’t be all bad. He pulled his Sacred Heart medal out from under his shirt and said it meant more to him than anything. He said his ma gave it to him before she passed.”

“She did,” Nell said.
This is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Jamie. Wear it for strength. You’re my only son. You’re the head of the family now. Make me proud.
Nell was gratified, if a bit surprised, that her brother had kept the medal all these years. “Claire, I don’t suppose you would know what became of that medal. It wasn’t among the items that were taken off my brother after the fire.”

Claire regarded Nell blankly for a moment, then looked away, shaking her head. “I couldn’t say, miss. Sorry.”

“So Jamie earned your trust?” Will said.

“He swore on his ma’s soul that he didn’t kill that lady and he wouldn’t hurt me. I could see in his eyes he was tellin’ the truth. He had these eyes, they were... like the eyes of Jesus in the pictures. You couldn’t look away from ‘em.” She bit her lip, he eyes damp.

“I know,” Nell said. As, no doubt, had Jamie, who’d always found it indecently easy to bend females to his will. He’d been thirteen the first time he talked himself under a girl’s skirts; she was seventeen, a voluptuous redheaded barmaid.

“He said he could tell I was kind and sweet and would help him,” Claire continued. “He said I was beautiful, not just on the outside like some girls, but deep in my heart, where only God could see. I think I musta turned red as a beet.”

“Because he said you were beautiful on the outside?” Nell asked.

“No fella ever told me that before.”

“So you helped him,” Will said. “The next day when everyone else was that ice cream social, you came back and gathered up some food and whatnot and brought it to him.”

“I went back there every day after supper to bring him food, stuff I didn’t think Ma would miss. She thought I was going there to clean up. I knew I couldn’t let her know Jim was there, ‘cause if she knew, she’d turn him in for sure. She’s real big on walkin’ the straight and narrow.” Claire seemed to be warming to her subject, perhaps because she’d had no one to confide in until now.

“Jim used to ask me to stay and talk,” she said, “‘cause he was lonely. Nobody ever talked to me like he did, all quiet and serious. He talked about important things. He made me feel important. He asked me what I thought about this or that. It got to where all I could think about during the day while I was doing my chores was getting’ back to the cranberry house that night, so I could be with Jim. He always seemed so happy to see me. But then he’d get...”

“What?” Nell said. “Melancholy? Did he feel guilty about Mrs. Cunningham?”

“No, no not at all. I told you, he said the other fella done it, a fella called Davey. Jim said he was real mad at Davey for doing that. And that’s why they went their separate ways, ‘cause Jim didn’t want to have nothing more to do with Davey after that.”

“My brother didn’t feel bad at all that an innocent woman died during a burglary he had engineered?”

Claire frowned as if trying to remember. “No, he told me it was all Davey’s fault, and his conscience was clean.”

They came to the split in the path that Mrs. Gilmartin had mentioned and followed the lefthand fork as it veered into another patch of woods. Nell thought about the tears Jamie used to shed as a boy when one of the orphaned or injured animals he would try to rescue didn’t make it. She recalled his frenzied sobbing whenever someone died—not just family members, but neighbors he barely knew, or other inmates of the poor house. It would appear that his skin had thickened since she’d last seen him, perhaps as a result of his years behind bars.

“How did your mother find out he was hiding in the cranberry shed?” Will asked the girl.

Claire winced. “She came there one night to see how much I’d gotten done, and she saw me and Jim... We was...” She bit her lip, her cheeks stained pink.

“Oh,” Nell said. “Claire, don’t be embarrassed. You’re not the first young girl to be seduced by a handsome, charming—”

“What? No, I didn’t mean that. We weren’t... you know. Jim said he knew I was a good girl, and he didn’t want to... you know, ruin me. But he... he kissed me sometimes, and I kissed him back, even though he said he couldn’t ever... pay me his addresses or nothin’. He said I’d best know up front he was gonna be leavin’ soon as the time was right, and that would be the end of us. I asked him was he gonna say goodbye or would I just come out there one night and find him gone. He said he was sick of goodbyes. He’d had a whole lifetime of goodbyes.

“Yes, he did,” Nell said in a low, shaky voice. His father, his mother, his siblings, one after the other, Duncan, her...

Will stroked her shoulder.

“The day Ma came to the cranberry shed,” Claire said, “Jim and me was laying together on this quilt I’d brung him to sleep on, and I know what Ma was thinking, but it wasn’t like that. We were just kissing, but she didn’t believe it. She started ranting and railing and threatening Jamie cause she knew right away who he was, ‘cause of him living there in secret. He just stood there real calm, while she screamed in his face. She slapped him—hard—and he just took it like it didn’t even happen, even though she’s as strong as a man. He told her he was sorry for livin’ on her property without permission, but she should know I hadn’t done nothin’ sinful. She called him a liar and slapped him again. I couldn’t stop crying. She said she didn’t want to turn him in cause then everybody would find out I gave myself cheap to a murdering thug, but that she would unless he left that night.”